The Cestus Deception: Star Wars (Clone Wars): A Clone Wars Novel Page 9

  At least six of the large spiders, and dozens of the smaller ones, had perished in blasts, lightsaber strokes, and showers of falling rock before they retreated shrieking into the caves. The largest, the enormous red-furred female, protected the others as they fled.

  The troopers started to pursue, but the general raised his hands. “No!” he called. “They’re broken. Let the brood go.”

  The female locked eyes with the general. Surprisingly, she lowered her head as if making obeisance, then backed into the shadows and disappeared.

  The troopers landed their craft, peering into the darkness to be certain no mistake had been made before holstering their weapons.

  “Perimeter sensors up immediately,” General Fisto said.

  “So we’re staying here, sir?” Nate asked.

  General Fisto’s answering smile was not pretty. “Might as well assume all these caves are spider-infested. At least we know this one is clear.”

  “Besides that,” Sirty whispered to Nate when General Fisto turned away, “we fought for it. It’s ours.”

  As the others set up in the cave, Kit Fisto carried his broadcasting unit a kilometer out to a completely desolate area with no line of sight to their new camp. There he triggered his beacon and sat in wait.

  After five seconds he turned it off. He waited five minutes, then broadcast for another five seconds, and set the automatic monitor to continue in like sequence: five minutes off, five seconds on.

  After an hour he heard an answering squeal in proper coded series. He turned off the monitor and waited.

  The sun was nearing the western horizon when a battered cargo ship appeared from the south. It flew in a slow, groaning circle and then settled toward the ground, frying the underbrush as it did. That thermal inefficiency implied an older model, and in merely adequate repair.

  The panel door opened and a ramp descended. Kit heard a bleeping sound, and then a human female appeared at the top.

  Kit had few standards by which to assess human beauty. Based on her movements and posture, however, this female was in excellent physical condition, her unblemished black skin and lustrous short hair suggested a healthy immune system, and she seemed quite aware and alert. Good. They would need these qualities to successfully implement their plans.

  The woman studied Kit, her expression one of exasperation. “A Nautolan. Pretty far from an ocean, aren’t you?”

  The Jedi was unamused. “I’m waiting,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “No sense of humor. All right: ‘Alderaan has three moons.’ ”

  “ ‘Demos Four but two,’ ” Kit replied without hesitation.

  She nodded as if he had confirmed more than identity. “Name’s Sheeka Tull. I was told to expect you.”

  “What precisely were you told?”

  She scuffed her toe across a line in the ground, raising a tiny plug of fine, dry dust. “They said if I helped you, certain things in my past would be forgotten. That right?” She looked back up at him, defiance sparkling in her eyes. He nodded, and she seemed relieved. “So. What do you need?”

  “What I need is a reliable contact. There were cave spiders.”

  She shook her head. “There are spiders all through these mountains, but I didn’t see any when I checked out that cave. Sorry.”

  Kit locked eyes with her, a test of wills. Was she telling the truth? She was his contact, given by the Chancellor’s most trusted tacticians. Trust was his only option. “Very well. I must speak to the anarchists known as Desert Wind,” he said.

  “They took quite a beating last year,” Sheeka Tull said. “What do you want with them?”

  “You have no need to know that,” he replied.

  “No.” Her eyes narrowed. “That is exactly what I need to know. If you won’t tell me, I can’t help you. I wouldn’t dare.”

  Kit watched her. If he had known her longer, he might have determined if she was telling the truth, or bluffing. A useful ability, but again, calibration was everything. He had to make a field decision, one that was tough no matter how he looked at it. “We need to create an effective force capable of sabotage and deception, in case the government needs to be overthrown.”

  He knew that his words rocked her, but she hid her flinch very well. “Well. Thanks for the honesty.”

  “You can take us to Desert Wind?”

  “No. But I can take you to the people who know them.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “After you’re finished here, you never heard of me.” She stood with her small fists balled against her waist.

  “Fair enough.”

  She nodded, and drew a little circle in the dust with the point of her toe. “All right, then,” she said. “Time for you to meet Spindragon.”

  16

  The insectile Cestian’s name was Fizzik, and at the moment he was at his most aggressively ambitious, in the peak of his species’ three-year cycle between male and female genders. In his current state, the coursing of masculine hormones was a nerve-dulling intoxicant, and made him willing to take almost any risk to obtain the medicine that would balance the hormones more smoothly. The plant capable of easing, or even accelerating, the transition was called viptiel, native to a world called Nal Hutta. Far too expensive for a mere hotel attendant.

  And that was why Fizzik decided to sell his soul to his distant brother Trillot. He waddled his bright gold oval through the crowd until he found a certain alley, disguised as a minor lava tube. Everywhere, the walls were slathered with promotions for various exhibits and attractions, and both flat and holographic commercials attempted to lure stray credits from unwary pockets.

  Fizzik had not been here for a year and a half. If there were a few who might have recognized him, they probably failed due to the fact that he had been female the last time he had passed this way.

  Once, hundreds of standard years ago, the planet had belonged to the X’Ting, who had driven their only rivals, the spider clans, into the distant mountains. But the coming of the Republic had changed everything. At first hailed as a triumph for the hive, in time the offworlders controlled everything. Regardless of what anyone said, the last century’s plagues had been no more or less than attempted genocide: the hives had all but collapsed, and Cestus Cybernetics became the planet’s de facto ruler. Most surviving X’Ting were relegated to cesspools such as this wretched slum. Some, of course (for instance, that worthless drone Duris, or Quill, the current head of the hive council), had sold their people out in exchange for power. Those traitors were the pampered pets of the Five Families.

  In his female persona, Fizzik often secured domestic work amid the offworlder upper classes. When he cycled back to male, most offworlder employers found his powerful pheromones sufficiently unpleasant to terminate his employment. So … down to the gutter again, scraping for a living until his emerging feminine persona earned him a better berth. Moving between social tissues over the years had earned him a wide network of contacts—a net wide enough, in fact, to have snared a valuable bit of information: that the Grand ChikatLik’s newest arrivals were critically important visitors from Coruscant. There was every chance he might be able to sell such information to one of the most powerful X’Ting in the capital, the being who held the threads connecting the criminal underworld to the labor organizers to the true masters of Old Cestus: Fizzik’s brother Trillot.

  In a few minutes he arrived at a heavy, oval iron door set in a shadowed corridor off bustling Ore Boulevard. In one sense, it was important to know the code words. In another, those who came to this door and sought entrance without having funds to spend or something to sell would find themselves on the wrong end of a flame-knife.

  The guards, one blue-skinned humanoid Wroonian and a gigantic furred Wookiee, glared down on Fizzik with no discernible shift in their facial expressions.

  “Need to see my brother,” Fizzik said, and added a code word known only to hive siblings.

  The guards nodded blandly and opened the door. One walked ah
ead of him, although he looked around as they moved down the shadowed corridor.

  The hallway was lined with small alcoves, in which various galactic life-forms reclined in shadow, alone or in pairs, staring out at him with vast, glassy eyes before sinking back into whatever thoughts or dreams had occupied them.

  “What you need Trillot for?” the Wroonian asked.

  “Got information. His ears only.”

  The guard grunted. “What you say? You want to eat diamonds?”

  Fizzik despaired. One would think that a being of Trillot’s wealth and power would employ the very best help, but that rarely seemed to be the case. “Just take me there.”

  “His brood-mother what?” the guard said, turning. His face now betrayed a trace of emotion, and it was not at all pleasant.

  Fizzik realized the trap he had entered. The alcoves around him rustled with curious eyes. This was nothing less than a shakedown. He thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of credits. His last. Oh, well, life was a gamble. If this one paid off, in a few minutes he would be flush. If not … well, the dead had no use for money.

  As soon as the credits touched the thug’s hands, the Wroonian smiled broadly. “Oh!” he said. “Oh! You want to see Trillot.” He made the credits disappear, and then swept a curtain aside.

  At first Fizzik could see only a broad couch, but as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he was able to make out his brother.

  Trillot was three broods senior to Fizzik. Like Fizzik, he was a minor child of a noble but impoverished brood-mother, his only inheritance a yearning for the wealth and power of ages past. Unlike Fizzik, however, Trillot had talent and a willingness to take risks. After a false start working in communications for Cestus Cybernetics, he found his niche in labor relations. Trillot’s three-year cycle between male and female personae tended to keep his immigrant opponents and rivals slightly off-guard. Fizzik knew that, unlike most X’Ting, Trillot used an imported cocktail of viptiel and other exotic herbs to collapse the monthlong breeding period at either end of the gender cycle into mere hours of numbed transformation. No incapacity, no fertility. No mewling grubs for one as ambitious as Trillot.

  Five years later Trillot had proven his worth to a local Ten-loss syndicate, and two years after that he resigned from Cestus Cybernetics to work directly for the overboss himself.

  A mysterious series of tragic accidents had cleared the way for Trillot’s ascension. Well, unexplained as long as Trillot himself chose not to comment.

  Everything that followed was almost preordained. Seeing Trillot’s utter ruthlessness and perhaps sensing the inevitability of his ascension, the overboss fled Cestus, leaving the power in Trillot’s capable hands.

  It was too little, too late. The overboss met with an accident, almost as if someone wished to ensure he would never return to attempt to claim what had once been his.

  Trillot’s power in ChikatLik had never really been challenged. Were he not cautious, such a challenge have might come in the lethargic monthlong transition between genders suffered by most of his kind. Another motivation to use the illegal viptiel cocktail that allowed him to make this transition in a single painful night. Trillot was aggressive at all times.

  In the twilight zone between labor and management, between white and black market, between upper and lower class, between offworlder and X’Ting hive council, there was no fixer like Trillot, and everyone knew it.

  Like most male X’Ting he was a deceptively delicate, insectile creature. His every motion seemed as carefully cultivated and pondered as a master’s game of dejarik. A high, crystalline brow over faceted eyes and an elongated oval for a body gave the impression of vast intelligence and great gentility. Fizzik knew that only the former impression was correct.

  But Trillot’s thorax was red and swelling, a clear sign of feminization. Such a rapid shift had to be agonizing, and Fizzik wondered what herbs and drugs Trillot used to control the pain. And then more to clarify his mind from all the others. And then more to protect himself from the toxic effects of the previous dosages. And then more …

  Fizzik was dizzy just thinking about it.

  Trillot spoke to the guard in a clicking, popping language that seemed odd emerging from his strangely prim mouth. The guard answered in the same indecipherable tongue. Then his head pivoted to face his guest. “Ah. Fizzik,” he said. Fizzik had heard more warmth and welcome in the voice of an execution droid. “It seems you have information for me. Ah, come along. No, no. Of course, if your information is sound, there will be compensation.”

  “I wish only to serve my elder brother.” Fizzik lowered his eyes respectfully.

  “Ah.” Trillot’s body seemed to move one section at a time, so that one part of it always remained still while the rest was in motion. It was unnerving to watch. Although of the same species, Fizzik had never possessed such plasticity. Trillot walked a bit awkwardly, his swelling egg sac unbalancing his stride. They traversed a dark corridor lined with alcoves, from which the glittering eyes of a dozen species watched them pass. Trillot seemed to have attracted Cestus’s entire underclass. Fizzik knew that the offworlder majority on the planet had dominated many of the other species to the point that less than 3 percent were native Cestians.

  The passage through the corridor was punctuated with low, respectful bows from Trillot’s coterie of hideous bodyguards. Suddenly Trillot stopped and sniffed the air. Now for the first time, Fizzik saw something like emotion cross the golden face. If he had to make a guess, he would have said that his elder sibling was unhappy. This would not be pretty.

  “I smell Xyathone,” Trillot said. He looked at the guard. “Do you smell it?”

  “No, sir,” the guard replied in a Bothan dialect that Fizzik actually understood. Trillot was rumored to speak more than a hundred languages, and Fizzik was inclined to believe it.

  “I do.” He moved closer to one of the alcoves. A thin tendril of steam wound its way from beyond, and Fizzik pulled the curtain aside.

  Two Chadra-Fan were curled into the darkness, inhaling vapor from a boiling flask. Trillot sniffed again, deeply. He spoke to them in their own language, and then turned. “Guntar!” he called.

  The guards hustled, and for that moment Fizzik thought Trillot had forgotten him completely. They returned shortly, dragging a fat little gray ball of a Zeetsa behind them. Trillot looked down on the sphere as it prostrated itself. “Did you sell my guests the mushroom?”

  Lips appeared on the sphere’s surface. “Yes,” Guntar babbled. “Of course. Nothing but the best—”

  “And why then has it been cut with Xyathone?”

  The little Zeetsa was the very picture of outraged innocence. “What? I did not know, I swear—”

  “Do you indeed? Then perhaps your senses are insufficiently acute. You should have smelled it. Tasted it in the mixing. Do you say that that insignificant nose and tongue of yours aren’t up to the task?”

  There was a pause, and Fizzik tensed. There would be no happy resolution to this matter.

  “I … I suppose …”

  “You know how I loathe inefficiency.” To his guards: “See that the offending organs are removed.”

  The ball screamed as the guards dragged him away. Trillot turned back to the Chadra-Fan. He spoke to them in their chittering tongue. They replied, and he drew the curtains shut. To the guards: “See that they get the best. From my personal stock.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Trillot pulled the corners of his mouth into something approximating a smile. “Come with me now, Fizzik. It will take a few minutes to reach my sanctum. I suggest that you use them composing your report. After all—” From somewhere in the darkness behind them echoed a stomach-curdling scream. “—you know how I loathe inefficiency.”

  17

  For hours the clone troopers had busied themselves in the cool, deep shadows of the Dashta Mountains. They glued, fitted, and welded, joining together hundreds of preformed durasteel sections, melding the
m with native materials to create the nucleus of a fine command center.

  “So where’s our first strike?” Forry asked Nate as they worked.

  He shrugged in response. “Give me a spot-weld, right here.” Their astromech unit extended a soldering probe. “First of all,” he said, shielding his eyes against a bright, sharp shower of sparks, “there’s reason to think we might not get used at all. General Kenobi’s supposed to protect the entrenched political and economic forces.”

  “Yeah, right,” Sirty said.

  “But if it does go down?”

  Nate grunted. “Then I’d guess we’ll hit Cestus Cybernetics.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Their comlink bleeped; a tone said that they’d be expecting friendly visitors in a little under a minute, and they were not to respond with force. That beacon triggered long before they heard the distant but distinct swoosh of air. A few seconds later General Fisto’s speeder bike appeared.

  Nate wandered out to the pad, feeling loose, dangerous, and satisfied. In a matter of hours they had turned this mountain hole into a reasonable headquarters.

  He watched the Nautolan’s speeder glide over the smooth and jagged rock surfaces, heading north. Nate followed on foot, arriving in time to watch a cargo ship arrive on the open spot they’d chosen as their secondary landing zone.

  The door opened, and the walkway extended. A dark-skinned human female exited, following Kit back up toward the cave. Nate saluted as Kit passed. The woman glanced at him with little curiosity as she and Kit entered the cave. The Jedi received salutations from the other clones. He briefly evaluated the work that they had already performed, then took the woman to a scanner and showed her some material. They conferred briefly, and Kit said: “Captain, Forry, I wish you to accompany us.”