Invincible (29 page)

“Today’s too-onebee droids can replace a blaster-shattered kneecap with an ilinium prosthetic more durable than the original.” Caedus stopped next to the only occupied bed in the ward and gestured at the stump of his severed arm, which still showed the white fusing scar where the skin had been closed over the bone. “They could have reattached my natural arm, had I been willing to lie around in one of
these
for a couple of months.”

Caedus intentionally slammed his prosthetic kneecap into the bed frame, rocking it so hard that the occupant—a young sinewy woman with curly brown hair and dark eyes—flinched. He smiled and held the hypo over the bed, easily within her reach…had she been able to move her arms.

“Yes, today’s medicine can even rebuild the nerves in a ruptured spinal cord. One little injection—” Caedus looked at the needle, which was nearly as long as his finger, then continued, “well, maybe not so little—is all it takes to start the process.”

The woman’s dark eyes began to grow glassy, and she looked away.

“Come now, Mirta,” Caedus said. “This war will be over soon, and you’ll be released with all of the Alliance’s prisoners. There’s no reason you need to be strapped into a hoverchair when that happens.”

So far, the woman had not said a word, not even to acknowledge her identity. But even if GAG’s terrorist-recognition technology had not identified her, Caedus would have known her. She had her mother’s mouth and her grandfather’s cold, dead eyes, after all. More importantly, he could feel her hatred burning in the Force, and
that
was what identified her most clearly—her obsession with avenging the death of Ailyn Vel.

“But we must start the process soon—before the damage grows irreversible,” Caedus said. “How many Jedi accompanied your team?”

Mirta continued to look away, but her face blanched and a small, pained voice croaked, “Go…get…borked.”

“Ah…she speaks. Progress at last.”

Caedus’s smile was sincere. A response—any response—meant he had found a vulnerable spot in her armor.

Then the ward room door hissed open, and Mirta’s face hardened as she recovered her composure and looked to see who had arrived. Caedus spun on his heel, already summoning the Force shock he would use to rebuke the fool who had ignored his order for privacy—then saw who it was and realized why he hadn’t sensed her coming. After learning how to conceal herself in the Force, Tahiri had begun to employ the technique—like Caedus himself—as a matter of course.

“Ah, Tahiri. You’re just in time.” Caedus motioned her into the room, then turned back to the bed. “Mirta was about to tell us who cut off my arm.”

Tahiri remained silent for a moment, then said, “I’d think you would
know
that, my lord.”

“Appearances can be deceiving,” Caedus said. “Isn’t that so, Mirta?”

Mirta only glared at him in silence.

“We’re back to that, are we?” Caedus sighed and looked sadly at the hypo, then turned back around to Tahiri. “It seems our prisoner is determined to live the rest of her life strapped to a board. I assume you’ve come to report. You may proceed.”

Tahiri frowned.
“Here?”

“There’s no need to worry about betraying our secrets.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Does the prisoner
look
like an escape risk?”

Mirta’s rage came boiling through the Force like a turbolaser strike, blasting Caedus so fiercely it felt almost physical. He allowed himself a smirk—more to signal his intentions to Tahiri than to congratulate himself, of course—and began to plot how he was going to turn that rage to his own ends, to redirect it at someone who had been making a real nuisance of himself lately.

Tahiri looked past Caedus toward the bed, apparently debating whether her news should be relayed in front of even an incapacitated enemy, then finally said, “I’m afraid I have a failure to report, my lord.”

“Your plan to discover the location of the secret Jedi base has failed,” Caedus surmised. Actually, the broad outlines of the plan had been
his,
but the failure was obviously in the details—and those had been mapped out by Tahiri. “Ben slipped free of your surveillance.”

“
Slipped
isn’t quite accurate,” Tahiri said. “He discovered our, um,
agent
trailing him and took measures.”

Caedus frowned—though not because Tahiri had lost track of Ben. He had foreseen that possibility in his visions and taken other measures. He just didn’t like the idea of losing his secret security droid. As irritating as SD-XX could be, lately it had seemed to him that the droid was the only one who truly understood him.

“What about the…agent?” he asked. Tahiri had been wise to avoid mentioning SD-XX in front of Mirta. Caedus had every intention of sending her back to Boba Fett in one fully functional piece, and he preferred to keep private the existence of his security droid. “Is he still functional?”

“I don’t know,” Tahiri replied. “We weren’t able to recover him.”

Caedus fought to keep his anger from rising. He had already made the mistake of letting his emotions control him, and that blunder had cost him so much more than Fondor and the deserters the traitor Niathal had stolen. It had cost him his daughter’s love—it had cost him Allana.

When he felt certain of sounding merely annoyed rather than enraged, Caedus asked, “Why not?”

Tahiri’s eyes began to sparkle. “We were otherwise occupied, my lord,” she said. “I saw another opportunity to learn the location of the secret Jedi base, and I seized it.”

When Tahiri did not elaborate, Caedus frowned and inquired, “Do you
really
intend to make me ask?”

Tahiri smiled, and he knew that it was something big. “I think so, yes.”

The joy she felt in her triumph was contagious; Caedus actually found himself grinning. “Very well,” he said. “Exactly
what
did you seize?”

“The
Beam Racer,
” Tahiri reported. “And the prince was aboard.”

Caedus’s brow shot up. “You captured
Isolder
?”

Tahiri nodded. “I did.”

“And he revealed the location of the Jedi base?”

“Not yet,” she said. “But before losing contact, our agent reported a conversation in which it was said that Tenel Ka wouldn’t trust anyone else with the location of the Jedi base.”

Tahiri’s face grew clouded, then she added, “I thought you might want to perform the interrogation yourself. I—I
killed
the last subject I worked on.”

Caedus’s heart went out to her. He remembered how
he
had felt when his first suspect died under interrogation: horrified and frustrated and ashamed all at once, but mostly afraid of what he was becoming. He would have laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, except the only one he had left was holding a hypo with a very long needle.

Instead, he said, “It’s not your fault, Tahiri. The suspect holds his own life in his hands. If he won’t cooperate, we can’t be blamed for the consequences.”

“I know,” Tahiri said. “But I was angry—”

“We all make mistakes,” Caedus interrupted, growing impatient with her self-examination. He had absolved her of guilt—what more did she require? “Where’s Isolder now?”

A flash of pain shot through Tahiri’s eyes, but she quickly collected herself. “The prince is secure in the
Anakin Solo
’s brig, with the rest of the
Racer
’s crew,” she said. “I offered to confine him in one of the VIP cabins, but he refused to guarantee his behavior.”

“He’s an honorable man,” Caedus said, nodding. He thought of how many times—going as far back as his student days on Yavin 4—he had imagined having Isolder as his father-in-law, and a pang of sorrow shot through his breast. “I’m glad it won’t be necessary to interrogate him—at least not harshly.”

Tahiri frowned in confusion. “He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who’ll be easy to break.”

“He wouldn’t be,” Caedus agreed. “But I’ve already learned the location of the Jedi base.”

Tahiri’s mouth dropped, but she seemed too astonished to actually voice the question.

Caedus closed his eyes and turned in the direction of Hapan space. “In the Transitory Mists, on this side of the Consortium, somewhere between Roqoo Depot and Terephon, I would say.” He opened his eyes and turned to Tahiri. “I’ll grow more precise when we get closer.”

Tahiri’s brow shot up so high that the scars on her forehead laid at an angle. She looked like she wanted to ask a dozen different questions, but all she seemed able to manage was
“How?”

Caedus smiled. “It’s in my blood, Tahiri.”

He left it at that—this was neither the time nor the place to explain how a Nightsister blood trail worked. The fighting around the Roche system was growing fiercer by the hour, but he could not leave—did not
dare
leave—until he understood what had happened to him in the Tactical Planning Forum. He had been fighting Luke one moment, Jaina the next, and then they had
both
been there—not just illusions of them, but presences real enough to bat blaster bolts back at the stormtroopers attacking them.

“Come here,” Caedus said, motioning Tahiri to Mirta’s bedside. “
You’re
a woman—perhaps you can find a way to make her discuss the Jedi on her strike team.”

Tahiri obediently came to stand beside the bed, but Caedus could see in the way she averted her eyes that she had lost her stomach for harsh interrogation. Of course, that only meant it was more important than ever to push her back into it—to remind her that a Sith never allowed personal feelings to interfere with the mission.

“The subject has no sensation below her shoulders, so our options are limited,” Caedus noted, adopting an impersonal tone that he hoped would make it easier for Tahiri to begin. “And I suspect she wants to die anyway, so death threats won’t work, either.”

“When do death threats
ever
work?” Tahiri’s gaze began to roam over Mirta’s sheet-covered body, and Caedus could see that his strategy was effective—that she was starting to focus on the problem instead of herself. “But she’s part Mandalorian, right?”

“Maybe even completely,” Caedus said. “The way their culture works, what you
say
you are is more important than what spills out of your veins. The file says she even married a Mandalorian recently. Why?”

“Mandalorians are way too proud,” Tahiri said. “Smug, even. It’s the biggest weakness I’ve seen in every one I’ve met.”

Caedus considered this for a moment, then asked, “You’re thinking humiliation?”

Tahiri nodded. “But we have to take it further. The subject’s a decent-looking woman for her line of work, and that has to make her vain.”

Caedus glanced over Mirta’s face and knew by the rush of fear he felt in the Force that Tahiri had struck a chord. “So, disfigurement,” he said. “I
hate
that.”

“Who doesn’t?” Tahiri asked. “But she’s a member of Fett’s family, right? Compared with the emotional stuff she must be carrying around already, a little humiliation is nothing. If we want to break her, we have to maim her so badly that people will pity her. Then, if she
still
doesn’t give us what we want, we send her back to Mandalore.”

That
inspired Mirta to raise her head. “Go ahead, you dung-sucking dark side slut! See what happens.”

“So disfigurement would be a problem for you?” Caedus asked. He glanced over at Tahiri with a look of admiration. “It sounds like you’ve found your inner Yuuzhan Vong. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Tahiri’s pride was genuine, her attention now completely focused on the task at hand. “Call me whatever you like, Mirta, but the choice is yours. We’re only the instrument of
your
decision.”

“Go drown in a cesspool,” Mirta shot back. “I’m looking at a dead woman.”

“Mirta, there’s no reason to be angry with
Tahiri.
” As Caedus spoke, he began to put the power of the Force behind his words, using its energies to plant them deep in her mind. “She isn’t the one who sent you on this mission.”

Mirta’s gaze flashed over to Caedus. “I
volunteered.
”

“Of course you did,” Caedus said in a reasonable tone. “You’re Boba Fett’s granddaughter. What else
could
you do?”

He saw the shock of recognition in her eyes and knew that she realized what he was trying to do. No matter. He had time and the Force on his side. With those two for allies, the only question was how long it would take to implant the conviction that her suffering was her grandfather’s fault, that Fett had sent her on the mission
knowing
it would fail. And once Caedus had done that, all he would have to do was stand back and let Mandalorian nature take its usual course.

When no further foulness spilled from Mirta’s mouth, Caedus shrugged and turned to Tahiri.

“The threat alone will never work on this subject,” he said. “I’ll have someone bring a mirrpanel so she can see what we’re doing to her.”

He stepped over to the wall and used a knuckle to depress the call button. When the door to the ward slid open an instant later, he was surprised to see that his black-clad GAG guard was accompanied by a white-uniformed medic with a Remnant insignia on her collar. In her slender hands, the medic held a blood-collection kit.

Before his guard could explain the woman’s presence, Caedus turned to her directly. “Is there something you require here, Lieutenant?”

The woman paled, but clicked her heels and inclined her head. “Lord Caedus, the Moffs request a sample of the prisoner’s blood for their genetic databank.”

“Later,” Caedus said. He was willing to accommodate the Moffs, but not in the middle of his interrogation—not when he was just starting to make progress. “You can wait outside until we’re done, or leave your comlink identifier with one of the guards.”

“Yes, Lord Caedus.” The woman looked so relieved that Caedus had to wonder if the rumors of his harsh treatment of Lieutenant Tebut had already crossed navies; it was just another reminder of the costly mistakes he had made by letting his emotions get so out of hand. “Thank you, Lord Caedus.”