Darth Plagueis Page 8

  “We’re directly beneath the central courtyard,” Damask explained as the beast-laden platform was elevating. “Each cargo symbolizes an abhorrent aspect of the Republic — practices we all wish to see overturned.”

  By then the platform had been raised to the level of the courtyard. The crowd quieted for a moment, then, simultaneous with massive discharges of energy, erupted into ovation once more.

  “Those discharges were the laser cannons doing their work,” Damask said loudly enough to be heard as the platform dropped back into view, revealing that what had been the beast was now a smoking, foul-smelling husk of sinew and bone. He aimed a sinister smile at the Gossams. “It’s all theater, you understand. Merriment for the masses.”

  “Obviously a real crowd-pleaser, Magister,” one of the Gossams said, swallowing some of his words.

  Damask spread his thin arms wide. “Then you must join in.” Approaching, he nodded his chin toward one of the empty platforms, beside which the Sun Guards had positioned themselves. “Climb aboard.”

  The saurians stared at him.

  “Go ahead,” Damask said, without humor now. “Climb aboard.”

  Two of the guards brandished blasters.

  The chief Gossam looked from one Muun to the next, terror widening his eyes. “Have we done something to displease you, Magister?”

  “A good question,” Damask said. “Have you?”

  The chief Gossam didn’t speak until all four had clambered up onto the platform. “Precisely how did we come to your notice?”

  “A mutual friend brought you to our attention,” Damask said. “A Bith named Rugess Nome. You recently supplied him with a survey report and a mining probe.”

  The platform began to rise and the Gossams extended their long necks in fear. “We can make this right!” one of them said in a pleading voice.

  Damask eyed the ceiling. “Then be quick about it. The laser cannons fire automatically.”

  “Plasma!” the same one fairly shrieked. “An untapped reservoir of plasma! Enough to provide energy to a thousand worlds!”

  Damask signaled one of the Ugnaughts to halt the platform’s rise. “Where? On what world?”

  “Naboo,” the Gossam said; then louder: “Naboo!”

  Hill elaborated, though unnecessarily. “Something of a hermit planet in the Mid Rim, and capital of the Chommell sector. Relatively close to Tatooine, in fact. Once a source for the veermoks we had cloned for use as game in the greel forests.”

  Damask allowed him to finish and looked up at the Gossams. “Who hired you to conduct a mining survey?”

  “A faction in opposition to the monarchy, Magister.”

  “We swear it to be true,” another said.

  “This Naboo is ruled by a royal?” Damask asked.

  “A King,” the chief Gossam said. “His detractors wish to see the planet opened to galactic trade.”

  Damask paced away from the platform. He considered torturing the Gossams, to learn who had hired them to sabotage Tenebrous on Bal’demnic, but decided to leave that for another day, since the Bith was known to have had many adversaries. Turning finally, he ordered the Ugnaught to return the platform to the floor.

  “This plasma reservoir is as enormous as you claim?” he demanded.

  “Unique among known worlds,” the leader said in relief as he and his comrades stood shivering in Damask’s withering gaze.

  Damask regarded them in silence, then swung to the commander of the Sun Guards. “Transport them to the most remote world you can find in the Tingel Arm, and make certain they remain there in the event I have further need of them.”

  Leaving his fellow Muuns to rest, Damask climbed the fort’s eastern rampart for starrise. He was as weary as any of them but too dissatisfied with the outcome of the Gathering to find much comfort in sleep. On the chance that an untapped reservoir of plasma might be of interest to the disgruntled leadership of the Trade Federation — and ignoring for the moment the effect it could have on Malastare’s energy exports — he had ordered Hill and the others to learn everything they could about the planet Naboo and its isolationist monarch.

  Once the Gossams of Subtext Mining had been dealt with, Damask and the Muuns had devoted the rest of the evening to meeting with members of what they termed their steering committee, which was made up of select politicians, lobbyists, and industrialists; financiers representing Sestina, Aargau, and the Bank of the Core; elite members of the Order of the Canted Circle and the Trade Federation Directorate; and gifted ship designers, like Narro Sienar, whom Plagueis planned to support in his bid to become chief operating officer of Santhe/Sienar Technologies. The committee met periodically, though seldom on Sojourn, to assure the swift passage of corporate-friendly legislation; fix the price of such commodities as Tibanna gas, transparisteel, and starship fuel; and keep Senators in place on Coruscant as career diplomats, as a means of distancing them from what was really taking place outside the Core.

  Not everyone agreed that the Muuns’ strategy of “tactical astriction” was the best method for keeping the Republic off-balance and thus ripe for manipulation. But Damask had insisted that their common goal of oligarchy — government by a select few — would eventually be realized, even if attained as a result of actions and events few would observe, and about which some of the membership might never learn.

  Starlight glinted from the hulls of the last of the departing ships. Damask took comfort in knowing that his guests believed they had taken part in something secretive and grand, and had been encouraged to execute campaigns that on the surface may have seemed informed by self-interest but were in fact bits of Sith business.

  Movements in the symphony that was the Grand Plan—

  Keening klaxons fractured the morning silence.

  Damask’s eyes narrowed and swept the surrounding forests for signs of disturbance. He had moved to the southernmost parapet when two Sun Guards hurried up the stairs in search of him.

  “Magister, the eastern perimeter has been breached,” one of them reported.

  Outside the fort’s walls, illumination was coming up and drone ships were beginning to meander through the treetops. Occasionally one of the imported beasts would lumber into the safe zone, touching off the alarms, but none of the remote cams were showing evidence of intrusion.

  “It’s possible that one of our guests may have overstayed his or her welcome,” the second Sun Guard said. He stopped to listen to a message being relayed to his helmet earphones. “We think we have something.” He looked at Damask. “Will you be all right, Magister, or should we wait with you?”

  “Go,” Damask told them. “But keep me informed.”

  Stretching out with his feelings, he began to scan the forest again. Someone was out there, but not in the area the guards were searching. He attended through the Force to the sound of movement in the trees. Had the Gran infiltrated an assassin? If so, had they found one clever enough to divert the Sun Guards into chasing an illusion? Damask and the other Muuns should have been the targets, but instead of moving toward the fort, the intruder was actually moving away from it.

  He spent another long moment listening; then, like a wraith, he dashed down three flights of stone steps and out through the old gate into the waking forest, parting his cloak as he ran, his left hand on the hilt of the lightsaber. Lifting off in great numbers from their evening roosts and screeching in displeasure, the morning’s earliest risers warned the rest that a hunter was on the loose. Of the most dangerous sort, Damask might have added: a hunter of sentients. In moments he was deep in a stand of old-growth greel trees well outside the security perimeter, when he sensed something that stopped him in mid-stride. Motionless, he drew inward in an effort to verify what he’d felt.

  A Force-user!

  A Jedi spy? he wondered.

  They had tried repeatedly to penetrate Sojourn’s defenses during previous Gatherings. But unless one had arrived in a ship designed and built by Darth Tenebrous, there would have been no
way to reach the surface undetected. And yet someone had obviously succeeded in making it downside. Lifting his hand from the hilt of the lightsaber, Damask minimized his presence in the Force, surrendering his eminence and disappearing into the material world. Then he began to move deeper into the forest, winding his way through the trees, allowing the Jedi to stalk him even as he berated himself for having acted rashly. If it came to ambush, he would not be able to fight back and risk exposing himself as a Sith. He should have allowed the Sun Guards to deal with the intruder.

  But why would a Jedi bother to trip the perimeter sensors only to retreat beyond their reach? They didn’t make mistakes of that sort. And surely whoever was out there wouldn’t have expected a Muun to respond, if for no other reason than Muuns didn’t make mistakes of that sort. So what was this one after?

  Ahead Damask heard the characteristic hiss and hum of a lightsaber, and saw the weapon’s blade glowing in the mist. Emerging from behind a thick-boled tree, the wielder had the lightsaber in his right hand, angled toward the spongy ground.

  A crimson blade in a crimson wood.

  Instantly he called his own lightsaber to his left hand, igniting the blade as the figure in the mist revealed itself fully: a tall, thin, pink-skinned craniopod with large lidless eyes—

  A Bith!

  Tenebrous?

  He faltered momentarily. No, that wasn’t possible. But who, then? Tenebrous’s offspring, perhaps — some spawn grown from his genetic material in a laboratory, since the species reproduced only in accordance with the dictates of a computer mating service. Was that why Tenebrous had declined to discuss midi-chlorians or ways of extending life? Because he had already found a way to create a Force-sensitive successor?

  “I knew I could draw you out, Darth Plagueis,” the Bith said.

  Plagueis dropped all pretence and faced him squarely. “You’re well trained. I sensed the Force in you, but not the dark side.”

  “I’ve Darth Tenebrous to thank for it.”

  “He made you in his image. You’re a product of Bith science.”

  The Bith laughed harshly. “You’re an old fool. He found and trained me.”

  Plagueis recalled the warning Tenebrous had nearly given voice to before he died. “He took you as an apprentice?”

  “I am Darth Venamis.”

  “Darth?” Plagueis said with disgust. “We’ll see about that.”

  “Your death will legitimize the title, Plagueis.”

  Plagueis cocked his head to the side. “Your Master left orders for you to kill me?”

  The Bith nodded. “Even now he awaits my return.”

  “Awaits …,” Plagueis said. As astonishing as it was to learn that Tenebrous had trained a second apprentice, he had a surprise in store for Venamis. Inhaling, he said, “Tenebrous is dead.”

  Confusion showed in Venamis’s eyes. “You wish it were so.”

  Plagueis held his lightsaber off to one side, parallel to the ground. “What’s more, he died by my hand.”

  “Impossible.”

  Plagueis laughed with purpose. “How powerful can you be if you failed to sense the death of your Master? Even now, your thoughts fly in all directions.”

  Venamis raised his lightsaber over one shoulder. “In killing you I will avenge his death and become the Sith Lord he knew you could never be.”

  “The Sith he wanted me to be,” Plagueis corrected. “But enough of this. You’ve come a long way to challenge me. Now make a worthy effort.”

  Venamis charged.

  To Plagueis, lightsaber duels were tedious affairs, full of wasted emotion and needless acrobatics. Tenebrous, however, who had pronounced Plagueis a master of the art, had always enjoyed a good fight, and had clearly bequeathed that enthusiasm to his other trainee. For no sooner had the blades of their weapons clashed than Venamis began to bring the fight to him in unexpected ways, twirling his surprisingly limber body, tossing the lightsaber from hand to hand, mixing forms. At one point he leapt onto an overhanging greel branch and, when Plagueis severed it with a Force blow, hung suspended in the air — no mean feat in itself — and continued the fight, as if from high ground. Worse for Plagueis, Tenebrous had made Venamis an expert in Plagueis’s style, and so the Bith could not only anticipate but counter Plagueis’s every move.

  In short order, Venamis penetrated his defenses, searing the side of Plagueis’s neck.

  The contest took them backward and forward through the trees, across narrow streams, and up onto piles of rocks that were the ruins of an ancient sentry post. Plagueis took a moment to wonder if anyone at the fort was observing the results of the contest, which, from afar, must have looked like lightning flashing through the forest’s understory.

  Realizing that the fight could go on indefinitely, he took himself out of his body and began working his material self like a marionette, no longer on the offensive, instigating attacks, but merely responding to Venamis’s lunges and strikes. Gradually the Bith understood that something had changed — that what up until then had been a fight to the death seemed suddenly like a training exercise. Exasperated, he doubled his efforts, fighting harder, more desperately, putting more power into each maneuver and blow, and in the end surrendering his precision and accuracy.

  At the height of Venamis’s attack, Plagueis came back into himself with such fury that his lightsaber became a blinding rod. A two-handed upward swing launched from between his legs caught Venamis off guard. The blade didn’t go deep enough to puncture the Bith’s lung but scorched him from chest to chin. As his large, cleft head snapped backward in retreat, Plagueis brought his lightsaber straight down, tearing Venamis’s weapon from his gloved hand and nearly taking off his long fingers, as well.

  With a gesture of his other hand, Venamis called for his lightsaber, but Plagueis was a split second quicker, and the hilt shot into his own right hand. Sensing a storm of Force lightning building in the Bith, he crossed the two crimson blades in front of him and said: “Yield!”

  Venamis froze, allowing the nascent storm to die away, and dropped to his knees in surrender as Sojourn’s risen primary blazed at his back through the trees.

  “I submit, Darth Plagueis. I accept that I must apprentice myself to you.”

  Plagueis deactivated Venamis’s blade and hooked it to his belt. “You presume too much, Venamis. Around you I would always have to watch my back.”

  Venamis lifted his face. “Is it true, Master? Is Darth Tenebrous dead?”

  “Dead, and deservedly so.” He took a step toward Venamis. “The future of the Sith no longer hinges on physical prowess but on political cunning. The new Sith will rule less by brute force than by means of instilling fear.”

  “And what is to become of me, Master?” Venamis asked.

  Plagueis studied him stonily. After a quick glance around, he snapped a yellow, horn-shaped blossom from a dangling vine and tossed it to the ground in front of Venamis. “Consume it.”

  Venamis’s gaze went from the flower to Plagueis, and he let misgiving show on his face. “I know this plant. It will poison me.”

  “It will,” Plagueis told him in a manner that held no sympathy. “But I will make certain you don’t die.”

  7: THERE WHERE THEY USED TO STAND

  In the depths of Aborah, Venamis hung suspended in a bacta tank, wireless sensors affixed to his narrow chest, neck, and fissured, hairless cranium.

  “You may be Tenebrous’s most important gift to me,” Plagueis said as he watched the Bith’s body bob in the thick therapeutic liquid.

  “His brain continues to recuperate from the effects of the coma-bloom alkaloids,” 11-4D remarked from the far side of the laboratory. “His physical condition, however, remains stable.”

  Plagueis kept his gaze on Venamis. The wound Venamis’s lightsaber had inflicted to Plagueis’s neck had healed, but the faint scar was a fresh reminder of his mortality. “That’s good, because I’m not interested in his mind.”

  In salute, the droid’s new app
endages made a surgical slashing motion.

  Blood analysis had revealed a high midi-chlorian count, which to Plagueis was further indication that a being could have great potential in the Force and yet still be inept. He wondered: was it Venamis he had felt through the Force after the murder of Tenebrous? A Jedi would have made for a more interesting experimental subject, but a Dark Side Adept was perhaps better suited to his purposes. And soon enough the adjacent bacta tank would contain a Force-resistant Yinchorri, as well.

  Immediately following the contest on Sojourn, Plagueis had commanded members of the Sun Guard to locate the starship that had allowed Venamis to infiltrate the Hunters’ Moon, then move it and the poisoned Bith to Aborah. Larsh Hill and the other Muuns had been apprised that an intruder had been captured and disposed of, but no more than that. An investigation of the ship had yielded data that might have surprised even Darth Tenebrous, who had provided the ship. It seemed that well before he had confronted Plagueis or learned of his Master’s fate, Venamis himself had been scouting for potential apprentices. Plagueis could not help being impressed, though begrudgingly. The young Bith would have done well in Bane’s era. Now, however, he was an anachronism, and by extension, Tenebrous also.

  That Tenebrous had targeted him came as no shock to Plagueis. He and the Bith had reached an impasse decades earlier regarding execution of the Sith imperative. The product of one of the galaxy’s most ancient civilizations, Tenebrous believed that victory could be achieved through a mating of the powers of the dark side and expert Bith science. With the aid of sophisticated computers and future-casting formulas, the varied beings of the galaxy could be provided for, and the Jedi Order would gradually dwindle and disappear. Tenebrous had tried to persuade Plagueis that the Force did not play games of chance with the galaxy; and that while the fated ascendancy of the dark side could be predicted, its rise could not be influenced or hurried by the Sith.