The cold burn of his words hit her like a splash of liquid nitrogen. He wasn’t merely angry. Unless she did something right here, right now, he was going to murder her. She didn’t even bother thinking about escape. If Dooku wanted to end her, he would. He had not taught her all the Sith lore he possessed, but even the slender connection between them made her terribly vulnerable to his arts. Besides which, he might well be the most powerful being in the galaxy, with nearly unlimited resources at his disposal. An amount of money that wouldn’t even register as a blip in Dooku’s accounts would be enough to keep her on the run from assassins for the rest of her short, miserable life, hiding out in jungles and living on womp rats, or passing herself through a series of chop shops, mutilating her features for the slim, desperate chance of disguise.
No. In every fiber of her being Asajj knew that running, hiding, defending was always the wrong strategy. In every engagement, one had to seize the initiative. In every engagement, the key was to attack.
“Kill your Master,” she said.
Dooku blinked. “What?”
Well, at least he wasn’t expecting it, Asajj thought, with a wild grin. She had made her gamble—nothing to do now but back it up. “Kill your Master now, with my help. Now while you can.” She noted the tiniest flinch on the Count’s face. “Sooner or later, every Sith apprentice tries to overthrow his Master. I know it. You know it. He knows it. Now is your time. You are an independent agent on a fortress planet. Armies are at your command. The wealth of worlds is at your feet. Now is your time.”
“I do admire the unexpected flair of your attack,” Dooku murmured. “I have mentioned the benefits of age to you more than once, but it has its drawbacks, too. One gets settled in one’s ways. But you…you still surprise me. You are still unexpected.”
“How do you think this war is going to go?” Ventress said, pressing her tiny moment of advantage. “What happens if you win? Will you return to Coruscant in triumph? Will you sit at the great man’s hand when the fighting is done? I don’t think so. How can he let you live—Dooku, the conquering general. Dooku the wealthy. Dooku the wise. You must stand too much in his sun, Count.”
“You are bluffing about things you do not know, Asajj. It is a brave show, but it will not do.”
His attempt at a condescending smile did not convince her. “He will use you up,” she said. “He will put you on the front lines when he can. He will throw Yoda at you, and his sycophants: Kenobi, Windu, Skywalker.”
“With great ability comes great responsibility, Ventress. Not, clearly, one of your long suits.”
“Fine, fine, take your shots,” she said impatiently. “You’re just buying time now, because I’m right. Ask yourself one question—ask it from the dark side, look at it clear-eyed, Count. Right now, your Master uses you because he is beset by dangers. What happens when you are the most dangerous being left standing?”
Through the comm channel, no sound but the faint static hiss of stars, burning and burning.
“If I told you to kill yourself, would you do it?” Dooku asked.
“No.”
“What if I told you to come here, back to Vjun.”
“I would come.”
“Would you be afraid?”
“Terrified.” Out here, in the deeps of space, she could hold him off. She could run away. But once she set foot in Château Malreaux, once she entered into the orbit of Dooku’s power, she would never leave alive unless he willed it.
“But you would come?”
“If you order it.”
Dooku regarded her. “I do.”
So much for bluffing. “Will you have me killed, or will you listen to what I have to say?”
“That is none of your business.”
“He’s going to use you up, Count. He’ll drain the blood from you and throw you aside. He’ll pick someone younger, weaker, easier to influence.”
“Someone like you?”
“I wish. No, when you go, I’ll be swept aside,” she said morosely. “I’m just one of your creatures, to him. Maybe to you, too. Loyalty runs stronger up than it does down, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Usually true,” the Count conceded. “Master Yoda, perhaps, is the exception. His loyalty to his students runs deeper than theirs to him, I think.”
“Admirable,” Ventress said dryly. “But that doesn’t do either of us any good, does it?”
Asajj Ventress sat before the nav computer on her stolen ship for a long time, trying to decide what to do, cursing softly but steadily. Finally she entered coordinates for Vjun. At the end of the day, running and hiding wasn’t her style. Her chances of convincing the Count that they should work together would be better face-to-face. He liked her fire and her passion, and—though his iron self-control never slipped—she knew he thought her lovely, and that didn’t hurt, either.
And if it went badly…better to be cut down quickly in person, blades drawn, than live in skulking misery for the rest of her days, feeling every stray gleam of sun on her back like a sniper’s targeting dot.
All that being said, forcing her fingers to put in the Vjun coordinates felt like deliberately sticking them into a fire, and she was in a fairly filthy humor when the ship’s comm console chirped. She ignored the signal. It wasn’t, after all, her ship. But the hail kept repeating, over and over, until looking up with irritation she saw the call-up code for the Tac-Spec Footman droid, the one who had given her Yoda’s location.
Oh, great. “What do you want?”
“I think you know,” said the calm voice at the other end. “I want the rest of my money. We agreed on a certain price. Now I find only one-third of that sum has been credited to my account.”
“I didn’t get the target.”
“My information was exact and correct, and that is what you paid for. Your inability to perform is no reason to penalize me.”
“Yeah, well, life’s tough all over,” Ventress snapped. “As you must know, I am out the price of a starship. I don’t have the credits to give you—to tell you the truth, I threw in the children’s lives as a favor to you. Consider it payment in kind.”
“They were not part of our agreement.”
“Spoken like a cold-blooded droid, all right. Or should that be cold-oiled?” Ventress hunted through the ship’s computer system, looking for the repair and maintenance manual. A service light had started blinking in the middle of her last hyperspace jump, a little icon of a purple jellyfish-thing with what looked like spears running through it and a big red bar; she had no idea what it might signify. “You know, haggling over money is not my favorite activity at the best of times, and to be perfectly frank, haggling with a tin can—a traitorous tin can at that—interests me even less.”
“I may be a traitor,” the droid said, “but I’m not a cut-rate one. I highly recommend you reconsider.”
Aha! Ventress thought, scanning through the ship’s manual—she had it! The blinking light was the fluid ligature spindling indicator. She read rapidly through the help section:
…when this light flashes, fluid ligatures may be in danger of spindling, or may already have spindled. Spindling may lead to excessive wear, loss of translight pressure, or weight gain due to instability in artificial gravity devices. Also, in rare cases, death.
Occasionally, fluid ligature spindling indicator may flash for no reason.
So here she was, heading back to Vjun in a stolen ship that might or might not have spindled fluid ligatures, in apparently imminent danger of a grav-induced weight gain, with the prospect of an interview with an angry Sith Lord waiting for her with execution on his mind.
“Tin Man, I gotta tell you—right now, you’re the least of my worries.”
Far away, in an anonymous comm booth, Solis, who had betrayed Yoda’s secret and now was not even to be paid for it, stared at the connection cut by recipient message on the screen. “We’ll see about that,” he said.
At the same instant that connection died, another sputtered
to life between the Jedi Council Chamber and Anakin Skywalker’s ship. “Hailing.”
“Master Windu!”
“Obi-Wan? Why aren’t you in your own ship?”
Obi-Wan grimaced. “Repairs. Anakin agreed to give me a lift.”
“I see. Current location?”
Obi-Wan rolled his eyes at Anakin, who grinned back at him. Mace Windu, supremely gifted in so many ways, was not much for small talk. “Inbound to Coruscant, flight plan as filed,” Anakin said. “We’re sublight for a day and a half for refueling and stores. Should be home in four days. According to local space news, reports of Master Yoda’s death were greatly exaggerated.”
“True. The same can’t be said for Maks Leem and Jai Maruk,” Mace said grimly.
“Oh.” The Jedi looked at one another, their smiles fading. “We hadn’t heard.”
“Master Yoda is on his way to—this channel is scrambled?”
The comm protocols on Anakin’s ship were permanently set for triple-encrypted hard code for any channel running to the Temple, but he double-checked. A gross malfunction in the ship’s reactor drives could cost him and Obi-Wan their lives; much tinier slips in signal encryption could cost the lives of millions. “All secure,” he said crisply. Mace Windu’s grimness was catching.
“Master Yoda is on the way to Vjun to negotiate secretly for the possible defection of a highly placed Confederacy figure. Very highly placed,” Mace said significantly.
“Master Yoda?” Anakin said, puzzled. “Surely there are more important things for him to be—”
He trailed off as Obi-Wan gave him a long look. “Extremely highly placed, I’m guessing,” the older man said.
Half a second later, Anakin got it. “Dooku? He’s going to negotiate with Dooku?—It’s a trap. He must know it’s a trap, right?”
“A trap, yes…but for whom?” Obi-Wan murmured.
“At the moment, Master Yoda is traveling to Vjun on a very important mission,” Mace continued. “We wanted to keep it quiet, but obviously the secret is out. Equally obviously, your old friend Asajj Ventress is gunning for him. She killed both the Jedi traveling with him; only two Padawans remain. I would like—”
“Uh-oh,” Obi-Wan said. “Why do I get the feeling we aren’t inbound to Coruscant after all?”
“—the two of you to proceed to Vjun with all possible speed and give Master Yoda whatever help he requests and requires.”
“Isn’t there someone else?” Anakin said unexpectedly. “We were supposed to return to Coruscant three weeks ago. I’ve already broken one promise to be back…”
The words hung in the air, irrevocable.
“Promise?” Mace said. “To whom did you make this promise?”
“The students in Master Iron Hand’s class,” Obi-Wan said smoothly. “Anakin has been promising to teach them some tricks.”
“Your chance to show off will have to be delayed,” Mace said. His look of distaste was one with which Anakin had become wearyingly familiar. Mace’s disapproval of Anakin seemed so general, so reflexive, it was hard not to resent even in a case like this, where there was actually far more to disapprove of than Windu knew. “Get to Vjun, please. Windu out.”
Anakin colored a little, and did not look at Obi-Wan. “Thanks.”
Obi-Wan shrugged it off, nettled. “I don’t know why I bother sticking my neck out for you.” He busied himself checking out a course for Vjun. “Especially since I feel, with every nerve in my body, that someday you won’t thank me for it.”
After the fight in the Phindar Spaceport, all Scout wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry.
Yoda had other ideas.
He talked the station authorities into letting them take a rental to Jovan. Then it was a public shuttle to the low-rent end of Jovan Station, packed with used-ship dealerships and scrap yards. Yoda didn’t want to take public transport anymore, he said. He pushed the Padawans from junkyard to junkyard, looking for a ship they could take to Vjun.
They’d had their choice of several decent-looking ships, but Master Yoda turned all of them down: too flashy, too new, too expensive. “Expensive?” Scout had asked. “You can use the credits of the Jedi Temple, can’t you? Or the Chancellor’s office, for that matter.”
Yoda’s face had sucked in and his ears had curled down in an expression of repugnance. “So waste the people’s money I should?”
Scout had thrown up her hands in frustration.
So the four of them kept looking—Yoda, Whie, Scout, and Fidelis, the gentleman’s personal gentlething. They had seen no sign of Solis since the spaceport. No prizes for guessing why. Ventress had come there looking for them. Her droids had targeted the R2 unit right away. When Solis disappeared after the battle, it was obvious he had betrayed them. Scout’s face went grim, remembering how the droid had set her up, dragging her away from the others with his story about needing a human escort in the spaceport. Whittling away their numbers. Maybe if she had stayed it wouldn’t have made any difference. Maybe she wouldn’t have been able to save Maks Leem and Master Maruk. But at least she wouldn’t have been a hundred meters away on a staircase, watching their murders.
Fidelis had been inconsolable. At first Scout wanted him scrapped or abandoned, but his anguish at having brought along a confederate who had endangered the heir of the Malreaux line was so deep and obsessive, so obviously hardwired, that even she didn’t believe he had been involved in their betrayal. They had thought about sending him away, but in the end that, too, seemed impractical. Having found Whie at last, nothing short of being cut in half with a lightsaber was going to keep the droid from following him. “If you refuse to let me come inside your ship, I’ll just rivet myself to the hull,” he’d said, and frankly they had believed him.
Yoda finally found what he was looking for in the fifth junkyard they visited on Jovan Station: a sway-backed old nag of a ship, an ancient B-7 light freighter with red blotches over the cargo bay doors.
“Rust?” Whie said. “How do you get rust with no air and no water?”
That got a big belly laugh out of the junkyard operator. “Naw, this little girl got held up by pirates, you see. Those red splotches aren’t rust, they’re—”
“How much?” Yoda said quickly.
Scout and Whie grimaced at one another. Master Yoda preferred not to use the Force for something as simple as arguing over a price. He said it was disrespectful to the Force, and to one’s opponent in commercial combat, but the real truth, Scout privately thought, was that Yoda was a gleeful, cranky, relentless bargainer who thought haggling was fun. So much of bargaining is about patience, and bazaar-stand shysters on a hundred planets had learned to their sorrow that one doesn’t know what patience is until one has tried to outlast an eight-hundred-plus-year-old Jedi skinflint. Whie and Scout had already heard Master Yoda spend hours dickering over price at the last two junkyards, only to stump away unsatisfied, waggling his stick and muttering, leaving the poor owners looking as if they’d been slowly crushed in a garbage compactor.
The two Padawans drifted away from the Haggling Zone. Whie looked terrible, Scout thought: gaunt and red-eyed from grief and lack of sleep. “Hey,” she said. “You hanging in?”
“Sure.”
“You’re lying.”
“Yeah.” He gave her a long, searching look, almost desperate. She saw his eyes flick toward Yoda, still haggling.
Scout jerked one thumb toward a little aisle between the B-7 and the next hulk, an old Epoch-class freighter with a single laser cannon turret, its barrel bent like a broken antenna. Obviously there was something on Whie’s mind; Scout figured a little privacy might make it easier to talk about. As benevolent as Yoda was, there were some kinds of weakness, some kinds of doubt one didn’t want to be confessing in front of the being with the power to make or break one as a Jedi Knight.
She ambled over to the narrow lane, running her fingers lightly along the Epoch’s fuselage. Its hull was dinged and scuffed and pocked with a sprinkling of
micrometeor punctures: the ship had probably spent her last few years as an insystem trader, swimming in dangerous solar space, murky with asteroid debris and other kinds of particulate matter. With starships, as with deep-water craft, only the lubbers loved the sight of land. To a sailor’s eye, blue water or hard black space were the places to be, far from the perils of leeward shores and gravity wells.
When they were safely out of sight, Scout said, “All right, spill it.”
Whie kicked absently at the old freighter with one space-booted toe. “Yesterday—was it yesterday, or the day before? I’ve lost track of the hours. It doesn’t matter. The last time I slept, I had a dream.” He paused. “A special kind of dream.”
“The one where you…”
“Where I was killed by a Jedi. Yes.” He swallowed and gave her a wan smile. “But it wasn’t the only dream I’ve had recently. There was another, just before we left Coruscant. You were in it.”
“Me!”
“Yes.” For the first time since Master Leem died, a little color crept into Whie’s face. “We were in a room, a beautiful, terrible room. And you were bleeding—”
“Master Whie?” called the anxious voice of the Malreaux family gentleman’s personal gentlething from behind the Epoch’s hull. “Master? Where are you?”
“Here! What is it?” Whie snapped.
“There you are!” Fidelis came hurrying around the corner. “I was doing currency calculations for Master Yoda, and when I looked up, you had gone!”