Yoda (13 page)

To a droid, on the other hand, another droid is exactly life-sized.

Which might explain how it came to be that one little R2 unit, still in its original drab factory colors, could go lurching and wheeping through the dense crowds thronging Chancellor Palpatine's Delta Concourse almost completely unnoticed, despite the fact that it kept banging into shins, walls, and water fountains as if, instead of sensors and a fine computer brain, it was being navigated from the inside by a hot, grumpy, and increasingly exasperated person with only four tiny eyeholes to look out of.

It might also explain why, in the midst of so much obliviousness, this same droid was being pursued, quite relentlessly, by a second R2, this one painted in the smart crimson color of the Republic, with the fine insignia of security painted on its carapace…

“Ma'am?” The guard on security point eleven was a perspiring middle-aged man with a double chin. His hair was grizzled black and white, cut to a military buzz under the sweat-stained edge of his uniform cap. “Ma'am, I'll have to ask you to step to one side with me here.”

Master Leem's jaw began to work. “But, why, Officer? Have I done—”

“Just step over here with me, please.”

With all three brows furrowing, Maks Leem followed the guard a few steps behind the scanner equipment. He stood with his back to the crowd. “Don't look around, don't look around. Just act natural. Make it look as if I'm going over your ID chip.”

Master Leem looked at him blankly.

“ID,” he said.

She handed it over.

He made a show of inserting it into his datapad. “Ma'am, sensors indicate that you are carrying a high-energy focused particle weapon on your person.”

“I can explain that—”

“Most of the guys here wouldn't recognize that sensor signature,” the guard went on, voice still low. “Not me. I know what it is. I know what you are. There's a group of us, we trade information, you know, but I never thought I'd actually see…”

“I'm not sure I understand,” Master Leem said.

“Don't look around. Don't look. Just act natural. I recognize the scanner sig,” he said huskily. “You're Jedi, aren't you? I mean, the real thing?”

Maks Leem chewed twice. Three times. “Yes. I am.”

“I knew it.” The guard's voice was thick with emotion. “You're undercover, aren't you? People say the Jedi are only out for themselves now. They say they're just the Chancellor's secret police. I never bought that for a second. That's not the Jedi way.”

“It most certainly isn't,” Maks Leem said, genuinely shocked that anyone should think of the Order as the Chancellor's private band of thugs.

“On a mission,” the guard said. “Don't look, don't look. Act natural. Just tell me what you need. I can help. Happy to help. Risk no object,” he said hoarsely.

“Truly, you are a friend of the Order,” Maks said.

“Tell me about it. You know how many times I've seen
Jedi!
—? Fifteen. Fifteen times. And I'm going with my nephew next week. Give me a mission. Just act natural and give me a mission,” he said. “Risk no object. Anything to help.”

“You've already done it,” Master Leem said gently. The guard blinked. “Did you think it was an accident that you were working security today?” she said. “Did you think I came to your line by
chance
?”

He looked at her, awestruck. “By the Force!” he whispered.

“We know who our friends are, Mister…Charpp,” she said, reading his name off his security badge. She tapped the handle of the lightsaber hidden under her cloak. “But remember, nobody must know. As far as everyone else is concerned, I'm just a humble traveler on her way out to Malastare to visit family. All you need to do now is act natural.”

“Act natural.” He nodded dutifully, making his chins wobble. “Of course, of course. But…” Here his voice grew very slightly wistful. “Is there anything else?”

“You could give me back my ID chip.”

“Oh. Right.” He shoved it back into her hands, the chip now liberally smirched with sweaty fingerprints.

“When the time comes, we will contact you,” Master Leem promised. “In the meanwhile: may the Force be with you!”

Leaving him standing there with tears brimming in his eyes, Master Leem hurried over to the two Padawans. “I'm glad to see you made it through. But where's Jai?” she said. She frowned. “And where's
you know who
?”

Evan Chan hated to fly. Oh, not in the atmosphere. Tooling around the atmosphere in a lightflier was fine. Also, boats were good. As an environmental hydrographer—or “water boy” as his class of professionals were known in the environmental impact biz—he spent lots of time zipping across planetary surfaces and sampling their oceans, rivers, and lakes. It was getting to other planets in the first place that was the problem.

The whole idea of the jump to hyperspace—the atom-juggling, light-smearing, molecule-twisting jump—made Evan queasy. Not just nauseous and sick to the stomach—though it did that, too—but
spiritually
uncomfortable. And yet there was no way to carry out his work as a government-certified pan-planetary water evaluator without jumping. Traveling to any planet outside the Coruscant system by sublight would take literally lifetimes.

Which is why he was in the men's refresher of the Delta Concourse at Chance Palp, sipping discreetly from his precious hip flask of liquid courage—SomnaSkol Red, in the 0.1-liter travel size.

He studied himself in the mirror over the sink. To tell the truth, he didn't look great. Faced with the prospect of a longer-than-usual hyperspace jaunt, he hadn't slept much over the last three days. His eyes were hollow and bleary, a two-day stubble shadowed his face like an unpleasant mold, and his knees were feeling distinctly jellylike. He put his head in his hands and leaned forward over the hard white glare of the sink.

A droid came into the refresher, banging off one wall with the sound of a tin can hitting a ferrocrete sidewalk, and scooted into one of the privacy stalls.

Evan blinked. He was trying to remember if he'd ever seen a droid in a refresher before. Perhaps a custodial droid, but this had been an R2 unit, with no security insignia on it.

“Odd,” Evan said out loud. Or at least, that's what he meant to say. As it turned out, the SomnaSkol had left his lips numb, and the word trailed out like 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

V
entress 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 reticle, she reached out with the Force, tenderly, entwining the picket like a 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 battery 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 snowdrift 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 war would carry weight. At the very best, it's diplomatically damaging, and a public relations nightmare.” Obi-Wan turned and slogged back to their ships. They had landed far from any settlements, to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves, but for a weary moment Obi-Wan was missing a cozy bar with a good fire and a chance to drink off one tumbler of excellent Arkanian sweet milk—a demure term for a creamy mead that could leave a strong man under the table.