The Cestus Deception: Star Wars (Clone Wars): A Clone Wars Novel

by Steven Barnes

  “Where are they taking us?” Debbikin asked.

  The droid paused for a moment before answering. “We have taken one of the obsolete runnel systems and are currently being shunted onto a mine track. I project that our probable destination, based upon information dealing with other kidnap/murder scenarios—”

  “Murder?” Lady Por’Ten shrieked.

  Ignoring her distress, the droid continued. “I regret to inform you that there is approximately a thirteen percent chance that the intent of this action is, ultimately, the death of every person in this car.”

  The Five Family executives glanced around at each other, mouths quivering in shock.

  The car went a bit farther, made a sharp right turn. It stopped, and then slowly, inexorably, they felt it sink beneath them.

  “Yes, as I anticipated, one of the mining tracks. This is not good, as it is not a part of the central system, and therefore may not show up on the maps. If the beacon has been disabled, which is probable, I project our chance of being rescued as approximately one in twelve.”

  “One in … twelve?”

  “Yes. Unless you would like the chance of us both being rescued and of all of you being recovered alive. In which case the chance is closer to one in six hundred fifty, based upon kidnap and homicide statistics—”

  “Shut up!” Lord Por’Ten roared, and stood. The car had finally come to a stop. Now they could hear footsteps on the roof, their eyes following them as one portentous thud at a time, they moved back to the rear, and then stopped.

  They glanced at each other, and Quill had opened his mouth to speak when a figure with thick ropes of tentacle wriggling from his head swung lightly down and smashed through the roof’s plastine partition. Jagged shards scattered as he landed without a sound, in marked contrast to the heavier tread heard up on the roof.

  A Nautolan! But what did he want?

  His eyes were huge and black, with no apparent irises, but with a filmy coating that seemed to shift in opacity from moment to moment depending on the angle of light. He was empty-handed, but there was a handle tucked into his belt, and Debbikin knew instantly that it represented a threat of some kind.

  “Who are you?” Quill spluttered.

  “My name is Nemonus. Greetings from Count Dooku,” the Nautolan said.

  “Wha-what do you want?”

  “You seek to change a bargain,” the intruder said.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  The intruder turned, so slowly that he seemed like a machine in low gear, a disturbing contrast to the terrifying speed with which he had smashed through the roof. “You must learn that there is no place you can hide. A deal was struck. Those who renegotiate price may find other matters transformed as well.”

  Although ordinarily the most imperious of men, Por’Ten completely melted before the intruder’s molten gaze. “Wha-what are you talking about?”

  The intruder came closer. His lips thinned. The tentacles about his head curled slowly, insinuatingly, as he spoke, twitching with their own crazed energy. He whispered, yet in some odd way the whisper was louder than a shout. “My master promised to keep you out of the war. That you would not be involved. That can change, my friends. That can all change.”

  Young Debbikin glanced at the others, nearing panic now. “No! We have kept our pledges to you. All of them.”

  The intruder sneered. “Then why have you raised your prices, threatened to withhold shipment without further credits?”

  There was a moment of relief as they glanced at each other. For a moment, they had feared that he knew of the negotiations with the Jedi Kenobi! No, this was something completely different, Cestus Cybernetics’ demand for a 10 percent surcharge. Llitishi of sales and marketing had sworn that Count Dooku would agree if they but held firm.

  “It is the war, the war!” Debbikin leaned closer, trying to establish a sense of intimacy. “Supply lines have been cut …”

  The intruder was unimpressed. “We have made other arrangements for you.”

  “Yes, but the timing is off, and we have to buy additional products so that all of the equipment matches. We are proceeding, but everything is taking longer, and therefore more expensive—”

  The intruder raised his palm. Although he hadn’t so much as touched them, the force of his personality drove them backward into their seats. “You cannot be trusted.”

  Quill was using his secondary hands to reach stealthily for the little hold-out blaster always attached to his wallet. They knew that he was descended from an assassin clan, and that those skills had been passed from one generation to the next for half a millennium. If their kidnapper made but a single mistake, the blaster would be out, the Nautolan would be dead, and they had a chance to regain control of the car. And Quill, incidentally, would have redeemed himself.

  “How can you say that! Our dealings with you have placed Cestus in jeopardy with the Republic. We would not betray you. If we did, we would have no one!” The intruder’s back was to Quill. The blaster was almost in hand …

  Tension crackled in the air. Debbikin kept his eyes on the intruder, striving not to reveal by eye movement or the slightest tremor of voice that anything was amiss.

  For the first time the intruder seemed to change expressions. The film over his black eyes swirled. “Your Families need a lesson. The best I can imagine is one written in blood—”

  Quill’s blaster was out and moving to the level, its tiny gleaming barrel rising to sight at the intruder’s back. But without turning, the intruder’s hand flickered. The gleaming handle at his belt blurred. Something that looked like a coil of glowing wire suddenly flexed, lashing backward toward Quill’s blaster. Three meters long it was, and thin as a thread, wrapping around the barrel. With the slightest twist of the intruder’s wrist, the blaster was sliced in half, the grip suddenly glowing white-hot. Quill dropped the blaster, howling from singed fingers, and thrust them into his mouth, sucking and nursing them.

  “Now then.” Kit Fisto smiled grimly. “Shall we negotiate?”

  37

  By the time Obi-Wan arrived at the palace, the halls were in an uproar. He was hustled into G’Mai Duris’s presence to see the regal X’Ting hunched in her seat listening to the words of a round, short-legged Zeetsa with a very worried expression.

  “—Regent Duris,” the leathery blue creature said in conclusion. Her stubby arms pointed at a glowing map hovering in the air. Her eyes traced the map with concern.

  “Excuse me, Shar Shar,” Obi-Wan said as softly as he could. “If there are concerns with the transportation grid that necessitate the postponement of the day’s negotiations, perhaps I should return at another—”

  Duris glanced up, an expression of surprise and then tears of gratitude overflowing her faceted eyes. “Master Jedi!” she said. “Obi-Wan. I am afraid we have an emergency. Thank goodness you are here!”

  “Indeed?” he asked. “How can I be of assistance?”

  “The Five Families should have been here an hour ago. Their private car seems to have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Obi-Wan managed to conceal the pleasure in his voice. “How is that possible?”

  “The entire planet is honeycombed with tunnels. Many of them are unmapped. We can only assume that someone, for their own purposes, shunted the car off its route into one of these secondary pathways.”

  “And as yet you have received no communication?”

  “None,” she said.

  Obi-Wan studied the entire map, his face set sternly. “May I assume that the other cars traveling along the map have sensors to avoid collision?”

  “My engineer can answer that question,” Duris said.

  The engineer was a small, graying human who looked as if the current stress might cost him his few remaining sprigs of hair. “Yes, the sensors are excellent.”

  “Tell me,” Obi-Wan asked Duris, “what is known of the situation at this time?”

  “A group of Five Family executiv
es were kidnapped.”

  “This Desert Wind group we’ve heard of?”

  “We do not know,” she replied. “We’ve heard little from them in the past year, and considered their threat broken. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like their style.”

  Obi-Wan closed his eyes and counted to five, and then opened them again, retaining his most serious expression. “Can you holomap the entire system?”

  The engineer nodded. “Well, of course, but why?”

  “In order to do something like this, to make the car disappear, they have to have removed it from the grid. The individual magcars should react to the absence of a moving object, slowing and speeding themselves in compensation. The degree of disruption will increase the closer we get to the point of departure.”

  “But they have clearly affected our computers. They left no trace—”

  “They left no direct data trace. But can the phantom car influence proximity sensors on other system vehicles?”

  “Well …,” the engineer’s mouth suddenly widened as he grasped Obi-Wan’s implication. “No. The safety system is off the main grid, a backup system to prevent a single mistake in central command from causing a systemwide catastrophe.”

  “Good,” Obi-Wan said, as the complete system sprang to life in a floating web of glowing silver threads. “Now I want you to filter for proximity feedback from the cars themselves, showing their actual positions and their projected positions according to schedule.”

  The engineer blanched. “But … we are not on Coruscant, sir. We have no computer fast enough to find the original point of departure—”

  Obi-Wan raised his hand. “I am not searching for a thing. I need to sense something that is not there. Where computers falter, the Force may prevail. Please. Give me the images.”

  The engineer gawped at Obi-Wan. Then Duris nodded her head and waved her primary hands, and he performed as requested. Soon every image on the grid was doubled. “Make the projected images red, and the actual ones blue,” Obi-Wan said, his voice dropping low.

  Duris remembered stories of these mystic warriors, and fought to repress a tremor of almost supernatural awe. She nodded to the engineer, and a series of ghostly overlay images began to form. Impossibly complex, all of it, because as each car accelerated or decelerated to compensate for the missing car, they began to interfere with other cars on the tracks, causing them to slow or speed in a widening ripple effect.

  Obi-Wan stood in the middle of the vast rippling maze, his eyes half lidded, arms outstretched as if actually feeling the entire web of motion. Then, slowly, he turned and pointed to a stretch of tunnel between one of the outer rings of luxury apartments and the central city. “This,” he said, “is where the phantom car originated. It is therefore here that the real car went offline.”

  Duris glanced at the engineer, who hunched his shoulders. Perhaps.

  The Jedi traced a line along a branching tunnel. “And it went here …” The tunnel branched again. He traced his finger along one of the paths, and then backtracked and took the other. “And then here, where it slowed and changed levels …”

  The throne room was blindingly silent. The quiet heightened the impact of each word almost unendurably. “And then it began moving again, until …”

  He cocked his head sideways. “This is strange. There is no track indicated here. Should there be?”

  The engineer cleared his throat. In fact, he looked a little frightened, regarding their guest with something halfway between dread and awe. “Well …” He consulted a holo rotating above his briefcase, and when he raised his head again a moment later, that tense crease of his lips deepened. “There is a utility corridor that was taken off the map because it was in bad repair, and not up to recent safety standards.”

  Obi-Wan’s eyes were still closed. “But?”

  “But in fact, if it is still up to the former specifications, it could take the load safely.”

  Again, silence. Obi-Wan nodded. “Here you will find your missing car.”

  The engineer swallowed hard. “Regent Duris,” he said. “There remains the problem of reaching it. If we assume that the kidnappers are tied into the central network, they’ll see anything we do to reroute a car. That reduces our options to acting off the grid. It will take hours to position a strike squad. Have we that much time?”

  Obi-Wan looked at her. Duris chewed at her chitinous lower lip. If this was Desert Wind, then there was little fear for the lives of the Five Families. Desert Wind kidnapped, but had never killed in cold blood. Not their style. But they had doubtlessly made arrangements for their captives to be spirited to some more secretive place—and from there, no one could predict what might happen.

  Of course, it was always possible that it was not Desert Wind. On Cestus, misinformation was simply a fact of life …

  Glancing back at Obi-Wan, she realized that she had not, for even a moment, doubted that this amazing man had done what all of Cestus’s computers could not. That by power of his mind and the mysterious Force, Obi-Wan Kenobi had found their missing Family members. With all that had happened in the last day she felt dazed and confused as she had not in all her time on the throne, as if suffering from a mild form of shock.

  “You might be right,” she said. “We may have no time, and the usual means will not serve. Master Jedi—have you a plan?” Somehow, she knew he would.

  “Tell your security people not to shoot until they’ve made an identification,” Obi-Wan murmured.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Obi-Wan paused for dramatic effect, and then replied: “Something drastic.”

  38

  Ore cars, equipment shuttles, passenger vehicles, mining machines, and repair droids all flowed through the same labyrinth of magrails and lev tracks, zipping past and moving around each other as if they were living, breathing things, individual tissue structures within a larger organism, cells in the body Cestus, drones in the technological hive.

  And atop one of those cars, clinging to the surface with nerves and muscles honed by decades of training, crouched Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi. He compensated for impossibly swift and sharp turns, accelerations, and decelerations with a profound understanding of the rhythms of the universe and its invisible currents.

  Sequestered in his rooms, Obi-Wan had privately absorbed the shuttle system patterns over the course of a long, sleepless night. In G’Mai’s presence he’d spent no more than a few minutes updating that research. Even if they had watched him spend hours immersed in study, what he was about to attempt would still have been impressive to them. With the secret practice and knowledge, his next actions would appear miraculous, putting his hosts—especially the volatile Quill—off-balance emotionally.

  But first he had to actually do it, knowing as he did that sensors on the various vehicles observed his every move.

  The vehicle began to slow and veer to the left. Following instincts far beyond the level of conscious thought, he jumped even before he saw the next car.

  For a moment Obi-Wan clung to the tunnel’s wall, then felt a blast of air as the next magcar barreled toward him. For a moment its transparisteel walls resembled the great glowing eyes of some subterranean creature. He glimpsed commuters who had been absorbed in their datapads or conversations suddenly stare at the man hanging upside down from the top of the tunnel, and they gasped as he dropped toward them. A yellow-skinned Xexto flailed her four arms in shock, screaming that the poor human was attempting some kind of bizarre suicide.

  Sorry, Obi-Wan mouthed, then clutched the front of the car, catching it as it slowed to round the curve, but still, it rammed the breath out of him.

  He clung with desperate strength. Eighteen seconds until they reached the next point, and he counted them off to himself, smiling inwardly at the civilians gawping up at this strange apparition.

  Before any of them could react with anything but distress, he was gone again.

  Obi-Wan wedged himself between the ceiling and the wall, bracing wi
th hands and feet. A cargo tunnel intersected here, and it was only ten seconds before he could hear it howling on its way to him, and he saw the single eye glaring only moments before it was beneath him. He dropped down onto an ore car. The jagged heap of rock was so steep that he almost slid off onto the tracks below. He scrabbled for purchase, found it, lost it, then found it again. The artificial hurricane ripped Obi-Wan’s legs out sideways, and he pulled them back in an instant too late. His right heel slammed into a wall, whipping him around and back, ripping at his grip, forcing him to release his hold and then to regain it a few chunks back.

  The wind lashed him mercilessly, and there was nothing to be done about that, not now. He knew that Cestian computers had modeled his Force-based analysis of the system kinetics, and would have found it accurate. By now they might even have adapted their own programs to enable them to track his whereabouts by reckoning the presence of an undeclared body hopping from car to car throughout the system.

  That, and the overhead monitors, made it clear that he was performing for an audience both critical and suspicious.

  From car to car he migrated, until he reached a junction where he could finally hop free, landing on the metal track beneath. He breathed in short, sharp bursts, refusing to give in to the fear lurking just below the surface of his concentration.

  Timing. Timing.

  Obi-Wan bent down and felt the metal path that the magcar levitated along at cruising speed. The car was coming. Not long now, and it was also too late to make other plans. Nothing now but to carry through. A sudden flood of air pressure hit him like a tide, overriding his carefully constructed mental blocks.

  Now. Obi-Wan turned and sprinted down the tunnel as fast as he could, fleeing the car barreling down on him; he could hear its warning siren. At the last instant he leapt forward, using the last strength in his body to accelerate himself, and spun in midair.

  For an instant, his body propelled by superbly conditioned muscles and a nervous system in tune with the deepest currents of the Force, Obi-Wan’s velocity came within five meters per second of the magcar’s. He braced himself, exhaling perfectly in time with the impact, arms bent as shock absorbers. Breath smashed out of his body with a gigantic huff, but that very exhalation provided him with the cushioning that allowed him to survive the impact. If he hadn’t almost matched the magcar’s speed …