“How so?” Palpatine said, leaning toward him.
“I’m leaving for Coruscant this afternoon. And my first act will be to notify the Jedi Order.”
Palpatine sat up straight. “Vidar, the Jedi listen only to the Senate and the Supreme Chancellor. You can’t simply walk into the Temple—”
“I’ll contact the members of the Council through my son. If I can convince Ronhar to leave the Order, the information will be my gift to the Jedi.”
“And suppose Ronhar doesn’t want any part of this.” Palpatine crossed his arms across his chest. “Have you even been able to speak with him? It’s my understanding that Jedi aren’t permitted contact with their parents.”
Kim scowled and studied the carpet. “Regardless, I was able to make contact.”
“And?”
Kim’s expression was cheerless when he looked up. “He told me that I’m a stranger to him, and that the Kim name has no significance for him.”
Palpatine sighed. “Then that’s the end of it.”
“No. He has agreed to speak with me in person on Coruscant. I’m determined to convince him, Palpatine. Family must come first.”
Palpatine bit back what he was about to say and began again. “Will you promise to keep me informed? Or at least let me know how to reach you?”
Kim went to the desk and sorted through the mess until he found the flimsi he was looking for. “This is my itinerary for the coming week,” he said, passing the flimsi to Palpatine. “Palpatine, if something untoward should happen to me on Coruscant …”
“Stop, Vidar. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.”
Kim ran a hand over his head. “You’re right.” He returned to the couch and sat. “Palpatine, we’re too close in age for me to have thought of you as a son, but I do consider you the younger brother I never had.”
Palpatine nodded without a word.
“If I fail to get through to Ronhar or the Jedi, I can at least alert my colleagues on the Senate Investigatory Committee.”
Palpatine restrained an impulse to stand. “I think you’re wrong about Tapalo and Veruna, Vidar. But I can say without hesitation that you will be risking your life by making such accusations public.”
“I’m perfectly aware of that, Palpatine. But if Ronhar rejects my plea, what else will I have to live for?”
Palpatine placed his hand on Kim’s shoulder.
The small part you will play in the revenge of the Sith.
By the time he left Kim’s office the weather had turned sharply colder. Snow flurries were swirling around the palace towers, and the shallows to the Solleu tributaries were sheened with ice. The agent from Coruscant whom Plagueis had provided — Sate Pestage — was waiting in a small plaza behind the Parnelli Art Museum, warming his hands with his breath.
“The Naboo have never heard of climate control?” he commented as Palpatine approached.
Recalling his early conditioning sessions on glacial Mygeeto, Palpatine almost laughed at the man’s remarks. Instead he said, “Radical change has always come slowly to this world.”
Pestage cast a glance at the stately columns that enclosed the domed museum. “No doubt about that.”
Slightly taller and older than Palpatine, he was sinewy and capable looking. His brown eyes were close-set and glistening, and his pointed nose and angular cheekbones were emphasized by black hair that had receded from his forehead and temple. Plagueis had mentioned that Pestage had been born in Daplona on Ciutric IV — an industrialized ecumenopolis outside of which Darths Bane and Zannah had once lived secret lives. Plagueis hadn’t revealed how he had discovered Pestage — perhaps Damask Holdings had had dealings with Pestage’s influential and extensive family — but he had said that Pestage was someone Palpatine might want to consider adding to his growing entourage of aides and confidants.
From the pocket of his robe, Palpatine prized the flimsi Vidar Kim had given him and handed it over. “His itinerary for Coruscant.”
“Perfect.” Pestage slipped the flimsi into his pocket.
“I want you to wait until his business on Coruscant is concluded.”
“Whatever you say.”
“He’s threatening to alert the Jedi Order and the Senate Investigatory Committee about various deals that were made.”
Pestage snorted. “Then he deserves everything that’s coming to him.” He scanned their surroundings without moving his head. “Have you made a decision about who to use from the data I supplied?”
“The Maladians,” Palpatine said.
A group of highly trained humanoid assassins, they had struck him as the obvious choice.
Pestage nodded. “Can I ask why?”
Palpatine wasn’t accustomed to having to justify his decisions, but answered regardless. “The Mandalorian Death Watch has its own problems, and the Bando Gora its own galactic agenda.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Pestage said. “Besides, the Maladians are known to honor all their contracts.”
“How soon can you have them on Coruscant?”
Pestage looked at him askance. “Perhaps it’s best that that remains on a need-to-know basis.”
The man’s audacity both impressed and bridled Palpatine. “There can be no mistakes, Sate.”
A long-suffering look flared on Pestage’s face, but his tone was compliant when he responded. “If there are, then I’m certain this will be our final conversation. I know fully well what Magister Damask and you are capable of, and I hope to make myself worthy of continuing to serve you. One day, perhaps, you’ll begin to think of me as family, as I’m sure Senator Kim does you.”
Just how much does this man know? Palpatine wondered.
“You’ve no qualms about living a double life, Sate?”
“Some of us are simply born into it,” Pestage said, indifferent to Palpatine’s penetrating gaze.
“You’ll contact me here?”
“As soon as the work is completed. Just make sure to stay close to your comm.”
“You’ll also be contacting Magister Damask?”
Pestage rocked his head. “He gave me the impression that he would be unavailable for the next few weeks. But I suspect we’re safe in assuming that the results won’t escape his notice.”
On a planet at the edge of known space, above the holo-well of a gleaming metallic table, a quarter-sized three-dimensional image of a tall biped rotated between graphs and scrolling lines of anatomical and physiological data. In a spoon-like seat suspended from the white room’s towering ceiling sat Hego Damask, dwarfed by a trio of slender, tailed scientists — two crested males and a female whose complexion was more gray than white.
“This being is representative of the entire species?” the scientist called Ni Timor asked in a gentle, almost sussurant voice.
“This one murdered six members of his species,” Damask said, “but he is otherwise typical of the Yinchorri.”
Tenebrous had introduced him to the planet Kamino early on in his apprenticeship, but he hadn’t visited in more than three years. In stocking Sojourn’s greel forests with rare and in some cases extinct fauna, he had hired the Kaminoans to grow clones from biological samples he procured through brokers of genetic materials. The glassy eyes, long necks, and sleek bodies of the bipedal indigenes spoke to a marine past, though in fact they had been land dwellers for millions of years preceding a great flood that had inundated Kamino. With global catastrophe looming, most technologically advanced sentient species would have abandoned their homeworld and reached for the stars. But the Kaminoans had instead constructed massive stilt cities that were completed even while the oceans of their world were rising and submerging the continents. They had also turned their considerable intellect to the science of cloning as a means of ensuring the survival of their species, and along the way had taken genetic replication farther than any known species in the galaxy. Residing outside the galactic rim, the Kaminoans performed their work in secret and only for the very wealthy. It was unlikely, in any case, that they would have abided by the Republic’s restrictions on cloning. Moral principles regarding natural selection seemed to be something they had left on the floor of what was now Kamino’s planetwide ocean, which perhaps explained why they were no more reluctant about providing game animals for Sojourn than they were about supplying shovel-handed clones to work in the mines of inhospitable Subterrel.