I smiled. A mere dozen hours before now this display would have impressed me and flattered me. I would have felt that I had her right where I wanted her, too; that I had trapped her into devoting so much energy to winning me that she’d never see how much I was fooling her. I would have poured a glass of the brandy, toasted her defeat and tossed it off triumphantly.
Now I just saw a pile of things that had been stolen from others. She had no right to any of this, and giving it to me, giving me things she did not own and had not worked to earn had no value. She took what she wanted, and while she thought she wanted me to come to her voluntarily, the fact was that she’d have from me what she wanted or she’d have me destroyed. Her gesture was as hollow as she was amoral; and that just made my decision to deal with her that much more important and imperative.
Elegos returned to the suite’s parlor after having completed a circuit through the bedroom, refresher station and food preparation station. “There is much more elsewhere, including things suggesting a fair amount of intimacy in the refresher station and bedroom.”
“In her fondest dreams, Elegos.” I gave him a confident smile. “We’ve got a month. In that time, I intend to become her worst nightmare.”
“Good. I applaud your decision.” The Caamasi clapped his hands together and smiled. “I should add, I think it is one worthy of even your grandfather.”
FORTY-TWO
“My grandfather?” I stared at Elegos, gape-mouthed. “You’re not referring to Rostek Horn, are you?”
The Caamasi shook his head and pointed me toward one of the suite’s chairs. “You inquired if I could be trusted several hours ago, and you informed me of a decision that requires I keep your trust, or you will be hurt and perhaps even killed. I offer you, now, something of similar value.”
I slowly sat. Highlights skittered silver over his gold down as he drew himself together in the middle of the room. I sensed a great solemnity about him, and knew what he was about to do was not something he did lightly. “Elegos, you need not tell me anything that will jeopardize you or your people. In fact, it might be best if you don’t.”
“No, I know I can trust you.” The Caamasi gave me a beneficient smile. “Even under pain of death you would not surrender this secret.”
Not knowing what to say, I just sat back and let my bandaged hands lie on my belly.
“You will recall I told you that memories of momentous events become strong and almost tangible to us?”
I nodded. “Killing someone would create such a memory.”
“Correct, or other things like the birth of a child, or meeting someone famous, or being present at some significant event.” Elegos’ expression softened slightly. “Among the Caamasi we refer to these memories as memnii. They are memories invested with emotion and sensory data and, even sometimes, intangible things that escape quantification. They are more fine in detail than any holograph, and more precious to us than any material possession.”
He brushed his fingertips lightly across the purple striping on his shoulders and around his eyes. “The truly significant thing about memnii is that we can share them with others. The ability to transfer them is limited by consanguinity, which is why our clans often intermarry, making certain there are open avenues of communication between groups. Because we can share these memories, because they come across with full impact, they have more completely allowed us to communicate within our species. This is why we have avoided violence and look to help others find peace.
“My markings are common among the Kla, the maternal clan into which I was born. It is fairly easy for me to transfer a memnis to another member of the Kla clan or to my father’s clan, the A clan.”
My head came up. “My grandfather knew a Caamasi named Ylenic It’kla.”
“My mother’s brother. We share the maternal line. I knew him well and we were very proud of his being a Jedi.” Elegos’ face took on a very happy expression. “You must understand, we Caamasi discovered something special about the Jedi. While only three or four generations of separation could all but block the transfer of memnii between Caamasi, when one of us came to know a Jedi and form a bond with him, we could transfer to him a memnis. This is nothing short of a miracle, and when my uncle became a Jedi, the Kla clan’s pride swelled incredibly. It is through a memnis my uncle gave to me that I recognized you. You have Nejaa’s eyes, his scent and his sense.”
“Your uncle was Ylenic? Where is he? Can he tell me more about Nejaa?”
Elegos blinked his eyes rapidly and covered his face with his hands for a second. I started to get out of my chair, but he held a hand out to stop me, then composed himself. “Forgive me. My uncle was not on Caamas when our world was immolated. He was visiting a friend on Alderaan and convinced that friend to provide a safe haven for other Caamasi survivors. He and others of our leaders who had survived decided that we also had to spread out, and to mix our clans in all these new settlements. While Alderaan might be the largest settlement, it would not be the only one.”
I felt my blood run cold. “He died on Alderaan.”
Elegos nodded slowly. “He had eluded the Emperor’s Jedi hunters for years, but he could not elude a world’s destruction.”
“What was the memory of my grandfather he gave to you? Can you give it to me?”
Elegos shook his head. “I do not think you are quite enough a Jedi, nor enough of a friend, for us to be able to do this yet.” He hesitated. “And I am not certain you would want this memory. It is of your grandfather’s death.”
I sank back in the chair and closed my eyes. What I knew of my grandfather’s death was a nightmare, but at least I could treat it like a dream. I didn’t want to even think about getting it full blown with emotion from my grandfather’s friend. “You’re right. Perhaps that’s not a memory to which I am entitled.”
“Yet.”
I nodded and opened my eyes again. “Yet.”
“We shall have to remedy that, then.” The Caamasi smiled again, slyly this time, giving him just a hint of predator. “How will we proceed?”
I brushed a bandaged hand over my mouth. “Every good operation starts with Intelligence. The Invids draw ships and crews from all over, but those based here are definitely the spine of Tavira’s operation. If we shatter them and drive them away, she’ll have to take greater and greater risks, which means she’ll make mistakes.”
“Destroying a planet of pirates is a tall order for a lone Jedi Knight and a lightsaber.”
“True, especially since I don’t have a lightsaber.” I frowned. “Don’t think I can download the plans for one from the HoloNet, and I don’t think sending Luke Skywalker a message inquiring after how to build one will bring a favorable response.”
“Even on Kerilt we had heard of his Jedi academy. He would not teach you?”
I winced. “I was there, but didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms with him. Do the Caamasi have the equivalent of the Corellian ‘Strafing the spaceport you’ve just left?’ ”
“Uprooting a plant after you have plucked a single blossom.”
“It works. Can’t be a Jedi without a lightsaber.”
Elegos shrugged. “Perhaps you can re-root the plant.”
Something in the back of my brain clicked. “Not re-root, just grow a new one.” I got up and jogged into my bedroom. There on a night table I had a datapad and a stack of datacard journals. I picked them up and started sorting them clumsily by pitching the ones I didn’t want onto the bed. Finally I got down to the ones I needed and handed them to Elegos.
He frowned. “Corellian Horticultural Digests?”
I nodded. “Nejaa’s best friend, the man I grew up thinking of as my grandfather—the man who is my grandfather—was wise enough to know I’d need the sort of information I’d declined to take with me. These journals have in them columns he has written. I thought he gave them to me when I was leaving because he wanted to share his work with me, but I never even got all the way through any of them. Too mu
ch plant stuff, and annotations that reference the genetic codes of the hybrids. In those codes he has encrypted Nejaa’s journals and teachings, and the instructions for creating a lightsaber have got to be in there.”
Elegos scooped the datapad up. “If you will permit me, I will go through these journals and see what I can find.”
“Good.” I held my hands up. “Since I can’t fly for a bit, I have ample reasons for wandering about all over the place. I know a lot about operations here, but not as much as I should. Once I know where the support structures are for the Invid organization, I can take them apart. It won’t be easy, but it’s got to be done.”
“As my uncle often said, ‘There are attempts, and there are accomplishments. Histories only praise one.’ ”
I laughed and clapped my hands, then bit back the pain. “You accomplish some decoding and I’ll accomplish some healing, then we’ll go from there.”
I actually managed to do a lot during the time I was healing, and my imminent elevation to Tavira’s side helped me immeasurably. When I was asked, for example, why I didn’t use the bacta tanks on Courkrus to speed my healing, I said Tavira would think me weak if I could not endure the pain. That satisfied most folks, while the Jedi healing techniques Elegos uncovered from the journals actually allowed me to speed my healing. I knew, however, that having my hands continually wrapped in bandages would be helpful since it made me decidedly less threatening to most folks.
I made the rounds of the myriad groups stationed on Courkrus, and was greeted warmly by all the various leaders. They clearly felt courting me would be good for them in the long run. I spent some time in the Warren with Riistar’s Raiders and the Red Nova crew. Aside from wanton cruelty visited on the indigs, they were a fairly benign bunch of individuals. They were not quite the hard cases that the Survivors were, and really didn’t seem to have any secrets or plotting going on that I could exploit.
In direct contrast, Shala the Hutt and his gang of glitbiters were malevolent to the core. They’d taken over a warehouse out near the spaceport and had remodeled it in a fashion best described as Old Republic because it looked as if the place had been destroyed before the Empire arose and left virtually untouched since. Debris tangled the place, with rusty orange being the dominant color and laser-burn black being a second choice. Duraplast crates that looked worn enough to be Death Star debris were scattered all over, and the whole place stank of rotting vegetation.
The duracrete slab in the center had been lased down into an amphitheatre with a flattened dais at the north end where Shala spread himself out. I’ve heard it said that young Hutts can be quite muscular and powerful, which must mean that Shala is older than dirt. If a rock could be described as obese and it drooled, that would be Shala. Shala tended to mumble a lot, then laugh, which made his cronies laugh, too. The 3PO droid he had translating for him did a fairly good job, but Shala hit him so often to correct him that the droid’s right arm looked like it had been dragged behind a speeder bike going at high speed through Vlarnya’s narrow streets.
I smiled at the droid. “Tell your master I find his hospitality most generous, but an allergy to most insects means I’ll have to decline snacking on those crunchbugs.” I nodded to Shala and passed the bowl of chirping bugs back to him, licking my lips enviously. I turned my attention back to watching two little mammals with tusks trying to tear each other to pieces. They fought hard, apparently not knowing Shala would eat the victor.
The most interesting thing about Shala’s warehouse was that the building was actually smaller on the inside than it was on the outside. The absolute glut of junk in the place made it difficult to tell that fact from the inside, and I would have missed it save for spreading my senses out to see if he had hidden guards located in various spots where they could snipe at interlopers. I didn’t find any at that time, but I did discover people working behind false walls and in other sunken pits buried beneath piles of scrap metal and plasteel.
I smiled and gently flicked away a droplet of tuskette blood that hit my right cheek. The victorious tuskette screamed as Shala snapped its spine and bit its head off. He offered me a raw haunch, but I declined, so he tossed it to another of the warehouse’s denizens, and a fight ensued for it. I sincerely hoped for the sake of the Rodian who won the prize that Shala would be sated by tuskette, lest another victor end up on the evening’s menu.
By far the most secretive of the groups in Vlarnya was the Blackstar Pirates. While they made a cantina called the Mynock Hole their home, most of them passed through it on their way to another location. Way off in the back of the common room, in a corner where visitors never got seated, members would punch a code into a keypad and be admitted beyond a sliding door fitted into the wall. I had no idea what went on back there, though the relief of pirates allowed to leave their public station and retreat to the back radiated off them like heat off a fusion reactor.
While collecting data, I did my best to limit my uses of the Force. I wanted to avoid detection, of course, but I also wanted to avoid having things that seemed anomalous happening before I started taking overt action. The fact was that the easiest solution to dealing with the Invids was to put together a lightsaber and harvest a bunch of heads. Decapping the pirates would certainly cause a quickening of the Invids’ downfall, but then I’d be the only one left on Courkrus, which would provide Tavira with a big clue as to which one of us was the source of her problems.
Even more of a problem than that, of course, was the fact that I’d be committing wholesale murder. While it was true that none of these folks would ever be elected Humanitarian of the Year, they didn’t all deserve death. Caet and Timmser, for example, were just good pilots who had fallen in with the Invids. Had they joined the Rebellion, they could have been plotting Tavira’s downfall. I wanted to give them a chance to redeem themselves, I guess, which meant I needed to convince them that what they were doing was wrong and to walk, run, slither or fly away from it.
In this I had an invisible ally: all my targets were spacers. Something about traveling through the vastness of space, never knowing if a jump will go bad, dropping you into a sun or leaving you stuck in hyperspace forever, that makes spacers a bit superstitious. For years I’d worn a Jedi Medallion as a good luck charm. I’d infiltrated the Invids because I read an omen in a dream. If enough things began to go wrong, if there were enough signs of impending doom, even the hardcore Invids would begin looking elsewhere for planets to plunder and places to stay.
In all of the places I went I did my best to memorize what I could. Knowing as much as possible about various layouts was vital if I was to slip in and slip out again. The game I was going to play was very dangerous, but it was one that I had to win, so I did everything I could to control all the variables.
After a week, I had enough information to start planning my campaign. I laid everything out, figured who I would hit first and how, then where I would move next. I had to hit hard to keep the pressure on, yet I had to strike at random so I could not be anticipated and trapped.
It wasn’t going to be easy, but then if it was, it wouldn’t have been a job for a Jedi.
Only one last thing needed to be accomplished before I could begin.
I needed a lightsaber.
Elegos uncovered my grandfather’s instructions on how to create a lightsaber fairly early on, and my heart almost sank. The datafile was rather specific about the various supplies that would be needed to create the weapon, so I had a shopping list. Beyond that, however, the file detailed the steps needed to put the weapon together and included the various meditations and exercises a Jedi apprentice should go through with each step along the way. The process Nejaa laid out, if followed precisely, would take almost a month, and I didn’t have a month. I knew impatience and haste were part of the dark side, but really hoped things could be truncated so I could actually succeed in my task.
I took the first step by collecting the various parts. The lightsaber, while an elegant and deadly weapo
n, actually was not that complex. Getting the parts to put one together was not difficult at all. To serve as the hilt, for example, I salvaged the throttle assembly and handlebar tube from a junked speeder bike. I took it from where the wreck hung in the Crash cantina and no one so much as noticed me make off with it. I got the dimetris circuitry for the activation loop from an old capital-ship-grade ion cannon fire initiation controller—won that piece of junk from Shala betting on another tuskette fight. The recharger port and wiring came from a comlink. A milled down Tri-fighter laser flashback suppressor became the parabolic, high-energy flux aperture to stabilize the blade and I pulled the dynoric laser feed line from the same broken laser cannon to act as the superconductor for energy transference from the power cell to the blade. Buttons and switches were easy to find, and dear old Admiral Tavira, with her gift of the brandy decanter and snifters, provided me all the jewels I needed to make a half dozen lightsabers.
The most difficult part of creating a lightsaber was producing the power cell that stored and discharged the amount of energy necessary to energize a lightsaber blade. That said, the parts list called for a pretty basic power cell—in fact, because of the age of the instructions, I had a hard time locating one that ancient. Newer power cells were more efficient than the one my grandfather had specified, but I didn’t think that would present a problem. After all, as I read the instructions I came to realize that the nature of the battery was not as important as how it was integrated with the rest of the components.
The core of the Jedi ritual for creating a lightsaber came down to charging the power cell that first time. My grandfather ridiculed the popular superstition stating a Jedi channeled the Force through his lightsaber. He suggested that this was a misunderstanding of what it took to charge it initially and tie it to the rest of the weapon. The Jedi, carefully manipulating the Force, bound the components together—linking them on something more than a mechanical or material level, so they worked with unimagined efficiency. Without this careful seasoning and conditioning of the lightsaber, the blade would be flawed and would fail the Jedi.