Invincible

by Troy Denning

  Once Taryn had removed the rest of the EV suits from the locker, Ben stepped inside and began to evacuate the air. By the time the procedure was finished, Trista was reporting over the helmet comm that the prince’s starcutter, the Beam Racer, had appeared on the tactical display and was dispatching its squadron of Miy’tils to support them. She also warned him to be careful leaving the air lock because the banging sounds had stopped—but Ben had known that much already. He could sense the droid lurking on the hull above the air lock, a ball of hot, quivering energy.

  Ben opened the hatch but stayed inside, borrowed lightsaber in hand, as blasterfire split the wispy red curtain of nova gas.

  Less than a second later the flurry of bolts died away and a droid hand—a black, skeletal droid hand—shot down from the upper edge of the hatch and opened fire with a standard blaster pistol. Ben activated Tahiri’s lightsaber and began to bat blaster bolts back out into space, but his mouth had suddenly gone dry, and he felt an irrational panic rising inside.

  He recognized that hand—could never forget that particular hand. Inside those fingertips were a dozen different anguishes—electrodes, needles, tiny torches, acid pads, and so much more. It was all he could do to keep analyzing the droid’s firing patterns—to just keep batting bolts aside and not lash out with his borrowed lightsaber—because he was terrified of that hand on a level far below thought, on a level so deep he associated the mere sight of it with suffering the way a ronto associates its driver’s face with food.

  Trista’s voice came over Ben’s helmet speaker. “Jedi Skywalker, are you always this much trouble?” she asked. “A Star Destroyer just came out of hyperspace between us and the Beam Racer.”

  An instant later another voice came over Ben’s helmet comm—this one thin and raspy, the voice of his nightmares in prison. “Did you really think you could escape me, Ben?”

  “D-Double-Ex?” Ben didn’t have to work very hard to sound scared.

  “Who else, Ben?”

  Double-Ex continued to pour fire into the air lock. Ben dropped into a corner where the droid’s firing pattern did not seem able to reach, deliberately landing with a heavy thud. Then he let Tahiri’s lightsaber roll from his hand, still activated, and tumble through the open hatch out into space.

  The blasterfire stopped, and an instant later the glossy black figure of a thin droid with a skull-like face and blazing blue photoreceptors came swinging through the hatchway.

  Ben was waiting with his hand already outstretched. “Hello, Double-Ex,” he said.

  With only comm waves to carry the sound, the droid had no idea where the words were coming from, and its head swiveled toward the opposite corner of the air lock.

  “Good-bye, Double-Ex.”

  Ben hit the droid with the hardest Force shove he could manage. Double-Ex let out a comm squawk of surprise, then flew out of the air lock backward. It instantly began to pour blasterfire back through the hatch, but only a moment passed before the difference between its momentum and that of the Blue Slipper made the angle impossible.

  Ben stuck his head around the edge of the hatch and was relieved to see a helix of bright dashes still pouring from the blaster pistol as the droid tumbled into the blood-colored gauze of the Carida Nebula.

  Then he noticed the matte-black hull of the Anakin Solo sliding past in the distance, the cloaking cone and gravity generator dome leaving no doubt about its identity. To his surprise, the hulking Star Destroyer seemed to be turning away from them, pouring ion cannon fire toward a target he could not see. The squadron of Miy’tils that had been sent to escort the Blue Slipper were flittering around its exhaust ports, no doubt trying to land a lucky missile and disable the Solo before it captured its target.

  “Fierfek!” Ben cursed. “Are they going after the Beam Racer?”

  “I wouldn’t say going after,” answered Trista. “Their tractor beam already has a lock.”

  “So they’re going to capture Prince Isolder?” Ben gasped.

  “They already have,” Taryn replied. “There’s only one escape now, and I truly hope he doesn’t take it. Isolder has always been a good uncle to us.”

  As the Solo drifted out of sight behind the Slipper’s tail, it finally dawned on Ben that they were turning away from the confrontation.

  “What are you doing?” Ben asked. He pulled the air lock’s exterior hatch closed and sealed it. “Maybe I can help him.”

  “You Jedi,” Taryn said, “always thinking you can do the impossible. No wonder you get in so much trouble.”

  Ben scowled and started to cycle air back into the lock. “But—”

  “Not a chance,” Trista said. “Her Majesty is going to be angry enough about losing her father.”

  I heard two droids talking the other day. The first one asked, “Did you beat the Wookiee at sabacc?” And the second said, “Yes, but it cost me an arm and a leg.”

  —Jacen Solo, age 14

  “Isn’t medicine miraculous today?” Caedus asked. No one answered, of course. It was a rhetorical question. “A being is more likely to die of a meteor strike than of old age or disease.”

  Little more than a standard week after losing his arm, Caedus was pacing—actually pacing—back and forth across the ward room. With his good arm, he was waving a hypo filled with a special preparation of protocells and neural growth stimulants. His mind was alert, focused, and filled with an energizing optimism that he had not experienced since his days at the Jedi academy on Yavin 4.

  “Today’s too-onebee droids can replace a blaster-shattered kneecap with an ilinium prosthetic more durable than the original.”

  Caedus stopped next to the only occupied bed in the ward and gestured at the stump of his severed arm, which still showed the white fusing scar where the skin had been closed over the bone. “They could have reattached my natural arm, had I been willing to lie around in one of these for a couple of months.”

  Caedus intentionally slammed his prosthetic kneecap into the bed frame, rocking it so hard that the occupant—a young sinewy woman with curly brown hair and dark eyes—flinched. He smiled and held the hypo over the bed, easily within her reach … had she been able to move her arms.

  “Yes, today’s medicine can even rebuild the nerves in a ruptured spinal cord. One little injection—” Caedus looked at the needle, which was nearly as long as his finger, then continued, “well, maybe not so little—is all it takes to start the process.”

  The woman’s dark eyes began to grow glassy, and she looked away.

  “Come now, Mirta,” Caedus said. “This war will be over soon, and you’ll be released with all of the Alliance’s prisoners. There’s no reason you need to be strapped into a hoverchair when that happens.”

  So far, the woman had not said a word, not even to acknowledge her identity. But even if GAG’s terrorist-recognition technology had not identified her, Caedus would have known her. She had her mother’s mouth and her grandfather’s cold, dead eyes, after all. More importantly, he could feel her hatred burning in the Force, and that was what identified her most clearly—her obsession with avenging the death of Ailyn Vel.

  “But we must start the process soon—before the damage grows irreversible,” Caedus said. “How many Jedi accompanied your team?”

  Mirta continued to look away, but her face blanched and a small, pained voice croaked, “Go … get … borked.”

  “Ah … she speaks. Progress at last.”

  Caedus’s smile was sincere. A response—any response—meant he had found a vulnerable spot in her armor.

  Then the ward room door hissed open, and Mirta’s face hardened as she recovered her composure and looked to see who had arrived. Caedus spun on his heel, already summoning the Force shock he would use to rebuke the fool who had ignored his order for privacy— then saw who it was and realized why he hadn’t sensed her coming. After learning how to conceal herself in the Force, Tahiri had begun to employ the technique—like Caedus himself—as a matter of course.

&n
bsp; “Ah, Tahiri. You’re just in time.” Caedus motioned her into the room, then turned back to the bed. “Mirta was about to tell us who cut off my arm.”

  Tahiri remained silent for a moment, then said, “I’d think you would know that, my lord.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” Caedus said. “Isn’t that so, Mirta?”

  Mirta only glared at him in silence.

  “We’re back to that, are we?” Caedus sighed and looked sadly at the hypo, then turned back around to Tahiri. “It seems our prisoner is determined to live the rest of her life strapped to a board. I assume you’ve come to report. You may proceed.”

  Tahiri frowned. “Here?”

  “There’s no need to worry about betraying our secrets.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Does the prisoner look like an escape risk?”

  Mirta’s rage came boiling through the Force like a turbolaser strike, blasting Caedus so fiercely it felt almost physical. He allowed himself a smirk—more to signal his intentions to Tahiri than to congratulate himself, of course—and began to plot how he was going to turn that rage to his own ends, to redirect it at someone who had been making a real nuisance of himself lately.

  Tahiri looked past Caedus toward the bed, apparently debating whether her news should be relayed in front of even an incapacitated enemy, then finally said, “I’m afraid I have a failure to report, my lord.”

  “Your plan to discover the location of the secret Jedi base has failed,” Caedus surmised. Actually, the broad outlines of the plan had been his, but the failure was obviously in the details—and those had been mapped out by Tahiri. “Ben slipped free of your surveillance.”

  “Slipped isn’t quite accurate,” Tahiri said. “He discovered our, um, agent trailing him and took measures.”

  Caedus frowned—though not because Tahiri had lost track of Ben. He had foreseen that possibility in his visions and taken other measures. He just didn’t like the idea of losing his secret security droid. As irritating as SD-XX could be, lately it had seemed to him that the droid was the only one who truly understood him.

  “What about the … agent?” he asked. Tahiri had been wise to avoid mentioning SD-XX in front of Mirta. Caedus had every intention of sending her back to Boba Fett in one fully functional piece, and he preferred to keep private the existence of his security droid. “Is he still functional?”

  “I don’t know,” Tahiri replied. “We weren’t able to recover him.”

  Caedus fought to keep his anger from rising. He had already made the mistake of letting his emotions control him, and that blunder had cost him so much more than Fondor and the deserters the traitor Niathal had stolen. It had cost him his daughter’s love—it had cost him Allana.

  When he felt certain of sounding merely annoyed rather than enraged, Caedus asked, “Why not?”

  Tahiri’s eyes began to sparkle. “We were otherwise occupied, my lord,” she said. “I saw another opportunity to learn the location of the secret Jedi base, and I seized it.”

  When Tahiri did not elaborate, Caedus frowned and inquired, “Do you really intend to make me ask?”

  Tahiri smiled, and he knew that it was something big. “I think so, yes.”

  The joy she felt in her triumph was contagious; Caedus actually found himself grinning. “Very well,” he said. “Exactly what did you seize?”

  “The Beam Racer,” Tahiri reported. “And the prince was aboard.”

  Caedus’s brow shot up. “You captured Isolder?”

  Tahiri nodded. “I did.”

  “And he revealed the location of the Jedi base?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But before losing contact, our agent reported a conversation in which it was said that Tenel Ka wouldn’t trust anyone else with the location of the Jedi base.”

  Tahiri’s face grew clouded, then she added, “I thought you might want to perform the interrogation yourself. I—I killed the last subject I worked on.”

  Caedus’s heart went out to her. He remembered how he had felt when his first suspect died under interrogation: horrified and frustrated and ashamed all at once, but mostly afraid of what he was becoming. He would have laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, except the only one he had left was holding a hypo with a very long needle.

  Instead, he said, “It’s not your fault, Tahiri. The suspect holds his own life in his hands. If he won’t cooperate, we can’t be blamed for the consequences.”

  “I know,” Tahiri said. “But I was angry—”

  “We all make mistakes,” Caedus interrupted, growing impatient with her self-examination. He had absolved her of guilt—what more did she require? “Where’s Isolder now?”

  A flash of pain shot through Tahiri’s eyes, but she quickly collected herself. “The prince is secure in the Anakin Solo’s brig, with the rest of the Racer’s crew,” she said. “I offered to confine him in one of the VIP cabins, but he refused to guarantee his behavior.”

  “He’s an honorable man,” Caedus said, nodding. He thought of how many times—going as far back as his student days on Yavin 4—he had imagined having Isolder as his father-in-law, and a pang of sorrow shot through his breast. “I’m glad it won’t be necessary to interrogate him—at least not harshly.”

  Tahiri frowned in confusion. “He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who’ll be easy to break.”

  “He wouldn’t be,” Caedus agreed. “But I’ve already learned the location of the Jedi base.”

  Tahiri’s mouth dropped, but she seemed too astonished to actually voice the question.

  Caedus closed his eyes and turned in the direction of Hapan space. “In the Transitory Mists, on this side of the Consortium, somewhere between Roqoo Depot and Terephon, I would say.” He opened his eyes and turned to Tahiri. “I’ll grow more precise when we get closer.”

  Tahiri’s brow shot up so high that the scars on her forehead laid at an angle. She looked like she wanted to ask a dozen different questions, but all she seemed able to manage was “How?”

  Caedus smiled. “It’s in my blood, Tahiri.”

  He left it at that—this was neither the time nor the place to explain how a Nightsister blood trail worked. The fighting around the Roche system was growing fiercer by the hour, but he could not leave—did not dare leave—until he understood what had happened to him in the Tactical Planning Forum. He had been fighting Luke one moment, Jaina the next, and then they had both been there—not just illusions of them, but presences real enough to bat blaster bolts back at the stormtroopers attacking them.

  “Come here,” Caedus said, motioning Tahiri to Mirta’s bedside. “You’re a woman—perhaps you can find a way to make her discuss the Jedi on her strike team.”

  Tahiri obediently came to stand beside the bed, but Caedus could see in the way she averted her eyes that she had lost her stomach for harsh interrogation. Of course, that only meant it was more important than ever to push her back into it—to remind her that a Sith never allowed personal feelings to interfere with the mission.

  “The subject has no sensation below her shoulders, so our options are limited,” Caedus noted, adopting an impersonal tone that he hoped would make it easier for Tahiri to begin. “And I suspect she wants to die anyway, so death threats won’t work, either.”

  “When do death threats ever work?” Tahiri’s gaze began to roam over Mirta’s sheet-covered body, and Caedus could see that his strategy was effective—that she was starting to focus on the problem instead of herself. “But she’s part Mandalorian, right?”

  “Maybe even completely,” Caedus said. “The way their culture works, what you say you are is more important than what spills out of your veins. The file says she even married a Mandalorian recently. Why?”

  “Mandalorians are way too proud,” Tahiri said. “Smug, even. It’s the biggest weakness I’ve seen in every one I’ve met.”

  Caedus considered this for a moment, then asked, “You’re thinking humiliation?”

  Tahiri nodded. “But we have to take it
further. The subject’s a decent-looking woman for her line of work, and that has to make her vain.”

  Caedus glanced over Mirta’s face and knew by the rush of fear he felt in the Force that Tahiri had struck a chord. “So, disfigurement,” he said. “I hate that.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Tahiri asked. “But she’s a member of Fett’s family, right? Compared with the emotional stuff she must be carrying around already, a little humiliation is nothing. If we want to break her, we have to maim her so badly that people will pity her. Then, if she still doesn’t give us what we want, we send her back to Mandalore.”

  That inspired Mirta to raise her head. “Go ahead, you dung-sucking dark side slut! See what happens.”

  “So disfigurement would be a problem for you?” Caedus asked. He glanced over at Tahiri with a look of admiration. “It sounds like you’ve found your inner Yuuzhan Vong. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Tahiri’s pride was genuine, her attention now completely focused on the task at hand. “Call me whatever you like, Mirta, but the choice is yours. We’re only the instrument of your decision.”

  “Go drown in a cesspool,” Mirta shot back. “I’m looking at a dead woman.”

  “Mirta, there’s no reason to be angry with Tahiri.” As Caedus spoke, he began to put the power of the Force behind his words, using its energies to plant them deep in her mind. “She isn’t the one who sent you on this mission.”

  Mirta’s gaze flashed over to Caedus. “I volunteered.”

  “Of course you did,” Caedus said in a reasonable tone. “You’re Boba Fett’s granddaughter. What else could you do?”

  He saw the shock of recognition in her eyes and knew that she realized what he was trying to do. No matter. He had time and the Force on his side. With those two for allies, the only question was how long it would take to implant the conviction that her suffering was her grandfather’s fault, that Fett had sent her on the mission knowing it would fail. And once Caedus had done that, all he would have to do was stand back and let Mandalorian nature take its usual course.