Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 02_ Shield of Lies - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [75]
She can pierce my projections, he realized. I wonder if I can pierce hers. I wonder if I can even tell when she’s using one.
Distracted by such thoughts, Luke almost overlooked the other surprise in the report from Coruscant. It waited for him in the section on ownership history, and fell under his eyes while he was wondering why, if she had such a talent for concealment, Akanah had needed to buy a ship at all.
You could have stowed away on any ship at any time, he was thinking. You wouldn’t have been trapped on Lucazec. Stang, you could have stolen the price of passage, even the price of the ship—
Then he noticed that the sole prior owner of the skiff was a man named Andras Pell, and that the transfer category given was:
CLASS III NONTAXABLE—INHERITANCE BY MARRIAGE
He rose out of the couch and turned to stare at the closed curtain screening the bunk. Just how did you buy your freedom? he thought at Akanah. And what else are you keeping from me?
Akanah hibernated—or hid—for nearly ten hours. But rather than frustrating Luke’s curiosity, her absence redirected it. For the last five hours of her isolation, Mud Sloth drifted in realspace on the fringe of Atzerri’s Oort Cloud with only the cold methane-ice comets for company. With all his inhibitions about making inquiries behind Akanah’s back gone, Luke made full use of the time, his credits, and his priority access codes.
From Carratos he requested any information available from newsgrid, political, or police records on Akanah Norand Pell, Andras Pell, and Talsava. He sent the same query to Coruscant’s criminal records office and citizen registry and to the home offices of both the Coruscant Global Newsgrid and the New Republic Prime Newsgrid.
From the New Republic Reference Service, he requested a quickreport on naming conventions on Lucazec and Carratos, thinking he might parse another lead from the names in hand.
A second request to the same source asked for five-hundred-word excerpts from all matches on the key words “Fallanassi” and “White Current.” After a short debate with himself, and despite the pathetic and sensational inaccuracies of Secrets of the Jedi, Luke also contacted an information broker on Atzerri and paid a hundred credits for a search on the same keys.
He also requested a Current Terms & Conditions brochure from the chief librarian’s office on Obroa-skai. The library computers there were the only resource offering both a greater variety and a greater volume of records than those held by Coruscant.
But Obroa-skai’s generosity with its planetary treasure was limited. To protect against theft of the library, and to provide the resources needed to maintain it, accessing the records meant either going to Obroa-skai or hiring one of the library’s own trained contract researchers.
In either case, Obroa-skai was not a resource one turned to for quick answers. The official language of New Republic recordkeeping was Basic, and everything held by Coruscant was kept in one of several readily searchable data specifications. But the Obroa-skai library was a collection of primary documents, in ten thousand storage formats and uncountable languages. The most complete general index covered only fifteen percent of the library’s holdings, and all the specialty indexes combined added only a few percent to that.
Those were the principal reasons why the brochure—which Luke received within minutes of requesting it, as the first response to any of his inquiries—reported that a normal single-part library search was averaging eight days. The waiting list for terminal time was holding at fifteen days, and the backlog for contract researchers had climbed to seventy.
Discouraging as those numbers were, Luke dispatched a command-control message to Artoo and Threepio on Yavin 4, instructing them to go to Obroa-skai