[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(36)

“I am,” he said, twisting and looking up at her. It was a surprising discovery.

She nodded toward the drive. “Do you think you’ll be able to fix it?

Or break it—I suppose that’s more descriptive.”

“It’s already done,” he said. “It wasn’t that hard once I got into it.

The lockout doesn’t go into the drive at all—it’s here at the nav controller, see? If it doesn’t get a signal from the FCZ interface, the controller can’t enable the drive—” He saw her expression and stopped himself.

“Anyway, I’m just studying up for the next problem now.”

“Already done? That’s wonderful!” she said. “I’m terribly impressed—I’ve never had so much as a single home tech course, and when I look down in there, I have no idea what I’m seeing. You could probably tell,” she added.

“Well—we should test it before we need it. I need to know if any of this was important,” he said, letting a small handful of metal plugs, clips, and wires cascade to the deckplate.

When he saw the sudden alarm in her eyes, he laughed and quickly said, “Just kidding. About the parts, anyway. We ought to test it, though.

I was thinking we could jump out just a little early. Even fifteen minutes would be enough.”

“What about the alert list?”

“The boundary of the FCZ isn’t a hard line—there’s a yellow zone. We can jump out of there without attracting any attention, but it’ll still be a fair test. I’m sure it’ll work, though.”

“So you do fix appliances,” she said mischievously, sitting on the deck in a spill of skirt. “What were you thinking about when I came in?”

“Home,” he said simply.

She settled back against a wiring panel. “It’s funny—I spent most of my life on Carratos, but ‘home’ always means Lucazec to me.”

“Tatooine,” Luke supplied. “Which I always said was a better place to be from than to be. I’m not so sure about that now.”

“Almost all of my memories from Ialtra are good ones,” Akanah said. “I suppose that’s one reason what you did there upsets me so much. Now I have that memory, too, and I would rather not.”

“At least you’re here to have it,” Luke said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to feel guilty about saving you.”

“What about killing those two men—do you feel anything about that?”

“One of them killed himself,” Luke said, pulling his feet up out of the hatchway and turning to face her.

“Commander Paffen.”

Luke nodded. “He said something about poison, remember?

I didn’t want him dead. I was trying to question him.”

“And the other? The one you eviscerated with your lightsaber? Were you trying to kill him?”

“He had a personal shield,” Luke said. “It takes a lot of force to get through one—and when your blade does pop through, it’s hard to stop it before it does a lot of damage.”

“I understand. Were you trying to kill him?”

“Didn’t I just answer that?”

“I don’t think so,” she said with a shy smile.

Luke eased himself back against the bulkhead on his side of the compartment. “I guess the truth is that, at the moment, I wasn’t particularly worried about whether I killed him or not.”

She shook her head slowly. “That is so hard for me to understand how you could not be aware of the power in your hands.”

“The power that mattered to me was the power to protect you from them,” said Luke. “You told me afterward that you weren’t in any danger, but that wasn’t how it looked.”

“Yes,” said Akanah. “I understand that. But, Luke, there’s something I must ask of you that you never again kill to save me. I am glad that you cared about me, but it makes my heart sick, my spirit heavy, to have the screams and the blood of those men in my memory, in the ruins of a place that I loved.”

“I don’t know if I can make you that promise,” Luke said. “I have my own conscience to satisfy. And sometimes it demands that I fight for my friends.”

“That you kill for your friends.”

“When it’s necessary.”

“Is that how you see the Jedi? Are they ready to kill to protect their friends on Coruscant?”

Luke’s gaze narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to understand,” Akanah said. “I want to know what your Jedi mean to the New Republic, and what the New Republic means to you.