• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“That’s a little like whistling in the stellar wind, isn’t it?” Dix said. “From what we hear, the clones got the drop on all of you.”

“Almost all of us,” Starstone said.

Bitters was rocking his head back and forth in uncertainty, but Shryne could tell that the white-haired computer expert was excited by the idea—and perhaps grateful for a chance to win points with Olee. Regardless, Filli said: “Could be dangerous. The Empire might be on to those frequencies by now.”

“Not if as many of us are dead as all of you seem to think,” Shryne countered.

Bitters, Dix, and Archyr waited for Skeck to speak.

“Well, of course, we’d have to get the captain to agree,” he said at last. “Anyway, I’m still waiting to hear the rest of the proposition—the part that makes it worth our while.”

Everyone looked at Shryne.

“The Jedi have means of accessing emergency funds,” he said, with a covert motion of his hand. “You don’t have to worry about being paid for your services.”

Skeck nodded, satisfied. “Then we don’t have to worry about being paid for our services.”

While Starstone was staring at Shryne in appalled disbelief and the crew members were talking among themselves about how best to slave the Jedi beacon transceiver to the communications suite, Brudi Gayn and a tall human woman entered the cabin space from the direction of the Drunk Dancer’s bulbous cockpit. The woman’s black hair was shot through with gray, and her age showed there and in her face more than in the way she moved.

“Captain,” Skeck said, coming to his feet, but she ignored him, her gray eyes fixed on Shryne.

“Roan Shryne?” she said.

Shryne looked up at her. “Last time I checked.”

She forced an exhale and shook her head in incredulity. “Stars’ end, it really is you.” She sat down opposite Shryne, without once taking her eyes off him. “You’re the image of Jen.”

Baffled, Shryne said: “Do I know you?”

She nodded and laughed. “On a cellular level, at any rate.” She touched herself on the chest. “I gave birth to you. I’m your mother, Jedi.”

The Emperor’s medical rehabilitation laboratory occupied the crown of Coruscant’s tallest building. A room of modest size, the laboratory’s antechamber closely resembled his former chambers in the Senate Office Building, and featured a semicircle of padded couch, three swivel chairs with shell-shaped backs, and a trio of squat holoprojectors shaped like truncated cones.

Palpatine sat in the center chair, his hands on his knees, the lights of Coruscant blazing behind him through a long arc of fixed windows. The cowl of his heavy robe was lowered, and the blinking telltales of an array of devices and control panels lit his deeply creased face, the face he kept concealed from his advisers and Senatorial guests.

For here he was not simply Emperor Palpatine, he was Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith.

On the far side of thick panels of transparisteel that separated the antechamber from a rib-walled operating theater, Vader sat on the edge of the surgical table on which he had been recalled to life and transformed. His flaring black helmet had been lifted from his head by servos that extended from the laboratory’s ceiling, revealing the pasty complexion of his synthflesh face and the raised wounds on his head that might never fully heal.

The medical droids responsible for repairing what had remained of Vader’s amputated limbs and incinerated body, some of which had observed and participated in the cyborg transformation of General Grievous on Geonosis a decade earlier, had been reduced to scrap by a scream that had torn from Vader’s scorched throat on his learning of his wife’s death. Now a 2-1B droid responding to Vader’s voiced instruction was tending to an injury to Vader’s left-arm prosthesis, the cause of which he had yet to explain.

“The last time you were in this facility, you were in no condition to supervise your own convalescence, Lord Vader,” Sidious said, his words transmitted to the pressurized laboratory by the antechamber’s sensitive enunciators.