The Clone Wars_ No Prisoners Part 4

"Yeah. Whatever."

Merish looked beatific. That was the only way Hallena could describe it. As more people crowded into the tapcaf for an ale to end the day, and the noise level rose, she kept an eye on the doors. The place smelled of sweat and musty spices. Exotic tunes-discordant half notes, not unpleasant, just unfamiliar- crackled from an old audio unit set high on the wall to her right. The conversations around her, while part of a general high level of noise, were somehow hard to eavesdrop upon, as if everyone in that tapcaf had grown used to speaking in a way that wouldn't attract the attention of the authorities.

She'd seen almost no droids here at all since she'd arrived on the planet, the office droid at the factory being a notable excep-tion. When she craned her neck to look through the open doors to the tapcaf kitchen, there were no droids there, the one place she was certain they'd have mechanical help.

She couldn't ask why. She was supposed to be a native.

"No kriffing droids," she said flatly. It could have meant anything. She meant someone throw me a line here.

"No, at least that hasn't happened yet," Merish said. "Flesh and blood is still cheaper. And most people are still more docile when they're kept busy all day."

Thank you, Merish.

There were all kinds of things the intel briefings never really told an agent. But these were the things she liked to know: she liked to know about att.i.tude. She liked to know why.

But all that she had been told was that the dissidents in Athar had regular contact with Sep agents. Her sole task was to map that network, identify as many individuals in it as she could, and turn that information over to someone else to . . .

To what? Observe. Break. Arrest. Maybe even to flood the network with disinformation and double agents.

Shil was so quiet that Hallena wondered if he was allowed to talk when Merish was around. She watched him from the corner of her eye, and tried not to look too curious about why he kept tugging his right sleeve down past his wrist. At first she thought it was a nervous tic, and then she wondered if he was simply concealing a weapon. It was only when he reached for his ale and knocked a sodden table mat onto the floor that she understood what he was covering up. As he bent down and stretched out his hand to retrieve the mat, his sleeve slid back, and she saw the scars.

They were not random.

They were old cuts; not the irregular marks of an accident, or the clean incisions of surgery, but a carefully inscribed network of cut after cut after cut, as if someone had tried to decorate him like a piece of Emori leatherwork. Her eyes froze on the raised scars for a long second. She knew without asking that they weren't some form of body art or anything voluntary. A couple of the lines had odd branches, as if he'd moved during the process and someone had to do it again.

It was odd how something glimpsed so briefly could sear an indelible image into her mind. She wouldn't forget those scars. As Shil straightened up, he caught her eye for a moment, then pulled his sleeve back into place.

"To set an example to the rest," Shil said softly. "Fear needs its advertising like any other commodity, or else who's going to buy it?"

And that was why he was covering it up. Not shame; not embarra.s.sment. He didn't even need to flaunt that he'd been tor-tured but was still walking free, still defiant. He was simply denying whoever had hurt him the outcome they'd wanted. He was not going to let anyone else see what his punishment had been, and be cowed by it.

"I understand," Hallena said.

Yes, I do. And I mustn't.

Merish, distracted for a moment, reached to smooth Shil's hair, then went back to watching the door as she sipped her ale. Her free hand rested on his leg in the shadow of the table.

Hallena had been trained to do a dirty job. One of her earliest lessons had been that there was no clear-cut line between enemy and ally, and that if she looked for one she would only forget what she was there to do. She would, her spymaster had once said, meet enemies she liked, and allies she hated. It wasn't her job to decide who was more worthy of support. Her sole task was to serve the Republic because she could have no idea of the bigger picture in which she blindly painted small sections.

It's going to be hard sometimes, Hallena.

She could hear his voice now, even through the hubbub of the tapcaf.

You're not immune to good and evil. You're not on the wrong side. You're just ignoring smaller complications that get in the way of the bigger task.

Gil Pellaeon called it collateral damage. Sometimes she wanted to talk to him about how he handled causing death and pain to people who got in the way when his ship was seeking bigger targets. But she'd never found the right moment to explain why, and reveal all the things she'd done.

Am I a bad person? Why can't I answer that question?

"So what did they do to you}" Merish asked at last.

Hallena didn't look at her. "What would drive me crazy quickest. Keeping me in solitary."

She couldn't claim it was violence. She was sitting beside people with real scars, and if anything went wrong, the story was easily disproved by examining her. But crazy-crazy was invisible. She could do crazy. She had no idea yet how long she might have to keep it up, but she was sure she could manage a long, long time.

"You're not going to trust us until we show you, are you?"

It was cruelly easy. First there was guilt, and then, when an agent found pleasure in being clever, there was callous smugness. Then, as age and bitter experience eroded that layer, guilt and disgust crept back in.

"No," Hallena said, playing the game of stating the truth to create a lie. "Look, I don't know anything about you, and you don't know anything about me. Why should either of us trust the other?"

"Oh, we know plenty about you. The office droid's very cooperative about sharing identichip data, if you know how to ask nicely."

The preloaded persona on the bogus chip had looked pretty bland to Hallena-a long-forgotten person from a town swept clean off the map-but it seemed to have more import to Merish and Shil.

"So prove to me you're not just them jerking me around before hauling me back inside again."

"Why would they want to do that?"

"Because they're sc.u.m," Hallena said, "and that's what small people with too much power do."

Merish stared into her face for a few moments as if looking for cracks in her story. "In a day or so it won't matter anyway."

Ah. There's a timetable. For what?

The tapcaf doors sighed apart again, admitting more threadbare factory workers and a gust of humid night air scented with the smoky exhaust of obsolete ground speeders. The old woman had been spot-on with her forecast of rain. Hallena didn't ask why a day would make a difference. She waited to be told.

"Varti," Merish said suddenly, craning her neck. "Look, it's Varti."

A small, bald man who looked close to retirement wove his way through the drinkers and headed for the table. Hallena thought his scalp was simply shiny, but as he moved under the overhead lights, she could see that his dark skin was tattooed with white designs from ear to what had been his hairline. If there was one lasting impression that she would take from this place, beyond its grime and casual brutality, it was the sense of inversion, of a negative holoimage, the expected areas of light and dark reversed.

Well, that's remarkably apt. . . because I really can't see any clear black and white in this situation.

Varti smiled at her, looking a little puzzled. He c.o.c.ked his head slightly to one side. In the street outside, klaxons screamed as more than one police speeder ripped past. Several men at the bar paused to look out the windows.

"I don't remember you, Orla," he said, holding out a thin, veined hand to Hallena. "But then Nuth is only memories itself now, and memories are fragile things."

Oh stang . . . steady, now. Don't blow it.

"I would have thought I'd have remembered you, too," she said, indicating his intricate white tattoos.

"I had hair back then."

The sound of traffic outside was becoming deafening, and Hallena found it hard to hear him. Merish just took another pull at her ale. Shil turned his head slowly to look at her and smiled, as if there were some wonderful joke they were about to share that excluded everyone else in the place, and Hallena took it as something romantic, nothing more.

"I'm used to a bit of quiet." Hallena was now into her stride as surly, disturbed Orla Taman, making statements to get an-swers. "Where's all that traffic going?"

Shil turned his gaze from Merish.

"Toward change," he said. "They're heading for the power station, I expect, if things are going to schedule." He c.o.c.ked his head. "Isn't it a lovely sound?"

And then all the lights went out. The bar was plunged into darkness.

Hallena's hand was on her hold-out blaster even before she thought about it. A loud cheer went up from the tapcaf crowd: in the second or two it took her eyes to adjust to the scant light from a couple of oil burners smoking gently to kill bugs, she saw glistening, metallic movement and heard the shunk-shunk of safety catches being drawn. A constellation of blaster charge lights winked into life, red, blue, green, amber.

Ambush.

Shil chuckled. More vehicle klaxons screamed outside the doors, their sound falling in pitch as they sped past. Hallena could feel the vibration as the downdrafts shook the walls.

Ambush . . .

The tapcaf flooded with light again, this time the ghostly green of a generator-powered emergency system.

Every drinker in the bar had a blaster rifle drawn, and some had a sidearm, too. They didn't look scared. They looked elated. The entire tapcaf was silent, like an army awaiting orders.

Ambush . . .

"Revolution," said Shil. He had a blaster rifle in his hand now, and so did Merish. "Now it begins. Now it begins, brothers and sisters. Now we take back what's ours."

The cheer was deafening. It drowned out the convoy of emergency speeders streaking through the city. Hallena drew her blaster automatically, and had no choice but to follow the flow.

The revolutionaries of Athar had mobilized. She'd landed in the middle of a coup.

As she joined the crowd streaming through the doors into the night, she felt exhilarated, but she wasn't sure that it was for the right reasons.

Chapter Three.

But Master Altis doesn't subscribe to those views about family. Does that place him on the dark side? What about the Jedi who founded our Order? They didn't ban attachment. Does that mean everything we are today is built on a foundation of darkness? Why did we decide it was suddenly a bad thing?

And are there other Force-users on the light side? I've never met any. Surely they exist?

-Padawan Bagar Nei-Leit, asking questions in philosophy cla.s.s at the Jedi Temple BRIDGE OF THE CARGO VESSEL WOOKIEE GUNNER, OUTER RIM.

"Master Altis?"

"Yes, I feel it, too, my dear."

Jedi Master Djinn Altis stood at the command console and closed his eyes to concentrate on the welter of sensations in the Force. Sometimes he sensed light dying somewhere behind his eyes, tiny short-lived flashes like subatomic particles; sometimes the lights lived longer and turned into great shimmering ribbons of color that wove and tangled into infinity. Now, though, the sensation was like microscopic pellets of hail hitting his scalp just under the skin, melting into cold water that ran down inside his spinal ca.n.a.l.

He recognized it as the collective distress and anger of a world tipping over into conflict. This was how the Force spoke to him, its unique voice, its tone different for every Force-user who listened.

The melting-hail effect was starting to become a common sensation in this war.

"We don't have to sit out this war." Callista Masana slid into the navigator's seat and checked the screen in front of her as if some crisis might be visible on the plot. She put both hands on the transparisteel plate that covered the display, eyes closed, as if she were communing with the computer system. She seemed to be as attuned with inanimate objects as she'd been with the tsaelkes on her parents' farm. "Is there nothing we can do?"

"We're doing it, Calli. Humanitarian relief." There were hundreds of tons of supplies-food, medicine, water purifiers, tents-in the ship's hold, bound for Yarille. "Someone has to. A war's not solely about fighting."

"You've never said if you think we should take up arms or not, Master. One day soon, we may have to do just that."

"I'm not a pacifist. I'll meet force with force when I have to."

"The definition of a pacifist," Callista said, easing herself out of the seat again, "is someone who knows the depth of violence inside them, understands that there's no going back once it's unleashed, and so chooses to never let it loose."

"I never said pacifists lacked courage or aggression. Actually, you've just defined the philosophy of many militarists-that force is there not to be used."

"But what's a deterrent worth if you know it'll never be unleashed?"

"And there, my dear, is the line. The pacifist says-I will not add fuel to this fire, even though I may want to because it may consume the world, and someone has to say . . . stop." Altis tapped the lightsaber hanging from his belt. "A pacifist would not carry this because he would not want the temptation of using it. The Jedi ... the Jedi, then, is not a pacifist because he chooses to stop the fire by violence, on the basis that fewer will suffer that way. The difference is vast-do ends ever justify means? That's our constant dilemma."

"And we're at war. It's not theoretical now."

"It never is. The choice is always with us, demanding to be made with every action we take, even in peacetime." Boots clat-tered down the pa.s.sageway, and Geith stuck his head through the hatch. "Forget the disturbance in the Force for a while and get something to eat. We have heavy work ahead of us when we reach Yarille."

Geith wandered onto the bridge and put his arm around Callista's shoulders. They made a very charming couple. The fact that they were a couple, nothing remarkable in this Jedi sect, was a quiet embarra.s.sment that the rest of the Jedi Order tried hard to ignore.

Attachment leads to suffering. Suffering leads to fear. Fear leads to anger . . .

The trap of pa.s.sion. The fast track to the dark side.

Very well, Master Yoda. What about the trap of abstraction? Compa.s.sion-compa.s.sion is an act, not an idea.

"I missed a good debate, Master." No, Geith was just a decent young man with Force powers who happened to love a girl very much like him. There wasn't the slightest hint of darkness in him, only this comfortable sense of an orb of warm light, like a sunset at the end of a still day. "If the means are morally unacceptable, then the ends must be unjustifiable."

"And what does that mean in real terms? Will you know it when the decision has to be made?" Altis feared the disconnection with reality that he felt he saw in the Jedi Order. The theory was laudable, the lesson repeated faithfully, but it had to be ap-plied with each breath, each step; to crush an insect carelessly or step to one side, to return fire or call for peace talks. Do it. Don't just say it. "Show me the next time you have to face that choice. Call me to witness it."

Callista and Geith leaned against each other like trees that had grown together over the years, oddly old and permanent for a moment.

"You think we should overthrow the Republic, then?" Geith said. "Yes, Master, we should. Shouldn't we?"

"Explain."

"The excuse of 'they started it' might be fine for children, and self-defense is reasonable, but. . ."

"Go on."

"The army. Anyone with a sc.r.a.p of honesty can see it's wrong to breed human beings and make them fight. We have no moral authority. We've already lost what we're supposed to be fighting for in this war. Even if the Republic wins."

Geith, like Callista, had known his parents before he became a Jedi. He'd been orphaned, but he remembered them, and that attachment-love, let's call it what it is, love, any kind of love you care to name-felt good and secure. Callista-she'd been an adult working on her parents' farm when she became Altis's second Padawan. It was unheard of, in the Jedi Temple at least. She knew her own mind.

I prefer my Padawans to enter the Order with open eyes. An act of conscious choice, not habit or coercion or someone else's decisions.

There was no way-even if he wanted to-that Altis could make Callista and Geith believe that attachment was the seed of a darkness that would engulf them.