[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(44)

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.

I know your past—I know your heritage—and I have already seen you kill once. Can’t you understand how alien and abhorrent this is to me—to those who gave Nashira shelter?”

“You don’t trust me.”

She folded her hands on her lap, and her voice became small. “I am trying, Luke—but you don’t know how hard it is for me to trust someone who believes as you do, and who has your power.”

Luke stole a sideways glance to catch her expression.

“Are you saying you’re afraid of me—because of this?” He rested his hand over the concealed lightsaber.

“I suppose I am,” she said. “I don’t want to be.”

“I would never hurt you, Akanah,” Luke said. “I brought this with me in case there were any surprises waiting—not to threaten you.”

“I move through the world without one,” she said.

“Could you not do the same?”

Luke slowly shook his head. “Not while I still call myself a Jedi.

It’s more than a weapon—it’s a tool for training the mind and the body. And it’s become part of me—an extension of my will.”

“And a way to enforce your will on others.”

He shook his head. “Most of the discipline of the lightsaber has to do with defense.”

“What about the rest?”

“The rest—the rest requires that you get close to your adversary, close enough to have to look them in the eye,” Luke said. “An old-fashioned idea, and a civilizing one. If all you want is to kill quickly, efficiently and impersonally, a blaster is a much better choice—the Emperor’s stormtroopers didn’t carry lightsabers, after all.”

“All of my nightmares are of places where there are men who want to kill ‘efficiently,’” Akanah said, turning her face back to the viewpane. “And the worst nightmare of all is to think that the only Universe that is, is such a place.”

Griann had been laid out on the plains of Teyr with a compass and a square. Its regularly spaced streets of regularly sized houses intersected with right-angle precision in a grid five kilometers square. At the heart of the city was a small commercial zone serving both the residents and the traffic on the Harvest Flyway. Around the boundary of the city was an enclosing wall of silos, granaries, ag domes, sheds for the autoharvesters and skyhoppers, control towers for the irrigation system, and all the other facilities necessary for servicing the fields beyond.

“Welcome to scenic Griann,” Luke said, guiding the bubbleback into a refueling stall. “What now? Do you have a plan?”

“I have an address,” Akanah said. “North Five, Twenty-six Down. My friend Norika lived there.”

Luke shot her a questioning look. “I thought the children were supposed to be hiding. How did you get a lead as specific as an address?”

“From Norika,” Akanah said. “I got one letter from her that first month, hypercommed to Carratos from a public terminal at something she called the committee office. I wrote her back, a dozen letters at least, but she never answered—I never heard from her again.”

“Hmmm. Someone probably enforced on her the idea that ‘hiding’ means you don’t tell anyone where you are,” Luke said.

“Or the circle came for them, and took them away.”