The Cestus Deception (36 page)

Admiral Arikakon Baraka was in a foul mood. He had been forced to take part in the clone training exercise, and now he followed orders that were taking him far afield from the Separatist hunt, bringing the
Nexu
to a planet called Cestus. By the time he finished threatening this Rim world, the rest of the fleet would have already engaged in some major battle, and the glory would belong to others.

This was no way to gain promotion, or the approval of his ancestors, which he craved even more.

Nonetheless, Baraka monitored the navigation routes, commanded his men, ran drills on all critical systems, and prepared to do his job. He would grind these Cestians to dust, then head back for the major battle sure to take place somewhere in the Borleias drift.

Only one thing stood between him and glory.

And soon, there would be nothing at all.

The speeder bikes purred to Obi-Wan’s touch, ready for the last leg of this adventure. Kit addressed the clone commandos as he finished packing his bags.

“Suspend all operations,” the Nautolan said. “There must be no chance that any of you fall into enemy hands. Your bodies would be incontrovertible evidence against the Republic, paraded to the Thousand Worlds as evidence of Palpatine’s treachery. Unless you hear directly from us, if we do not return, try beaming another message through Resta’s farm. Signal Admiral Baraka to pick you up. Unless you receive a direct order do
not
leave this camp. Is that understood?”

The troopers glanced at each other uneasily. “Isn’t it possible that we could launch a rescue if you run into trouble, General Kenobi?”

Obi-Wan managed a confident nod. “Do not leave this camp except under direct orders, am I clear?”

The troopers nodded, and the Jedi headed out into a strong headwind. The sandstorm continued to build as they traveled north toward ChikatLik. At times Obi-Wan looked behind him and couldn’t see Kit’s speeder; he had to trust that his companion was there.

Just as he could see no sure solution to the situation at hand, but needed to have faith that such an answer did, indeed, exist.

“We have the credits you requested. Where is our suit?” It had taken an entire day to make their way back into Chikat-Lik, and Obi-Wan’s nerves were badly frayed. This was an unforeseen additional complication.

Trillot tittered. “There is nothing on this planet more highly protected than those suits. My nest is raided periodically—if it was found here, no legal defense or explanation would suffice.”

Plausible enough, but…

Obi-Wan noted her discomfort, and suddenly he sensed danger around him. “Well then, where is it?” What was wrong? All the words were right, and yet… and yet…

“Follow me to my personal turbolift,” Trillot said. “I will take you to the dock myself. Where are the credits?”

“Half now,” Kit said, laying a satchel on the table before him. His dark, unblinking eyes never left their hostess. “And half after we have our suit. Fair?”

“Of course,” Trillot replied.

Obi-Wan and Kit followed Trillot to the lift platform. They entered and the door closed behind them. As they descended, Kit turned to Trillot, his huge dark eyes reflecting the dim light. “I have heard of you, and am glad for this opportunity to meet. If there is difficulty, I promise you we’ll never meet again.”

“I think we will have no further business” was the gangster’s pious reply.

When the lift stopped, they were in a freighter-size hive cavern beneath the main city. As far as the eye could see, thousands upon thousands of deserted hive cubicles stretched around the walls. Obi-Wan smelled water: a subterranean lake, perhaps a river. The dock was surrounded with stacks of unopened crates.
A hive converted to a smuggler’s lair,
Obi-Wan thought.
Smuggling goods through subterranean rivers? Ingenious. But…

“Be cautious,” Obi-Wan said as they stepped out.

“An unneeded warning,” Kit replied.

A third voice entered the conversation. “And a belated one.” Instantly, a shimmering circle of light sizzled the air around Obi-Wan. He recognized it instantly: a Xythan force shield.
A snare.

“A new security device created by Cestus Cybernetics. It absorbs and returns all energy. Feel free to use your lightsaber.”

Obi-Wan knew that last voice. Suddenly, and with shocking clarity, all that had happened in the last days made terrible, and possibly terminal, sense. “Asajj Ventress,” he said.

She appeared out of the shadows, but it was not shadows alone that had protected her. In each hand she held a glowing red lightsaber with a curved handle.

A dozen young X’Ting emerged from the boxes around her. Males, barely out of their adolescence, judging by the light rings of fur around their necks. They swaggered and postured, but they were callow.

“You have perfected the Quy’Tek meditations, Adept,” he said. “You can shield your Force.”

“From fools, yes,” she said, and smiled. “Go ahead—use your lightsabers. The field will draw power from them.”

“And those?”

Trillot crept around the edge of the energy field. She seemed like a vex caught between two reeks. “They are loyal to the hive,” she said.

“She has no love for you, Trillot,” Obi-Wan said.

“And even less for you, I think.” The gangster tittered.

Ventress turned to the gangster. “You may leave now, Trillot. Your protocol droid will translate my orders to the X’Ting.”

Trillot went back up the turbolift as swiftly as it would move her.

Ventress smiled. “I knew, in the end, I would defeat you.”

“You call this a fair fight?” The acid in Obi-Wan’s voice did nothing to mask the lethal fury building within him. Now he understood all the death, all the critical failures since his arrival on Cestus. All attempts to bring this matter to a peaceful conclusion had been thwarted by this bald-pated witch, and the confusion he had felt until this moment was wiped away completely.

“No,” she said calmly. “I call it victory.”

Commander Baraka’s supercruiser emerged from hyperspace and moved into position over Cestus. A swift scan revealed no defenses capable of resisting a ship of the
Nexu
’s class, so he approached without haste, taking this opportunity to put his crew through a series of attack drills.

Until ten hours passed, or they received a coded message, there was little to be done.

Cestus lay before them, a world of wealth without warriors to protect it. They now needed only a message from the surface, or one from the Supreme Chancellor. It was just a matter of time.

When the cruiser entered the system, alarm ripped through ChikatLik like a whirlwind. Everyone knew someone who had heard the rumor that the city was to be destroyed. Thousands left the city in the first three hours, a stream of refugees that clotted the skylanes and roadways.

G’Mai Duris went on the air, promising her citizens that the vessel was only there to protect the Republic’s interests. Since Cestus was a friend of the Republic, how could anyone think harm would come to them? The fact that this broadcast was also sent to every major star system along the Rim missed no one.

Quietly, leaders of the Five Families made excuses and slipped away to their private haven beneath Kibo Lake. To most Cestians, it seemed their planet was trapped between the Republic and the Confederacy, and they hoped to ride it out, survival temporarily transformed into a more urgent motivation than profit.

To the Five Families, a game was being played out that could end with their power broken, or raised to the highest levels. Palpatine might win. Count Dooku might win. No matter which, they intended to survive.

True, a storm had been unleashed upon Cestus, but as long as they survived, Confederacy contracts might yet be honored. After all, the entire galaxy was watching, and this would be a perfect time for Count Dooku to provide an objective example of the advantages to be found in trading the Separatists.

There were other factors, of course, factors discussed only among the Families, or by those who had reviewed very private evaluations distributed solely to the top families. But those factors, and their implications, would be meaningless if they did not survive the next few days…

“This will end in… perhaps twenty hours.” Ventress glanced at the two Jedi, still trapped within the energy shield. “I regret that I will not have the opportunity to match lightsabers with you again, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Count Dooku wants you alive,” she said, prowling at the edge of the shield. So intense was her hunger that the tips of her twin sabers trembled. “But mightn’t he forgive me if I simply slew you in single combat?”

“Please.” Obi-Wan locked eyes with her. “Try me.”

“I’d rather that honor be mine,” Kit said.

“Ohhh,” she breathed. “Oh, yes, you and I. It will happen, Obi-Wan Kenobi. But I must remember that the operation is more important than my individual satisfaction or advancement. Surely you can understand this.”

She looked up at the craggy ceiling above him. “The Supreme Chancellor will humble Cestus as an example to other breakaway planets. The fate of this one small planet will push hundreds of star systems into the Confederacy’s arms. Mission accomplished.”

“What of the biodroids? Don’t you want them?”

She smiled. “It would be good, but volume production will require cloning, and our efforts to clone the dashta tissue will require another year, at least. For the time being, that is a dead end. A bluff.”

She smiled and came closer, so close that her face almost touched the wall of shimmering energy. “Those beacons you planted in Clandes. Very nice. You could not enter the actual plant, so you triangulated three external signals. A good plan. But one easily countered. What a shame that the coordinates have been recalibrated,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” Obi-Wan said, fearing that he understood her meaning precisely.

“You planned to destroy the filtration and power plants with minimal loss of life.” She
tsk
ed. I’m afraid that that won’t do. Our plans require a more… dramatic event.”

“What have you done?” he whispered.

“No… better you should ask what is it
you
have done,” she said. “And why would you have a cruiser deliberately strike a cave fault, destroying the entire industrial complex and its millions? Yes, I think that a slaughter like that will polarize the galaxy, don’t you?”

His head spun. And Count Dooku had no way of cloning or mass-producing dashta tissue for at least a year? “Then your droid order was a sham?”

“Intended to frighten Palpatine and your precious Jedi Council into an overreaction. I would say our plan worked, wouldn’t you?” Her laughter was as warm as dry ice. “The resulting slaughter will tip the galaxy in our favor. Then once we do clone the tissues, who needs Cestus?”

“You’re a monster,” Kit said, voice calm as a dead sea.

At that moment the vast energies within Obi-Wan swirled and stilled. As hopeless as the situation seemed, he believed to his core that this was not over. Somewhere, Ventress had made a mistake. And when that single mistake manifested, he would be ready to take advantage…

Still under direct order, the four surviving clone troopers remained confined to base. They were fully aware of the forces struggling around them, and also of the nightmare about to descend on Ord Cestus.

Jangotat’s mind swam with visions and possibilities. He more than anyone knew the ARC mission mandate. It was engraved on his brain like his own number.
Stop the production of JKs. Preserve the social order.

Preserve the order? But the order was corrupt! The Five Families were willing to murder countless civilians to make a profit. If that was not the very definition of
betrayal,
what was? Even worse, only a fool couldn’t see that they had already allied themselves with the Separatists, and the Jedi were no fools, that much was certain.

They, then, were caught in events, controlled by their programming.
Just like a clone,
he thought.

The
Nexu
hovered in orbit above them. Any minute now a message might come from General Kenobi to begin bombing. If not, within a few hours the ship would take out the beacon-marked targets without additional authorization.

These people were going to die. Ordinary citizens with roots couldn’t just throw their homes in a rucksack and ship off when danger came. They railed against the darkness, they fought on for their loved ones, they prayed in silence.

The troopers waited, but the longed-for communication with the generals did not come. Dead? Captured? Time was running out. In a few hours the bombardment would begin, and that was all to the good, wasn’t it?

Jangotat stalked the camp’s perimeters, chewing on a nervestick while acid boiled his gut.
Something is wrong.

When he circled back around to the others, Seefor was talking. “What do we do now?”

Forry shrugged. “If he doesn’t come back, it didn’t work. Then the bombardment begins, we call in transport, and we go home. Nothing to do but wait.”

Jangotat wandered away, mind racing, hoping against hope that their Jedi commanders would call in, that the word would come that the line was shut down without the vast damage of an orbiting strike.

He was a bit surprised when old Thak Val Zsing and the X’Ting woman Resta approached him. Val Zsing had seemed

broken, but now there was something alive and almost aflame about him. “I know things,” he said. “Please. Listen to me.”

Jangotat, remembering what he had learned in the cave, opened his senses. He saw the man’s wounds as well as his strength. He believed that this miserable wretch needed, deserved, one chance to redeem himself.

We are more than our actions. More than our deeds, or programming.

“What is it?” he asked.

“No one talk to Resta. No one talk to Thak Val Zsing,” she said. “So we two talk. Talk about the old days. What Gramps say ’bout the prisons, how Resta’s hive forced to dig in them. I remember things about them.” She tapped her finger against her temple. “I see I know things about ’Secutive ‘resort.’” She snorted. “You know, the one they rip away power away to build? The one that kill my man?”

The X’Ting leaned closer, her thick red eyebrows arched and erect. “I look at ’puter map.”

“Our computers?”

Thak Val Zsing nodded. The old man’s eyes were piercingly hot. “Same routing map you used to get through the tunnels, when the Jedi put on their little show, remember, star-boy?”

Jangotat agreed that he did, still not seeing the point.

“That program charts energy usage, utilty bills, all kindsa real-time routing information on the major systems.” Val Zsing’s voice hushed to an excited whisper. “And we saw something. Oh, brother, did I ever see something.”

“In last five hours, since big ship pull into orbit, ‘resort’ light glow.” Resta leaned forward, so excited she could barely contain herself. “
That where Five Families hide!
”