Yoda, Dark Rendezvous

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