Shades of Gray
Chapter 7
He woke with a hammering headache – one fierce enough to have been spat up from the deepest Sith-hell alongside whatever vile substance had produced it. Squinting balefully at the filigree skylight of Hojo Lenn's penthouse, Obi Wan unsuccessfully tried to remember what had happened between the exclusive jargul den …and here. There was a significant gap, and he suspected that he had spent the majority of it unconscious. The apartment was quiet…and the sky overhead was a deep purple, dotted with moving points of light. It was late night.
"Oh, are we feeling better?" Shree Uun's voice mocked him from a corner of the room.
He levered himself upright, glared at the Clawdite woman draped across one of the largest couches in the luxurious room. "Where is Lenn?" he asked, his voice dry and grating in his parched throat.
She nodded her now platinum head in the direction of Lenn's private room. "He sent everyone away for the night. It's just you and me, chooba-buki." She uncurled and came sashaying across the carpet toward him. He drew in deep steadying breaths, but the pounding headache did not lessen. The Force stirred about him slowly, thick and unresponsive. Stars…that spice was dangerous stuff.
Uun seated herself beside him and seized his face between her hands, none too gently, jerking his head to the side just quickly enough to send a sharp thrill of pain stabbing down his neck. "What did he give you?" she demanded, as though interrogating a prisoner. "Glitterstim? Rhyll? What?"
He pulled free, gritting his teeth. "Ixetal cilena."
Uun hissed in a breath and then grabbed him again, a bit more gently. "That kriffing barve," she muttered. "My poor buki-nuba." She peered into his eyes and then pushed him away again. "You're dead," she declared. "Weeks or months. Nobody kicks that spice habit. He's got you screwed good and hard." She paused, wistfully. "Should have let me-"
"What do you mean?" he asked in his turn, pressing the palms of his hands against his aching temples.
"You'll need it again. And again. And Lenn's the only one who'll supply you, believe me. You're his slave until you drop in your tracks." She stood bitterly and stalked across the sumptuous apartment, then pivoted angrily and returned to stand in front of him. "I've seen it before. That's his way."
"I see," he muttered. That was problematic. He was going to have to find a way out of this new situation he had landed himself in. But there was something about Uun's emotional state that triggered a further question. "You knew somebody else who suffered the same fate, didn't you?"
"We're not that up close and personal, remember?" she flung back at him bitterly. Then she relented and sat down again, stroking a soft hand down his face and along one arm. "Well, yes. I knew …. someone."
"Who?" He knew intuitively that this was the key to unlocking the secret of Shree Uun, and her position as Lenn's security officer.
"Let's not talk about it," she decided abruptly.
He watched her retreat to a cabinet against the opposite wall, and rummage inside its recessed shelves. So Lenn used spice as a means of subjection. Possibly even the Senators who had drafted the original contract with him were such victims….and if so, then the very nature of this dubious business arrangement with the Republic was called into serious question. He tried to release some of the pain into the Force. Think. Breathe. Was there a way to stop Lenn signing that agreement? To scare him off? The grim truth was that the Senate was so slow-moving and internally corrupt that the contract would likely carry through no matter what was revealed about Lenn himself, or his spice dealings. Having agreed to a moral compromise, the lawmakers would doubtless be willing to widen the terms of that compromise a little further. In such times as these, war and the money to fund it trumped every other consideration. He felt sick.
"Here." Uun was shaking a glass of something liquid under his nose. "It'll help."
He waved it away. More toxins were the last thing he needed.
The Clawdite placed one hand on her ample hips. "It's Corellian brandy, mixed with about a quarter of a deathstick. You need it, don't you get that? This is a low-dose, synthetic version of what he gave you – not as good, not as strong. Just enough to stave off withdrawal. Your other option is to suffer until Lenn gives you another hit."
He groaned. He had a job to do here, now: he was still officially commissioned to protect Lenn from assassination attempts, his own growing misgivings notwithstanding. "Very well – give me the blasted thing." He downed the liquid in one go. It tasted quite vile.
But it did seem to alleviate the inexplicable pain, the subliminal itch of longing for something else, something more potent… He closed his eyes, reached into the Force again. Slothfully, it filtered back into his grasp, not complete, not as fleet and bright as it should be – but there. He wrapped its soothing if frayed threads about himself, shamelessly craving their comfort. Like a youngling clutching some blanket or plaything, he sunk into a light trance, welcoming the relief, even if it was tinted with fever, with the first stirrings of new delirium.
"That's right," Uun soothed. "You go back to sleep. I'll take the next watch."
He nodded dimly, too absorbed in burning away what ill effects he could, in garnering new strength form the Force, to care much about her fickle attentions. Eventually, she stopped pawing and stroking at him and wandered off to mind her own business. He also kept watch, invisibly, from a fragile sanctuary deep within the Force.
Another day and night… he could manage, somehow. He still had a job to do.
The endless permutations of hyperspace seemed to taunt him. Foolish, foolish, foolish, the radiant smears seemed to chant as they slid past the cockpit's transparent canopy. Anakin glowered back, alone in the tiny ship, unable to pace or stretch or even shift position. Such fighters were not the most comfortable means of traversing long distances; most were not even fitted with supra-light drives. But the Republic Navy had learned early in the war that fighters without hyperdrive capacity were easily stranded and vulnerable, and had wisely opted to provide some of the fleet's more powerful models with the capacity to initiate a jump in case of emergency, or for stealth operations that had to be launched from distant locales. Anakin heartily appreciated the wisdom of this design improvement ; however, that didn't mean it made the experience of being cooped up in a miniscule cockpit for twelve hours any more pleasant.
He reverted just shy of the Inner Rim. He was getting ahead of himself again, running headlong into something he might regret later. He needed to hear a calm voice reasoning him away from the precipice on which he stood crouched to spring; he needed to hear a wry and critical appraisal of his own perspective. He feared his own daring, his own audacity. He felt…imbalanced. He needed Obi Wan.
The transmission to the Council took forever. Wartime security meant that even alpha priority signals had to be routed through scrambler and encryption circuits. When he did receive an answer, it was Mace Windu whose shimmering form appeared over the tiny projector plate.
"Skywalker," the tall Korun Jedi greeted him in his habitually brusque manner. "I take it you are finished with your retreat?"
"I'm on my way home," he replied. "I ..uh…was hoping to contact Master Obi Wan. I need to speak with him. Urgently."
Mace Windu's dark face conveyed a flicker of concern, and then disapproval. "He's not available. His mission is too sensitive to risk any communication."
Anakin scowled. Yeah, right. "I need to speak to him. I need his advice. On a personal matter."
But petulance was never a smart tactic when dealing with Master Windu. "If you require counsel, Skywalker, then I suggest you return to the Temple as soon as possible. We'll find somebody for you to speak with. Yoda can meet with you as soon as you arrive."
Anakin noted that Mace had the wit not to offer himself as a stand-in for Obi Wan. And that the Korun master's last words had been delivered in a gentler tone, one that hinted – very subtly- at a certain degree of human empathy beneath the Jedi ice. But it wasn't good enough, not by a long shot.
"No, no thank you master. I'll…I'll just wait until Obi Wan is back," he grumbled.
Mace Windu nodded once, very slowly and solemnly, his deep brown eyes seeming once again to size up the young "Chosen One" and find him not to his own personal choosing.
Anakin stared back, disconsolate. Where was Obi Wan? Why was he never around when he was needed? He lied, he pretended not have feelings, and then he disappeared, abandoned Anakin just at the most crucial moment. This was all his fault.
"May the Force be with you," Mace Windu said, dismissing him.
Yeah, kriff that. He was on his own— as usual. The Force surged and darkened around him. He slammed his finger against the comm. panel, cutting off the fading blue image.
When the transmission had ended, Anakin was trapped in the cockpit again, at close quarters with his own frustration and the trickling grains of time, running out all too fast. There was absolutely no way in the nine hells the Republic could go through with this protection contract. It all came down to Hojo Lenn, the spider at the center of an evil web. Like the mysterious Sith lord the Jedi council had been seeking all these years – ever since Naboo – he spewed forth filth and suffering and lies and deceptions in a limitless fountain, drowning out light and clarity until the whole galaxy appeared in nothing but varying shades of gray. Good was evil, evil was good….it made his head hurt. He hated this war, and the confusion it sowed. He longed for clean distinctions: black, white. Good, bad. Right, wrong.
He was sick to death of lingering twilight.
Making his decision, he punched the fighter's engines back into life and shot away, streaking toward his distant goal with the singular focus of a starving predator. Even if the rest of the universe was mired in ambiguity, he knew his purpose.
Twilight deepened into looming dusk.
The Force warned him, and he bolted upright. Three running strides brought Obi Wan to the doors of Lenn's room; and murky or not, the Force overrode their locking mechanism. Shree Uun was only a pace behind him, startled by his sudden leap into motion, by the urgency of his actions.
"What are you doing?" she hissed in the darkness, voice rigid with alarm.
"Danger," he answered curtly, pushing her out of his path. The Twi'Lek courtesans sat up in the middle of Lenn's silken nest of a bed, drawing the coverlets over their bare chests, screaming in fright as he bounded onto the thick mattress, grabbed for the pillows heaped in a soft mountain at its head.
Lenn stirred, shouted out some incoherent expression of displeasure. The Force resounded with danger; the thin bleeping of an remotely activated explosive sliced through the air; the Twi'Leks' shrieking drowned out Uun's shouted expletives.
He tossed mounds of synthsilk and velvet to the floor, hands seeking wildly for what the Force told him was there. His fingers closed around a cool sphere, nestled deep amid the downy pinks and lavenders. Grenade. About to blow.
He seized his blaster, blew out the bedroom window in a catastrophic blossoming of shards and sparks, and flung the deadly object through the newly-made opening with as much brute strength as he could muster, diving for Uun's gesticulating form at the same time. He slammed her to the carpeted floor beneath his own weight just as the disruptor charge exploded, sending a vibrant disc of blue-edged light careening through the air above their heads, dissecting the walls of the room in an instantaneous, devastating moment. The sonic disturbance followed, a sound felt rather than heard, a painful blow to the eardrums.
Plaster, paint, duracrete, glass fragments rained down. The expanding arc of the disruptor's effect field demolished the room's interior, left a cloud of fine particulate dust in its wake. The Twi'Leks and Lenn lay frozen in the middle of their bed; Uun writhed and pushed frantically, eventually managing to kick her rescuer in the gut hard enough to escape.
"Kriff, Ben! What in name of a Hutt's mother?" she fumed.
Lenn recovered his wits first. "How in all the vaping moons of hell did that get planted in my private chamber?" he roared.
The Clawdite waved an angry hand at the mess. "Blame the droids. I told you no servants, including automated."
"Shut up, Uun. You were on security here this afternoon." Lenn's eyes flicked in Ben's direction. "Fast thinking," he grunted. "You're worth the money."
Serving droids tottered in, and the front doors were assaulted with pounding as the building's maintenance crew and emergency response team demanded entrance. One of the Twi'Leks scurried to admit them while the other helped Lenn heave himself out of bed. Shree Uun offered a very rude gesture to her employer's broad back and then stalked out of the ruined chamber.
"You could have killed yourself to save that son of a vetch," she spat at Ben as she shoved past. "You're an idiot."
He followed her out the doors, into the dim antechamber. "I'm security," he corrected her. "I thought you were too."
She poked a finger into his chest, hard. "I never met security that went in for chizzsk-head heroics." She tossed the curtain of golden hair over one shoulder. An irrational anger swelled around her in the Force. "Don't do that again or I'll have to kill you myself." For a moment, the façade melted, and her blunt reptilian face shone through the mask; then the shimmering glimpse of her true nature blurred back into the blonde human again.
"So glad you care," he replied acidly.
Uun stepped closer, the embers of anger transforming into mingled suspicion and desire. "How in kriff's name did you know that was going to happen?" she demanded, practically breathing in his face.
"I told you. I can read minds," he quipped.
"Really?" One hand came up to trace sensuously over his jawbone, down his neck. "Then read this." Her lightning-strike open-handed slap would have been stunning had he not blocked it. The Clawdite merely laughed and withdrew a step or two. "You arrogant gundark." Her eyes devoured him greedily for another moment before she turned and stalked off toward the knot of servants and officials crowding the entry hall.
Shree Uun's suspicion was one problem; the disruptor grenade presented another. How had it been so effectively hidden, and by what mechanism had it been triggered? And how many more attacks on Lenn's life would there be before the fateful agreement was signed in one standard day? The drug lord's enemies were cunning and determined – and running out of time.
Abruptly tired and dizzy, he sat back down upon one of the suite's lavishly upholstered chairs. The worst was surely yet to come…and he had certainly seen better days. The Force surged inelegantly against his mind, a sea sloppily churning on a broken shore. Was Lenn even worth this? Not for the first or last time, he allowed a distracting doubt to creep in: had the Council strayed from the path in agreeing to this mission in the first place? Had he? With a deep sigh, he closed his eyes and sought after the elusive center.
He had a duty. And at this moment, he really couldn't afford to meditate on its implications.