Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [185]
I chose the Survivors as my first targets. I knew them better than I knew anyone else, so I had an edge on getting into their minds. The Survivors were also the most disciplined of the Invids, so if I could break them, make them skittish, the nervousness would bleed over into the other groups. My move against them would be the prelude to my attacks on the other groups, so I wanted it to be especially chilling.
Elegos and I worked hard on it, programming it into my datapad, then projecting it out of the holoprojector pad in my suite. We ran it over and over again, allowing me to memorize it from every angle, and practice my part in it. I had to be careful and quick, but if it worked right, it would shake the Survivors to their core.
I took a seat in the Crash cantina at a table very much in the back. Captain Nive normally sat there, and not too long afterward he joined me. Jacob had not been paying me court as had the other pirate leaders—he trusted in the friendship we had built up during the time he commanded my squadron. I actually liked him and the way he managed the Survivors, but from the conversations we’d had, I knew he was not wholly comfortable with all he had done in his life. That confidence, expressed to me late one night, was about to come back and haunt him.
Jacob sat with his back to the corner of the room. I sat at his left, with my back toward a wall, but slightly exposed along my flank. Another chair sat across from him and could not be seen by most of the rest of the room because of a pillar. I had a bottle of Savereen brandy sitting in front of me, and a snifter in my right hand. Jacob drank lum, but never enough to get roaring drunk, just mildly suggestible. We sat there, chatting in low voices about the latest rumors concerning Shala the Hutt, when I pushed the empty chair out with my left foot, as if someone were drawing it back to sit.
I tapped the Force, letting it fill me, but turned my head toward the chair and away from Jacob. “You can’t sit here. This is a private table.” As I said that, I reached out with my senses and projected an image into Jacob’s brain.
Jacob’s head came up and he blanched. “Not possible.”
The figure he saw sitting down opposite him spat out a thick golden credit coin, that bounced once on the table. My left hand swept out to grab it, then I slapped down the credit I’d palmed. My left hand recoiled. “It’s cold.”
The figure across the table from Jacob wore an Imperial Captain’s uniform, albeit a bit too small, and had a mouse under his left eye. In fact, Captain Zlece Oonaar of the Crusader looked exactly the way he had after the Survivors had tried him and Jacob had ordered his execution. Jacob himself had stuffed the gold credit in his mouth, following the old superstition of buying off the evil things the dead would say about the living, then had him pitched out of the Backstab’s main airlock.
Zlece Oonaar looked directly into Nive’s eyes. “You can have your gold back. The dead don’t speak ill of the dead.”
I grabbed Jacob’s left wrist with my right hand. “What does he mean?”
Jacob’s mouth hung open. “I don’t know.”
Zlece nodded slowly. “You know. You know you should have died the day all your friends did. If you’d fought harder, they might have lived. You failed them, and now you will join them. Doom is coming to Courkrus. All your victims will be avenged.”
Jacob stood abruptly, tearing his wrist from my grip, and threw his mug of lum through the phantasm. I let the image fade into a bloody mist that drifted away as the mug shattered against the pillar. Jacob stood there, gape-jawed and trembling, then looked around at everyone else in the cantina. Their attention had been drawn to him when the mug exploded, but they had seen nothing prior to that.
Jacob pointed at the chair. “Did you see him?”
Other people started to shake their heads.
He looked