Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 02_ Shield of Lies - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [48]
“Need to stretch?”
“No,” she said, pointing behind them. “I can manage.” As “getaway” vehicles, bubblebacks featured a compact waste station and reprocessor, with a full set of standard humanoid fittings. “Do we need to refuel?”
“No. Griann has fuel stops, I assume.”
Akanah checked her aid card. “Yes. Though ‘local prices may vary from published visitor area rates.’ Please, let’s push on.”
They had nearly reached Griann when Akanah finally noticed the outline of the cylinder in the right thigh pocket of Luke’s walk-arounds.
“You brought your lightsaber?” she asked, leaning toward him.
“Yes,” he said. “You sound surprised.”
“How did you get it through Arrival Screening? You can’t fool a scanner with Jedi mind tricks. Can you?”
“You can fool the person whose job it is to respond to scanner alarms,” Luke said. “But even that wasn’t necessary. Lightsabers are still the rarest weapons in the galaxy. There’s only one model of general security scanner that’s programmed to recognize them, and Teyr doesn’t use it.”
“Then what do they think it is?”
Luke smiled. “Most scanners misidentify a lightsaber as a type of shaver. Which I suppose it could be, in a pinch—if you were very, very good with it.”
She settled back in her seat. “I wish you had left it in the ship.”
“That’s asking too much,” Luke said. “I don’t carry it every minute, but I don’t like to be that far away from it. I’ve gotten in more tough spots because of not having it close enough than I ever have for carrying it.”
Looking out her window at the gently rolling fields and the day moon that was setting over them, Akanah said, “Please remember what I asked of you—it’s important to me.”
“I remember,” Luke said. “I hope you remember that I didn’t make you any promises.”
“Is there that much pleasure in killing, that it becomes something difficult to give up?”
Luke shot a hard glance across the bubbleback at her. “What makes you think I take pleasure in killing?”
“That you won’t renounce it,” she said, turning to meet his gaze. “If I had caused a million deaths, I don’t think I could ever pick up a weapon again. I don’t understand how you can.”
With no ready answer, Luke turned his gaze back toward the flyway ahead. It wasn’t until years after the Battle of Yavin that Luke had first become aware that the Death Star he had destroyed at Yavin had a complement—officers, crew, and support staff—of more than a million sentients.
In retrospect, it was something he should have realized without prompting. But it took a new Battle of Yavin display at the Museum of the Republic on Coruscant to point it out to him. When Luke thought of the Death Star, he associated it with Vader and Tagge and Grand Moff Tarkin, with the stormtroopers who’d tried to kill him in its corridors and the TIE pilots who’d tried to kill him above its surface, with the superlaser gun crews who had obliterated defenseless Alderaan.
But the signs at the massive cutaway model of the Death Star in the museum had spelled out the numbers in its table of specifications, and Luke could still recite them: 25,800 stormtroopers, 27,048 officers, 774,576 crew, 378,685 support staff—
“One million, two hundred five thousand, one hundred nine,” Luke said quietly. “Not counting the droids.”
The calm precision of the recitation brought a look of startled horror to her face.
“But you have to look at both sides of the ledger,” Luke went on. “Alderaan. Obi-Wan. Captain Antilles. Dutch. Tiree. Dack. Biggs—” Luke shook his head. “Sometimes your enemies don’t give you much choice—kill them, give up, or be killed. And if you think I should have done anything other than what I did—”
“The past is fixed, unalterable,” Akanah said. “What I care about is what you’ll do today, or tomorrow.