Fate of the Jedi: Backlash Page 27

  “So what’s she after, Ben? You’ve now had several opportunities to talk to her.”

  “She gave you no clues when she helped you last night?”

  “Unless her helping me was itself a clue. Why would a Sith want the Grand Master of the Jedi to survive?”

  Ben shook his head. “I doubt that she wants you to survive. You killed her mistress. Our whole Order stands as an inevitable enemy to her kind. At best, she saved your life because she wants to kill you herself, not watch you die at the hands of savages.”

  “That’s probably it. Vestara’s first goal: deliver Luke Skywalker into the hands of her people. But what’s goal number two?”

  Ben sighed. “She made comments about admiring these people. I think she meant the Dathomiri in general. And, really, it makes sense. The Dathomiri may be nature-loving stay-at-homes, but I don’t think there’s a higher percentage of Force-sensitives among any population in the galaxy. That, and its isolation means new Force techniques, new ways of looking at things. We really need to get a new Jedi facility operating here, Dad.”

  “You’re right.” Luke frowned. “It was awfully easy for us to discover where Vestara’s yacht was. I mean, Amelia’s a clever girl … but should she have been able to find that ship?”

  Ben shrugged. “But we know no message large enough to contain the Maw navigational data Vestara had acquired was transmitted off-world. So she’s got to be thinking about how she gets offworld to join her people. And that means a ship. The only ships she could be confident would be on hand are her stolen yacht and Jade Shadow. And she’s made no effort to get back to either one.” Ben blinked as a new thought settled into place, an unpleasant one. “Unless …”

  “Say it.”

  “She’s shown no sense of urgency. Zero. None. Her time spent with the clans here feels an awful lot like a delaying tactic.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She has no intention of returning to the spaceport for either ship. Because the Sith are coming here for her.”

  Luke gave an approving nod. “So when she got to Dathomir in the first place, she staged an approach that looked like it might end in a crash landing. But she really just landed.”

  “She sneaked into the spaceport, no harder for a Sith to do than a Jedi, and she struck a deal with the best mechanic in port. Here, take my ship, it’s all yours. My asking price …”

  “Is just enough credits to send off a hypercomm message. Very short, easy to encrypt and conceal, comparatively inexpensive to bounce around a number of comm stations to conceal its destination from investigators, and small enough that it couldn’t contain the Maw navigational data.”

  Ben smacked himself in the forehead. “Because if only she has the nav data, the Sith have to come for her. She remains valuable. Good tactics for dealing with the Sith, even when you are Sith. So then she runs off into the rain forest to act as a diversion, to keep us away from the spaceport and Monarg.”

  “In the meantime, she really gets a good look at the Dathomiri and likes what she sees. She may even run into the Nightsisters first, as you speculated. So she could have been playing the Nightsisters against the Raining Leaves.”

  Ben looked around and spotted Vestara. She was seated with Kaminne and Olianne, and was holding Halliava’s daughter, Ara, in her lap. They were chatting, laughing. Had they been dressed in modern clothes and surrounded by the trappings of a tapcaf, they could have been a gathering of family members anywhere in the galaxy. “Dad, if we’re guessing right, time could be very, very short.”

  “I know. When the hunters and scouts move out, we need to have someone watching Vestara. Preferably both of us, trading off, so if she detects one of us, she may lose that sense when we switch.”

  Ben kicked another rock and watched it fall. “Blast it. I was almost starting to like her.”

  Halliava, trainer of scouts for the former Raining Leaves, was naturally among those who assembled to enter the forest and search it for signs of the Nightsisters. Vestara was not. After a quick, private consultation, Luke and Ben decided to enter the forest and shadow Halliava while Dyon, remaining on the hilltop, would keep a surreptitious eye on Vestara. “But don’t forget,” Luke told Dyon, “you’re no safer on the bare hilltop than we are in the forest. Remember the example of Tribeless Sha. Danger is everywhere.”

  A bare minute after Halliava and other Dathomiri scouts and hunters entered the forest verge, so did the Skywalkers. Initially they chose an angle that would theoretically carry them away from Halliava, but, once concealed by trees, they vectored toward her.

  * * *

  For Vestara, the problem was a simple one to solve. She waited until the Skywalkers were gone and until Dyon was distracted. He was often distracted; curious clan members had questions for the offworlder, and, clearly a lonely bachelor, he had eyes for many of the ladies of the clans. Vestara contrived to perform tasks near the lip of the east face, and when Dyon and others were listening to an announcement from Firen, the senior subchief still present, Vestara dropped over the lip of the hill crest.

  It was no suicide jump, of course. She plummeted several meters, landing lightly on the first ledge down. A flick of her finger and an exertion in the Force caused the sentry on this hill facing to look around for the source of a phantom noise and miss seeing the rest of her descent. Soon enough, she made her way into the verge of trees, out of sight.

  She would have to be just as careful here as under the eyes of the Bright Sun members. The forest now teemed with hunters and scouts and Nightsisters and Jedi, all intent on doing harm to one another. Vestara was, in theory, allied with any and all of them, but traps and sudden surprises made accidents not just possible but potentially deadly.

  She headed for the spot Halliava had told her about, a place where a small creek passed beside a naturally occurring cross-shaped stone, and waited for Halliava, who might be some time shaking her pursuers.

  It was not too lengthy a wait. Half an hour passed, and then, with stealth suited to a trained Sith, Halliava appeared from behind a draping fern frond. She moved forward to embrace Vestara. For the first time, her true emotions showed; she looked worried and chastened. “The Sisters will listen more closely to you next time. I will listen. We have suffered a serious setback.”

  Vestara gave her a raised-brow, I’m sorry I was right expression. “You could not know what the Jedi were capable of. I barely knew. But you have not lost. Far from it. The common Dathomiri still fear the Nightsisters. They have simply been heartened by surviving last night’s assault. Today they’ll add up the numbers they’ve lost, they’ll begin telling stories of the Nightsisters from days gone by, and they’ll become afraid again.”

  “Yes.” Halliava sat on the cross-shaped stone. “But the Jedi. They are very skilled, very powerful. For men, anyway. I barely lost them as they tracked me. They might find me again, so we must hurry.”

  “Did you bring my things?”

  “Of course.” From the pouch hanging at her belt, Halliava withdrew two items, each wrapped in cloth to keep it from making noise. She unrolled each in turn and handed it to Vestara. The first was her lightsaber; the second, a comm-equipped data tablet similar to a data-pad.

  Vestara took the data tablet and keyed in a security code. Her hopes were not high; every day since she had caught Halliava in secret conference with a fellow Nightsister, she had conceived more details for the Dathomir stage of her actions, and had approached the Witch with her hastily spun offer and explanation, she had checked her comm device for word from her kind. It had not come.

  But today there was a blinking icon on the interface, an icon meaning that an encrypted message had arrived.

  Vestara did not let excitement show on her face, did not let it speed up her actions. She simply keyed in the decryption code and held the device before her.

  The tablet screen resolved into an image: a human woman in Sith robes, a woman unknown to her, with sharp, angular features, black hair, and an almost savag
e aspect to her expression. Vestara nearly laughed. The Sith woman had clearly been picked because she was closest to media depictions of the Witches of Dathomir; all she needed to do was tousle her hair and put on animal skins to be suitable as a Nightsister. Well, that, and spray on some false tan; she was very pale.

  The woman spoke. “Vestara, greetings. We have received your initial communication and your follow-up reports with great interest. Of course we would be delighted to aid your new sisters in their quest. The weapons you have requested have been assembled, and we have chosen a worthy Sith Saber to trade for a Nightsister that each group may benefit from the new knowledge brought to it. We are in the Dathomir system and await your instructions.” The screen faded.

  Halliava had heard the message, and her eyes were wide. “They’re here.”

  Vestara smiled at her. “They’re here, and the Jedi and the Bright Sun Clan will burn like dry leaves in a fire under the weapons they’re bringing you.”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “We need to choose a landing field for the Sith shuttles. A broad meadow or a flat beach, something like that. It should be at least a couple of kilometers from the Bright Sun hill so our enemies can’t bear witness to their landing. I need to go there and transmit the location with my device, so they know exactly where to come. Then, tonight, at the time we’ve told them, we show up to collect our rewards.”

  The smile that crossed Halliava’s face was one of relief and victory. “I know just the place. Let’s go.”

  Some time after he realized that he could no longer find Vestara anywhere in camp, Dyon spotted her again—carefully ascending the southwest approach, a waterskin at either end of a pole carried across her shoulders. After she made it across the hill crest, he approached her. “Replenishing our water stores?”

  “No, hunting lizards.” Then one of the skins she carried caught her eye and she gave a little gasp. “Why, it is water!”

  “Clearly, sarcasm is a universal constant among teenage girls.”

  “Only the worthwhile ones. Didn’t you hear the call for water bearers?”

  “I did.” But you didn’t. You were already gone. You just knew the call would be coming.

  “You could help, too.” She swung around to face the forest again. The motion caused one of her waterskins to sweep toward Dyon. He ducked beneath it, stood again once it was past.

  She gave him a smile of apology. “Sorry. There, where you see the line of clan members headed into the trees? In that direction is a creek.”

  “Thanks.” Dyon waited until she continued on her way, to the central spot on the hill where water containers were collected. Then he headed down the slope and brought out his comlink. He’d better tell Luke and Ben right away of his failure to keep track of the Sith girl. That was the sort of information that could become more dangerous as it aged.

  THE SCOUTS AND HUNTERS OF THE BRIGHT SUN CLAN LEARNED SEVERAL things in the morning hours. Before noon, they, the chiefs, and the offworlders gathered at the foot of the hill to tell what they’d learned and concluded. Ben kept his eye on Halliava and Vestara as they separately arrived, but the two did not interact any more, or with anything that looked like hidden meaning, than any other two clan members.

  The Nightsisters had taken away their dead. There were no bodies from Luke’s rock bombardments for them to identify, only bloody patches. In his visions, Luke had not seen their faces well enough to describe them for identification. Their identities remained secret.

  The Nightsisters had withdrawn, and without laying in any traps that had been detected. Some Bright Suns took this as a sign that they had fled for good. Kaminne, Tasander, and other wiser heads, the Skywalkers among them, dissuaded the optimists of this notion. “They knew we’d be looking for their traps today,” Tasander told them. “They’re changing tactics. Not allowing us to predict them.”

  “We must do the same to them.” That was Halliava, who had evidently ranged many kilometers in her search for the Nightsisters. “They expect us to stay on the hill and endure another assault. I say we leave hunting parties out after dark to visit death upon them from behind.”

  There was a general murmur of assent at her words, and after a few moments of consideration, Tasander and Kaminne nodded. Kaminne called, “Come to me to volunteer for those hunter duties. I will assign units so that you can be in place well before dark.”

  Luke spoke into Ben’s ear, too quietly for others to hear. “That’s what we’ll be doing.”

  Ben nodded. “Too noisy and rocky on the hill to sleep anyway.”

  CHIEF OF STATE’S OFFICE, SENATE BUILDING, CORUSCANT

  It was a near-perfect re-creation of the meeting of the previous day—Daala, Dorvan, Han, and Leia, sitting in the same chairs. Leia, in her Jedi robes, Daala, in her admiral’s uniform, and Han, in another set of his iconic trousers, shirt, and vest, looked identical. Only Dorvan—his suit shirt a coral hue, matching the handkerchief in the pocket opposite the one holding his sleeping pet—seemed to have been altered. Too, Dorvan now held a datapad and consulted it more frequently than he looked at the other attendees, a mannerism Han found irritating. But then, he found most politicians and politics irritating.

  Daala tapped a fingernail against her desktop as if nervous. “Aren’t the Jedi worried about recourse?”

  Leia looked professionally curious. “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll spell it out. They give me their mad Chev Jedi for study. We don’t freeze him. We unfreeze the Horns. We study them. We exchange data with the Jedi. Perhaps even allow one of their scientists to be present during our tests and scientific meetings.”

  Leia nodded. “Right.”

  “But I know that I’m the pragmatic, unfeeling opponent who might at any moment say, Well, we’re done cooperating. Freeze the lot of them. The Jedi seem to have built in no recourse against a sudden reversal of opinion on my part.”

  “Well, this is only the first exchange of many through which we intend to build a greater relationship of trust between you and the Order. If it goes as planned, we proceed to the next set of concessions, compromises, and agreements. We …” A sudden thought occurred to Leia. She narrowed her eyes. “You’re stalling. Why are you stalling?”

  Beside her, Han looked over his shoulder at the door. Leia knew her husband didn’t have a blaster on him, not even a hold-out, in the Chief of State’s office; it was a significiant sign of trust on Daala’s part that the Solos could be in here without bodyguards being present. But Han was doubtless figuring out what to do if the door opened and security agents swept in to arrest them. Which one he’d hit, how he’d take the agent’s blaster away, whom to shoot first.

  Now it was Daala’s turn to seem surprised. “When do I get that power?”

  “Which power?”

  “The power to read the minds of Chiefs of State. Did you get yours when you left the office, or is it a Jedi thing?”

  “I’ll bet you my husband’s Bloodstripes that I’m right.”

  Han shot her a dirty look. “Hey.”

  “Well, you are right. I’m stalling.” Daala gave Leia an apologetic look. “But I’m not springing some trap. While we’ve been talking, Wynn here has been putting a poll into the field. Wynn?”

  Dorvan looked up from his datapad. “‘Should Chief of State Natasi Daala release the insane Jedi from carbonite imprisonment?’ In different polls, it’s phrased different ways. For instance, in one it’s ‘the Jedi who went on a violent rampage and attempted to kill fellow Jedi and GA citizens.’ Another poll narrows it to ‘Jedi who have not been convicted of a crime.’ We’re charting public opinion and measuring variations in response based on things such as former Alliance or Confederation loyalty, planet of origin, species, age, gender, the variant forms of description of the Jedi I mentioned, what they had for their last meal, political party affiliation, occupation, and what news broadcast they usually watch.”

  “And you were waiting for early results to your
poll before saying yes or no?” Han sounded outraged. “Whatever happened to doing what feels right?”

  The smile Daala turned on Han was not a friendly one. “What feels right is banning the Jedi altogether and setting up an order of Force-users loyal to the government. Should I proceed with that approach?”

  “Well, I meant what feels right and what’s also not monumentally stupid.”

  Daala’s smile faded. “You’re insolent, General. And insubordinate.”

  “Yeah, the truth has a way of sounding that way.”

  “Han, please.” Leia caught his eye, shot him what to Daala and Dorvan would have looked like a warning expression. Only Leia and Han knew they were playing good-guard, bad-guard. She returned her attention to Daala. “Now you know why Han never pursued a career in public office. He’s much better at shooting people. But he’s coming close to the truth here. Aren’t you worried about letting the tail wag the nek?”

  “No.” Daala looked unconcerned. “The poll data is just one of many variables I’ll be using to come to a conclusion. Not even a particularly important one. But one we can sample while we’re sitting here. One most people wouldn’t have noticed I was stalling to sample.”

  Han turned to Dorvan. “Well, since it’s not a crucial element in the decision … what sort of early results are you getting?”

  Dorvan glanced at Daala for permission and, receiving her nod, returned his attention to his datapad. “A simple majority favor unfreezing the Jedi. Expected variations based on the various personal factors I mentioned.” He blinked several times. “Variations based on the language describing the Jedi are not as extensive as I would have expected. Well within the range of, say, mathematical rounding errors.”

  “Interesting.” Daala didn’t sound in the least interested. “All right. Doing what seems right. Here’s my counteroffer. The Jedi turn Sothais Saar over to the government. He won’t be frozen. He will be studied. He will be allowed standard prisoner access to an advocate, plus unrestricted access will be permitted to one medical scientist provided by the Order and one Jedi liaison. If, after thirty days, he has demonstrated no unusual facility for escape or mayhem, we will unfreeze one of the Horns under the same terms. If, after another month, the situation remains unchanged, we’ll unfreeze the other Horn.”