Star Wars®: Yoda: Dark Rendezvous Page 3

  “It doesn’t feel very good, does it? Like sharp stones in your throat and chest.” Dooku made another little patting motion, and Ventress slammed to the tile floor. “It’s the blood vessels I hate,” Dooku said. “The way they stretch inside, like balloons about to pop.”

  “P-p-p-please…”

  “But worse than anything is the memories,” he said, more softly still. “They crowd around, like flies on meat. Every despicable thing, every petty vice, every little act of spite.” A cruel, strange quiet stretched out as Ventress panted on the stone floor. Rain ticked against the window glass, and the Count’s soft voice went dark and far away. “All the things you should have stopped, but didn’t, and nothing will ever be right again. And the things you’ve done,” he whispered. “By the pitiless stars, the things you’ve done…”

  The comm on Dooku’s desk beeped. He shook his head, like a man waking from a dream. “The Troxan delegation is at the door.”

  Ventress crawled to her feet. Her face was bruised and her cheeks were wet with tears. Both pretended not to notice. “Tell them I’ll be right down,” Count Dooku said.

  Physically, the Count’s age was rarely a handicap. Deft as he had become with the Force—unimaginably more subtle than the boy who had watched water-skeeters in the Jedi gardens all those years ago—he wore his eighty-three standard years better than most humans half his age. He was still in superb physical shape, senses keen, health undiminished by even the memory of a cold.

  Only in this situation, stooped before the image of his Master, did he feel his years. Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension.

  “These are the envoys from Troxar,” his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn’t ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.

  “They are considering surrender,” Dooku said. “They claim they have a resistance planned, ready to rise in insurrection when the clone troops withdraw.”

  “No!” the flickering figure said sharply. “The war has already damaged the planet too much to make it worth saving. Its only value now is to chew up more troops and resources. Tell them they have to fight on. Promise them reinforcements—tell them you will be deploying a new fleet of advanced droids to retake the whole system within a month, if only they can hold on. Explain that such weapons will not be put in the hands of those who surrender.”

  “And when the month passes, and no reinforcements arrive?”

  “Help will come within another month at most. Promise them that, and make them believe it. I’ve shown you how.”

  “I understand,” Dooku said. How casually we betray our creatures.

  The hooded figure cocked its head. “Having an attack of conscience, my apprentice?”

  “No, Master.” He met the hooded figure’s hideous eye. “It was their own greed that brought them to you,” he said. “In their heart of hearts, they always knew what they were getting into.”

  The Château Malreaux was alive with eyes.

  The spectacular security system installed by the seventeenth (and last) Viscount Malreaux in the final months of his descent into madness was one of the reasons Dooku had chosen the château for his current base of operations. Optic recorder studs littered the mansion, disguised as upholstery rivets in the parlor, screw heads in the kitchen cabinets, painkiller pills in the apothecary’s pantry, and the black eyes of birds woven into the tapestries of the Crying Room. Top-of-the-line infrared swatches, originally developed as prosthetics for tongue-damaged Sluissi, were grafted into the cream-and-crimson Malreaux livery of the table linen and carpets and drapes. The faux walls that had been built at enormous expense to riddle the château with secret passageways were pocked with spyholes. Microphones nested like spiders in dozens of drawers and linen closets, under every bed, taped to the roof by each of the eleven chimneys, and even glued on the base of a priceless bottle of Crème D’Infame in the wine cellar.

  The seventeenth (and final) Viscount Malreaux, convinced he was being poisoned, had murdered his kitchen staff and then fled into his secret tunnels, coming out only at night. The last anyone saw of him was a murky glimpse shot from a security cam hidden in a fake onion in a hanging basket in the kitchen: a thirty-second recording of a skeletal figure creeping from a hidden grate into the kitchen to drink two hurried gulps of tap water and gnaw a handful of raw flour.

  If it hadn’t been for the smell, the corpse of the seventeenth (and terminal) Lord Malreaux would never have been found.

  Someone hidden in the secret passage that ran over the study, for example, would have been able to watch the whole of the conversation between Dooku and Asajj Ventress through a peephole gimlet in the ceiling. If that person had been patient, and waited until Ventress was well away, he or she would have seen the conference between Dooku and the hologrammic apparition of Darth Sidious.

  And if the watcher had waited a good while after Dooku left the room, he or she might have seen a section of shelving swing out unexpectedly, admitting a small, quick, evil creature, a Vjun fox, its coat a brindled red and cream, with clever prehensile hands instead of paws.

  After pausing a moment to sniff, it advanced warily into the room, speculatively at first, but almost immediately coming to the spot where Dooku had dropped Jang Li-Li’s thawing severed hand. The floor was tiled in the Malreaux check, half fusty crimson, half dirty cream, like dried blood and curdled milk. The hand, landing with a wet thud on one of the dirty-cream tiles, had left a splotch. The fox sniffed, and its thin pink tongue showed between its lips.

  “Not yet, my sweet.” A wheezing older woman limped through the secret door. She was dressed in dirty tatters of what had once been fine clothing—a pink ball gown gone black at its raveled hems, torn stockings, and the remains of what had once been a pair of gold lamé slippers. Around her neck she wore a fur stole made from foxtails tied together. “Wait a bits. Which Momma wants to take a look-see.” She lowered her bulk to the floor with a grunt and bent forward to peer at the stain.

  She gasped. “Oh, precious,” she whispered. She leaned over to stare more intently at the splotch, and her eyes, small and hard as little black marbles, went wet and shiny. “Oh,” she said. She sat slowly back on her haunches, rocking and rocking. “Oh, oh, oh!”

  The fox looked up at her.

  The old woman looked back with an expression of such savage triumph that the fox recoiled, baring its little yellow needle teeth. “Oh, such a day for Momma, sweetness! Which she’s been waiting such a long time for this,” she whispered. She met the foxy eyes. “Can’t you see, honeypot? Can’t you smell it? The Baby’s coming home!”

  She stood up. Emotion made her hams shake, and the thick flesh of her upper arms. “Time to get ready,” she muttered. “Clean the Baby’s room. Make his little bed.” She limped quickly back into the passageway.

  The fox waited with pricked ears until the sound of her mutters dwindled slowly into the darkness. Then it bent its head to the bloodstained floor, and with its long pink tongue licked the tile clean.

  Count Dooku’s meeting with the Troxan delegation went well. He made a cold kind of game of it, trying to see how little he could say, letting them do all the lying for him. “There are new battle droids in production,” he had remarked. That was all it took; they did the rest.

  “Surely you’ll be sending them to our quadrant,” said the under-palatine for patriotic liaisons.

  “Really, we’re key to the entire region,” his assistant said.

  “Of course, you understand our need,” another said.

  “What other planets have fought so bravely for the cause?” a fourth asked.

  Each of these fine hopes he reinforced with a smile and pushed into their minds with the Force, like a seal pressed into warm wax, so it felt like certainty. In fact, using the Force was hardly necessary. What man—or Troxan, either—would choose to believe that with every sen
tence he was betraying thousands of his fellows to death, when he could see himself as a hero instead? So much for the urge to Do Good, Dooku thought. Shown up again as just another illusion blinding creatures to the stark universe the dark side alone showed in all its bitter clarity.

  What are we, Dooku?

  Alone. Alone. Alone.

  Watching the Troxans hang themselves was middling sport at best, too easy to take much pleasure in. Dooku moved rapidly to bring the meeting to a close and send them back to their slaughterhouse. “Anything else?” he asked.

  The delegates looked at one another. “Actually, there was one other curious incident,” said the under-palatine, a portly middle-aged Troxan with a bulbous nose and purple gills. “As you may know, I was honored with the title of first diplomatic legatee, and sent to the second round of talks with Republican negotiators. Nothing came of it, of course; the Senate has dropped even the pretense of debate now, and it’s all threats and bluster these days.” He rippled his throat gills dismissively. “It hardly alters the impression, as I mentioned to the Senatorial committee years before hostilities even began—”

  “The curious incident,” Dooku said impatiently.

  The flustered under-palatine sucked in his cheeks. “I was getting to that. At the end of the session, I was approached by Senator Amidala of Naboo, who asked me to deliver something to you.” With plump, nervous hands he brought out a small box, marked with the Jedi seal. “Let me assure you, we have taken every precaution here, used the most advanced scanning techniques—”

  “We thought it might be a bomb,” his assistant volunteered.

  “Or a bug,” another said.

  “I still think it could be poisoned,” a fourth said.

  “Believe me when I say, your safety, of course, has been uppermost…”

  Dooku reached for the box. He found to his surprise that his hands were shaking. Odd. He had been almost as surprised as Ventress to see himself sparing the gaunt Jedi, Jai Maruk. It had been a sudden whim, sending him back. A hook dropped for Yoda, as he had told Sidious afterward. A hook baited with the pink squirm of an old memory.

  Darth Sidious had given him a curious look, then, one that passed through him like a flush of fever, a weakness inside. “Do you still love him?” his Master said.

  Dooku had laughed and braved it out. The idea was ridiculous.

  “Ridiculous?” his Master had said, in that soft, terrible voice of his. “I hardly think so.” And then, his voice like honeyed poison, “A good student always loves his teacher.”

  There was always a risk, talking with Sidious. Sometimes the conversation would go badly, and Dooku would fail to please somehow. It was a terrible thing, failing to please his Master.

  He shook his head. These were a boy’s weak fears. If Yoda had truly taken his lure, he would come, and if he did—what a gift for Sidious that would be, a nine-hundred-year-old head! That wheezing old half-crippled sage was stuck in the Republic like a cork; pull him out and, with a pop, the dark side would come rushing through. Then his Master would see how loyal a servant Dooku truly was.

  He grabbed the box. He could feel Yoda’s touch still lingering on the edges like a distant echo. Vividly his mind went back to their last meeting, on Geonosis: swords drawn at last, and finally equal. What a bittersweet moment—to see Yoda again, and be a match, or more than a match for him…but not to be seen by him. No, they had gone their separate ways, and Yoda had newer Jedi to look after. Kenobi and, worse yet, young Skywalker.

  Oh, yes, and wasn’t everyone watching him. Even Darth Sidious, with a gleam in his eye, mentioned the boy as one strong in the Force. “Just a little piece in a great game,” his Master had said; but a stab of jealousy had gone through Dooku when Sidious lingered over the name. Skywalker, yes…The Force is strong in him.

  The same Anakin Skywalker who, he had learned, had recently killed a clone of Count Dooku of Serenno. Poor foolish clone. Another changeling, another Dooku abandoned by his parents, left to be chopped up by some upstart Jedi butcher in the name of a corrupt Republic.

  Dooku rather thought that if he weren’t so old and wise, he would probably hate this Anakin Skywalker. At least a little.

  His flipped back the clasps on the box. Strange that his hands should still be shaking so.

  The under-palatine for the Bureau of Patriotic Defense looked over his shoulder. “We studied it exhaustively,” the diplomat said, flapping his gills in puzzlement, “but all our experts agree it’s nothing more than a plain wax candle.”

  2

  On the top of a dilapidated skyrise in the Temple district of Coruscant, two droids were playing dejarik in the rain. They played extremely fast, moving each piece with blinding speed and precision; their fingers fell and rose like sewing-machine needles plunging through reams of syncloth.

  The two droids were built to an identical design, humanoid and tall, but there the resemblance ended, as if they had been twins separated at birth, one to live in a palace, while the other was doomed to be an outcast, scraping out a hardscrabble existence in alleyways and gutters. The first droid was immaculately painted in an ornate livery, cream with crimson piping on his limbs, the blood-and-ivory colors repeated in a formal checker on his torso. The red was somewhat light and shaded with brown, like the color of fox fur, or dried blood. The cream was tinged with yellow; the color swatch at the store where the droid had last retouched his paint had called the tint “animal teeth.”

  The outcast droid had long since worn down to bare metal, and never been repainted. His scratched face was gray, scuffed as if from countless years of hard service. He paused to look up into the rain. He was careful to scour himself every night, but still the rust crept into his joints and scratches, and his face was pocked where flakes and patches of metal had started to rust and been ruthlessly rubbed away.

  The droids sat at the edge of the roof. The scuffed one kept his visual receptors on the game, but his richly painted partner was constantly glancing up, looking out onto the canyon between buildings, the busy slidewalks and the constant flow of fliers humming by, and, farther off, the wide entrance and towering spire of the Jedi Temple.

  Of course, from this little terrace, it would be very difficult to observe much of anything happening at the Temple. At such a distance, and with the rain falling, too, it would have required the eyes of a Horansi to see a bedraggled figure come splashing up to the Temple’s front doors. To resolve that figure as an angry Troxan diplomat carrying a curious-looking diplomatic pouch would have taken something far beyond biological sight: something on the order of the legendary Tau/Zeiss telescopic sniperscope—etched transparisteel or neural implant reticle available on request—whose ability to hold its zero through a full range of adjustment from X1 to X100 had never been matched in the four hundred standard years since the last T/Z production line fell silent.

  The cream-and-crimson droid paused, its fingers motionless over the board. Several kilometers away, through a shifting curtain of rain, the Troxan diplomat was arguing with the young Jedi standing sentry duty at the Temple doors. The packet changed hands.

  “What are you doing?” his drab, gray partner asked.

  The diplomat splashed back through the rain to a waiting flier. The youngster disappeared into the Temple.

  The liveried droid’s fingers bent down through the holographic warriors on the circular gameboard to move a piece. “Waiting,” he said.

  The xeno-ethnologists of Coruscant have estimated the number of sentient species in the universe at around twenty million, give or take a standard deviation or two depending on just what sentient means at any given time. One might ask, for instance, if the Bivalva contemplativa, the so-called thinking clams of Perilix, are really “thinking” in the usual sense, or if their multigenerational narrative semaphores reflect something less like conversation and more like hive building. Still, twenty million is the usual number.

  Of all of these species, an observer watching Jedi Master Maks Leem l
ift the hem of her robe and go hurrying through the Jedi Temple, late in the evening some thirty months after the Battle of Geonosis, might argue that it was the three-eyed, goat-headed Gran whose faces were most particularly suited to expressing worry. The three shaggy brows above Master Leem’s anxious eyes were tensely furrowed. Her jaw was long and narrow, even by Gran standards, and when she was anxious she had a tendency to grind her teeth, a ghostly holdover from the Gran’s cud-chewing ruminant past.

  Master Leem was not normally of a nervous disposition. Gentle, motherly, and placidly competent, she was a great favorite of the younger acolytes, and very difficult to rattle. A Mace Windu or an Anakin Skywalker might grow restless at the Jedi’s essentially defensive posture, but not so Maks Leem. The Gran were a deeply social, community-oriented folk, and she had gladly given her life in service to the ideal of peacemaker. What she hated was that now, by slow but seemingly relentless degrees, she and the Jedi were turning, contemptibly, into soldiers.

  She had thought the Republic’s civil war was the worst thing that could happen. Then came the slaughter on Geonosis, claiming the flower of a Jedi generation in a single day. The flash of plasma bolts, the taste of sand in one’s mouth, the whine and shriek of battle droids—it seemed like a nightmare now, a confused blur of grief and pain. She had lost more than a dozen comrades, all closer to her than sisters. That had brought the war home as no distant newsvid could.

  On the way back to Coruscant, Master Yoda had spoken of healing and recovery, but for Maks Leem the last thirty months had been hard, hard. For her, it was easier to face memories of the battle than to cope with the terrible emptiness in the Temple. Forty places set for dinner in a hall made to hold a hundred. The west block of the kitchen gardens left fallow. The rhythms of Temple life cut away for lack of time; no time for gardening now, or mending robes by hand, or games. Now it was hand-to-hand combat, small-unit tactical training, military infiltration exercises. Food made in a hurry from ingredients bought in the city, and grave-eyed children of twelve and fourteen suddenly monitoring comm transmissions, running courier routes, or researching battle plans.