Timothy Zahn - Hero of Cartao 1

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Hero of Cartao 1.

Hero's call.

by Timothy Zahn.

ONE YEAR AFTER THE BATTLE OF GEONOSIS

"Master Doriana?" Emil Kerseage's deep voice called. "We're here."

Kinman Doriana awoke with a start, blinking his eyes against the sunlight

streaming in through the shuttle's viewports. For a moment he gazed at the

landscape rolling beneath him, trying to remember where exactly he was. There

had been so many systems...

The disorientation cleared. He was on Cartao, major trading center for

Prackla Sector, carefully nonaligned in the war between the Republic and the

Separatists. And home to...

'There it is," Kerseage said. He turned the control stick delicately,

rolling the shuttle slightly to the left to give Doriana a better look.

"Spaarti Creations."

Doriana gazed out the side viewport, impressed in spite of himself.

Situated among a group of forested hills just north of the compact town of

Foulahn City, perhaps three kilometers northwest of the equally compact Triv

Spaceport, was the unique manufacturing plant known as Spaarti Creations. Over

a kilometer across at its widest, it had the patchwork look of something that

had repeatedly been added onto over the decades. The roofline echoed the

frozen chaos, with towers, heat exchangers, antennas, and skylights poking out

at apparently random spots along the building's overall three-story height.

There were no windows he could see, ventilation apparently being handled by a

line of small, louvered air vents dotting the outer walls about midway up the

sides. "Impressive," he commented.

"You think so?" Kerseage shrugged. "Personally, I've always considered it

an architectural version of a weed patch. No order or organization anywhere."

"Ever been inside?"

"No one but employees get to go in," the other said, his lip twisting

with disgust and resentment. 'Them, and the high and mighty."

"Like me?" Doriana asked.

Kerseage glanced at him, as if suddenly remembering just who his

passenger was. "No, no, I was thinking about Lord Binalie's chums," he

backtracked hastily. 'The Prackla Trade Council-that sort of crowd."

"You don't think much of them?"

Kerseage shrugged again, uncomfortably this time. "It's nothing to do

with me," he muttered. "I got a shuttle; I fly people places. That's all."

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"I see," Doriana said, returning his attention to the manufacturing plant

now passing directly beneath them. Clearly, Kerseage didn't want to say any

more.

But then, he didn't have to. Like everything else he ever did, Doriana

had made sure to research Cartao before coming here and hiring this particular

man to bring him across the sparsely settled planet to Spaarti Creations. The

cargo transport company Kerseage had once owned had been inadvertently run out

of business two years earlier by a poorly worded regulation the Prackla Trade

Council had issued after the Battle of Geonosis.

Kerseage's appeal was still crawling its way through the system, but by

now the issue was essentially moot. His company was gone, and he clearly

blamed Lord Binalie for it.

"What about the plant's satellite facilities?" he asked, his eyes

flicking around the forested areas north and west of the main facility. 'The

buildings where they store raw materials and finished product."

"You mean the three Outlinks?"

"Right," Doriana said. "Where are they?"

"I don't know, exactly," Kerseage said. 'The closest one's supposed to be

about three kilometers northeast, just past that big gray-topped worker

barracks thing." He pointed.

"Mm," Doriana said, peering into the distance. There was nothing showing

in that direction that he could see. Well camouflaged, either by accident or

by design. That could be useful. "Where does Lord Binalie live?"

"There." Kerseage pointed to the left as he brought the shuttle around in

a wide semicircle. "You see Foulahn City, just south of that kilometer-wide

stretch of grassland?"

"I see it," Doriana said. "I don't think I've ever seen a city come to a

stop that abruptly before. Except where there's a lake or cliff to limit it,

of course."

"It might as well be a cliff," Kerseage grunted. "That particular line of

grassland marks the southern edge of Spaarti land, and no one travels or

builds there. The Cranscoc insist on it. Anyway, you see that big open area on

the northern edge of the city, butting up against the grass strip?"

"Yes," Doriana said. It looked like a park-grassland, quite a few clumps

of trees, large sections of sculpted bushes-with a few small buildings and one

very large one. Even from this distance, the place reeked of wealth and power.

On one of the low hills facing the plant, he could see a pair of figures

standing together. 'The Binalie estate?"

"You got it," Kerseage said. "You seen enough?"

Doriana took a last look around, fixing the geography in his mind.

Foulahn and Navroc Cities lay to the south and southeast of the plant, with

the craggy Red Hills pushing up against the southern ends of both cities. Triv

Spaceport was to the east, with low, increasingly forested rolling hills to

the north, and a small river winding its way between the two cities and then

between Foulahn and the spaceport.

"Yes," he told the pilot, resettling himself in his seat. "Let's go see

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Lord Binalie."

They're turning around some more," Corf Binalie announced, shading his

eyes with his hand as he peered upward into the sky.

"I think they might be coming here."

"Who, the people in the shuttle?" Jafer Tories asked, his white hair

blowing past his cheek as he gazed downward at the ground, trying to pick out

the particular siviviv vine he and the boy had been following for the past

half hour. "Yes, I know."

"You know who they are?" Corf asked, frowning up at him. "Did Dad say

something to you about visitors?"

"No, but he didn't need to," Tories assured the boy. "It's been obvious

for nearly a minute now."

"Oh, come on," Corf objected in that tone of strained patience twelve-

year-olds did so well. "How could you?"

"Simple logical deduction," Tories told him in that pedantic instructor's

tone seventy-three-year-olds did equally well.

"There was no reason for them to pass directly over the plant unless that

was what they were specifically looking at. After realizing how little that

gained them, their natural next step is to want to take a look from the

inside. For that, they need to come see your father."

Corf shook his head in amazement. "Boy," he said. "I wish I were a Jedi."

"If you were, you'd probably have to goto war someday," Tories warned.

"You didn't have to," Corf pointed out.

"Not yet," Tories said with a grimace. "But I could be called up at any

moment. The Council merely decided to leave a few Jedi where we are for the

moment in case of unexpected Separatist moves in our areas. I could get to the

scene of trouble anywhere in Prackla or Locris Sectors long before they could

send someone from Coruscant or one of the major battle areas. Being a Jedi is

never easy, and can be downright dangerous."

"Yeah, but you're real smart," Corf said. Clearly, distant rumblings of

war didn't faze him in the slightest. "You're good at figuring out stuff."

"Logical thinking is hardly the exclusive preserve of Jedi," Tories

admonished him. "Anyone can learn to put facts together in their proper order.

"Maybe," Corf said. "I still think it's a Jedi thing." Tories smiled,

shading his eyes with his hand as he watched the shuttle approach. In point of

fact, of course, he hadn't really known the shuttle was coming to the Binalie

Estate, but had merely concluded there was a high probability of it. If it

turned out the pilot was merely showing off Spaarti Creations to some visiting

friend, he was going to look pretty foolish.

This might not be a bad thing. Tories had spent the past thirty years on

Cartao, dispensing wisdom, mediating disputes, and handling the occasional

pirate or overeager crime lord. Some of the locals had come to respect him,

others had chosen to hate him, while most had never been more than vaguely

aware that Prackla Sector even had a resident Jedi guardian.

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