Shades of Gray
Chapter 5
Hojo Lenn's private penthouse was situated atop one of Corusacnt's most sought-after residential towers. When the noisy and intoxicated crowd finally made their way back to this luxurious domicile at the third hour past midnight, a gleaming assemblage of liveried droids took the staggering and mumbling members of the household well in hand, ushering some of them into private rooms to one side, others into the spacious 'fresher array, still others onto the sumptuous couches and cushioned furnishings occupying the vast central room, one topped by a glittering dome transparent to the traffic-fretted heavens.
Shree Uun by this time was barely able to stand on her own; her weight was an awkward impediment to Obi Wan's movements as he tried to maneuver his way through the doorframe in the wake of Lenn's identical twin Twi'Lek concubines. Only the crime lord himself seemed unaffected by the evening's excesses. He waved a magnanimous hand at his apartment's interior. "Make yourselves at home," he declared in a stentorian tone. "You –Unn. I'm retiring to my private chambers."
The Clawdite was sufficiently coherent to acknowledge the statement with a brusque nod. "Ben and I have security covered," she slurred.
"I pay you too much," her corpulent employer remarked, before lumbering off toward a pair of burnished double doors at the suite's far end.
"Ben," the silver-skinned woman – or the person who appeared under such a guise at present – breathed huskily down his neck. "You are the only man ever to drink me under the table. I think you cheated."
He looked about for an unoccupied piece of furniture on which to deposit his over-attentive companion, but not a scrap of cushion anywhere appeared to be available. "Perhaps I did," he admitted, doggedly steering her unsteady steps toward a smaller alcove set to one side. "Do you expect trouble tonight?" It was clear that only one of them was in any condition to serve as bodyguard to Lenn.
"I hope so," the shapeshifter smiled, one hand escaping his grip and wandering uninvited over whatever parts of him she could reach. It wasn't his fault if he dropped her rather unceremoniously upon the plush bed in the small room's center.
"I'll keep watch," he decided. "You need to sleep."
But Shree Uun was made of hardier stuff than one might imagine. Her drunken grin widened as she lashed out with her feet, deftly catching him behind the knee and bringing him down on top of her. He twisted out of her feeble attempt to pin him in a headlock and seized her wrists. "That's enough," he warned.
She chuckled throatily. "You're such a bossy priss, ma booki," she smiled. "They shouldn't let bastards like you be so good-looking."
Oh, in the name of… "You want to go to sleep right now," he commanded, slamming against her half-stupefied mind with the Force. She immediately went limp, eyes rolling back into her head. The compulsion so shattered her concentration that for a moment her exotic humanoid face melted back into murky reptilian features, the true mien of the Clawdite beneath the affected illusion.
He let the door slide shut softly behind him as he returned to the main lounge area. Here, Lenn's friends and followers sprawled inelegantly upon every piece of furniture and the floor. Snores and grunts textured the nighttime silence; the serving droids had whirred away into their alcoves to await the next crisis. The doors to Lenn's private boudoir remained firmly sealed.
He found a patch of unoccupied carpet directly beneath the ornamental skylight, a bare stretch of synth-silk pile where the city's glow filtered through the filigreed panes overhead and splashed down in a muted geometry of light. Obi Wan knelt in meditation posture, closed his eyes. Here, among two or three dozen besotted villains, he kept a traditional Jedi vigil. If there was to be danger tonight, he would sense it before it arrived.
The hours crept on toward morning, and the assorted occupants of Lenn's posh apartment remained situated in motionless vignette: a sea of limp and listless bodies, limbs akimbo, mouths gaping open in drunken sleep – and the lone island kneeling in their midst, folded quietly in contemplation of the Force. To the assassin probe hovering tentatively above the domed skylight, the life forms inside gave every indication of being vulnerable and off-guard. Its operating parameters noted the absence of a conscious, active sentry and initiated an attack sequence.
The moment the droid's fusion cutter had carved a small circular opening in the permaglass overhead, Obi Wan snapped instantly form deep contemplation to acute battle awareness. The Force twisted with precise warning: danger above. He felt no intention, no thought at all behind the threat, and concluded immediately that the intruder was a droid. His right hand, resting loosely against his thigh, moved imperceptibly to one side, seeking his saber hilt, before he registered that the weapon did not occupy its customary place and should not be used here save in the worst extremity.
The glass overhead softly pinged as the droid removed the panel and descended through the skylight, sensor array sweeping indifferently over the sleeping denizens of the room, its thin red beam settling at last upon the doors to Lenn's bedroom. It hovered lower, passed along about two meters in the air, its repulsors thrumming like the purr of a hunting colwar, and headed toward the doors. Its passage did not wake a single one of Lenn's guests.
Lip curling slightly in distaste, Obi Wan closed his fingers about the unwieldy blaster Master Sinube had convinced him to carry. He loosened it from its holster, drawing it out with only the faintest whisper of sound –
-The assassin unit whirled in place and sent a bolt of plasma directly at him. He rolled backward even as it fired, sucking in a hissing breath. The carpet was blackened where the shot hit. He dove sideways to avoid the next blast, which zipped past his ear and shattered a crystalline lamp on a small table. The guests stirred fretfully. He jumped clear over the next shot, landing in a crouch and leveling the blaster. The probe zoomed upward, seeking a higher vantage point. He closed his eyes, felt rather than saw its erratic motion, pulled the trigger. One, two, three bolts penetrated the droid's carapce and sent it crashing to the floor. The fourth shot hit the decorative moulding in the ceiling and sent a cascade of plaster down on the serving droids tottering into the chaotic room, their arms jerking spasmodically in their distress.
The doors at the far end of the suite flew open, to reveal a flustered and irate Lenn clad in …absolutely nothing. The Twi'Leks dithered and wailed in the background, pulled at his arms as though to draw him back into the safety of the inner chamber.
"What's going on?" the enormous man roared.
"Assassin probe," his new security officer replied, curtly.
Lenn's eyes rested upon the mangled remnants of the droid smoking on the ruined carpet, and then flicked to the blaster in Ben's hand. "Good work," he grunted, then turned and retired. A few of the more sober guests muttered or bemoaned the mess, and the serving droids were already fussily setting to rights what damage they could.
And that was all. Apparently a bit of midnight murder was not much of a conversation piece in this milieu. With a shrug, Obi Wan fetched the droid's remains off the floor before the enthusiastic housekeepers could whisk it away to the 'cycler. With any luck, he might be able to glean some clue about its origin. Of course, after taking three high-power blaster bolts directly in the central processor, the chances of that were very slim indeed; the probe was little more than slag and scrap now.
With a small grimace, he re-holstered the weapon responsible for the ugly carnage. "So uncivilized," he muttered.
Anakin crept toward the rim of the mining crater under cover of darkness. The cold wind blew grit into his eyes and magnified the generators' hum into a ululating howl, a low and wavering note of distress to match the disturbance in the Force. Automated droid patrols hummed along the edge of the massive pit; whenever one approached too close, he sent it flying in the opposite direction with a snap of one hand.
And then he reached the edge. Flat on his belly, he peered down into an inverted cone, a rough-hewn bowl carved deep into the crust of the planet. Mineral strata textured the sloping sides in stark stripes of red and brown and white, dimming into blackness near the bottom. He sensed innumerable beings laboring upon the narrow scaffolding erected along the pit's walls, and yet more inside the countless tiny caves which punctuated the steep inclines.
There was little visible light. He knew from studying in the Temple, and from accounts whispered in the spacers' saloons on Tatooine when he was a boy, that exposure to light would ruin the spice, would enrage the territorial arachnids which produced the priceless substance as an excretion of their bodies, spinning it into shard-like webs, organic crystals deep in the murk below. He also knew that the spiders were deadly, the razor-sharp webs dangerous, the risk of overexposure to the spice itself immense, and the working conditions in such places worse than slavery. Kessel was an infamous penitentiary site, a place where hardened criminals from the Outer Rims were sent to die by the harsh justice systems that reigned so far out from the glalaxy's more fastidious Core. He had not been aware until now that such things existed within the bounds of the Republic he was sworn to serve.
He found a lift and threw the droid operator over the ledge, clattering into the inky abyss below. The Force overrode the control system, and he descended, his disgust deeping into wrath as the rattling cage descended. He had been an idiot not to guess at it. Especially now, with the war. Ryloth was the major supplier of ryll spice, and with the Twi'Lek homeworld constantly under siege, there must have been a dramatic decrease in production. Kessel was now in Separatist hands; so where else did the greedy rich of Coruscant turn to supply their addictions?
He gazed at the answer all around him. Workers crept like battered insects along the narrow walkways, emerging and disappearing into the cave openings in a steady stream, their shoulders slumped, their bodies swathed in drab mining suits. They wore helmets with inset dark-lights, carried only the most primitive of tools. There was no other way to mine spice without ruining it. The generators thrummed away, supplying power to a quiet traction system which carried the collected strands of spice-laden web back to the surface and the refineries. He saw humans, Twi-Leks, reptilians, Zabrak, Ithrorians, and countless others. The oppressed were well-represented here. How was such cheap and expendable labor kept in submission?
There were guards, overseers, droid security patrols as well. The enforcement was well-organized. Overhead and all around, the supply line carried small baskets of harvested web strands upward to the surface. There must be thousands of miners here in this one pit. He stopped the lift and peered across the dark chasm at a particular hole on the opposite side. As he watched, two tall miners emerged, carrying the body of a third between them. The Force roiled with death- and before his astonished eyes, the two shuffling miners edged their way to the scaffolding rail and dropped the body over its edge, into oblivion. Anakin did not even hear a thump.
So this was how Hojo Lenn and the army of slythmongers dependent on him for supplies made their living. This was the treasure trove the Galactic Senate was willing to protect with military might in exchange for a share of profits – and maybe even product. This was the depth to which the Republic had sunk. He had seen enough.
Shaking with nameless rage, he hit the control and began the slow ascent to the surface.
The droid was, as he suspected, a complete ruin. Its parts dissected and laid out neatly before him on the low table in the room's corner, he could pronounce it dead beyond a shadow of doubt, its processors fried, its transponder melted into a useless glob. Anakin's genius might have been able to salvage some fragment of information from the probe's blasted-out corpse; but Obi Wan was left staring disconsolately at the mess. The only thing he could say with certainty was that it was not of any standard Separatist design; though even that proved nothing. Dooku or his associates might have contracted with a local or independent agent, one who opted for less mainstream technology. He sighed.
A silver hand settled itself against the small of his back. "Well, good morning," Shree Uun murmured, gazing at the mangled droid remains. "Lenn says you saved his life last night. Guess I'll keep you 'round after all…even though that was a dirty trick you played on me."
He swept the droid bits into a waste canister. "No trick. You fell asleep."
"I don't fall asleep just when things are getting interesting," Uun corrected him. Her hand slid lower down his spine, and then abruptly seized a handful of hard muscle below, long fingers digging in with painful enthusiasm.
He spun, placing his back to the table. "Then it must not have been very interesting."
The Clawdite gripped the edge of the table, pressing herself all together too close for comfort. " Maybe you're the one with the problem, hm?" She rolled her exotic, almond shaped eyes. "Let me guess, ma chooba… you prefer blondes." Her features seemed to melt, shimmer into a haze; the Force churned, shuddered, and stilled; and Shree Uun had transformed from the stately silver-skinned woman of a moment ago into a creature with fine-drawn delicate features and a mane of silver-gold hair. She lowered almost transparent lashes at him demurely. "Better?"
"No," he decided. "And who is that?"
Uun lifted one pale shoulder. "Somebody I killed."
"Then it's worse," he snapped. "I have work to do."
She seized his arm roughly as he strode away. "Hey! I got you this job, remember? You're working for me."
"Not any more," he informed her blithely. "Your employer has just contracted with me directly, to be his personal bodyguard. I'm accompanying him to his meeting with the Senators this afternoon."
"What?" Shree Uun spun about, eyes frantic. "That's not true!"
Hojo Lenn chose this moment to emerge from his room, attired in a much more dignified and expensive manner than his last appearance. "Ben!" he called jovially. "We will depart in ten minutes. Uun, you can stay here and make sure there are no intruders in my absence."
The Clawdite fumed and sputtered. "He takes care of one droid and you promote him? I've saved your skin a dozen times, Lenn!"
The drug lord pointed a ring-bedecked finger at her. "You were asleep on the job last night," he pointed out. "I would fire you if you weren't such a fine…decoration." He paused, assessing her newly-donned persona. "You are looking lovely this morning, my dear. I could perhaps find you some other work around here."
Uun's scowling reply was muttered at Lenn's retreating back.
"Come along, my boy," the latter called out. "We mustn't be late for our meeting with the esteemed members of the galactic legislature."
Ben bowed deeply to the irate Clawdite before following Hojo Lenn out the door.
"I'm not done with you, either," she snarled at him as he stepped over the threshold.