Yoda (23 page)

“Uh, nothing?” Whie guessed. “We're not exactly in the cabana quarters of Jovan Station. It's not like a bunch of naval ratings in spacesuits are going to roll out of a nearby bar and pick a fight with me.”

“Though noble and accomplished, you are still naïve in the ways of the world,” Fidelis said starchily. “A salvage yard like this is exactly where you might expect to find rogue droids. Runaways, looking to salvage parts. Masterless creatures that are not above taking a human hostage, if their programming has gone sufficiently awry.”

“This warning's a little bit late,” Scout said hotly. “Why didn't you think of that before you hired Solis?”

“The fact that I made an error in judgment is no reason to—”

“Fidelis,
get lost,
” Whie grated.

The droid drew himself huffily upright and retreated to the end of the aisle between the two freighters, pointedly maintaining eye contact.

“Do you suppose he can read lips?” Scout murmured.

“Yes,” Fidelis called.

“Shut up, droid,” Whie growled. Obviously the chance for a private chat had gone.

Scout blinked. “I don't think I've ever heard you be rude before.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't be.” She laughed. “I think it's cute.”

“…Cute?”

Even Scout had to admit Yoda got a fantastic bargain on the B-7. “How'd you get it so cheap?” she asked, gaping at the smirking old Jedi as he stuffed a datapad into his belt. “You must have used your Jedi mind powers. I thought you said that was unfair?”

“Not interested in
fair,
am I. Interested in results,” he wheezed. “Besides, Jedi powers used I not. Paid fair price I did.”

Scout and Whie looked doubtfully at the shabby hulk. “What's wrong with her?” Scout said. “I mean, besides the obvious?”

Yoda rapped the outside of the ship with his stick, raising a little cloud of dust. And paint. And meta-ceramic. “Good hull. Good lines,” he said.

“One laser cannon,” Whie said. “No concussion missile tubes. No blaster cannon.”

“She's got a Hanx-Wargel SuperFlow II aboard and a Siep-Irol passive sensor antenna,” the junkyard owner said vehemently. “Backup generators, Carbanti active sensor stack, and almost new aft deflector shields, local-made but nothing wrong with them.”

“What about bow shields?”

“If anything comes at you with a gun, you should run,” the dealer said.

“If that doesn't work?”

“Surrender.”

“Very encouraging,” Scout said.

“I take it very hard, you talking down my beautiful little”—the dealer glanced quickly at the side of the ship where the name had been painted—“
Nighthawk.
I've a good mind to raise my price, you being so uppity.”

“If she's got all these features,” Scout persisted, “why were you selling her so cheaply? What
doesn't
she do?”

The dealer hemmed and hawed. Scout turned to Yoda, who smiled beatifically. “Fly,” he said.

“‘A bargain it is!' he says. ‘Fix it up in no time, we will!' Pass me the sonic wrench,” Scout growled. Pale honey-colored fluid dripped from the engine-starter array she was trying to install, each drop drifting and spreading out in Jovan Station's comparatively light gravity.

“I think I've almost got these couplers installed,” Whie said.

“Red ends up?”

“Yeah.”

They worked side by side, installing the engine-starter unit Yoda had salvaged from a Corellian light freighter at the back of the yard.

“What's Master Yoda doing while we're working?” Scout grunted.

“Know that, I do not! He said something about supplies. Did you hear about the water?” Scout looked over. “Both for our use and coolant, ten five-hundred-kilo casks. We'll be loading it on ourselves,” Whie said.

“Five hundred!”

“Master Yoda felt it would be wasting money to rent a lifter pallet for just one job,” Whie said.

They exchanged looks.

Another fat blob of lubricant dripped free. This one had a dead bug in it, a metal borer with feathery antennae and mouthparts stained rust red. “Ew,” Scout said.

“Pass me the solder-blaster, would you?” Whie was working about five meters away. Scout tossed him the tool in a gentle underhand. In the low g, it floated into his hand. She pitched him a stick of solder to go with it.

“Thanks.”

Whie peered up. He had a mainplate off, exposing wires and tubes coiled like multicolored intestines. No wonder people talked about the “bowels” of a ship, he thought. He was working on the vaccum-pump housing; the casement was cracked, so the vacuum seal kept failing. Funny to think—a little hairline fracture causing all this trouble, because it let the
nothing
out.

A ship's vacuum like Jedi honor—nothing one could notice, until it was gone.

“Scout? Do you ever wonder if you're a bad person?”

“Wonder? I know,” she said, laughing.

“Be serious. If you discovered you weren't a good person, that would bother you, wouldn't it?”

“I've never been a
good
person.” Scout used the sonic wrench to pry open a nut that had rusted in place. “I just shoot for
good enough.
Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

Scout waited, not looking at Whie. According to the calendar, she was a year older than him, but he was so accomplished, so poised, that she usually forgot about the age difference. Today he sounded young, and she felt older than him by far. She remembered something Yoda once said
—Age more than a count of heartbeats is. Age is how many mistakes you have made.
Counting by screwups, she was an easy ten years older than Whie.

“I used to think I was a good person,” Whie said quietly. “But then some things happened. I had this dream,” he said. “And in this dream, I was thinking bad thoughts.”

“Whoa there, boy. You're can't get down on yourself because of what you thought when you were
asleep.
”

“You don't understand. This wasn't a dream, this wasn't my unconscious speaking: this
really happened.
Is going to happen,” he corrected himself. The pain in his voice was obvious now, and Scout realized this was deadly serious to him.

Whie pressed solder into the cracked vacuum-chamber casing and ran the blaster-iron over it. Strange these sticks of metal, which seemed so hard and straight, could be so easily made soft. Inconstant. “And then there was the other dream. The one about dying. I've never dreamed about that before.”

Scout waited.

“The whole thing was confused. I'm not sure where I was, or what I was doing. I was in my own head; there was a lightsaber flashing. I tried to defend myself, but the other was too strong for me. Too fast. Then the light like a bar across my eyes. Like a sun.” The soldering iron sparked and glowed in the dim recesses of the battered freighter. “Then nothing.”

“Just because it was a lightsaber, that doesn't mean it was a Jedi.”

“Oh, but I knew. The dream was so short, I didn't even see who it was, but when I fell into the moment, I wasn't even frightened yet, I was just so
surprised.
I was thinking,
This is how I'm going to die?
Isn't that weird. Even having had this dream, my death is still going to come as a surprise, when it happens. I guess it always does,” he added.

Scout gave the reluctant nut another shot of loosening solvent. “Maybe you got it wrong. Maybe you won't die. You didn't die in the dream, right? Not that you know for sure. Maybe it was a test, or an exercise. If you thought it was a Jedi, that's the most likely answer—a drill, or a tournament like the one we had just before we left,” Scout said. “I bet that's it.”

“Maybe,” Whie said. She knew he didn't believe it. “Do you want the solder-blaster back?”

“Nah, I'm okay.” Scout finally managed to pry off the rusted nut. “The dream you had with me in it. Did I die?”

“Not in the part I saw.”

This was not as comforting an answer as Scout had been hoping for.

“Scout, I think I'm going to go over to the dark side,” Whie said in a rush. “That's how it makes sense. That's why I'm thinking what I'm thinking in the first dream. That's why a Jedi cuts me down.”

“That's ridiculous,” Scout said, genuinely shocked. “You're the last person in the world to go over to the dark side. Everyone knows that. You're better than any of us. You always have been. I used to
hate
how good you were. There's no way,” she said positively.

“I always used to think of myself as a good person,” Whie said. “I was proud of it. But now, looking back, I was just
pretending
to be good. You know? Acting. It wasn't real at all. I was just…pretending to be a Jedi.”

For the first time Scout put down her tools and sidled over under the belly of the ship. She put her hand on his arm. “Whie, listen to me. Sometimes pretending is all there is.”

An hour later, Fidelis was setting ship's stores into the pantries of the freighter's tiny galley. Yoda had told him to buy enough food for a feast, and he had done his best. Programmed to please, he was distressed at the idea of cooking without knowing his guests' preferences—but, he philosophically reminded himself, all life was improvisation, and anyway the only cuisine Whie had ever known was what they served in the Jedi Temple cafeteria. If Fidelis couldn't exceed that standard, he deserved to be left behind with the rest of the scrap on Jovan Station. Besides, although his exposure to Whie per se had been slight, he had cooked for twelve generations of clan Malreaux, and of course he had the boy's complete genetic scan available. Gustatory development was still more art than science, but armed with this much information, it would be strange if he couldn't come reasonably near the mark.

As he set out his ingredients, he could hear Yoda in the forward cockpit, grunting and snuffing as he peered over the ship's manifest and owner's manual. Creaks, gasps, and bangs came from aft, where Master Whie and the girl were stowing the great casks of water.

Fidelis poked his head into the cockpit. “Pardon me, Master Yoda, but I would like to delay cooking for the time being and help stow the water. I shall be back in a matter of moments.”

“No,” the old Jedi grunted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Go not. Padawans' job it is, to load the ship.”

“Being considerably stronger, however, it would surely be more efficient for me to do the heavy lifting, particularly as it would eliminate the risk of muscle strain or injury on the young people.”

“Use the Force they must. Good practice will it be.”

“But neither of them has slept in more than a day.”

Without bothering to look up from the ship's manual, where he was studying the B-7's rather odd protocols for coming out of hyperspace, Yoda reached back and whacked Fidelis on the leg with his stick. The droid made a pleasant ringing sound, like a brass bell. “Missing the point, are you, toaster-thing. Padawans need to work. If not working, think they will.”

“Oh,” Fidelis said.

Yoda turned, looking over his humped shoulder so their eyes met, sentient and machine. “Old are we, and strong; trees that have survived many frosts. But for these two, their Masters' deaths a first winter are. Work, let them,” he said gently. “And eat. And cry. And maybe, just maybe, sleep after all.”

The droid regarded him. “You are wise, Master Yoda.”

“So they tell me,” Yoda grunted. “But since here you are, tell me more of Count Dooku's quarters.”

“They are hardly that,” the droid said stiffly. “I trust the Count is staying as a guest of House Malreaux. The exact nature of the situation is unclear, as I have been on Coruscant for many years, and my communication with Lady Malreaux has been somewhat erratic.”

Yoda studied the droid. “Jai Maruk mentioned to me a lady he saw in the house. A Vjun fox followed her.”

“That would be Lady Malreaux. The fox is her familiar.”

“Familiar?”

Fidelis shrugged. “So the servants call it. I do not care to speak to superstition, although certainly the Force is reputed to be very strong on Vjun, and House Malreaux, of course, has produced the finest adepts of its arts.”

“Strong it is…in the dark side,” Yoda murmured.

Fidelis shrugged. “Count Malreaux's attempt to apply genetic manipulations to the midi-chlorian bodies was, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps overly ambitious. And yet, one must admire his scope and vision!”

“Must one?” Yoda said dryly. “An old saying is there, about playing with fire, gentleman's personal gentlething. But of your Lady Malreaux—Dooku's mad housekeeper is she now.”

Even Yoda had rarely seen a droid look shocked: but shock was exactly the expression on the droid's metal face now. Shock, mortification, and something else that in a sentient one might almost call anger. “That cannot be.”

“Washes the floor, Jai said she did. Also cleans refreshers,” Yoda said. “Is it the wrong word,
housekeeper
?
Servant
would be better?
Scullery maid
?” he asked innocently.
“Slave?”

“
Lady
is the appropriate term,” Fidelis said sharply. “Or
Mistress.
”

“Like to meet with Dooku, would I,” Master Yoda continued blithely. “Convince him to come back to Coruscant I must. Not easy, though. Guards will be there. Followers, perhaps. Soldiers. Know you any private ways into Château Malreaux?”

“I do indeed,” Fidelis said.

Three hours later, the
Nighthawk
was lumbering out of Jovan Station, beginning the long, slow run she needed to warm up for the jump to hyperspace. Her motley crew was gathered in what the B-7 owner's manual optimistically called “the crew lounge,” a small bubble in the ship's throat between the cockpit and the galley, just wide enough to fit a small projector table suitable for playing hologames or screening holovids—as long as they had been encoded in one of two Hydian Way formats, neither one of which was the Coruscanti standard for Republic pictures.