The Cestus Deception (20 page)

By the time Obi-Wan arrived at the palace, the halls were in an uproar. He was hustled into G’Mai Duris’s presence to see the regal X’Ting hunched in her seat listening to the words of a round, short-legged Zeetsa with a very worried expression.

“—Regent Duris,” the leathery blue creature said in conclusion. Her stubby arms pointed at a glowing map hovering in the air. Her eyes traced the map with concern.

“Excuse me, Shar Shar,” Obi-Wan said as softly as he could. “If there are concerns with the transportation grid that necessitate the postponement of the day’s negotiations, perhaps I should return at another—”

Duris glanced up, an expression of surprise and then tears of gratitude overflowing her faceted eyes. “Master Jedi!” she said. “Obi-Wan. I am afraid we have an emergency. Thank goodness you are here!”

“Indeed?” he asked. “How can I be of assistance?”

“The Five Families should have been here an hour ago. Their private car seems to have disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Obi-Wan managed to conceal the pleasure in his voice. “How is that possible?”

“The entire planet is honeycombed with tunnels. Many of them are unmapped. We can only assume that someone, for their own purposes, shunted the car off its route into one of these secondary pathways.”

“And as yet you have received no communication?”

“None,” she said.

Obi-Wan studied the entire map, his face set sternly. “May I assume that the other cars traveling along the map have sensors to avoid collision?”

“My engineer can answer that question,” Duris said.

The engineer was a small, graying human who looked as if the current stress might cost him his few remaining sprigs of hair. “Yes, the sensors are excellent.”

“Tell me,” Obi-Wan asked Duris, “what is known of the situation at this time?”

“A group of Five Family executives were kidnapped.”

“This Desert Wind group we’ve heard of?”

“We do not know,” she replied. “We’ve heard little from them in the past year, and considered their threat broken. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like their style.”

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and counted to five, and then opened them again, retaining his most serious expression. “Can you holomap the entire system?”

The engineer nodded. “Well, of course, but why?”

“In order to do something like this, to make the car disappear, they have to have removed it from the grid. The individual magcars should react to the absence of a moving object, slowing and speeding themselves in compensation. The degree of disruption will increase the closer we get to the point of departure.”

“But they have clearly affected our computers. They left no trace—”

“They left no direct
data
trace. But can the phantom car influence proximity sensors on other system vehicles?”

“Well…,” the engineer’s mouth suddenly widened as he grasped Obi-Wan’s implication. “No. The safety system is off the main grid, a backup system to prevent a single mistake in central command from causing a systemwide catastrophe.”

“Good,” Obi-Wan said, as the complete system sprang to life in a floating web of glowing silver threads. “Now I want you to filter for proximity feedback from the cars themselves, showing their actual positions and their projected positions according to schedule.”

The engineer blanched. “But… we are not on Coruscant, sir. We have no computer fast enough to find the original point of departure—”

Obi-Wan raised his hand. “I am not searching for a thing. I need to sense something that is
not
there. Where computers falter, the Force may prevail. Please. Give me the images.”

The engineer gawped at Obi-Wan. Then Duris nodded her head and waved her primary hands, and he performed as requested. Soon every image on the grid was doubled. “Make the projected images red, and the actual ones blue,” Obi-Wan said, his voice dropping low.

Duris remembered stories of these mystic warriors, and fought to repress a tremor of almost supernatural awe. She nodded to the engineer, and a series of ghostly overlay images began to form. Impossibly complex, all of it, because as each car accelerated or decelerated to compensate for the missing car, they began to interfere with other cars on the tracks, causing them to slow or speed in a widening ripple effect.

Obi-Wan stood in the middle of the vast rippling maze, his eyes half lidded, arms outstretched as if actually feeling the entire web of motion. Then, slowly, he turned and pointed to a stretch of tunnel between one of the outer rings of luxury apartments and the central city. “This,” he said, “is where the phantom car originated. It is therefore here that the real car went offline.”

Duris glanced at the engineer, who hunched his shoulders.
Perhaps.

The Jedi traced a line along a branching tunnel. “And it went here…” The tunnel branched again. He traced his finger along one of the paths, and then backtracked and took the other. “And then here, where it slowed and changed levels…”

The throne room was blindingly silent. The quiet heightened the impact of each word almost unendurably. “And then it began moving again, until…”

He cocked his head sideways. “This is strange. There is no track indicated here. Should there be?”

The engineer cleared his throat. In fact, he looked a little frightened, regarding their guest with something halfway between dread and awe. “Well…” He consulted a holo rotating above his briefcase, and when he raised his head again a moment later, that tense crease of his lips deepened. “There is a utility corridor that was taken off the map because it was in bad repair, and not up to recent safety standards.”

Obi-Wan’s eyes were still closed. “But?”

“But in fact, if it is still up to the former specifications, it could take the load safely.”

Again, silence. Obi-Wan nodded. “Here you will find your missing car.”

The engineer swallowed hard. “Regent Duris,” he said. “There remains the problem of reaching it. If we assume that the kidnappers are tied into the central network, they’ll see anything we do to reroute a car. That reduces our options to acting off the grid. It will take hours to position a strike squad. Have we that much time?”

Obi-Wan looked at her. Duris chewed at her chitinous lower lip. If this was Desert Wind, then there was little fear for the lives of the Five Families. Desert Wind kidnapped, but had never killed in cold blood. Not their style. But they had doubtlessly made arrangements for their captives to be spirited to some more secretive place—and from there, no one could predict what might happen.

Of course, it was always possible that it was
not
Desert Wind. On Cestus, misinformation was simply a fact of life…

Glancing back at Obi-Wan, she realized that she had not, for even a moment, doubted that this amazing man had done what all of Cestus’s computers could not. That by power of his mind and the mysterious Force, Obi-Wan Kenobi had found their missing Family members. With all that had happened in the last day she felt dazed and confused as she had not in all her time on the throne, as if suffering from a mild form of shock.

“You might be right,” she said. “We may have no time, and the usual means will not serve. Master Jedi—have you a plan?” Somehow, she knew he would.

“Tell your security people not to shoot until they’ve made an identification,” Obi-Wan murmured.

“What are you going to do?”

Obi-Wan paused for dramatic effect, and then replied: “Something drastic.”

Ore cars, equipment shuttles, passenger vehicles, mining machines, and repair droids all flowed through the same labyrinth of magrails and lev tracks, zipping past and moving around each other as if they were living, breathing things, individual tissue structures within a larger organism, cells in the body Cestus, drones in the technological hive.

And atop one of those cars, clinging to the surface with nerves and muscles honed by decades of training, crouched Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi. He compensated for impossibly swift and sharp turns, accelerations, and decelerations with a profound understanding of the rhythms of the universe and its invisible currents.

Sequestered in his rooms, Obi-Wan had privately absorbed the shuttle system patterns over the course of a long, sleepless night. In G’Mai’s presence he’d spent no more than a few minutes updating that research. Even if they had watched him spend hours immersed in study, what he was about to attempt would still have been impressive to them. With the secret practice and knowledge, his next actions would appear miraculous, putting his hosts—especially the volatile Quill—off-balance emotionally.

But first he had to actually
do
it, knowing as he did that sensors on the various vehicles observed his every move.

The vehicle began to slow and veer to the left. Following instincts far beyond the level of conscious thought, he jumped even before he saw the next car.

For a moment Obi-Wan clung to the tunnel’s wall, then felt a blast of air as the next magcar barreled toward him. For a moment its transparisteel walls resembled the great glowing eyes of some subterranean creature. He glimpsed commuters who had been absorbed in their datapads or conversations suddenly stare at the man hanging upside down from the top of the tunnel, and they gasped as he dropped toward them. A yellow-skinned Xexto flailed her four arms in shock, screaming that the poor human was attempting some kind of bizarre suicide.

Sorry,
Obi-Wan mouthed, then clutched the front of the car, catching it as it slowed to round the curve, but still, it rammed the breath out of him.

He clung with desperate strength. Eighteen seconds until they reached the next point, and he counted them off to himself, smiling inwardly at the civilians gawping up at this strange apparition.

Before any of them could react with anything but distress, he was gone again.

Obi-Wan wedged himself between the ceiling and the wall, bracing with hands and feet. A cargo tunnel intersected here, and it was only ten seconds before he could hear it howling on its way to him, and he saw the single eye glaring only moments before it was beneath him. He dropped down onto an ore car. The jagged heap of rock was so steep that he almost slid off onto the tracks below. He scrabbled for purchase, found it, lost it, then found it again. The artificial hurricane ripped Obi-Wan’s legs out sideways, and he pulled them back in an instant too late. His right heel slammed into a wall, whipping him around and back, ripping at his grip, forcing him to release his hold and then to regain it a few chunks back.

The wind lashed him mercilessly, and there was nothing to be done about that, not now. He knew that Cestian computers had modeled his Force-based analysis of the system kinetics, and would have found it accurate. By now they might even have adapted their own programs to enable them to track his whereabouts by reckoning the presence of an undeclared body hopping from car to car throughout the system.

That, and the overhead monitors, made it clear that he was performing for an audience both critical and suspicious.

From car to car he migrated, until he reached a junction where he could finally hop free, landing on the metal track beneath. He breathed in short, sharp bursts, refusing to give in to the fear lurking just below the surface of his concentration.

Timing. Timing.

Obi-Wan bent down and felt the metal path that the magcar levitated along at cruising speed. The car was coming. Not long now, and it was also too late to make other plans. Nothing now but to carry through. A sudden flood of air pressure hit him like a tide, overriding his carefully constructed mental blocks.

Now.
Obi-Wan turned and sprinted down the tunnel as fast as he could, fleeing the car barreling down on him; he could hear its warning siren. At the last instant he leapt forward, using the last strength in his body to accelerate himself, and spun in midair.

For an instant, his body propelled by superbly conditioned muscles and a nervous system in tune with the deepest currents of the Force, Obi-Wan’s velocity came within five meters per second of the magcar’s. He braced himself, exhaling perfectly in time with the impact, arms bent as shock absorbers. Breath smashed out of his body with a gigantic
huff,
but that very exhalation provided him with the cushioning that allowed him to survive the impact. If he hadn’t almost matched the magcar’s speed…

If he hadn’t spun to grasp…

If the exhalation hadn’t been perfectly timed…

He would have been smashed down, dragged under, ground into splinters. As it was, Obi-Wan struggled to pull himself up higher and higher on the car, until, scraped and panting, he lay above it and settled in for the rest of the ride.

In the council rooms, members of the Five Families fortunate enough not to be kidnapped were watching the entire display with shock. “What kind of creatures are these Jedi?” Llitishi whispered, mopping perspiration from his crinkled blue brow.

“I don’t know… but I am profoundly grateful to have them on our side,” said the elder Debbikin, hoping for his son’s safety. “I think that we must seriously reconsider our stance.” There was much murmured agreement, followed by eager attempts to tap into the sensors for further data.

For more than an hour after the magcar’s power had been cut and it had settled to the shaft floor, the mood in the diverted car continued to deteriorate. The captured leaders of the Five Families had watched with alarm as their solitary kidnapper was joined by three ruffians dressed in Desert Wind khakis. The intruders had exchanged a few quiet words, then gone about their plans. Clearly, they wished to separate their captives from the city grid as swiftly as possible.

“What do you intend to do with us?” Lady Por’Ten whispered.

“Wait,” a masked Desert Wind soldier replied. “You’ll see.” The dark-eyed Nautolan said nothing.

At first they had hoped for rescue, but as they watched their kidnappers set up electronic scramblers to confuse the tunnel sensors and monitors, they realized their chances of being found were slight.

One man patrolled outside the car, leaving two within it with the Nautolan. Young Debbikin watched the one outside. He walked back and forth around the car… and then he was gone. For a moment there was confusion, and then the figure reappeared. Only… was it the same person? Had he been mistaken, or had the car’s tinted windows revealed some kind of brief and violent struggle?

Hope was a luxury they dared not indulge in. And yet…

“And now—” the taller of the Desert Wind ruffians began. He never had a chance to finish the words. A black noose dropped down under his chin. The cord tightened, and the man was hauled up through an emergency door in the car’s roof, kicking and screaming, scrabbling at his neck with hooked fingers. Instantly their Nautolan kidnapper wheeled, snarling.

Cloak fluttering around him like the plumage of some bird of prey, Obi-Wan Kenobi dropped down into the car. The tan-clad Desert Wind soldier was the first to reach him, and therefore the first to go down in a brief flicker of a lightsaber. He stumbled back, the shoulder of his jacket smoking and spitting sparks.

The Nautolan glared at his adversary, and for a moment the hostages were all but forgotten.

“Jedi!” the Nautolan snarled.

Obi-Wan’s eyes narrowed to slits, his courtly manner a distant memory. In an instant he had transformed from ambassador into the deadliest of warriors. “Nemonus,” he hissed, then added, “Not the first time you’ve tried blood diplomacy.”

“Nor the last,” the Nautolan growled. “But it
is
the last time I’ll tolerate your meddling.”

Without another word the two leapt toward each other and the fight was on.

As long as they lived, the men and women in that car would remember the next few moments. The Nautolan wielded his glowing whip in a sinuous blur, with demonic accuracy. It arced up and around, flexing and coiling like a living thing. Wherever it went and whatever he did, the Jedi was there first.

There had been much speculation as to why a Jedi would prefer a lightsaber to a blaster. All of the disadvantages of such a short-range weapon were obvious. But now, watching the drama unfold before them, another fact became obvious as well: Obi-Wan’s lightsaber moved as if it were an extension of his body, a glowing arm or leg imbued with the mysterious power of the Force.

The two adversaries were almost perfectly matched. One might have expected the lightwhip’s greater length to give advantage, but in the confined space that simply wasn’t true. Strangely, while the Nautolan’s lash splashed sparks here and there, gouged hot metal from panels, and sent flecks of fire floating down to where they huddled on the ground, none of them was touched. The Nautolan was pure aggression. His face narrowed to a fighting grimace, spitting curses in strange languages, moving his torso with a boneless agility that seemed impossible for any vertebrate.

Certainly the Jedi would cower. Would flee and save himself. Nothing could stand before such a bafflingly lethal onslaught—

But Master Kenobi stood firm. He wove through that narrow space, his lightsaber flashing like desert lightning, deflecting every flicker of the whip. The Nautolan’s speed and ferocity were matched by the Jedi’s own cold and implacable determination. They leapt and tumbled, wheeling through the confined space, somersaulting so that they were virtually walking on the ceiling as they evaded and attacked, achieving a level of hyperkinesis simultaneously balletic and primal.

Master Kenobi was the first to penetrate the other’s guard, such that the lightwhip was barely able to enmesh the glowing energy blade in time to deflect. The cloth along the Nautolan’s arm flared with brief, intense heat. They saw the abrupt change in the kidnapper’s demeanor. The Nautolan snarled, and fear shone in his face. The Jedi was winning! In another engagement, two at the most, Master Kenobi would have solved the lightwhip’s riddle, and go for the kill.

The Nautolan lashed this way and that as if gathering his energies for renewed aggression. Then with a single smooth, eye-baffling motion he scooped up the wounded Desert Wind soldier as if he were a mere child. The Nautolan bounded up through the roof, and was gone. They heard his footsteps pattering down the tunnel. And then… nothing.

Master Kenobi turned to them, his face beginning to relax back from its battle mask. If he had not chosen to speak, there might have been no words voiced in that car for an hour. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

Quill was reduced to mere babbling. “No! I—that was amazing! I’d always heard stories of the Jedi, but never… I just want to say thank you! Thank you so much.”

Master Kenobi ignored him and went from one of them to the other, checking to see that all were well. Then he examined, analyzed, and disconnected the override device. Within moments light returned to the car. The droid began to wheel and pivot as if awakening from drugged slumber. He looked at Kenobi. “Ah! Master Jedi! I assume it is you who has returned my function.”

“That’s true.”

“And your orders?”

“Get these people back to the capital.”

“At once, sir.”

The droid fit his action to his words. The rescued hostages gave a ragged cheer—even Quill, whose faceted eyes shone with awe. Young Debbikin tugged at their savior’s robes again. “Master Jedi,” he asked. “How can I repay you?”

The Jedi smiled grimly. “Tell your father to remember his duty,” he said.