To approach the field from either above or below the solar plane was just as suspicious. One of the ways smugglers implicitly signaled their “honorable” intentions was to relinquish control of their ships to the station. Every eye on Kantaros would have been upon them from the moment they transmitted their call sign.
They made planetfall on Bothawui, took on fuel, and turned I-Five loose in the Bothan Space Authority’s data banks. He could find no transponder code for Kantaros Station; nor could he find any indication of where it might be in the Fervse’dra field.
“Clever of Vader,” Den said as they moved away from Bothawui toward the ring of asteroids, “hiding his depot in a bunch of tumbling rocks. How are we going to find it?”
“It will still have an energy signature,” I-Five said. “We’ll be able to pick that up on ship’s sensors.”
“Oh, sure,” said Den. “Once we’re close enough to register the energy output. Do you have any idea how big this asteroid belt is?”
I-Five’s R2 turret swiveled toward him. “It is three-hundred-point-oh-six-million kilometers across at its widest point and has a diameter of—”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
Jax, seated at the helm, let out an audible breath. “Den’s right, though. It would take forever to scan this whole structure, even if we took the inside orbit.”
“It will take approximately five days, twenty-seven hours, and—”
“That was also rhetorical. Add to that the fact that if we don’t give them remote pilot control, we might as well come in with blasters blazing.” Then Jax added, “That wasn’t rhetorical.”
“I wasn’t keeping score,” the R2 unit replied.
Den smiled, enjoying the fact that Jax had said something humorous. “So what do we do, then?” he asked. “Is there any way to extend our scanner’s range?”
“This vessel already has one of the most advanced scanning systems I’ve encountered,” I-Five said. “But even with that, we stand only a fifty–fifty chance of locating the station because of the width and depth of the asteroid belt. Which is,” he added, “something of a misnomer—its range is almost sufficient to qualify it as a sphere, rather than a—”
Den was shaking his head. “I never should have installed that vocalizer.”
Jax closed his eyes, looking suddenly exhausted. “So, up to four days if we scan from the interior of the field, and if we don’t manage to locate the station …”
“Then we’ll have to repeat the process on the outer perimeter, which will take roughly twice as long.”
“Time,” Jax murmured. “It’s always a matter of time. Time we don’t have.” He opened his eyes and, after a moment’s hesitation, switched to autopilot. “Den, you have the helm. I-Five, if you think it will do any good, you can target the asteroid field with the scanners and see if we get lucky.”
“And what are you going to do?” I-Five asked as Jax slid out of the pilot’s seat.
“I’m going to find the station … one way or another.”
Den felt as if someone had poured an icy beverage over his head. “You mean you’re going shopping for Force signatures. You’re going to poke around for Vader. Do I need to remind you how dangerous that is?”
“Apparently,” the droid muttered.
“You do not. But I may not have to poke around for Vader. If the intel is correct, he’s loaded up his little dungeon with Inquisitors. That’s a lot of Force energy in one place. And one of those Inquisitors is Probus Tesla. Trust me—I will never forget that signature.”
“There is every possibility,” I-Five said, “that Tesla remembers your signature as vividly as you remember his. If he knows you’re still alive, then Vader will also know it.”
Jax paused by the cockpit hatch, his gaze on the transparisteel viewport over the control console. Den held his breath, hoping the Jedi would change his mind. But he didn’t. He shook his head, his mouth a tight, grim line.
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” he said, and disappeared.
Once in his cabin, Jax sat cross-legged on his meditation mat and contemplated the situation. What I-Five had suggested was a distinct possibility. Through a series of confrontations, Jax had become only too familiar with Probus Tesla’s Force signature. It was an alien thing to him. He experienced the Force as threads, ribbons, tendrils of energy that twisted and wove themselves into a fabric of power and meaning. Tesla’s energy did not weave; it boiled, surged, undulated. It had made him wonder if the other adept’s experience of it was, as Kajin Savaros’s had been, liquid in nature.
He had once heard it said that to understand another’s sense of the Force was to understand how he or she could be defeated. He didn’t need to defeat Tesla, only to pass by him unnoticed … or perhaps disguised.
He had closed his eyes and now opened them to gaze at Laranth’s tree. The tree had its own Force signature—a singularly strong signature for a plant. Could he possibly use that to cover or obscure his own telltale energy the way the Inquisitors used the scales of the taozin to muddy theirs?
There was only one way to find out.
He rose and lifted the tree’s pot out of the feeding container.
Twenty-Three
Probus Tesla breathed deeply and let his body follow the path of memory through the moves of the Soresu combat form. He wore a belted, sleeveless gray tunic and a fine sheen of sweat. He wielded a lightfoil, good for little beyond ritual combat and the practice of forms. He schooled himself, cooled his temper against the anger that seemed on the verge of swamping his self-control, and moved through the steps of the form and the lines of the Sith mantra.
Step.
Peace is a lie; there is only passion.
Cross-step.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Turn.
Through strength, I gain power.
Step.
Through power, I gain victory.
A sweep of the foil.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
Step–turn–twist.
The Force shall free me.
“Your movements are tentative, Tesla. I fear you are distracted.”
Tesla did not open his eyes. He knew what he would see—his Elomin apprentice, Renefra Ren, standing in the doorway of the meditation chamber, no doubt wearing a bland expression that would somehow still manage to suggest both smugness and subservience. In Tesla’s opinion, his apprentice was an obsequious snake.
But Ren was not the target of the anger he was struggling to master. It was the Dark Lord, himself, who had spurred his Inquisitor to a passion that was threatening to slip its leash.
“If I am distracted,” Tesla said, still not opening his eyes, “it is because of my awareness of you. Why have you come?” He continued executing the movements of the form. Perversely, Ren’s interruption was helping his focus; he executed a series of thrusts that were both powerful and smooth.
“To tell you that Lord Vader has returned to the station from his rendezvous on Bothawui.”
Tesla’s concentration splintered. He stopped in the midst of a sweep and turned to look into his apprentice’s glittering black eyes. “I knew that, of course,” he said, but he hadn’t—his own inner turmoil had blocked him.
Renefra Ren’s browridges arched, and his smile became even more smug. “Then I am surprised you didn’t seek him out. I know you like to be … attentive to him.”
“I was meditating,” said Tesla. “And unlike some among our number, I do not feel the need to ingratiate myself with Lord Vader at every opportunity. I have served him long enough—and well enough—to know when he is open to approach. If he needs me, he will no doubt summon me directly.”
The Elomin was silent for a moment, his black eyes unreadable, but his smile was gone. “No doubt; but he seemed … disturbed by something. There was a different scent about him, and I detected an undercurrent of fury in his voice as he spoke to his adjutant. I thought perhaps you also sensed this.”<
br />
Again, Tesla was caught off guard. Had he been so intent on his meditations that he had mistaken his Master’s agitation for his own? He reached out now with a trickle of Force sense and felt for Vader’s aura. Yes, there was something there—something like dark static.
“Whether I did or not should be irrelevant to you, Renefra,” Tesla said, using the Elomin’s personal name to remind him of his station. “Again, if the Dark Lord wishes me to attend him, he will summon …”
The words deserted him as Vader’s summons came—a strong, almost painful tug at his Force sense. He straightened, deactivated the lightfoil and put it back in the equipment rack, then fetched his deep red robe from a hook by the door of the chamber.
Ren’s eyes widened. “He calls?”
So much hunger in those two simple words. Tesla smiled. “As I expected he would.” He belted his robe, hooked his lightsaber to the belt, and swept from the room, leaving Ren behind to wallow in his longing.
The corridors of Kantaros Station were sterile durasteel that gleamed a ghostly, muted greenish white. Tesla found the color soothing. It reminded him of moonlight on the fields of grain near his boyhood home in Corellia’s Denendre Valley. But the air in his valley had never had this scrubbed quality. The air on Kantaros Station was antiseptic and metallic, though Renefra Ren bragged he could smell the dust from the asteroid in which the station was embedded.
The heart of the station was the detention center where Tesla’s Master kept persons and items of interest. The quarters Vader kept were very near this dark heart. And while the quarters, cells, common areas, and storage units were patrolled by both Imperial troops and Inquisitors, the Dark Lord’s private rooms were guarded only by his own immense abilities.
Tesla chose to avoid the cells today, skirting them on the broad inner hallway that described a circle around the center of the complex. Thinking about what Vader kept there—or rather, who—only served to remind the Inquisitor of the anger he had been trying to quell. Not only was Darth Vader the most powerful Force-user Tesla had ever known, he had always thought of him as a towering genius. But events over the last months had sown seeds of doubt. He had seen Vader inexplicably allow the Jedi Jax Pavan to provoke him to irrational acts. In fact, it had seemed to the Inquisitor as if Pavan’s destruction was more important to the Dark Lord than the wishes of Emperor Palpatine or the putting down of the nascent rebellion. He had sometimes thought that given a choice between extinguishing the resistance on every world or wounding Pavan, Lord Vader would choose the latter.
When the Jedi had at last been destroyed, Tesla had expected his Master to be triumphant—to bend himself to eradicating the entire network of interfering “freedom fighters.” Instead, Vader had taken Thi Xon Yimmon alive and insisted on handling his interrogation completely on his own, relegating his team of Inquisitors to surveillance and guard duty. There had been no sign of triumph; it was if the destruction of the Jedi had not been a major accomplishment.
This was the source of Tesla’s ill humor. He longed to interrogate the Whiplash leader himself, to show his Master the extent of his powers and his loyalty. But not only had Vader denied Tesla a chance to prove himself, he’d made no progress with the Cerean himself. Or at least he had reported none to the Inquisitorius. The one time Tesla had asked if he might assist, Lord Vader had made it very clear that he, alone, was privileged to work with such prizes as Thi Xon Yimmon. No one else was to be allowed near him.
His Master’s rejection was hard for Tesla to take in any event, but with the added presumption that he was not capable of breaking a non-adept, it was galling.
How capable were you with your last assignment? he asked himself. How successful were you with Jax Pavan’s Padawan, Kajin Savaros? How successful were you in protecting your Master’s interests then?
Not very. He supposed he should be grateful that Lord Vader hadn’t dismissed him outright or left him on Coruscant with the least experienced Inquisitors and apprentices.
Tesla’s ruminations ended at the outer hatch to his Master’s quarters. He paused there and announced himself as a ripple on the surface of the Force. The outer hatch slid into the wall, and he entered the Dark Lord’s rooms.
Vader faced him, standing just outside his private meditation chamber. The segmented entrance was even now closing. Tesla tried to catch a glimpse inside without appearing to do so. No one, to his knowledge, had ever seen the interior of Lord Vader’s private sanctum. It was rumored that only within that specialized structure was the Dark Lord able to exist outside of his enviro-suit.
This close to his Master, Tesla was even more aware of the dark static that hummed just beneath the gleaming exterior of the suit’s carapace.
“What is it, my Lord?” he asked, and felt as if he had been doused with hot and cold water almost simultaneously. He took a step back. He had never before felt anything like that from his Master. It confused him.
Vader turned and swept across the room to stand at a viewscreen that looked out onto an intimidating panorama of floating, rolling rocks, starkly lit by the system star.
“I must leave the station again,” Vader said.
“But you’ve only just returned—”
“Things are transpiring on Imperial Center that I must attend to.”
“Shall I go with you?”
“I think not. You will stay behind here and maintain close watch over our important guest. In fact, Tesla, I want you to attend him daily.”
Tesla only barely kept himself from smiling. How long had he waited to hear those words? He wanted to throw himself at Vader’s feet and thank him, but knew that the Dark Lord despised subservience in his followers. To cringe or quiver when Darth Vader appeared or spoke was to invite his contempt. Those who assumed he demanded complete servility in his underlings made a mistake that Tesla had seen end careers … and lives.
“Attend him, Lord? Then you wish me to interrogate him?”
“No. Nor are you to use your Force abilities on him except to read his moods and his passions. I want you merely to observe him.”
The Inquisitor knew his facial expression had lost its equanimity. “Observe him? Observe him doing what?”
“Being. He is a man alone with his own thoughts and feelings. Learn them.”
“Is this … Is this what you have been doing, Lord Vader?”
“After a fashion.”
Tesla nodded. “I see.”
“Do you?”
Tesla heard the dangerous note in his Master’s voice, experienced it as an icy spray in his back brain. He stifled the fear it induced and squared his shoulders. “You wish to lull him into a false sense of security. To defeat his expectations of you. To … cause his own straying thoughts to betray him.”
“You have learned something after all.”
Tesla’s relief was profound. So profound that he felt, again, that warm tide flowing around him. He read it as his Master’s approval, but it was supplanted almost as soon as he’d felt it by the cold static he’d felt from Vader earlier. Puzzling. The two sensations were so at odds, and yet seemed to overlap.
“As I said,” Vader continued, “you shall attend and observe. Do not prepare questions, only ask such questions as you feel moved to ask. Do nothing beyond that. Nothing. Then you shall report to me what you observe and any impressions you take away from the session.”
Tesla gave no outward sign that he was at a loss to understand the instructions. What sort of interrogation was this? “Of course, Lord. But if I might ask—what takes you back to Imperial Center? Is something wrong there?”
Dark amusement lapped at Tesla’s consciousness.
“Something is always wrong on Imperial Center,” Vader said. “What is wrong now is that someone appears to be plotting against the life of Emperor Palpatine.”
Tesla left off musing about the nature of the observations his Master desired of him. “I am gratified that our spy network is so effective.”
Vader uttered a sou
nd that might have been a grunt or a laugh. “Our spy network? It is often next to useless, motivated by fear and ideology. This came from Black Sun, which is motivated by simple greed and opportunism. I trust their network—and their motives—far more than I do our own.”
Tesla went away from the interview foundering in a mixture of pride and perplexity. He had been assigned the duty he had coveted, but with such narrow constraints! There was only one way to widen his influence with Darth Vader, and that was to be able to present him with some intelligence about Thi Xon Yimmon that the Dark Lord had not already gleaned himself.
Attend and observe. Probus Tesla had every intention of discovering a way to do more than that without it being apparent.
Jax sat back against the wall of his cabin, sorting through the impressions he had gleaned in his brief contact with the Inquisitor. Trepidation. Relief. Even a spark of exultation—all this had flowed through the momentary connections. But while the emotions of the Inquisitor were chaotic and confusing, his location was clear. As was his identity. Jax had a history with Probus Tesla that neither man was likely to forget.
Jax rolled to his feet, returned the miisai tree to its container, and made his way up to the bridge.
Twenty-Four
The core of Kantaros Station was buried in an asteroid. The asteroid itself was a halfhearted, lumpy attempt at a sphere that had failed due to lack of gravity. The station was visible as a chaotic jumble of structures that poked or peeked out of the native rock. Studying it, Den saw what he took to be a control bridge, docking rings above, at, and below the asteroid’s natural equator, and some docking tethers and space bridges that were used to debark and unload vessels too large to fit into the docking bays but not large enough to make a close approach suicidal.
Traffic around the station seemed strangely light. The only ship nearby was an Imperial frigate that floated serenely in the flow of stone, dwarfed by the ponderous asteroids. There were no surveillance buoys or small patrol craft.
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