[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(18)
“Alema Rar,” Mara said.
“Right.” Luke thumbed the comlink back on. “Tell our visitor we’ll be right up.”
Their visitor was only a little over average height but stood so straight that he seemed much taller. Dressed in a black flight suit and engulfed by a dark gray traveler’s cloak, his lace shadowed, he looked more like a forbidding figure from a cautionary children’s tale than a peaceable visitor. The darkness of the lofty Temple Reception Hall, with most of its glow rods extinguished because of the late hour and shadows gathering in every corner, reinforced his somber manner.
Seha, the receiving apprentice on duty, bowed to Luke and Mara as they entered. She twirled a lock of red hair around nervous fingers. At Luke’s gesture, she moved out into the main corridor.
Luke and Mara approached the visitor. Luke could read very little from him-no sense of menace, but also not one of friendliness. Perhaps a trace of anger, deeply buried. “Colonel Fell” Luke said.
Jag bowed and offered a little heel-click. “At your service,” he said. He reached up to throw back his cloak hood, revealing the features Luke remembered. His was a lean face with startlingly bright green eyes and a scar leading up from his brow to his hairline. His hair was still dark, a bit longer than the military haircut he had once typically worn, with a mop of it hanging almost into his right eye; where his scar entered his hairline, one stripe of hair was white. The trim, rakish beard and mustache were new, and gave him an even greater resemblance to his father, the famous Soontir Fel.
Luke stepped forward to stretch out a hand. “Why the secrecy? You could have visited us officially, with your credentials.”
“There are no credentials.” Jag shook Luke’s hand, then when she offered it. “I’m no longer a colonel, no longer an ambassador. No longer a citizen of the Chiss, no longer even a member of my father’s house. Technically, that suggests I’m no longer even jagged Fel. I’m as much Twin Suns Three as I am anything else.”
“Ah.” Luke considered. Jag wasn’t awash in self-pity, wasn’t seeking sympathy with his words; he was just letting Luke in on things the Jedi Master needed to know. “And if I understand correctly, your mission here has something to do with Alema Rar.”
“Everything to do with her.”
“Take a walk with us,” Mara said.
They walked through the halls of the Temple, which were mostly dim and little-trafficked at this hour, and jag told the Jedi Masters, in unemotional tones, of the events of his last few years. How, during the Dark Nest missions, he had guaranteed the parole of Lowbacca, how Lowbacca had violated that parole, how the damage done by Lowbacca and his Jedi friends had become the responsibility of the Fel family … how jag had been exiled from that family, as a matter of consequence and honor. How jag had been shot down on the world of Tenupe and had survived there, a lean and dangerous existence, for two years. How Alema Rar, mad as a half-crushed bug and carrying within her mind the dual imperatives to re-create the Dark Nest and avenge herself on Luke and Leia, had also survived, also escaped.
“In those two years,” Jag concluded, “I gave a lot of thought to Alema Rar, to what she was, what she could do. Afterward, I continued researching her … and investigating ways to counter her Killik abilities. She can scrub herself from the short-term memory of people, meaning that you can run into her and, if you survive, moments after the encounter you have no memory of meeting her. It makes her terribly hard to track. Her Killik abilities and remaining Jedi powers make her an extreme danger to you and your sister-and to the galaxy.”
“So you’ve come here to warn me,” Luke said. “I appreciate that.”
“More than that, I come with gifts.” From a tunic inner pocket jag drew two items. One was the shape and size of a large credcoin, but silvery and featureless; no portrait of a long-dead hero or deserved-to-be-dead tyrant graced its faces, though a blob of some whitish substance adhered to one side. The other item was a common data card.
He handed the card to Mara. “This is a graphical interpreter and communications program,” he said. “It operates in concert with most security holocam programs found in government installations, capital ships, any secure building. Basically, it evaluates every humanoid figure the cam sees, comparing them with a database of Alema Rar’s unusual physical characteristics, and when it finds a match, it notifies the security department and sends a coded message to any data repository you specify. If you can get this installed on enough systems, we can perhaps plot her movements, find out her whereabouts before she does any more harm.”