planetfalls recorded for Mud Sloth since Akanah had taken ownership
were at Golkus and Coruscant, and Golkus was near enough to being on a
line from Carratos to Coruscant that a stop there en route needed no
explanation. Curiously, though, there was no record of their departure
from Coruscant, nor of their stops at Lucazec, Teyr, or Atzerri.
The latter omission Luke could explain by the update cycles--there must
not have been time for the routine transmission of data from those
flight control centers to Coruscant, or for the addition of that data
to the master record. But the former omission was puzzling.
Luke's cloaking work as they left Coruscant should only have concealed
their point of origin from watching eyes and discouraged curiosity
about any out-of-trajectory alarms at Flight Control.
But as far as Coruscant was concerned, Mud Sloth had never left. The
skiff had never requested clearance to lift to orbit, had never
requested clearance through the planetary shield--except they never
could have left without it. And shield passage required not only that
the skiff answer a transponder interrogation, but also that Ship
Registry verify the ID. It was impossible to imagine how their passage
had gone unrecorded.
Luke wondered what would happen when the out-world updates arrived and
Mud Sloth was suddenly in two places at once.
Then, just for a moment, he toyed with the idea that both places were
really the same--that they were still on Coruscant, perhaps even still
in his hermitage, and some elaborate deception was under way.
He quickly rejected the idea as too extreme a solution to the
mystery.
But it left a worrisome question in its wake Just what was Akanah
capable of? What were the limits of her power?
May I cloak us as we leave? she had asked.
And he had not thought to question it.
What had she done? Something that could hide them completely from the
best planetary security the best engineers could devise? He realized
he had missed a pattern.
How had she gotten into his hermitage without his knowing it? How had
she gotten past the security droid and into the commonal on Teyr? All
the questions pointed toward the same answer--some gift of deception,
illusion, or concealment that went well beyond what he himself could
call upon.
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 shipm 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
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 Lu-cazec 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 sensa tional 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 and search the library on his behalf, as they had done once
before.
The only request he made that was refused outright was for the Fleet
Office's daily Tactical Briefing Memo randum, also known as the tr ouble
map--a compendium of situation reports from all the various Fleet and
base commands. Unlike that aboard his E-wing, Mud Sloth's hypercomm
wasn't military-rated, and there was no persuading the Intelligence
Section to send a white-star file to what they considered an unsecured
receiver.
Luke thought about comming Admiral Ackbar directly to ask his appraisal
of the trouble in Farlax--the news digest Luke had picked up on Atzerri
was almost as sensational and unbelievable as the Jedi document. But
doing so promised to invite questions Luke wasn't ready to answer, and
possibly force a decision he wasn't ready to make.
Instead, he chose to contact the public information offices of both the
Senate and the General Ministry. He asked for the official record of
the past twenty days, hoping he could read between the lines well
enough to know if it was time to head home.
Then he lowered the lights in the flight compartment, stretched out on
the deck behind the control couches, and closed his eyes. All his
pending requests required patience, from minutes to hours to days. But
just reaching out had left him feeling better about his
circumstances.
Even if some of his efforts returned nothing useful, the next time he
and Akanah talked, he expected to be in a much stronger position.
Sorry as I am to say it, what I have to have now is reason to trust
you, not just reason to want to, he thought. If we're going to go on
any farther together, you're going to have to start trusting me.
Prompted by a sensation like a feather tickling somewhere inside his
skull, Luke became aware of two things at once that he had fallen
asleep on the deck, and that he was being watched.
He turned his head in the direction of the sensation and opened his
eyes. He found himself looking directly at Akanah. She was sitting on
the edge of the bunk, hands folded on her lap, her hair bed-tousled.
"Hi," she said. "I'm sorry I monopolized the bunk for so long. I
didn't mean to do that."
Taken aback by her apology, Luke pulled himself up to a sitting
position."
"'s all right," he slurred. "You must have needed it. You looked like
you did, anyway, back at Talos."
She nodded. "About Talos--there's some things we have to talk about,"
she said. "You've been very patient with me, and I've been terribly
unfair to you. You deserve to know what's been happening with me."
Having had his own opening speech preempted, Luke could find nothing
more to say than "Go on, then--I'm listening."
Akanah nodded toward the foredeck. "You have some messages. You'll
probably want to look at them first."
Eyeing her quizzically, Luke moved to the copilot's couch and browsed
the list of waiting replies.
There was an acknowledgment from Streen on Yavin 4, which Luke skipped
for the moment. He also skipped the press folders from the Senate and
General Ministry, which were irrelevant for the moment.
The New Republic Reference Service had responded with a short precis on
naming, ending in the messages Search Key FALLANASSI--Not Found
Search Key WHITE CURRENT--Not Found As Single Term Search Key
FALLANASSI + WHITE CURRENT Not Found It was the same with the response
from the information broker on Atzerri--an apologetic note and an offer
to apply half of the search fee to Luke's next request.
With increasing agitation, Luke skimmed through half a dozen more
replies from various agencies and companies on Carratos and
Coruscant.
All were singularly uninformative--a few dates, a few facts that fell
into the category of vital statistics, and several NO RECORD and NOT
FOUND messages, with a pair of REQUEST DENIED rebuffs scattered among
them.
"Let me tell you what your messages say," Akanah said gently. "My full
name was Akanah Norand Goss, now Akanah Norand Pell. I was married on
Carratos to Andras Pell, a man thirty-six years my senior. Andras died
a year later, and I inherited this ship and a few thousand credits.
His obituary says it was an innocent death, and no one official seems
to have taken any notice of his passing, but you wonder if I might have
both married and killed him to escape from Carratos. And no matter who
and where you asked, there's nothing at all to be found about the
Fallanassi."
"How do you know?" he demanded, twisting around to face her. "Did you
read my mail?"
"No. I didn't need to."
"You knew I was going to check up on you," he said.
"Oh--I thought you would, eventually. I rather thought it would be
sooner."
"So you checked yourself, and you knew how little I'd find."
"I checked for myself," she corrected. "You're not the only one
looking for pieces of your past."
He sat down on the edge of the copilot's couch.
"Why are there so few?" he asked, the accusatory tone leaving his
voice.
"Talsava and I lived in the shadows on Carratos. We came in
unregistered. We lived in a part of Chofin where people come and go
without notice. When Tatsava left, I became one of the invisibles--I
owned nothing, did nothing that put my name in the identity records of
the occupation. The only time I ever lived above the line on Carratos
was the last two years--the years I was with Andras."
"No one questioned who you were, where you came from?"
"No. The old records were seized by the Empire, and the occupation
records were destroyed by the liberty movement. Everyone was given a
fresh start. I took a name in the local custom for women--given name,
mother's name, father's name. But it means nothing anywhere but there,
anytime but then."
"So there's no reason for it to be anywhere in Coruscant's records."
"Or Lucazec's, or Teyr's. It's not that there are other names behind
which the records hide--" "As far as the bureaucrats and census-takers
were concerned, you didn't exist."
She smiled. "On Carratos, the census is of property and the owners of
property," she said. "When I owned nothing, I did not count. When
Andras took me, I was his property. Now that I own this"--she raised
her hands to indicate the skiff "I am a person."
Luke nodded slowly. "I guess that all makes sense, the way you explain
it," he said. "But something else I learned still doesn't have an
explanation. The traffic records say we're still on Coruscant, and I'm
starting to think that we're still going to be there no matter how many
systems we visit."
Inexplicably, Akanah giggled. "Did your tracking report mention a
visit to Golkus?"
"Yes!" Luke said. "On your way to Coruscant."
"And did it say why I went there?"
"No. I didn't think about it much, either," Luke admitted. "I guess I
figured that, it being your first trip in the skiff, there was either
some little problem you needed fixed, or you just didn't like being
alone out here."
"Well--the second is true, absolutely true. But so is the first. The
problem I needed fixed was the ship's identification transponder. I
told you--we leave no trail that an outsider can follow. There was
someone on Golkus who could help with that."
"Someone? Altering ID profiles is no mean trick."
"His name would mean nothing to you but could harm him," Akanah said.
"I believe he once worked with---or for--Talon Karrde."
"How do you know him?"
"He came through Carratos once, years ago," she said. "When I heard
why, I arranged to meet him and to do him a favor. But the price was
still dear. I paid him with most
of the credits I had, plus favors I
had collected from others."
"So he changed the profile--what, to some other Adventurer? So some
other ship left Coruscant."
"Oh---he did more than change it," Akanah said.
"If that's all I'd asked for, it wouldn't have been quite so dear. No,
he put what he called a smuggler's kit in the transponder."
"This ship's black-boxed?" Luke stared wonder-ingly.
"I guess that's what it's called. Every time we jump, the profile
changes--to something that looks legitimate but isn't. If I'd had the
price, I could have bought bootleg IDs instead of counterfeits."
"And I suppose the system doesn't activate until after you've jumped
out from wherever the work was done, so the trail doesn't point back to
this gentleman."
Luke frowned. "Stang, the days we've wasted--we could have jumped out
from Lucazec, or Teyr--" "I encouraged you to," she protested. "I'm
the one who asked you to disable the interlock."
"Yeah, but you neglected to mention that it'd be safe to do it," Luke
grumbled. "We blast out of one system under one ID, tiptoe into the
next under an-other--and no one connects the two. Very sweet. This
fellow on Golkus is going to do a brisk business."
"He chooses not to," Akanah said. "I had the impression he considers