Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [69]
“Seha, why did you try to poison the Senators?”
Seha flashed the journalist a big, innocent smile. “Of course I didn’t do that, silly. I’m innocent of all charges.”
“Seha Dorvald! What’s it like being a mad Jedi?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Mad Jedi think they’re lost in a world of imposters. I know everyone around me is real, except maybe you.” It hurt Seha’s face to be cute all the time. Others had told her she was good at it, but it just wasn’t natural for her.
“Seha! Why a droid attorney? Why not an organic?”
She rolled her eyes. “Really, a C-class VoxPop advocate droid is too much legal firepower for this case. I’m pretty sure a mouse droid with a two-bit logic chip could get me cut loose. I brought some credcoins to buy a ride back to the Temple when I’m freed later today.”
It was all nonsense, of course. With Daala personally interested in the case, with the entire weight of the GA Department of Justice being brought to bear, Seha couldn’t have wrangled her freedom with a squad of YVH combat droids masquerading as attorneys or a million credits to spread around as bribes.
But her droid did have some unusual features. In addition to the cultured speaking voice flavored with the traditional Coruscanti accent that once dominated the officer ranks of the Imperial armed forces, it was loaded with extrasensory apparatus, especially holocams—recording from artfully concealed, tiny apertures—that would document every centimeter of their movements even if the droid were shut down or shackled with a restraining bolt. If, as the Jedi Masters predicted, Seha was going to be hauled straight into the main security center of the Senate Building, the droid would emerge with invaluable information about that center’s layout, personnel, and defenses.
With every question and answer, Seha and her droid got closer to the building’s entrance. Now a dozen security troopers emerged from the entrance, marching toward her, and she suspected she wouldn’t have to contend with the crowds for much longer.
“Why’d you choose here to turn yourself in?”
She blinked, all teenage-style innocence and good cheer, at the speaker and his holocam. “I was going to end up here anyway. I understand Natasi wants to chat with me. Maybe we’ll talk about boys, or I can give her some good political advice.” The use of Chief of State Daala’s given name was improvised, but Seha suspected Han Solo would approve for its audacity and aggravation factor.
She hoped she didn’t end up being tortured for it.
A second later she was surrounded by trooper uniforms. She and her attorney droid were hustled through the mob of journalists, many of whom gave way only grudgingly and with invectives shouted at the troopers, and then she was inside the main entrance.
She sighed, relieved. Maybe she would be tortured, but at least the reporters were gone.
A few hundred meters away, in the airy, light-drenched office of the Senator from Coruscant, Fost Bramsin nodded in approval, his attention fixed on the HoloNews broadcast. Seha’s image, her questions and answers, were now being cycled through the analysis of the news commentators. “She plays well to the holocams.”
In the visitor’s chair on the opposite side of the desk, Senator Treen paused with her cup halfway to her lips. She sniffed, a disapproving noise. “I’m not at all happy with her surrender. If she’d stayed gone, no one would have had a chance to discover that she had nothing to do with the poisoning.”
Bramsin gave her a reassuring, if weary, smile. “No one will. Jaxton and Lecersen aren’t exactly going to admit that they allowed themselves to be poisoned. Seha Dorvald’s in the hands of Parova, which means our hands. No one will figure out what she was doing here … until we have figured it out.”
“I just don’t care for the notion that some mysterious agency, perhaps the Jedi Order, is active in ways that might interfere with us.”
“She’ll have confessed, to us alone, within a couple of