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

by Steven Barnes

  In the darkness, Jangotat’s burned mouth twisted into a cold and lethal smile.

  61

  Jangotat flowed through endless cycles of sleep and wakefulness. Sometimes the cool, moist animal was on his chest, and sometimes not. Sometimes he heard voices and sometimes he didn’t.

  When he awakened hungry, Jangotat was fed some kind of fruity mushroom mash. The texture was vile and slippery but the taste was incredible, fresh, as if made by hand.

  From time to time he was massaged, and afterward felt someone peeling dead flesh away from his back. The hands managing him were the softest and most caring he had ever known. He was alarmed to realize that there was a part of him that craved that, loved that, and wanted more if he could have it.

  No. This is not my life. Not a trooper’s life …

  He could not be certain but it seemed days later when the last twist of gauze was finally unwrapped from his eyes. He reached up and gripped his nurse’s wrist. A thin wrist, like a stick, really. He could have snapped the bone with a single wrench. By touch, he knew his caregiver to be a male X’Ting. Brother Fate. He heard breathing, but no words. “Where is Sheeka Tull?” he asked.

  “Right here,” she answered from nearby. He swore that he could hear the smile in her voice.

  Layer upon layer of gauze was unwound, and as it was, light began to stream into his famished optic nerves. “We’ve turned the lights down. Your eyes may still be sensitive.”

  And so they were. When he opened them slowly, blinking hard, the light in the room struck like a physical blow.

  He held up one hand in front of his eyes.

  “Are you all right?”

  He blinked and lowered his hand again.

  As images began to resolve, he saw he was recuperating in another of Cestus’s endless cave formations. Sheets and blankets covered the walls, and simple furnishings divided the floor space into living quarters. There was a fair amount of equipment that he didn’t recognize but guessed to be medical materials of some kind. A makeshift hospital?

  “Why did you bring me down here?” Jangotat asked.

  The brown-robed ones glanced at each other in amusement.

  “Who are you? Are you medics or mentops or something?”

  “No, not exactly,” Fate said. “It’s a little hard to explain.” Although he declined further explanation, Jangotat felt no harm from the X’Ting, and managed to relax.

  “It’s time for us to look at those wounds,” he said. They helped Jangotat to a sitting position and peeled away the leaves that had been placed—

  Leaves?

  He hadn’t looked more closely, merely felt them on his body. What he had assumed to be cloth was actually some kind of broad, pale, fleshy thin fungus.

  They peeled the fungus away one sheaf at a time. They were dead, that much was certain. In peeling them away, a thin film of mushroom remained behind, clinging to his skin.

  His skin …

  The light in the room was dim, but there was enough to look down at his body. He remembered when the killer droid’s blast struck him, searing away skin. He feared muscle and bone might be damaged as well. Looking at his body now, he saw a pale shininess between knee and hip, but nothing else to indicate that a burn had ever existed at all.

  This … this is better than synthflesh, he thought, comparing the fungus to the healing compound included in ARC first-aid kits. This discovery would have to go in his report. To see such results from a healing chamber was one thing entirely. To see its equivalent achieved with a few leaves was simply astounding. This was X’Ting biotechnology? Certainly, on the galactic market these plants would be precious.

  Nicos Fate was joined by a human male and an elderly X’Ting woman, and the three checked him from foot to follicle. Sheeka stood watching, and averted her eyes as they peeled the sheet back.

  At least, he thought she turned her head.

  Finally they seemed satisfied with the general trend of his healing, replaced the bed covers, and turned to Sheeka. “We’ve done what we can. Now it’s up to you.”

  And the three physicians filed out of the room, leaving Sheeka and Jangotat behind.

  For a long time Sheeka just looked at him, and then finally she sighed. “I’ve endangered these people by bringing you here.”

  With a groan, he pushed himself up to a seated position. “Then I should leave.”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” she said. “What you’ve brought to this planet can’t be unbrought.”

  Jangotat frowned. “I’m sorry things seem to have turned out so badly.”

  “I thought,” she said, “I really thought I might be able to avoid all this. That never again would I have to watch people I love die.” Her face twisted with sudden sharp anger.

  “You must hate me,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Sheeka raised a reasoning hand. “I hate what you represent. I hate the purpose for which you were made. But you?” She paused before speaking again, and he filled that pause with a thousand hurtful comments. I hate you most of all …

  But what she said was the one thing he would never have expected. “I pity you, Jangotat,” she said. There was genuine compassion in her voice. He looked up at her wonderingly, barely comprehending her words at all.

  * * *

  A day later Sheeka and the insectile Brother Fate took him out of the cave. This was a simple community, although what exactly they traded in, he was not certain. Medicines, perhaps? They seemed to have a fungus for all occasions: some were tough enough for shoe leather; others said to be edible in a variety of tastes and textures. Brother Fate pointed out a dozen medicinal varieties. The cave fungi seemed the center of this village’s activity. But was that all there was to this place? He sensed something more.

  “Why are you here?” he asked Brother Fate.

  “Everyone needs a hive,” the X’Ting said.

  “But … I’d heard X’Ting didn’t mix much with off-worlders.”

  “No,” Brother Fate said. “Strange, is it not? G’Mai Duris is Regent, but the X’Ting are the lowest of the low.”

  “The offworlders did that to you, and you help them?”

  He shrugged. “My ancestors were healers in the hive. Bring any injury to us, and we want to heal. It is our instinct, and there are no limits. Five hundred years of history doesn’t change a million years of evolution.”

  Jangotat bore in, disbelieving. “You help your oppressors?”

  Brother Fate smiled. “No one here ever oppressed me. Many here ran from Cestus Cybernetics, from the cities, looking for a better way. How are they different from X’Ting?”

  If that was really Brother Fate’s attitude, then there was hope for this planet after all. The X’Ting medications alone were a potential spice mine.

  There was so much to see here, so much that didn’t perfectly reflect his own worldview. There were many children in the community, so whatever this village was, it was no mere sterile medical enclave. No.

  “I need to communicate to my men,” he said to Sheeka on the first day he was able to walk outside. Well, more accurately, she and Brother Fate walked while he hobbled along between them. Children wound their way around them, laughing up at him, aware that he was an offworlder, certainly, but perhaps not completely understanding exactly what the term offworlder meant.

  “I can’t take the risk of a message being intercepted,” she said. “But I’ll figure something out.”

  Although His wounds were healing with abnormal speed, Jangotat’s impatience burgeoned. This was not where he belonged. Not here in the mountains, where the air was clear and clean, the scenery lushly beautiful.

  This was not where he belonged, although Sheeka’s stepchildren Tonoté, Tarl, and Mithail asked him a thousand questions about the world outside Cestus: “What other planets have you been to?” “What’s the Chancellor like?” “Have you ever seen a Podrace?” He found to his pleasure that he enjoyed answering them.

  This was not his world, alth
ough two days after he arrived he was well enough to be taken to Sheeka’s round, neat, thatch-roofed home.

  And there in the house that her dead love Yander had built for her, he saw another side of the formidable pilot who had saved his life in the caves. Here he saw an aproned woman managing a houseful of happy children. She merrily produced great heaps of bread and vegetables and strange, fishy-tasting fungi. Jangotat liked his fresh steaks and chops—but had to admit that his belly groaned with satisfaction from the thick, chewy mushrooms alone.

  He inquired about that, and little Mithail said: “The Guides tell us that—”

  Sheeka’s soft, warning smile was enough to get the child to be quiet, and Jangotat noticed that the conversation swiftly and sneakily was turned to other things, and he was coaxed into discussing battles and campaigns on far-off worlds. He was amused when childhood imagination transformed grinding fatigue and constant terror into something romantic and exciting.

  He chuckled, and then let the amusement die, asking himself if he wouldn’t have responded the same way, given the same life and the same stimuli.

  And there at the table, his mouth filled with hot bread, he watched the siblings’ easy camaraderie. Not so different from his own brethren. Not every clone trooper joke, jest, trick, or game was somehow related to the arts of death.

  Just 95 percent of them.

  Here, there was also fanning, and gathering, the setting of traps and the repulsion of predators. The entire community seemed to be enthralled with the very process of living. The intensity of the work seemed joyous, and he could appreciate that as well.

  And he wondered … what would he have been here?

  And the thought was so sudden, and so achingly strong that for a few moments he stopped chewing, eyes unfocused on the wall, thoughts previously unknown to him unreeling in his mind.

  He turned and looked down at Sheeka’s end of the table, and realized that he was sitting where her former husband might have sat, and that these might have been his children. Something very like a tide of sorrow washed over him, one swiftly stemmed, but real nonetheless …

  This is not my world …

  Jangotat was sleeping when Sheeka Tull entered the cave infirmary, and for this she was glad. Even with the healing fungus, his body had suffered terrible insult, needing constant monitoring and care to ensure that no infections set in.

  She conferred quietly with Brother Fate, who reassured her that all would be well.

  She left Brother Fate’s little cubicle and went back to the sleeping area, looking down on Jangotat. He slept flat on his back, as Jango had. His brawny chest rose and fell slowly, and he made the same little sleep sounds that Jango had once made. That she had grown accustomed to. That, once upon a time, she had foolishly allowed herself to hope might be sounds that accompanied her own sleep, all the days of her life.

  She closed her eyes, trying not to think the thoughts tumbling into her mind. Another chance, she thought. You know what Jango was. You know how it felt to be with him. You never thought you’d feel love like that again.

  The most devastating male animal she had ever known. Was that an insult to the memory of her dead husband? Yander had been good, and kind, and …

  And not Jango Fett. And now, here was Jangotat …

  Another chance.

  “No,” she whispered. It would be wrong. It would be selfish.

  It would be human.

  The next day he felt well enough for walking in the hills, and accompanied burly little stepson Tarl and red-haired stepdaughter Tonoté as they went to check chitlik traps up in the tree-line caves above their fungus farm. The orange-striped, cave-dwelling marsupials’ mammary glands exuded a cheesy substance called kista that helped offworlders cope with the toxins and microorganisms in Cestus’s soil.

  They sang to him a tune he had heard before:

  One, one, chitliks basking in the sun.

  Two, two, chitlik kista in the stew.

  Three, three, leave a little bit for me.

  Four, four, can I have a little more?

  Five, five, set the traps to catch alive.

  Six, six.

  So the children could augment the community by capturing and “milking” the creatures of kista, then releasing them again—usually without damage.

  Set the traps to catch alive …

  He’d seen few dead animals since arriving. No furs, no curing meat. All he had eaten was the satisfying, hearty fungus. These folk “hunted” without harm.

  Who were they, and what had made them that way?

  Jangotat watched the children as they checked the slat walled deadfalls. The chitliks hissed from behind the barriers, but struggled less than he would have expected as they were milked, almost as if playing a game of some kind with their captors. The creatures seemed aware that the humans meant them no harm. Later, he found himself helping the kids design traps and snares based on his own survival training although of course they needed to be modified to ensure that chitliks were caught alive.

  He rolled over on his back on the grass, looking up at the sun and relishing the simplicity of his present life. Soon enough he would be back in combat, but for right now, the most important thing was the capture of a few small, furry creatures that would provide vital antitoxins for the village meals, with enough surplus to supplement trade in fungi.

  The children were fascinated by his nimble fingers, and he amused them with simple skills he had been taught in his own “childhood”: knife juggling, rope escapes, silent stalking, sign reading, a dozen other tricks that he had learned as normal children learned counting games or skipping rope.

  And although there was laughter in his eyes as they came down together from the mountains into the hills, Jangotat’s heart was heavy. And that night at the collective meals … so similar, yet so different from the communal meals he had enjoyed with his brethren on Kamino, he thought …

  This is not my world.

  And then: But it could have been.

  62

  To Obi-Wan Kenobi’s way of thinking, what could be done had been done. Every mistake that could possibly have been anticipated had been corrected. This time, only a fraction of the surviving recruits knew exactly where the central head—quarters lay. The forty-eight survivors were organized into cells of five or six, with only the other members of the cells knowing their names. The outlying farms and mines had suffered a wave of arrests. Many who had been unwise enough to indulge in a bit of tavern-boasting about their recent exploits were now languishing in prisons—or had been slain trying to escape.

  Who knew where the captives had been taken? There was little those captured by the JKs in the mines could tell, but together with the holovid they could make a convincing case for Jedi perfidy, perhaps sufficient to induce more planets to leave the Republic.

  In the last days Obi-Wan and Kit had set up camp in an abandoned tricopper mine, one with an entrance through a sheltered overhang that could not be seen by flybys or drone satellites. One known to none of the captured recruits. One free of cave spider nests, with multiple exits that could be taken at a moment’s notice. Obi-Wan was determined that the previous slaughter would not happen again. They could not afford another such catastophe.

  Forry approached. “Jangotat is still unaccounted for,” he said.

  Skot OnSon, their youngest recruit, had been brought blindfolded to the new cave, and now stood at what he considered attention. “Some of our guys tried to get him out,” he said. “We found their bodies, but—”

  “So you don’t really know what happened to him,” Obi-Wan said.

  “No, General Kenobi.”

  Obi-Wan hunched over his hands, trying to make sense of the data. “We may have been betrayed,” he said quietly.

  There was utter silence in the cave. Then Sirty spoke up. “You suggest that Jangotat has broken Code?” He said that with the air of a man informed that gravity has abruptly ceased to work.

  Seefor looked at Obi-Wan with som
ething close to anger. “It has never happened.”

  Obi-Wan was angry with himself that he had allowed such a speculation to creep into his mind. The troopers were as loyal as mortal flesh could be. Seefor had rightfully found his implication offensive. “I do not mean to insult you. I merely state a fact: Jangotat was behaving oddly before the attack.”

  Kit Fisto chose this moment to speak. “I believe that he was killed. An energy blast could have fried his comlink. Tons of rock were dislodged. He may be buried.”

  Another pause. The clone troopers did not like this idea, but greatly preferred it to the alternative. “There’s another possibility. We haven’t been able to raise Sheeka Tull by comlink. It’s possible that he’s with her … they were seen together.”

  Kit clapped his hands. “From now on, security is water—tight,” he said. “No messages out of our camp. This cannot happen again.”

  “Agreed, sir.”

  “Then we have to move to step three,” Obi-Wan said harshly. “Intensified sabotage. Kit?”

  Kit examined the floating hologram, and then spoke. “It might be possible to determine the most critical parts of the fabrication and distribution system, and halt or slow production without damage to the physical plant itself.”

  “And this selectiveness is important because …?”

  “Cestus cannot survive without a cash stream. To disrupt it other than temporarily would kill thousands.”

  “So?”

  “So I have a plan …”

  63

  Strictly speaking, the thousand-square-kilometer sprawl of Clandes Industrial’s complex was not a city at all. It would most accurately be considered a starburst-shaped collection of manufacturing facilities located three hundred kilometers south of ChikatLik, seventy-five kilometers southeast of the Dashta Mountains. Clandes’s twenty-four underground levels bristled with employee barracks and support structures for the merchants, cantinas, personal service corps, and the transportation agents who enabled them. Much of the complex was based on the hive cluster that had once occupied the location. Once, before the plagues.