The Cestus Deception (25 page)

Jangotat and the rest of the rescue party had traveled most of the way to the location indicated by Barrister Snoil’s homing beacon, zipping along close to the ground on speeder bikes. They were less than three klicks away when they picked up the first signals from ChikatLik’s approaching rescue craft.

“We have a problem, Captain,” Sirty said.

“Agreed, Sergeant.” Obi-Wan’s escape from the ship had been anticipated, and had gone off without a hitch. His capsule had been all but invisible to the scanners. Snoil’s unanticipated exit was another matter altogether. The Vippit’s rescue beacon would be seen by anyone with a scanner tuned to the emergency frequencies. The troopers had their orders: to retrieve Snoil. There was no telling the nature or inclination of those who now rushed to find them. Was it still important not to expose the presence of trained Republic forces on Cestus? What to do?

He made his decision from among a handful of equally bad options. “Forry and Desert Wind travel north to intercept. Dig in and do what you can to make yourselves look like a larger force. They won’t be anticipating hostile fire, and
should
retreat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On it!”

Two of the speeder bikes peeled off to head north. He sent a coded message to those remaining with him. “Follow me. Increase to maximum velocity.”

The Republic transport drama had attracted attention from members of the Five Families. A seething Quill had already returned to Duris’s throne room, and Llitishi was said to be on his way. Quill radiated both hatred and triumph. How long would it be before he found a way to kill her? A month? A week? A few days?

“Regent Duris,” said Shar Shar, rolling side-to-side with dismay. “Our security force approaches the beacon location for the escape capsule, but there is a problem.”

“And what is that?”

The little blue ball frowned. “Look.” On the projection field, a few small dots zipped from the direction of the Dashta Mountains, heading for the capsule.

“What is that?”

“Ordinarily I’d guess aboriginal nomads, ma’am. But they’re moving kind of fast.”

Quill sneered, his wings fluttering with repressed rage. “We know that Desert Wind was cooperating with the Jedi. We are simply seeing the weapons that bought such cooperation,
Regent.
”

“And now they intend to rescue the Vippit?” Her head spun.

“They may even be responsible for the attack.”

“They have no such weaponry.” Duris bit her tongue. These waters were deepening. Could Desert Wind have been involved? But if they had other allies, allies who might have supplied the technology for such an assassination, then were the anarchists playing both sides against the middle, supporting anyone who would provide them with weaponry? Then what of her intuition that Quill had obtained the holovid from complicit sources? And if he had—
Whose trap is this, really? And who has been caught in it?

Duris was beginning to think that Obi-Wan might have been more truthful than she thought. Why, then, had he not proclaimed innocence in some way? If security considerations were involved, why had he not asked for a private audience? No, she had seen his face: surprise, shock, consternation… and shame.

“Ma’am!” Shar Shar called out. “The rescue force is under fire!”

Duris manipulated her chair-arm sensor, momentarily unable to find the feed. “Any visual contact?”

Shar Shar tried to manipulate the drone satellite but couldn’t get magnification powerful enough to show anything but a few specks and flashes in the desert. “No,” the Zeetsa said. “But they are using weapons similar to those known to be possessed by Desert Wind.”

Of course. That meant nothing. And everything. Her head hurt. “Tell them to pull back. Put a smaller security team into the area.”

The other dots were moving. Had they reached the capsule and extracted the survivor?

“They’re leaving!” Shar Shar bubbled. The dots on the map bleeped out. “And they must have reached the mountains. Our drone satellite can’t see anything at all now.”

Had Snoil been rescued? Kidnapped? Murdered? Tortured for information? Welcomed as a friend? It was impossible to say from this vantage point. But the differences among those possibilities might cost G’Mai Duris her cloak of office.

More important, they might cost the life of every being on Cestus.

With anarchists attacking on multiple fronts, there was little time for rest in ChikatLik. The attacks were always carried out with laser precision, and inevitably involved minimal structural damage and no loss of life. Still, with every strike an industrial complex was damaged, production slowed or stopped. Mines were rendered too dangerous for workers to enter, vehicles were sabotaged, and security forces were humiliated and enraged. And behind it all, behind every mark on the map that meant another blown bridge, another crippled skyport, another central processing by-station rendered useless, Duris thought she sensed the mind of Obi-Wan Kenobi: brilliant, ferocious, tactically diverse, and respectful of life in all its forms.

Could the Jedi still be alive?

If the majority of production loci were jammed, if those critical production lines were slowed to a crawl, her hands would be tied. She would have to either sue for peace or call in Confederacy forces to protect their interests, throwing Cestus onto the path of destruction. Because if Cestus declared for the Confederacy, then the Republic would consider her an enemy planet producing lethal arms. Cestus had no fleet capable of resisting
either
juggernaut. Politically, economically, and personally she would be torn to pieces, and Cestus would end as a minor footnote in dull academic histories detailing failed attempts at secession.

During those days the Regent slept little. It seemed that every five hours or so there was another report, bearing new embedded images of flaming refineries, fleeing security forces, stories of commando teams—perhaps Desert Wind, perhaps something else—striking from silence and shadows, destroying only equipment, and then fading away again. Just dissolving into thin air.

Then in the middle of a night, Shar Shar’s cries roused her from uneasy dreams. “We’ve trapped Desert Wind!” she called. “Please, come now.”

G’Mai Duris wrapped a robe around her ample body and hurried to follow her assistant’s spherical blue form as it ricocheted down the hall toward the observation room.

She recognized the location in the holos: the Kibo geothermal station west of the Zantay Hills. Kibo had appeared on a high-priority list of possible targets and thus been allotted additional security teams. Apparently those precautions had borne fruit.

“What do we have?”

“A Desert Wind unit. No more than ten. They were sabotaging one of the towers, and a secondary sweep picked them up. We swooped in before they could escape. Seemed to have cut off their retreat.”

“Good, good,” Duris said. “Then there is a chance for capture, and then interrogation.” Perhaps now they would finally learn a bit of the truth. Perhaps.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was pinned down in a bunker at the rock-tumbled edge of Kibo Lake, just outside the power station’s white duracrete dome. For the last hour a slow wind had been building. The air was clouded with sand and dust, reducing the accuracy of defensive fire. Their enemies seemed less encumbered: one of his recruits was already wounded by sniper blasts. The surprise and the accurate return fire had dispirited the others.

The clone troopers were still disguised as Desert Wind fighters. Even though Obi-Wan knew that the incriminating holovid existed, if there were no additional witnesses, and no obvious clone trooper involvement, it would be easier for Coruscant to deny allegations.

Kibo Lake’s fifty-kilometer-wide volcanic crater was the fourth largest on the planet. Active vents at the bottom transformed this, one of Cestus’s largest bodies of groundwater, into a hypermineralized geothermal soup pot, home to a collection of odd primitive aquatic forms, and a power source for many of the outlying mines.

The geothermal stations tapped those volcanic vents, concentrating the heat and ultimately powering a series of steam turbines. The power was sold in a dozen forms planetwide.

Both stealth and courage had been required to move into position for the assault: they’d skimmed silently across Kibo Lake’s simmering alkaline soup and simultaneously crawled over the crater wall from the desert, in a precision pincer operation.

Explosive charges had been carefully placed, guards neutralized without fatality. If all had gone well they would have faded back into the desert an hour before the first explosion’s false dawn illuminated the night sky.

It was not to be. The problem had been an accident, really. Thirty hours before their attack, Kibo’s security system had malfunctioned. The entire security network had been quietly taken offline for repair, and it was impossible for Obi-Wan to test their attempts at a bypass. Worse still, there was no way to know when the system might come back online.

Perfect opportunity? Or perfect trap?

For half an hour Desert Wind had watched and waited and sweated before deciding to go on with the plan. So half of them entered the refinery while the others remained behind, hoping that when the alarm system switched itself back on it would not reveal their intrusion. Failing that, they hoped to disarm it completely.

Their plan might have worked, except that the plant security wasn’t testing the old alarm system at all. The power station staff were installing a completely
new
system, one that did not show up on any of the plans provided by the ever-bribable Trillot.

Obi-Wan had walked directly into an unintentional trap.

“We’re surrounded!” Thak Val Zsing hissed.

“No,” Obi-Wan said calmly. Val Zsing stuck his head up and was immediately driven back by accurate blasterfire.

“We’re pinned,” Obi-Wan corrected, “but not surrounded. Right over there—” He pointed at a series of ceramic spirals near the main dome. “—heat extraction coils run boiling water to the turbines.” He spoke as calmly as he could, but knew that his companions’ patience would not last indefinitely. “Jangotat?”

Jangotat had been patiently watching his quadrant since the ambush was discovered, and now responded evenly. “Yes, sir?”

“I want you to draw them for me. I’ll provide covering fire—” Jangotat knelt down as Obi-Wan traced in the dust with his fingertip.

The trooper grasped the implications instantly, but Thak Val Zsing was still uncertain. “I don’t understand,” the old man said.

“Watch, and learn,” Obi-Wan said. “But now we need covering fire.”

“A
lot
of covering fire,” Jangotat added. “Are you Jedi as good with blasters as you are with lightsabers?”

“Better,” Obi-Wan joked. “We only use lightsabers to make fights more… equitable.”

The ARC grinned. “Let’s do it, then.”

Obi-Wan chuckled to himself. Gaining a new name seemed to have given Jangotat more personality as well.

Obi-Wan and his forces began a flurry of counterblasting that temporarily tied down the guards crouching just beyond the dome. Taking that opportunity, Jangotat dashed out from the hiding place and, firing by instinct, managed to hit one of the security guards on the fly. A fatality. No way around it, now. Obi-Wan had known that this action might cost lives, but he’d allowed himself to hope—

His thoughts were interrupted as Jangotat dashed from the side and zigzagged across the wharf, drawing a blistering stream of fire. Blaster bolts ripped around his feet as Jangotat made a high, clean dive into the volcanic pit. Obi-Wan flinched. That water had to be
hot
!

As he had suspected, the forces pinning them down changed locations slightly to get a better view of the steaming surface. In that moment, Obi-Wan aimed carefully and blew a hole in the heat condenser coil.

Live steam billowed from the burst coil and the security men screamed, for a moment forgetting all plans and intentions. A good scalding could do that.

He glanced behind himself long enough to be certain that a speeder bike swooped in to fish Jangotat out to safety. Then Obi-Wan led the charge toward the disorganized security forces.

Forty meters separated them. If Obi-Wan could just steal a few seconds, aggression could compensate for superior numbers. One of the blind, scalded men turned his weapon on the charging intruders, too late to keep them from closing the gap.

One of the Desert Wind recruits went down hard, his chest transformed into a smoking husk. The clash was joined.

Obi-Wan’s lightsaber flashed, and guards fell. Steam gushed from the damaged coil. While it stung his eyes, he was not nearly so close to it as those first men had been. That must have been brutal.

The air around Obi-Wan blurred with lightsaber slashes. Speeder bikes screamed in from above now, and Obi-Wan glimpsed Kit Fisto’s speeder streak past as the Nautolan plunged into the fray, lightsaber flashing left and right, deflecting laser blasts and severing blasters at the barrel. Fortunate guards scrambled back to safety. Unfortunate ones fell clutching wounds, and a few would never move again.

They had been trapped, and tricked; disaster had been averted only because Jangotat had been willing to do
exactly
as ordered, even though those orders seemed insane. Disaster had been reversed, become a rout that might devolve into a slaughter if he didn’t stop this. He waved the withdrawal signal to the Nautolan, and their troops went into retreat. They had done more damage than their original plan had called for. When the explosives detonated, this entire facility would be a splintered mass of rubble.

And yet, try as he might, he felt no pride at all.

Lives had been lost. The door to chaos had just been opened, and it stretched wider by the moment.

In the days since the Jedi had been expelled from ChikatLik, Desert Wind had destroyed three refineries, an energy facility, and a manufacturing plant.

And this, Duris knew, was only the beginning.

She didn’t know where to turn. All she could do was issue security orders. Although they would be carried out without fail, she was no longer certain how much difference it would make.

Duris no longer knew who to trust. The Five Families constantly lied. It was their nature, fed to them along with their first food. Every few hours the Cestus map sprouted another red blotch. And that meant that time was running out. Already, she knew, the Five Families were making their own plans. Either to find a way to remove her from office, or worse.

And the devil of it was that what she wanted most of all was to speak with Obi-Wan one more time. To ask him to explain. Perhaps if it had been just the two of them, that might have been possible. But now…

“Your orders, ma’am?” Shar Shar burbled.

“Keep gathering information, Shar Shar,” she said. “And hope for a miracle.”