Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [201]
She shook her head adamantly. “I will not betray my people.”
Her words came stiff and pronounced slightly oddly. Precise, that’s it. It almost seemed as if she were speaking with the same very proper diction my grandfather used. It was a datapoint—not much of one, but a point nonetheless.
“No, of course, you don’t want to do that. I don’t want you to do that, but we have to find the Invidious, and find it quickly. Leonia Tavira has to be stopped … from being able to harm anyone else.” I’d almost ended my sentence at the word stopped, but I caught a momentary hesitation of her breath, which made me add the extra phrase. “We really don’t want to see her hurt anyone else.”
“You can’t stop her.”
I glanced back at Luke, then turned to her. “He says that just because you could not stop her, does not mean we cannot. Sorry, he always makes things sound so dire, but the fact is, he’s right. I’ve been here for months, on many operations where you or another of your brethren were on the Invidious, and you never detected me. Why not? Because he was shielding me. You know you looked, you know you tried, but it wasn’t until this evening, when we wanted to trap you, that I revealed myself enough to let you find me. And you never even detected him.”
I stood and walked over to confer with Luke, letting her mull over what I’d said. I raised a finger to my lips to keep Luke silent, but frowned to get him to give me that expression. When he did look at me angrily, I recoiled. “But you can’t be so cruel. To remove her access to the Force forever isn’t going to do her or us any good. Sure, it might teach her a lesson, but so would having a bantha trample her. I don’t think she should be made an example of. It won’t make the others more tractable.”
Luke really got into his part, jabbing me hard in the chest with two fingers. I did an about face, rubbing my chest, and returned to Red’s side. “I really do think I can get him to unblock your access to the Force, I really do. You just need to tell us where Tavira keeps the Invidious. I mean, we already know you manage to keep it hidden—you’re very good at that stuff, hiding and all.”
“No, I cannot tell you. None of us will betray our people.”
I sighed and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Well, I know you’re thinking about things from your point of view, and maybe even thinking about them from Tavira’s point of view. That Star Destroyer is very powerful, and for you to be working with her, you’ve got to be afraid she’s going to turn it on your people if you betray her. I understand that. It’s crystal clear.”
I let my voice drop a bit in tone and volume as I leaned forward. “Thing of it is this, though: you didn’t get me. You didn’t get him. Tavira, when she doesn’t hear that you succeeded, will see you as having failed. And you know her—failure isn’t an accident, it’s a conspiracy. The way I see it, and I know her almost as well as you do, she’ll see herself as betrayed at this point and act. What you have to ask yourself is this: do you want to be the cause of her killing all your people, or do you want to let the guys who defeated you take their run at Tavira?”
FORTY-SEVEN
Red cracked a little and we were able to use what we learned from her to bust the rest of the Jensaarai—that’s what they called themselves—wide open. What we got from them was incredibly interesting because it came wrapped in a strange philosophical package that equated Obi-Wan Kenobi with Darth Vader in terms of being a Jedi exterminator. The Jensaarai were trained as Jedi were, even to the point of constructing lightsabers and training with them, but it was not nearly the transitional point for them that it was in the Jedi tradition I knew.
For the Jensaarai, their crowning moment, their full growth into becoming one of the Jensaarai Defenders—they