Zan glanced over his friend's shoulder. Before Jos could turn around, he heard a voice say, "I've been told I resemble one, sir." The words were precisely articulated, with that slight mechanical hollowness that comes only from a vocoder. He turned and saw a droid standing halfway down the ramp.
"Of course," the droid added, "those who said it might only have been trying to be kind."
Jos looked at the droid. It looked like one of the protocol models that were ubiquitous all over the galaxy. If so, it had been refurbished a few times; the powerbus cables weren't the standard models, if he remembered correctly. The recharge coupling was different as well. The light pewter armor had more than a few nicks and dents. Jos looked back at Zan. "I ask for office models," he said. "Anything, even an old CZ model. And they send me a protocol droid."
"It'll come in handy at all those fancy state dinners and diplomatic summits you're always being dragged off to," the Zabrak said with a straight face.
"Oh, yeah. I don't know how I've managed to survive here without my very own attache droid."
The droid muttered something behind him that sounded very much like: "Blind luck, I'd say."
Jos and Zan both turned and stared at him. "What was that?" Jos asked.
The droid came to attention, and even though his face was an expressionless metal mask, Jos felt that something—fear? resentment? both?—somehow flashed there for a moment. But when the droid spoke again, the voice was emotionless, even more so than most 3PO models.
"I said, 'I'm instructed to stay—' here, that is. On Drongar. I think you'll find me more than competent to assist you, sir. I've had extensive medical programming, including access to the database files of Sector Gen—"
"What's your ID classification?" Jos interrupted.
"Eye-Fivewhycue, sir."
Zan frowned. "I've never heard of a Fivewhycue line."
The droid glanced at Zan and hesitated a moment before answering. Again, although the rigid features did not change, Jos felt somehow that the droid was momentarily unnerved by Zan's appearance. But when the I-5YQ answered, it was politely.
"A modification of the Threepio series, sir, with certain changes in the cognitive module units. Its design borrows somewhat from the old Serv-O-Droid Orbots model. The line was discontinued by Cybot Galactica not long after its inception, due to litigation." The droid hesitated, then added, "I am usually called I-Five."
The two surgeons looked at each other. Jos shrugged and said to the droid, "Okay, I-Five. You'll be doing double duty—data storage and secretarial as well as assisting in the OT. Think you can handle that?"
I-Five hesitated before answering, and Jos felt again, for just a fraction of a second, that the droid wanted to respond in kind to his sarcasm. But I-Five simply said,
"Yes, sir," and followed them as Jos and Zan started across the compound.
Strange, Jos thought. The heat must really be getting to me if I start expecting droids to mouth off. ..
11
The man from Black Sun couldn't believe it.
"This is a joke, right? You're tapping my buttons."
Bleyd said, "Not in the least." He had disarmed Mathal at blasterpoint, and the man was nearly having a seizure in his disbelief.
"You're insane!" Mathal's tone was truculent, but his eyes were darting about nervously, and Bleyd could already smell the man's fear-sweat.
"In your position, I might think so, too. But I'm afraid it's not that simple. Now listen carefully. The hatch is locked. The code that opens it is here, in my belt pocket. If you want to leave this vessel alive, you'll have to collect it from me. There is a large knife in plain sight somewhere on this deck with which you may arm yourself for your attempt."
Mathal glared. "Yeah? What's to stop me from breaking your neck right now?"
"You could try, even if I didn't have a blaster, but I wouldn't advise it. I am stronger than you, and my heritage is ... somewhat fiercer. Your chances of victory would be exceedingly small. Even with the knife and me barehanded, the odds are probably no better than fifty-fifty."
"When I get back to my vigo and tell him about this, he's going to have your skull for a drinking cup."
"That may well be," Bleyd said. "But only if you get past me. I'll give you two minutes before I come for you. Next time we see each other, one or both of us dies." Bleyd flexed his hands, feeling the tendons in them moving like oiled cables. "You'd best hurry." He nodded in the direction of the spinward corridor.
The human knew a real threat when he heard it, Bleyd gave him that much credit. He tucked his bluff and bluster away and took off, fast. In ten seconds he was out of sight around the corridor's curve.
Bleyd gave him the rest of the allotted time, enjoying the slight, lingering, sour odor of the man's sweat, then started down the corridor opposite the direction Mathal had taken. The weapon was closer this way, and there were several places wherein he could hide to watch it and wait. He would allow the man to collect the knife—that was only fair, since a Sakiyan's muscles and ligament-attachment angles were mechanically superior to those of a human's, making Bleyd at least half again as powerful as a strong man, and a good deal quicker as well.
Had he been hunting for food, if there had been a mate and younglings to feed back home, he would have pulled a blaster and shot the man dead without a second's hesitation. Then dressed him out, shouldered him, and started home. Survival demanded efficiency, and you did not give food-prey any chance—you did not risk yourself if you had a family to feed. If you died, so would they, and then both monthrael and yithrael—personal honor and pride honor—would be forever stained.
Ah, but sport hunting, when there were none depend-
ing on you . .. well, that was completely different. If you were stronger, smarter, and better armed than your prey, where was the challenge? Any well-armed mindless drone could kill. The quarry of a real hunter should have a chance to win. If you made a mistake hunting a predator, it should cost, and if that cost might be your life, that was the spice that made the game taste best.
Mathal might be only a messenger boy now, but Bleyd knew that Black Sun operatives usually began their careers at the basic levels. Once upon a time, before he had been recruited by Black Sun, Mathal had been freelance muscle, paid for his ability to offer violence or even death. He was not a grass eater, Bleyd knew. He was a predator.
Hardly in Bleyd's class, of course. Bleyd was a first-rate hunter. Armed with naught but a lance, he had stalked Shistavanens on Uvena III. He had taken a rancor with a pulley bow and only three quarrels. He had tracked and killed unrepentant Noghri with a pair of hook-blades whose cutting edges were no longer than his middle fingers.
He could not remember the last time he had made a potentially fatal error on a sport hunt. Of course, it took only one ...
He reached the knife a few minutes before Mathal could possibly circle around the length of the torus. There were three places that afforded a good view. One was at deck level, three steps away, in a shadowed corner. The second was behind a massive heating/cooling coil across the corridor, at least a dozen steps away. The third hiding spot was inside a ventilation shaft almost directly over the weapon's location, and, while two body-lengths in distance, it was a straight drop.
There was no real question of where he was going to hide. His ancestors, like those of the humans, had originally come from the trees and the high ground.
Bleyd gathered himself, squatted low, and sprang. He caught the edge the ventilation shaft, pivoted aside the grate covering it with one hand while clinging to the edge, and pulled himself into the shaft feetfirst. He turned around, rotated the grate back into place. Supporting himself by the strength of his arms upside down in the narrow shaft, he began to breathe slowly and evenly, dropping his heart rate into hunting mode. A tense hunter could not move fast.
He did not have long to wait. Two minutes, three . .. and here came the human, stomping along and vibrating th
e deck loudly enough for a deaf old pride elder to hear.
Mathal arrived in the vicinity of the knife. He looked around warily, then snatched the blade up. Bleyd heard him sigh in relief, and his grin became wider.
The knife was a good weapon, one of Bleyd's favorites. It had a thick haft; the blade as long as the man's forearm and nearly as wide as his wrist. It was made of hand-forged and folded surgical stain-free flex-steel, a drop-point fighter with a circular guard of flex-bronze and a handle of hard and pebbled black rass bone, so it wouldn't slip in a sweaty or bloody grip. After all, it would hardly be sporting to provide one's prey with a poor weapon. And his research had told him that Mathal was an expert knife fighter. Bleyd knew he would need skill and strength to prevail. Luck was not a factor.
He took a final breath, pivoted the grate cover aside, and dived for the man, headfirst. He screamed the blood cry of his pride:
"Taarrnneeesseee—/"
Mathal looked up, terror on his face. Too late, he raised the knife. Bleyd brushed it aside and reached for the man's throat.
Then they were joined—
The spy had less trouble with this kind of thing. After all, anyone could blow things up and assassinate targets. While it was true that a certain amount of skill was required to do such acts without being caught—and the spy had more abilities in that direction than anyone here could possibly know—the real challenge in this project was in a different arena. The labyrinthine ways of bureaucrats and the military could be slow, but just as certain to accomplish the desired results when manipulated properly. As the spy had been taught from childhood, any job could be done with the correct tools. In order to undermine a military organization or a government hundreds of thousands strong, subtlety was a must. One thought of armies and navies as giant Sauropoda—huge beasts that lumbered ponderously along their paths, crushing anything that got in their way, often without notice. A single person could not hope to stop or even turn such a beast by him- or herself, no matter how physically strong or adept. Hence the old saying: "If a ronto stumbles, do not stand under it to break its fall."
No, the way to move something so massive in a new direction was to convince the monster that the change of course was its own idea.
In theory, this was also simple. One planted the idea in the right place at the right time and waited for it to take hold. In practice, it was somewhat harder—a complex game of wits.
The recent transport destruction had created concern
and not a little paranoia. But the threat was still too nebulous to turn the monster from its path so that it could be overwhelmed. A bit of mystery was all to the good, but military leaders were not swayed overmuch by the unseen. They lived and died by facts—or what they could be convinced to believe were facts.
The threat had to become more real. What Vaetes and his people needed to see at this point was an actual villain. And there existed on the base someone who fit the bill perfectly. Too bad he would have to suffer, but it was what it was.
12
Zan sat on the backless folding stool he favored for playing his quetarra, tuning the instrument. When he wasn't playing it, it rested in a spun-fiber case that was light, but strong enough to support him jumping up and down on it without damage to the instrument. After a few drinks one late evening, Zan had demonstrated this with considerable gusto. Watching a Talusian Zabrak hopping around on an instrument case like a giant, demented Geonosian leaf-leaper, his cranial horns nearly puncturing the low ceiling, was a sight that Jos was fairly certain he could have charged credits for people to see.
Jos was stretched out on his cot, reading the latest flatscan update of the Surgica Galactica Journal. Some hotknife thorax chopper had posted an article on microsurgical laminotomy revision for spinal injury on the battlefield, and it was all Jos could do to keep from laughing out loud. "Use the pemeter scope to check for nerve impingement." Or: "Application of sthenic field and homeostatic phase induction is critical at this juncture."
Pemeter scopes? Sthenic fields? Homeostatic phase inductors? Oh, yeah, right. Outside of a twenty-million-credit surgical suite in a first-class medcenter, your
chances of finding any of these, much less all of them together, were about as good as reaching lightspeed by flapping your arms. It was obvious this guy had never been in the field. Love to see what the wonder slicer could do with just a vibroscalpel and a hemostat on a patient with a ruptured aorta ...
Zan finished tuning his quetarra and strummed a chord.
After a moment, he began plucking the strings, softly at first, then a bit louder. Jos didn't mind listening to Zan play, despite what he said sometimes just to get a rise out of his friend.
The piece Zan played was fast, had a good beat, and after a few seconds Jos gave up reading and listened. Was that leap-jump? Was Zan actually playing something written in the last hundred years? Wonders, it seemed, would never cease.
Jos didn't say anything. It wouldn't matter if he did, because when he was really into it, Zan tuned out all distractions. Once, about six months before, a fumble-fingered Gungan harvester who ought not to have been issued any weapon more dangerous than a stick had somehow activated one of the pulse bombs he carried on his hopper. The hapless amphibian had turned himself, his vehicle, and a goodly section of the local landscape into a smoking crater. He'd been three hundred meters away from their cubicle when it had gone off, and even at that distance the blast had been enough to knock over glasses, rattle the furniture, and shake a few pictures from the shelter's walls. Zan, who had been in the middle of some concerto or another, didn't miss a note. When he was done, he'd looked around, puzzled, at the mess. "If you don't like the music, just say so," he'd said to Jos.
Besides, Jos didn't want to interrupt the music, which had gone from the driving beat of leap-jump right into the heartbeat bass and melody of heavy isotope. Amazing how his friend could make a single stringed instrument suggest the sounds of omni box, electroharp, and all the other instruments of a six-piece band ...
After another minute or so, Zan stopped.
Trying to act casual, Jos said, "Interesting. What, uh, was that?"
Zan grinned. "That? 'Etude for Dawn,' the Sixteenth Vissencant Variation. Good to see you've become a classical music fan at last, my lead-eared friend."
Jos stared. "Didn't your mother ever tell you your horns would grow if you told a lie?"
"I admit I speeded it up a hair. And shifted the timing in a couple of places, brought up the bass line, but essentially .. . well, judge for yourself."
He began to play again, looking not at the fret board but directly at Jos, a small smile on his lips.
Jos listened. Sure enough, it was the same piece of music, but with an entirely different tone and mood— definitely classical now.
"How'd you do that? One minute it's good, the next it's lift-tube music."
Zan laughed. "You're pathetic. A space slug is less tone deaf."
Something about the way Zan was watching him, as if waiting for something to sink in, sank in. "All right," Jos said. "Fire the second round."
Now Zan really laughed. "If you had any education past the end of your scalpel, you'd know there were only fifteen Vissencant Variations. What I played was Duskin re Lemte's 'Cold Midnight,' a leap-jump/heavy isotope fusion just out on the HoloNet. I downloaded it
a couple of days ago. Slow it down, add a little contrapuntal line, and it isn't bad. Re Lemte obviously had some classical education on his way to the mass market. Not that you would know."
"You'll suffer for this," Jos said. "My revenge will be terrible. Maybe not swift or particularly inspired, but definitely terrible."
Zan chuckled and started playing again. "Couldn't be any worse than your musical taste."
Alone in her cubicle, fresh and clean from the sonic shower, Barriss Offee sat naked on the floor. Her legs were crossed and knotted, ankles over thighs, her back straight, in the position called Repose. Her ha
nds rested, palms up, on her knees; her eyes were open, but unfocused. She breathed slowly, drawing the air in through her right nostril and whirling it deep into her belly, then expelling it slowly through her left nostril.
Floating meditation was, for her, one of the trickiest of the Jedi exercises. There were days when it was as smooth as mercury on a transparisteel plate: she would sit, and breathe, and be there—gravity would fall away, and she would rise like a balloon, to hover weightless half her body-length in the air. But at other times her mind refused to clear, and no matter how long or hard she concentrated, her rear stayed firmly on the floor.
Today was one of those times. Thoughts chased each other through the corridors of her mind like Tyrusian butterfly-birds, chittering inanely. Master Unduli would be shaking her head, Barriss knew, if she could see her Padawan now.
The thought of her Master released a flood of mixed emotions. Back on Coruscant, Barriss had thought of herself as an average Padawan, a little more adept than
some, a little less so than others. Not brilliant, but not particularly stupid, either. Her Master had told her this was part of the limitation Barriss had put upon herself. She could remember that lesson well. It had come after a long hand-to-hand combat workout at one of the training centers, followed by lightsaber practice that had left her arms sore and burning. They had moved to a high-walled balcony, two hundred flights above ground level, beneath the constant stream of traffic going to and from the nearby skyhook way station. The balcony had been shielded, but Master Unduli had dropped the fields so that the sounds, the smells of burned fuel, the winds funneled by massive buildings, and the glare of passing advertising banners were a multisensory assault. Along with the slightly sour odor of her own sweat and the physical exhaustion she felt, it was nothing less than overwhelming.
"Sit," her Master told her. "Do your Rising Meditation to a height sufficient that you can see over the wall to observe the small bakery directly across the way. For the purpose of this exercise, consider that it is vitally important that you be able to tell me how many pastries are visible in the window."
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