by Troy Denning
Shevu’s brow shot up. “How worthwhile?”
“We could make you a very happy man in a very short time,” Ben replied. “As a matter of fact, we’re making preparations for a meeting with him now.”
The look that came to Shevu’s face was equal parts surprise and fear. For an instant, Ben thought that he had been misreading his friend all along—that either Shevu did not want to be involved in moving against Caedus so directly, or he had been Caedus’s double agent from the beginning.
Then Shevu smiled. “There’s no telling how long it would take to put you in touch face-to-face,” he said. “But I can tell you where to find him. Would that be worth something to you?”
Ben nodded. “Probably. How much depends on how hard it would be for us to arrange a meeting.”
“Should be easier than on Coruscant,” Shevu replied. “I hear that Three-Eye’s new gang has been causing problems on Nickel One. The last I heard, he was on his way to bring them into line.”
“Are you sure?” Ben asked. Two different intelligence services—Hapan and Wookiee—had confirmed that the Anakin Solo was in its hangar at Crix Base above Coruscant. “We’ve heard that his space yacht is still in its moorings.”
“Security precaution,” Shevu replied. “He crossed some Bothans awhile back, and it’s become advisable for him to travel in something a little less conspicuous. He’s definitely gone to Nickel One.”
“Nickel One?” Ben repeated. Suddenly, the Remnant’s easy conquest of the Roche system seemed more convenient than alarming. Asteroids were small places, and if the Jedi acted quickly, they would be able to slip a strike team into place before the Imperials had a chance to debug their security operation. He reached for a credit chip. “That should be worth something to us. How about …”
Ben let the sentence trail off as he felt Jaina reaching out to him in the Force, warning that trouble was on the way. He looked past Shevu and saw the Rodian couple coming, their hands slipping into the pockets of their outer tunics.
“Ten thousand?” Shevu asked, misinterpreting Ben’s sudden silence and still trying to maintain cover. “It’s not easy to come by that kind of information, and if Three-Eye ever finds out—”
“Seccer!” Ben yelled, using the galaxywide slang for a public security officer. He hit Shevu in both shoulders, but harder in the right so that he would be spun around and see the approaching Rodians. “Dead seccer!”
Hoping to make it appear that he was resisting arrest—and that Shevu was therefore not involved in anything disloyal to Caedus or GAG—Ben drew his hold-out blaster and fired past his friend’s head. The first bolt came close enough to raise a heat welt along Shevu’s jaw and make it appear the effort to kill had been sincere. The other three shots were not so close, scattering the crowd and sending the two Rodians diving for safety.
“Sorry!” Ben hissed, leaning close to Shevu’s head. “I think they were watching you. Maybe you should come—”
Shevu elbowed him in the ribs, lifting him off his feet and drawing a real grunt of pain.
“No. You go!” Shevu spun around, simultaneously reaching for his blaster and clutching at Ben’s cloak lapel. “Make it look—aaargh!”
The order ended in a surprised scream as Ben clamped a hand over Shevu’s wrist and pivoted away, sending his friend into a flying somersault that ended with him lying flat on his back.
“See ya!” Ben whispered. “Good luck!”
He put a couple of blaster bolts through the loose cloth of Shevu’s tunic for good measure, then turned to run.
He found himself staring down a hundred-meter aisle that seemed to be spontaneously opening in front of a woman sprinting through the crowd toward him. Dressed in a dark cloak and black GAG armor, she had blond hair, a lightsaber hilt in her hand, and a dozen GAG commandos following close on her heels.
“Oh, kriff!” Ben said. “That’s Tahiri!”
The rising whine of repulsorlift cooling fans began to howl over the plaza, and Ben looked up to see a flight of GAG-black troopsleds sweeping down from the milky sky.
“Go!” Shevu ordered. “Make this count!”
Ben obeyed instantly, charging into a mass of beings slowly pressing away from the Reconstruction Authority monument in an effort to escape the fight about to erupt in their midst. Assuming Shevu would be close behind him, he began to use the Force to clear a path ahead, at the same time tearing away the wig and heavy robes of his Arkanian disguise.
Ben was traveling in the opposite direction from Jaina and Aunt Leia, trying to protect the mission by moving the action away from his backup team. When the odds got this bad, it was better to split up and avoid getting your partners captured or killed as well. That way, at least there would be someone left to file the report.
The crowd broke into screams as energy bolts began to zing back and forth across the square behind him, and that’s when Ben realized Shevu wasn’t with him. He stopped and spun around, but all he could see was the constant flash of blasterfire flickering through the wall of panicked tourists backing toward him.
Ben tore the finger socks—part of his disguise—from his hands and started to push back toward the fight, then remembered the last thing Shevu had said to him before sending him off. Make this count. If Ben rushed back there now, he would be doing just the opposite, robbing Shevu’s sacrifice of meaning—and in all likelihood still failing to save him.
Leaving his lightsaber to hang on the belt beneath his tunic, Ben pulled the comlink from his pocket. He allowed the press of the crowd to push him slowly backward, away from what now sounded more like a tapcaf fight than a shootout, determined to make this count and then go back for his friend.
He did not open a direct channel to the Sweet Time. That would give GAG eavesdropping droids the few precious seconds they needed to trace his signal and identify the rest of his team. Instead, he recorded a quick message describing what he had learned about Caedus’s location, ending with a report of Shevu’s capture and, most likely, his own. He formatted it for a five-millisecond burst transmission that would be too fast to track, then opened the channel to the Sweet Time … and felt a cold prickle of danger sense race down his spine.
A familiar female voice sounded a pace behind him. “Don’t transmit it, Ben. I won’t hesitate to kill you.”
“You just did.”
Ben depressed the TRANSMIT button, then tossed the comlink into the air and reached for his lightsaber—only to find Tahiri’s hand already there.
“Bad idea,” she said.
Ben spun toward the hand, bringing an arm up and smashing his elbow into the side of her head. He started to tell her she talked too much, then heard the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber and realized he had just made the same mistake.
A line of scalding pain erupted across his lower back, and he saw the bright glow of Tahiri’s blade tip shining beside and a little behind him. When his body did not fall to the plaza deck in two pieces, he guessed that he was still alive and continued his spin, bringing his hand around in a reverse knife-hand strike that would have caught her just below the ear and almost certainly knocked her unconscious—had she not blocked.
As Ben’s head snapped back, he caught a glimpse of scarred brow and blond hair, then felt his teeth biting through his tongue and his feet flying out from beneath him and realized Tahiri had caught him beneath the chin with a fist or an elbow or a hydraulic hammer, and it hardly mattered which because all he could feel was the inescapable darkness of a black hole drawing him down into the singularity of unconsciousness, into helplessness, defeat, and death.
Ben refused to go. He lashed out in the Force, grabbing at the last place he had seen Tahiri, pulling with all his might and feeling … feeling something give, feeling something like legs or ankles or feet come flying toward him, then hearing Tahiri scream in anger or pain or maybe just surprise.
A sharp clang echoed through the plaza decking as her armor hit, and the darkness started to retreat from Ben’s he
ad. He sensed Tahiri lying at his feet, just as flat on the deck as he was. She swore, profaning Ben’s dead mother and promising to make him pay for making this so hard, then he saw his lightsaber lying on the durasteel not far from his hand—surrounded by a dozen pairs of black boots, but still within his Force grasp.
Ben reached out in the Force. Half a dozen troopers cried out in astonishment as the weapon banged off their boots, spinning and tumbling through the thicket of shins and ankles to arrive in his hand upside down, with the emitter nozzle pointed straight into his eye.
Tahiri’s voice sounded from a meter beyond his feet. “I’ve had it with this kreetle!”
Ben flipped the lightsaber around and sat up. Tahiri was sitting up now, too, looking straight toward him. Her face was slimmer and more lined than he remembered it, but still as beautiful as ever, framed by a halo of flowing golden hair and marred only by the three diagonal scars on her brow and the fury in her eyes.
“Put him out,” Tahiri ordered. “Now!”
Ben ignited his lightsaber, and that was when he saw—finally—the black wall of GAG troopers arrayed around him in a ring, all pointing blaster rifles in his direction. He gave himself over to the Force and felt himself springing to his feet, his blade moving to block, then heard it bat onetwothree blaster bolts aside before a flurry of hot punches caught him square in the back. His body exploded into paralyzing pain, and the electric darkness rose up to swallow him again.
How many stormtroopers does it take to change a glow panel? Two: one to change it, and one to blast him, then take credit for the work.
—Jacen Solo, age 14
By the time Jaina pushed through to the front of the crowd, Tahiri and her troopers were clamping Ben into the GAG Doomsled, fitting his wrists and ankles with electromagnetic bands that would keep his limbs firmly affixed to his durasteel seat. His head had already been enclosed inside a full-faced “blinder” helmet—basically a durasteel bucket with no viewplate, secured to the ceiling by a short chain.
Ben had fled away from his backup. Jaina knew her young cousin had only been trying to preserve mission security, that he had followed textbook procedure when facing overwhelming odds—but that was GAG thinking. Jedi stuck together. They trusted one another to do the impossible, and when they found themselves in trouble, they did not make it harder for their partners to extract them by running in the opposite direction.
Across the compartment from Ben, Shevu lay stretched over several seats, his wrists and ankles already magclamped to the durasteel. He wasn’t wearing a blinder helmet—the chain was too short to reach someone lying prone—and he was cursing and screaming as an MD droid tended to a blaster wound he had suffered, abrasion-cleaning it without the benefit of a numbing agent.
All this was being done with the Doomsled’s detention compartment open to full view, so the public could see the stern efficiency with which GAG dispatched traitors to the Alliance. Good government was transparent, after all.
But there was also another reason, Jaina knew. Ben remained in full view so his backup team would feel encouraged to attempt an ill-advised rescue. There was simply no other reason a Sith apprentice and a full GAG security detail would take ten minutes to secure a pair of semiconscious prisoners—or wait for a Doomsled to arrive in the first place. Standard procedure was to whisk prisoners away instantly, both to maximize their confusion and to minimize any chance that they would be rescued—or silenced—by unconstrained colleagues.
Jaina realized all that, recognized an obvious setup when she saw one, and it meant nothing to her … because she wasn’t losing Ben. She wasn’t putting her uncle through that kind of anguish, and she wasn’t giving her brother another shot at their cousin. Ben had stepped too far into the light to fall again, and Jaina knew that he would let himself be tortured to death before turning dark—and knowing Caedus, that might be exactly what happened.
Jaina saw the black streak of a vidlog droid zipping down the line of bystanders toward her, creating a record of onlookers that would be analyzed frame by frame back at headquarters. She was disguised as an Elomin office girl, but her mask-flattened nose and fake skull-horns would not fool a GAG facial-recognition servobrain. She used a Force flash to disrupt the vidlogger’s optics, then slipped back into the crowd. Of course, the Force flash itself would confirm that Ben had had a Jedi backup—but Tahiri certainly knew that much already. At least now she wouldn’t know exactly which Jedi it had been.
Once Jaina was sufficiently hidden in the crowd, she made her way to within a few meters of a sultry Codru-Ji female who had males of all species stealing furtive glances. The woman’s outfit—a daring mini-vest-and-clingpant combo—was part of a hide-in-plain-sight strategy, the kind of thing that anyone who knew the stately Leia Organa Solo would be shocked to see her wearing. Even more shocking, at least to Jaina, was the throng of admirers that her mother could still attract … and she felt fairly certain that the prosthetics and makeup did not have all that much to do with it.
Jaina caught her mother’s eye, then flicked her gaze toward one of the medwagons that had arrived to gather the GAG casualties Ben and Shevu had left scattered across the plaza. Leia nodded and shot a flirty smile at a red-skinned Devaronian who had been dipping his brow horns in her direction, then sent a teasing brow flash toward a blue-faced Duros whose red eyes had remained fixed on her for a good five seconds. She put on a sad little pout and waved good-bye to both, then started to work her way through the crowd toward the med-wagon Jaina had indicated.
They met at the circle of gawkers surrounding the vehicle. Jaina kept her eyes on the two Rodians being loaded into the patient compartment by MD droids, but her attention was on her mother.
“You’ve got half the males in the plaza standing on their tongues,” she whispered. “I hope Dad doesn’t know how you act when you’re dressed like that.”
“Of course he knows,” Leia replied. “He loves it when I dress like this.”
Jaina tried not to imagine her father leering at her mother in that outfit and failed miserably. “Thanks for that picture. I knew there was a reason I don’t travel with you guys much.”
Leia chuckled. “You ought to—maybe you’d learn to dial down the gravity setting a little,” she said. “You need to give your alter ego room to play in these situations. That’s the best way to make it work for you.”
“Really?” Jaina wondered why her mother would think her “alter ego” was an uptight secretary from an emotionally restrained species. “I look forward to hearing more about your theory later. In the meantime …”
Jaina gestured at the medwagon, where the second Rodian’s gurney was being magclamped to the floor, opposite his companion. From what she could sense through the Force, both agents were in pain, but completely stable and far from death.
“Shall we?”
Leia eyed the medwagon, then said, “You know we don’t stand a chance, right?”
“I know that it’s Ben.”
Leia let out a huge sigh of relief. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
She stepped across the intangible line of control that a pair of Coruscant Security officers had created by the simple fact of their presence. Ignoring them, she started toward the medwagon’s patient compartment, wailing and whimpering and in general doing a pretty credible job of looking like a vac-brain glitter girl on the verge of hysterics.
“Webbbbi!” she screamed. “What happened?”
The two security officers sprang after her, both raising stun sticks and yelling dire warnings to stop.
“It’s okay,” Jaina said, also crossing the line of control and coming up behind the two officers. “She’s with me.”
Force commands only worked on weak-minded individuals, which Jaina felt sure had to include most of the beings serving her brother. These two were no exception. They stopped almost in their tracks and turned around, their shoulders already sagging in an unconscious gesture of subservience.
Still, an Elomin sec
retary in a high-necked sheath was far from the uniformed superior they had been expecting. They frowned and glanced at each other, then the older of the two—an anvil-headed Arcona with deep cracks in the flesh around his green eyes—extended a long-taloned hand.
“Credentials, please.”
“I’m undercover.” Jaina gestured with her hand, giving the Arcona something to focus on other than the mesmerizing tone of her voice. “I have no credentials.”
The Arcona’s gray brow knitted into a deep furrow. “She’s undercover,” he said. “She has no credentials.”
“So?” asked his companion, a handsome human with bright white teeth and what looked like a two-day growth of beard stubble. “That just means she’s GAG. Leave her alone.”
“Good thinking,” Jaina said to the human. “And you don’t need to file a report about this. We’re undercover.”
Now the human frowned, and she realized that she might have overplayed her hand. “No report? Sergeant Qade will have our heads.”
“No, he won’t.” Jaina leaned in close, then lowered her voice so that the two officers had to lean down to hear her. “Who do you think we’re investigating?”
The cracks around the Arcona’s eyes suddenly widened into red stripes of raw flesh, and the human’s white teeth vanished behind his pale lips.
“Qade?” he gasped. “I don’t believe it!”
Jaina leaned in even closer. “Does that mean you’re unwilling to cooperate, Officer …” She paused until she sensed the man’s name rising to the top of his mind, then finished, “Tobyl?”
Tobyl’s eyes widened, and he stood up straight. “Not me!” he said. “Er, I mean, we never saw you.” He turned to the Arcona. “Right, Jat’ho?”
The Arcona simply looked away and stepped back toward the line of control, threatening to arrest a hapless Falleen couple who had done nothing wrong.
“Good,” Jaina said. “A note of commendation will be placed in your file.”