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 holoscreens 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 troopersZavirkwas 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 all: 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 conversationsmostly boring, some bizarre, a few incomprehensiblealmost 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 a rustle of fabric and quiet, intense activity at another console. Zavirk had summoned Girdun, and they both looked grim. Ben paused to listen.
“You sure?” Girdun asked.