"I've heard they do not look favorably upon you. You criticize them too freely, Raith. When your present customers pass into history, have you considered subcontracting?" Tarkin asked with a slightly taunting air.
Sienar gestured with his spidery fingers. "I hope you recognize I am versatile. After all, we've known each other for ten years."
Tarkin gave him an oh, please! glance. "I'm still a young man, Raith. Don't make me feel old." They advanced to the end of the parapet and along a suspended walkway leading to an octagonal, transparisteel-walled room suspended thirty meters above the center of the factory floor. "These, pardon me, look like advanced fighters to me. Very pretty they are, too."
Sienar nodded. "Experimental models for protecting freight haulers on the fringe. The Republic no longer polices some of the most lucrative routes. I presume with the Trade Federation forces integrated, they will once more. At any rate, these ships have already been paid for."
"They are storable?"
"Of course. Multistack in spare holds. All to spec. A true surprise for raiders. Now. Enough about my business worries. About our relationship-"
Tarkin rested his hands on the rail. "I've made new con tacts," he said. "Very useful contacts. I can tell you very little more."
"You know I'm an ambitious man," Sienar said with a look he hoped seemed both hungry and dignified. Tarkin would not be easy to fool. "I have plans, Tarkin, extraordinary plans, which impress anyone with imagination."
"I know plenty of people with imagination" Tarkin said. Perhaps too much imagination at times…" They continued walking. Assembly droids bustled beneath them, and a suspended crane hauled three fuselages in a nested carrier just meters away. "In truth, I've come to pick your brains, tell you a remarkable fairy tale, and enlist you in my cause, old friend. But not out here, not out in the open."
Inside the transparisteel-walled design room, closed to all but Sienar and his special guests, Tarkin sat in a comfortable chair of inflatable plastic, one of Sienar's design. Next to him a large dark gray holographic table hummed faintly.
Sienar dropped black security curtains all around the lighted center. The men were absorbed by an eerie silence.
Tarkin tried to speak, but no sound could be heard. Sienar handed him a small, nut-sized silver vocoder connected by a flexible wire to a beautifully machined plasteel mouthpiece. He showed Tarkin how to insert the button into his ear and allow the mouthpiece to float just in front of his lips.
Now they could hear each other.
"I do small favors for certain people," Tarkin said. "I once balanced these favors between opposing sides. Lately, my efforts have become a bit more lopsided. Balance is no longer necessary."
Sienar stood before his old friend and listened intently. His tall, cleanly muscled body seemed to reject repose.
"Some of these people have an appreciation for fingers-not tentacles, my friend, not palps, but human fingers-reaching into a great many stellar soup bowls, testing the temperature to see if they are ready for the eating."
"Why the concern that they be human?"
"Humans are the future, Raith."
"Some of my best designers are not even remotely human."
"Yes, and we employ nonhumans wherever they are useful, for now. But mark my words, Raith. Humans are the future."
Raith noted the tension in Tarkin's voice. "So marked."
"Now listen closely. I'm going to tell you a tale of intrigue, wonderfully ornate, yet at its heart very simple. It involves a kind of spacecraft rare and little-seen, very expensive, of unknown manufacture, supposedly a toy for the wealthy. It may ultimately lead to a lost planet covered by a peculiar kind of forest, very mysterious. And it may soon involve the Jedi."
Sienar smiled in delight. "I adore stories about the Jedi. I'm quite the fan, you know."
"I myself am intrigued by them," Tarkin said with a smile. "One of my assignments-I will not tell you who does the assigning and how much they pay-is to keep track of all the Jedi on Coruscant. Keep track of them-and discourage any increase in their power."
Sienar lifted an eyebrow. "The Jedi support the senate, Tarkin."
Tarkin dismissed this with a wave. "There is a youngster among the Jedi with a curiosity for droids and all sorts of machinery, a junk collector, though with some talent, I understand. I have placed a small, very expensive, very broken droid in the way of this youngster, and he has taken it into the Jedi Temple and made it mobile again, as I suspected he would. And it has been listening to some curious private conferences."
Sienar listened with growing interest, but also growing puzzlement. The Jedi had not once, in his lifetime of designing and constructing fine ships and machines, ever shown an interest in contracting for spacecraft. They had always seemed content to hitch rides. As far as Sienar was concerned, for all their gallantry and discipline, the Jedi were technological ignoramuses-but for their lightsabers, of course. Yes, those were of interest. .
"Please pay attention, Raith." Tarkin jerked him out of his reverie. "I'm getting to the good part."
Half an hour later, Sienar replaced the security vocoders in their box and lifted the curtains. He was pale, and his hands shook slightly. He tried to hide his anger.
Tarkin's moving in on what could have been mine!
But he quelled his chagrin. The secret was out. The rules had changed.
Absently, and to create a distraction from his reaction to Tarkin's story, he switched on the hologram display, and millions of tiny curves and lines assembled in the air over the dark gray table. They formed a slowly rotating sphere with a wide slice removed from the side. Two smaller spheres appeared above and below the poles, linked by thick necks bristling with spiky details.
With a contentedly prim expression, Tarkin turned to the hologram. His thin, cruel lips pressed tightly together, revealing thousands of years of aristocratic breeding. He bent over to examine the scale bars, and his eyebrow lifted.
Sienar was pleased by his reaction.
"Impossibly huge," Tarkin commented dryly. "A schoolboy fancy?"
"Not at all," Sienar said. "Quite doable, though expensive."
"You've piqued my curiosity," Tarkin said. "What is it?"
"One of my show projects, to impress those few contractors with a taste for the grandiose," Sienar said. "Tarkin, why have these. . people. . chosen me?"
"You haven't forgotten you're human?"
"That couldn't be their main criteria."
"You'd be surprised, Raith. But no, likely at this stage it is not crucial. It's your position and your intelligence. It's your engineering expertise, far greater than my own, though, dear friend, I do exceed you in military skills. And, of course, I do have some influence. Stick with me, and you'll go places. Fascinating places."
Tarkin could not take his eyes off the slowly rotating sphere, with its massive core-powered turbolaser now revealed. "Ah." He smiled. "Always a weapon. Have you shown this to anybody?"