Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 01_ Outcast - Aaron Allston [93]
Ben felt a little trickle of worry. “So how do Dad and I get out?”
“You've already been told. You don't.” Chara looked serene but sympathetic. “Like the rest of us, you are here forever. For your own sanity, you must resign yourselves to the idea that you are already dead—that you now exist only to preserve knowledge.”
NOT FAR FROM THE ARMAND ISARD CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, CORUSCANT
Under an assumed name, Winter rented quarters in the residential building nearest the prison in which Valin was being held—in which Valin was stored, since someone frozen in carbonite needed only monitoring, not a cell and sustenance.
The prison itself was an artifact of early-Imperial-era architecture. Surrounded by a comparatively narrow plaza, which would serve as a kill zone for guards should prisoners escape, it consisted of a tall, tiered single building within an exercise yard surrounded by fifteen-meter walls, all made of black synthstone. Synthstone towers with snipers' nests rose from the corners; spotlights, bright enough to give a sunburn to a target fifty meters away, were mounted atop the towers and at intervals along the walls. Otherwise the only bright points to be seen were on the upper reaches of the building, where lit viewports indicated the quarters of the warden and senior officers. It was a place of gloom and oppression, and the Darkmeld conspirators' new quarters looked down upon it from a distance of half a kilometer.
In those viewports, Jaina's team placed holocams with powerful zoom functions. On nearby desks and tables were banks of monitors for the holocams deployed to watch Seff Hellin.
Monitoring had been reasonably successful. Using holocam-equipped mouse droids, holocams surreptitiously mounted on government buildings surrounding the prison, and even data feeds stolen from surveillance satellites, the team had not only watched Seff perform his workman deception but had used a mouse droid to follow the rogue Jedi to his temporary quarters a kilometer from their own stakeout. All the darkmeld conspirators took shifts at the stakeout quarters—even Jaina, when she felt she was safe in sneaking away from Dab for a few hours.
She had done so this night, and she and Jag shared duty at the monitors.
Jaina looked up from the screen displaying the notes the others had been keeping. “His timing is as steady as public transportation on Kuat.”
Jag, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, nodded. “Seems to be. The eight hours prior to dawn, he's in his workman disguise, mostly underground in front of the prison. The next eight hours he's at his quarters, presumably asleep. The next eight hours we can't reliably track yet, but he seems to use them to acquire gear and maybe get in touch with contacts.”
“We need to find out what he's doing in front of the prison. Digging a tunnel? Planting high explosives? Surely he's not that crazy.”
“We do.” Jag rubbed his eyes and then looked at Jaina. “Armand Isard. Any relation to Ysanne Isard?”
“Her father. She sent him to prison. Not this prison.” Ysanne Isard was one of the officers who had acted as temporary rulers of the Empire after Palpatine had died. Earlier in her career, she had won a private power struggle with her equally treacherous father. He had been executed; she had replaced him as director of Imperial Intelligence. “I think it was some sort of act of malicious humor rather than contrition on