Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [116]
“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said.
“Not your fault, Hara.” He finished his form and again exerted himself to slide up to a standing position. Then, finally, he felt he’d done enough, just barely enough, to warrant a return to work. He moved forward into the cockpit.
The blasted claustrophobic cockpit. There were three seats, two forward and one back, all with control boards pressed in so close there was barely room to get into them. And there were no viewports, just monitor screens providing a live holocam feed of what was going on outside. A vehicle without viewports issued no visible light for other sensors to detect. This was efficiency. But efficiency, as almost always, came at the expense of beauty and comfort.
He squeezed into the rear seat, the command chair. Hara occupied the forward port-side chair. Fardan, a young fair-skinned human male, was in the starboard seat as communications and sensor operator.
Dei looked at him. “Well?”
Fardan turned to give Dei an apologetic look. “You’re correct, sir. The computer gives a high degree of confidence to the possibility that this is the Queen Mother’s flagship.” The young man had a long face, not as handsome as the Sith preferred, and wore his long black hair in a braid. He looked like a younger version of Dei.
“Plot their course as closely as you can, to a thousand significant digits if you have to. When they jump, I want to know the exact direction they’re jumping.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dei turned his attention to Hara. “Have our reprovisioning ship stand by to follow us.”
“Yes, sir.” She typed a few sentences onto her small comm board and transmitted. Compressed text caused a much tinier potential blip on enemy sensors than voice, which in turn was smaller by several orders of magnitude than holograms, so this crew used it whenever feasible.
This craft that Dei commanded brought him both exasperation and pride. Exasperation because it was so inelegant. Designed and manufactured in the Corporate Sector, it was, on the exterior, oval and seamless, coated in a sensor-absorbing material that was black in the depths of space but could assume ambient colors when near a planetary surface. Designated the EE-104 Fisheye and named Cryptic Warning, it was as unlovely as a particularly nasty-looking piece of candy. All it needed was lint from a pocket sticking to it to complete the picture.
On the other hand, it was a very expensive, highly efficient tool of espionage and war. Designed for the purpose of coordinating sneak attacks and for sitting for days or weeks on station, unseen, to monitor enemy activities, it had the most impressive array of sensor and stealth features Dei had ever seen. The Sith had captured only two such craft, and Gavar Khai had assigned one to the command of Querdan Dei. That was an unmistakable sign of faith in his abilities.
Dei knew that his operation was a long shot on Khai’s part, devotion of a finite set of resources to the Jedi Queen project. Lord Taalon had seen a vision of a possible Jedi Queen in the future; Gavar Khai had noticed a marked similarity between the description of the Jedi Queen and the current Hapan Queen Mother, who had once been a Jedi. Clearly Tenel Ka Djo was not the Jedi Queen; her appearance was slightly different, and there had never been any indication that she would choose to be fitted with a prosthetic arm, while the Jedi Queen clearly had two working limbs.
But Tenel Ka Djo had had a daughter, lost in the last war, and she could have another. So Khai’s orders were simple. Take up station at Hapes; find a way to gain access to the vicinity of Tenel Ka Djo; and kill her.
Dei knew that he was nothing but a tourniquet for possible loose ends. He was used to assignments that were both very difficult and mostly unrewarding. His own interests never leaned toward Sith politics, toward stroking the egos of those in power. And this