“Out where I can see you!” he commanded.
“Well, well. The traitor returns to the scene of his treachery.” Tuden Sal’s voice came from a corner of the room to Haus’s left.
The prefect could only vaguely make out a form that might have been the Sakiyan. “I’m no traitor, Sal. I don’t know who was, only that it wasn’t me.”
“Of course you’d say that. You want me to come out where you can shoot me.”
Haus lowered his blaster. “I’m not going to shoot you, Sal.”
“I don’t suppose it matters, really, does it? I should have died with the others.”
“I thought you had.”
The Sakiyan uttered a dry laugh. “No, no. A general doesn’t go into battle with the troops. I sent them on a suicide mission and watched from a safe distance. Watched it all go wrong. Watched them die.”
“I tried to warn you, Sal.”
A beat. “You did, didn’t you?”
Tuden Sal came out of hiding then. He was armed—a small hold-out blaster that was barely visible in his hand. He made no move to use it.
Haus kept his own weapon lowered.
“I should have listened,” Sal told him. “If I had, none of this would have happened.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I told the others it was because you might be a traitor to the cause or that you were a coward.” He shook his head. “It was because I knew you’d do whatever you could to stop me. The Empire took my life away from me, Pol. My business. My family. I only saw one way to get it back: kill Palpatine.”
“So in the end, you used Whiplash for your personal vendetta.”
“I did.” Sal’s face worked, and for a moment, Haus thought the Sakiyan might weep. Instead he simply said, “I did worse than that.”
“What do you mean?” Haus asked, then stiffened at a minute sound from the corridor behind him.
He turned. His Bothan lieutenant, Kalibar Droosh, was framed in the doorway, his blaster leveled at his prefect’s midsection.
“A very revealing conversation, sir,” the lieutenant said in his hissing, oddly accented Basic. “One I’m sure the Imperial Security Bureau would be most interested in hearing.”
“And you’re going to relay it to them?” Haus asked.
“Of course. I’m sure there will be great rewards for the man who captures … or kills … the remaining members of Whiplash.”
“He’s not a member of Whiplash,” Tuden Sal said acidly. “He was merely a hanger-on.”
The lieutenant shrugged. “Close enough. And there was that woman, too, the so-called informant you brought here before. I assume you’ve got some way to contact her, sir?”
Haus felt bile rising in his throat. Sheel. This sorry specimen would go after her next.
“Why do you want to do this, Lieutenant? What love do you have for the Empire?”
“They pay me. Good credits for faithful service. More, if I can give them items of interest. I’ve been watching you for a while, Prefect Haus. Since I transferred into your prefecture. I was taken with how unusual your friends are. I expect you’ll generate quite a bit of interest among my superiors. Maybe enough to get me assigned permanently to the ISB.”
Haus sighed and started to turn his blaster butt-first so he could hand it to Droosh.
“Oh, no, sir. You keep that. It’s important for this to look—”
There was a ragged scream from Tuden Sal as he flung himself out from behind Haus, firing as he moved.
Haus extinguished the hand lamp and dived to his left. Two more blaster bolts ripped through the darkness in swift succession—one from the doorway and one from the center of the cabin.
Eyes dazzled, Haus lay still and listened, his own blaster up and leveled at the door. He heard the hiss of tortured breathing to his right. Nothing from the outer corridor. The hot stench of burnt flesh, hair, and fabric hinted at what he’d see when he turned on his lamp and blinked his eyes.
Through the slashes of afterimage, Haus saw Tuden Sal lying against the rear wall of the cabin. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t likely to live long, either. Droosh’s blaster had caught him in the ribs, leaving a charred hole.
Of Droosh, he could see only the man’s boots. He got carefully to his feet, light and blaster aimed at the fallen officer. From the center of the cabin it was clear Droosh was never going to get up again. Sal’s shot had caught him right between the eyes.
Haus knelt next to Sal. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“Oh, you would have?” Sal grunted. “You’d’ve let him shoot you. This called for another suicide mission. Mine … payback.”
“Sal …”
The Sakiyan raised a trembling hand to Haus’s sleeve. “Hide … the train. The data …”
“I’ll take care of it. Sheel and I will take care of it.”
Sal drew a shuddering breath, his eyes losing their focus. “Stupid … so many mistakes.”
He was gone before Haus could ask him what mistakes he was referring to, and if they might impact his own continued existence.
Haus sat in the darkness for a long moment, trying to herd his thoughts into some semblance of order. When the chaos had settled and logic reasserted itself, he stood and considered the grim task ahead of him—disposing of the bodies.
After that … well, how hard could it be to hide a train?
Thirty-Two
The Delta-7 Aethersprite dropped out of hyperspace just within the orbit of the Fervse’dra asteroid field and moved into synchronous flow with the nearest body. Jax had considered his approach to Kantaros Station all during the four-day journey to the Both system. With Darth Vader on Coruscant, he had a window of opportunity, but possibly only a very narrow window.
The first order of business was to find the station. He had returned to where the station had been; it was not there now. He input the telemetry of the station’s last position, which he’d gotten from the Laranth’s navicomp, into the starfighter’s system and had it extrapolate its current location.
He found it more or less where the navicomp said it would be, and parked his ship on a slowly tumbling asteroid roughly one hundred klicks behind it in the flow of stone. He wedged the Aethersprite in between two projections of icy rock. That should be enough to preserve him from accidental detection, but if there were patrols that came this far out, or an approaching vessel overflew his position, his energy shielding would be useless. He set the ship’s sensors to their widest possible spectrum and brought their perimeters in to the point that gave him just enough time to scurry out of sight if anyone entered the area. This gave him decreased range, but increased sensitivity. A lone speeder, life pod, or drone would vibrate his sensor web.
Then, hands on the controls of the ship—ready to lift off at a moment’s notice—he settled into a meditative state, preparing to reach for Thi Xon Yimmon’s consciousness.
For a fraction of a second, his mind swerved to the idea Xizor had raised—that it would be easier to destroy Yimmon than to save him. Everything in Jax rebelled against the thought. Rebelled so emphatically that, for a moment, he was physically ill. He righted himself with a will, closed his eyes, and sank, once more, into meditation. He missed the miisai tree and found himself calling its shape to his mind’s eye.
Jax couldn’t afford detection, so he reached out delicately, carefully. He missed the tree at this point, too, because he had used it before to cloak his own Force signature. All he had now was the memory of the miisai, his native talents, and the skills he’d developed in training them.
And he had the Sith Holocron.
In the stillness that came with the thought, Jax fetched the thing out of the inner pocket of his surcoat. As if his regard had touched off a response in the artifact, it warmed in his hand. When he closed his eyes, he could still see it as a locus of diffuse light and heat … a Force signature.
Balancing the Holocron on his palm, he stretched out his energies with more confidence—long, t
railing ribbons of the Force wove through the ambience generated by Ramage’s device and sought their goal.
He found Yimmon, at length, ironically, by using Vader’s seemingly random array of deflection fields to triangulate. He found it interesting that Vader didn’t realize that randomness was a chimera. Patterns were so woven into the fabric of the universe that they emerged despite the most rigorous attempts to avoid them.
Jax was amazed at the Cerean’s mental state. He was calm. Almost too calm, considering the circumstances. Had they drugged him?
No … there was no sense of confusion or sluggishness, just serenity. And watchfulness. He frowned, trying to shake the feeling that he was being observed in some way. It was not unnerving, merely unexpected. As if …
With a suddenness that stole his breath, Jax sensed another presence—no, more than one: a strong Force signature, unrecognizable, pushed aside the recognizable consciousness of the Whiplash leader. Then, before he could half grasp that—
—Listen. Indecision is all loss. Yimmon’s separation destroys us all.
The voice that was not a voice was clear, strong, and insistent. And undeniably alien. Cephalon, in fact.
Aoloiloa? How could that be? How could a Cephalon stationed on Coruscant reach out to him here in this Mid Rim asteroid field?
He felt of the Cephalon’s communication. It was equal parts familiar and unfamiliar. Aoloiloa, but not Aoloiloa. It was, Jax realized, with a jolt of adrenaline, not just one Cephalon, but a living network of them, linked together to send him this message.
But you’ve already told me this, he thought. What more can I do with it? Why do you keep repeating it?
—Separation destroys us all.
Separation destroys … what did that mean?
“I have to get him back,” Jax murmured aloud. Which meant he had no more time to delay. He must move now.
—Separation destroys us.
But wait. The message had changed subtly with every repetition. Jax swallowed a groan of pure frustration. Why, in the name of the Force, could the Cephalons not just say things clearly?
—Separation destroys, insisted Aoloiloa and his networked kin.
I shouldn’t do this alone? Is that what you mean? Is it my separation that destroys?
Jax put the question to the Force, to the living universe. The answer came in the form of a sense—so strong he almost cried aloud—that he was not alone in the confines of the Aethersprite’s cockpit.
—Seek, said the Cephalons, communion. Seek sisters.
Communion? Sisters?
For one dreadful moment Jax was certain he was losing his mind. In one sense Laranth was a sister—a fellow Force-user. But Laranth was dead, returning to him only in dreams and memories. Still, he was frozen in his seat, afraid that if he opened his eyes, Laranth would be sitting beside him in the jump seat.
And equally afraid that she wouldn’t be.
He unfroze when the ship’s perimeter alarms went off. There was a small vessel entering the system. Only a slow-moving freighter, but it had an escort of Imperial TIE fighters and it would soon overfly his position.
Without pausing to think, Jax released the soft docking clamps and gave the ship just enough of a push from its ion drives to turn it away from the oncoming convoy. Then he dived in the opposite direction, out of the plane of the ecliptic, and wove his way through the asteroids. He engaged his hyperdrive once free of the field, only half noting what course he’d set.
He’d used the Force to make that last course setting and hoped he was right and that, on some level, he’d understood what the Cephalons had been trying to say.
What did that mean: Seek sisters?
Whose sisters? The Cephalons’? The only known species that could be considered “sisters” of the Cephalons were the Celegians. They were a rather isolated species and there were few among them who had engaged in training their Force abilities, notwithstanding their natural use of telepathy and telekinesis. They seemed, though not genetically related, at least endophenotypically connected.
Sisters in the resistance? Aren Folee or Sacha Swiftbird fit the bill, as did Sheel Mafeen. That made logical sense. It made so much sense, he leaned forward to check the coordinates he’d set, expecting the navigational array would tell him he’d be on a heading back to Toprawa.
His hand was hovering over the nav panel when a third possibility occurred to him: that by “sisters” was meant other Force-users. He could think of only one such group that could be considered “sisters” of the Jedi and the Gray Paladins: the Witches of Dathomir.
He shook himself. That was a ridiculous thought. Dathomir was not a safe place for Jedi. Especially male Jedi. Though there were exceptions, most of the Dathomiri clans were extremely matrilineal and matriarchal. In many, if not most, men had been reduced to virtual slavery. And though the Witches were strong in the Force, they were understandably hostile to outsiders.
Still, they were allied with the light side of the Force, and their mantra—handed down from their alleged ancestress, the banished Jedi Knight Allya—was “Never concede to evil.”
Jax’s sense of irony was still operant enough to permit a wry shake of his head at a species that didn’t include the concept of slavery in its definition of evil.
There had been two unabashedly evil orders among them, though. These were the Nightsisters and Nightbrothers—many of them human–Zabrak hybrids, and all outcasts from existing tribes. In the years leading up to the Clone Wars, they had allied themselves with the Sith, but not before they had used the serendipitous discovery of the interstellar portal called the Infinity Gate in an effort to destroy Coruscant, which was then the seat of the Republic.
The Jedi had brought them down and destroyed the Star Temple that contained the Gate on Dathomir. Since that time—thirteen years earlier—Dathomir had been all but quarantined. Not fair to the majority of clans, but they were hardly friendly to begin with, and they had neither strategic position nor natural resources that the Empire might envy, nor technology that it might fear.
Jax closed his fingers. The Witches were strong in the Force; that they chanted spells to employ it hardly mattered. They were Force-users—but Force-users who lived and worked beyond the more regimented existence of the Jedi Order, even as Laranth and the Gray Paladins had.
Sisters, indeed. What knowledge might they possess that another fringe dweller might find of use?
Jax made the decision emotionally before his reason capitulated. He dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of Bothan space and put his hands to the navigational controls again, this time to set a course for Dathomir. He was both exhilarated and chilled when he realized that was the course he had already laid in.
Thirty-Three
Probus Tesla orbited his Cerean captive as a planet orbited its star. He had begun his pacing around the Whiplash leader in a moment of frustration with the other’s impassivity. But when he sensed that the constant movement was actually having an impact on Yimmon, he kept it up.
He had lost track of how many times he’d circled the still figure—probing with tiny trickles of Force sense—when he decided to make a more assertive move. The trickle became a stream and he pressed, seeking a chink in Yimmon’s psychic wall. To his surprise, the Cerean flinched away mentally, withdrawing from his approach.
Tesla curbed his excitement and increased the pressure.
“What’s wrong?” he asked aloud. “Why are you suddenly shy? Is it something I’ve said? Something I’ve done?”
He was tempted to tell Yimmon what he’d learned from his last communication with his Master—that Whiplash was dead, broken. He stopped himself. Hadn’t his Master told him to do no more than watch?
He flooded the connection between himself and the Cerean, seeking an inlet. But the other was barricaded behind a seawall of calm.
Tesla’s lip curled. Yimmon wasn’t a Force adept, and his pitiful mental defenses were lumpish, inert, rocklike. Water eroded rock, Tesla mused; ent
ered its chinks, built up pressure, and blew it apart. The Inquisitor called such images to mind and brought the Force to bear. His physical and mental eddying must have somehow disconcerted the stolid rebel. Perhaps he had only to keep up his assault.
Yimmon’s defensive barrier seemed to yield and contract … and then it held.
Tesla sought a way to breach it. He settled on a means that was not quite in violation of his Master’s instructions.
“What if I were to tell you that there has been a coup on Coruscant?” He let the question hang and was rewarded with a sudden spark of interest from Yimmon, as if he had poked his head above his barricade.
“What if I were to tell you that there had been an attempt on the life of the Emperor. Perhaps you already knew this?”
No response, but the other’s pulse quickened; his breathing shallowed.
“And what if I were to tell you that the perpetrators of this attempt were crushed utterly and their entire organization shattered?”
Ah, yes. Now, that was a reaction. He could sense how much Yimmon wanted to open his eyes, to see Tesla’s face, though he would be unable to read anything in it.
“Has such a thing happened, you’re wondering? Let’s assume that it has. And that resistance operations on other worlds are next. And that they will fall, one after the other. Would you warn them if you could? Ah, but of course you can’t. You have no way to reach them.”
Having put that suggestion in place—having invited Thi Xon Yimmon to think about his resistance colleagues on their various worlds—Tesla monitored the comparatively nervous activity behind the Cerean’s calm façade for a moment more, then pressed ever so gently at it. Then he withdrew … apparently. At least it should feel to Yimmon as if he had withdrawn.
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