by Troy Denning
When no further foulness spilled from Mirta’s mouth, Caedus shrugged and turned to Tahiri.
“The threat alone will never work on this subject,” he said. “I’ll have someone bring a mirrpanel so she can see what we’re doing to her.”
He stepped over to the wall and used a knuckle to depress the call button. When the door to the ward slid open an instant later, he was surprised to see that his black-clad GAG guard was accompanied by a white-uniformed medic with a Remnant insignia on her collar. In her slender hands, the medic held a blood-collection kit.
Before his guard could explain the woman’s presence, Caedus turned to her directly. “Is there something you require here, Lieutenant?”
The woman paled, but clicked her heels and inclined her head. “Lord Caedus, the Moffs request a sample of the prisoner’s blood for their genetic databank.”
“Later,” Caedus said. He was willing to accommodate the Moffs, but not in the middle of his interrogation—not when he was just starting to make progress. “You can wait outside until we’re done, or leave your comlink identifier with one of the guards.”
“Yes, Lord Caedus.” The woman looked so relieved that Caedus had to wonder if the rumors of his harsh treatment of Lieutenant Tebut had already crossed navies; it was just another reminder of the costly mistakes he had made by letting his emotions get so out of hand. “Thank you, Lord Caedus.”
She began to back out of the chamber until Tahiri said, “Wait.”
Caedus glanced down his shoulder at her. “You have a good reason for countermanding my command?”
“Uh, if you don’t mind, my lord,” Tahiri said. “I’d like to know the purpose of the sample. Does it have something to do with the Empire’s nanokiller?”
Before answering, the lieutenant looked to Caedus for permission.
“Go ahead,” Caedus said. “An order from my apprentice is an order from me.”
“Thank you, my lord,” the lieutenant said. She turned to Tahiri. “That’s correct, ma’am. Since the prisoner is a granddaughter to Boba Fett, the Moffs thought it might be wise to develop a strain targeting him.”
“That is a good idea,” Caedus said. Mirta’s fear was a boiling cloud in the Force—and with good reason. A sample of her blood would accomplish in a needleprick what he had expected to spend days—perhaps even weeks—working on. “And how long will it take to develop that strain?”
“Their close family relationship will make it fairly easy,” she reported.
“No more than three days. It might be as fast as one, if we’re allowed unlimited access to the prisoner.”
Caedus half turned, looking back at Mirta’s horrified face. “I think we can arrange that,” he said. “Would you like me to hold her head so she doesn’t try to bite you?”
“That would be very kind, Lord Caedus.” The lieutenant started forward, already removing the sterile cover from her collection kit. “Thank you.”
“Wait!” This time, the countermand came from Mirta. “I’ll tell you who was on my team.”
Caedus raised his hand to stop the lieutenant. “I thought you might have a change of heart.” He began to put the power of the Force behind his words again. “How touching. You’re actually trying to protect the man who sent you into this mess.”
Mirta ignored his sarcasm. “No samples.” She pointed her chin at the hypo in his hand. “And I get my injection. Agreed?”
“And you really believe that I’ll keep my word?” Caedus asked. The question wasn’t an idle one. He was actually interested in how the rest of the galaxy perceived him. “Or do you have some proposal to guarantee that I do?”
“Not that I have any other choice, but I’ll trust your promise,” Mirta said. “If you’d lie to a woman in this condition, you really are a supreme sleemo.”
The insult made Caedus’s stomach clench in anger, but he recalled what had happened the last time he hadn’t controlled his anger and nodded.
“You keep your part of the bargain, and I’ll keep mine,” he said. “Who was with you?”
“There was only one Jedi,” Mirta said. “Your sister, Jaina.”
“My sister?” Caedus roared despite himself. “You expect me to believe that?” He waved the stump of his arm at her. “That Jaina did this?”
“I don’t know who did that, but Jaina was the only Jedi I saw.” Mirta seemed completely unimpressed by his anger. “And don’t look so surprised. She’s been training with Mandalorians.”
“Then why didn’t she share their disposal barge?” Caedus demanded. He turned to the lieutenant. “Take your sample.”
“What?” Mirta seemed genuinely shocked. “You’re a Jedi! Can’t you tell I’m not lying?”
“I’m a Sith,” Caedus corrected. “And I don’t need the Force to know you’re lying. There were two Jedi there. I fought them both.”
Mirta did a good job of appearing completely confused—even in the Force. “I don’t know about that, but the only one who came with us was Jaina.”
“Then how did Luke get in?” Caedus demanded. He whirled on the lieutenant. “What are you waiting for? I gave you an order.”
“Of c-course.” The frightened lieutenant stepped to the foot of the bed—where the prisoner could not even attempt to bite her—and pulled the sheet off Mirta’s feet. “Sorry, my lord.”
Mirta watched in horror as the lieutenant raised a vein, then, just before the needle was inserted, said, “Okay, Luke was with us.”
The lieutenant looked to Caedus for instructions.
Caedus ignored her. “I know that. How did he get into the planning forum?”
“With us.” Mirta’s answer sounded more like a question than an answer, and Caedus realized she was still lying to him—he could even sense it in the Force. “We had control of the Nickel One security system and help from the Verpine—”
“Yes, I know all that, too,” Caedus said. “I’m interested in Luke—in how he really slipped into the asteroid. This is your last chance.”
Mirta’s eyes grew desperate. “I told you,” she said. “We came in through a gun emplacement, then blew a reactor core to cover our breach point.”
Incredibly, Mirta was still lying about something. Caedus could sense it in her desperate Force aura—that she was being mostly truthful but misleading him about something crucial.
“At least something you said is true,” he said. He passed the hypo to the lieutenant. “Take your sample—and give her this injection. She told half the truth, so I’ll keep half my word.”
Mirta began to curse him again, and Caedus knew he had made all the progress he was going to that day. He motioned Tahiri to follow him, then left the room and started down the corridor toward his quarters, deep in thought as he puzzled over how Luke had really gotten into the room.
It always came down to Luke. It had been Luke’s eyes into which he had been looking when his arm was taken, it was Luke’s face that haunted his dreams, it was Luke who he saw in his visions. Sometimes Luke was chasing him through a desert landscape filled with spires and arches, sometimes Luke was driving a crimson lightsaber through his heart … sometimes Luke was wearing Caedus’s black robes, sitting on his dark throne, ruling his Sith Empire.
“That was a lot of trouble,” Tahiri said, finally tearing Caedus out of his thoughts. “If you were going to betray your promise, why bother justifying it? It’s not like anyone there was going to talk about it.”
Caedus stopped in the middle of the corridor. “I didn’t betray my promise,” he said. “Mirta was lying about something.”
“Sure, after you started pressing her,” Tahiri said. “But I didn’t sense the lie the first time. If Luke was there, she didn’t know how he got there.”
“Luke was there,” Caedus insisted.
“Sorry,” Tahiri said, not quite cringing. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“No—forgive me,” Caedus said, finally realizing what he had overlooked—what the Force must have been telling h
im all along. “I was just coming to a decision.”
Tahiri remained silent, waiting for his pronouncement.
“Have Mirta transferred to the Anakin Solo, and inform the Moffs that I would like them to place their assets at my disposal and select a command committee to accompany us.”
“Very well,” Tahiri said. “Shall I inform them of our objective?”
“My uncle.” Caedus began to walk again. “I’ve been growing more and more convinced that killing Luke Skywalker is the key to winning this war—and I’m sure of it now.”
What’s the difference between a lightsaber and a glowrod? About two thousand degrees!
—Jacen Solo, age 15
It felt great to sweat again. The outdoor sparring session wasn’t the only exercise Jaina had performed since returning to the secret base at Shedu Maad—since she’d limped back after failing to kill Caedus at Nickel One. But today was the first time Cilghal had allowed her to really let go—to prove to Luke and everyone else that she was ready to attack again.
Jaina sprang at Zekk, doubling him over with a powerful thrust kick to the gut, then dropped to her haunches—and realized why when an electrostaff came swinging through where her neck had been a split second earlier. She immediately spun into a squatting leg-wheel, hooking her heel behind a furry stump of a leg and sweeping it forward.
Lowbacca roared in surprise and tried to transfer his balance to his other leg, but Jaina was already coming up on his flank, driving her shoulder into him and sending him tumbling. The electrostaff came down across Zekk’s shoulder, emitting a sharp crackle as it discharged its immobilizing shock. Jaina slapped the flexible “blade” of her own staff across Lowbacca’s back, then heard Jag rushing in behind her and sent him flying with a back kick to the belly.
Tesar was on her like a rancor, driving her back with a flurry of scaly-footed kicks and cane strikes, his dark Barabel eyes bulging with the joy of the fight. Jaina parried a head strike, blocked a gut kick by driving an elbow into his instep, then hook-trapped a blazing-fast head slap and hung off his enormous arm as she swung up, wrapping her legs around his waist and shocking him three times in the ribs before his reptilian neural system registered the incapacitating jolts and finally dropped him to the grass in a heap of quivering scales.
Jaina rolled over her shoulder and came up ready to face her last unzapped opponent, but Jag was still sitting on the far side of the courtyard. He was trying to catch the wind that had been knocked out of him and rubbing a red welt where he had apparently struck his forearm with his own electrostaff.
“You didn’t have to shock yourself,” Jaina teased. She deactivated her electrostaff. “You could have just said stop.”
Jag didn’t smile, but a twinkle did come to his durasteel gaze. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “You had that wild look in your eye again.”
Jaina did not need to ask what look. She knew the one he meant; it was the one she had learned in Keldabe, when Beviin taught her the art of losing herself to the fight. She looked around at her four opponents, who were all still resting on the grass, trying to catch their breath and let their neural systems recover from the jolts they had received.
“You four want to go again?” She looked around the courtyard perimeter, where her parents, uncle, and several Masters stood watching the workout session. Behind them loomed one of the amber-stained mine buildings the Jedi were now calling home, with the billowing crowns of a few dozen kolg trees showing above the structure’s corrugated roof. “Maybe we could get Master Durron to help out.”
If that didn’t prove to them that she was ready to go after Caedus again, nothing would.
“No more sparring today, Jedi Solo,” said Cilghal. The Mon Calamari Master stepped into the practice area, holding a large bioscanner in her flipper-like hands. “Even if your injuries no longer trouble you, they are not healed.”
“They’re healed enough,” Jaina countered. “Caedus is recuperating, too, you know.”
“Then perhapz someone else should harry the prey a bit while you recover,” Tesar said, still sitting on the mat. “This one would love to take over the hunt.”
Jaina glanced over. “No offense, Tesar,” she said, cocking her brow. “But if I’m not ready, how come you’re the one on the ground?”
Tesar’s pebbly lips drew back in reptilian surprise, then he slapped his tail on the grass and began to siss almost uncontrollably.
“No offenssse!” He slapped his tail down again. “Truly funny!”
Lowbacca chuffed in puzzlement, then looked over at Tesar and shook his head. Barabel humor remained inscrutable—at least to Wookiees.
Zekk rose, looking a little embarrassed, and stepped over to Jaina. “Okay, maybe you’ve got a point,” he said. “But if you reinjure yourself training, where will you be then? Caedus will have healed, and you won’t.”
Jaina considered this, then sighed. “You would have to be the voice of reason.” She raised her arms so Cilghal could run the bioscanner over her ribs. “All right. Let’s grab a set of shatter panels.”
“Panels?” Jag started toward her. “Jaina, listen to Zekk. You’ve got to—”
“Shatterpoint is a Force technique, Jag, not a physical one,” Luke said, speaking from the edge of the courtyard. “And Jaina does need to practice. It shouldn’t aggravate her injuries.” He turned to Cilghal. “Right?”
Cilghal studied the bioscanner for a moment, then nodded. “As long as you don’t twist your body too violently, Jedi Solo.”
“Thanks,” Jaina said. “I won’t.”
As Zekk and the others fetched a set of panels from the edge of the practice mat, Jaina closed her eyes and began a breathing exercise to clear her mind. During one of her debriefings with Luke, she had described how Jacen had used shatterpoint to destroy Roegr’s beskar’gam. Luke had surprised her by suggesting that he teach it to her.
Jaina should not have been surprised that her uncle had mastered the technique himself—but she was. So she had foolishly blurted out something about it being a lost art, and that hardly anyone could master it. Luke had simply smiled and replied that an art was not lost just because it could be wielded only by a handful, and that if her twin brother was one of the few capable of learning it, so was she.
By the time Jaina had cleared her mind, her four sparring partners stood around her in a semicircle. Each was holding a small panel in front of him, his legs braced and his elbows locked so the panel would not move when it was struck.
Jaina did not take any time to study her targets or be certain of her strike. She simply looked at the panel in Jag’s hands—a homogoni slab five centimeters thick. She actually saw how the Force bound its cells together, how they were organized into long lines that gave the wood its grain, and exactly where that grain could be split. Then she simply let her hand slide out and do it, let her fingertips touch the place she had seen. At once, she felt the Force shooting through her hand as it rushed into that weak spot, shattering the bonds that had held the slab together.
The homogoni did not just split, it shattered, and Jag was left holding two tiny fragments with a pile of slivers at his feet.
“Nice job,” he said.
Jaina had already turned to the panel in Zekk’s hands, a plastoid breastplate that had been taken from a captured stormtrooper. She saw the plastoid as she had seen the homogoni, but now there was no true grain, just layer after layer of polymers crossing in every conceivable direction, with one spot where the layers were particularly thin. She let her hand slide out again. The breastplate fragmented into a dozen pieces and clattered to the grass at Zekk’s feet. Next, Jaina turned to Tesar and let her hand slide out to touch the small square of hfredium hull plate he was holding. The square parted into triangles and fluttered out of the Barabel’s hands.
Finally, she turned to Lowbacca, who was holding a disk of raw beskar. Luke had arranged to buy the disk from one of the arms dealers that the Mandalorians were now quite freely supplying with the
stuff. She almost hesitated, but forced herself not to think, to just see and do, and before she knew it her hand was shooting out toward the heart of a spiral of carefully worked metal crystals.
And the disk crumbled, just as Roegr’s breastplate had when Caedus had tapped it with the pommel of his lightsaber.
Behind her, Jaina’s father let out a loud, embarrassing whoop. “Who needs a lightsaber?” Han exclaimed. “I haven’t seen anything that impressive since your mother wrapped a chain around Jabba’s throat.”
“Han, you didn’t see that,” her mother said. “Freeze-blind, remember?”
Jaina turned to find her mother tapping her temple near her eyes, and her father still pumping his fist into the air. But it was the doorway a dozen meters behind them that caught her interest. Emerging from it was a handsome young man with reddish hair and his father’s blue eyes, with a pair of well-dressed Hapan women following close behind.
“Ben?” Jaina spread her arms and rushed across the grass to greet him. “You’re back!”
She wrapped him in a tight embrace and whirled him back and forth, ignoring for the moment whether he wished to speak himself—or even needed to breathe.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” she ordered.
Ben managed to disengage himself. “Do what?”
“Move away from your backup!” Jaina said. “What were you thinking?”
She finally began to notice the women accompanying Ben—and grew so distracted she did not hear Ben’s reply. They were definitely identical twins and definitely Hapan nobility, with the fine clothes and haughty bearing typical of women of that class. But they were more than that. With their long straight noses, thin arcing eyebrows, and silky red hair, they were obviously relatives of Tenel Ka—and fairly close relatives, at that.
“… not to get you and Aunt Leia captured, too,” Ben was saying. “That’s the protocol for a situation like the one we were in at Monument plaza, and it was the right thing to do.”
“Yes, it was,” Leia agreed, joining them. “Welcome back. And please forgive Jaina. She was just worried about you. We all were.”