EBONY AND JADE
Part Four
Mara Jade came back to consciousness and immediately gasped for breath. The air was hot and stifling, and sweat was pouring down her face. She was firmly tied, and alone, she realized. Her equipment had all been removed. Boda was gone, and there was no sign of Vader. Afraid and confused, Mara did the only thing she could think of. She mentally called the Emperor.
Palpatine answered quickly, his expectant face floating in her mind's eye. He accosted her demandingly.
--- Well? Have you captured the Jedi? What happened? Where is Lord Vader?
--- I'm so sorry, Master. I let you down. I almost had him, but he overcame me and left me tied here. He got away.
The Emperor's irritation came through to her with sickening clarity. His reply was cruelly curt.
--- I am disappointed. Lord Vader had best not be taking advantage of your absence...for his sake and yours. I will send someone to assist you in time. We will speak about your performance when I see you in person.
Abruptly, Palpatine's presence left her. Mara put her sweaty face down on the bed of moss, which was no longer soft. It had turned a brittle, ugly brown. It suited her. She did not deserve softness - she had failed in her first mission as Emperor's Hand, and there probably wouldn't be a second one.
Darth Vader made his decision. "Very well, Jedi. You win, this time. But this does not change anything. You are merely postponing your death. I will find you again, and soon."
"I'll probably be dead before we have a chance to meet again," said Boda. "This is the second time you've given me another chance to deal with your Master, and I won't waste it. Good-bye, Sith Lord."
Boda turned and ran off into the garden. Vader let him go, and set out for the north lift.
Drawing energy from the Force, Boda ran at full tilt for the side of the building. His beloved Bafforr trees and other plants seemed to streak past as he raced the clock to safety. Time was as short as his breath. He cursed his aged body - it was so limited! It had never fit him well anyway, like a scarf that was on too tight, or a shirt one size too small. But it was all he had. Panting, he reached the glass wall that surrounded the greenhouse. The panorama of Imperial City was spread out before him, a crowd of skyscrapers and a stream of flying craft above them. The sun was setting, creating a thousand shadows on the architectural landscape beyond the thick glass. Boda lifted his lightsaber, and sliced into the window in front of him. With several wide strokes, he cut out a large hole in the transparent wall, letting in the wind and noise of the endless city.
The Bafforr trees behind him rustled in alarm. "You arrre leaving," they said.
"Yes," Boda replied, not turning around. He couldn't look at them.
"Will you be coming back to usss?" asked the grove, sensing that something was very wrong.
Boda swallowed hard. He was going to miss the trees. They had been his only friends for so many years. "I - no, I won't be coming back. I have to go and destroy that great evil I told you about."
"Yesss. The darrrk one. What will become of usss?"
"You...you don't have much time. The Sith Lord just couldn't be stopped. In order to save myself, I...I...the Phelarion moss is..."
"We fffeel the heat," the grove said. "And the mosss will brrring ffflamesss."
"I'm sorry," said Boda. "I wish it could have been different. I know you've served me well, for a long time. I have one more thing to ask of you. I need the vines to lower me out the window. There's not much time left...otherwise, I'll die right here."
Boda wondered if the trees he had betrayed would help him. They rustled in response, a vigorous sound made by dozens of them at once. Several of the thick vines snaked out and wrapped around his chest and shoulders. "Good-bye, masssterrr," the trees said. "Live forrr usss." Then the vines lifted him out the hole he had made and began to lower him gently down the side of the skyscraper.
Boda saw a drop of several hundred stories below him, but the vines did not let him fall. When he had descended five stories, the tough vines reached their limit. Boda took his lightsaber and cut his way into the nearest window. He used his legs to push away from the side of the building, then swung back neatly into the hole he had made. He was in an empty, quiet residence hallway. With another slice of the saber, he severed the vines, and began to run down the hall in search of an elevator.
Vader found Mara Jade right where Boda had promised. She had been tied with syntherope, but seemed otherwise unharmed. As he approached, she looked up, groggily. Vader had noticed the rising heat, but it had not penetrated the temperature-controlled suit he wore. Mara was sweltering. Vader was relieved to see her uninjured, but perversely upset to find no explosives nearby. Had Boda taken him for a fool? Maybe there was no bomb here.
Without warning, the ground around him erupted, blasting stones, tree trunks, and soil into the air. A great wash of flames swept over him as he fell protectively over Mara Jade. The explosions did not stop there - instead, they intensified. All over the garden, a fireball of enormous proportions was building. Debris rained down hard on his armor as Vader scooped up Mara and sprinted for the open lift door. He rushed inside with her and pounded the closure button. The doors hissed shut against a wave of heat and fire, and a sound of thunder that went on and on. As Vader held on to the groaning girl, the lift shook hard. The interior lights were snuffed out, and the lift went into a sudden free fall.
Vader braced himself against the wall as the lift plummeted, experiencing a vivid thought of what the impact more than two hundred floors below would be like. He had to get both of them out of there immediately. Drawing his lightsaber, he reached up to cut a large hole in the roof of the lift, shoving the falling severed section to the floor next to him. Then, getting a tight grip on Mara, he gathered the power of the Force and leaped straight up. His powerful jump took him through the hole, and he landed on the roof of the lift, breaking smoothly into a run as he did so. He crossed the distance to the side of the shaft and jumped up at it. Vader slammed into the shaft wall as the lift continued to fall away. He protected Mara from the impact, taking it all on his prosthetic armored right arm and leg. His bionic hand clamped onto a rung of the shaft's maintenance ladder and refused to let go. When he finally stabilized, he looked down to see the lift disappear into the darkness until it hit bottom with a terrific crash. Distant rumblings sounded from above as well, signaling the end of Boda's rooftop home, and probably a considerable amount of the skyscraper itself.
For a long moment, he hung on the ladder, not moving. He was covered in slime and dirt, his cape had been partly burned, and he was disturbed at the narrow escape. Mara hung in his grasp, moaning in fear. Boda had escaped cleanly, and both of them had barely survived the aftermath. As Jedi hunting missions went, Vader thought ruefully, this one certainly could have gone better.
It did not take long for Vader to climb the ladder to a maintenance access hatch, which opened onto a hallway on the seventy-third floor of the building. The area was clogged with people, but even if they had not recognized the Dark Lord from the HoloNetNews, they would have cleared space for the imposing figure as he strode down the hall. Mara Jade had been untied, and had come back to herself. She walked briskly in Vader's wake. Taking an elevator (which emptied of people as if by magic), they descended to the fiftieth floor and the main building offices. Citizens continued to stream around them. The building was being evacuated due to the fire and the explosions which had collapsed the top ten floors. The offices were already empty, and Vader went straight to a HoloNet terminal in one of the cubicles.
"What are we doing now?" asked Mara. It was the first thing she had said since Vader had rescued her. She was wracked with shame, but Vader had not criticized her. Instead, he had simply led her along purposefully. In a way, she wanted to be chastised. She had failed her mission. Instead of capturing Boda, he had captured her, and she assumed that this had caused Vader to lose Boda as well.
"Now," he said, "we contact the Emperor. He will need to know what has happened. Then, we must continue searching for Ashka Boda."
"We?" asked Mara. "You mean I'm still a part of the mission? After what happened up there?"
"You may yet be of some use to me," Vader said dryly. "And do not berate yourself too much for what happened. I, too, underestimated Ashka Boda and his defenses. It was my mistake to separate us, not yours. Perhaps together, we might have succeeded."
Mara was stunned at this generosity, but she did not argue with it. "For what it's worth," she said, "you were absolutely right. Boda's Force powers were what caused me to fail. I had him pumped full of neurotoxin, but somehow, he got rid of the poison. Then he choked me with the Force....wait! I had almost forgotten that! He used the dark side - I could feel it! He's no Jedi - he's a dark side adept. We were wrong about him all along."
Vader's posture showed his surprise. "A dark side adept," he said wonderingly. "What does this mean?" Vader paused in thought. "He also told me that it was I who gave him a second chance at life...but he said his name was not Ashka. There is indeed more to this than I have guessed. We must consult with the Emperor at once."
Vader turned to the HoloNet station and, after a moment of examining it, pounded it in frustration. "It is useless. The explosion must have damaged the connection from this building to the network."
"I know another way to contact the Emperor," Mara said hesitantly. She felt gratitude towards Vader for what he had done, and she wanted to turn it into trust between them. She was no longer sure of the truth of what the Emperor had told her about Vader and Boda, but she was sure that Vader was treating her with more respect than Palpatine had. "I'm a strong projecting and receptive telepath...and I'm closely attuned to his mind. I can call him, and he'll hear me, whatever he's doing."
Vader stared at her, considering. Perhaps he was deducing why he had not been told about this before. Mara strongly suspected that there was a deficiency of trust on the parts of both Vader and his Master. Theirs must be a very strange relationship.
"I have received his thoughts at a distance as well," Vader said, "but I am rarely successful in sending my thoughts to him. His mental screens are formidable, and he does not like interruptions. Very well. Contact him, and tell him that Ashka Boda will be coming for him. I will wait in the next room."
Mara nodded as Vader moved away. She realized that he was in fact aware of the undercurrents here; he was preventing the Emperor from sensing him, so that Palpatine would not realize that Mara had revealed her talent. She concentrated on her connection to the Emperor, and soon, his face appeared to her. He was highly agitated.
--- Where are you, Mara Jade? I was just told there was an explosion in the building where you were. Where is Ashka Boda, and where is Lord Vader?
--- I got away in time, Master. Lord Vader rescued me. But it meant he had to let Boda go, in order to save me. He's...he's nearby, trying to find out what caused the explosion.
Mara glanced at the doorway nervously, hoping her cover story would be believed, but the Emperor wasn't even interested in such details. His anger was plain to Mara. She blanched at the heat of it.
--- Curse Lord Vader! He had the Jedi in his hands, and he let him go?
--- Yes, but -
--- It seems that both of my servants are suffering from incompetence this day! Vader will pay for his foolish choice. Must I capture Boda myself?
--- But Emperor...it was to save my life. I would have died...
--- Young fool! This matter is more important than you realize. You have no idea what is at stake! A life far more important than yours hangs in the balance!
--- Master...Ashka Boda...he...he might be coming to find you. Lord Vader told me -
The Emperor's mood changed like lightning.
--- So! The Jedi is going to come to me? Excellent! I wonder what he hopes to accomplish by coming here? If you are correct, then I can deal with him myself. Perhaps your failure will be of no consequence after all. I must prepare a welcome for our fugitive...and so I have no more time for you right now. Return to the Palace with Lord Vader as soon as you can...
With that, he faded out, leaving Mara alone with her crushed feelings. Her Master would have wanted Vader to sacrifice her! What was so important to him about this Boda that he placed so little value on her own life? Slowly, her self-esteem began to bleed out of the ragged hole in her spirit.
Vader walked back in to find her sitting dejectedly in a swivel chair. "Well," demanded the Dark Lord. "What did he tell you?"
"He...he just cut me off. I didn't even have a chance to tell him that Boda is a dark side adept. He was just...furious that we let Boda get away. He thought...he thought you should have let me die instead."
"It is no worse than I expected," Vader said calmly. "The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am. Let him discover Boda's true nature for himself. I plan to follow him to the Palace. Perhaps I will reach him before he gets there. He and I have unfinished business to conclude."
"What does he want with the Emperor?" Mara asked.
"Like many others before him, he plans to put an end to our Master, even if it means dying himself."
"Does he have a chance? Can't we stop him?"
"If Ashka Boda reaches the Emperor, he will find him more than ready. I have little faith in his chances..."
"So what is he," Mara demanded, "a madman? Is he just going to stroll past a legion of guards, hoping to get to the throne room, when Palpatine knows he is coming?"
"He may indeed be mad," said Vader thoughtfully, "but I do not think he is a fool. He dealt with us in his garden with great cunning...and there is the matter of the explosion he caused. Such destruction in the Palace could alter the situation a great deal."
"What was it that exploded?" Mara asked. "Could you tell?"
"It seemed to be the ground itself," Vader said. "Perhaps an organic weapon of some kind, among his exotic plants."
Mara quickly put the pieces together. "He worked in the Palace for eleven years, as a gardener. If he had an organic explosive all that time, he could have put it anywhere. Maybe he plans to use it against the Emperor - it could be why he was so confident."
"Let me try to recall," Vader said. "The Force will enhance my memory. I believe I saw one of the organisms in the greenhouse elsewhere..." He fell silent for almost a minute. "I have it," he said finally. "When we were in the greenhouse, I saw a gray moss all over the ground. The same moss was in the Palace gardens where I saw Ashka Boda. The Ho'Din botanists asked me what it was, but I did not know."
"All right, maybe that is the explosive," said Mara, "but how does he set it off?"
"The most obvious change in the room," observed Vader, "was the increased temperature."
"Right, but how could he apply that much heat to the Palace? It's climate controlled."
"He will have a way," declared Vader. "Our dark Jedi is almost as devious as the Emperor himself. Let us be on our way immediately."
