Light of the Jedi(56)
Marchion Ro peered in at Mari, who lay in a sealed oblong pod with a clear front panel. Wires ran from it to power sources in the deck, and large tanks of various medical chemicals bubbled nearby, their contents dripping into tubes running into the pod. The machine was essentially one large medical capsule designed to keep Mari as healthy and comfortable as could be managed for a human who had been alive for well over a century.
Mari had dialed in to the particular focus she found while doing these runs, her eyes flickering, charting routes through the swirl of hyperspace that her mind was uniquely capable of seeing. No other being seemed able to do it, and no navidroid came close. Droid brains could chart routes along already established paths, but what Mari did was nothing like that. Mari found the roads between the roads, via some mix of instinct and unconscious mathematical analysis that operated on a level she couldn’t explain.
Marchion had asked her, of course—many times—as had his father, and his grandmother. If Mari San Tekka’s gift could be replicated, then there truly was no limit to what could be accomplished. Mari had tried, but it was like explaining why there were always more stars the farther you traveled, the deeper you looked. Some things just were, and could not be explained.
Or duplicated.
When Mari San Tekka died—and that day could not be far off, despite the best medical technology in the galaxy being applied to extending her life span—the Paths would die with her. And at that point, the thing that made the Nihil more than just another marauder gang carving out territory in the Outer Rim would vanish.
Marchion pressed a control on the exterior of Mari’s medical pod, and spoke.
“Can you bring us back, Mari?” Marchion Ro said.
The old woman ignored him, and the Gaze leapt again. Marchion braced himself against the shock without thinking. Some people could barely keep their feet when Mari San Tekka took the ship on one of her little voyages, but he had been experiencing it since he was a child.
“Mari?” he said again.
No response. Hyperspace swirled outside the viewports, and Mari’s eyes tracked it, seeing paths visible only to her.
Marchion Ro frowned. He pressed another control on the medical pod’s console, and Mari’s entire body tensed as a mild electric shock coursed through it.
He wished she weren’t making him do it. The woman was not robust, and he didn’t know how many jolts she could take. Her doctor, a rotund Chadra-Fan named Uttersond, had once described Mari San Tekka’s heart as a paper lantern.
But he didn’t have time for her to be lost in her mind. He had plans, and questions, and the Nihil needed Paths, and the Paths came from Marchion Ro, but truly from this old woman to whom he had tied his entire future, this woman he kept alive and pampered and she just wanted to fly his ship halfway across the galaxy instead of just—
He pressed the button again, and Mari’s body went rigid.
—giving him—
Again.
—what he—
Again.
—needed.
Mari San Tekka collapsed back against the cradle in her medical pod, and then her body trembled and shook. Her mouth gaped open, spittle shining at its corners, and her eyes rolled back in her head.
An alarm began to sound, a low, insistent beep, which he knew would summon Dr. Uttersond. Marchion Ro tapped another control and the alarm ceased.
He leaned over the medical pod, watching Mari San Tekka endure her seizure. The pod went through its emergency procedures; needles extended on actuator arms from its sides and slipped into the protruding veins on the woman’s stick-thin arms, as flat metal paddles slid beneath her robes to stimulate her heart.
Maybe this is the end, he thought. Everything I’ve done, all those years of planning…it could be over, right here, today.
The idea had a perverse appeal. Fascinated, he watched Mari San Tekka’s trembling, tiny body, wondering if his life was about to embark on…well, an entirely new path.
His finger hovered over the alarm for Uttersond, and he didn’t know what the idiot doctor could do, but perhaps something, and was pressing it even as Mari San Tekka coughed, a sharp barking sound, and her seizures ended.
Her eyes opened, and she looked around her in wonderment. They locked on Marchion, and she smiled, broad and kind and open as a child.
“Why, Marchion, hello,” she said. “Did I lose myself again? I’m sorry. You know how I get when I take us traveling. There’s just so much to see, you know.”
Her index finger twitched on the control panel beneath her hand, and Marchion felt the Gaze drop from hyperspace.
“It’s all right, Mari, everything’s just fine.”
Mari swiveled the medical pod, taking it vertical, so instead of looking up at him she could stare him right in the eye. Her mind was clouded by age, but her gaze was not—her eyes were clear and focused, and she never seemed perturbed in the least by his own black orbs.
“Well, that was a good one, in any case. Found a new path between Pasaana and Urber. Should reduce travel time by a third, maybe more. It’ll make you a bundle!”
Mari San Tekka had been a hyperspace prospector since she was six years old. Something had happened to her as she traveled out in the interstellar wilderness with her family, and it had changed her. Changed her mind. Opened her up so she could see things no one else could—the Paths. For some years, she had used that ability on behalf of her people, and brought them wealth and renown…but that fame brought with it a price.