But a moment later he realized he had made an error. Whatever lay in that basket was nothing human. It weighed more than an infant as well: perhaps ten kilos. And it hissed. The basket wobbled slightly, and from their efforts to keep it balanced, he knew that there was something moving in there, something serpentine.
“Will you trust us as you ask us to trust you?” the old X’Ting female said.
“What would you have me do?”
“Place your hand inside,” she said.
“And?”
“And then we will see.”
General Fisto looked at her, and then at Thak Val Zsing.
Nate held his breath. This was a test of both courage and intuition. Trust and common sense. What was in the basket? The woven sand-reed container was large enough to hold any of a thousand venomous creatures. And if it bit the general, what then? Was Kit Fisto supposed to magically transform the poison within his body? To charm the beast so that it would not bite? Or was this entire thing some kind of an elaborate assassination plan? Whatever it was, he could not repress a hint of apprehension. What would the Jedi do?
General Fisto’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded his head. “Yes.”
The old X’Ting couple laid the basket down. The cover still obscured whatever was inside. The general rolled up the sleeve of his robe and extended his hand into the container. Nate noticed that the pace of entrance was neither slow nor fast, but continued at a single unvaried medium rate.
General Fisto’s eyes never left the old woman’s. His arm had disappeared up to the elbow, and the witnesses watched carefully.
And yet … what was he missing? There was something happening here that defied definition.
Finally one of the other old females nodded, and the general, using the same slow, steady pace, withdrew his arm from the basket. Its underside glistened with something wet. He rolled his sleeve down without wiping the wetness away. The Nautolan’s face was impassive.
The two brown-robed X’Tings retreated to a neutral position and sat cross-legged, primary and secondary arms folded in a prayer position, foreheads leaning against each other. The others formed a wall between the clones and General Fisto and the basket. They were hunched over and seemed to be studying something.
Then they returned. “He tells the truth,” the woman said. And the others nodded.
Thak Val Zsing exhaled mightily. Nate could tell that he was relieved, but his pride wouldn’t let him speak it.
“Very well, then,” Thak Val Zsing said. “The Guides … have never been wrong before. All right. I yield the leadership of Desert Wind.” He paused. “And I hope I’m not making the biggest mistake of my life.”
As Kit Fisto walked back up to the cave, Nate ran up next to him and spoke in a low voice. “What did you feel in the basket?” he asked. “Some kind of rock viper?”
“I do not know,” Kit said, barely moving his lips. “It did not try to harm me. But I felt … something. A presence I have sensed before.” When Kit said no more, Nate accepted that and rejoined his brothers.
Thak Val Zsing shook his head as they walked toward the cave. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. His eyes burned with challenge. “I’m not the one who’s trusting you, Jedi. Remember that.”
“I will,” Kit promised.
“Well,” he said, scratching his head. “A promise is a promise.”
“It is good that you are a being of your word.”
“Sometimes,” said Thak Val Zsing, his shoulders slumping, “his word is all a man has.”
“You bring more than words,” Kit replied. “Eat with us?”
Thak Val Zsing and his people jostled to find seats at their rude table. As steaming platters heaped with fresh meat, mushrooms, and hot bread were placed before them, he turned to Kit again. “We haven’t had a good meal in a week. Can you …?”
“All you can eat,” Kit said.
Thak Val Zsing and his people attacked their plates ferociously, bolting down their food like starving Hurts. Finally they slowed, belching and laughing, and it became possible to speak with them.
“I have read the files,” Kit said, “but I’d like to know your views. What happened on Cestus?”
“The story’s an old one,” Thak Val Zsing said. “I probably look like a miner, by now. Truth is, I was a history professor. Lost my job when the government cut social programs and utilities to the outlying areas.”
“The elected government? The regent G’Mai Duris?”
He snorted. “She’s not the real power here, star-boy. Better play catch-up. Anyway, I went to work in the mines. The rest, as they say, is history.” He grinned. “Look. Old story. You have oppressors and the oppressed. That was true before the Republic ever found these people: the X’Ting drove the spiders into the mountains, and probably exterminated some others who were gone before we ever arrived. We came, bought land from them for a few trunks of worthless synthstones, and a couple of hundred years later some mysterious ‘plagues’ killed about ninety percent of ’em. Convenient, eh?”
“Extremely. You think these plagues no accident?”
Val Zsing snorted. “There’s no evidence you could trouble your precious Chancellor with. Any prison cramming together species from around the galaxy is a forcing ground for exotic disease. Let’s just say that the Five Families weren’t heartbroken.”
Thak Val Zsing tore a great chunk out of a roasted bird and chewed as juice ran down through his beard and onto his shirt. “Maybe my great-grandfather laughed about it, but it’s not funny now. The Five Families own everything. Those of us at the bottom barely have enough bread. Our babies cry in the night.”
“I thought Cestus Cybernetics was wealthy,” Kit said.
“Yes. But precious few of those credits make their way to the bottom.”
“We’re gonna change that,” Skot OnSon said. “Overthrow the government, take back our world.”
Our world, Kit thought. And just whose world was it? The Five Families? The immigrants? The X’Ting hive? What about those wretched spiders the troopers had driven into the dark? He was sorry to have taken their cave now, but happy to have restrained the troopers from pursuit.
22
Obi-Wan and Barrister Snoil hadn’t left their apartment since returning from the throne room. The attendants seemed to hover around them, hoping for tips, bringing them food and rather clumsily trying to overhear their conversations. Finally Obi-Wan had to ask the hotel’s management to solve the problem.
Snoil had an unquenchable appetite for work. The Vippit rarely ate and never slept. He pored over documents, consulted with Cestian legal minds, relayed communications through their cruiser to Coruscant for second and third opinions.
Through it all, Obi-Wan sensed not desperation but a kind of joy at having an opportunity to discharge his old debt through excellent performance. If he could just find a way through this legal warren, understand the path that might lead to peaceful resolution, they might all leave Cestus happy.
Obi-Wan helped where he could, offered advice, tried to take some of the burden from Snoil’s shell, but in the end he felt almost useless. Their next meeting with G’Mai Duris was in no more than eighteen hours, and as of yet they had no ammunition to turn the tide.
But something would come up. Something always did …
23
Three hundred kilometers northeast of the command base stood the saw-toothed expanse of the Tolmea mountain range. Its tallest peak, Tolmeatek, rose thirty-two thousand meters from the valley floor, its snowcapped summit a gleaming beacon for the adventurous. Only within the last hundred years had any non-native managed the climb without re-breathing apparatus. The very word tolmeatek meant “untravelable” in X’Ting. The lesser mountains were of the same inhospitable disposition, stark inclines and flash storms making the entire region too dangerous for casual travel.
And ideal for clandestine activities. Within the shadow of mighty Tolmeatek nestled another landing pad, also hidd
en from chance observation.
A three-X’Ting delegation gazed up into the stars until one of the orbs began to change position. Oddly, it appeared tiny until the last possible moment, when it seemed as if the minuscule object suddenly expanded with impossible speed.
The greeters waited at their places, unmoving. Two wore shadowy robes, one a recently acquired offworlder style cut for an insectile X’Ting. A narrow landing ramp descended from the shining ship. A female humanoid appeared in the doorway. She wore a floor-length cloak and was clearly visible only in silhouette, but what they could see made them hold their breath.
The cabin behind her was dark. Her profile was cleanshaven, with a skull both symmetrical and large enough to suggest formidable intellect. The pale skin covering it was so clear and flawless as to be almost translucent. Six knife-shaped tattoos were arrayed on each side of her head, daggers pointing at her ears. She seemed to sparkle a bit, as if with some inner radiance. Doubtless, a trick of the light.
As she descended, they saw that her eyes were a flat and expressionless blue, briefly examining Fizzik without any comment or judgment. He was so far beneath her notice that he barely registered at all, neither threat nor ally. For all the change in her expression he might have been an astromech droid.
Fizzik was afraid of this woman, and found the sensation oddly delicious.
He stepped forward, prepared to offer his planned greeting. “Ma’am …?”
The woman tilted her head slowly sideways, staring at him as if he were an unaccustomed form of lower animal life. That odd sensation within him, the fear-thing, swelled. Fizzik went silent.
She took two more steps and then touched her belt. All around the ship, in a giant circle with a radius of perhaps twenty meters, the sand sizzled. Fizzik had noticed a line of tiny sandwasps crawling across the sand, mindlessly carrying their burdens back to their nest. Where that line crossed the sand, half a dozen of the tiny creatures had curled into smoking balls. The others on either side of the line were unharmed.
For the first time, she spoke. “If your people approach my ship,” she said, “you’ll need new people.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Very good,” she mocked. “Take me to Trillot.”
Fizzik opened the back of a little snub-nosed tunnel speeder to her, and she entered without another word. Her movements flowed, as if she were more felinoid than humanoid: A savagely beautiful predator.
The tunnel runner hovered and then pivoted, heading into one of the nearby entrances. The little geebug was built for swift maneuvering in the warren of tunnels beneath Cestus’s surface.
These tunnels had been built by hive technicians eons ago, but had only been electronically mapped fairly recently—a few standard decades, perhaps. The geebug was also equipped with the very latest and most powerful scanning equipment and skittered through the tunnels like a thrinx on a griddle.
Fizzik sat beside the pilot in the front seat, but took a chance to cast a glance back at the rear seat, to see, perhaps, if their guest was at all discomfited by the series of near misses as they negotiated the warren.
She seemed unflappable, her piercing blue eyes amused, full pale lips curled up at the edges as they scraped through an especially close call. She scanned the cave walls as they flew past, noting everything. Their passenger turned and looked at him, curiosity lighting her face at last. “So the Five Families fear to meet with me openly.”
“It is considered risky. But you will be with them soon.”
She snorted derisively. “What is all this?” she asked, gesturing at the walls.
He found her voice a kind of coppery music. “The planet is honeycombed with mines and tunnels. They are the easiest way of traveling without detection.”
She chuckled, although what might have piqued her amusement was beyond him. She turned at last to face him. “And you are—?”
“Fizzik, brother to Trillot, who awaits your arrival.”
When she offered no introduction in return, he shrank back. He stared at her, and as he did her eyes grew vast and dark. “Perhaps,” he said, “I should just let you rest from your no doubt long and arduous journey.”
Their passenger closed her eyes. And no matter how abrupt their spins and turns, what jolts the tunnel runner got from near misses, she did not open them again until the vehicle came to a halt.
The instant the vehicle shushed to stillness her eyes snapped open, and Asajj Ventress was as alert as a Gotal on the hunt. Her short nap had apparently refreshed and renewed her. That is, if such a creature required refreshment and renewal.
They had arrived in a cave below the heart of the city. Five of Trillot’s most trusted aides awaited them. Whereas she had exited the ship like a queen or some kind of dark princess, here she opened the front of her cloak and assumed another aspect, which Fizzik recognized as that of a military leader. Beneath the black skintight suit her body was as sinewy as a snake, only her breasts and hips feminizing an otherwise androgynously muscular physique.
Trillot had briefed Fizzik about Commander Ventress, of course. Rumors had floated about, and even his brother wasn’t certain which to believe. Some said she was a Jedi herself; that she had left the ancient Order, taking her weapons with her. Others said that she was an acolyte of some shadowy group superior to even the feared Jedi Knights.
The ring of greeters parted, and they stepped to a turbolift platform large enough for four. He noted that the aides did not deign to step aboard, as if they wished to keep a safe distance. The two rode up together.
She smelled of acid fruit.
Darkness enfolded and then released them as they reached the upper level.
As they emerged into Trillot’s headquarters, the hard, cold creatures who awaited them seemed to part like shallow water. No one dared touch her; none approached her. A kind of silence descended over the entire floor as he escorted her to her meeting.
Trillot was seated at his desk as she entered his office. He was bloated now, his transformative hormones in full effect, accelerated by the alien herbs. He squirmed and fidgeted almost continuously, as if he could find no comfortable position.
Oddly, Ventress seemed somewhat deferential. From a pack so cunningly hidden upon her taut body that he had missed it entirely, she withdrew several items and politely placed them on the table before Trillot.
The golden gang lord’s faceted red eyes moved back and forth across the items, and he waited. The air shifted, and he smelled the slightest musky tang. Trillot, he knew, exuded musk from neck glands when going through the Change, but that smell intensified when he was nervous. In all the years he had known his brother, Fizzik had smelled it only twice before.
The woman nodded deeply. The bag shuddered. Something black and red thrust its head out of the flap, forked tongue flickering as if tasting alien air.
“Gifts,” Ventress said. Was that the very tiniest trace of mockery in her voice? “Of salt, water, and meat.”
Trillot stared, uncertain what to do. Ritual meals were common, a highly developed art in X’Ting hive politics. But Trillot was no royal, not even a noble. What could he make of this? Mockery or not, he dared not respond impolitely. His gaze shifted to Ventress and then back to the table. The red-and-black head proved to be the head of a banded snake, emerging from the bag slowly. No … it wasn’t a snake. Its small stubby legs paddled as it attempted to escape its confines. It moved sluggishly, as if it had been drugged.
Trillot looked at his protocol droid, and then back at the crawling creature … no, creatures, because a second had emerged.
The protocol droid bent and said quietly: “I believe that you are expected to ingest the windsnakes. With relish, sir.”
Yes, that was definitely a tiny smile on Ventress’s face, but whether genuine or artificial he couldn’t say.
Trillot studied her for a moment, and Fizzik wondered what his employer was going to do. Again, an unexpected flash of emotion. This woman became more intriguing with every pa
ssing moment.
With a movement swift enough to baffle sight, Trillot’s hand snapped out, grasped one of the windsnakes just behind the head, and dashed its body against the table. Even more swiftly the second time, he repeated the maneuver with the other one.
“Send for Janu,” he said. A droid scurried out of the room, and a moment later an enormous brown creature with a distended chin and a raised, horny crest dividing its head waddled into the room, great dusky folds of skin cascading down to the floor. “Yes, sir?”
“Water, salt, and two succulent windsnakes. What recipe can you concoct?”
Janu tilted his waffled head sideways as if measuring. He picked up the limp bodies and sniffed them, bringing them close to his flat, wet nostrils. Then, suddenly, his thick lips split in a grin. “Ah! Glymph pie. Windsnakes come from Ploo Two, and the Glymphids are famous for a variety of casseroles. I can procure fantazi mushrooms—”
“No,” Trillot said, voice cracking a bit. Fizzik sharpened his eyes. Ah! The vocal change was another dead giveaway: his brother was thick in the shift toward his female state. Soon his eyes would change from rust-red to emerald. “I will need my wits about me this evening.”
As he said this, he glanced at Ventress, who remained motionless, squatting on the balls of her feet, back perfectly straight, immobile as a stone. Again, Fizzik had never heard his brother discussing his private practices or habits with an outsider. Or at all, when it came right down to it. An almost perverse fascination bubbled within him.
“Fine,” Janu said. “Then I will use … banthaweed.”
“That should suffice.” He waved at the tray, and the enormous Janu lifted it and carried it away.
“I thank you for your gifts,” Trillot said. “I assure you that I will enjoy them to the full.”
Ventress inclined her head with palpably false modesty. “A small gift from Count Dooku,” she said. “A delicacy. Take heart: the Yanthans who remove the venom sacs rarely make a mistake.” She smiled. “And even if they do—it is said to be a good death.”
The Cestus Deception: Star Wars (Clone Wars): A Clone Wars Novel Page 13