Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [194]
“Go on,” said Cuis. He was barely audible. “Finish it.”
“Who sent you?” I know. But I want to hear. “Tell me.”
“Kill me.”
“Join me.” Vader squeezed, still a meter away. “And you can live.”
Cuis stared back at him with unnaturally black eyes, panting, contemptuous. He had no fear, none at all.
“That’s not how I work. I have my code.”
“Name him.”
Cuis simply looked back at him.
Vader throttled him to the point of unconsciousness and loosened his grip again. “Last chance.”
“No.”
“Name him, and join me.”
There was no answer this time. Cuis simply stared. He wouldn’t be broken. Vader clamped and relaxed, clamped and relaxed, taking Cuis to the point of death each time, but he got nowhere.
Good man.
He let go completely and Cuis pitched forward, taking huge gulps of air with the sucking wheeze of a dying old man.
A door opposite him flew open. “Lord Vader!” Lekauf came running out, blaster drawn, but Vader held up his hand and stopped him a little more insistently than perhaps he should have. Lekauf bounced back with a grunt as if he’d run into a wall, which in effect he had. But Vader didn’t want Cuis dead right then. He was still savoring rage, seeing how it had swept through him and given him the power to defeat a faster Jedi and keep the memories locked deep within. He shut down his energy blade with a flick of his thumb.
Lekauf picked himself up. “There might still be others, sir.”
“There aren’t,” said Vader, and he stepped forward and held his arm out to Cuis. The assassin didn’t take it. Vader could have raised him with the Force alone, but he didn’t. He took hold of his tunic and lifted him to his feet, holding him steady.
“You’ll never betray the man who sent you after me, will you?”
Cuis never took his eyes off Vader’s mask. But it wasn’t horror on his face. It was simply disdain. It was a novelty for Vader, who had grown used to the awe his appearance alone inspired in everyone else.
“Get one of those technicians,” he said.
Palpatine sat up, distracted from his datapad, by a faint tingling ripple that filled the back of his mouth and spread into his chest. The Force shifted imperceptibly in a far corner and settled again, but it was different this time. Something had changed forever.
Vader had changed.
“How reassuring,” said the Emperor to himself.
Boots clattered on the polished floor.
“Sir, did you call, sir?” said the stormtrooper. “I heard—”
“Nothing to worry about,” said the Emperor, laying the datapad on the inlaid table, screen-down. “There’s nothing further to worry about at all.”
Arkanian Micro was a very obliging contractor. Vader sat and watched carefully as medical technicians took buccal swabs from Cuis’s mouth and passed cell-collecting devices over the skin of his arms. They were harvesting the building blocks of an army. For all the curious things Vader had seen in his life, this seemed the most extraordinary, that so much could be made from so little.
“Is that it?” said Cuis. His voice had recovered a little from the repeated choking, but he still didn’t show any fear, or even that pathetic sense of hope that he might have escaped retribution. He did appear to be simply asking a question, not embarking on a plea for mercy.
In his enhanced peripheral vision, Vader noted that the technicians were now watching Cuis with more interest than they were watching him.
There were gestures and lessons and symbols that you could employ without even needing to harness the Force. Vader knew he had to choose one, or lose ground and reputation. He needed to stamp his authority on the situation and let word of mouth do the rest.
It was still a pity.
“I said, Is that it.” Cuis was insistent. “Answer me.”
“I’m afraid it is,” said Vader, and took out his lightsaber. The red beam activated at the lightest of touches. “But you’ll become an entire army. How many men can say that?”