“I agree,” Kit said. His black eyes gleamed. “There are other forces at play here. From the beginning, we have been manipulated. It is time the next phase of our operation went into effect. Nate?”
He said this raising his voice and nodding toward the clones, who one by one rose and gave their reports.
As the food worked its way through his system, Obi-Wan was comforted by the troopers’measured, military cadences. On occasion he’d found that emotionless precision irritating, but now it calmed him. The value of such competency could not be underestimated. Here, it might save all their lives, and the plan as well.
All in all, he was pleasantly surprised by the commandos’ accurate, perceptive, and entirely admirable reports.
When they were complete, Kit Fisto leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Your thoughts?” he asked after Obi-Wan had remained quiet for almost a full minute.
“Impressive,” he said. “It makes my own blundering seem all the more childish in comparison.”
Obi-Wan stood, slapping his palms against his legs. “The situation has changed,” he said. “Our resources have changed, and the nature of our adversaries has changed. Gentlemen”—He scanned the assembled. “—an unknown person or persons destroyed our transport ship and killed one of your brothers. This was an unspeakable act, and must be addressed as such.”
The recruits, their new and improved “Desert Wind,” were hard now. Their grueling training had weeded out the weaklings and transformed them into a band capable of following orders, of marching courageously into danger. Still, a vital question remained: were they really willing to kill or die? It was never possible to determine who would cower under fire. Only combat itself could answer the questions burning in every raw recruit’s breast:
Will I? Can I?
He saw that question now. Saw also that his brush with catastrophe had not diminished him in their eyes. In fact, it seemed the surviving members of Desert Wind now accepted him as they had not before, saw him as an ally, one who might now be willing to go beyond his stated parameters into something more radically dangerous.
Someone had attempted to murder him. Someone had betrayed and manipulated him. Duris? The Five Families? Trillot?
Someone. But who? Who stood to gain by his death?
He pulled his mind back to the task at hand. “We will continue on,” he said. “And we will finish what we started together. You do not know me, but through the glowing reports of my associates, I know you.” He had their eyes and minds. What he needed was their hearts. “In the coming days, the nature of our new situation will become clear to you, and I trust that none of you will falter at the grim task ahead. This is no longer a charade. Justified it may be, but I ask that you control your rage. I ask you to follow the path of least violence for the damage that we are called upon to do. To be merciful when possible, and courageous in action when not.”
He paused, and gathered himself. “We journeyed to Cestus seeking a diplomatic solution. It would seem that that option is no longer available to us. Ladies. Gentlemen.” He locked eyes with each of them in turn. “We must consider ourselves at hazard.”
47
For hours G’Mai Duris had pored over her advisers’ reports and suggestions, seeking to better understand her current position. The Republic had attempted to influence her decisions by deception. The Jedi had won her the leadership of the hive council. Had given her a piece of information that could destroy Cestus Cybernetics, or offer her people a new beginning.
But by perpetrating a fraud, Obi-Wan had plunged her into a nightmare. She could not support the Jedi, or accept his support. The information in her hands could not be used to manipulate Cestus Cybernetics. Without support from the Republic, the information would do little save ensure her own assassination.
Another question remained as well, one she was having a more difficult time answering. How exactly had the Jedi been foiled? She didn’t believe for an instant that the scheming Quill had trapped Obi-Wan in such a fashion. No. She had seen too much of her cousin’s past power-grubbing to think her rival capable of such a coup. Quill had received serious assistance. But from whom?
There was another force at work here, and one that might prove far more dangerous.
Her assistant Shar Shar rolled into the room, blue skin gleaming splotchily in alarm. “Regent Duris!” she cried. “We have terrible news!” Shar Shar extruded an arm and punched a code into the machine, waving her stubby hands through the reading stream until the images changed. “This just came through a minute ago.”
The view was from orbit, one of the drone satellites used to monitor and protect the entire planetary system, everything from the moons to the mines. They watched Obi-Wan’s ship rising up through the atmosphere. “We lost the image for a moment as the shift between the ground monitors and the orbiters was disrupted. Perhaps by this drone ship—”
Something appeared from the direction of a moon. It was black and configured strangely, and Duris thought her eyes deceived her. For a moment she imagined it to be some great bird of prey, but then she saw it to be no manner of living thing, but a ship of an unfamiliar design.
But was it really unfamiliar? Hadn’t she seen such a ship design among a series of craft purchased by Cestus Cybernetics security just last year? It appeared from nowhere, swooped out of frame until another satellite caught it, and then it and the Jedi’s ship were both in the viewing field at the same time. The black ship spat something out toward the Jedi ship, which promptly commenced corkscrewing maneuvers. “Who is in the escape pod?” G’Mai asked.
“Let me see.” Her assistant manipulated the field. “Not much shielding on a pod. We might be able to—ah! Not human…it was the Vippit barrister.”
“Then the Jedi is still piloting the ship?”
“Perhaps, and—” Suddenly the entire visual field flooded with light, enough to wash the shadows from the room and temporarily render them all dazed and nearly blind.
“What was that?” Duris asked, instantly comprehending the horrid absurdity of the question. She knew precisely what it was. Even more important, she understood what it meant.
Some unknown force or person had destroyed the Republican ship and, with it, the Jedi personally appointed by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine to negotiate with Cestus. She groaned. Things had been horrendous enough. The discovery of Obi-Wan’s perfidy, and its public disclosure, had tied her hands. But this went so far beyond bad that she would have to find new descriptions, and those new words would have to wait until she ceased feeling too nauseated to think.
For all her current anger, she suspected Obi-Wan had acted from a desire to bring Cestus back into the Republic’s sheltering fold. With respect and deep relief she noted that no one had actually been harmed during the fraudulent kidnapping. In her heart she believed that this suggested genuine concern for the lives and welfare of even the lowliest security people, let alone the Families themselves. But who or whatever had acted against the Jedi had displayed no such scruples. Beyond doubt Cestus would be blamed, and she would have no option but to throw her support to the Confederacy.
And although she could not fully grasp the intents of all sides in this matter, she knew that for all of his deception she preferred Obi-Wan to these shadowy assassins.
“What do we do?” asked Shar Shar, bouncing in agitation.
“There is only one thing we can do,” she replied. “And that is to safely retrieve any survivors. Snoil, at least, may be alive. Search for a rescue beacon!”
48
Jangotat and the rest of the rescue party had traveled most of the way to the location indicated by Barrister Snoil’s homing beacon, zipping along close to the ground on speeder bikes. They were less than three klicks away when they picked up the first signals from ChikatLik’s approaching rescue craft.
“We have a problem, Captain,” Sirty said.
“Agreed, Sergeant.” Obi-Wan’s escape from the ship had been anticipated, and had gone off
without a hitch. His capsule had been all but invisible to the scanners. Snoil’s unanticipated exit was another matter altogether. The Vippit’s rescue beacon would be seen by anyone with a scanner tuned to the emergency frequencies. The troopers had their orders: to retrieve Snoil. There was no telling the nature or inclination of those who now rushed to find them. Was it still important not to expose the presence of trained Republic forces on Cestus? What to do?
He made his decision from among a handful of equally bad options. “Forry and Desert Wind travel north to intercept. Dig in and do what you can to make yourselves look like a larger force. They won’t be anticipating hostile fire, and should retreat.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On it!”
Two of the speeder bikes peeled off to head north. He sent a coded message to those remaining with him. “Follow me. Increase to maximum velocity.”
The Republic transport drama had attracted attention from members of the Five Families. A seething Quill had already returned to Duris’s throne room, and Llitishi was said to be on his way. Quill radiated both hatred and triumph. How long would it be before he found a way to kill her? A month? A week? A few days?
“Regent Duris,” said Shar Shar, rolling side-to-side with dismay. “Our security force approaches the beacon location for the escape capsule, but there is a problem.”
“And what is that?”
The little blue ball frowned. “Look.” On the projection field, a few small dots zipped from the direction of the Dashta Mountains, heading for the capsule.
“What is that?”
“Ordinarily I’d guess aboriginal nomads, ma’am. But they’re moving kind of fast.”
Quill sneered, his wings fluttering with repressed rage. “We know that Desert Wind was cooperating with the Jedi. We are simply seeing the weapons that bought such cooperation, Regent.”
“And now they intend to rescue the Vippit?” Her head spun.
“They may even be responsible for the attack.”
“They have no such weaponry.” Duris bit her tongue. These waters were deepening. Could Desert Wind have been involved? But if they had other allies, allies who might have supplied the technology for such an assassination, then were the anarchists playing both sides against the middle, supporting anyone who would provide them with weaponry? Then what of her intuition that Quill had obtained the holovid from complicit sources? And if he had—Whose trap is this, really? And who has been caught in it?
Duris was beginning to think that Obi-Wan might have been more truthful than she thought. Why, then, had he not proclaimed innocence in some way? If security considerations were involved, why had he not asked for a private audience? No, she had seen his face: surprise, shock, consternation…and shame.
“Ma’am!” Shar Shar called out. “The rescue force is under fire!”
Duris manipulated her chair-arm sensor, momentarily unable to find the feed. “Any visual contact?”
Shar Shar tried to manipulate the drone satellite but couldn’t get magnification powerful enough to show anything but a few specks and flashes in the desert. “No,” the Zeetsa said. “But they are using weapons similar to those known to be possessed by Desert Wind.”
Of course. That meant nothing. And everything. Her head hurt. “Tell them to pull back. Put a smaller security team into the area.”
The other dots were moving. Had they reached the capsule and extracted the survivor?
“They’re leaving!” Shar Shar bubbled. The dots on the map bleeped out. “And they must have reached the mountains. Our drone satellite can’t see anything at all now.”
Had Snoil been rescued? Kidnapped? Murdered? Tortured for information? Welcomed as a friend? It was impossible to say from this vantage point. But the differences among those possibilities might cost G’Mai Duris her cloak of office.
More important, they might cost the life of every being on Cestus.
49
With anarchists attacking on multiple fronts, there was little time for rest in ChikatLik. The attacks were always carried out with laser precision, and inevitably involved minimal structural damage and no loss of life. Still, with every strike an industrial complex was damaged, production slowed or stopped. Mines were rendered too dangerous for workers to enter, vehicles were sabotaged, and security forces were humiliated and enraged. And behind it all, behind every mark on the map that meant another blown bridge, another crippled skyport, another central processing by-station rendered useless, Duris thought she sensed the mind of Obi-Wan Kenobi: brilliant, ferocious, tactically diverse, and respectful of life in all its forms.
Could the Jedi still be alive?
If the majority of production loci were jammed, if those critical production lines were slowed to a crawl, her hands would be tied. She would have to either sue for peace or call in Confederacy forces to protect their interests, throwing Cestus onto the path of destruction. Because if Cestus declared for the Confederacy, then the Republic would consider her an enemy planet producing lethal arms. Cestus had no fleet capable of resisting either juggernaut. Politically, economically, and personally she would be torn to pieces, and Cestus would end as a minor footnote in dull academic histories detailing failed attempts at secession.
During those days the Regent slept little. It seemed that every five hours or so there was another report, bearing new embedded images of flaming refineries, fleeing security forces, stories of commando teams—perhaps Desert Wind, perhaps something else—striking from silence and shadows, destroying only equipment, and then fading away again. Just dissolving into thin air.
Then in the middle of a night, Shar Shar’s cries roused her from uneasy dreams. “We’ve trapped Desert Wind!” she called. “Please, come now.”
G’Mai Duris wrapped a robe around her ample body and hurried to follow her assistant’s spherical blue form as it ricocheted down the hall toward the observation room.
She recognized the location in the holos: the Kibo geothermal station west of the Zantay Hills. Kibo had appeared on a high-priority list of possible targets and thus been allotted additional security teams. Apparently those precautions had borne fruit.
“What do we have?”
“A Desert Wind unit. No more than ten. They were sabotaging one of the towers, and a secondary sweep picked them up. We swooped in before they could escape. Seemed to have cut off their retreat.”
“Good, good,” Duris said. “Then there is a chance for capture, and then interrogation.” Perhaps now they would finally learn a bit of the truth. Perhaps.
50
Obi-Wan Kenobi was pinned down in a bunker at the rock-tumbled edge of Kibo Lake, just outside the power station’s white duracrete dome. For the last hour a slow wind had been building. The air was clouded with sand and dust, reducing the accuracy of defensive fire. Their enemies seemed less encumbered: one of his recruits was already wounded by sniper blasts. The surprise and the accurate return fire had dispirited the others.
The clone troopers were still disguised as Desert Wind fighters. Even though Obi-Wan knew that the incriminating holovid existed, if there were no additional witnesses, and no obvious clone trooper involvement, it would be easier for Coruscant to deny allegations.
Kibo Lake’s fifty-kilometer-wide volcanic crater was the fourth largest on the planet. Active vents at the bottom transformed this, one of Cestus’s largest bodies of groundwater, into a hypermineralized geothermal soup pot, home to a collection of odd primitive aquatic forms, and a power source for many of the outlying mines.
The geothermal stations tapped those volcanic vents, concentrating the heat and ultimately powering a series of steam turbines. The power was sold in a dozen forms planetwide.
Both stealth and courage had been required to move into position for the assault: they’d skimmed silently across Kibo Lake’s simmering alkaline soup and simultaneously crawled over the crater wall from the desert, in a precision pincer operation.
Explosive charges had been carefully placed,
guards neutralized without fatality. If all had gone well they would have faded back into the desert an hour before the first explosion’s false dawn illuminated the night sky.
It was not to be. The problem had been an accident, really. Thirty hours before their attack, Kibo’s security system had malfunctioned. The entire security network had been quietly taken offline for repair, and it was impossible for Obi-Wan to test their attempts at a bypass. Worse still, there was no way to know when the system might come back online.
Perfect opportunity? Or perfect trap?
For half an hour Desert Wind had watched and waited and sweated before deciding to go on with the plan. So half of them entered the refinery while the others remained behind, hoping that when the alarm system switched itself back on it would not reveal their intrusion. Failing that, they hoped to disarm it completely.
Their plan might have worked, except that the plant security wasn’t testing the old alarm system at all. The power station staff were installing a completely new system, one that did not show up on any of the plans provided by the ever-bribable Trillot.
Obi-Wan had walked directly into an unintentional trap.
“We’re surrounded!” Thak Val Zsing hissed.
“No,” Obi-Wan said calmly. Val Zsing stuck his head up and was immediately driven back by accurate blasterfire.
“We’re pinned,” Obi-Wan corrected, “but not surrounded. Right over there—” He pointed at a series of ceramic spirals near the main dome. “—heat extraction coils run boiling water to the turbines.” He spoke as calmly as he could, but knew that his companions’ patience would not last indefinitely. “Jangotat?”
Jangotat had been patiently watching his quadrant since the ambush was discovered, and now responded evenly. “Yes, sir?”
“I want you to draw them for me. I’ll provide covering fire—” Jangotat knelt down as Obi-Wan traced in the dust with his fingertip.
Star Wars®: The Cestus Deception Page 23