Invincible (24 page)

“How’s the prisoner?” she asked.

“Prisoner Nine-Zero-Three-Two-Bee-Tee is recovering as scheduled,” the droid reported. “He should be ready to resume interrogation tomorrow morning, assuming his electrolytes stabilize.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to move that up.” Tahiri glanced over at Ben, then added, “There have been some developments that require a more aggressive approach.”

“I can’t authorize that,” the droid said. “With his electrolytes so far out of balance, a substantial physical stress of that kind is likely to induce myocardial infarction.”

“You mean his heart might fail?” Tahiri turned to Ben. “What do you think, Ben? Do we need to risk a myocardial infarction?”

“There wouldn’t be any use in it.” Ben glanced around the room, looking for something he could use to disable Tahiri before she continued, but objects that could be hurled at a guard did not tend to be left lying around in prison infirmaries. He found only a large swinging panel labeled
BIOWASTE PROCESSING
, and even that would have to be ripped from its hinges first. “I won’t tell you where our base is.”

Tahiri sighed. “I was afraid you’d say that.” She glanced at the guards behind him, and Ben’s back began to prickle with danger sense. “It appears we’ll have to do this the hard—”

Ben was already spinning to defend himself, but he never heard the final
way.
His body simply erupted into one huge cramp as both guards fired their stun rifles and Tahiri triggered his stun cuffs, and he felt himself falling into a white, electric fire.

When Ben finally stopped falling, he found himself chained into a heavy hoverchair—one of those he had seen the droid-orderlies using to move invalids through the corridor. Shevu was lying across from him, still strapped into his bed, but with the security panel lowered. The MD was standing at one corner of the bed. The droid’s lack of attention to Shevu’s monitor suggested it had been relieved of responsibility for the prisoner’s welfare.

“Good,” Tahiri said. “Now that we’re all here and awake, perhaps you’d care to say hello to your spy, Ben?”

Shevu’s eyes snapped open, and his head turned toward the center of the ward. “Ben?”

“Right here, Captain,” Ben said. “I’m sorry—I didn’t think they’d be watching you. Someone must have—”

“Ben, don’t. We’re soldiers.” Shevu’s gaze slid to Ben. His eyes were glassy with pain and confusion, but there was also something more—forgiveness, perhaps, and…could it be pride? “You haven’t told them anything, have you?”

Ben shook his head. “Nothing.”

Shevu’s cracked lips formed a smile. “Good man.” He glanced over at Tahiri. His expression changed to one of loathing, and the bed frame clanged harshly as his arm hit the end of its restraint. “Keep it that way. No matter what this little—”

“That’s enough.” Tahiri made a gesture with her finger, and Shevu’s mouth clamped shut so hard that his teeth clacked. She patted him lightly on the cheek, then turned to Ben. “Let me tell you how this is going to work, Jedi Skywalker.”

“It
isn’t
going to work,” Ben retorted. “I wouldn’t betray the entire Order to save one man.”

“No?” Tahiri shook her head, then reached into Shevu’s bed and placed her thumb over his eye. “I can’t tell you how much I hope you really don’t mean that.”

She began to push, and Shevu’s mouth opened in an involuntary scream. His pulse rate shot up, and several of the waves crawling across the monitor above his bed oscillated wildly and erratically. Ben’s guts began to tie themselves into cold, greasy knots, and he reached out with the Force, trying to pull Tahiri’s hand away.

She fought him, at the same time depressing a button on the remote in her free hand. Four liquid jolts of pain shot through Ben’s limbs and met in a burning collision inside his chest, and his concentration crumbled away in cinders.

Shevu’s arms and legs began to flutter against his restraints, and Tahiri said, “There’s only one way you’re going to stop this, Ben. How much pain are you willing to cause your friend?”

“A lot less than I’m willing to cause you,” Ben replied.

Tahiri looked genuinely hurt. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Ben’s stomach was clutching so hard that he thought he might throw up. He knew that he could not give Tahiri what she wanted—no matter
what
she did to Shevu. But how could he let her continue? She was doing more than just causing pain—she was blinding him.

And then Ben heard it, recognized that Shevu wasn’t just screaming, that he was yelling one long word:
qquuuuieeeet!

Ben clenched his jaw tight, then reached out again with the Force. This time, however, he was contacting not Tahiri but Shevu, pouring soothing energies toward him, touching his mind with soft suggestions of unconsciousness. As Shevu’s screams grew a little less frenzied, Tahiri pulled her hand away and frowned at the MD droid. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You told me he was completely awake.”

The droid studied Shevu’s vital signs, which were oscillating more wildly than ever, then replied, “The prisoner is as conscious as medical stimulants can make him. He has simply grown accustomed to the pain you are inflicting on him. That’s the only reasonable hypothesis.”

“Not the
only
one,” Tahiri said, looking to Ben.

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re lying, Ben.” Tahiri raised her hand, and tiny forks of Force lightning began to dance on her fingertips. “I don’t think your mother would have approved.”

Before Ben could respond, she moved her hand over one of the half-healed blaster burns on Shevu’s torso, then released a blue bolt of Force energy.

The monitor broke into an unreadable scribble of oscillating colors, and a long, hoarse rattle poured from Shevu’s mouth. Half a dozen different alarms began to beep and chime from the monitor, then all the lines went flat.

The MD droid cocked its head, studying Shevu’s vital signs for a moment, then announced, “Prisoner Nine-Zero-Three-Two-Bee-Tee has expired.”

Tahiri stepped away from the bed looking as shocked and dismayed as Ben felt. “Do something!” she ordered the MD. “Revive him.”

The droid obediently stepped to the bedside and extruded a long needle from its index finger, which it jabbed into Shevu’s heart. When the lines on the monitor did not even blip, the droid clamped a breathing bag onto Shevu’s face with one metal hand and pressed the other over the heart, then began mechanical efforts to keep both air and blood circulating.

But Ben already knew that the droid’s efforts were going to fail. Tahiri couldn’t use a dead man to coerce someone into telling her anything, and Ben knew his friend well enough to realize that Shevu would rather die than be used to help Darth Caedus secure his hold on power. So when Tahiri pushed things a little too far, Shevu simply let go of living.

“Stop it,” Ben said. He couldn’t bear to watch Shevu being abused any longer. “You can’t bring him back. This is just beating up the body.”

Tahiri glowered at him. “You can tell that from over there, Ben?”

The MD stopped working. “The prisoner is correct,” it said. “Magnetic imaging confirms that Prisoner Nine-Zero-Three-Two-Bee-Tee suffered a stress rupture of the aorta.”

Tahiri’s jaw fell, and her Force-aura grew cold with horror, and that was when Ben knew she did not like what she was becoming, that she was serving Caedus for the same reasons Ben himself had followed Jacen so long—because she was confused and ashamed and desperate. She could not allow herself to see what a monster Caedus had become because that meant seeing what a monster
she
was becoming, too.

But none of that made any difference to Shevu now. And it was going to make even less difference to his wife, Shula, whom he had married just a couple of months earlier—then promptly sent home to Vaklin because he had
known
that something like this was going to happen.

“You should be proud, Tahiri. Now you’re just like your Master.” Ben was saying this not only because he was angry, but because it was true—and because if he could make Tahiri see just
how
true, then maybe she would come to her senses. “Jacen tortured Ailyn Vel to death, and now you’ve done it to Shevu. I guess you
are
a Sith.”

To Ben’s surprise, Tahiri did not whirl on him. She did not even seem to see him. She merely stepped back, staring at the MD’s feet and slowly shaking her head.

“You’re wrong.
I
didn’t kill him.”

“The prisoner was already in a weakened condition,” the MD said, neatly dodging the question. It pointed a finger at the security pad on the side of Shevu’s bed, and the limb restraints clicked open. “If you won’t be needing the body, I’ll send it down for processing.”

“Processing?”
Ben didn’t know what he had expected, but the thought of his friend being sold to a bioparts dealer turned his stomach—and filled him with a sick, hollow feeling that was half anger, half guilt. “You can’t—”

“I can’t
what
?” As Tahiri whirled on him, the MD was lifting Shevu from the bed. “This is
your
doing, Ben. All you had to do was answer one simple question.”

She depressed a row of buttons on the remote, and Ben’s entire body clenched in electric agony.

“Where is the Jedi base?” She stepped closer, cocking her arm to backhand him. “Answer me!”

Ben glanced over at Shevu, who was being carried toward the processing chute, and shook his head. “Sorry.”

Tahiri brought her hand down across Ben’s face, striking him so hard that it rocked the hoverchair—and that was her mistake. Ben threw his weight in the direction of the tilt, tipping the hoverchair over on its side. Simultaneously, he was Force-hurling Tahiri into the two confused guards standing at his back.

By the time the trio crashed into one of the empty beds behind him, Ben was already reaching out with the Force, depressing keys on Tahiri’s remote. His leg shackles snapped open instantly, but he managed to shock his arms senseless before he finally hit the proper key and released the stun cuffs.

Ben rolled out of the chair and spun around to find his captors rapidly disentangling themselves. Tahiri was already reaching for her lightsaber, and one guard was swinging his stun rifle around to fire. Ben gave the barrel a Force shove, pushing the muzzle toward Tahiri just as a white bolt of electricity shot out.

Tahiri gave a strangled cry, then her eyes rolled back and she dropped to the floor, twitching and shuddering. Ben summoned Tahiri’s lightsaber to hand, barely activating it in time to bat a bolt from the second guard’s stun rifle into the MD droid—which was holding Shevu’s body in front of the processing chute, apparently waiting for the guards to bring the prisoner under control before proceeding.

The bolt struck the droid over its primary processing unit, and it stumbled back into the wall and dropped to the floor with Shevu’s limp body in its arms. Ben used the Force to rip the stun rifle from the first guard’s grasp, at the same time leaping at the second one. He deflected another stun bolt, then brought the lightsaber down on the weapon’s barrel and quickly snapped the blade back up to within a centimeter of the trooper’s chin.

“I’d really rather not have to kill you both,” Ben said. “But it’s your choice—and I don’t have a lot of time for you to decide.”

“Not k-k-killing is fine, L-L-Lieutenant,” Wyrlan answered. His helmet turned toward the other guard. “Right, Garsi?”

“Fine with me,” Garsi said, raising his arms. “Thanks for the choice.”

“Don’t make me regret it,” Ben warned. He glanced up at the corners of the room and noted that the status lights on all four of the security cams were dark. “How come those monitors aren’t active?”

Wyrlan and Garsi turned their helmets toward each other, then Garsi said, “You saw what was going on in here. Would
you
want someone sneaking a holo of that to HNE?”

Ben considered this, recalling how Tahiri had locked the door behind them, and realized there was a very good chance that central security did not know he had just freed himself.

“I see your point.” He motioned at the processing chute. “Would someone alive survive a trip through there?”

“Sure,” Wyrlan said. “It’s just a repulsor track that carries bodies down to the collection docks.”

“But they have escape safeguards,” Garsi warned. “It wouldn’t be smart to try leaving that way.”

“And
I
won’t be,” Ben said. He motioned at Tahiri. “Put her in the stun cuffs and drop her down the chute.”

The two troopers obeyed, then Wyrlan motioned at Shevu’s body. “What about him?”

“He’s leaving with me,” Ben said. “Take off your armor.”

A LONG TIME AGO…

J
AINA
S
OLO AND HER BROTHER
J
ACEN ARE WANDERING THROUGH
the shadowy halls beneath the Jedi academy on Yavin 4, keeping to the musty subterranean passages where no one else ever goes. They are fourteen, and they are walking because their friend Tenel Ka has just lost her arm in a lightsaber accident, and they have to do
something,
even if walking is all they
can
do. They are in pain, and they wish it could be the same pain their friend is feeling. Maybe if they could share it with her, it wouldn’t seem so horrible. Maybe it would feel like things hadn’t changed so much after all.

But Jaina knows that can’t be true, because Uncle Luke has promised to call when Tenel Ka is ready to see her friends, and they have been walking for hours. Still, there has been no summons. They can only keep wandering, alone together, trying not to be overwhelmed by their shock and despair. And Jaina senses through their twin bond that Jacen has other, more painful emotions. He is filled with shame and self-loathing because it was his lightsaber that removed Tenel Ka’s arm—because he was so intent on proving himself to her that he failed to notice when her blade blurred with static, and half a second later her arm was lying on the ground.