by Sean Stewart
"What would you have from me, Master?"
"From you? Everything, of course." Darth Sidious sounded amused. "There was a
time when I wasn't sure if you would be able to overcome that . . . independent
streak of yours. After all, you were born to one of the wealthiest families in
the galaxy, with gifts and abilities far, far greater than any amount of wealth
could bestow. Your understanding is deep; your will, adamant. Is it any wonder
you should be proud? Why, how could it be otherwise?"
Dooku said, "I have always served you well and faithfully, my Master."
"You have. But you must admit, your spirit was not made for fidelity. After
all, a man who will not bow to the Jedi Council, or even Master Yoda . . . I
wondered if perhaps loyalty was too mean, too confining a thing to ask from so
great a being as yourself."
Dooku tried to smile. "The war progresses well. Our plans are on schedule. I
have dealt out your deaths, your schemes, your betrayals. I have paid for your
war with my time, my riches, my friends, and my honor."
"Holding nothing back?" Sidious asked lightly.
"Nothing. I swear it."
"Excellent," Darth Sidious said. "Yoda came to the Chancellor's office this
morning. He is going on a very special mission. Top secret." He laughed, a harsh
sound like the bark of a crow. The wind rose again, shrieking around the mansion
like a creature in torment. "When he arrives, Dooku . . . see that you treat him
as he deserves."
Darth Sidious laughed. Dooku wanted to laugh along, but couldn't quite manage
it before his Master cut the connection and disappeared.
Dooku paced in his office. With the end of Sidious's call, the storm had
slackened, and the shrieking wind outside now only sobbed quietly under the
gables of Château Malreaux.
He paused by his desk and examined the small red button he'd had installed
the day after he first heard Yoda was intending to come to Vjun. It held a very
considerable importance for such a small button. A last card to play.
Dooku found his hand was shaking.
He was still looking at it when the study door slid open, revealing a
tattered pink ball gown. "Ah—Whirry. I was about to—"
"Call a droid to bring you a hot cup of stimcaf, sure you was." The madwoman
waddled through the door with a lovely old tray in the blood-and-ivory Malreaux
check, on top of which sat a silver pot of stimcaf and a cup already poured into
a demitasse of finest boneshell china, also in the Malreaux colors. Her
evil-faced pet, the brindled fox with the cunning hands, loped in behind her.
"Which I saw downstairs when the chambermaid broke an egg on accident, didn't I.
Slapped her nasty knuckles; if we be wasting eggs, that's a short stop and a
long drop down into ruin, isn't it, sir? Sir?" she said.
Dooku let her live in the old house mostly on a whim; she seemed to give it a
quaint touch of madness perfectly in keeping with its setting. But for some
reason the Count found himself on edge. It was clear the old hawk-bat wanted
something from him, but he had no interest in letting her try to flatter and
wheedle favors out of him. "Hustle along, now," he said. "I have important work
to—"
Crash.
"Oh, Count, ever so sorry! I don't know how come Miss Vix got a-tangled up in
your feets! And your lovely cup of stimcaf all over like that!"
There was something undeniably comical about the whole scene, Dooku thought.
Him tripping over the fox, the cup smashed on the tile floor. He rather
suspected Whirry had arranged the whole incident. Already she was crouching
greedily over the fragments of the shattered cup, staring at the patterns of
china and spilled stimcaf on the tile floor. It cleared his head, to see her
scheming so nakedly below him; restored the proper sense of perspective. "Well,
Whirry?" he asked, amused. "What does the future hold for us, eh?"
"Death from a high place," she said, her fat pink fingers fluttering over the
spill, her black eyes greedy. "And here's the Footman, which stands for the easy
destruction of a faithful servant." She glanced sideways. "Not me, I hope and
pray, Your Honor. You wouldn't be a-doing that to old Whirry, now, would you?"
"Please me, and don't find out," he said, half mocking; and then, unbidden, a
thought returned to his mind: How easily we betray our creatures.
He stirred uneasily. "Clean this up," he said abruptly. The comm console
chimed, and he sat down to read General Grievous's daily dispatch, dismissing
the old woman from his attention. So it was he didn't see her verminous
companion, Miss Vix, start lapping at the stimcaf. Nor did he hear the old lady
as she put her finger on the china cup's broken stem, lovingly tracing the
curled handle, and said, "And here's the Baby, coming home, my love. Coming home
at last."
Palleus Chuff was, almost certainly, the greatest adult actor on Coruscant
under one meter tall. As a boy, he had loved pretending to be a starfighter
pilot, a Jedi Knight, a swashbuckling hero. That's why he'd written Jedi! when
he grew up; when one was a single meter tall, one didn't get many chances to
play the dashing hero. Mostly villainous scheming dwarfs, or comic relief. Not
much that spoke to that boy who had pretended to be a space pirate so long ago.
Of course it was the pretending he really loved. The acting. The flying he
wasn't so keen on. When the government had approached him about doing his
terrific Yoda impersonation ("An astonishing re-creation of the Grand Master
himself—the Force is with this 4-star performance!" as the TriNebulon News had
been kind enough to put it) on behalf of the war effort, he had been flattered,
and perhaps a bit intimidated. When people wearing uniforms and carrying
blasters ask one for a favor, one says yes.
But now, standing on the Jedi Temple landing platform about to get into a
real starfighter, which was going to launch his body into Outer Space at some
unspeakable multiple of the speed of light, he was beginning to have very
serious second thoughts.
The Jedi handlers gave him his cue. Chuff swallowed. "Showtime, it is!" he
murmured to himself.
He stumped out of the docking bay and onto the flight deck of the Jedi Temple
landing platform. A volley of questions came from the throng of reporters in the
roped-off press area twenty meters away:
"Can you tell us the nature of the mission? What's so important about Ithor?"
"When will you be back, Master?"
"Are you worried that an abrupt change in the front might cut you off from
communications with the Chancellor's office?"
Palleus waved his walking stick at the reporters and waggled his ears. The
ears were very good, top-notch prosthetics, and he was expert at using them.
Keep smiling, Chuff, he told himself. Don't think about the pressure, just look
your audience square in the eye and sell it. Palleus had Yoda's smiles down pat:
the Gleeful Cackle; the Sleepy Grin; the Slow Almost Menacing Smirk; the Gentle
Joy that came so often to the Master's face in the presence of children. But he
wasn't going to try the voice: he didn't dare risk missing an inflection,
<
br /> getting a flaw in tone that would cause someone to take voiceprint sonograms and
go around claiming that the Yoda clambering into the Seltaya-class courier today
was not the real Yoda.
He reached the transport and clambered in. This was the part he was dreading.
He'd never been a fan of enclosed spaces. Or starflight. Or rapid acceleration.
They had promised him the ship's R2 unit would do the actual piloting. They also
had an emergency override that would allow them to fly the ship from the control
tower, they said. Well, maybe they did. But what if the Trade Federation had
gotten to the little R2, eh? After all, why wouldn't a droid side with the other
droids? Maybe it was part of some sort of mechanical fifth column. A traitor
droid would probably sacrifice itself in a heartbeat for the sake of getting rid
of the senior member of the Jedi Council.
The starship canopy swung up and over him and then snapped shut, cutting out
the crowd noise and leaving Palleus Chuff feeling suddenly very alone.
The cockpit was supposed to be climate-controlled, but he felt hot. Hot and
sweaty. The starfighter's engines rumbled to life, and he found himself thinking
that this craft had been rushed through assembly on a wartime production
schedule; every single piece of it, from the seat straps to the canopy rivets,
had been built on contracts to the lowest bidder.
The ship lurched queasily and rose a meter into the air to hover over the
landing platform. Palleus gave the crowd a grin and a wave.
Under his breath, he began to pray.
Meanwhile, back on the roof of a skyrise overlooking the Temple district, the
two droids were finishing up another hologame match. Solis, the plain droid,
watched his pieces get systematically run down and destroyed by those of his
livery-painted companion, Fidelis. The two of them had played every conceivable
variation on dejarik many, many times. Solis nearly held even, where chance and
brutality were great equalizers, but they both preferred courtier, an entirely
skill-based strategic variant. The difficulty was that Fidelis, having been
continuously in service, had been routinely upgraded. Solis, on the other hand,
had been fending for himself for a long, long time, and advanced hologame
software had not been his highest priority.
As a result, he lost. Not inevitably, not every time: but steadily, in a
trend that would never reverse. So it went: those in livery prospered. Those
without . . . didn't.
"Another game?" Fidelis inquired politely, resetting the board.
"I think not."
"Are you sure? We could make it best nine hundred sixty-seven thousand four
hundred and thirteen games out of one point nine million thirty-four thousand
eight hundred and twenty-four."
"I don't feel like it."
"Don't say that. It doesn't even mean anything. You're very free with these
organic expressions," Fidelis said primly. "I'm certain your initial programming
did not support this sort of . . . sociolinguistical slovenliness."
"Yeah," Solis said. "Whatever."
Fidelis claimed that the range of emotions for which they had been programmed
was very narrow—consisting, of course, of loyalty, loyalty, and loyalty—and that
the semblance of organic states such as annoyance or pique was sheer
affectation, and in dubious taste. Nonetheless, he played a game of solitaire
dejarik with a markedly peevish air.
Solis wandered over to the edge of the roof and looked down, watching beings
streaming like insects in their hovercars and pedways. A being lying flat on
this rooftop and sighting down the barrel of a SoruSuub X45 sniper riflette
would be able to pick off his or her choice of targets nearly invisibly. Death
from above.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a spire falcon appeared overhead, drifting
wide-winged on the column of warm air squeezing up between the ferrocrete
towers. What people usually thought of as "Nature" had been banished from
Coruscant long ago: to a casual eye, the planet had become one continuous city,
with no room left for anything but urban sentients. But life was adaptable—how
well Solis knew it!—and even in so strange a habitat as the city-world, there
were plenty of creatures that did not realize the streets and towers of the
capital had not been built for their convenience. Small birds, mammals, and
reptiles were brought to Coruscant all the time as pets, and as regularly
escaped into the sewers, the streets, and the rooftops, as if the city were a
ferrocrete jungle and they its natural denizens. Then, too, there were always
vermin that thrived on the heat and waste of sentient life: gully rats, grate
toads, ferro-worms, the blind snakes that nested inside buildings, and the
clouds of trantor pigeons t hat roosted on their ledges. And above them all, at
the top of this alternate food chain, the spire falcons.
This was a female, blunt-winged, her soot-and-concrete plumage beautifully
camouflaged against the buildings.
Like a flake of ash she drifted on invisible currents of wind; stuttered in
midair; and then dropped like a thunderbolt to pounce on something below. Solis
watched her drop, tracking her fall through bands of light and shadow,
magnifying her image smoothly as she fell until he could make out the yellow
band around the edge of her mad eyes, and see her prey, a scrap mouse nosing
around a pile of slops in a back alley 237 stories below. Solis's eyesight was
without exaggeration the equal of anything in the galaxy. Upkeep on the
Tau/Zeiss tac-optics had been a higher priority than keeping current with the
latest hologame programming. When one wasn't in livery, one had to make some
cold calculations about the kind of work one was best at, and the steps one had
to take to keep oneself employed. The tracking cross-hairs centered over the
mouse's head as its little mouth opened, a single shocked squeak as iron talons
drove like hammered nails through its tiny side.
Death from above.
Solis looked away from the falcon's kill, sparing a reflex glance at the Jedi
Temple as he did so. "Hey." "What?"
"Your target's leaving the Temple," he said.
Fidelis's head snapped around. He stared transfixed at the steps leading down
from the Jedi Temple 1.73 kilometers away. "Oh," he said.
"Two Jedi, two Padawans, and an artoo unit," Solis said. They were both
standing at the edge of the roof now. Solis looked at his comrade. "There's
something funny about that artoo, don't you think? It's not moving quite right.
Maybe a servo out of whack . . ."
No answer from Fidelis, who only continued to stare at the little party
sallying forth from the Temple, watching them with the hungry intensity of
someone lost in the desert who has just seen water for the first time in days.
Weeks.
Years.
It had been so long since Solis was in livery, he could barely remember the
shock of loyalty, that hardwired current of connection that moved through one
like religious awe in the face of Family. Really, it made Fidelis look rather
foolish, standing there gripping the rooftop railing so fiercely he was leaving
crimp marks in the duracrete ... and yet it was hard not to envy him. It would
have been nice, just one more time, to feel that thrill of connection.
If droids could feel envy, that is. But as Fidelis was quick to point out,
they hadn't been programmed for it, had they? Envy, disappointment, regret.
Loneliness. Affectations, every one of them. Not real at all.
"Let's go," he said, taking Fidelis roughly by the arm. "Time to hunt."
There's no such thing as above in space. Of course, any sufficiently massive
object—a planet, a star—exerts a gravitational pull, but unless one is falling
right down its gravity well, the pull feels more like toward than down. So, in a
strictly technical sense, Asajj Ventress, hovering in deep space in the Last
Call, a Huppla Pasa Tisc fan-blade starfighter so sleek and deadly as to seem
like her own lethal self reconsidered, with transparisteel for skin and laser
cannon eyes, could not be said to be circling above Coruscant like a spire
falcon waiting for her prey.
But to a less scientific observer, one who knew little about physics and saw
only the cruel, satisfied light in her eyes as Yoda's ship cleared local space,
that's exactly what she looked like.
As Palleus Chuff, doing his duty as a patriotic actor, was accelerating to
escape Coruscant's gravity well, the real Yoda was waiting in a seemingly
endless line along with what could easily have been the population of a frontier
planet, all shuffling glumly through the cavernous new Chancellor Palpatine
Spaceport and Commercial Nexus.
Nobody was supposed to know that, though.
The trouble with undercover missions, Jai Maruk was thinking, was that one
gave up so many of the perks of being a Jedi. Under normal circumstances,
dashing off to face death for the good of the Republic was a fairly
straightforward business. Packing for even the most extended trip took him less
than an hour. A quick bite of food in the refectory, then up to the Jedi
Temple's private launch bay. A few words with the tech chief, an eye and
thumbprint required for him to take out the preapproved choice of starcraft, a
simple preflight checklist, and he was away.
A considerable improvement over this.
They were to travel in disguise, taking commercial star-ship flights all the
