Star Wars: Yoda: Dark Rendezvous: A Clone Wars Novel by Sean Stewart

Author:Sean Stewart [Stewart, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-49269-2
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-10-04T13:00:00+00:00

10

Château Malreaux stood on a high bluff on the north side of the Bay of Tears, a deep-water harbor guarded by sudden shoals. The River Weeping, which ran into the bay, had hollowed out a fantastic labyrinth of caves through the coastal cliffs. These features—a harbor friendly to those who knew her secrets, and death to those who didn’t, and the chained galleries of caves that honeycombed the shore—had made the Bay of Tears the perfect smuggler’s port. The first Count Malreaux had been a pirate, extorting his grant of nobility from the surrounding territory in exchange for a promise, only occasionally broken, to stop plundering passing ships.

The view from the bluff had a kind of bleak grandeur: the windswept point, bare but for the ubiquitous covering of Vjun moss, glowed a venomous green between leaden skies and a pewter sea. The wind blew hard, driving long rollers before it to smack heavily into the cliff face. Thin strings of rain bent and whipped in the air, mingling with spray blowing off the sea. A few pirate gulls, black with silver markings, wheeled and screamed over the little inlet.

The system of caves and tunnels that led up from the beach had exits everywhere, including, of course, the cellars of Château Malreaux. One of these underground passages opened into the side of a tall hillock, crowned with thorn-trees, half a kilometer inland. From the cover of these thorns, an interested observer watched as an old B-7 freighter, accompanied by two wasp-winged Trade Federation fighter craft, came lumbering in, apparently intending to set down on the deserted landing pads in the ruins of Bitter End, a city on the far side of the bay from the château. Bitter End had numbered some sixty thousand souls before plagues and madness had rendered it a ghost town a decade before.

The freighter lurched suddenly, as if experiencing a problem with its attitude thrusters. It slipped rapidly sideways, spinning convincingly, and disappeared into a cleft between two rocky hills. A nicely judged performance, the observer thought. The Trade Federation fighters balked, jerked, and finally finished their descent into Bitter End.

One hundred twelve seconds later, the first landspeeders came screaming down the road from Bitter End to the cliff across the bay from Château Malreaux. The road ended there, at the famously scenic vista.

From his hidden observation post, Solis dialed up his T/Z telescopic sniperscope with the implanted reticle to identify the troops spilling out of the landspeeders and heading into the rugged terrain. Ten, twelve, fifteen humans in all, plus ten elite assassin droids like the ones Ventress had brought to Phindar Spaceport, and two platoons of grunt droids to help beat the bushes. There would be more specialized trackers in soon, no doubt; this would be the reception committee Dooku had sent to be Yoda’s “guard of honor.”

There was a cave entrance within three minutes’ hard scramble of where the B-7 had touched down. Yoda’s crew should make it in plenty of time, Solis thought.

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