Legacy Of The Force_ Bloodlines Part 22

"Yes, because that's the most robust stance I can persuade the Senate to allow. And blockades are very flexible responses," Niathal said.

"If it were carried out on behalf of the Alliance, that is."

"We live in a world of blurred lines."

The debate was remarkably subdued, all things considered. Jacen began to wonder if the backlash he had expected was actually his fear of the Jedi council's opinion. If anything, he appeared to be ... popular.

That didn't make him comfortable. He wanted to remain aloof from anything that might sway him, and even a Jedi could enjoy being liked a little too much.

Jacen and Niathal joined Omas in the Chief of State's cabinet room, where Senator G'Sil was already waiting. Omas didn't look happy and sat down at the head of the lapis-inlaid table with slow deliberation.

"Well, let's be grateful today's events went as well as they did."

G'Sil looked up. "Where are we housing the internees?"

"Just over half of them had Corellian pa.s.sports in the end, so we've put them in an old barracks block for the time being," said Niathal. "The rest were allowed to return to their homes. The question is how far we plan to go with this, because we have a lot of Corellian citizens resident here, and if we have to intern them all by force it's going to be a labor-intensive job."

"Immigration reports growing numbers looking to leave."

"I'm getting very uneasy about this, Admiral," said Omas. "The images on HNE might have played well to the jingoistic element on Coruscant, but it reminded a lot of us of Imperial excesses."

"You authorized the action." Niathal fixed Omas with that head-tilted stare. "What did you expect it to remind you of?"

Jacen cut in. Niathal had dispensed with any pretense of disinterest in Omas's job the moment she had been appointed Supreme Commander. She was going for broke.

"We're simply doing the same as the terrorists, except we caused no serious casualties,"

said Jacen. "A small action creating a disproportionately large impact. This is as much a propaganda war as anything."

"You planned to scare Corellians out?"

Niathal lowered her voice. "No, we planned to make it clear we would deal with threats to the population of Coruscant."

"And that's why you go in and do your own sleight of hand, is it?" Omas was addressing his remarks to Niathal even though it had been Jacen's operation. "One ma.s.sive overreaction makes it look as if you have the whole situation under control?"

"If that's how you want to see it, Chief Omas, yes." Jacen answered. It's me you're dealing with, not Niathal. "No deaths. A rea.s.sured public. A clear statement to any who want to kill and maim civilians that they won't be tolerated. Removing truly dangerous individuals from our streets. And also sending a message that if Corellia can be stopped from pursuing a destructive path at the expense of the common good, then any world can. Or would you rather let the enemies within erode our society? These are people who are happy to accept the benefits of being a Coruscant resident, an Alliance citizen, but don't want the effort of being loyal to it. If that's my sleight of hand, then I'll sleep soundly tonight."

Omas looked about to speak but simply glanced down at his hands as if making a conscious effort not to respond. He was too wily a politician to take on both Jacen and Niathal in front of G'Sil. If he lost, G'Sil would smell blood.

"If you'll excuse me, I have to talk to the Corellian emba.s.sy." Omas stood up and walked to the doors. "I'd appreciate a schedule of your next operations in advance."

G'Sil watched him go. "It's always a shame when HNE isn't here to record a really great speech."

No, Senator, that's not the game I'm playing. You have no idea, do you? No idea at all.

"You might be surprised to know I meant every word," said Jacen. "I know what a war looks like and I want this one to be the last one."

G'Sil seemed to take his comment as youthful sincerity. "Now, there's a wish with a lot of meanings," he said. "Let me go and calm Omas down. He's finding it hard to adjust to Jedi who aren't nice, tidy parts of the high council. Funny how we can attack Corellian territory without turning a hair, but we lose our nerve when we kick down a few doors on our home turf."

I never wanted to take on the Jedi council. But n.o.body here can see anything except in terms of personal ambition.

"Are we both after the same job?" Niathal asked Jacen. It was always hard to tell if a Mon Calamari was joking. Jacen sensed that there was a tinge of amus.e.m.e.nt in her mind, but not much.

"I don't want to be a politician," he said. "You'd make a fine Chief of State, but I wouldn't."

Niathal's mood changed like the sun coming out and Jacen felt relaxed goodwill and . . .

respect. He'd meant what he said; she'd taken it as a deal struck between them. "What job do you want, then? Jedi council?"

Oh, not that. She was already seeing him as a rival to Luke. From a political point of view, it had its own inevitability, but she couldn't have known that the Jedi didn't feature in his plans at all.

"I'm not even a Master." He had a moment of cold clarity in which he saw exactly what he wanted, and it stood outside him, a vision to observe and not be part of. "What I want is for the trillions of ordinary people in the galaxy to be able to get on with their lives knowing that it's being run by a stable form of government. The vast majority of folk just get smashed by the fallout from the power struggles of a handful. I want to see that stop.

I want to see power meaning duty, service, not a prize."

Niathal adjusted her tunic, straightening the braid fastening. "Well said. For someone whose whole family is an elite, you have a refres.h.i.+ngly military take on the exercise of power." Jacen had cut free from his attachment to a heroic reputation, but it was comforting to be rea.s.sured that he wasn't deluding himself. He savored a small moment of relief, and dreamed of a secure galaxy for Tenel Ka and Allana.

Chapter Eleven.

Chief of State Cal Omas today authorized new emergency measures to crack down on continuing unrest in Galactic City. Corellian pa.s.sport holders now have forty-eight hours to report to their local CSF precinct and opt for repatriation or face internment. The move has been condemned by Senate representatives from Altyr Five. Obreedan, and Katraasii. Meanwhile, anti-terrorist squads raided homes in the Adur quarter overnight and seized explosives and blasters. Ten men and three women have been charged with conspiracy to cause explosions.

-HNE lunchtime news bulletin ARKANIAN MICROTECHNOLOGIES HEADQUARTERS, VOHAI.

If there was a weak point in any perimeter, Boba Fett would find it. And he had.

He watched a small bird-a hummer, bright scarlet-perch on the top of the four-meter-high perimeter fence that ran for six kilometers around Arkanian Micro's headquarters and noted that there was no reaction from the guards in the gatehouse.

There was no point having a security system so sensitive that birds could set it off. And if a bird could get over that fence, then so could Fett.

Security cams didn't cover much beyond a hundred meters around each guarded gate. It all depended on the sensors that detected entry at any unsupervised point along or over the fence, and that was a weak point for a man with a custom disrupter.

The sensors projected a slim movement-sensitive ellipse along the entire cross section of the fence, generated from ground level and extending two meters on either side of it and-if the sweep from orbit by Slave I's scanners was correct-two hundred meters above it to thwart aerial incursions.

Or intruders with jet packs, of course. Fett didn't take that personally.

But the sensors didn't react to small objects. Fett stood back from the two-meter line and took two long wires with gription clips. He cast one like an angler, looping it out from shoulder height just as he had when fis.h.i.+ng for devees from the landing pad of his Tipoca City home as a kid. The clip snapped on to the mesh of the fence, insubstantial as a hummer. Then Fett cast the other wire two meters along the fence, attaching a second gription clip.

He now had two long lines that enabled him to attach his disrupter without breaching the sensor field. Standing inside the bight of the wires, he plugged them into the casing of the disrupter and pressed the key. He was now as good as inside. As far as the detection system could tell, there was an unbreached perimeter; the wires were effectively a loop in the fence, and the bypa.s.sed section of fence itself didn't exist.

Fett adjusted the controls of his jet pack and soared over the fence, landing carefully within the bypa.s.sed zone. He memorized the section, visible only by looking for the gription clips. The palm-sized disrupter itself nestled un.o.btrusively in the gra.s.s beyond.

Fett sprinted to the cover of the wall and jetted to the flat roof. Normally he would have fired his grappling hook and climbed, but speed mattered now. It was worth the extra jet pack fuel. He lay on his belly and crept across the roof, his visor almost touching the gravelly surface as the penetrating radar scanned for people within.

It was a huge area to cover. He pressed a medical sound sensor, more sensitive than the military ones, to the roof to pick up what signal he could. From the sound of the conversation immediately below him-a woman recording someone's educational details-he had landed over the personnel department. And he was still crawling across offices that had external windows. Taun We would be somewhere far from daylight, right at the center.

It took him more than two hours to edge his way across what seemed to him a featureless charcoal-gray cinder plain, listening for clues to what lay beneath and watching the radar outlines of bodies moving. He hoped that the disrupter would still be there when it came time to leave, but if it wasn't, it would be far easier to make a run for it on the way out than on the way in.

This is really hurting my hips. And my chest.

Fett lifted his body slightly and took his weight on his knees and elbows. He heard the clink of gla.s.s dishes and the wusshh and umppp of chiller cabinets opening and closing. He saw people sitting, probably at a long bench and others cl.u.s.tered around a table. The outlines of the inorganic objects were almost impossible to make out, but he was used to a.s.sembling a mental image from the scant cues provided by the movement and shape of bodies.

He'd seen a few labs in his time. He knew how Taun We liked hers laid out. When she'd had a leg cloned for him a few years before, her Tipoca laboratory had still been just like it was when he was a kid and she had first shown him around.

He heard the occasional word that sounded like a conversation about a scanning microscope.

Could mean anything. But I'm over the labs, that's for sure. Next vent I find, next point of entry, I'm going down there.

He checked the chrono readout in his helmet, s.h.i.+fting his focus and feeling the beginning of a headache. Three hours. Too slow. The longer he took, the more vulnerable he was to discovery.

You don't quit now, Fett.

And then he heard it: just a couple of words. It wasn't even anything from which he could derive meaning. But he knew that tone, that pitch, so very well that it was like hearing his own name whispered in a crowded, noisy room; everything else fell silent as his brain filtered out all irrelevance.

It was Taun We's fluting, gentle voice. He forgot the raw ache in his sternum and felt the adrenaline course through his body, erasing every pain.

Gotcha . . .

He frame-grabbed the coordinates in his HUD, got to his knees, and scouted around for an air vent. There was a biohazard containment opening fifty meters across the roof, the kind of hatch that a hazmat team would use to enter the building if it was ever contaminated and sealed. And he knew it would yield to the lock overrides on his wristband. He hadn't met a lock, seal, or panel that didn't.

And it was designed to take someone wearing a full hazmat suit. For once, his jet pack wasn't an enc.u.mbrance as he took a security blade from his s.h.i.+n pocket to bypa.s.s the breach alarm and opened the hatch.

He slid down the vent and found himself standing in a chamber with two doors leading off it. Both were locked. When he switched to his HUD's normal vision, the glow around him was that dull amber emergency lighting, and a safety notice on the wall read: LAST INSPECTED 6/8/1/36.

He adjusted his helmet's sound sensors and listened. The corridor outside was clear. A quick flick back to the terahertz radar scan confirmed it. He made his way down the corridor, checking as he went, following the occasional sound of Taun We's voice until he found himself outside an office with two shapes visible inside on his helmet scanner: one dense human body and a Kaminoan one with its characteristic abdominal s.p.a.ces.

Fett ducked into the nearest alcove-a fire control station-and waited for the human to leave. Eventually the doors opened and a woman left. The lock panel at the side of the doors flashed again, but Fett slid a blade from his override system into the slot and the doors parted with a whisper.

He took the precaution of locking them behind him. Leaning over the desk, a tall creature with a long graceful neck and small, round gray head was engrossed in work at a data screen.

Taun We didn't turn around. "Please leave the file in the tray."

"Nice place you got here."

Kaminoans never showed emotion, but the speed with which Taun We whipped around and the way her head jerked back on seeing him told him she was surprised..

"Boba?"

"Oddly, there's only one."

"How ... did you find me?"

"It's my job, remember?" Fett walked slowly across the room and propped his backside on the edge of her desk. He lifted his helmet. "Let's say I followed the money."

"Koa Ne sent you to-"

"No. He wants the data back, but that's not why I'm here."

Taun We stared into his face, blinking slowly. She knew him about as well as anyone alive, and that wasn't a long list. She looked ... old, very old.

"Are you all right, Boba? Is your leg functioning properly?"

"No. In fact, my whole body is giving me a few problems."

"Can I be of help?"

"I'm suffering from tissue degeneration. Liver problems. Autoimmune diseases. Tumors. My doctor says I have a year or so to live if I'm lucky." He reached in his belt for a datachip. "Take a look at the tests."

Taun We took the chip with long, thin fingers and slid it into her dataport. "Ah," she said. "I see."

She got up and went to a cabinet, and Fett's natural mistrust of the galaxy kicked in. If she could run out on her own government, she could betray him. He clicked his blaster just as a warning.

Taun We turned slowly and glanced at the blaster. "Do you think I would wish to draw attention to the fact that you tracked me down and gained access to my secure office?"

"You stole data and defected. Never had you down for that kind, either."

Did I ever care about Taun We? I think I did.

Fett thought that it was funny how you never truly recalled how you felt as a child, except for the defining moments: and he was defined by his love of his father, and he knew it, and he was proud of it. When the idea occurred to him that it was all he was, he shook it off.

I miss Dad, every single day, every single minute. I want to live up to him.

Fett motioned Taun We to sit down with the barrel of his blaster. She settled in the chair, hands clasped, and didn't react at all: no fear, no surprise, no affection. She was ice, control, indifference.

You brought me up-more or less.

"Boba," she said. She still had that soothing, musical voice. He wasn't sure how long Kaminoans lived, but she had to be coming to the end of her life. "I regret that I don't have the skills to help you."

You're the nearest I ever had to a mother. And that scares me sometimes.

"I guessed as much," said Fett. "I just want your data. And some information."

She's completely cold. I was just another experiment she was pleased with.

"My data belongs to Arkanian Micro."

"The data belongs to the Kaminoan government, but seeing as they aren't paying me, I'll take it to cover my expenses."

"I can't hand it over."

"So I'll take it." Fett slipped the data breaker from a pouch on his belt and flipped it over in his left hand. He selected the docking interface that fit Arkanian Micro's computer system; the device had a dozen different plugs that rotated into position on a wheel. "Or copy it, anyway. I don't plan to sell it-yet."

Taun We blinked slowly. She had the eyes of the Kaminoan ruling cla.s.s: gray, not yellow, not low-caste blue. "It will ruin Arkanian Micro."