by James Luceno
Sidious and Sate Pestage, in whose hands a repeating blaster fashioned a hell of its own, a barrage of light that separated limbs from torsos, hooded heads from cloaked shoulders. Hurrying to Plagueis’s side, Sidious lifted him upright, and in unison they brought swift death to the rest.
In the stillness that followed, 11-4D, glistening with leaked lubricant, reenabled itself and walked stiffly to where the two Sith were standing, syringes grasped in two of its appendages.
“Magister Damask, I can be of service.”
Plagueis extended his arm toward the droid and then lowered himself to the floor as the drugs began to take effect. He lifted his gaze to Pestage, then glanced at Sidious, who, in turn, showed Pestage a look that made abundantly clear he had become a member of their secret fraternity, whether he wanted to or not.
“Master, we need to leave at once,” Sidious said. “What I felt, the Jedi may have felt, and they will come.”
“Let them,” Plagueis rasped. “Let them inhale the aroma of the dark side.”
“This carnage is beyond explanation. We can’t be here.”
After a moment, Plagueis nodded and summoned a gurgling voice. “Recall the Sun Guard. When they’re done here—”
“No,” Sidious said. “I know where the Gran are. It won’t be business as usual this time, Master.”
The Malastare ambassador’s residence occupied three mid-tier stories of a slender building located at the edge of the government district. The front of the residence looked out on the stand-alone Galactic Courts of the Justice Building, but the rear faced a narrow canyon that was more than fifty levels deep and off limits to traffic. Following directions furnished by Pestage, Sidious rode turbolifts and pedestrian walkways to a meager balcony ten levels above the upper story of the residence. His fury notwithstanding, he would have preferred to linger until nightfall, which came early to that part of Coruscant, but he was certain that the Gran were expecting word that the Maladians had satisfied the terms of the contract, and he couldn’t risk having them flee for the stars before he got to them. So he lingered on the balcony until it and the walkway in both directions were unoccupied, then jumped from the overlook and called on the Force to deliver him safely to a narrow ledge that ran beneath the lowest floor of the residence. There he perched only for the time it took to activate the lightsaber he had retrieved from Plagueis’s starship and use it to burn his way into a wide maintenance duct that perforated the building at each level.
Crawling to the first egress — a distance of scarcely ten meters — he lowered himself into a murky storage room and once more called the weapon’s crimson blade from the hilt. Constructed to fit the Muun’s large hand, the lightsaber felt unwieldy in Sidious’s, so he switched to a two-handed grip. Moving with a caution that belied his murderous intent, and on the alert for cams or other security devices, he eased out of the room into a tight corridor and followed it toward the front of the building. There, in a formal entryway, two Dugs were standing guard in a desultory way. Moving quickly, a blur to human senses, he caught them by surprise, splitting open the chest and abdomen of one and beheading the other while the first was attempting to prevent his entrails from spilling onto the glossy mosaic floor. A brief scan of the foyer revealed the presence of cams installed in the walls and high ceiling. He wondered how the killings appeared to anyone monitoring a display screen. It must have seemed as if the two Dugs had been butchered by a phantom.
Still, all the more reason to hurry.
He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push, he took a wide stance in the shattered doorway and positioned the blade of the thrumming lightsaber vertically in front of him. Through the weapon’s glow he saw a dozen or more Santhe guards in uniform seated around a table littered with food and drink containers gape at him in disbelief before reaching for weapons fastened to their hips or scurrying for others buried beneath the rubble of their celebratory meal.
Sidious waded into the room, returning volleys of blaster bolts from those first to fire, then attacked, raising his left hand to levitate two guards into midair before running his blade through each of them. Snarling like a beast, he whirled through a circle, ridding three guards of their heads and cutting a fourth in half at the waist. The blade impaled a guard who had flattened himself to the floor in abject terror, then went straight into the shrieking mouth of the last of them.
As that one collapsed in a heap, Sidious caught a glimpse of himself in an ornate mirror: face contorted in rage, red hair in electrified disarray, mouth webbed with strands of thick saliva, eyes a radioactive shade of yellow.
He flew back to the stairwell and raced to the top of the next flight, which opened into a large room filled with female Gran and younglings, along with Gran and Dug servants. Having heard the commotion from below, some were already on their huge flat feet; others, though, were too shocked to move.
All the better for him, and he left not a single one of them alive.
Then: through a warren of expensively appointed rooms to another set of closed doors, from behind which issued the sounds of a banquet in progress — one that had probably commenced hours earlier and wasn’t meant to end until hours later, with the deaths of Senator Palpatine, Hego Damask, and the other Muuns an accomplished fact.
Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plants and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats. From the head of the table, Pax Teem gawked at him as if he might be a creature escaped from his most horrifying nightmare. And yet he wouldn’t be the first to taste Plagueis’s blade but the last: once he had been forced to watch the rest of his party butchered, from hooves to eyestalks; the painted ceiling brought down by Sidious’s Force pull; the flames of a gentle gas blaze in the room’s fireplace incited to a blistering inferno that Sidious tugged behind him as he soared from the table to the floor and closed on his final victim.
In desperate flight from the Sith and the spreading flames, Pax Teem had backed himself to a tall window framed by floor-to-ceiling curtains. Entreaties of whatever sort tried to thrust themselves through his stricken voice box and past his square teeth, but none succeeded.
Deactivating the lightsaber, Sidious beckoned the flames with his fingers, encouraging them to leap from the table to the curtains. A bleating scream finally emerged from Teem’s narrow muzzle of a mouth as the blazing fabric collapsed around him, and Sidious watched him roast to death.
21: INVESTITURE
Assassinations, murders, and other crimes were no match for the codes of silence that had governed the Order of the Canted Circle, the Gran Protectorate, Santhe Security, and the Jedi High Council almost since their inceptions. Had the elite members and private guards of the Canted Circle not been drugged and found unconscious in dressing rooms and other places, police investigators summoned to the headquarters by two Jedi Knights would never have been allowed to enter the landmark building, let alone the order’s vaunted initiation room, in which were discovered the bodies of two Echani, believed to be bodyguards; a dozen Muuns, killed by decapitator disks and vibroblades; and three times that number of Maladian assassins dressed in borrowed robes, who had succumbed to blaster bolts, blunt-force injuries, and, in some cases, traumatic amputations. So scattered were the latter, investigators initially suspected that an explosive device had been detonated, but no trace of a device was ever uncovered. The Muuns were quickly identified as top-ranking members of a clandestine financial group known as Damask Holdings, though its wealthy founder and chief operating officer, Hego Damask, was believed to have survived the sneak attack. The Jedi who had alerted the police never revealed what had drawn them to the Fobosi district to begin with, or why they expressed such interest in the case. As well, the members of the Order of the Canted Circle refused to answer any
questions.
At the Malastare embassy in the heart of Coruscant the evidence was even more baffling, and complicated by a fire and ensuing gas explosion that had swept through the building. Fire marshals and forensics specialists were picking through the charred remains of the three-story resiblock when two members of the Jedi Council had paid an unannounced visit. Again, the Jedi had declined to explain their actions, but the police were able to make progress on their own. The amount of blood residue discovered at the scene led investigators to determine that, prior to the arrival of the police, several bodies had been incinerated on site, which suggested the work of elements of organized crime. In the wake of the recent assassination of Senator Vidar Kim, the Senate Investigatory Committee formed a special task force to look into the matter. Many beings were interviewed and interrogated, and many security cam recordings studied during the course of the investigation, but most of the principal players and witnesses hid behind their lawyers, even when threatened with imprisonment for obstruction of justice.
A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.
The droid 11-4D — fully repaired — was waiting for him on the landing zone and led him inside, leaving the guards to wait with the airspeeder.
“You appear to be in much better condition than when I last saw you, droid,” Sidious remarked as a turbolift dropped them deep inside the complex.
“Yes, Senator Palpatine, Aborah is a restorative place.”
“And Magister Damask?”
“I leave it to you to judge for yourself, sir.”
Exiting the turbolift, the first thing to catch Sidious’s eye was the library: rack after rack of texts, scrolls, disks, and holocrons — all the data he had been craving since his apprenticeship began. He ran his hands lovingly over the shelves but barely had time to revel in his excitement when 11-4D ushered him onto a descending ramp that led into what might have been a state-of-the-art medical research facility.
His eyes darting from one device to the next, he asked, “Is this new since the Magister’s injuries?”
“Only some of what you see,” the droid said. “For the most part this area is unchanged since I was first brought here.”
“And when was that?”
“Approximately one standard year before I was introduced to you on Chandrila, sir.”
Sidious considered it, then asked, “Is Magister Damask your maker, droid?”
“No, sir. He is simply my present master.”
Deeper in the complex, they moved past cages containing as many creatures as could be found in a well-stocked zoo. OneOne-FourDee indicated a cluster separate from the rest.
“These are the Magister’s most recent pregnancies.”
“The Magister’s?” Sidious repeated in bewilderment.
“His success rate has improved.”
Sidious was still trying to make sense of the droid’s statements when they entered a long corridor lined with windowless cells. Through the Force he could sense life-forms behind each locked door.
“Captives?”
“Oh, no, sir,” 11-4D said. “Ongoing experiments.”
As they turned a corner at the end of the corridor Sidious came to a dead stop. Centered in a kind of operating theater stood a towering bacta tank, in which floated a male Bith.
“That is Venamis,” Plagueis said in a voice that wasn’t entirely his.
Sidious pivoted to see his Master limp into the room, mouth, chin, and neck concealed behind a breath mask or transpirator of some sort. Most of the vibroblade wounds had healed, but his skin looked especially wan. Sidious had been wondering if Plagueis had been weakened by the attack, but he saw now that, for all the punishment his body had sustained at the hands of the Maladian assassins, the Muun was no less strong in the Force.
“Your thoughts betray you,” Plagueis said. “Do you think that Malak’s powers were weakened by Revan’s lightsaber? Bane by being encrusted in orbalisks? Do you think Gravid’s young apprentice was hindered by the prosthesis she was forced to wear after fighting him?”
“No, Master.”
“Soon I will be stronger than you can possibly imagine.” Plagueis forced himself to swallow, then said, “But come, we have much to discuss.”
Sidious followed him into a cool chamber, furnished only with a bed, two simple chairs, a cabinet, and a square, exquisitely woven rug. Motioning Sidious into one of the chairs, Plagueis lowered himself with noticeable difficulty into the other. After a long moment of silence, he nodded in satisfaction.
“I am pleased to see how greatly you have changed — how powerful you have become, Lord Sidious. What happened on Coruscant was meant to happen, but I take consolation in the fact that the events have shaped you into a true Sith Lord. You are indeed ready to learn the secrets I have been safeguarding.”
“What is this place, Master?”
Plagueis took a moment to gather enough strength to continue. “Think of it as a vessel that contains all the things to which I am devoted. All the things I love.”
“This may be the first time I have ever heard you utter the word.”
“Only because no other term exists that adequately expresses my unconditional attachment to the creatures and beings with whom I share this place. Love without compassion, however, for compassion has no part in this.”
“The Bith — Venamis …”
“Dispatched by Tenebrous to test me — to eliminate me had I failed. But Venamis has been a gift; essential in helping me unlock some of the deepest secrets of the Force. Every creature you have glimpsed or sensed here has been a similar blessing, as you will see when I lead you into the mysteries.”
“What did the droid mean when it said the Magister’s pregnancies?”
Beneath the breath mask, Plagueis might have quirked a smile. “It means that the pregnancies were not achieved by normal means of conception, but rather through the Force.”
Surprise and disbelief mingled in Sidious’s blue eyes. “The Force?”
“Yes,” Plagueis said pensively. “But I failed to exercise due caution. As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics. I have been audacious, and the Force has tested me the way Tenebrous sought to. Midi-chlorians are not easily persuaded to execute the dictates of one newly initiated in the mysteries. The Force needs to be won over, especially in work that involves the dark side. It must be reassured that a Sith is capable of accepting authority. Otherwise it will thwart one’s intentions. It will engineer misfortune. It will strike back.”
“The Maladians—”
“Perhaps. But in any case this is why the Jedi Order has descended into decadence and is dragging the Republic down with it. Because the Jedi have lost the allegiance of the Force. Yes, their ability to draw energy from the Force continues, but their ability to use the Force has diminished. Each of their actions engenders an opposite, often unrecognized consequence that elevates those attuned to the dark side; that buoys the efforts of the Sith and increases our power. Yet our use of that power requires delicacy. We must be alert to moments when the light side falters and openings are created. Then, and only then — when all the conditions have been met — can we act without fear of meeting resistance or repercussion.
“To say that the Force works in mysterious ways is to admit one’s ignorance, for any mystery can be solved through the application of knowledge and unrelenting effo
rt. As we had our way with the Senate, and as we will soon have our way with the Republic and the Jedi, we will have our way with the Force.”
Silenced by awe, Sidious scarcely knew how to respond. “What would you have me do, Master?”
The transpirator emitted a series of tones, and Plagueis inhaled deeply. “I will relocate to Sojourn in order to devote myself fully to our investigations, to furthering the imperative, and to healing myself.”
“What will become of Aborah?”
“For the time being it can serve as a repository.”
“And Damask Holdings?”
“The group will not be re-formed, though I may continue to host annual Gatherings. And I will tutor San Hill personally, to prepare him for assuming chairmanship of the Banking Clan.”
“Why do we need them?”
In a harsh whisper, Plagueis said, “Because war is now on the agenda, Sidious. But our actions must be circumspect, restricted to those star systems rife with petty conflicts, where appropriate beings can be encouraged, appropriate operations can be funded … We must arrange for worlds in the Outer Rim to suffer while the Core prospers. Pathetic as those worlds may be, we have no choice but to use what we have at hand.
“The IBC will be essential in financing the war we will slowly foment. We will need the Banking Clan to finance the manufacturers of weapons and to sustain an alternative economy for the eventual enemies of the Republic.” Plagueis looked directly at Sidious. “Our success will be measured by signs and portents. There is much you need to learn regarding the Yinchorri and the Kaminoans. But all in due time. For now, Sidious, know that you are the blade we will drive through the heart of the Senate, the Republic, and the Jedi Order, and I, your guide to reshaping the galaxy. Together we are the newborn stars that complete the Sith constellation.”
Sidious touched the cleft in his chin. “I’m relieved to learn that I didn’t disappoint you, Master. But the Jedi summoned the police to the Fobosi district moments after we left. The plan is already endangered.”
