“Well, er, yes—Master Yoda is correct. This, uh, recording—” He twitched his head around at the ghostly corpses that filled the office. “—was made with the prospectors’ own equipment; it’s adapted to Haruun Kal work, where more sophisticated electronics—”
“I don’t need a lesson on Haruun Kal.” Mace’s voice went sharp. “I need your evidence.”
“Yes, yes of course, Master Windu …” The agent fished in his travelcase for a second or two, then came up with an old-fashioned data wafer of crystal. He handed it over. “It’s, uh, audio only, but—we’ve done voiceprint analysis. It’s not exact—and there’s some ambient noise, other voices, jungle sounds, that kind of thing—but we put match probability in the ninety percent range.”
Mace weighed the crystal wafer in his hand. He stared down at it. There. Right there: the flick of a fingernail could crack it in two. I should do it, he thought. Crush this thing. Snap it in half right now. Destroy it unheard.
Because he knew. He could feel it. In the Force, stress lines spidered out from the wafer like frost scaling supercooled transparisteel. He could not read the pattern, but he could feel its power.
This would be ugly.
“Where did you find it?”
“It was—uh, at the scene. Of the massacre. It was … well, at the scene.”
“Where did you find it?”
The agent flinched.
Again, Mace took a breath. Then another. With the third, the fist in his chest relaxed. “I am sorry.”
Sometimes he forgot how intimidating some men found his height and voice. Not to mention his reputation. He did not wish to be feared.
At least, not by those loyal to the Republic.
“Please,” he said. “It might be significant.”
The agent mumbled something.
“I’m sorry?”
“I said, it was in her mouth.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the holographic corpse at Mace’s feet. “Someone had … fixed her jaw shut, so scavengers wouldn’t get at it when they … well, y’know, scavengers prefer the, the, er, the tongue …”
Nausea bloomed below Mace’s ribs. His fingertips tingled. He stared down at the woman’s image. Those marks on her face—he had thought they were just marks. Or some kind of fungus, or a colony of mold. Now his eyes made sense of them, and he wished they hadn’t: dull gold-colored lumps under her chin.
Brassvine thorns.
Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.
He had to turn away. He realized that he had to sit down, too.
The agent continued, “Our station boss got a tip and sent me to check it out. I hired a steamcrawler from some busted-out jups, rented a handful of townies who can handle heavy weapons, and crawled up there. What we found … well, you can see it. That data wafer—when I found it …”
Mace stared at the man as though he’d never seen him before. And he hadn’t: only now, finally, was he truly seeing him. An undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little man who must have resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine. To have walked into a scene that Mace could barely stomach even in a bloodless, translucent laser image; to have had to smell them—touch them—to pry open a dead woman’s mouth …
And then to bring the recordings here, so that he could live it all again—
Mace could have done it. He thought so. Probably. He’d been some places, and seen some things.
Not like this.
The agent said, “Our sources are pretty sure the tip came from the ULF itself.”
Palpatine glanced a question. Mace spoke without taking his eyes off the agent. “The Upland Liberation Front, sir. That’s Depa’s partisan group; ‘uplanders’ is a rough translation of Korunnai—the name the mountain tribes give themselves.”
“Korunnai?” Palpatine frowned absently. “Aren’t those your people, Master Windu?”
“My … kin.” He made himself unclench his jaw. “Yes, Chancellor. You have a good memory.”
“A politician’s trick.” Palpatine gave a gently self-deprecating smile and waved a dismissive hand. “Please go on.”
The agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. “There have been a lot of … disturbing reports. Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can’t be verified. The jungle … swallows everything. So when we got this tip—”
“You found this because somebody wanted you to find it,” Mace finished for him. “And now you think—”
Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. “You think those people might have been killed just to deliver this message.”
“What a hideous idea!” Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He appealed to the agent. “This can’t be true, can it?”
The agent only hung his head.
Yoda’s ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. “Some messages … most important, is how they are framed. Secondary, their content is.”
Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. “These ULF partisans—we ally ourselves with them? The Jedi ally with them? What sort of monsters are they?”
“I don’t know.” Mace handed the wafer back to the agent. “Let’s find out.”
He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a control.
The holoprojector’s phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of windrattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for a word here or phrase there, sometimes twisting below the distorting ripples of the aural surface. Mace caught the words Jedi, and night—or knife—and something about look between the stars …
He frowned at the agent. “You can’t clean this up?”
“This is cleaned up.” The agent produced a datapad from his travelcase, keyed it alight, and passed it to Mace. “We made a transcript. It’s provisional. Best we can do.”
The transcript was fragmentary, but enough to draw chills up Mace’s arms: Jedi Temple … taught (or possibly taut) … dark … an enemy. But … Jedi … under cover of night.
One whisper was entirely clear. He read the words on the datapad’s screen as the whisper seemed to come from just
