the drool one got on oneself at the dentist when one's mouth was frozen.
Another R2 raced into the refresher. This one was wearing Chance Palp colors,
black and tan, with a security logo. Its small metal head swiveled aggressively,
pointing its cam around the white-tiled room.
The cam froze, trained on the stall where the first droid had gone. The door
was open just a crack.
The cam aperture narrowed appraisingly.
Evan Chan shut his eyes very hard, and then opened them. The second droid was
still there.
He took another shot of the SomnaSkol.
The security droid now wheeled stealthily—there was no other word for
it—toward the suspicious stall. It was one of the big multipurpose stalls, with
a toilet, urinal, trough, collection rods, and a telescoping drain with suction
action. With infinite care the little security droid reached out with one metal
claw, clamped soundlessly on the handle, and tugged the door swiftly to the
halfway-open position.
Lights flashed, and the little droid rocked back and forth, wheeping and
borping in consternation. Evan squinted, staring at the scene reflected in the
mirror. The security droid's cam swept the floor of the stall. It was empty.
After a moment's hesitation, it rolled inside: and as it did, Evan's eye was
caught by a flicker of motion in the mirror. The first droid was floating
soundlessly over the top of the stall door.
Chirps and burbles of dismay. Most from the security droid, but some very
definitely from Evan. He watched the first droid come floating noiselessly down
behind the stall door. Now the two droids' positions were reversed, with the
security droid poking around the stall in a bewildered fashion, and the fugitive
droid in the main part of the refresher, hidden behind the stall door.
The fugitive droid stuck out its little arms. The bolt on the stall door shot
home with a crack like a blaster rifle pulse, and then squeaked in the most
uncanny way, as if the transparisteel rod was being tied into knots.
The security droid went berserk, whooping and beeping and banging on the
stall door. Colored lights flashed over the white tiles. For its part, the
fugitive droid made an even more horrible sound: a strange, hollow cackle,
horribly unsynthetic—the sound of a Kowakian monkey-lizard laughing inside a
barrel, perhaps.
Then Evil R2, as Evan had come to think of it, spun and rolled clumsily from
the room.
Evan stared at the shaking stall door. He listened to the frantic wails of
the trapped security droid. And then, with trembling hands, he took out his
flask of SomnaSkol Red and emptied every drop into the sink, swearing he would
never touch the stuff again.
6
Ventress took the Jedi courier group just after they dropped into Ithorian
local space. Last Call was rigged with the best tech Geonosis could supply,
including a "gemcutter" prototype built from plans the good folks at Carbanti
United Electronics didn't even know had been stolen yet. The gemcutter had been
built to counteract the cloaking effect of ships moving in hyperspace, so they
couldn't suddenly materialize in the middle of one's fleet like a sand panther
dropping from a tree onto the helpless herbivores below. Carbanti's prototype
acted like a seismograph, picking up the fault lines a ship tore in the
space–time continuum as it prepared to drop out of hyperspace. The warning was
usually less than five seconds, but those seconds could mean the difference
between life and death.
And of course if one put the gemcutter on a ship as fast and lethal as Last
Call, flown by a pilot faster and more lethal still, one could entirely reverse
the equation, so that, to continue the metaphor, the would-be panther found
itself dropping onto a sharpened stake.
Beyond the last planet of the Ithorian system, space–time thinned; buckled;
tore. Like a bead of dew condensing on a cold window, the first Republic fighter
dropped through the rip and exited hyperspace. Asajj recognized it as an HKD
Tavya-class armored picket, with an extra proton torpedo battery mounted on its
undercarriage. Ignoring her tactical computer and Last Call's HUD sighting
lover in her embrace. She could see the pilot's eyes go wide with shock; feel
the wild rush of adrenaline go screaming through his blood as his sirens went
off. She could taste the sudden clammy sweat around his mouth. "Last call,
lover," she whispered. "It's closing time."
Laser cannons glittered in the silent vastness of space, and the picket ship
drifted into splinters, like a Dantooine dandelion head gone to seed and blown
apart. It was always strange how quiet death was in space, with no air to carry
the thunder of explosions or the screams of the doomed. Even in the Force, one
puny life lost made little difference, and the pilot's end came meekly, not with
a roar in the mind's ear, but a flickering absence, like a candle going out.
Yoda's wingmates knew their business well enough. Two more pickets had
crystallized in realspace. Instantly they understood they were under attack, and
opened up with their forward cannons. They shot past Asajj on each flank,
screaming insystem.
She tipped Last Call up and sent it tumbling, twisting between the deadly
blinks of hardened light from the left Tavya's laser cannon. The one on the
right belched out two tracers—targeted proton torpedoes, moving nearly twice her
current velocity.
Instantly Asajj juked and turned, forcing the torpedoes to bleed off speed in
maneuvers. The harder she was to target, the more closely they would have to
match her speed. She could sense their mindless little targeting computers,
tirelessly reformulating interception angles with her every jerk and twist, and
she laughed out loud, corkscrewing insystem after the first ship.
The gemcutter flashed, and a moment later the Call told her a Seltaya-class
armored courier was punching out of hyperspace. Master Yoda had arrived.
She was gaining fast on the first of the Tavyas. He had one turret-mounted
laser he could swivel around to fire backward at her, but he never came close to
hitting her. On a good day, Asajj Ventress could walk between raindrops, and any
day with a chance to bring Yoda's charred green head to her Master was a good
one in her books.
The Tavya's pilot stopped firing abruptly, throwing everything he had into a
wild dash for the first planet in the system, a lifeless frozen rock one would
barely dignify with the word moon—but the Ithorians had armed it with a
formidable battery of automated defenses as a deterrent for unwelcome visitors.
He was hoping to run under the protection of its big guns.
Not that it would work. The Call was too fast. He had to see that. His
readouts would be telling him. He had to try something new. Duck or rise, that
was the question. He couldn't just stop. Asajj reached out through the Force,
like another kind of gemcutter, surfing on the Tavya pilot's intention.
Down.
He would dive toward the rapidly approaching b
attery and hope she overshot.
She could feel his heart racing; could feel him steeling himself to hold on,
hold on, forcing himself not to commit too early.
She laid a couple of char lines across his wings just to make him twitch.
There—the dive! A fast drop, pulling ten crushing g's. Even his pressure suit
couldn't adequately protect him from that. Asajj could feel blackout starting to
close over him.
Merciful, really.
With the blood congealing in his veins from pressure, he was only dimly aware
of Last Call shooting by underneath him and pulling sharply up. He didn't have
enough extra consciousness to understand that Asajj, anticipating him, had
already cut under his line. He couldn't pay nearly enough attention to notice
the very tiny object trailing her.
The proton torpedo's new interception angle took it straight into the belly
of the Tavya and detonated. The ship cracked open like an egg, spilling out
white light and a red-stained yolk. Another little candle guttered out.
Yoda must have felt that.
The Tavya that had fired the proton torpedoes at her was banking away,
heading back to join Yoda. She picked him off almost casually as another picket
ship, the last of the four accompanying Yoda, dropped into realspace.
Three guards down, one to go, and then the Master himself.
Asajj frowned. It was singularly curious that Yoda hadn't opened fire on her
himself. Although he was usually quoted mumbling some piety about the inherent
beauty of peace or life, the wizened old swamp toad was no slouch with a
lightsaber, by all accounts, and from her reading about the battle on Geonosis,
she would have expected him to come to the defense of his entourage with all
cannons blazing.
As if in answer to her thought, his ship opened fire, but the shots were slow
and wide of the mark. Either the old guy or his R2 unit was fighting the ship
while suffering from some kind of damage, or else Yoda had a plan so subtle she
couldn't grasp it at all. In a way, she was almost hoping for the latter. If he
was sitting there in his cockpit gasping through a stroke, it lessened the glory
of the kill very considerably, although she wouldn't, obviously, dwell on that
when she reported back to Dooku.
Another few blinks of laserfire flashed off into the distance, missing her by
a clear thirty degrees. If the old being had a plan, it was too deep for her to
determine. Perhaps he was signaling for reinforcements, with some kind of code
embedded in the pulse of his weapons?
Asajj shrugged and accelerated into a corkscrewing attack run on the one
remaining picket. Best to get the distractions out of the way.
The gemcutter stammered a warning across her monitors, and a moment later the
last of Yoda's protectors jumped right back into hyperspace. Asajj cocked one
eyebrow. Better a live womp rat than a dead dire cat, as the saying went. So
much the better. The stars knew that an overdeveloped sense of compassion was
not one of her vices, but she got no particular pleasure from slaughtering
defenseless bystanders.
Now for the Jedi Master himself.
She closed her eyes, feeling for him in the wide darkness of space. It was
harder than she had anticipated. Dooku was a presence she could find half a
planet away—a burning shadow, darkness made visible. From the Grand Master of
the Jedi Order she expected no less . . . but when at last she felt the little
frightened pinprick of life inside his ship, he seemed a weak and puny thing.
Perhaps age, that tireless hunter, had chased him down at last? She'd seen
old beings wither thus, when the fire of life burned lower until they had no
heat left for the great passions, love and hate and fury, but spent their last
years in embers, able to support the little fires of avarice, peevishness,
anxiety. Life's thin, pinched afterglow.
She felt out for him again, eyes open this time, watching his ship fall
steadily under Last Call's shadow. She rested her fingers on the firing buttons
as her targeting computers locked down his thrusters, engine core, canopy. She
had originally intended to go directly for the engine core, on the theory it
would be best to be thorough, but if the old Jedi was going to go this easily,
perhaps she should try just pricking open the canopy and letting the vacuum in.
That would certainly leave her with a more convincing trophy to hand to Dooku
than a series of archived spectrographic analyses that implied some organic
residue left in a pile of debris.
The Seltaya juked and twisted mechanically in her sights, but there was no
flair to its movements at all. Her fingers tensed.
No.
Ventress took her hands off the firing controls. She knew exactly what the
Seltaya was doing. Its R2 unit was executing its factory-standard evasive
maneuvers; she recognized them from a dozen previous kills.
Whoever was in that ship, it sure wasn't Yoda.
With a snarl Ventress snapped off a single shot from her lasers, picking off
the Seltaya's rear stabilizer and sending it tumbling into space. Under high
magnification, she saw the viewports of the Seltaya's cockpit go green. Whoever
was in there—a decoy, obviously—was spacesick, and throwing up.
She had ambushed a decoy.
Score one for the other team.
Asajj took a deep breath, refocusing. What to do now? Killing the poor
creature over there in a fit of pique would hardly be constructive. The decoy
might well have been a child, come to think of it—she had seen the footage of
him walking across the spaceport to the starfighter, and if he was more than a
meter tall, it wasn't by much.
She shifted over to tractor beams and slowly stilled the tumbling ship. She
could just let him go, of course. The R2 ought to be able to pilot him on to
Ithor, although the descent would be tricky thanks to the damage she had done to
his rear stabilizer. Once he got there, the local authorities could package him
up and ship him back to Coruscant. What a farce.
Asajj shook her head. What a fool she felt. To think that the Grand Master of
the Jedi Order could possibly go so easily into the long night.
Except...
. . . As far as the world knew, that was exactly what had just happened.
That cowardly fourth starfighter had seen her destroy the rest of the
entourage. Remote surveillance from the Ithorian battery would confirm the
engagement. If she were to let the decoy carry on to Ithor, surely the Republic
would be a little embarrassed. But if she destroyed his ship in a way that would
ensure blasted pieces went spinning insystem for the authorities to find . . .
what would happen then?
Her cruel, pretty mouth twisted into a smile. What was it Dooku said to her
once? There are at least two things one appreciates more the older one becomes:
excellent wine, and confusion to the enemy.
She laughed, and dragged the hapless Seltaya in. "Confusion to the enemy,"
she said.
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker stood ankle-deep in the meltwater of
spring on the Arkanian tundra, facing a third figure, a tall, imperious woman
with the snow
drift eyes of her species. "Please," Obi-Wan said. "Reconsider."
"I have considered the matter long and carefully," the Arkanian said. Her
name was Serifa Altunen, and she was a Jedi Knight.
Had been a Jedi.
Carefully she took off her Jedi cloak, folded it up, and handed it to
Obi-Wan. "I follow the Force—not the law. I serve the people—not the Senate. I
will make peace—not war."
"You swore an oath to the Jedi Order!" Anakin said.
She shrugged. "Then I am forsworn. But I must tell you, I do not feel it
much."
"If every Jedi gets to choose which orders she will follow, and which ones
she will not, it won't be long before we are all lost," Obi-Wan said.
Serifa's eyebrows rose. "I do not feel lost. The. Force is as it always has
been. It is the Order that has strayed from the path."
Which probably served Obi-Wan right for coming in philosophical with an
Arkanian. Yoda managed to pull off these sage-like meditations, but they never
seemed to work out quite right for Obi-Wan. Maybe one just had to be older.
"More to the point, the war will be lost," Anakin said angrily. "Say what you
like about following your conscience, but if we divide our forces, the Trade
Federation will win. If you think the Republic has strayed from the path of
benevolence and wisdom, wait until you experience government by battle droid."
"So you care about winning this war?" the Arkanian asked.
"Of course I do!"
"Why?"
Anakin threw up his hands. "What do you mean, why?"
Serifa gave him that condescending look the Arkanians had been perfecting
over the course of millennia. "Perhaps you, too, should examine your path—at
least until you come up with a better answer to that question."
They watched her mount the hoversled she had ridden to this rendezvous and
peel away over the thawing tundra on it, raising twin fountains of icy
meltwater. Scattered patches of snow and ice the same white as the Arkanian's
eyes; white sun, too, glittering on the watery plain as if on broken glass.
Obi-Wan blew out a breath. "That didn't go so well."
"Does she really have influence on the government?"
"I have to think a respected Jedi coming forward to say she has renounced the
Order and recommending that Arkania declare itself to be a neutral party in the