Conquest: Edge of Victory I (40 page)

The agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. “There have been a lot of … disturbing reports. Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can’t be verified. The jungle … swallows everything. So when we got this tip—”

“You found this because somebody wanted you to find it,” Mace finished for him. “And now you think—”

Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. “You think those people might have been killed just to deliver this message.”

“What a hideous idea!” Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He appealed to the agent. “This can’t be true, can it?”

The agent only hung his head.

Yoda’s ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. “Some messages … most important, is how they are framed. Secondary, their content is.”

Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. “These ULF partisans—we ally ourselves with
them?
The
Jedi
ally with them? What sort of monsters
are
they?”

“I don’t know.” Mace handed the wafer back to the agent. “Let’s find out.”

He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a control.

The holoprojector’s phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of windrattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for a word here or phrase there, sometimes twisting below the distorting ripples of the aural surface. Mace caught the words
Jedi
, and
night
—or
knife
—and something about
look between the stars …

He frowned at the agent. “You can’t clean this up?”

“This
is
cleaned up.” The agent produced a datapad from his travelcase, keyed it alight, and passed it to Mace. “We made a transcript. It’s provisional. Best we can do.”

The transcript was fragmentary, but enough to draw chills up Mace’s arms:
Jedi Temple … taught
(or possibly
taut) … dark … an enemy. But … Jedi … under cover of night
.

One whisper was entirely clear. He read the words on the datapad’s screen as the whisper seemed to come from just behind his shoulder.

I use the night, and the night uses me
.

He forgot to breathe. This was bad.

It got worse.

The whisper strengthened to a voice. A woman’s voice.

Depa’s voice.

On the datapad in his hand, and murmuring in the air behind his shoulder—

I have become the darkness in the jungle
.

The recording went on. And on.

Her murmur drained him: of emotion, of strength, even of thought; the longer she rambled, the emptier he got. Yet her final words still triggered a dull shock inside his chest.

She was talking to
him …

I know you will come for me, Mace. You should never have sent me here. And I should never have come. But what’s done can never be undone. I know you think I’ve gone mad. I haven’t. What’s happened to me is worse
.

I’ve gone
sane.

That’s why you’ll come, Mace. That’s why you’ll have to
.

Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane
.

Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.

No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.

“That’s—uh, that’s all there is.” The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.

They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine’s office now looked unreal: as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the jungle.

As though only the jungle were real.

Mace spoke first.

“She’s right.” He lifted his head from his hands. “I have to go after her. Alone.”

Palpatine’s eyebrows twitched. “That seems … unwise.”

“Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do,” Yoda said slowly. “Great risks there would be. Too valuable you are. Send others, we should.”

“There is no one else who can do this.”

“Surely, Master Windu”—Palpatine’s smile was respectfully disbelieving—“a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi—”

“No.” Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. “It has to be me.”

“Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely—”

“Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor,” Yoda said. “Listen to them, we should.”

Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.

Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.

“If Depa has … gone mad—or worse, fallen to the dark side,” he began, “it’s vital that the Jedi know
why
. That we discover
what did it to her
. Until we know this, no more Jedi should be exposed to it than is absolutely necessary. Also, this all might be entirely false: a deliberate attempt to incriminate her. That ambient noise on the recording …” He glanced at the agent. “If her voice was faked—say, synthesized by computer—that noise could be there precisely to blur the evidence of trickery, couldn’t it?”

The agent nodded. “But why would someone want to frame her?”

Mace waved this off. “Regardless, she must be brought in. And soon—before rumor of such massacres reaches the wider galaxy. Even if she had nothing to do with them, having a Jedi’s name associated with these crimes is a threat to the public trust in the Jedi. She must answer any charges before they are ever publicly made.”

“Granted, she must be brought in,” Palpatine allowed. “But the question remains: why
you?”

“Because she might not want to come.”

Palpatine looked thoughtful.

Yoda’s head came up, and his eyes opened, gleaming at the Supreme Chancellor. “If rogue she has gone … to find her, difficult it will be. To apprehend her …” His voice dropped, as though the words caused him pain. “Dangerous, that will be.”

“Depa was my Padawan.” Mace moved away from the desk and stared out the window at the shimmering twilight that slowly darkened the capital’s cityscape. “The bond of Master and Padawan is … intense. No one knows her better—and I have more experience in those jungles than any other living Jedi. I’m the only one who can find her if she doesn’t want to be found. And if she must be—”

He swallowed, and stared at the moondisk of light scattered from one of the orbital mirrors. “If she must be … stopped,” he said at length, “I may be the only one who can do that, too.”

Palpatine’s eyebrows twitched polite incomprehension.

Mace took a deep breath, finding himself once more looking at his hands,
through
his hands, seeing only an image in his mind, sharp as a dream: lightsaber against lightsaber in the Temple’s training halls, the green flash of Depa’s blade seeming to come from everywhere at once.

He could not unmake what he had made.

There were no second chances.

Her voice echoed inside him:
Nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who’s finally sane
, but he said only—

“She is a master of Vaapad.”

In the silence that followed, he studied the folds and wrinkles of his interlaced fingers, focusing his attention into his visual field to hold at bay dark dream-ghosts of Depa’s blade flashing toward Jedi necks.

“Vaapad?” Palpatine repeated, eventually. Perhaps he’d grown tired of waiting for someone to explain. “Isn’t that some kind of animal?”

“A predator of Sarapin,” Yoda supplied gravely. “Also the nickname it is, given by students, for the seventh form of lightsaber combat.”

“Hmp. I’ve always heard there are only six.”

“Six there were, for generations of Jedi. The seventh … is not well known. A
powerful
form it is. Deadliest of all … But dangerous it is—to its master, as well as its opponent. Few have studied. One student alone to mastery has risen.”

“But if she’s the only master—and this style is so deadly—what makes you think—”

“She’s not the only master, sir.” He lifted his head to meet Palpatine’s frown. “She is my only student to
become
a master.”

“Your
only student …” Palpatine echoed.

“I didn’t study Vaapad.” Mace let his hands fall to his sides. “I created it.”

Palpatine’s brows drew together thoughtfully. “Yes, I seem to recall now: a reference in your report on the treason of Master Sora Bulq. Didn’t you train him as well? Didn’t he also claim to be a master of this Vaapad of yours?”

“Sora Bulq was not my student.”

“Your … 
associate
, then?”

“And he did not master Vaapad,” Mace said grimly. “Vaapad mastered him.”

“Ah—ah, I see …”

“With respect, sir, I don’t think you do.”

“I see enough to worry me, just a bit.” The warmth of Palpatine’s smile robbed insult from his words. “The relationship of Master and Padawan is intense, you said; and I well believe it. When you faced Dooku on Geonosis …”

“I prefer,” Mace said softly, “not to talk about Geonosis, Chancellor.”

“Depa Billaba was your Padawan. And she is still perhaps your closest friend, is she not? If she must be slain, are you so certain you can strike her down?”

Mace looked at the floor, at Yoda, at the agent, and in the end he had to meet Palpatine’s eyes once more. It was not merely Palpatine of Naboo who had asked; this question had come from the Supreme Chancellor. His office demanded an answer.

“May the Force grant, sir,” Mace said slowly, “that I will not have to find out.”

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