Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 08_ Ascension - Christie Golden [127]
“Then—you do think there is one?”
“Oh, my dear, there are two,” Eramuth said. “We’re working on disentangling them, but we have a ways to go yet. How would you feel about joining a very elite little club?”
JEDI TEMPLE, CORUSCANT
“IT IS TOO LARGE,” MUTTERED SITH SABER TANEKA SHIRRU. “THIS Temple. It is wasteful.”
“It is ancient,” her companion, Saber Mor Akrav, countered. “They had many centuries to keep adding on wings. It is a vast place indeed.”
Mor, Taneka, Jashvi, and Rulin were currently exploring some of the labyrinthine tunnels that seemed to twine for kilometers beneath the too-large and wasteful Jedi Temple. When the time was right, Lord Vol would arrive on Coruscant, and High Lord Workan wanted a thorough map created to present as a gift to their Grand Lord. Not for the first time, Shirru wished the Jedi had simply left such useful information behind, but the canny Jedi had safeguarded their precious knowledge.
As, mused Shirru with grudging admiration, the Sith would have done.
The Jedi had planned to be gone for a long time. They had therefore taken the most valuable physical documents, flimsi, and objects with them. Doubtless, they had backed up their significant data and taken those, as well. What they had been forced to leave behind was well protected indeed. The Lost Tribe was at a distinct technological disadvantage. While every Jedi could be expected to be familiar with the computers and data-storage systems of their Archives, the Sith had caught up with the rest of the galaxy a mere three years earlier. There were only a few Sith who had devoted themselves to this science, and when they had first attempted to retrieve data, they had triggered a protective virus that raced through the systems, deleting information as it went.
Frantic attempts to undo the damage or at least halt further destruction had ensued. They had managed to stop the process, but no one wished to attempt data recovery until such time as the Sith were firmly ensconced on this new world and all experts, Keshiri and human, had been given the opportunity to examine the system.
That was another burden under which Shirru and the others in the Temple labored. The human Sith serving Workan were all visible, posing as new Senators and their aides, or working for the new holonetwork BAMR, or in various other positions. The Keshiri Sith needed to stay unnoticed, as their appearance would be remarked upon. Hence, all those asked to unobtrusively reside in and map the temple were Keshiri. While Shirru understood the reasoning behind the decision, she did not like it. It harked back to centuries past, when human Sith were deemed better than Keshiri Sith, and she longed for her Grand Lord to arrive so that she could properly stand alongside the human members of the Lost Tribe.
Lord Vantsuri Shia, who had been placed in charge of the Keshiri Sith, had immediately commandeered the room that had once been Grand Master Luke Skywalker’s. The other Sith had had no difficulty finding rooms.
“Their own rooms,” Shirru had sniffed. “Sith apprentices share one large room. No wonder the Jedi are soft, if they are so pampered at an early age.”
Despite the lack of information about the Temple, several groups had already mapped a not-insignificant portion of it. And interesting and intricate and ancient though it might be, Shirru still found it overly large, and Mor’s comment as to why it was so large did nothing more than annoy her.
“Yes, the Jedi did have a great deal of time to build it, and thus they have created a great waste of time for us,” Taneka replied. The Keshiri Saber was irritated at having been assigned what she perceived as a task far beneath her simply because she was not human, and made no attempt to hide it. Her presence in the Force, as well as her body language and acidic tone of voice, made this clear to all around her. “This is unnecessary. And unsanitary,” she added, as her boots squelched in