by Sean Stewart
Dooku wished Darth Sidious would speak.
It was Ventress's fault. The woman was impossible. She was talented, yes, but
really, a battalion of droids was of more immediate practical use. At this rate,
cheaper, too. He should terminate her.
The remorseless hooded figure flickered like a ghost on the holoconsole.
"I was not aware. Thank you for showing this to me. Needless to say, Ventress
was acting on her own initiative." The arrogance—one might even say, the faint
condescension—with which he had been thinking of his Master a few moments before
had drained out of him like blood spilling from an open vein. "Nevertheless, the
basic facts remain: Yoda is coming to me here, and here I will finish him, once
and for all."
"So I trust." Darth Sidious smiled. Once, early in Dooku's Jedi career, he
had arrived on a distant planet too late to stop a massacre—a long hall of wood
and grass, tribal enemies inside, the outside doused with kerosene and a match
thrown in. The flames, dancing, had looked like his Master's smile. "Of course,
Count, I leave you to manage Ventress as you see fit: but would you like to know
what I do, when my servants show enough . . . initiative?"
Dooku found his finger touching—just touching—the small red button on his
desk. "Master?"
"I crush them," Darth Sidious said.
Jedi Council Chamber, Coruscant.
"Master Windu!"
"Chancellor."
"I give you great joy on the day's glad news! Wherever help is most needed
and least expected, Master Yoda appears to save the day! A wonderful boost for
morale: one day he is reported dead—the next, rising up on the other side of the
galaxy with a glorious victory! Whoever said the public had lost faith in the
Jedi must be eating his words tonight."
"We try, Chancellor."
A pause.
"You are grave."
"We lost two Jedi Knights, sir, friends I have known since my childhood in
the Temple , and operatives of exceptional value. Master Yoda is now traveling,
his cover broken, into the heart of enemy territory, accompanied by two
apprentices who are barely more than children."
"Ah. Yes, I see. The politician is impressed with a victory on the
battlefield of public relations; the military commander not so much. But I had
anticipated you in this, at least somewhat. I tell you, Master Windu, I am not
easy with Yoda's situation for precisely the reasons you describe. I should be
happier if you were to replace the fallen with another detail. I'm not sure who,
exactly . . . Well, why not Obi-Wan? Didn't I see in my last briefing that he
had finished his last mission? Obi-Wan and young Skywalker. I would feel more
comfortable if I knew they were on their way to Vjun. I think the world of
Master Yoda, but he is very old, and perhaps not all that he once was. The idea
of him facing Count Dooku alone, in the Count's stronghold . . . it makes my
blood run cold. Yes, Obi-Wan and Skywalker would do very well."
"Is that an order, Chancellor?"
"Let's call it a request, Master Windu. A heartfelt request."
"This transmission was some time in coming," Dooku said, a
twenty-centimeter-high hologhost, bright mauve, on the transmission deck of the
cutter Asajj had stolen from the Phindian Spaceport docks.
"I've been a little busy, Count." Asajj tried to fix the console's color
controls, wondering if the system was defective, or if the rig had been
customized for some alien with ocular peculiarities that made mauve seem
natural. Also, she was in no hurry to meet Dooku's eye. "I had to calculate a
couple of hyperdrive jumps to shake Phindian security off my tail."
"You lost the Call."
"Yes. To Yoda."
"No, to an actor, apparently."
"What!"
"Perhaps I have more recent information," Dooku said. His voice was very
calm. Very considering.
Asajj knew she was in bad trouble here. "The actor was doubling for Yoda. I
caught him over Ithor."
"It would have saved time and trouble to leave him in the debris field, don't
you think?"
Ventress's hands were getting clammy. She would a thousand times have
preferred him ripping into her than this cool, surgical, distant voice. A fight
would have been a dust-up between allies, between colleagues. This was more like
a dissection.
"If I left him in the debris field, his remains would have been identifiably
not Yoda's. I could have pushed him out an air lock somewhere else, but . . ."
"But what?"
She shrugged. "I have chosen my friends and enemies. To kill randomly, to
kill for no purpose but spite seems weak to me. Undisciplined."
"If I had asked you to kill him?"
"Of course I would have done so."
"What about your scruples, then?"
"My loyalty to you overcalls them."
"But I did not ask you to kill him, did I?"
"Did you even know he was aboard the Call?" Ventress said. She realized the
trap he had let her walk into the instant the words were out of her mouth. "No,
you didn't. Because I never gave you a chance. I didn't tell you. Perhaps I
should have." She squared her shoulders.
"I'll accept that responsibility. I was acting on my own initiative."
Some emotion, hard to read, flickered across his mauve face at the word
initiative.
"Principles, scruples: this is somewhat the territory of the young. As one
ages," the Count said, "one becomes more practical. I don't care so much about
theoretical constructs of right and wrong. I care about timing, effect,
precision. If I have a prisoner, or indeed an ally"—he looked mildly at
her—"that is costing too much in resources, or introducing too many
uncertainties into the scheme of things, I eliminate that person. Do you
understand me?"
Asajj swallowed.
"I think," the Count continued blandly, "you had better convince me that you
are a net gain to my efficiency, Asajj. You have lost two of my ships, one to
Obi-Wan and the other to a second-rate actor from the Coruscant stage. Without
consulting me, you broke in upon a chain of events I had put in motion to bring
Yoda to my dungeons of his own free will. Instead of contemplating his head at
this moment, I am watching a spike in Jedi popularity and a recovery of Republic
morale that two days ago was nearing the breaking point. Right now, you are a
very expensive ally, Asajj. Right now, you are costing me more than you're
worth."
The cold burn of his words hit her like a splash of liquid nitrogen. He
wasn't merely angry. Unless she did something right here, right now, he was
going to murder her. She didn't even bother thinking about escape. If Dooku
wanted to end her, he would. He had not taught her all the Sith lore he
possessed, but even the slender connection between them made her terribly
vulnerable to his arts. Besides which, he might well be the most powerful being
in the galaxy, with nearly unlimited resources at his disposal. An amount of
money that wouldn't even register as a blip in Dooku's accounts would be enough
to keep her on the run from assassins for the rest of her short
, miserable life,
hiding out in jungles and living on womp rats, or passing herself through a
series of chop shops, mutilating her features for the slim, desperate chance of
disguise.
No. In every fiber of her being Asajj knew that running, hiding, defending
was always the wrong strategy. In every engagement, one had to seize the
initiative. In every engagement, the key was to attack.
"Kill your Master," she said.
Dooku blinked. "What?"
Well, at least he wasn't expecting it, Asajj thought, with a wild grin. She
had made her gamble—nothing to do now but back it up. "Kill your Master now,
with my help. Now while you can." She noted the tiniest flinch on the Count's
face. "Sooner or later, every Sith apprentice tries to overthrow his Master. I
know it. You know it. He knows it. Now is your time. You are an independent
agent on a fortress planet. Armies are at your command. The wealth of worlds is
at your feet. Now is your time."
"I do admire the unexpected flair of your attack," Dooku murmured. "I have
mentioned the benefits of age to you more than once, but it has its drawbacks,
too. One gets settled in one's ways. But you . . . you still surprise me. You
are still unexpected."
"How do you think this war is going to go?" Ventress said, pressing her tiny
moment of advantage. "What happens if you win? Will you return to Coruscant in
triumph? Will you sit at the great man's hand when the fighting is done? I don't
think so. How can he let you live—Dooku, the conquering general. Dooku the
wealthy. Dooku the wise. You must stand too much in his sun, Count."
"You are bluffing about things you do not know, Asajj. It is a brave show,
but it will not do."
His attempt at a condescending smile did not convince her. "He will use you
up," she said. "He will put you on the front lines when he can. He will throw
Yoda at you, and his sycophants: Kenobi, Windu, Skywalker."
"With great ability comes great responsibility, Ventress. Not, clearly, one
of your long suits."
"Fine, fine, take your shots," she said impatiently. "You're just buying time
now, because I'm right. Ask yourself one question—ask it from the dark side,
look at it clear-eyed, Count. Right now, your Master uses you because he is
beset by dangers. What happens when you are the most dangerous being left
standing?"
Through the comm channel, no sound but the faint static hiss of stars,
burning and burning.
"If I told you to kill yourself, would you do it?" Dooku asked.
"No."
"What if I told you to come here, back to Vjun."
"I would come."
"Would you be afraid?"
"Terrified." Out here, in the deeps of space, she could hold him off. She
could run away. But once she set foot in Château Malreaux, once she entered into
the orbit of Dooku's power, she would never leave alive unless he willed it.
"But you would come?"
"If you order it."
Dooku regarded her. "I do."
So much for bluffing. "Will you have me killed, or will you listen to what I
have to say?"
"That is none of your business."
"He's going to use you up, Count. He'll drain the blood from you and throw
you aside. He'll pick someone younger, weaker, easier to influence."
"Someone like you?"
"I wish. No, when you go, I'll be swept aside," she said morosely. "I'm just
one of your creatures, to him. Maybe to you, too. Loyalty runs stronger up than
it does down, in case you hadn't noticed."
"Usually true," the Count conceded. "Master Yoda, perhaps, is the exception.
His loyalty to his students runs deeper than theirs to him, I think."
"Admirable," Ventress said dryly. "But that doesn't do either of us any good,
does it?"
Asajj Ventress sat before the nav computer on her stolen ship for a long
time, trying to decide what to do, cursing softly but steadily. Finally she
entered coordinates for Vjun. At the end of the day, running and hiding wasn't
her style. Her chances of convincing the Count that they should work together
would be better face-to-face. He liked her fire and her passion, and—though his
iron self-control never slipped—she knew he thought her lovely, and that didn't
hurt, either.
And if it went badly ... better to be cut down quickly in person, blades
drawn, than live in skulking misery for the rest of her days, feeling every
stray gleam of sun on her back like a sniper's targeting dot.
All that being said, forcing her fingers to put in the Vjun coordinates felt
like deliberately sticking them into a fire, and she was in a fairly filthy
humor when the ship's comm console chirped. She ignored the signal. It wasn't,
after all, her ship. But the hail kept repeating, over and over, until looking
up with irritation she saw the call-up code for the Tac-Spec Footman droid, the
one who had given her Yoda's location.
Oh, great. "What do you want?"
"I think you know," said the calm voice at the other end. "I want the rest of
my money. We agreed on a certain price. Now I find only one-third of that sum
has been credited to my account."
"I didn't get the target."
"My information was exact and correct, and that is what you paid for. Your
inability to perform is no reason to penalize me."
"Yeah, well, life's tough all over," Ventress snapped. "As you must know, I
am out the price of a starship. I don't have the credits to give you—to tell you
the truth, I threw in the children's lives as a favor to you. Consider it
payment in kind."
"They were not part of our agreement."
"Spoken like a cold-blooded droid, all right. Or should that be cold-oiled?"
Ventress hunted through the ship's computer system, looking for the repair and
maintenance manual. A service light had started blinking in the middle of her
last hyperspace jump, a little icon of a purple jellyfish-thing with what looked
like spears running through it and a big red bar; she had no idea what it might
signify. "You know, haggling over money is not my favorite activity at the best
of times, and to be perfectly frank, haggling with a tin can—a traitorous tin
can at that—interests me even less."
"I may be a traitor," the droid said, "but I'm not a cut-rate one. I highly
recommend you reconsider."
Aha! Ventress thought, scanning through the ship's manual—she had it! The
blinking light was the fluid ligature spindling indicator. She read rapidly
through the help section:
. . . when this light flashes, fluid ligatures may be in danger of spindling,
or may already have spindled. Spindling may lead to excessive wear, loss of
translight pressure, or weight gain due to instability in artificial gravity
devices. Also, in rare cases, death.
Occasionally, fluid ligature spindling indicator may flash for no reason.
So here she was, heading back to Vjun in a stolen ship that might or might
not have spindled fluid ligatures, in apparently imminent danger of a
gray-induced weight gain, with the prospect of an interview with an angry Sith
Lord waiting for her with execution on his mind.
&
nbsp; "Tin Man, I gotta tell you—right now, you're the least of my worries."
Far away, in an anonymous comm booth, Solis, who had betrayed Yoda's secret
and now was not even to be paid for it, stared at the CONNECTION CUT BY
RECIPIENT message on the screen. "We'll see about that," he said.
At the same instant that connection died, another sputtered to life between
the Jedi Council Chamber and Anakin Skywalker's ship. "Hailing."
"Master Windu!"
"Obi-Wan? Why aren't you in your own ship?" Obi-Wan grimaced. "Repairs.
Anakin agreed to give me a lift."
"I see. Current location?"
Obi-Wan rolled his eyes at Anakin, who grinned back at him. Mace Windu,
supremely gifted in so many ways, was not much for small talk. "Inbound to
Coruscant, flight plan as filed," Anakin said. "We're sublight for a day and a
half for refueling and stores. Should be home in four days. According to local
space news, reports of Master Yoda's death were greatly exaggerated."
"True. The same can't be said for Maks Leem and Jai Maruk," Mace said grimly.
"Oh." The Jedi looked at one another, their smiles fading. "We hadn't heard."
"Master Yoda is on his way to—this channel is scrambled?"
The comm protocols on Anakin's ship were permanently set for triple-encrypted
hard code for any channel running to the Temple , but he double-checked. A gross
malfunction in the ship's reactor drives could cost him and Obi-Wan their lives;
much tinier slips in signal encryption could cost the lives of millions. "All
secure," he said crisply. Mace Windu's grimness was catching.
"Master Yoda is on the way to Vjun to negotiate secretly for the possible
defection of a highly placed Confederacy figure. Very highly placed," Mace said
significantly.
"Master Yoda?" Anakin said, puzzled. "Surely there are more important things
for him to be—"
He trailed off as Obi-Wan gave him a long look. "Extremely highly placed, I'm
guessing," the older man said.
Half a second later, Anakin got it. "Dooku? He's going to negotiate with
Dooku?—It's a trap. He must know it's a trap, right?"
"A trap, yes ... but for whom?" Obi-Wan murmured.
"At the moment, Master Yoda is traveling to Vjun on a very important
mission," Mace continued. "We wanted to keep it quiet, but obviously the secret