The Cestus Deception (34 page)

His mouth worked without producing words.

“I think you are. Wake up before it’s too late. You’re not just a number, you’re a man, a living, breathing man. You were born dreaming that you’re some kind of machine, an expendable programmed device. You’re not.”

“Then what am I?” He blinked hard, shivering. “What is this feeling? I’ve never known it.” He paused, mouth opening in astonishment. “
Loneliness,
” he said finally, answering his own question. “I feel so alone. I’ve never felt alone before. How could I? I was always surrounded by my brothers.”

“I’ve felt lonely in a crowd,” Sheeka said. “Only one thing really cures loneliness.”

“What is that?” Another plea, but this one did not shame him.

“The sense that the universe knows that we’re here.”

Confusion warred with clarity. “But how can it see me among so many brothers? We’re all the same.”

“No,” she said, her voice carrying a new sharpness. “You’re not. As you told me, no two of you have ever had the same experiences. So no two of you can be the same.”

“I lied,” he said, the words twisted with anguish. “There’s no
me
inside. It’s all
us.
The GAR. My brothers. The Code. But where am I? Who am I?”

“Listen to your heart.” Her palm and fingers rested against his chest. He felt the warmth, so deeply that for a moment he feared its cessation, feared that if she drew her hand away he would become a man of ice.

Again.

“Your heartbeat says it all. It says we are all completely unique.”

She paused.

“And that, in that very uniqueness, we are all the same.”

We are all the same… because we are all unique.
The words echoed through the chamber, but he heard them not merely with his ears. He knew now why she had asked him to cease listening to the sounds. Cease using his
outer
ears, so that the inner voices could whisper their secrets. “Unique, as every star is unique. As every particle of the universe is unique.”

And in that uniqueness, we are all the same. Every being. Every particle. Every planet. Every star.

He was speaking to himself. She spoke to him. The dashta eels spoke to him. His wrinkled, bearded, and beloved future self, the Jangotat who would never be, spoke to him. The child he had never been, who had known a mother’s love and a happy home, a mother who would nurture him that he might one day make his own choices in the world…

All of these spoke to him. Each in its own voice, but together they blended into a single chorus, a single blended sentiment, overwhelming in its simplicity and abiding love.

He sagged from his knees onto his side. All false strength, all bravado drained from him like water squeezed from a sponge. In its place remained a sense of lightness rather than power. He had always felt himself to be a man of iron, if not durasteel. What need had durasteel for air or water or love?

Jangotat heard a wet slippery sound, then another and yet another. He looked up. The legless eels wriggled cooing from the pool, surrounding him. Very tentatively, he bent and reached out, touched the nearest. Its blind, eyeless face observed him with a vast and aching intelligence. Its touch was Love itself.

“What did you see?” Sheeka asked from behind him.

“Another life,” he said.

“Another life?”

He nodded. “I might have been born to a mother and father. Had brothers and sisters. Played with my pets.”

That last seemed to surprise her. “Pets?”

Absurdly gentle emotions flooded him. “I saw a Corosian phoenix once. The most beautiful thing I ever saw. I wanted one. As a pet.” He laughed at himself. “Not at that station. Not at any post I know of. A burden to the army, you see?”

“Strange,” she said, voice troubled. “Strange. Usually the Guides are a healing influence.”

“They are.” His bruised lips turned up in a smile. “For given that other option, I choose
my
life. However and for whatever purpose I was given life, still I choose everything that led me to this moment.”

He paused again, the world spinning around him. Within him. “I choose everything that led me to this place, and to you.”

She sank down beside him, the eels parting to make room. Although they could not see, they saw all.

She pressed her full warm lips against his, setting her hands against his cheeks to draw him even closer. Although he had shared kisses with other women, this was different, an unfolding in his heart.

Sheeka Tull placed her cheek against his, and whispered something that he could not quite hear.

“What?” he asked, afraid to know. “What did you say?”

“That thing you’ve never heard,” she answered. Then paused again before speaking the words he had waited a full, brief lifetime to hear. “I love you.”

Sheeka Tull’s beautiful dark face rippled with reflected light. Jangotat knew that his existence had contained no greater peace and fulfillment than this. They kissed again, her lips warm against his.

The next days seemed a sort of dream, a phantasmal passage from which he would inevitably awaken. The village accepted the fact that he had moved into Sheeka’s house, her children that he had moved into her guest room.

As Jangotat sat sunning himself, Sheeka’s son Tarl came to sit with him on the porch. They talked for a time, and then Jangotat began to use his knife to carve the yellow-haired lad a toy.

He knew that they were welcoming him to become one of them. That while such a choice was impossible, Sheeka was inviting him to stay. These were peaceful folk who prayed Cestus would not be pulled into a conflict beyond their understanding. He now comprehended so much more. The eels had given their beloved friends permission to use the sterile young, but for defensive purposes only. Only to give the humans a means of income, to save the economy of the planet that gave them life. Modifying security droids for the battlefield was an abomination that might destroy them all. Just another level of confusion.

But despite the problems, without really saying a specific word, the Zantay Hills fungus farmers were offering Jangotat something he had never really had: not merely a bunk, but a home. Sheeka’s stepdaughter Tonoté came to sit at his other side, her red hair ruffled by the noon breeze blowing in off the desert.

“Where will you go after?” Tonoté asked in her disarmingly fragile voice.

“After what?”

“After you stop being a soldier. Where will you go? Where is your home?”

“The GAR is my home.”

She leaned her small head against his shoulder. “But when you stop fighting. Where will you go?” Strangely, those words seemed to resonate in his mind.
Where will you go…?

You’re not intended to “go” anywhere. You will die where you are told.

“I don’t know what you mean.” Why had he lied?
The greatest wish of a trooper is to die in service.

Isn’t it? The possibility of another fate had never really occurred to him. The clones hadn’t existed long enough for any of them to wither in their premature fashion, or retire… whatever
that
might mean to a being with such a truncated life span.

There was simply no precedent.

Tarl looked up at him adoringly, and Tonoté bent her long graceful neck to lean her little head against Jangotat’s shoulder. Sheeka watched from the window, smiled secretively, then closed the shutters again.

Sandstorms raged the next day, followed by one of Cestus’s brief, violent rains. It tamped down the dust but also created a canopy of dark, heavy clouds. Time seemed to stretch endlessly, and through much of the morning Jangotat wandered the muddy streets alone, seeking he knew not what. Something. Some understanding of these people that continued to elude him. They watched him as they flowed among the stone houses, and were friendly enough, but treated him as what he was: someone who was just passing through. Just on his way to somewhere else. The deepest smiles and sweetest laughter were confined to those who would stay, or might return.

He was neither.

Late that evening, news reached Sheeka that contact had been made with Desert Wind. Jangotat made his tearful good-byes with the village, and Sheeka’s children. He longed to return to the dashta cave to make another, equally difficult farewell, but intuition told him the request would be presumptuous. It was he who had been presented to the dashtas, not they to him. Their lair was a secret, and a risk had been taken even bringing him there. He could not, would not, ask for more.

Sheeka took him to a neutral landing site, where a few minutes later a two-person speeder bike appeared, piloted by Desert Wind’s youngest member.

“How are things going, Skot?” Sheeka asked.

OnSon’s mouth managed to twist into the vestige of a smile. “We’re regrouped, and that’s more than I would have expected a week ago. It’s all right, except for Thak Val Zsing.”

She started. “What of him?”

OnSon sneered. “He betrayed us. I’m not sure what happened, but the old man lost it. He knew those killer droids were coming. Instead of warning us, he saved his own hide. Pretty messed up.” He looked at Jangotat. “Well. I didn’t really expect to see you up and around so soon.”

Jangotat shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of help from…” He glanced at Sheeka, who shook her head subtly. “Friends.”

“Friends are good to have,” OnSon said.

Sheeka Tull’s beautiful dark face was calm and impassive. “Will I see you again?” she asked Jangotat quietly.

“I don’t know.” Finally, the truth.

She rested her head against his chest and pounded it softly with closed fists. “I don’t know why I do this to myself,” she said in a small voice. “I just have this soft place in my head for you strong, quiet, self-contained types.”

His arms, arms that could not protect her, enfolded her small, wiry frame. “Don’t you mean
a soft place in my heart
?” he whispered into her hair.

She glanced up at him, a hint of mischief lightening her face. “I meant exactly what I said.”

Then Jangotat surprised himself, leaning down to kiss her thoroughly, without any concern for what OnSon or anyone else might see or think.

And then he left. As the speeder bike raced on, he looked back at the dwindling, dust-blown figure of Sheeka Tull, intuiting that he would never see her again, but not knowing exactly what that might mean for either of them.

By roundabout routes young OnSon brought Jangotat back to the new camp. It was set up in an abandoned mine in a tumbled range of hills, completely overgrown and impossible to approach without being seen. He immediately approved of the location, and wished that they had found one as good before their first disaster. Such foresight might have spared some of the spider clan.

After hiding the speeder they moved through rocky overhangs—mindful of the possibility of spy satellites—and he was led into the cave.

His surviving brothers welcomed him, of course. Memory of what had happened just prior to his injury was muzzy, but according to all accounts he had acquitted himself well.

Crouching in the rocks at the outskirts of the camp lurked old Thak Val Zsing. Where before he seemed merely gray-bearded and a bit tired, now he was elderly. Derelict. Broken, a shadow of the boastful and boisterous man he had been just days before. The other members of Desert Wind avoided him like the plague, and twice he saw men spit into the dust at his feet. In a single unthinking instant, Thak Val Zsing had obliterated a lifetime of courage.

Honor. Such a fragile thing.

Jangotat spent hours exploring the new environs, familiarizing himself with the escape routes, and getting caught up on all the logistics. He was briefed on Obi-Wan’s JK encounter and the Clandes plant’s temporary closing.

All those losses, and the near death of General Kenobi, and all that had been accomplished was a
temporary
shutdown. This was 10 percent.

“What have you heard?” he asked Forry.

“Word is General Kenobi still hasn’t got an uplink. Must be ready to pop.”

“So… no news on the Clone Wars?”

“None. Anything could be happening up there. Out there.” Forry shook his head. “This is about as ten percent as it gets.”

Late that night a shuttle landed at the western pad, disgorging the two Jedi without fanfare or fuss. Obi-Wan and Kit slipped through the camouflaged cave mouth and were immediately briefed by the clone commandos and brought up to date on all that had happened in their absence. Then the Jedi went off to a small side cave they had taken as their own lodging, and made preparations for sleep.

Kit noticed an odd quietude about Obi-Wan, but his companion decided to speak before the Nautolan could inquire into his mood. “I remember her words, Kit.”

“Whose words?”

“G’Mai Duris. She warned me that this could turn into a no-win scenario, one where I might well fail to prevent the destruction of an entire, peaceful people.”

Kit stirred the fire with his stick. Sparks circled up into the air. “Then we mustn’t fail. By the Thousand Tides, there must be a way.”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan said, and managed a smile. “But knowing it, and saying it, is not the same as finding it.”

Anxious but loath to reveal the extent of his anxiety, Obi-Wan watched as Sirty struggled to repair their damaged equipment. After heroic exertions the trooper had managed to conceal a message on a tight-beamed commercial fertilizer order from Resta’s Kibo Lake farm, but he doubted they would be able to use
that
particular trick again. The forces arrayed against them were powerful, and clever indeed. The only safe thing to do was assume that no more than a single message could be sent or received in any single route.

Sirty’s comlink squawked to life. “We have it, sir!”

“Luck?” Obi-Wan asked.

“Perseverance. I was able to tap into one of the backup circuits. Military equipment has built-in redundancy.”

“Splendid.”

Obi-Wan took his position as the communications equipment fired up. Within seconds he received an image of a male Falleen tech at a distant relay station.

The high-collared, emerald-skinned hologram image raised an eyebrow. “I do not recognize your communications protocols.”

“Automatic authentication has been damaged,” he said, and then provided a coded series of words, concluding with: “—This is Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Knight, on Republic business. Provide a link and you will be rewarded.”

“Very well.”

After six minutes of static Obi-Wan learned that his first choice, Master Yoda, was unavailable, in the field supervising an operation. He made a swift decision, changed his access codes, and Palpatine himself appeared. “Chancellor?”

The politician’s wise and weathered face creased with pleasure. “Master Kenobi. The Council and I had begun to worry.”

“There is cause,” the Jedi admitted. “Not all has gone well.”

“Explain, please.”

Obi-Wan took a deep breath and then proceeded. “Cestus is not an obscure planet producing a dangerous machine. It seems to be at the center of an invisible game board. Count Dooku has infiltrated deeply, focusing unforeseen resources here.”

“To what end?” The Chancellor’s deep, resonant voice was calming.

“To the end that my mission was compromised, and that we are forced to hide. We strike at the infrastructure when possible.”

The Chancellor brooded before answering. “Do you expect this tactic to be successful?”

“I do not know. But I request more time to try.”

The Chancellor shook his head. “We need results, General Kenobi. I intend to assign a supercruiser to assist you.”

Obi-Wan’s heart sped up. “But sir, don’t you think—”

“I think that a warship positioned in orbit around Cestus would make them a bit more mindful, don’t you?”

“But the Confederacy will use it as an excuse to counterattack with their own ships, and claim that they were merely protecting an innocent planet against Republic aggression.”

“Well then, you had better resolve the situation before those ships arrive, hadn’t you?”

The Chancellor terminated the transmission.

Obi-Wan seethed. There it was. First “a ship” and then “before the
ships
arrive.” The Chancellor was sending a notso-subtle message: if Count Dooku interfered, Palpatine would be happy to humble him. In fact, considering their problem in getting Confederacy forces to expose themselves, Obi-Wan wondered if this entire affair might not have been a feint, a mere drawing thrust, designed specifically to provoke an aggressive response.

But no. If he thought that, the next thought, the very next thought was to wonder if Palpatine was capable of sacrificing all of their lives in exchange for victory…

Despite his distrust of politicians, he did not, could not believe this.

But if he did, what then?

And if he could not resolve this, death could come in any of a dozen ways: slain by friendly fire, by security guards, by military bombardment…

Or even at the unseen hands of their mysterious adversary.