by Sean Stewart
Dooku found his hand was shaking.
He was still looking at it when the study door slid open, revealing a tattered pink ball gown. “Ah—Whirry. I was about to—”
“Call a droid to bring you a hot cup of stimcaf, sure you was.” The madwoman waddled through the door with a lovely old tray in the blood-and-ivory Malreaux check, on top of which sat a silver pot of stimcaf and a cup already poured into a demitasse of finest boneshell china, also in the Malreaux colors. Her evil-faced pet, the brindled fox with the cunning hands, loped in behind her. “Which I saw downstairs when the chambermaid broke an egg on accident, didn’t I. Slapped her nasty knuckles; if we be wasting eggs, that’s a short stop and a long drop down into ruin, isn’t it, sir? Sir?” she said.
Dooku let her live in the old house mostly on a whim; she seemed to give it a quaint touch of madness perfectly in keeping with its setting. But for some reason the Count found himself on edge. It was clear the old hawk-bat wanted something from him, but he had no interest in letting her try to flatter and wheedle favors out of him. “Hustle along, now,” he said. “I have important work to—”
Crash.
“Oh, Count, ever so sorry! I don’t know how come Miss Vix got a-tangled up in your feets! And your lovely cup of stimcaf all over like that!”
There was something undeniably comical about the whole scene, Dooku thought. Him tripping over the fox, the cup smashed on the tile floor. He rather suspected Whirry had arranged the whole incident. Already she was crouching greedily over the fragments of the shattered cup, staring at the patterns of china and spilled stimcaf on the tile floor. It cleared his head, to see her scheming so nakedly below him; restored the proper sense of perspective. “Well, Whirry?” he asked, amused. “What does the future hold for us, eh?”
“Death from a high place,” she said, her fat pink fingers fluttering over the spill, her black eyes greedy. “And here’s the Footman, which stands for the easy destruction of a faithful servant.” She glanced sideways. “Not me, I hope and pray, Your Honor. You wouldn’t be a-doing that to old Whirry, now, would you?”
“Please me, and don’t find out,” he said, half mocking; and then, unbidden, a thought returned to his mind: How easily we betray our creatures.
He stirred uneasily. “Clean this up,” he said abruptly. The comm console chimed, and he sat down to read General Grievous’s daily dispatch, dismissing the old woman from his attention. So it was he didn’t see her verminous companion, Miss Vix, start lapping at the stimcaf. Nor did he hear the old lady as she put her finger on the china cup’s broken stem, lovingly tracing the curled handle, and said, “And here’s the Baby, coming home, my love. Coming home at last.”
Palleus Chuff was, almost certainly, the greatest adult actor on Coruscant under one meter tall. As a boy, he had loved pretending to be a starfighter pilot, a Jedi Knight, a swashbuckling hero. That’s why he’d written Jedi! when he grew up; when one was a single meter tall, one didn’t get many chances to play the dashing hero. Mostly villainous scheming dwarfs, or comic relief. Not much that spoke to that boy who had pretended to be a space pirate so long ago.
Of course it was the pretending he really loved. The acting. The flying he wasn’t so keen on. When the government had approached him about doing his terrific Yoda impersonation (“An astonishing re-creation of the Grand Master himself—the Force is with this 4-star performance!” as the TriNebulon News had been kind enough to put it) on behalf of the war effort, he had been flattered, and perhaps a bit intimidated. When people wearing uniforms and carrying blasters ask one for a favor, one says yes.
But now, standing on the Jedi Temple landing platform about to get into a real starfighter, which was going to launch his body into Outer Space at some unspeakable multiple of the speed of light, he was beginning to have very serious second thoughts.
The Jedi handlers gave him his cue. Chuff swallowed. “Showtime, it is!” he murmured to himself.
He stumped out of the docking bay and onto the flight deck of the Jedi Temple landing platform. A volley of questions came from the throng of reporters in the roped-off press area twenty meters away:
“Can you tell us the nature of the mission? What’s so important about Ithor?”
“When will you be back, Master?”
“Are you worried that an abrupt change in the front might cut you off from communications with the Chancellor’s office?”
Palleus waved his walking stick at the reporters and waggled his ears. The ears were very good, top-notch prosthetics, and he was expert at using them. Keep smiling, Chuff, he told himself. Don’t think about the pressure, just look your audience square in the eye and sell it. Palleus had Yoda’s smiles down pat: the Gleeful Cackle; the Sleepy Grin; the Slow Almost Menacing Smirk; the Gentle Joy that came so often to the Master’s face in the presence of children. But he wasn’t going to try the voice: he didn’t dare risk missing an inflection, getting a flaw in tone that would cause someone to take voiceprint sonograms and go around claiming that the Yoda clambering into the Seltaya-class courier today was not the real Yoda.
He reached the transport and clambered in. This was the part he was dreading. He’d never been a fan of enclosed spaces. Or starflight. Or rapid acceleration. They had promised him the ship’s R2 unit would do the actual piloting. They also had an emergency override that would allow them to fly the ship from the control tower, they said. Well, maybe they did. But what if the Trade Federation had gotten to the little R2, eh? After all, why wouldn’t a droid side with the other droids? Maybe it was part of some sort of mechanical fifth column. A traitor droid would probably sacrifice itself in a heartbeat for the sake of getting rid of the senior member of the Jedi Council.
The starship canopy swung up and over him and then snapped shut, cutting out the crowd noise and leaving Palleus Chuff feeling suddenly very alone.
The cockpit was supposed to be climate-controlled, but he felt hot. Hot and sweaty. The starfighter’s engines rumbled to life, and he found himself thinking that this craft had been rushed through assembly on a wartime production schedule; every single piece of it, from the seat straps to the canopy rivets, had been built on contracts to the lowest bidder.
The ship lurched queasily and rose a meter into the air to hover over the landing platform. Palleus gave the crowd a grin and a wave.
Under his breath, he began to pray.
Meanwhile, back on the roof of a skyrise overlooking the Temple district, the two droids were finishing up another hologame match. Solis, the plain droid, watched his pieces get systematically run down and destroyed by those of his livery-painted companion, Fidelis. The two of them had played every conceivable variation on dejarik many, many times. Solis nearly held even, where chance and brutality were great equalizers, but they both preferred courtier, an entirely skill-based strategic variant. The difficulty was that Fidelis, having been continuously in service, had been routinely upgraded. Solis, on the other hand, had been fending for himself for a long, long time, and advanced hologame software had not been his highest priority.
As a result, he lost. Not inevitably, not every time: but steadily, in a trend that would never reverse. So it went: those in livery prospered. Those without…didn’t.
“Another game?” Fidelis inquired politely, resetting the board.
“I think not.”
“Are you sure? We could make it best nine hundred sixty-seven thousand four hundred and thirteen games out of one point nine million thirty-four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Don’t say that. It doesn’t even mean anything. You’re very free with these organic expressions,” Fidelis said primly. “I’m certain your initial programming did not support this sort of…sociolinguistical slovenliness.”
“Yeah,” Solis said. “Whatever.”
Fidelis claimed that the range of emotions for which they had been programmed was very narrow—consisting, of course, of loyalty, loyalty, and l
oyalty—and that the semblance of organic states such as annoyance or pique was sheer affectation, and in dubious taste. Nonetheless, he played a game of solitaire dejarik with a markedly peevish air.
Solis wandered over to the edge of the roof and looked down, watching beings streaming like insects in their hovercars and pedways. A being lying flat on this rooftop and sighting down the barrel of a SoruSuub X45 sniper riflette would be able to pick off his or her choice of targets nearly invisibly. Death from above.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a spire falcon appeared overhead, drifting wide-winged on the column of warm air squeezing up between the ferrocrete towers. What people usually thought of as “Nature” had been banished from Coruscant long ago: to a casual eye, the planet had become one continuous city, with no room left for anything but urban sentients. But life was adaptable—how well Solis knew it!—and even in so strange a habitat as the city-world, there were plenty of creatures that did not realize the streets and towers of the capital had not been built for their convenience. Small birds, mammals, and reptiles were brought to Coruscant all the time as pets, and as regularly escaped into the sewers, the streets, and the rooftops, as if the city were a ferrocrete jungle and they its natural denizens. Then, too, there were always vermin that thrived on the heat and waste of sentient life: gully rats, grate toads, ferro-worms, the blind snakes that nested inside buildings, and the clouds of trantor pigeons that roosted on their ledges. And above them all, at the top of this alternate food chain, the spire falcons.
This was a female, blunt-winged, her soot-and-concrete plumage beautifully camouflaged against the buildings. Like a flake of ash she drifted on invisible currents of wind; stuttered in midair; and then dropped like a thunderbolt to pounce on something below. Solis watched her drop, tracking her fall through bands of light and shadow, magnifying her image smoothly as she fell until he could make out the yellow band around the edge of her mad eyes, and see her prey, a scrap mouse nosing around a pile of slops in a back alley 237 stories below. Solis’s eyesight was without exaggeration the equal of anything in the galaxy. Upkeep on the Tau/Zeiss tac-optics had been a higher priority than keeping current with the latest hologame programming. When one wasn’t in livery, one had to make some cold calculations about the kind of work one was best at, and the steps one had to take to keep oneself employed. The tracking crosshairs centered over the mouse’s head as its little mouth opened, a single shocked squeak as iron talons drove like hammered nails through its tiny side.
Death from above.
Solis looked away from the falcon’s kill, sparing a reflex glance at the Jedi Temple as he did so. “Hey.”
“What?”
“Your target’s leaving the Temple,” he said.
Fidelis’s head snapped around. He stared transfixed at the steps leading down from the Jedi Temple 1.73 kilometers away. “Oh,” he said.
“Two Jedi, two Padawans, and an artoo unit,” Solis said. They were both standing at the edge of the roof now. Solis looked at his comrade. “There’s something funny about that artoo, don’t you think? It’s not moving quite right. Maybe a servo out of whack…”
No answer from Fidelis, who only continued to stare at the little party sallying forth from the Temple, watching them with the hungry intensity of someone lost in the desert who has just seen water for the first time in days.
Weeks.
Years.
It had been so long since Solis was in livery, he could barely remember the shock of loyalty, that hardwired current of connection that moved through one like religious awe in the face of Family. Really, it made Fidelis look rather foolish, standing there gripping the rooftop railing so fiercely he was leaving crimp marks in the duracrete…and yet it was hard not to envy him. It would have been nice, just one more time, to feel that thrill of connection.
If droids could feel envy, that is. But as Fidelis was quick to point out, they hadn’t been programmed for it, had they? Envy, disappointment, regret. Loneliness. Affectations, every one of them. Not real at all.
“Let’s go,” he said, taking Fidelis roughly by the arm. “Time to hunt.”
There’s no such thing as above in space. Of course, any sufficiently massive object—a planet, a star—exerts a gravitational pull, but unless one is falling right down its gravity well, the pull feels more like toward than down. So, in a strictly technical sense, Asajj Ventress, hovering in deep space in the Last Call, a Huppla Pasa Tisc fan-blade starfighter so sleek and deadly as to seem like her own lethal self reconsidered, with transparisteel for skin and laser cannon eyes, could not be said to be circling above Coruscant like a spire falcon waiting for her prey.
But to a less scientific observer, one who knew little about physics and saw only the cruel, satisfied light in her eyes as Yoda’s ship cleared local space, that’s exactly what she looked like.
As Palleus Chuff, doing his duty as a patriotic actor, was accelerating to escape Coruscant’s gravity well, the real Yoda was waiting in a seemingly endless line along with what could easily have been the population of a frontier planet, all shuffling glumly through the cavernous new Chancellor Palpatine Spaceport and Commercial Nexus.
Nobody was supposed to know that, though.
The trouble with undercover missions, Jai Maruk was thinking, was that one gave up so many of the perks of being a Jedi. Under normal circumstances, dashing off to face death for the good of the Republic was a fairly straightforward business. Packing for even the most extended trip took him less than an hour. A quick bite of food in the refectory, then up to the Jedi Temple’s private launch bay. A few words with the tech chief, an eye and thumbprint required for him to take out the preapproved choice of starcraft, a simple preflight checklist, and he was away.
A considerable improvement over this.
They were to travel in disguise, taking commercial starship flights all the way out to Vjun, and the whole process so far had been excruciatingly boring. After taking an hour to drop off their baggage and another hour getting tickets, they had been standing in this monstrous security line for nearly three hours. It was all very well for Maks Leem—she was a Gran. Gran were descended from herd animals; they liked crowds. Jai singularly didn’t. He was a private man at the best of times; the muddy wash of emotions slopping around him—anxiety, irritation, preflight nerves, and sheer shrieking boredom—was foggy and irritating at the same time, like being swaddled in an itchy bantha blanket. On top of which, their position was ridiculously exposed. A would-be assassin could loom out of the crowd at any instant. Even if he had time to react, simply drawing his lightsaber in the crush of this crowd would probably lop the limbs off a couple of innocent bystanders.
On top of which he was supposed to look after his new Padawan, Scout. Not that she had done anything wrong so far—if you didn’t count her annoying tendency to contradict his judgment, more than a little off-putting in a fourteen-year-old girl. But she still had her left hand in a bandage, and bacta patches on her burned leg. Not only was the Force weak in her; the truth was, she ought to have been lying in the infirmary sipping Hillindor fowl soup.
And to be honest—which Jai Maruk was, even to the one audience to whom people tell their worst lies, himself—Jai didn’t feel ready to deal with a Padawan. He was a doer still, not a teacher. He wanted to get back to Vjun and make good his last miserable interview with Count Dooku, and he didn’t want to drag a teenage girl across the galaxy at the same time. Clearly Master Yoda had a reason for forcing the Padawan on him, but Jai hadn’t learned to be happy about it.
And as for Master Yoda himself…
Jai glanced uneasily at the little R2 unit traveling with them and caught it starting to sidle out of line again, slipping under the security ribbons. “Scout, check the artoo,” he grated. “It seems to be having a little difficulty staying put.”
The girl clapped her hand on top of the R2’s caparace, which gave an odd ringing thump, as if she had whacked the side of an empty metal barrel. “Don’t worry
, Father,” she chirped. “I’ve got an eye on him. On it, I mean.”
“At least we’re nearly at the head of the line,” Master Leem said soothingly.
A little knot of security officers in the tan-and-black colors of the Republic were directing people into a dozen different security scanners, so the one mighty line splintered at the end of its journey like a river dividing into a dozen channels to run into the sea. Each station was staffed by a pair of weary, irritable security personnel; behind them, additional squads were performing random security checks, opening people’s carry-on luggage and making them empty their pockets and performing pat-down searches.
“You should have packed your lightsaber in your luggage,” Scout murmured to Jai Maruk.
He gritted his teeth and made a grab for the R2, which had skittered forward and bumped into the Chagrian in front of them. “Terribly sorry,” he ground out.
They got to the head of the line. “Line seven,” the security guard said to Jai Maruk. “You to line eleven, and you’re in line two,” he said to Maks and Whie. “Line three for the girl. Who’s the droid going to go with?”
“Me,” all four of them said at once.
The security guard raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll take the artoo,” Jai Maruk said. “We are all traveling together. You should let us go through the scanners together,” he added, slowly and with emphasis.
The security guard started to nod, caught himself, and glared at Jai Maruk with redoubled suspicion. “Like the song says, you’ll meet again on the other side, Twinkle-toes. But you just earned yourself a completely random Deep Tissue Inspection. DTI on number seven!” he bellowed.
“But—” Master Leem said.
“No time for that,” the guard said, shoving her toward line number eleven.
“But—” Scout said.