Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [146]
“Yet return she has not.”
Mace knotted his fingers together. A breath brought his voice back to its customary deep, flat dispassion. “Haruun Kal is still nominally a Separatist planet. And she’s a wanted woman. It won’t be easy for her to get offworld. Or even to signal for extraction—the local militia use all kinds of signal jamming, and whatever they don’t jam they triangulate; whole partisan bands have been wiped out by one incautious transmission—”
“Your friend she is.” Yoda used his stick to poke Mace on the arm. “Care for her, you do.”
Mace didn’t meet his eyes. His feelings for Depa Billaba ran deep.
She had been onworld for four standard months. She couldn’t communicate regularly; Mace had tracked her activities by sporadic Republic Intelligence reports of sabotage at the Separatist starfighter base, and the fruitless expeditions of the Balawai militias trying—and failing—to wipe out Depa’s guerrillas, or even contain them. More than a month ago, Republic Intelligence had sent word that the Separatists had pulled back to the Gevarno Cluster, because they could no longer maintain and defend their base. Her success could not have been more brilliant.
But he feared to learn at what cost.
“But it can’t simply be that she’s missing, or …,” he murmured. A dark flush spread over his bare dome of skull when he realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. He felt Yoda’s eyes on him still, and gave half an apologetic shrug. “I was only thinking: if she’d been captured or—or killed—there would be no need for such secrecy …”
The creases on Yoda’s face deepened around his mouth, and he made that tchk sound of mild disapproval that any Jedi would instantly recognize. “Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all.”
Mace nodded silently. One did not argue with Master Yoda; in the Jedi Temple, this was learned in infancy. No Jedi ever forgot it. “It’s … maddening, Master. If only … I mean, ten years ago, we could have simply reached out—”
“Cling to the past, a Jedi cannot,” Yoda interrupted sternly. His green stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. “Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful Jedi. Brilliant warrior—”
“She’d better be.” Mace tried to smile. “I trained her.”
“But worry you do. Too much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis.”
The smile wasn’t working. He stopped trying. “I don’t want to talk about Geonosis.”
“Known this for months, I have.” Yoda poked him again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge green eyes glimmered softly. “But when, finally, to talk you want … listen, I will.”
Mace accepted this with a silent inclination of his head. He’d never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.
Anything else.
“Look at this place,” he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor’s office. “Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum … How this office was, in those days—”
Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. “Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was.” Some vast distance drifted through his gaze: he might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi.
It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long-vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.
For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.
“Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition’s soil.” In the wave of his hand,