“We have news of Depa Billaba.”
Despite his earlier reasoning, the simple sadness in the Chancellor’s voice sent Mace’s stomach plummeting.
“This man has just come from Haruun Kal. I’m afraid— well, perhaps you should simply examine the evidence for yourself.”
“What is it?” Mace’s mouth went dry as ash. “Has she been captured?” The treatment a captured Jedi could expect from Dooku’s Separatists had been demonstrated on Geonosis.
“No, Master Windu,” Palpatine said. “I’m afraid—I’m afraid it’s quite a bit worse.”
The agent opened a large travelcase and produced an old-fashioned holoprojector. He spent a moment fiddling with controls, and then an image bloomed above the mirror-polished ebonite that served as Palpatine’s desk.
Yoda’s ears flattened, and his eyes narrowed to slits.
Palpatine looked away. “I have seen too much of this already,” he said.
Mace’s hands became fists. He couldn’t seem to get his breath.
The shimmering corpses were each the size of his finger. He counted nineteen. They looked human, or close to it. There was a scatter of prefabricated huts, blasted and burned and broken. The ruins of what must have once been a stockade wall made a ring around the scene. The jungle that surrounded them all stood four decimeters high, and covered a meter and a half of Palpatine’s desk.
After a moment, the agent sniffled apologetically. “This is—er, seems to be—the work of Loyalist partisans, under the command of Master Billaba.”
Yoda stared.
Mace stared.
There—those wounds … Mace needed a better view. When he reached into the jungle, his hand crawled with the bright ripples of the holoprojector’s scanning-matrix lasers. “These.”
He passed his hand through a group of three bodies that gaped with ragged wounds. “Enhance these.”
The Republic Intelligence agent answered without taking his handkerchief away from his reddened eyes. “Uh, I’m uh—Master Windu, this recording is, er, is quite unsophisticated—almost, uh, primitive—” His voice vanished into a sneeze that jerked him forward as though he’d been slapped on the back of the head. “Sorry—sorry, I can’t—my system won’t tolerate histamine suppressors. Every time I come to Coruscant—”
Mace’s hand didn’t move. He didn’t look up. He waited while the agent’s whine trickled to silence. Nineteen corpses. And this man complained about his allergies.
“Enhance these,” Mace repeated.
“I, ah—yes. Sir.” The agent manipulated the holoprojector’s controls with hands that didn’t quite tremble. Not quite. The jungle flicked out of existence. It reappeared an instant later, spread across ten meters of the office’s floor. The tangled upper branches of the holographic trees had become glimmering scan patterns on the ceiling; the corpses were now almost half life-sized.
The agent ducked his head, scrubbing furiously at his nose with the handkerchief. “Sorry, Master Windu. Sorry. But the system—it’s—”
“Primitive. Yes.” Mace waded through the light-cast images until he could squat beside the bodies. He rested his elbows on his knees, folding his hands together before his face.
Yoda walked closer, then crouched as he leaned in for a better view. After a moment, Mace looked up into his sad green eyes. “See?”
“Yes … yes,” Yoda croaked. “But from this, no conclusion can be drawn.”
“That’s my point.”
“For those of us who are not Jedi—” Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s voice had the warm strength of a career politician’s. He rounded his desk, on his face the slightly puzzled smile of a good man who faced an ugly situation with hope that everything might still turn out all right. “—perhaps you’ll explain?”
“Yes, sir. The other bodies don’t tell us much, between decomposition and scavenger damage. But some of the mutilation on the soft tissue here—” A curve of Mace’s hand traced gaping slashes across a holographic female torso. “—isn’t from claws or teeth. And they didn’t come from a powered weapon. See the scoring on her ribs? A lightsaber—even a vibroblade—would have slashed right through the bone. This was done with a dead blade, sir.”
Revulsion tightened the Supreme Chancellor’s face. “A—dead blade? You mean just—like a piece of metal? Just a sharp piece of metal?”
“A very sharp piece of metal, sir.” Mace cocked his head a centimeter to the right. “Or ceramic. Transparisteel. Even carbonite.”
Palpatine took a deep breath as though suppressing a shudder. “It sounds … dreadfully crude. And painful.”
“Sometimes it is, sir. Not always.” He didn’t bother to explain how he knew. “But these slashes are parallel, and all of nearly the same length; it’s likely she was dead before the cuts were made. Or at least unconscious.”
“Or—” The agent sniffled, and coughed apologetically. “—just, er, y’know, tied up.”
Mace stared at him. Yoda closed his eyes. Palpatine lowered his head as though in pain.
“There is, uh, a history of, uh, I guess you’d say, recreational torture in the Haruun Kal conflict. On both sides.” The agent flushed as though he was ashamed to know such things. “Sometimes, people—people hate so much, that just killing the enemy isn’t enough …”
A fist clenched in Mace’s chest: that this soft little man—this civilian—could accuse Depa Billaba of such an atrocity, even by implication, grabbed his heart with sick fury. A long cold stare showed him every place on this soft man’s soft body where one sharp blow would kill; the agent blanched as if he could count them all in Mace’s eyes.
But Mace had been a Jedi far too long for anger to gain an easy grip. A breath or two opened that fist around his heart, and he stood. “I have seen nothing to indicate Depa was involved.”
“Master Windu—” Palpatine began.
“What was the military value of this outpost?”
“Military value?” The agent looked startled. “Why, none, I suppose. These were Balawai jungle prospectors. Jups, they call ’em. Some jups operate as a kind of irregular militia, but irregulars are nearly always men. There were six women here. And Balawai militia units never, ah, never bring their, ah, children …”
“Children,” Mace echoed.
The agent nodded reluctantly. “Three. Mm, bioscans indicate one girl about twelve, the other two possibly fraternal twins. Boy and a girl. About nine. Had to use bioscans …” His sickly eyes asked Mace not to make him finish.
Because a few days in the jungle hadn’t left enough of them to be identified any other way.
Mace said, “I understand.”
“These weren’t militia, Master Windu. Just Balawai jungle prospectors in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Jungle prospectors?” Palpatine appeared politely interested. “And what are Balawai?”
“Offworlders, sir,” Mace said. “The jungles of Haruun Kal are the galaxy’s sole source of thyssel bark, as well as portaak leaf, jinsol, tyruun, and lammas. Among others.”
“Spices and exotic woods? And these are valuable enough to draw offworld emigrants? Into a war zone?”
“Have you priced thyssel bark lately?”
“I—” Palpatine smiled regretfully. “I don’t care for it, actually. I suppose my tastes are pedestrian; you can take a boy out of the Mid Rim, but …”
Mace shook his head. “Not relevant, sir. My point: these were civilians. Depa wouldn’t be involved in something like this. She couldn’t.”
“Hasty, your statement is,” Yoda said gravely. “Seen all evidence, I fear we have not.”
Mace looked at the agent. The agent flushed again.
“Well, er, yes—Master Yoda is correct. This, uh, recording—” He twitched his head around at the ghostly corpses that filled the office. “—was made with the prospectors’ own equipment; it’s adapted to Haruun Kal work, where more sophisticated electronics—”
“I don’t need a lesson on Haruun
Kal.” Mace’s voice went sharp. “I need your evidence.”
“Yes, yes of course, Master Windu …” The agent fished in his travelcase for a second or two, then came up with an old-fashioned data wafer of crystal. He handed it over. “It’s, uh, audio only, but—we’ve done voiceprint analysis. It’s not exact—and there’s some ambient noise, other voices, jungle sounds, that kind of thing—but we put match probability in the ninety percent range.”
Mace weighed the crystal wafer in his hand. He stared down at it. There. Right there: the flick of a fingernail could crack it in two. I should do it, he thought. Crush this thing. Snap it in half right now. Destroy it unheard.
Because he knew. He could feel it. In the Force, stress lines spidered out from the wafer like frost scaling supercooled transparisteel. He could not read the pattern, but he could feel its power.
This would be ugly.
“Where did you find it?”
“It was—uh, at the scene. Of the massacre. It was … well, at the scene.”
“Where did you find it?”
The agent flinched.
Again, Mace took a breath. Then another. With the third, the fist in his chest relaxed. “I am sorry.”
Sometimes he forgot how intimidating some men found his height and voice. Not to mention his reputation. He did not wish to be feared.
At least, not by those loyal to the Republic.
“Please,” he said. “It might be significant.”
The agent mumbled something.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, it was in her mouth.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the holographic corpse at Mace’s feet. “Someone had … fixed her jaw shut, so scavengers wouldn’t get at it when they … well, y’know, scavengers prefer the, the, er, the tongue …”
Nausea bloomed below Mace’s ribs. His fingertips tingled. He stared down at the woman’s image. Those marks on her face—he had thought they were just marks. Or some kind of fungus, or a colony of mold. Now his eyes made sense of them, and he wished they hadn’t: dull gold-colored lumps under her chin.
Brassvine thorns.
Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.
He had to turn away. He realized that he had to sit down, too.
The agent continued, “Our station boss got a tip and sent me to check it out. I hired a steamcrawler from some busted-out jups, rented a handful of townies who can handle heavy weapons, and crawled up there. What we found … well, you can see it. That data wafer—when I found it …”
Mace stared at the man as though he’d never seen him before. And he hadn’t: only now, finally, was he truly seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine. To have walked into a scene that Mace could barely stomach even in a bloodless, translucent laser image; to have had to smell them—touch them—to pry open a dead woman’s mouth …
And then to bring the recordings here, so that he could live it all again—
Mace could have done it. He thought so. Probably. He’d been some places, and seen some things.
Not like this.
The agent said, “Our sources are pretty sure the tip came from the ULF itself.”
Palpatine glanced a question. Mace spoke without taking his eyes off the agent. “The Upland Liberation Front, sir. That’s Depa’s partisan group; ‘uplanders’ is a rough translation of Korunnai—the name the mountain tribes give themselves.”
“Korunnai?” Palpatine frowned absently. “Aren’t those your people, Master Windu?”
“My … kin.” He made himself unclench his jaw. “Yes, Chancellor. You have a good memory.”
“A politician’s trick.” Palpatine gave a gently self-deprecating smile and waved a dismissive hand. “Please go on.”
The agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. “There have been a lot of … disturbing reports. Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can’t be verified. The jungle … swallows everything. So when we got this tip—”
“You found this because somebody wanted you to find it,” Mace finished for him. “And now you think—”
Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. “You think those people might have been killed just to deliver this message.”
“What a hideous idea!” Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He appealed to the agent. “This can’t be true, can it?”
The agent only hung his head.
Yoda’s ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. “Some messages … most important, is how they are framed. Secondary, their content is.”
Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. “These ULF partisans—we ally ourselves with them? The Jedi ally with them? What sort of monsters are they?”
“I don’t know.” Mace handed the wafer back to the agent. “Let’s find out.”
He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a control.
The holoprojector’s phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of windrattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for a word here or phrase there, sometimes twisting below the distorting ripples of the aural surface. Mace caught the words Jedi, and night—or knife—and something about look between the stars …
He frowned at the agent. “You can’t clean this up?”
“This is cleaned up.” The agent produced a datapad from his travelcase, keyed it alight, and passed it to Mace. “We made a transcript. It’s provisional. Best we can do.”
The transcript was fragmentary, but enough to draw chills up Mace’s arms: Jedi Temple … taught (or possibly taut) … dark … an enemy. But … Jedi … under cover of night.
One whisper was entirely clear. He read the words on the datapad’s screen as the whisper seemed to come from just behind his shoulder.
I use the night, and the night uses me.
He forgot to breathe. This was bad.
It got worse.
The whisper strengthened to a voice. A woman’s voice. Depa’s voice.
On the datapad in his hand, and murmuring in the air behind his shoulder—
I have become the darkness in the jungle.
The recording went on. And on.
Her murmur drained him: of emotion, of strength, even of thought; the longer she rambled, the emptier he got. Yet her final words still triggered a dull shock inside his chest.
She was talking to him …
I know you will come for me, Mace. You should never have sent me here. And I should never have come. But what’s done can never be undone. I know you think I’ve gone mad. I haven’t. What’s happened to me is worse.
I’ve gone sane.
That’s why you’ll come, Mace. That’s why you’ll have to.
Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane.
Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.
No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.
“That’s—uh, that’s all there is.” The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.
They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine’s office now looked unreal: as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the
jungle.
As though only the jungle were real.
Mace spoke first.
“She’s right.” He lifted his head from his hands. “I have to go after her. Alone.”
Palpatine’s eyebrows twitched. “That seems … unwise.”
“Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do,” Yoda said slowly. “Great risks there would be. Too valuable you are. Send others, we should.”
“There is no one else who can do this.”
“Surely, Master Windu”—Palpatine’s smile was respectfully disbelieving—“a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi—”
“No.” Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. “It has to be me.”
“Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely—”
“Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor,” Yoda said. “Listen to them, we should.”
Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.
Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.
“If Depa has … gone mad—or worse, fallen to the dark side,” he began, “it’s vital that the Jedi know why. That we discover what did it to her. Until we know this, no more Jedi should be exposed to it than is absolutely necessary. Also, this all might be entirely false: a deliberate attempt to incriminate her. That ambient noise on the recording …” He glanced at the agent. “If her voice was faked—say, synthesized by computer—that noise could be there precisely to blur the evidence of trickery, couldn’t it?”
The agent nodded. “But why would someone want to frame her?”
Mace waved this off. “Regardless, she must be brought in. And soon—before rumor of such massacres reaches the wider galaxy. Even if she had nothing to do with them, having a Jedi’s name associated with these crimes is a threat to the public trust in the Jedi. She must answer any charges before they are ever publicly made.”
Star Wars: Death Troopers Page 26
