MedStar_ Battle Surgeons Part 15

She still couldn't see him, but she knew where he was. Just over there, in the dark shadow of a quiet power gen-erator, a few meters to her right. He was an evil presence, a pulsing obstruction in the Force's smooth continuum.

Her voice was low and even. "What makes you think you are the person to give lessons in humility?"

Phow Ji glided from the darkness. "Those who can, do. Those who can't, don't."

"Very succinct. What do you want?"

"Like I said-a lesson is required. The last time we chatted, you tripped me. From behind.

I owe you a re-turn of the favor. I think a mud bath is only fair. Noth-ing serious, no broken bones or anything. This is an exercise in reciprocity, nothing more. If your Force can stop me, then by all means"-he held his arms wide in a beckoning gesture-"use it."

What an egotist he was! So convinced in his own mind that he was unbeatable. And that he was so good he could humiliate her without hurting her-there was a real challenge for a fighter.

She briefly considered touching his mind with a sub-liminal suggestion that he didn't really want to do this, that what he wanted was go back to his quarters and take a cold shower-but she could feel the discipline of his thoughts. They were a dense weave, as impenetrable as spin-worm silk. Ji was not weak-minded enough for a Padawan's ability to sway him easily, if at all.

Ji settled into a stance, legs planted low and wide. He raised his hands, beckoned with one in a flippant gesture. "Come, Jedi. Shall we dance a little? "

I shouldn't be doing this. I should refuse and walk away. Let him think I'm afraid-what does it matter?

But he should respect the Jedi, even if he didn't respect her. It sat poorly with her to hear the name of her Order coated with contempt.

She stayed where she was.

She shifted her weight slightly, not moving her feet, just balancing herself so that she could push quickly with either leg, forward or back.

The evening was muggy; everything was damp, even the air. Her perspiration had nowhere to go; it gathered and rolled down her face and neck, soaked into her jumpsuit, threatened to drip into her eyes.

Ji smiled. "Good move. You don't want to be com-mitted one way or the other when facing a skilled oppo-nent."

He circled to his right, and Barriss moved away from him, maintaining a wary distance.

The temptation to reach for the Force, to use it to flat-ten Ji, was almost overwhelming.

She had no doubt she could do it. One gesture, and Ji would fly into the near-est tree like a rabid rockbat. No fighter, no matter what his physical strength, could pit muscle against the Force and prevail. Maybe she couldn't control his mind, but she could control his body. This she knew.

She would win the battle if she did it. But, she knew, she might lose the war. Ji had told her he had no plans to harm her. He wanted to knock her sprawling into the mud, to embarra.s.s her, but that was the extent of it. She sensed no darker, baser purpose than that. Nothing would be greatly damaged, save her dignity-which was, of course, his point.

Ji's driving energy was con-trol, and right now, he wanted, needed, to control her.

To use the Force against an opponent when you were in no real danger was wrong. She had been taught so all her life. The Force was not something to spend like a to-ken in a sweets shop simply because you could. Neither was it solely a weapon.

So what was left? Her own fighting skills. These were not inconsiderable-Jedi were trained in all manner of disciplines, both mental and physical, and the Masters knew there were times when use of the Force was not appropriate. Even without activating her lightsaber, she was someone to be reckoned with.

Of course, her self-defense skills had not been de-signed to deal with a champion martial artist-what were the odds of ever encountering such a situation? Especially when he didn't intend to seriously injure or kill her?

She would have smiled at that thought another time. The odds didn't really matter when the reality stood two steps away, facing you and ready to attack.

There was always the option of using the lightsaber. Ji would, of course, consider it a breach of combat rules. That didn't matter to her, but she was concerned that the drawing of the energy blade might spur him to at-tack more viciously. A Jedi Knight or Master would have the skills to stop him without injuring him, but as a Padawan, she was not confident in her ability to do so. She might wind up killing him-and she did not want that on her conscience.

She had already determined that his would be the first move. If Phow Ji was waiting for her to attack him, he'd be waiting for a long-He leapt, covering the two strides separating them with phenomenal speed. Barriss barely had enough time to dodge, twist to her left, and block, so that his punch glanced off her shoulder, instead of connecting with her solar plexus.

She backed away, keeping her guard up.

"Excellent," he said. "You have very good reflexes. But you should have counterattacked.

Pure defense is a losing strategy."

By acting as a teacher with a student, she knew, he was trying to show his superiority-as if he needed to demonstrate that.

Ji circled the opposite way, moving his hands up and down and around in an almost hypnotic weave, trying to draw her attention.

His hands didn't matter. It was his feet she had to watch. To get close enough to her to attack successfully, he had to step, had to move in. He could wave his hands around all day as far as she was concerned. When he moved his feet, then she would have to-He came in again, and this time, instead of moving out of his path, Barriss slid forward to meet him.

But she dropped very low, below his center of gravity, firing a hard punch at his belly as his strike sailed over her head. She hit him, but it was like punching a wall-there was no give. His abdominals were like ridged plasteel.

She scooted out of range as fast as she could, but not fast enough. She caught a slap on the left side of her neck as she retreated, hard enough to make her vision flare red for an instant.

She gained two steps away, and he turned to face her again.

"Very good, Padawan! Not the best target, but a clean strike. You'll need more than one, though. Think com-binations-high, low, multiple attacks."

Her neck stung, but the pain was small, and no dam-age done. The Force sang within her, and she could barely keep from using its power. The dark side was al-ways there, her Master had told her; always waiting for an opportunity to be set loose. Give in once, it would be twice as powerful the next time. Give in again, and you might be lost forever.

Oh, but she wanted to show him-wanted to knock that gloating smirk from his face and replace it with awe, with amazement, with......fear...

Too much thinking, she realized too late. Ji leapt in again and, in a fast series of open-hand techniques, slapped her head, her torso, and her hip. The last hit was coupled with a foot hooked around her ankle. Bar-riss went down, hard, and the wet ground was only a lit-tle forgiving as she slammed into it.

Whatever might have happened next, as she scram-bled back up into a defensive stance, was interrupted by the too-familiar drone of lifters arriving. People came boiling out of their quarters, heading for their stations.

Those who noticed Ji and Barriss at all spared them lit-tle more than a glance.

"I think we're done," Ji said. "My point has been made."

Barriss said nothing-she did not trust herself to. Her rage enveloped her like the mud.

She trembled under the weight of it. She could feel the dark side surging within her, whispering to her of how good it would feel, how easy it would be to let her rage fuel it and send it raven-ing for her enemy, to seize her lightsaber, leap after him and bisect him with a single downward slash of the singing energy blade...

Phow Ji had no idea how close to dying he was just then. Her rage was such that a flicker of a finger would suffice. He'd never know what hit him-and it would even be justice, in a fashion-was he not, after all, a killer?

Yes, he was-but Barriss Offee was not. It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, but she did it-she re-sisted the dark side. She lost the battle, but won the war.

This time...

25.

Admiral Bleyd paced. The chill he felt in his spine seemed as cold as interstellar s.p.a.ce.

He had immedi-ately regretted crushing the spycam disguised as an in-sect; had he simply kept it, he might have been able to backwalk the guidance system memory and find out where it had come from. As it was, all he had for certain was the knowledge that somebody was spying on either Filba or him. Given the nature of the device, the opera-tor could be anybody within ten kilometers of the camp. Maybe Black Sun had an operative here? Or maybe it was one of his own people...

Bleyd growled deep in his throat. Somebody had poi-soned Filba, the autopsy had confirmed that, and Bleyd was not a believer in coincidences that large. The Hutt is murdered and there just happens to be a miniature spy-cam there to witness it? The probability of it wasn't quite as high as that of a rogue planetoid smashing into Drongar in the next five minutes-but it wasn't far be-hind. No, the two events were surely linked.

Filba had enemies, of course, and it could be possible that one had just happened to choose this time to repay an old debt, and then used the spycam to make sure it went down smoothly. But whoever had done it, and for whatever reasons, that person now had information linking the dead Hutt with Bleyd in a criminal enter-prise. No matter how he scanned it, that was bad. He had to find out who it was, get whatever recording there might be, and eliminate it-along with whoever had it.

He considered the possibility that it might be one of the enemy, but quickly dismissed the notion. It did not seem likely that a Separatist spy had managed to sneak into camp, poison Filba, and then hurry back to hide out in the marsh among the slitherers and saw gra.s.s, and watch it happen via the spycam. And what spy would have any interest in the goings-on at a Rimsoo? Nothing strategic happened here, save for the occasional ship-ment of bota. It was true that one of the transports had blown up, and, while there was no reason to a.s.sume Filba had anything to do with it, the rumor floating about the unit was that he had. Filba had been as warped as an event horizon-a fact that had evidently been fairly common knowledge. That could serve him, since he had been keeping the Hutt in reserve in case something went wrong with their black-market operation. He could have blamed the big slug for everything, and then Filba could have had an "accident" before his trial. And now...

Now that he was no longer around, it would be even easier to make him the scape-Drall for any illegalities that might turn up.

Bleyd stopped pacing and smiled. Yes. This could turn out to be an advantage after all.

Even a killer storm watered the garden.

But if the spycam's operator was in the camp, as Bleyd suspected, that was a bantha of a different color. He - or she, or it-might seek to use the information against Bleyd-and that, of course, could not be allowed.

So. The hunter had evidence of prey. Bleyd bared his teeth. Let the tracking begin...

Den Dhur went where he usually went to work out his problems-the cantina. But even sitting there in the semidarkness, feeling the damp sluggish air, reluctantly stirred by the circulators, sliding over him like hot oil, he barely sipped at his drink. Now was not the time to dull his perceptions or his wits. Such as they were.

Filba was history, and so was Den's story-n.o.body wanted to read an expose about a dead Hutt on a one-rocket planet. The ma.s.ses wanted their bread and cir-cuses. A nefarious gangster revealed, captured, and punished-that was the good stuff, that was what sold newsdiscs. But Filba dying of pump failure, or even be-ing poisoned by an old enemy, before he was brought to justice? That wasn't what the readers wanted, not at all.

As he'd suspected, Bleyd had been in on whatever skulduggery had been going with Filba.

That was a great story-but one he couldn't dare file until he was at least fifty pa.r.s.ecs away, the enmity of angry, crooked, and feral admirals being generally bad for one's health. Still, the stone hidden in the stew was that the admiral knew somebody had seen and heard what had hap-pened just before Filba was shuffled off back to the pri-mordial ooze from whence he'd come. It wasn't the admiral who had poisoned him-Den was fairly sure of that, judging by Bleyd's reactions. Not that it mattered much, since black marketing during wartime was gener-ally considered treason and was punishable by death. At best, even if Den had all kinds of outstanding favors due him from high places-which he didn't-his career would be ruined if this got out while he was still in the same sector as Bleyd; at worst, he'd be quietly executed and s.p.a.ced.

The first thing he had done after he saw Bleyd crush the moon moth was feed the receiver unit into a waste disposal unit that turned it into sludge and piped it off into the swamp with the rest of the sewage slurry. He had cursed at the necessity-the unit had not come cheap-but it wasn't worth his life. Besides, without the cam, it wasn't much more than a big flimsiweight while he was here.

The recording from the cam, a disc the size of his lit-tle fingernail, was now glued to the back of a wall brace of the south refresher, just a hand-span above the cat-alytic tanks-not a place where anybody would happen across it, and one where, even if by some miracle it was found, it wouldn't be connected to him. He needed the recording to verify his story, but he didn't need Bleyd finding it and having him shot. As long as he kept his mouth shut, he should be safe enough. Bleyd couldn't know who had been watching, and the admiral wasn't about to start an investigation that might reveal his own complicity in Filba's bootlegging activities.

The only problem was, this meant Den was going to be stuck here on scenic Drongar for a while. Any sud-den move to fire thrusters now would certainly throw the hard glare of suspicion on him. If Bleyd were look-ing for the cam's operator-and you could take it to the First Bank of Coruscant that he was-then anybody from this Rimsoo who tried to leave quickly would probably find himself being brain-scanned, and a re-porter would likely have to endure a harsher exam than most. Den had no desire to be turned inside out by a high-ranking official who knew his life was in the bal-ance if his crimes came to light.

Too bad-it was a great story, far better than if only Filba had been implicated. The rabble did so love to see the mighty brought low, and a fleet admiral stealing was the kind of thing that could win a Nova Award, if done right. Poor troops in the field, dying because medicine or some equipment wasn't on hand due to a crooked admiral who was filling his vault? Ah, the teeming tril-lions would love that. They would scream for Bleyd's head on a force pike.

But if he moved too soon he could get turned into fer-tilizer, and if there was one thing this planet didn't need, it was more fertilizer. Not to mention how much he didn't need it.

No, he would just have to stick it out. Find another story to justify his being here.

Maybe something with Phow Ji, that fighter who'd slaughtered the mercenar-ies? It wouldn't be too comfortable having him irritated at you, either, but at least Den could get some protec-tion from the higher-ups, Ji being only a lieutenant. Yeah. That would keep the pot boiling long enough for him to eventually jet this swamp world. Once he was on the other side of the Core, then he could bring low the mighty Admiral Bleyd for his audience.

Black Market Admiral Revealed! a.s.sociate in crime dies mysteriously!

Den smiled. He did love a thrilling headline.

He took a bigger sip of his drink. Problem raised, problem solved. Another victory for crack reporter Den Dhur, speaking to you live from the Ja.s.serak Front in the Clone Wars...

26.

There were times, during her meditations, when Barriss slipped from her concentration, drifted from being-in-the-moment and into memory. In earlier years, she had never been sure whether this was a good thing or not; then she had learned to simply accept that it was what it was. True, it was not conducive to the purpose of achiev-ing a clear mind, but sometimes the past offered insight into the present; therefore sometimes she went with it.

And so it was tonight. Because she was still troubled by the strong feelings she'd had during the fight with Phow Ji the night before, when the memory arose un-bidden she let it take her where it would...

It had been a sunny but cool morning on Coruscant. No rain was due in this sector for another day, and the slidewalk leading to the park was busy, but not too crowded, as she and Master Unduli reached the desig-nated greenbelt. The other beings also on their way to the large patch of nature represented an amazing vari-ety of sentients: Nikto, Phindians, Zeltrons, Wookiees, Twi'leks... a fascinating glimpse of the galaxy's infinite diversity, all headed for Oa Park. There was much ferro-crete and metal on this world-some said too much - and parks were dotted here and there to help those who wished more contact with nature achieve it. Oa Park contained within its boundaries more than thirty differ-ent environments simulating various other worlds, each with its own atmospheric mix, solar spectrum, and grav-ity field, separated from each other by energy boundaries.

On such a bright morning, in the middle of smiling and laughing folk going to enjoy the multifarious flora and landscapes and streams, the dark side seemed far, far away to Barriss. But even as that thought crossed her mind, as she and her Master stood in the shade of a four-hundred-year-old blackneedle tree three meters thick and two hundred meters tall, Master Unduli had smiled and said, "The dark side is always at hand, Padawan.

It is no farther away than a heartbeat, an eye-blink, side by side with the bright side of the Force, sep-arated by no more than a hair. It waits to snare the unwary, wearing a thousand disguises."

Barriss had heard that before, many times, and she believed what her teacher said, but she had never really felt or understood exactly what it meant. She had not been tempted by the dark side, as far as she knew. She said as much, as they moved to a quiet spot where the gra.s.ses had been engineered to grow short and soft, like a living carpet. "We'll do the Salutation here," her Mas-ter said.

Barriss nodded. She moved to one side a bit to give her Master s.p.a.ce.

"To answer your question, let me offer this: every conscious move you make, from the smallest to the largest, requires choice. There is always a branch in the path, and you must decide upon which turning you will tread. Do you recall the testings of your ability to sense a remote while wearing blinders?"

"Of course." This was among the most basic of Jedi skills. A remote was a small levitating droid about the size of a goldfruit that could be programmed to zip about and fire mild electric bolts at a student. With a blast helmet on and the blinders down, the only way to know the position of the orb was to use the Force. As a student progressed in the use of his or her lightsaber, blocking the remote's bolts became a standard exercise. Since you couldn't use your eyes or ears to track the de-vice, the only way to avoid being shocked was to let the Force guide your hands.

Her Master continued: "And were there not instances when your use of the Force was less than perfect and the training bolts got past your lightsabor?"

"Far too many of those instances," Barriss said rue-fully. She shook her head. "At times, I felt like a needle cushion!"

"And did you ever feel during those times like de-stroying the remote? Reaching out with the Force and crushing it like a wad of sc.r.a.p flimsi?"

As she spoke, Master Unduli began the Salutation to the Force, a combination exercise and meditative pos-ture that started with a body arch upward, followed by a deep squat and leg-extended stretch to the rear.

Barriss copied her Master's pose. "I confess there were occasions when I had little love for the training de-vice, yes."

"And did you have sufficient skill in use of the Force to have destroyed it, had you chosen to do so?" Master Unduli stood and repeated the pose, ending on the other leg.

Again, Barriss copied her.

"Yes. Easily."

"Why didn't you? If the goal was to protect yourself from being shocked, would that not have been justifi-able?"

Barriss frowned. "But that was not the goal. The goal was to learn how to attune my lightsaber with the Force so that I could stop the bolts from striking me. The shocks were painful, but without any lasting damage. In a real fight, with a full-charge blaster bolt coming at me, if I could not block that, I might not have the power to stop a shooter fifty or a hundred meters away from pulling the trigger."

"Precisely. But did you know that one student in eight does eventually reach out to destroy a remote? That they usually justify it by saying it is more efficient to stop the source of the damaging bolts than to endlessly deflect them? Laser Pose, please."

Her Master lay upon the soft gra.s.s, rolled up onto her neck and shoulders, and extended her body skyward, her hands on the ground at her sides.