Chapter Eighty Four

Komari stepped into her former Master's study, gathering her hard won Jedi serenity around her with more difficulty than she had needed ever since Master Fay and Master Unduli had put her back together, body and soul. She knew both would remonstrate with her for the very idea, but she owed the two of them far more than she could ever repay, just as she owed Master Dooku for coming for her in the first place when she had turned due to the tortures of the Bando Gora. Dooku had saved her body and given her a chance to rejoin the Light. Fay had healed her body, and, between her and Unduli, they had helped Komari save her soul. Those thoughts were foremost in her mind now as she entered the room where she knew Master Dooku had left his last will and testament.

It had been two days since Master Yoda had informed her and the others who were connected to Master Dooku in some fashion of his death. Of course, the ancient Grandmaster hadn't outright stated how Master Dooku had died, as he had no idea. All they knew was that, in Yoda's words, "A great light, extinguished it has been. A great darkness, gone too now. Burned each other out, they did."

Of course, knowing her Master, Komari had been able to put that together quickly enough. He had gone after some Dark Side user. Imagine her surprise when Master Yoda had informed her that the High Council actually felt that the Sith, or at least something called the Brotherhood of the Sith, which she had never heard of, might still be out there.

It would be just like my Master to go after him on his own, and just like most Jedi to assume that if you remove the head, the body will die. I could have told him after my experiences with the Bando Gora that that was not the case, but no one asked me… And now I am both stalling and devolving into snark in a manner that is unbefitting of a Jedi. Come, Komari Vosa, remember what Master Dooku would say: fearing the unknown is worse than fearing reality, but both fears must be met and overcome.

With a deep cleansing breath, Komari banished such thoughts and stepped into Master Dooku's study. As she did, Komari remembered the recording her master had left her to tell her to come to his study in the event of his death. It had been mailed to her directly by the Dooku house lawyer, the lawyer informing her that they had not found a will for him yet, but that they had found those instructions, and they had been dutifully observed and found to have been written by Master Dooku. As a Jedi, of course, his being of sound mind did not come into it.

Inside his study, Komari moved around, reaching out with the Force to find the thing that she was here to find. It was a somewhat tough skill to learn, and the more people in an area the harder it became, but it worked very well on small enclosed spaces and on mechanical items.

Seconds later a small hidden compartment in his desk, which you had to be sitting at in the chair at a proper angle to open, yielded up its secrets. The setup wasn't very high tech, but Komari though that it was somewhat ingenious in how well it was hidden. From the compartment she pulled out not one, but three little data chips.

The one on top of the small pile had a single K written out on it. the next was unlabeled, but Komari could tell it was a specially prepared security chip, one which could not only slag itself but any system it was connected to if the individual who tried to use it didn't input the correct code. The last was a simple chip like the first, though it too was unlabeled.

So, the order in which I view these is laid out for me. Very well, Master, though I find it most droll that you are trying to control things like this from beyond the grave, Komari thought whimsically. Still sitting at her former master's desk, she inserted the disk with the K on it into the desk's reader.

Instantly a full body hologram of Master Dooku, his face set into grave lines, one hand resting on his lightsaber hilt as he stared into the pickup. "I, Master Dooku, being of sound mind and body, do prepare this last will and testament, to be enacted upon the moment of my death for my estate and all items therein. This should be read by my last padawan."

The image's lips quirked. "Well, my last full time padawan, at any rate, if not my last student: Knight Komari Vosa. If Knight Vosa is reading this, please prove your identity by entering in a code now. A single word that can describe our first mission together. You have two minutes to do so before this disk erases itself."

Komari sighed, but nodded. No one but she among those now living knew that the first mission she and Master Dooku had done together actually hadn't been one that had been put on the books of the Order. It'd been a simple enough mission, simply finding a thief that had begun to target elderly men and women on the second level of Coruscant. Dooku had turned it into a training exercise for her: how to find and winnow through the minds of multiple types of sentients in order to find someone who was feeling guilty, and connecting that guilt to the crime that they were investigating.

Thinking of a single word that could be used to describe the mission threw her for a brief moment, but then she remembered the name of the culprit. Typing it in quickly, she watched as the tiny timer disappeared from the screen and her master's image returned.

When he spoke, however, the air of whimsy was gone, and he had quickly gotten down to business. "Komari, I have made many mistakes in my lifetime. Mistakes with you, mistakes with Qui-Gon, mistakes in my own life and my own training. Yet despite everything, I have to say that perhaps my worst mistake was not involved in the training of you or Master Qui-Gon, but that in my own thirst for knowledge I looked to dark places. As you well know after the Mandalore debacle I had become thoroughly fed up and disappointed by the lack of growth in the Order,. The corruption within the Senate, and how closely we were tied to them also repulsed me."

The image seemed to sigh. "What you do not know is that after your disappearance and before we learned you were still alive, I went even further. I thought if perhaps the Sith, or some small variant of them, came back, they would push the Order to grow again, to break the cycle of stagnation that the Order has been in since the end of the New Sith Wars."

Dooku's image laughed now, a wry, self-deprecating tone that jarred sharply with everything Komari had seen of the man in life. "I was wrong about that, and I should have trusted the Force. The Force, the Light Side, brought us Lily and Harry and the changes their presence has created in the Order. You now of what I speak."

Komari barely had a moment to nod agreement with that, her mind somewhat reeling from the idea that her Master had looked for the Sith so long ago and the way he had admitted to his faults like this. He had apologized and admitted to making mistakes with her and Qui-Gon, but that was a far cry from this.

But then the message continued. "I was unsuccessful in finding the Sith, obviously, and yet, and yet when I heard from Master Giiett that the Order felt the Dark Side user which killed Qui-Gon could be a Sith, I felt somehow that the Force was telling me something, that the Force was telling me that this threat was someone I knew. I began to meditate on it, searching my memory for clues using the organizational method Lily has been teaching us here on my estates. I found it. I found the individual who had tried to steer me towards some Sith practices, and then I began to research them. The head of the Banking Clan, Hego Damask. With that knowledge, I decided to go after him on my own.

"If you're reading this, I hope that at least I have taken him with me. But if not, I urge the Order to investigate the Banking Clan very, very closely. On the disk below this one you will find everything I was able to discover through both the Force and certain illegal means. There is nothing which would hold up in a court of law, but some of it is worrisome enough to follow up on."

For a moment Dooku sighed, looking every inch his age, where before he had been projecting an aura of weathered strength. "I hope I succeed. But if I do not, I wish to leave the universe a better place than it was before my death. I want you, Komari, to keep the training center going. This is my earnest request to you as your former master. My House's resources will answer to you for now. But the training center is my most important request of you."

Komari breathed a slight sigh of relief. So this was only going to be a temporary thing; that was good. Komari had no desire to be tied down to Master Dooku's estates. For one thing, it smacked too much of putting worth on material things to her, and for another, many of the Order were still too leery of her for her to want to add another way to stand out. So I'm named as the family manager of the family's holdings, but not the actual heir. That makes sense. And I can bet who he did name as the heir.

Master Dooku continued on, telling Komari about the powers she could wield as manager and the things she couldn't do, which were far more numerous. "As I said at the beginning of this message, I have made many mistakes in my lifetime," Dooku said after winding down. "I urge you to learn from them. Learn from them, but walk your own path. If that path leads you to being the kind of Jedi that the Order wishes you to be, I will respect that. But if it does not, I will respect that too. Think for yourself; live for yourself. Trust in the Force and do not give into the Dark again. That is all I ask my former padawan, my proud Knight. May the Force be with you and with the Order." With that the image disappeared, and a moment later it began to repeat.

Komari leaned back, trying to analyze what she was feeling at this point. There was grief there, certainly, but also a strange kind of relief, or perhaps vindication. She knew that Master Dooku had gone out the way he would have wanted, lightsaber in hand. And given what Master Yoda had said, he had indeed taken his target with them.

She was a little concerned about having been left in charge of his family's holdings, but that concern was tempered by how little as manager she could do unless those holdings began to see significant downturns in their fortune. That shouldn't happen, she thought, thinking about what little she knew about Master Dooku's family's holdings. And it says that the rest of the will is going to come into effect once certain conditions are met, and that I would know what they are. Hah! That too is obvious, and I can think of no one better to look after those. Still, it will be interesting to see how the Council reacts. It is rather obvious to anyone who knows of their connection in the first place, after all.

But the training center and the mansion were hers now. That was interesting, and it filled Komari with a sense of purpose. Further, she felt the touch of the Force on her. For the first time in years it was unequivocal and certain: this was what the Force wanted from her. So be it. This is my new charge, and one I will prove worthy of, Komari thought, standing and taking the three data chips as she left the room and locked it behind her.

She moved to work through the mansion to Master Dooku's personal Hypercom array. Every one of the counts who ruled Serenno had one of these, and they did not feed into the central one on the planet unlike most such systems. Instead they allowed the user to connect directly to the Hypernet.

Thus, a moment after sitting down, she was looking into the wizened face of Grand Master Yoda. He looked even more aged than the last time she had seen him. The death of Master Dooku had come to him first and had obviously hit him hard.

"News you have," Master Yoda said, his eyes closed at first before he opened them to lock eyes with her through the hologram. "Report you have to give?"

Komari quickly explained what she had found, showing Master Yoda the data crystals in the pickup. She finished, asking, "Is this legal, Master?" She would still follow her former master's wishes regardless, but it was important to know at the outset what kind of opposition she would face.

"Illegal it is not," Master Yoda said after a moment's reflection, his words not giving anything away. "Outside of military items, the Jedi ownership of things, never been made illegal in the Republic or the Order. Not actually made his heir: not enough there for the Order or the Senate to concern ourselves. Of Jedi stepping in to manage estates, precedent there has been before this."

Indeed Yoda was actually understating things. Jedi were routinely called in to mentor or watch over young heirs in many systems. The Green Jedi of Corellia took this further, acting in the manner Komari would be for the Dooku estate if requested to. This tied them closer to the Corellian government, far more than the Jedi Order as a whole was happy about, and also smacked too much of being connected to material things. But so long as they didn't own military systems or infrastructure, the Order was prepared to look the other way rather than to push the Green Jedi into breaking off entirely from the Order, as they had threatened to do numerous times in the past thousand years.

"Master, if you allow me to accept this appointment, I will act as I feel Master Dooku would in terms of the training center and his holdings," Komari said. "And you know exactly who he might have named as his real heir."

"I do," Yoda said, looked at that second data disk. "Looked at that, have you?"

Komari shook her head.

"Do not then. Cross that bridge we will when forced to."

Komari nodded to that, more than willing to leave that particular basket of snakes in Master Yoda's capable hands. "I also have the security disk, which explains how Master Dooku came to believe the head of the Banking Clan was the Sith. Should I upload it?"

Yoda quickly shook his head. "No. Still on the planet, is Master Bilaba?"

"Yes, Master Yoda. She seems to have learned the Shield technique very well, and her retraining with her lightsaber is going well. In her case it is more disuse of her lightsaber than a weakness in her personal style."

"Give the disk containing Dooku's findings to her you will. Inform her she is to come back to Coruscant you will immediately after finished talking we have," Yoda ordered.

"I will do so, Master," Komari said, feeling very gratified that Yoda was taking this so seriously.

"Well are you?" Yoda asked abruptly, looking at Komari with shrewd eyes through the pickup. Despite the distance between them, Komari got the impression that Yoda could sense a lot more about her than she could about him.

Though I probably shouldn't be surprised by that, she thought sardonically. A Jedi pushing over a thousand years should have a broader set of tricks than me.

"I am well, Master," she said aloud. "I wish that Master Dooku had confided in me his suspicions before going off on this quest of his, but if he had, I do not think he would've been Master Dooku. Headstrong, certain to the point of arrogance in his own skills and beliefs, and a way with the lightsaber and the Force: that was Master Dooku in a nutshell.

"He was not perfect, but none of us are, and despite his many faults I will remember him as a great man. I will remember his lessons, his teachings, and his messages to me, and I will strive to be worth his trust."

"Greatest student he was. Strongest he was. Wisest. Hrhrhrm. Best he was. My greatest achievement he was," Yoda said, and it was as if Komari's words had acted like a balm to him as Dooku's last words had been to her. "Do well I know you will in your new position. A title, perhaps, we will come up with for you in the future. For now, may the Force be with you."

"And with you, Master Yoda," Komari said, holding upper hand formally in salute before ending the communication.