Star Wars®: The Cestus Deception

by Steven Barnes

“You are not the original participant,” the machine said in its androgynous, synthesized voice. “It is necessary that the original participant finish the process.”

  Obi-Wan looked back over his shoulder at the wounded, broken X’Ting warrior. How proud and confident he had seemed only an hour before! How obvious now that all of that pride had been a thin shield against the fear of failing his people, a support against the terrible weight of that responsibility.

  “He is unable to continue,” Obi-Wan said.

  “In one hundred seconds this test is terminated,” the voice said. “Ninety-nine, ninety-eight…”

  “Ask me the questions!” Desperation crept into Obi-Wan’s voice. “Please. Ask me the—”

  “Ninety-three, ninety-two…”

  Obi-Wan jumped out of the chair and went to Jesson, still huddled on the floor, primary and secondary arms wrapped around his knees.

  “Jesson,” he said in his calmest voice. “You must try again.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You must. There is no one else.”

  The X’Ting sank his head against his knees and shivered.

  “All your life,” Obi-Wan said, “you have prepared yourself for a great challenge. As all warriors do.”

  No response.

  “Do not think I don’t know how you feel. Your warrior clan could not protect the hive from Cestus Cybernetics. They have power beyond anything your people can match. And so you feel that even your death cannot free your people. Even the best effort you can manage is not enough to fill the need. So deep in your heart you feel that there is nothing.”

  Jesson finally looked up. “You understand this?”

  “It is the same on planets all over the galaxy,” the Jedi said. “Whenever there are conquered species, the warriors are the first to be oppressed. Because they are the most dangerous.”

  “Seventy…sixty-nine…sixty-eight…”

  “All my life,” Jesson said, “all I’ve wanted is to fulfill the function I was appointed at birth. As my ancestors did. When female, to bear healthy eggs, to learn and heal and teach. When male, to fight for my hive, to keep it safe. Perhaps to die.”

  Jesson looked up at Obi-Wan, faceted eyes glimmering with hope. If the offworlder could understand his misery, then perhaps, just perhaps there was a way out. There was an answer.

  “And then when G’Mai Duris regained leadership of the hive council, you had hope.”

  “Yes!”

  “Fifty-four, fifty-three…”

  Obi-Wan fought to keep his voice calm, although he felt the urgency boiling within him. “And when you were chosen to be the one to find and bring back the royals, you thought that this was your chance. This was your opportunity to serve the hive. This was the moment of glory!”

  “Yes!”

  “It still is,” Obi-Wan said. “All warriors dream of conquest, of glorious victory or glorious death. But none of us knows the price of our lives. None of us knows the worth of our deaths. That is for others to decide, after we are gone. All we can do is struggle, to fight with both courage and compassion, to sell our lives dearly. And later, after the battle is over, others will be able to decide if that sacrifice was in vain, or whether it was the deciding factor. Some of us must place our lives on the altar of sacrifice. Others on our dreams of victory.”

  Jesson gazed up at him, some small measure of hope and understanding creeping in. “And if I fail, and the royal eggs die?”

  “Then you will have done all that you could, serving the hive with all your strength.”

  “And if my failure costs your life as well as my own, Jedi?”

  Obi-Wan spoke as kindly as he could. “My life was forfeit the moment I set myself on this path. Tread not the path to war seeking to preserve life. That is a fool’s dream. Seek to live your days honoring whatever principles you hold dear. Work to gain the highest skills of which you are capable. Sell your life dearly.”

  “Be true to the hive,” Jesson said.

  “Yes.”

  “How can a human understand so well?”

  Obi-Wan smiled. “We all have a hive,” he said.

  “Twenty-seven, twenty-six…”

  “Stand, X’Ting warrior,” Obi-Wan said, putting durasteel into his voice.

  Jesson stood.

  “Fifteen, fourteen…”

  He made his way back to the chair and sat down. The countdown ceased.

  “Are you prepared to continue?” the voice asked in Basic, after a series of X’Tingian pops.

  Jesson answered in affirmative clicks.

  There was a pause. The rotating hologrammic sphere was moving more swiftly now. But a single layer remained over the egg chamber.

  “Answer,” the machine said. “Who ate our eggs and now hide their young? Whose web of fear ensnares them? Who stole the sun but now live in shadow?”

  “It’s too simple,” Jesson whispered.

  “Sometimes simplicity is the best disguise,” Obi-Wan said. “Don’t try to be tricky. Answer with truth.”

  “But that is what I did before,” Jesson said. “And both times I was wrong.”

  “This was created by your own people,” Obi-Wan said. “They would not make it impossible for you to succeed. Trust your forebears.”

  But Obi-Wan felt a slight prickle at the back of his neck. Something. A warning? A clue? Something. What was it? Something about the array of weapons around the chair? The nozzles. The questions. Apparently simple for an X’Ting…

  But the answers were wrong.

  Obi-Wan’s instinct was screaming at him, but he couldn’t put his finger on what, exactly, it was trying to say. Couldn’t, but had to. This was the last chance, and if he couldn’t help his X’Ting companion, all was lost, and his cause was set back irreparably.

  Still, in the depths of his heart, he felt a simple answer, heard it echoing with the truth of the Force.

  “Answer truthfully,” he said again. “Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to second-guess. Give it the answer that you know to be true.”

  Jesson nodded. “The spider people,” he said. “Once, they were the lords of this planet. Once, they drove us from the surface. We sent them to the shadows.”

  His hands splayed out on the control panel, and his eyes were locked on the rotating sphere. What? What…?

  It rotated more rapidly, and a thin whining sound arose in the room, seemed to envelop them. Then the sphere accelerated faster still, and the segments fragmented and flew away.

  “Answer incorrect,” the voice said. “Egg termination has begun.”

  Obi-Wan stared, shocked. How wrong could he have been? Rarely had his insights been proven so horribly wrong. Perhaps he could burn through the floor with his lightsaber and save the royal pair…

  He triggered his weapon and blazed it into the floor’s pentagonal gold seal. Beneath it, he imagined, was a case-hardened durasteel vault door. The hologrammic image was melting, blazing, even as the first sparks leapt from the floor and the room filled with smoke. Jesson sat stunned in the chair, unable to move. “No,” he said. “I did everything right. I did everything. No, please.”

  “Vaporization fifty percent complete—”

  The chamber lights flashed on and off in dizzying bursts, and nozzles at the corners of the rooms began to hiss, expelling a thin greenish gas. Obi-Wan snapped his rebreather into his mouth, sorry that he didn’t have one for Jesson, as well. But if he could just get through this lock, if he could just get to the egg vault, even if his companion perished, the mission would still…

  “Vaporization complete.”

  He felt numb.

  Jesson leaned over the controls, sobbing. “Kill me, kill me,” he said, speaking to no one in particular, and the universe in general.

  The weapons array around Jesson began to glow, and the mist filling the air was sucked toward it. In a few minutes the room was cleared of mist, and Jesson lay still. Obi-Wan looked at his companion’s limp body, feeling a sense of despair and fai
lure that he had rarely known.

  Then…Jesson moved.

  He sat up and looked around, as torpidly as if he had been drugged. “Why am I still alive?” he asked.

  “Look at the holo,” Obi-Wan said quietly.

  Without any fuss, the schematic had reappeared on the display. In miniature form, the egg chamber was rising up through the shaft.

  “What…what is this?” Jesson said.

  The computer began a series of clicks and pops.

  “What does it say?” Obi-Wan asked.

  Jesson listened carefully. “It says…‘Congratulations, X’Ting warrior. You have succeeded.’ ”

  Obi-Wan was staggered. What was this?

  He looked more carefully at the weapons array around the chair and realized that he had been wrong. It wasn’t a weapons array at all. They were sensors. And the gas? It had been some kind of analytic compound that combined with Jesson’s pheromones, the smells that X’Ting emitted under stress. The resultant cocktail had been reabsorbed and analyzed by the sensor array…

  Clarity struck like lightning. “You were never intended to answer the questions successfully,” Obi-Wan exclaimed. “Your answers were probably correct. Answering them proved that you knew X’Ting history. The sensors proved you were X’Ting. But it needed to know how you would react to failure.”

  “To…failure? But I don’t understand.”

  “You might have sought the egg from a wish to destroy it. Or to control all the X’Ting. It might have been for lust of power, or from greed. But when you came from love of hive, and failed, and saw your failure as killing the last king and queen, you felt not anger, but anguish. The test was not for your mind. It was for your heart.”

  “It smelled my grief,” Jesson said, comprehending.

  The burned gold seal rose up, exposing a durasteel column of the same shape. The column rose until it was Jesson’s height, revealing a chamber. Thick transparent crystal windows slid open, showing a disk half a meter high. Around the edge of the disk blinked the red-white lights of an activated antigrav ring. With the greatest delicacy, Jesson pulled the disk out. The antigrav ring reduced its effective weight to no more than a few grams. Holding it in hovering position with the touch of their fingers, X’Ting and Jedi checked the little readout meter blinking at the top.

  “They are alive,” he whispered. “I will take them to the council. Our medical clan will know what to do.”

  “Yes,” Obi-Wan said.

  The walls were blinking more rapidly. A speaker squealed a deep, booming vibration that rattled Obi-Wan’s spine.

  “What’s that?” Jesson asked.

  Obi-Wan inspected the controls. “I think it’s a worm repellent,” he said. “The room is letting us leave.”

  The doors unsealed. They examined the far door. The dead X’Ting lay limp and half melted. “What killed him?” Jesson asked.

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to take the risk. We know the hazards behind us. We’ll go back the way we came.”

  7

  The egg cask was relatively easy to take through the door leading to the worm chamber. They stood on the ledge and gazed down on the floor beneath them. Artificial lights had triggered along the ceiling and, in combination with the fungus, illuminated the plowed soil where the worms had fled the shrill, painful sounds. Obi-Wan extended his senses into Force: nothing. The cave was deserted.

  They moved the disk down to the dirt floor. With the help of the antigrav unit, the carbonite disk virtually floated across the cavern. The rock walls seemed so huge and majestic now. Obi-Wan hadn’t been able to appreciate it, but as artificial lights switched on in the ceiling, the sight of cascading stalactites and vast arched walls took his breath away.

  What sort of celebratory scene had the builders pictured for this moment? Were thousands of X’Ting expected to be gathered now, cheering this ceremony as a new queen and king entered the world?

  How strangely and sorrowfully it had all worked out.

  There would be such celebration eventually, of course, but not now. Now there was silence and shadows.

  The egg cask slid easily through the pentagonal openings on the far side of the cavern. Jesson seemed drained but exultant, a different being from the cocky young warrior who had accompanied Obi-Wan from the council chamber less than two hours before.

  Truly, Obi-Wan thought, transformation was not a matter of time. It happened in a blink, or not at all.

  They crawled through the darkness, pulling the precious cargo between them. Jesson found his way through the labyrinth more easily this time, and their steady shuffling was not really laborious—it was filled with a sense of purpose.

  “You know, Jedi,” Jesson said back over his shoulder, “I may have been wrong about you.”

  “It’s possible,” Obi-Wan said, smiling.

  A few moments passed, during which they proceeded in darkness, Jesson scenting his way and perhaps organizing his thoughts.

  “I’ve seen what you can do, and who and what you are.” He paused. “It is even possible that Duris wasn’t lying about that Jedi Master. Maybe he really did visit, and maybe he really did do something worth remembering.”

  Obi-Wan chuckled. He himself might never know. At least, not until he returned to Coruscant. Then he might make polite inquiries, just to satisfy his curiosity.

  On the other hand, some of the greatest Jedi were notoriously reticent to speak of their deeds. His questions might well be carefully deflected, his curiosity never satisfied.

  They reached the next chamber, the hall of statues where they had first entered. Jesson climbed out and down onto the ledge. Obi-Wan gently pushed the egg cask out. Suspended by its antigrav unit, it floated down to Jesson as gently as a chunk of tilewood settling through water.

  Obi-Wan jumped down lightly. There was a choice to make: to go back the way they had come, to reenter that first hollow statue and brave the cannibals again, or…

  “I’m in no mood for an unnecessary battle,” the Jedi said. “Let’s climb the rocks and see if the door up on the far side will open.”

  “Agreed,” Jesson said. Fatigue blurred his voice. The last hours had to have been the most taxing of the X’Ting warrior’s life. A frantic battle, a climb through darkness, pursuit by carnivorous cave worms, dooming and then saving his species’ royal heirs…

  Obi-Wan wondered: would an X’Ting deal with this stress by celebrating, or by hibernating?

  When they were both safely on the stone ledge, they guided the egg cask up the incline toward what Jesson said was a door.

  It took several nerve-racking minutes to get the egg cask over the rockfall. On the far side they found something ghastly: the corpse of another of Jesson’s broodmates, his lower body jutting from beneath a boulder. His withered secondary arm still clutched a lamp.

  So much death, in service to their hive. Any species that produced both a G’Mai Duris and a Jesson Di Blinth was formidable indeed.

  Obi-Wan picked up the lamp. It was of industrial design, heavier and more powerful than the GAR-surplus model Jesson had brought down into the labyrinth. When he triggered it, an eye-searing beam splayed out against the wall.

  Pity it hadn’t helped Jesson’s brother.

  Just a few meters up the ramp was the door that would take them back to the main hive. A droid mechanism had barred the door. In all probability, the same booby trap had triggered the deadfall.

  “I think my question is answered,” Jesson said behind Obi-Wan, voice deep and respectful.

  “What question is that?” Obi-Wan asked, triggering his lightsaber’s energy beam. He examined the door more closely, judging the best angle for the initial cut.

  “Look. Please,” Jesson said.

  Obi-Wan turned around, allowing his eyes to follow Jesson’s beam of light. It played out along the cavern, illuminating in turn image after gigantic image of the kings and queens of the X’Ting, their greatest leaders in colossal array. Rendered in chewed stone was a ve
ritable forest of noble, insectoid titans. Some male, some female, some tall and young, some stooped and old, their four hands variously held in postures of beseeching, imploring, protecting, comforting, teaching, healing.

  A hall of heroes, indeed, Obi-Wan thought. “What is it?”

  “There,” Jesson replied. “Where we first came in.” And he focused the beam on the largest statue.

  Now Obi-Wan could see the stooped, aged figure far more clearly. The narrow ladder tube they had descended had been a cane. The chamber in which they had fought so desperately against the cannibal X’Ting was, from without, seen to be a muscularly rounded torso. Their point of initial entry, the very first chamber, was a head with flared, triangular ears. The statue stood at least seventy meters high, taller than any other in the X’Ting Hall of Heroes.

  Indeed, many questions were answered, but more remained, questions that Obi-Wan might never satisfy. For there, robed arm outstretched in greeting, gigantic and benevolent in the lamplight of a valiant, long-dead X’Ting soldier, loomed the hollow, chewed-stone statue of a smiling Master Yoda.

  Read on for an excerpt

  from the exciting prequel to

  Star Wars: Episode III

  Revenge of the Sith

  LABYRINTH

  OF EVIL

  by James Luceno

  CAPTURING TRADE FEDERATION VICEROY—AND SEPARATIST Councilmember—Nute Gunray is the mission that brings Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, with a squad of clones in tow, to Neimoidia. But the treacherous ally of the Sith proves as slippery as ever, evading his Jedi pursuers even as they narrowly avoid deadly disaster. Still, their daring efforts yield an unexpected prize: a unique holo-transceiver that bears intelligence capable of leading the Republic forces to their ultimate quarry, the ever-elusive Darth Sidious.

  Swiftly taking up the chase, Anakin and Obi-Wan follow clues from the droid factories of Charros IV to the far-flung worlds of the Outer Rim…every step bringing them closer to pinpointing the location of the Sith Lord—whom they suspect has been manipulating every aspect of the Separatist rebellion. Yet somehow, in the escalating galaxy-wide chess game of strikes, counterstrikes, ambushes, sabotage, and retaliations, Sidious stays constantly one move ahead.