Piris shrugged. "All empires become too big and collapse under their own weight."
"Maybe that's what we're seeing."
Her body was telling her that it was all over now. She felt hot as her biochemical defenses rushed around looking for damage to repair, and found none. The aftermath of battle was always a restless hour or two for her, so she occupied herself wandering around the bridge, patting crew members on the back, and telling them what a fine job they'd done. One
young human male was wiping tears away with the back of his hand, his attention fixed unnaturally on the sensor screen in front of him; he'd lost a friend today, maybe more than one. There was nothing to say. She simply put her hand on his shoulder and stood there in silence for a while until the helm crew began their checks before hyperjumping.
"I'll be in my day cabin," she said, pausing to shake Piris's hand.
"Well done, Captain."
She knew what they'd be saying as soon as the bridge hatches closed behind her. They'd be expressing surprise that old Iceberg Face could go around patting backs and showing sympathy. Combat did that to her: she had a brief period of dropping her guard, and then she was back to normal, a politician who used to be a competent naval officer and still missed fleet action.
The hyperspace vista from her cabin viewport was soothing.
Sometimes she picked a streak of starlight that was stretched into a line, and tried to think of it as a star with orbiting planets full of life, and picture what was happening there. She did it now to clear her mind before deciding what to say to Cal Omas.
She knew she had to give him an ultimatum. And to make it stick, she needed Jacen Solo to stand by her.
GAG HEADQUARTERS, CORUSCANT
Captain Heol Girdun smiled and beckoned Ben into a dark office.
Somehow the two elements combined into Ben's least favorite way to spend an afternoon.
"Behold," he said, and Ben's eyes adjusted to the low light. There were no windows. The only illumination was from banks of holo-screens and monitors. Ben realized there were GAG troopers sitting at consoles, with that glaze of defocused concentration that looked like blank boredom.
"The eyes and ears of the Guard. Welcome to the monitoring center. The ultimate in scrutiny."
"Sir," whispered one of the lieutenants, "keep the noise down, will you?"
Girdun's grin was picked out in blue by the light from a frequency analyzer. "They're all such artists." He steered Ben by his shoulder, taking him to an alcove away from the active consoles. Girdun probably didn't realize how well a Jedi could navigate in darkness, but Ben humored him. "This is where we keep an eye on Senators and other social misfits for their own good."
"Whose calls do you tap?" Ben felt uneasy about it. "I bet it's not even exciting."
"All government staff, our special list of probable and proven scumbags, and politicians," said Girdun. "And given the number of Senators and the volume of hot air they emit, we get automated voice recognition systems to do it, or we'd be here for the next thousand years. If the droid picks up any keywords of interest, it tags the conversation and alerts us. Then we have to sit and actually listen to it."
One of the troopers—Zavirk—was ladling sweetener into a cup of caf.
He sipped it gingerly, looking slightly comical with an audio buffer lead dangling from his ear. "I joined the army to see the galaxy," he whispered, "but all I got was eight-hour watches of listening to weird politicians making appointments to—"
"Ben's fourteen,'" Girdun said.
"Well, if you want him to do monitoring, he's going to hear stuff that'll make his hair curl, sir."
Ben had never considered what tapping comlinks of suspects and people in sensitive posts actually entailed. "I won't faint," he said.
"And if I'm old enough to get shot at, I'm old enough to hear . . .
stuff."
"Can't argue with that logic." Girdun sat him down at a console and gave him an earpiece. "Okay, the screen here shows you the sound files the droid's lined up as worth listening to, as well as holocam footage.
You just work through it and make notes if anything seems worth following up. You're looking for anyone who might be contacting Senators and seems a bit odd, any conversations about Senators or government staff. . .
look, you're a Jedi. You've probably got a sixth sense about this stuff just like you have about hidden explosives."
"So do nek battle dogs," said Zavirk, "but Lieutenant Skywalker smells better, and he can do tricks."
Ben decided he might like it here for a while. It didn't feel like spy HQ at alclass="underline" just a bunch of troopers he knew well, doing a routine wartime surveillance job. Ben realized he'd partitioned his feelings so that he didn't have to think about Dur Gejjen as a person. The man had a wife and child. Tenel Ka had a child, too, though, and Gejjen had been happy to hire someone to assassinate her. Ben had been weighing the morality of his mission and wasn't sure if he was only telling himself what he wanted to hear.
And there was nobody he could talk it over with.
He settled in his seat to begin checking recordings, and tried not to think about Gejjen. The conversations—mostly boring, some bizarre, a few incomprehensible—almost lulled him into meditation. It was an effort not to try hiding in the Force again, something he now practiced whenever he could.
The monitoring center smelled strongly of caf. Ben felt in need of some, too, after a few hours, and he lost himself in a conversation between two government staff about the regular route that a certain Senator took from the Senate to her apartment. But he was jerked out of his concentration by
Ben paused to listen.
"You sure?" Girdun asked.
"Run a voice profile if you don't believe me," Zavirk said. "That's the Corellian PM."
There were ten people in the room, and they'd all stopped to listen. Gejjen's soothingly persuasive voice with its faint accent was telling someone that there was no point doing this through the usual channels, because nobody else was in a negotiating mood.
". . . you and I know that this could be solved by the removal of a few hotheads. . . some of our military need slapping down, and so do some of yours. I'd call an immediate cease-fire if I could be assured of a few things."
"Such as?" said the unmistakable voice of Chief of State Omas. They were tapping the Chief of State's secure comm line. Ben wasn't sure they had authorization to do that.
""We'll agree that Corellia pools its military assets with the GA as long as we have an opt-out clause that says we have the right to withdraw it if our own needs are more urgent. Niathal has to go. Jacen Solo has to go. Once that's out of the way, we're back to normal and you've got what you want. "
"Centerpoint. "
"Well, we're having problems repairing it anyway."
"Centerpoint has to be made inoperative."
A pause: too brief even for most people to notice, but Ben did. "It already is. But if you want a multiplanetary force or observers there, fine."
"What about the Bothans, and the other planets fighting their own wars'?"
"I can bring the Commenorians into line, and the Bothans . . .
well, once we're all back in the GA then Bothawui's got to toe the line.
The little people—if the fighting gets out of hand, we'll commit troops to put a stop to that. "