Tales from the New Republic (16 page)

When Harkness opened his eyes this time, it was still dark, but his body felt almost weightless. Not dizzy and thick, not drugged; just light. It was because there was less pain in his body now.

He didn’t feel as though he could sit up yet, but at least the possibility of moving didn’t fill him with trepidation anymore. And the humming sound lingered at the back of his head in a muted, almost pleasant way. He entertained the idea that it might be a fraction of a song Chessa used to sing; she had been on his mind for what seemed like hours now, although he couldn’t remember her ever singing in front of him.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was stronger, clearer. “Hey, Sarge.”

“What?” said Jai, still across the room.

“How you feeling?”

“Better, I guess,” she said.

“Me too. I don’t know why.”

“How long have we been here?”

“Dunno. A few days. Maybe a week.”

“Maybe an hour.”

“Maybe.”

“Has this… uh… ever happened to you before?” she asked.

“Getting captured? Yes,” he said. The memory of it appeared out of nowhere and surprised him; nothing about his current ordeal had seemed familiar until now.

“Oh,” she said.

He expected her to ask if that was how he had lost his eye, and then remembered that she still couldn’t see his face. In all the time they had been there, their eyes still had not adjusted to the darkness.

“Did they work you over that time?” she asked.

“Yeah. Worse than this.”

“Can’t imagine that.”

“Well, maybe not by much,” he said. “Is that what you were thinking about over there? My prison record?”

Suddenly he recalled something he had said earlier, regarding the gray boys in the interrogation room. Living their lifelong dream of making an Infiltrator scream. Maybe Jai had been done the same way as he had, and then again—

“Jai?” he said tentatively. “Do you—still have both eyes?”

“Huh?”

“I mean… did they put your eyes out?”

Jai laughed, a surprising, loud, sardonic cackle. It took her a couple of minutes to rein it in, and then she said, “Hey, Dirk—who can tell?”

Harkness felt his lips twitch slightly.

Then he heard more laughter, both of their voices, ringing off the walls, choking through the pain, and eventually dying down to a few stuttering gasps. When it was over, his ribs ached and his throat hurt, but he felt an unfamiliar satisfaction.

“Why’d you ask me that, anyway?” asked Jai around a final chuckle.

“Forget it. Long story.”

“Oh, well, you better not get started. I have to be somewhere in ten minutes.”

“Yeah, I have a date myself.”

It occurred to Harkness that he did have someplace to be, and people to be with. But where, and with whom? When the walls stopped ringing, the humming came back.

“Is that what you’ve been thinking about?” asked Jai. “My eyes? If it makes you feel better, Harkness, I’m told they’re stunning.”

“No,” said Harkness, and he sobered. “I was actually thinking about Chessa.”

“Who’s that?”

“My girl.” Harkness thought about her face the last time he had seen her. It was a nice, normal day, full of routines, loading the ship, the two of them flirting over the cargo load. But he had known, somewhere on the odd fringes of his mind, that she was about to die. He always knew when somebody was about to die. There was a softness to his or her features on those days. He would see it all through his stint in the Alliance, and he saw it for the first time in Chessa, standing there in the docking bay.

“Do you think about her a lot?” Jai asked.

“She’s dead,” said Harkness in his usual blunt, conversation-ending tone. Dirk, how’s Chessa doing these days? She’s dead. Oh. They always changed the subject after that.

But not Jai. “I know,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. It’s the way you said her name.”

Harkness didn’t know how to respond to that. Jai had spoken with such confidence, and he hated it when people thought they could dissect him. Like all those Alliance counselors he never wanted to go to.

“How did I say her name?”

“Like it was sacred.”

“So what? That’s how you said your sister’s name.”

“Yeah, but—”

Jai broke off, so abruptly that Harkness thought she had disappeared altogether. In her place Harkness imagined a deep black hole generating silence, threatening to suck him through, too. Harkness could actually hear it, ringing, clouding his ears.

Then his mind cleared out and he realized what he had said. And what it had meant.

“Sarge?” he said.

“Yeah.” Her voice took on a heavy, listless resignation that was very familiar to Harkness. He wished that she had the energy to crawl across the floor and smack him across the face. Or that he had the energy to do it for her.

“When?” he asked.

“Two months ago.”

Endor. No wonder the name had sounded familiar. Harkness remembered briefly meeting a tall, dark-haired officer named Morgan Raventhorn shortly before the battle. A kid, really. He imagined that girl lying on the floor across from him, with a slightly older face.

Jai remained quiet, but her breathing hadn’t changed. She wasn’t crying. He wondered whether she had cried over her sister at all, and if not, whether she would anytime soon. That idea puzzled him; up until that moment, he had guessed that Jai’s mind worked much the way his did, and that their experiences were similar. But he had never been so numb he couldn’t mourn.

Harkness’s usual course, as a practiced loner, was to give other loners a fairly wide berth. If they wanted to be left alone, he knew it, and he would honor it. But Jai was different. Certainly Harkness had lost his faith in the New Republic, had lost his faith in love, and sometimes had lost faith in himself and his purpose. But he couldn’t imagine what you did when you lost your faith in everything all at once.

“Chessa was killed by a bunch of stormtroopers,” he told her. “All she was doing was loading crates, but they started a firefight with her. They knew she was a Rebel sympathizer.”

Jai was silent. Harkness went on, “I had been thinking about marriage at the time. I was an idiot, you know; I was young, I thought I could have everything.”

“I had a fiancé myself,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“Krül.”

She said it the way she had said Morgan’s name.

Harkness didn’t think he should say anything else after that. He felt embarrassed at having told Jai so much about himself. Even after four years in the Alliance, among people he trusted without question, he had not told anyone about Chessa. To those who had known her, he never talked about what she meant to him.

The silence seemed to fill up all around him like some invisible snow, and he thought about the absolute last time he had seen Chessa. Pasty, bleeding. Not even a person, really. Some dead people looked like they were sleeping; Chessa’s expression was frozen, her eyes staring up at the docking bay ceiling, surprised and horrified. He shook that image away and pictured her alive and healthy. Then he pictured her lying in a dark cell with a bloody nose and nothing to live for.

At that moment, Harkness came across a part of himself that he did not like to acknowledge, and his stomach tightened. It was the part that had already begun to dissolve the security of his prison, and his sense of unparalleled freedom. It was the entire reason the interrogation officers had seen fit to beat him. He had yet again discovered, to his dismay, the part of himself that wanted to survive. Whole. Undefeated.

Harkness sighed heavily. Well, it was cozy while it lasted. He shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, willing his body to heal itself, willing the pain to stop. It wasn’t that he had any flair for manipulating the Force or anything like that; he just knew that the reason he had survived all the injuries and setbacks and impossible missions that had marked his military career was because he had willed it. And that was why he wasn’t going to die in this cold, rank little cell. Just by wanting to heal, willing himself to live, he’d find some way to save himself from whatever the Imperials had planned for him.

Saving Jai, on the other hand—that was the part he feared he couldn’t do anything about.

“Radlin?” said the taller of the guards, thoughtfully giving the E-web a final wipe and sticking the rag in his back pocket. His voice echoed off the mountainside. “Radlin, I’m bored.”

“I guessed,” said Radlin, still sitting and waggling his foot.

“I mean really bored. Really really. What are we even here for? There’s no more Rebels.”

Radlin said, “It’s procedure. Procedure is this thing you do where you follow orders so you get that promotion thing we talked about?”

“I’m just saying we should think up something to do.”

“You’re just all antsy ’cause that merc guy showed up looking for the Rebels.”

“
You’re
just all mad ’cause we weren’t the ones who caught him. Look, Rad, let’s just go hunting or something. Pick off some more of those Walking Dead Rebels.”

Behind a nearby tree, Tru’eb caught his breath when he heard them mention the Walking Dead. But it was too late—right on cue, Platt came stumbling up the hill toward the guards. She was trying to imitate the Sullustan’s jerky walk and his glazed expression, but her steps were exaggerated and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth. Tru’eb put a hand to his face and shook his head.

Nevertheless, Radlin leaped up, knocked over his chair, and stumbled backwards. When the tall one turned around and saw Platt, he visibly tensed, but he gave a terse, macho laugh. “Radlin, you want this one?”

Platt stopped when the guards’ ledge was at her chest level. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back. “Is this the way to the spice mines of Kessel?”

Radlin gave a shriek and opened fire.

“Honestly, Platt,” Tru’eb said, as Platt put on Radlin’s camouflage jacket, “I don’t know how you talked me into that. You know there’s nothing more dangerous than a blaster being handled by someone in a panic.”

“Yeah, but there’s nobody more fun to pick off than somebody in a panic, either.” Platt surveyed the area. “You think there’s any more patrols roaming around?”

“Yes. So let’s be quick about this.”

The dugout was actually situated in front of a deep, man-made fissure that ran straight through the cliff and out the other side. Tru’eb and Platt were pleased to discover that this end of the fissure gave way to a relatively flat area of the forest.

For twenty minutes they made their way over fallen trees and scrub and large rocks. Platt was becoming increasingly nervous. From what she had seen, this end of Zelos didn’t really have dusk; the sun just seemed to wink out in the evening. Moreover, the fog was still thick enough that she could see no more than two meters in front of her at a time.

“What are we going to do,” she said, stepping in front of Tru’eb and walking backwards, “if we don’t find the garrison before nightfall? I don’t think that cheap survival shelter has another night’s worth of—”

Tru’eb stopped. “Just a moment,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

“No. What?”

“Almost a rumbling noise.”

“I didn’t—” Platt said, and then the ground underneath her disappeared.

She felt herself falling, tried to scream through a dry mouth and clenched lungs, felt a violent surge of blind panic shooting through her entire body—and then a yanking sensation through her right arm as she stopped and dangled where she was. Tru’eb had her by the wrist.

“What… what was… what just happened?” she said when Tru’eb had hauled her back up and she was on her knees on solid ground. “Did I just fall off the… how come I didn’t see… Tru’eb, what happened?”

Tru’eb didn’t answer; he was staring over her shoulder, awed. Platt turned around just in time to see a black TIE fighter come
whooshing up
out of the ground about four meters in front of them.

Both of them fell back in a shower of dirt and leaves, the deafening sound of the TIE roaring overhead, and Platt thought the sheer momentum of the thing might blast her into the mountainside. Then, just as abruptly, everything went quiet.

They looked up. The TIE fighter sailed just above tree level and then disappeared.

When the pounding in Platt’s head subsided, she looked at what she had stepped off of. The ground ahead looked like an overgrown clearing. But now Platt saw that she had walked right off the edge of a sheer rock face that descended hundreds, perhaps even thousands of meters.

Tru’eb was next to her, staring into the gorge. It was impossible to make out the bottom of the valley, a dark well with layers of fog drifting above it. Plunging down into the darkness, the cliff wall was a marbled gray with steplike ridges naturally chiseled into it. There were also outcroppings along the way, so heavily overgrown that the plants and trees hung precariously out over the valley; waterfalls poured out of the rock face in a number of places. After several dozen meters everything disappeared into a bluish-gray soup.

Far below, winking on and off through the fog, there was a small blue light. And another, and another, and a hundred, neatly lined up. Platt shut her eyes and then looked again.

“Running lights,” she said, amazed. “But it’s too dark to make out the garrison.”

“Hence, the Valley of Umbra,” Tru’eb said.

“Yeah, I get it. Look at the waterfalls. Twenty credits says that’s a leaky aqueduct.”

“Look there,” Tru’eb said. “Do you see that? There, and over there—all around.”

Platt looked. Weaving in and out of the cliff was a series of metal ladders and walkways, probably leading to maintenance ducts hidden in the rock face.

Tru’eb took her macros. “Six hundred meters down.” He looked up. “And the distance across is twice that. I suppose we can safely say we know where Harkness is.”

Mist oozed up over the edge of the valley. Platt wasn’t sure whether she should be excited or appalled at knowing Harkness’s location.

“There must be a turbolift or a flatbed loader leading down.” Tru’eb said. “You have code cylinders in that uniform, correct?”

“Yes, but I’m not keen on explaining why we’re not at our post. Or why one of us grew head-tails and fangs and the other decided he was much freer as a woman.”

Tru’eb shrugged. “Then it’s straight down.”

“How?”

“We’ll take the maintenance ladder wells. They must eventually lead all the way to the bottom.”

“Suppose somebody’s working on them, genius?”

“Why would they? They have repulsors.”

“Yes, but I’m trying to delay this as long as possible.” She looked at him. “I really don’t want to go down there.”

“But you will.”

“But I will.” She sighed and slid down on her belly, wedged her foot into the cliff face and hoisted herself down. The nearest ladder was about five meters below, according to the macros, but it wasn’t hard to get a foothold on the crags. Before long the two smugglers were standing on a solid, grassy boulder that jutted out over the valley. One of the rusty maintenance ladders, dripping with moisture, stuck out of the rock face nearby.

“I’ll go first,” said Tru’eb, dusting up his hands with dirt and taking a step toward the ladder.

Platt grabbed his shoulder. “Tru’eb.”

“Yes, Platt.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“Harkness is our friend.”

“So what? We have lots of friends.”

Tru’eb stepped onto the ladder. “No, we don’t”