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 wind-rattled 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 trav-elcase, 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 data-pad's screen as the whisper seemed to come from just behind his shoulder.
I use the night, and the night uses me.
He forgot to breathe. This was bad.
It got worse.
The whisper strengthened to a voice. A woman's voice.
Depa's voice.
On the datapad in his hand, and murmuring in the air behind his shoulder-,' have become the darkness in the jungle.
The recording went on. And on.
Her murmur drained him: of emotion, of strength, even of thought; the longer she rambled, the emptier he got. Yet her final words still triggered a dull shock inside his chest.
She was talking to him.
I know you will come for me, Mace. You should never have sent me here. And I should never have come. But what's done can never be undone. I knowyou think I've gone mad. I haven't. What's happened to me is worse.
I've gone sane.
That's why you II come, Mace. That's why you'll have to.
Because nothing is more dangerous than a Jedi who's finally sane.
Her voice trailed off into the jungle-mutter.
No one moved or spoke. Mace sat with interlocked fingers supporting his chin. Yoda leaned on his cane, eyes shut, mouth pinched with inner pain. Palpatine stared solemnly through the holographic jungle, as though he saw something real beyond its boundary.
"That's-uh, that's all there is." The agent extended a hesitant hand to the holoprojector and flicked a control. The jungle vanished like a bad dream.
They all stirred, rousing themselves, instinctively adjusting their clothing. Palpatine's office now looked unreaclass="underline" as though the clean carpeted floor and crisp lines of furniture, the pure filtered air, and the view of Coruscant that filled the large windows were the holographic projection, and they all still sat in the jungle.
As though only the jungle were real.
Mace spoke first.
"She's right." He lifted his head from his hands. "I have to go after her. Alone." Palpatine's eyebrows twitched. "That seems. unwise." "Concur with Chancellor Palpatine, I do," Yoda said slowly. "Great risks there would be.
Too valuable you are. Send others, we should." "There is no one else who can do this." "Surely, Master Windu"-Palpatine's smile was respectfully disbelieving-"a Republic Intelligence covert ops team, or even a team of Jedi-" "No." Mace rose, and straightened his shoulders. "It has to be me." "Please, we all understand your concern for your former student, Master Windu, but surely-" "Reasons he must have, Supreme Chancellor," Yoda said. "Listen to them, we should." Even Palpatine found that one did not argue with Master Yoda.
Mace struggled to put his certainty into words. This difficulty was a function of his particular gift of perception. Some things were so obvious to him that they were hard to describe: like explaining how he knew it was raining while he stood in a thunderstorm.
"If Depa has. gone mad-or worse, fallen to the dark side," he began, "it's vital that the Jedi know why. That we discover what did it to her. Until we know this, no more Jedi should be exposed to it than is absolutely necessary. Also, this all might be entirely false: a deliberate attempt to incriminate her. That ambient noise on the recording." He glanced at the agent. "If her voice was faked-say, synthesized by computer-that noise could be there precisely to blur the evidence of trickery, couldn't it?" The agent nodded. "But why would someone want to frame her?" Mace waved this off. "Regardless, she must be brought in. And soon-before rumor of such massacres reaches the wider galaxy. Even if she had nothing to do with them, having a Jedi's name associated with these crimes is a threat to the public trust in the Jedi. She must answer any charges before they are ever publicly made." "Granted, she must be brought in," Palpatine allowed. "But the question remains: why you?' "Because she might not want to come." Palpatine looked thoughtful.
Yoda's head came up, and his eyes opened, gleaming at the Supreme Chancellor. "If rogue she has gone. to find her, difficult it will be. To apprehend her." His voice dropped, as though the words caused him pain. "Dangerous, that will be." "Depa was my Padawan." Mace moved away from the desk and stared out the window at the shimmering twilight that slowly darkened the capital's cityscape. "The bond of Master and Padawan is. intense. No one knows her better-and I have more experi ence in those jungles than any other living Jedi. I'm the only one who can find her if she doesn't want to be found.
And if she must be-" He swallowed, and stared at the moondisk of light scattered from one of the orbital mirrors.
"If she must be. stopped," he said at length, "I may be the only one who can do that, too." Palpatine's eyebrows twitched polite incomprehension.
Mace took a deep breath, finding himself once more looking at his hands, through his hands, seeing only an image in his mind, sharp as a dream: lightsaber against lightsaber in the Temple's training halls, the green flash of Depa's blade seeming to come from everywhere at once.