Yoda (21 page)

Scout had just started to run when Ventress killed Jai. Master Maruk had lifted his lightsaber to block a downward stroke from one of her blades; the other passed cleanly through half his chest in a scything cut that dropped him like a bundle of chopped burr millet.

The breath left Scout's body as if she'd been hit by a landspeeder. It didn't even occur to her to worry about herself. Jai Maruk was suddenly dead. Her Master, whom she was sworn to honor and defend. An hour before, she had been complaining about him, but when the true test came she had proved everything he ever said about her unreadiness was right. She had fallen on the stairs, she had dropped her lightsaber, she had wasted time because she let the stupid droid catch her by the throat: one ridiculous screwup after another, and each of them eating away the precious seconds that turned out to be all the time her Master ever had.

And now he was dying or dead already.

Whie faltered and stopped. “Stars,” he whispered as Scout ran up. His face was deathly pale, and he was staring at Asajj Ventress. “This isn't right. It's not supposed to be here.”

Another grinding crash came from down below. The wind no longer whistled through the hole in the floor.

The rigid concentration left Master Leem's body. She slumped by the hole, her breathing fast and shallow.

Ventress turned from Maruk's body and walked over to where Maks Leem lay. “That was noble, but someone appears to have patched the hull breach.” She drove her lightsaber through Master Leem's chest. “Eighteen,” she added.

With a yell of rage Whie lunged toward her, lightsaber blazing. Ventress stepped back. “Don't,” she said calmly.

He attacked, blindingly fast. She was faster. He lunged: she stepped aside, turned his blade, reached out with the Force, and flung him into a ticket counter hard enough to drive the air from his lungs so all he could do was hang there, gulping, with his diaphragm in spasms. “I don't particularly want to kill you,” she said, “but I will if you insist.”

Air came back into Whie's chest with a whoop. “Not here, you won't,” he gasped. “Not today. Are you Jedi?”

Deliberately, Ventress spat. “No.”

“You carry a lightsaber.”

“My first Master was a Jedi. The Order abandoned him to torment and death. It's not a club I'm eager to join.”

Whie laughed. It wasn't a good sound.
He's hysterical,
Scout thought.
Seeing Master Leem die has completely unhinged him.
“Usually you don't have to join the Jedi Order. Heck, I didn't. Usually they just…sign you up.”

Ventress examined him, and then glanced, warily, at Fidelis, who came to stand at his master's shoulder. “The Force is strong in you,” she remarked.

“So they tell me. I have a peculiar talent,” the boy said. “I dream the future. Last night, for instance, I dreamed my own death. And this wasn't it.”

Scout stared, wide-eyed. No wonder Whie had seemed so strange this morning. “Actually—and I think you'll find this amusing,” Whie said, still on the ragged edge of hysteria, “I learned that I will die under a Jedi's hand. So I'm afraid you're out of luck,” he said. “Doesn't mean I can't kill
you,
” he added.

“Do you want to?”

“You killed the person I loved best in the world,” Whie said. “You stabbed her in the chest while she was helpless. I'd say my reasons are pretty good.”

“I would agree.” Ventress studied her fingernails. “But you're not really displaying the real Jedi sense of unattachment, are you?” Still watching him—and, rather more carefully, Fidelis—she began to pace as she talked, punctuating her words with the
click-clack
of her boot heels on the floor. “I mean, a real Jedi wouldn't attack, would he? A real Jedi would survey the tactical situation: respect his responsibility to the girl: respect his need to preserve himself as a valuable and expensive asset of the Republic. A real Jedi would try to find Master Yoda. A real Jedi would be a coward,” she said. Nothing mocking in her voice now. Just thoughtful. Boots clicking, a steady tick like a pendulum, cutting time into seconds. “A real Jedi would leave their bodies lying here.” She looked up at him curiously. “Do you want to be a real Jedi?”

He stared at her with hate.

“I don't think you do,” Ventress said.
Click, clack.
“You are still young. You are not fully indoctrinated. And I think that deep down in your heart, you know the Jedi way is a lie. Do you
want
not to care that I killed your Master? Do you want to be the person who wouldn't care?”

Click, clack. Click, clack.
Black boots. Slow strides. Voice calm. Strangely gentle. Strangely touched, as if seeing herself in Whie's pale fury. In Scout's horrified eyes.

“Let me tell you about the dark side,” Ventress said quietly. “Typical Jedi propaganda to name it so. Let me give it another name,” she said.
Click, clack.
“Let's call it
the truth.
”

She paused to study Master Leem's body with something like sadness. “The truth is, you do care that this one is dead. You should. The truth is, you would be less than alive if you didn't. The truth is, the principles that seem right to an eight-hundred-odd-year-old hypocrite who may live forever make no sense for the rest of us who live and suffer and die in this world. Our time here is so short: so precious: so sweet. To turn your back on it, to crawl into your monastery and teach yourself not to feel. What a waste,” Ventress said. Her voice shook. “What a…
blasphemy.

“If the universe loves the ‘good' as the Jedi would have you believe—if the morality of the weak indeed governs the dance of the stars, if life is fair—why then am I alive, while your Master lies dead?” For a moment it looked as if she would touch Maks Leem's body with her foot. If she had, Whie would have killed her where she stood, or died trying.

Instead she paced on, always walking, that mesmerizing
click, clack
echoing through the empty concourse. “The truth is, there is no good, and no evil, either,” she said with a wan smile. “There is only life…or not.

“The powerful always trick the simple with the promise of power. That's the easiest way to bring someone to see the dark side. ‘Give in to your anger!' It's a simple trick, and an effective one, because it works. When people stop denying what they have always known in their hearts is true, they come to some degree into their own power. But that is not the end of the journey,” Ventress said. “It is the beginning. That despair, that furious instant when your eyes open and see the world for what it really is…a necessary first step, that's all.”

She looked from Whie to Scout and back again. “Behold: I give you the gift of life. Hate me, if you like. By all means hate this,” she said, glancing at the bodies of the two Jedi. “You should. I give you the gift of my own heartbreak. If you learn from it, if you can face the emptiness of the universe, then you have some chance of growing up.” She shrugged. “If, like scared children, you can't let go of old Yoda's hand, and you crawl back for his bedtime stories and his soothing lies, so be it. If having had a chance to see the truth, you willfully choose to live the Jedi lie, then I will know what to do when next we meet, and I'll do it with far less remorse than these executions.”

A comlink beeped on her wrist. Asajj raised it to her mouth. “Yes?…Where are you?…You let yourself…you're tumbling in
space
?…No, I'm not going to stop to
collect
you,” she said, rolling her eyes at the Padawans. She listened for another moment, and then snapped the comlink off and sighed. “Yoda has destroyed my ship and thrown my droids out the air lock. Several Phindian military cruisers are heading this way. Given the odds”—her eyes flicked curiously to Fidelis again—“I had best be stealing another ship before Master Yoda gets back.”

With a shaking hand, Scout flicked the power switch on her lightsaber. “You're not going anywhere.”

Ventress took what looked like a small dart gun from a holster at her side and fired at the wall. Some kind of contact corrosive or incendiary must have been packed into the tip, because where it hit the wall immediately buckled and blew out. “Hull breach,” Ventress said brightly as the air started to scream out of the station again. “I'd fix that if I were you.”

She turned her back on them and ran quickly back through the security checkpoints, heading for the cruisers on the station's docking arm. With a last look of fury, Whie turned his attention to the ruptured wall. Reaching into the Force, he concentrated on holding the breach closed until Yoda arrived.

“Scout?” The word a whisper of agony.

Scout whirled. Jai Maruk, not quite dead, was trying to form her name. She ran over and knelt beside him. Asajj Ventress's killing blow had carved terribly into his chest. He was gasping, short shallow panting breaths.

He smiled at the sight of her face. Squinted at the blood, the bruises on her head and around her throat. His mouth worked. “Still…winning…the hard way,” he whispered. He looked down at his ravaged body. “Me…too.”

He was smiling. She didn't think she'd ever seen him smile before. Tears welled up inside Scout. “Don't try to talk. It will be all right, Master. Master Yoda will be here soon to take care of you.” Tears dropped from her eyes onto his shattered chest. There was a long hitch in his breathing. His eyes closed. “Master Maruk? Master Maruk! Don't go,” Scout cried. “Don't leave me!”

His eyes opened, and he smiled again. “Never…,” he whispered. “…my Padawan.”

His eyes closed, and he was gone.

9

C
ount Dooku scooted his chair back from the dining room table at Château Malreaux, dabbing at the spilled wine dripping from its edge. As if she had been waiting for the spill to happen, half-mad Whirry lumbered into the dining room, settling a foxtail stole around the ragged shoulders of her dirty pink ball gown. “Which I can clean that up for Your Lordship, can't I, pets?”

Dooku sighed. In all reason—and he was a reasonable man—the spill was his own fault. He had been distracted, turning over the progress of the war. Things were going so well in the Outer Rim, the Republic press was urging action there, “before the whole Rim is lost to the Confederacy for good.” Really, sometimes it seemed to Dooku that Darth Sidious's plots were needlessly complex. It was beginning to look very much as if Dooku could simply
win:
march his battle droids into Coruscant and claim the Republic outright.

Not that he would ever question the
power
of Darth Sidious. The dark secrets at his command. But each man to his own devices: give a problem to a soldier, and you will get a military solution; the same question will get you diplomacy from a diplomat, and clothes from a tailor. Darth Sidious had the mind of a
schemer,
and so he put his faith in schemes.

Dooku checked himself. The thought was unfair. Say rather, Darth Sidious, alone in all the galaxy, knew most intimately the dark springs that ran through creatures' hearts. He was an expert in personal disintegration—in the ways one came to betray oneself. It was no wonder, then, that even a clash of empires revealed itself to the Sith as fundamentally a
psychological
battle, to be won and lost at the level of each being's inner strength or weakness. Dooku himself—though certainly psychologically acute, both naturally and through his Jedi training, and more recently through the wisdom of the Sith—was also born to wealth and power, and had for years now commanded very large groups of followers, both in armies and corporations. It seemed to him that a being's inner nature, whether noble or debased, looked much the same as he or she was crushed under the tread of a tank. When one has sufficient force, there is no need for schemes.

“Uh-oh,” Whirry said. She had reached out to dab at the spilled wine with an old rag—stars forbid she should risk a wine stain on the fancy Malreaux linen napkins—but her hand had stopped in midair, hovering over the splotch of burgundy on the table. “You're in trouble.”

“Whirry,” Dooku began severely, “I have told you before, I don't like—”

The comm console chimed. Glancing over, the Count saw who was calling and cut his sentence off short. “I'll take this in my study,” he said.

For a long time Darth Sidious did not speak to him. Instead, he simply piped the breaking news story into Dooku's holoconsole. A smiling Palleus Chuff, bruised but modestly triumphant. Long panning shots of the interior of the Phindar Spaceport: reporters pointing excitedly at spent flechettes and plasma scorch marks. Quickly patched holes in the floor and wall. Head shots of Master Yoda—“another glowing chapter in his legendary career.” Security footage of Trade Federation assassin droids running amok; two Jedi Knights bravely battling to save civilians before being cut down. Asajj Ventress, of course. A shot from external space station cams:
Last Call
tumbling heavily through space, accelerating, and then making a hyperdrive jump to certain doom. A state-of-the-art ship built at Dooku's own expense—the third one she'd lost, if one counted the craft Anakin and Kenobi had stolen from her.

Dooku wished Darth Sidious would speak.

It was Ventress's fault. The woman was impossible. She was talented, yes, but really, a battalion of droids was of more immediate practical use. At this rate, cheaper, too. He should terminate her.

The remorseless hooded figure flickered like a ghost on the holoconsole.

“I was not aware. Thank you for showing this to me. Needless to say, Ventress was acting on her own initiative.” The arrogance—one might even say, the faint condescension—with which he had been thinking of his Master a few moments before had drained out of him like blood spilling from an open vein. “Nevertheless, the basic facts remain: Yoda is coming to me here, and here I will finish him, once and for all.”

“So I trust.” Darth Sidious smiled. Once, early in Dooku's Jedi career, he had arrived on a distant planet too late to stop a massacre—a long hall of wood and grass, tribal enemies inside, the outside doused with kerosene and a match thrown in. The flames, dancing, had looked like his Master's smile. “Of course, Count, I leave you to manage Ventress as you see fit: but would you like to know what I do, when my servants show enough…initiative?”

Dooku found his finger touching—just touching—the small red button on his desk. “Master?”

“I
crush
them,” Darth Sidious said.

Jedi Council Chamber, Coruscant.

“Master Windu!”

“Chancellor.”

“I give you great joy on the day's glad news! Wherever help is most needed and least expected, Master Yoda appears to save the day! A wonderful boost for morale: one day he is reported dead—the next, rising up on the other side of the galaxy with a glorious victory! Whoever said the public had lost faith in the Jedi must be eating his words tonight.”

“We try, Chancellor.”

A pause.

“You are grave.”

“We lost two Jedi Knights, sir, friends I have known since my childhood in the Temple, and operatives of exceptional value. Master Yoda is now traveling, his cover broken, into the heart of enemy territory, accompanied by two apprentices who are barely more than children.”

“Ah. Yes, I see. The politician is impressed with a victory on the battlefield of public relations; the military commander not so much. But I had anticipated you in this, at least somewhat. I tell you, Master Windu, I am not easy with Yoda's situation for precisely the reasons you describe. I should be happier if you were to replace the fallen with another detail. I'm not sure who, exactly…Well, why not Obi-Wan? Didn't I see in my last briefing that he had finished his last mission? Obi-Wan and young Skywalker. I would feel more comfortable if I knew they were on their way to Vjun. I think the world of Master Yoda, but he is very old, and perhaps not all that he once was. The idea of him facing Count Dooku alone, in the Count's stronghold…it makes my blood run cold. Yes, Obi-Wan and Skywalker would do very well.”

“Is that an order, Chancellor?”

“Let's call it a
request,
Master Windu. A heartfelt request.”

“This transmission was some time in coming,” Dooku said, a twenty-centimeter-high hologhost, bright mauve, on the transmission deck of the cutter Asajj had stolen from the Phindian Spaceport docks.

“I've been a little busy, Count.” Asajj tried to fix the console's color controls, wondering if the system was defective, or if the rig had been customized for some alien with ocular peculiarities that made mauve seem natural. Also, she was in no hurry to meet Dooku's eye. “I had to calculate a couple of hyperdrive jumps to shake Phindian security off my tail.”

“You lost the
Call.
”

“Yes. To Yoda.”

“No, to an
actor,
apparently.”

“What!”

“Perhaps I have more recent information,” Dooku said. His voice was very calm. Very considering.

Asajj knew she was in bad trouble here. “The actor was doubling for Yoda. I caught him over Ithor.”

“It would have saved time and trouble to leave him in the debris field, don't you think?”

Ventress's hands were getting clammy. She would a thousand times have preferred him ripping into her than this cool, surgical, distant voice. A fight would have been a dust-up between allies, between colleagues. This was more like a dissection.

“If I left him in the debris field, his remains would have been identifiably not Yoda's. I could have pushed him out an air lock somewhere else, but…”

“But what?”

She shrugged. “I have chosen my friends and enemies. To kill randomly, to kill for no purpose but spite seems weak to me. Undisciplined.”

“If I had asked you to kill him?”

“Of course I would have done so.”

“What about your scruples, then?”

“My loyalty to you overcalls them.”

“But I did not ask you to kill him, did I?”

“Did you even know he was aboard the
Call
?” Ventress said. She realized the trap he had let her walk into the instant the words were out of her mouth. “No, you didn't. Because I never gave you a chance. I didn't tell you. Perhaps I should have.” She squared her shoulders. “I'll accept that responsibility. I was acting on my own initiative.”

Some emotion, hard to read, flickered across his mauve face at the word
initiative.

“Principles, scruples: this is somewhat the territory of the young. As one ages,” the Count said, “one becomes more practical. I don't care so much about theoretical constructs of right and wrong. I care about timing, effect, precision. If I have a prisoner, or indeed an ally”—he looked mildly at her—“that is costing too much in resources, or introducing too many uncertainties into the scheme of things, I eliminate that person. Do you understand me?”

Asajj swallowed.

“I think,” the Count continued blandly, “you had better convince me that you are a net gain to my efficiency, Asajj. You have lost two of my ships, one to Obi-Wan and the other to a second-rate actor from the Coruscant stage. Without consulting me, you broke in upon a chain of events I had put in motion to bring Yoda to my dungeons of his own free will. Instead of contemplating his head at this moment, I am watching a spike in Jedi popularity and a recovery of Republic morale that two days ago was nearing the breaking point. Right now, you are a very expensive ally, Asajj. Right now, you are costing me more than you're worth.”

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.”