Whisper Your Weakness

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Chapter Fourteen

Later that night, Luke was tinkering with his lightsaber in the room that had become his workshop. The apartment the New Republic had given him was really too large for just one person, but Luke did appreciate having a place where he could fiddle with mechanical things. That was something he’d always done, even back on Tatooine, to take his mind off things. Missing Mara fiercely, he definitely needed something to take his mind off things.

He paused as he heard his door chime ring. Usually, he sensed anyone coming near his home long before they got there. I must have been really preoccupied, Luke thought with an embarrassed grimace. Not very becoming of a Jedi Master.

Stretching out with the Force, Luke determined the identity of the person there. He wasn’t actually too worried as most people wouldn’t get past the locked door in the lobby and the security guards downstairs. The only ones who made it as far as his door were friends or New Republic officials or other Jedi. He smiled when he realized who it was…an old friend he hadn’t seen in far too long. The smile turned into a puzzled frown as he sensed the other’s upset.

Carefully laying the pulled apart lightsaber onto his work table, Luke walked swiftly towards the door. Waving his hand, he opened it with the Force as he was moving up the hallway.

“Wedge?” he asked. The dark-haired pilot turned to look at him and Luke could see the anguish in his face as well as reading it through the Force.

“Luke. I’m…I’m really sorry to bother you-”

“It’s no bother. Please, come in and tell me what’s wrong?”

Wedge moved hesitantly into Luke’s apartment and walked into the living room, standing in the center of the room and looking completely lost. Luke closed the front door and walked up behind him, laying a calm hand on his friend’s shoulder. The Corellian jumped in shock and Luke’s worry increased. Wedge was definitely not acting like himself.

Quietly guiding Wedge to the sofa, Luke gently pushed the distraught man into the seat. He sat down on the chair beside the sofa and turned to face Wedge, waiting for his former wingmate to tell him what was wrong.

Wedge sat there for a long moment, not saying a word, and then he abruptly thrust a piece of flimsy at Luke.

Luke took it and read silently.

We have your daughter.
She will die unless you
contact Luke Skywalker
and direct him to this address.
Tell no one else or she dies.

There was a time, date, and an address printed underneath the ominous words.

Sucking in a startled breath, Luke jerked his gaze back up to Wedge. “Syal?”

Wedge nodded. He cleared his throat and spoke quietly. “Iella was out shopping with her. She turned around for a second…no more than a second! And she was gone. Iella found her little bag in the middle of an aisle and that was attached to it.”

“Did you contact NR Security?”

“No. Iella wanted to, but I talked her out of it. That was a hell of an argument,” Wedge said and a wry ghost of a grin briefly appeared on his lips. “I wanted to bring it to you first, to see what you thought.” He looked at Luke with hope in his eyes.

Luke was well used to that look, having seen it many times before in many desperate faces. But he’d never thought he would see it on Wedge Antilles’ face. Corellians were notorious for their bravado, but Luke could sense it easily - Wedge was frightened out of his mind.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“About three hours.”

The piece of flimsy was crumpled in Luke’s hand as he clenched it into a fist, trying to damp down his fury. That someone would use a child to get to him…it was disgusting.

“I’m sorry, Luke. I know this has to be a trap. But it’s my little girl,” Wedge pleaded, misunderstanding Luke’s reaction.

Luke looked at him sharply. “I’m the one who should be apologizing to you, Wedge. Obviously, this never would have happened to you if you didn’t know me.”

“You don’t know that. No, give it back to me. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have gone to Security as soon as Iella contacted me,” Wedge said as he reached a hand out for the flimsy.

Luke moved it out of his reach and gave his friend an incredulous look. “Do you really think I’m not going to help you, Wedge? Syal is just as much a niece to me as Jaina is.”

“But-”

“Look, this is obviously meant as a trap for me, I think we can agree on that. That means they probably won’t hurt Syal. But what will they do if I don’t show up? I will not allow some thug to hurt your daughter because of me,” Luke said harshly. He glanced down at the flimsy again, smoothing it out so he could read it once more. “They didn’t give you much time. I’m supposed to be there in only an hour.”

“Maybe we should contact Han or the Rogues-”

“You can call them and have them around the area as backup, but I need to go in by myself, Wedge, or they may follow through on this threat.”

The two men stood and Luke started towards his bedroom to get dressed in his Jedi blacks. He was already mentally reviewing strategies in his head, his mind pushing forward to the mission ahead. Luke knew he had to set aside any personal feelings for Wedge, Iella and Syal if he wanted to be able to focus.

“It’s too bad Mara isn’t here,” Wedge said with a little smile.

Luke froze in shock and turned back to his friend with a surprised look on his face.

“Why would you say that?”

“Well, isn’t she the one that usually backs you up on stuff like this?” Wedge asked with a puzzled frown at Luke’s reaction.

“Oh, of course,” Luke stammered, feeling a blush steal over his face. “Uh, yeah, I wish she was here, too.”

Feeling incredibly flustered, and embarrassed that Wedge was there to see it, Luke spun around and nearly ran into his bedroom. Closing the door behind him, he leaned his back against it for a moment and grimaced.

“Get a grip, Skywalker!” he muttered to himself.

Emerging several minutes later in his Jedi ‘uniform’, Luke was feeling much more in control of himself and his emotions. I can’t keep reacting like that whenever someone says her name or this secret will never make it to Han’s birthday party. Resolutely, he pushed all those thoughts aside and focused on Syal Antilles.

One hand reached down automatically to check his lightsaber and he looked down in surprise when it wasn’t there. Remembering where it was, Luke let out a curse.

“What is it?” Wedge asked.

“My lightsaber is in my workroom, completely torn apart,” Luke said with a frown.

“Can’t you fix it?” Wedge asked and then winced when Luke gave him a look. “Sorry, of course you can fix it. So…”

“I don’t have time if I’m going to be at this place by the deadline they gave you.”

“You don’t have another one?”

Luke smiled wryly. “I gave my spare one to Mara Jade about five years ago.”

“So what are you going to do?” Wedge asked worriedly.

“I’ll do without it. A Jedi’s ally is the Force, not just his lightsaber. Although they do come in very handy, I’ll admit.”

Luke was more nervous about going into an unknown situation without his lightsaber than he was willing to let on to Wedge. His friend was already worried enough, Luke didn’t want him to have doubts about his ability to handle the predicament they’d found themselves in.

Luke had to borrow a blaster from Wedge as he hadn’t owned one in almost ten years, ever since he’d started exclusively using his lightsaber. When this was over, the first thing on his list would be to build a back-up saber.

The ride to the address given in the message took less than half an hour. Since Wedge drove a speeder the same way he flew an X-wing, it probably would have taken anyone else quite a bit longer. The two friends were silent during the trip, each lost in their own thoughts, but each taking comfort in the other’s presence. The building in question was an abandoned factory in the mid-levels and, in the way of most buildings on Coruscant, it was massive.

Luke and Wedge sat in the Corellian’s speeder for a long moment, staring at the place. The Jedi was trying to ignore the bad feeling that was surging at him in the Force. It didn’t matter…there was no way he could not do this. Wedge was counting on him.

Wedge had tried to convince Luke that they should both go in, but Luke had refused to allow him to. Instead, the Jedi had instructed his friend to call Han and some of the other Rogues to come and surround the area as backup. As Luke moved to get out of the speeder, Wedge’s voice made him pause.

“Please bring my little girl back to me safe, Luke,” he said, his voice a quiet plea.

“I will,” Luke promised, knowing that he had to do, and not try.

Again, Luke started to exit the speeder and again, Wedge’s words halted him for a moment.

“You watch out for yourself, too, all right?”

“I will,” Luke said again and managed to give his friend an encouraging smile.

Luke stepped out of the speeder and walked slowly towards the entrance of the building, opening himself up to the Force as he did so. He didn’t sense any hostile beings close by and there were no bubbles of empty Force space, so no ysalamiri either. He decided to take that as an optimistic sign.

Moving cautiously through the darkened hallways of the factory, Luke kept his senses on alert for either Syal or the people who had taken her. There were silent machines, towering stacks of crates and meandering hallways that made the trek very time-consuming and hazardous. Luke wasn’t certain if it reassured him or worried him more that he had made it as far as he had without encountering anyone.

Just as he was beginning to wonder if Syal’s kidnappers had sent them on a wild bantha chase, Luke suddenly heard the faint sound of a small child crying. He tightened his grip on the blaster in his hand, almost wincing at the wrongness of the way it felt. He hadn’t realized just how much his lightsaber had become a part of him.

Renewing his focus once again, Luke moved in the direction of the muffled sound. Now he could sense Syal’s faint presence in the Force, but he still couldn’t sense anyone else nearby. The sounds of the little girl’s crying were growing louder as he got nearer to wherever it was she was being held. Finally, stepping into a large empty room, Luke saw a chair on the opposite wall.

Sitting in it, tied securely with thick ropes, was Syal Antilles. Luke breathed a quiet sigh of relief that she appeared to be mostly unharmed. She was sobbing quite insistently, and her hair, which had been in a cute little braid around the top of her head, was all mussed and tangled. Her face was dirty and there was a red mark on her right cheek. Luke’s jaw tightened as he realized the kidnappers must have struck her at some point.

Holstering the blaster, as he didn’t want to frighten her any further, Luke strode quickly across the room towards the little girl. He attempted to smile, wanting to reassure her.

“Hey, Syal. It’s me, Uncle Luke. You remember me, right?” he said softly as he knelt in front of her.

She had gasped in shock at first seeing him and her eyes had widened with fear, but now Luke saw the glint of recognition enter her expression. Her little head jerked forward in a nodding motion.

“Your daddy sent me here to get you. I’m going to untie you now and I’ll take you to him, okay? Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right,” Luke said soothingly as he reached out to begin untying her bonds.

“I w-want my d-daddy!” she wailed pitifully.

“I know, I know,” Luke crooned as he paused to put one hand on her cheek, gently stroking the red mark her kidnapper had left. “He’s waiting outside. I’m going to take you to him. And I’ll tell him how very brave you’re being. You are a very brave girl, you know,” Luke said and smiled at her again as he went back to untying the knots.

“I d-don’t feel very brave,” she sniffled.

“Well, you are. And I should know, I’ve rescued quite a few princesses in my time,” Luke grinned. He was pleased to see a tiny little grin on her face in return, even if her chin was still a bit wobbly.

“I’m not a princess.”

“That’s not what your daddy said. He told me you were his little princess,” Luke whispered with a conspiratorial air. To his great relief, she giggled a little bit. He hoped that she would be able to come through this experience unscathed.

He finally succeeded in getting the last knot undone and Syal surged forward, wrapping her arms around his neck tightly, her sobs beginning again. Luke held her close for a long moment, whispering reassurances into her ear, stroking her trembling back. She was only a few months older than Jaina and Jacen, and Luke couldn’t help but feel anger that someone would hurt something so innocent.

Straightening up, Syal still attached to his neck like a limpet, Luke turned to survey the room again, his uneasiness about the simplicity of the little girl’s ‘rescue’ growing ever greater. Cautiously, he began to make his way back towards the door where he’d entered, his senses still on alert for anything sinister.

When it came, it still managed to take him by surprise, and Luke had a second to reflect ruefully that he had been letting his training slip in the last two or three months. A space in the floor beneath him, which had seemed solid when he’d passed over it several minutes ago, suddenly gave way and he was falling into a black hole. He grunted and Syal shrieked in his ear as Luke instinctively twisted his body in midair to make sure that the little girl wouldn’t be under him when they landed.

They hit the ground with a thud a few seconds later, briefly knocking the wind out of Luke. It hadn’t been a very long fall, so Luke figured they’d only dropped about a story. He struggled to his feet, not an easy task as Syal had begun crying again and also refused to release her death grip on his neck.

“Shh, it’ll be all right, sweetheart,” Luke tried to comfort the sobbing child.

“I w-want my m-momma!” she wailed.

“I’m going to make sure you get back to her, sweetie, I promise.”

“Wh-where are we?” she sniffled and Luke thought her cries seemed to have calmed a bit.

“We fell through the floor, but that’s about all I can tell you. But hey, it’s not the first time I’ve fallen into a big hole. We’ll be fine,” he tried to reassure her again. At least there’s no rancor down this hole…I hope.

“It’s dark in here!”

“I know, but I don’t have a light.”

“Oh, please, allow me.”

The dark voice was unexpected and Luke stiffened, turning in the blackness towards the direction he believed it to have come from. A glowstick flared to life and Luke flinched at the sudden brightness in the small area. Once his eyes had adjusted, he peered at the man holding the light. He was inside the cage with them, although well beyond arm’s reach.

“Dr. Berdin?” he asked incredulously, although some tiny part of him wasn’t surprised.

“So, you do remember me! I’m flattered, Master Skywalker,” Viktor Berdin said with a sneer.

Luke’s expression smoothed into a blank slate as he started to pull on the Force for calmness. He could not let Berdin see how troubled the situation he was in was making Luke feel. The calm expression faltered as he found himself unable to access the Force. It was as if the bountiful energy field he’d relied on for most of his life was there, but just out of his reach, blocked from him somehow. Luke turned a cold glare on Berdin.

“Did the ysalamiri cost you a fortune?” he taunted.

“Do you really think that those vermin are the only way to cut a Jedi off from the Force? Take a closer look at where you are.”

Warily, Luke’s eyes darted around the area that the glowstick illuminated. They had fallen through the floor into a huge cage, the bars extending from the floor to the ceiling. Something attached to one of the bars about three meters up caught his eye. It was a round object about a handspan wide, made out of some kind of dark metal, with a pulsing light in the center of it. Luke’s frown deepened as he glanced to his other side and then behind him and then back to the front of him. There was one of those things on each of the four sides of the cage.

“Those are disruptor disks. Once every second, they send out a pulse that disrupts the natural energy field within two meters of them. By placing them all around you, I’ve effectively neutralized your connection to your precious Force. And I don’t even have to feed them. Convenient, wouldn’t you say?”

Luke’s gaze jerked back to the man who threatened him and Syal, already pondering whether he could take the older man by surprise, even if he was hampered by a five-year old in his arms. The Force wasn’t the only thing that made Luke Skywalker a formidable foe. He’d been a rebel long before he was a Jedi.

He froze at the sight of the blaster now aimed directly at his chest. Automatically, he shifted Syal to the side so that the blaster was not pointed at her back. The child had her face buried in Luke’s shoulder, not wanting to look at the face of the man who had so frightened her. Luke gazed at Berdin impassively.

“I presume you want something from me or you wouldn’t have gone to this much trouble.”

“I don‘t want anything from you, Jedi,” Berdin spat the title as an insult, but Luke remained emotionless. “But I do have something planned for you.”

“Let me guess. My head on a pike?” Luke said with an affected weary tone.

“That will be the end result. But there are many ways a man can be hurt in between now and that moment, Skywalker,” Berdin said, with an evil smile.

Luke felt a cold chill run up his spine at the utter sincerity of the doctor’s hatred and ill intentions. For the first time in a very long while, Luke felt an edge of real fear curling along his senses. Inexplicably, his thoughts turned to Mara and he had the sudden desperate urge to see her, to hold her in his arms. That urge was nearly swallowed by the overwhelming doubt that he would ever do so again.

Pushing the fear aside, Luke took another quick glance around at the bars of the cage. They were narrow enough to prevent him from squeezing through, but that would hopefully not be the case with Syal. He looked back at Berdin and even without being able to touch the Force, Luke could almost feel the malevolence rolling off the man.

“And what about her?” Luke asked with a nod of his head in Syal’s direction.

“Well, there can’t be any witnesses left alive, of course,” Berdin said with a falsely sympathetic smile.

Luke’s jaw clenched in frustrated anger. It didn’t matter what Berdin had planned for him. He could deal with whatever the bastard decided to do to him. But Luke would not allow an innocent five year old girl to be killed because of him.

Perhaps he was unable to touch the Force at the moment, but Luke had been honing his speed and reflexes for the last dozen years or so and he knew what he was capable of. Reaching up, he wrapped one hand around Syal’s upper arm and wrenched her away from his neck, doing his best to ignore her yelp of fright, and tossed her as gently as he could a few paces behind him. At almost the same moment, he rushed forward and grabbed the end of the blaster in Berdin’s grip with his bionic hand, pushing it up towards the ceiling. His other hand came up to grasp the doctor around the throat.

Berdin was startled only for a bare instant and then his features darkened with rage and he struggled against Luke’s hold. The blaster fired once up into the air and Luke grimaced, glad that it was his artificial hand holding the weapon or he would have had a nasty burn on his palm. Behind him, Luke could hear Syal screaming.

“Syal, run!”

Her wails only grew louder and he could tell that she was not moving. Gritting his teeth against Berdin’s strength, which matched his own without the Force, plus the doctor had at least a dozen centimeters in height on Luke, the Jedi called to Wedge’s daughter again.

“SYAL! Run and hide, NOW!”

As the two of them fought for control, Luke managed to catch Syal slipping through the bars of the cage out of the corner of his eye. A burst of relief flowed through him and he could only hope that he had gained her enough time to get away.

“How very noble and self-sacrificing of you, Jedi!” Berdin grunted through his exertions. “But it doesn’t change your circumstances.”

“Doesn’t matter. At least she’ll be safe from you,” Luke replied through clenched teeth.

Berdin’s laughter sent another chill down Luke’s spine and he suddenly found himself being forced down, the doctor’s greater height winning the advantage. The man was much stronger than he looked at first, Luke realized with dismay.

“The others will take care of her before she can escape.”

Luke started in surprise at the doctor’s threat, his concern for Syal’s well-being causing him to lose his concentration for a moment. It was only a moment, but it was enough for Berdin to throw Luke off and knock him to the ground. Before he could scramble to his feet again, Luke looked up into the muzzle of Berdin’s blaster.

“Say good-bye to your life, Skywalker,” Berdin said coldly.

Luke stared up at him without expression, unwilling to let the doctor have the satisfaction of an emotional response. Just as Berdin’s finger squeezed on the trigger, Luke was conscious of a tiny flicker of the Force teasing the edge of his perception. The earlier blaster bolt had, unknown to either of the combatants, struck one of the disruptor disks, and Luke had fallen on the cusp of the dead zone of the other disks’ range. Instinctively, the Jedi Master sent a sharp cry of distress out through the Force.

The blaster fired and his world went dark.

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