Jacen didn't catch Niathal's eye. He walked out, followed closely by her,
and said nothing until they were back in her office.
"Well?"
"Not good," she said. She wandered up to the window to watch the traffic streaming in orderly lines in the skylanes around the Senate District. "Not exactly open with us, is he?"
"I never told him we have GAG personnel operating on Corellia, so we're even."
"We can't sustain the current strategy. Perhaps I should talk to Senator G'Sil and get it referred to the Security Council."
"And then we divert our energies into an internal power struggle with Omas while we have a war to fight. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that if you take a shot at someone, you keep firing until they can no longer return fire. Wound them, and you have an angry enemy who knows your position."
"I know where you're heading with this, Jacen."
"You know I'm right."
"That doesn't make it any easier."
"If he does a deal with Gejjen, we're not just back to square one: the Alliance is in a worse position than when it started."
"And we'll be out of the game."
"That's academic." Jacen almost asked Niathal if she had children, and then realized he had almost done the most stupid thing imaginable: reveal his constant fears for the future of his own daughter, a child whose paternity had to stay hidden. He recovered fast, astonished at his weakness. "Because the game will be recurring wars."
"Or Omas might end up with a vibroblade in his throat."
"He's insane to meet Gejjen face-to-face without close protection anyway. He hasn't asked for it from us. He hasn't asked CSF, either—"
"GA Intel?"
"No. We tap their comms, too."
"You're a source of constant revelation, Jacen Solo . . ."
"Are you in?"
"Say it."
Jacen looked around the room, trying to look as if he was simply thinking, but suspicious that someone else might be doing to him what he did to them—eavesdrop electronically. Was Niathal setting him up? No, he was sure he could sense bugs in a room. There were none. "You know what I'm proposing."
"I don't, actually. Not in detail. Say it."
"Regime change." Too late. But he couldn't sense any risk. His logical brain was the paranoid, whispering voice, not his Force-senses.
He realized he'd become less instinct-driven and more rational, and that was the problem. Thinking too much, feeling too little, just like Lumiya says. "We remove him from office long enough to get this war won, and then hand it back to Senator G'Sil when the situation is stable so that new elections can take place."
His words emerged like uninvited strangers, and he didn't even believe himself. Niathal made a little splutter that could have been laughter.
"I get the removal. It's the gap in the middle between remove and elections that fascinates me."
"We run the GA during the interim as a duumvirate. No dictatorship.
Joint control."
Niathal indicated her uniform and then reached out to jab a bony finger into the rank tab on his shoulder. "Military coup. That's what it's called. Let's not prevaricate."
"Okay, I remove him and you take over, alone."
"I don't think so. Duumvirate sounds best to me."
Jacen liked two; two was the Sith way. Knowing Niathal's ambition for the Chief's office, he'd have the same circling, edgy power struggle with her as a Sith Master with an apprentice who was expected and encouraged to plot to overthrow him.
But he would rule as Sith Lord in due course, when the GA and elections were academic, and she would administer the state. That would satisfy her.
"I'll take care of Gejjen, by the way," he said. "He's a massively destabilizing influence, and removing him will throw Corellia into disarray."
"How will you take care of Omas?"
"I'll remove him by house arrest."
"Deposed heads of state tend to become martyrs and hostages."
"We can't be seen to kill our own, and framing Gejjen for it did occur to me, but it's not necessary. We need to show ourselves as civilized people working within the law."
"With a coup."
"Under the law, as the law will stand, it won't be."
"Ahhhh. I forgot." No, she hadn't, he knew that. "Your amendment to the law."
"I'm tabling it for next week, through Aitch-Em-Three."
"And in the meantime?"
"Leave that to me. I'll have someone there when Omas meets Gejjen."
Jacen checked his datapad. "He needs only a day to do his business with Gejjen, no more, so—my people have him under surveillance, ready to move.
Then we have evidence to present to G'Sil."
"And then you arrest him."
"I was thinking I might arrest him at the same time you present the evidence to G'Sil. When we move, we have to move fast. No room to be outmaneuvered."
Niathal let out a long breath. Jacen waited.
"I'll be ready to move on your signal. Make sure you keep me up to speed with all this, won't you?"
It was done. Jacen's takeover was in place. He had the GAG at his back, and Niathal would deliver the fleet as well as the army. With the right presentation of Omas selling out to the Corellians, it would be a very orderly coup.
There was no need for unnecessary bloodshed. That was what this was all about: an end to violence, chaos, and instability.
That was worth everything he was risking.
Jacen took an air taxi back to a plaza a few minutes' walk from the GAG HQ: just another citizen, no sleek black GA transport, no privilege.
Either the driver didn't recognize the uniform, or he hesitated to say, Here, you're the chief of the secret police, aren't you? It was a silent,
contemplative journey.
It was time to make sure nothing went wrong, if manifest destiny could go wrong. He opened his comlink and called Lumiya.
"Shira," he said, aware of the pilot up front. "I need you to do a job for me."
chapter seven
Goran, in Fett's absence, I think you really ought to see this. I don't think it can wait. Sometimes the vongese do you a favor.
—Site foreman Herik Vorad, on examination of excavated rock from land north of Enceri, Mandalore
SAFE HOUSE, CORUSCANT
So you're going to do it before you achieve your full Sith powers,"
said Lumiya. She lit the candles and closed the blinds. Jacen needed to shut out the world and feel what was happening; he was running increasingly on a mundane agenda, the agenda of the lesser beings he worked with. "Why?"
"If I do it afterward, when might afterward be?" Jacen watched the flames shimmering and settled down cross-legged on a floor cushion, but his eyes kept wandering away from the focus of concentration, and Lumiya felt obliged to rap him sharply on the top of his head and point at the candle. "Omas is doing a deal with Gejjen. The deal excludes me, and Niathal, possibly in a rather terminal way."
Working in the world of those who couldn't use the Force, Jacen was falling into conniving and manipulating just like them, and while Lumiya didn't think that was a bad thing—all tools were valid to achieve the outcome—he was letting himself be bound by their rules. He was talking about timing. He had full mastery of the Force, but he seemed to enjoy using the limited tricks of ordinary people.
The admiral was irrelevant in the long term. He had to be aware of that. "Niathal is afraid of you, Jacen. Or at least wary."