Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 05_ Allies - Christie Golden [13]
It was the briefest of pauses, as Vestara chewed and swallowed, but pause she did. She patted her lips delicately with a napkin and graced him with another one of her radiant smiles. But somehow to Ben, this one seemed just a little forced.
“Dead, once we were done with them.”
She was closed down, guarded. Just like he was. Ben had to make an effort not to sigh.
They finished their meal in an uncomfortable silence.
OFFICES OF THE IMPERIAL HEAD OF STATE GALACTIC EMPIRE EMBASSY COMPLEX, CORUSCANT
THE HOUR WASN’T ALL THAT LATE, NOT AS JAGGED FEL WAS STARTING to reckon hours, but it was late enough that his brain was tired and having difficulty focusing. He rubbed his eyes, strained from staring at datapads all day, and put the one he was reading atop a pile. On a whim, he assembled them all into a little tower. There were quite a lot of them.
He turned his expensive—and incredibly comfortable, which was more a necessity than a luxury, considering how much time he spent in it—nerfhide chair toward the vidscreen and touched a button.
A too-familiar face filled the screen: the visage of a man with tawny, perfectly coiffed hair, a stylish suit, and a faux-sincere expression. The so-called journalist, Javis Tyrr. Behind him, framed artistically off center in the cam, was Raynar Thul, looking as if he were listening to something no one else could hear.
Thul had been a Jedi who had gone missing years earlier. He had reappeared, alarmingly and unexpectedly, as UnuThul—a Joiner who was leading the Killik expansion into the Chiss territories. He was mad, and disfigured, and had been under the care of the Jedi healer Cilghal for a long time. His burn scars had healed but still left the face framed by the cam looking stiff and artificial. Free now to come and go as he pleased, Thul had not yet chosen to leave the Jedi Temple.
“I’m sitting here, on the steps of the Jedi Temple, speaking with Raynar Thul, who—”
Jag glowered and changed the channel.
“—former Jedi Tahiri Veila,” a human woman with long black hair swept up into a bun was saying. “The charges are—”
Jag’s glower deepened. He wanted to hear about Tahiri’s situation even less than he wanted to stare at Javis Tyrr’s smirk. He changed the channel again.
Another reporter’s face filled the screen. By human standards, Javis Tyrr’s perfect features were more appealing than the one Jag regarded now, but Fel would take the homely, oversized face of Perre Needmo and his levelheaded reporting over Tyrr’s pretty looks and sensationalism any day. Needmo was a Chevin, and his face was long and solemn with a wrinkled, expressive snout. He had the calm mien of an elder statesperson, and evoked trust and confidence. His show, too, tended to include positive things as well as negative, so one didn’t feel the need to take a sanisteam right after watching. It made a nice change from Javis Tyrr Presents.
“—from reporter Madhi Vaandt,” Needmo was saying, and the scene cut to a young female Devaronian standing in what looked to be the heart of the Coruscant Underlevel. Not for the first time, Jag was struck by how extremely different the genders were in Devaronians. The females didn’t even look like they belonged to the same species, and their behavior and natures couldn’t be more different from the males. That they needed one another to continue the species had always seemed to Jag like some great cosmic joke.
Whereas the males had bare, reddish skin, two prominent horns of which they were extremely proud, and sharp incisors, the females were covered in short soft white, brown, or reddish fur except for their hands, feet, and faces, which were pale pink, and had merely darker pigmented ovals where horns would be on their male counterparts.
The males had a reputation for irresponsibility and wanderlust, and tended to roam the galaxy. They were not the finest representatives of their species,