Revelation

  “We didn’t discuss that.”

  “Oh, I thought of it later …”

  “Why create a mine shell if you don’t intend to sit it out? It’s not as if we have hulls and troops to spare.”

  “Because I still think we should take the yards sooner rather than later, and we can pick them off once the planet is locked down. Then, when the yards are secured, I intend to capture the capital and main regional centers.”

  “Yes, you did say that, but let me remind you that there are still five billion Fondorians, at least half of them on the planet’s surface, and most in those cities.”

  “I’m hoping it won’t get to that stage. I may sacrifice one yard to show I mean business, but Fondor won’t want its industrial infrastructure destroyed. Will it? Small, rich world, one that will see sense.”

  “Corellia has an even smaller population, and look how well that went.” Niathal checked the splendid gold fob chrono on her jacket. “My, is that the time? I must be going.” She headed for the doors.

  “Wow,” Tahiri said, when Niathal was long out of earshot. “Are you two always that barbed with each other?”

  “It’s how we keep on our toes.” Caedus would have been much more worried if Niathal oozed sweetness and light to him; as long as he felt that she despised him—and he felt it—and she paraded her disdain openly, he knew he could still trust her not to attack him. She was much more transparent than he’d first expected. “She’s actually very, very good at her job. I just wish she’d accept that she’s not very good at mine.”

  “You can feel her hatred. I certainly can.”

  “It’s not hatred, Tahiri,” Caedus said. “It’s disdain, contempt and a certain superior pleasure at being better and nicer than me—as she sees it. That’s loathing, perhaps. Not hatred. Hatred is close to fear, and always has an element of dread in it. Like love has a component of pity, and it’s just as hard to see the line between the two.”

  Tahiri might have taken it at face value, or she might have been unpicking hidden meaning in it. He hoped she was doing the latter. “I’ll turn to at eighteen hundred,” she said, as if she’d learned all the new jargon to impress him and possibly secure another fruitless, tantalizing glimpse of Anakin. “Sir.”

  She walked out of the office with a more rigid spine. Perhaps she’s choosing pain, too.

  “You did well with Admiral Pellaeon, by the way,” he called after her. “Good job, Lieutenant.”

  Something else had just shifted in the Force, a small thing, a cog turned by just a single tooth, but it had moved, and with it the rest of the machine was subtly altered. That was the nature of destiny. Caedus felt around in the Force for where Luke and his entourage might be. But his mind was too restless now, fixed on the need to bring down Fondor.

  It will be a short siege, I promise. A decisive one.

  He tried to search out his twin sister, just out of … curiosity.

  Jaina. I can’t believe how easy it is to forget people. I can go for days without even remembering you exist. Jaina …

  He reached out in the Force, but something else in the great machine had changed, too. He couldn’t feel Jaina, not the familiar mix of temper and passion and—always applied too late—the urge to control it all. Perhaps Ben had taught Jaina how to shut down in the Force, too, like he’d probably taught his mother so she could kill Jacen Solo more efficiently. Caedus checked himself as he realized that he saw Jacen as a separate entity. It was more than having changed: it was separation. Jacen still existed for the family who tried to understand him, but he wasn’t the man sitting here now.

  Better not teach Tahiri to Force-hide. It just complicates matters.

  Jacen Solo. Gone, now; not concealed. Gone, and never coming back.

  Caedus spent the afternoon moving assets around imagined Fondor space, feeling fresh pleasure each time his finger connected with the amber lights representing the new assets, the battleships and fighter squadrons of the Imperial Remnant. This would not be the long, groaning, humiliating failure of trying to subdue Corellia. He had a good chunk of the Fourth Fleet, and nobody else was placed to come to Fondor’s aid. Everyone else now had their own woes and war to keep them busy.

  This time, it’ll be different.

  It would be different because there was no more Jacen Solo, or any of his levers left to pull.

  And if there was no more Jacen Solo, then Darth Caedus had no twin sister.

  Caedus relaxed.

  GA FLEET HANGAR, GALACTIC CITY: SIX HOURS LATER

  “We’re on,” said Shevu. “The Anakin Solo has cleared orbit.”

  Ben could see Shevu on the monitor that was set in the CSF speeder’s dash. He didn’t know—or ask—how the captain had managed to borrow a police traffic patrol vessel, but it was handy cover for anyone who wanted to sit waiting at a skylane intersection near a military installation without drawing the wrong kind of attention.

  It was also linked to a network of skylane surveillance holocams. All Ben had to do was sit there and monitor the images that the forensics droid relayed from the interior of the StealthX cockpit.

  “Okay,” Ben said. “Let me know if you need a spot of disruption.”

  Shevu adjusted his helmet as he walked toward the hangar’s open doors. Yellow light spilled out onto the permacrete ramp. “If you ever take up a life of crime, Ben, you’ll do staggeringly well at it. Just as well Jedi are pretty honest.”

  Ben had learned that, even for him, there was a principle of need-to-know—and he didn’t need to know how far CSF was involved now. The police looked after their own, no questions asked; and as far as they were concerned, Shevu was still one of the lads, even if he now wore the black of the Galactic Alliance Guard.

  It was just a matter of slipping the CSF forensics droid into the StealthX. It was a small sphere about the size of a smashball, disturbingly like a thermal detonator, and packed into its innards were probes, spectrometers, reagents, sample packs, and a full array of sensors that recorded everything at the crime scene it was sent to record. It was perfect for sending into dangerous or inaccessible places that a flesh-and-blood CSF scenes-of-crime officer couldn’t reach, and it was also small enough to be discreet.

  The only problem was that it didn’t look like a maintenance droid, and someone might notice. Ben’s job was to make sure they didn’t.

  Shevu, in uniform and taking advantage of the fact that GAG officers could do as they pleased in Jacen’s new galactic order, ambled into the hangar, and the external traffic remote lost him in the shadow. There was a brief fog of static on the monitor as Ben switched from the traffic-control holocam to Shevu’s helmet cam.

  “Here we go,” said Shevu. The forward image showed Jacen’s personal StealthX sitting in its bay, canopy closed, in a line of X-wings connected to the diagnostic grid by cables and wires. Maintenance droids and a couple of human technicians walked in and out of eyeshot looking harassed. “Got the droid ready.”

  “I’m watching.”

  Ben followed Shevu’s field of view as the captain walked up to the technicians and asked them when Colonel Solo’s StealthX was starting its maintenance cycle. They assumed they were being nagged to make the vessel a priority.

  “Okay, we’ll do it before the next batch of X-wings,” one technician said in an exasperated tone. “Look, we can only process them so fast, you know.”

  “It’s okay.” Shevu sounded as if he was relenting. “I’ll hang around, if you don’t mind. You know what a pain in the neck he is about efficiency.”

  The technicians lapsed into stunned silence, mouths slightly slack with horror. It was just a figure of speech, but with the gossip about poor Tebut doing the rounds of the fleet, it sounded like a very sick joke. They didn’t seem sure whether it was safer to laugh at it or not. Armed forces humor was very tasteless sometimes, right on the borderline between laughter and tears. Shevu shrugged and walked away.

  It was a perfect excuse for him to mooch around the hangar, l
ooking as if he were killing time by sticking his nose in everywhere. He was a secret policeman. It was what they expected him to do. He clambered up the ladders on a couple of X-wings, prodded cables, and generally made all the movements of a man wanting to get on with something because he had a very unreasonable boss.

  Did the rest of the fleet still like Jacen? A few days ago, he’d been their hero, one of the team. He sent procurement managers to the front line for providing poor-quality kit to the troops, or not providing it at all. He led from the front; he never asked his personnel to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. This, Ben knew, was what created the loyalty that made beings put their lives on the line for an officer. It wasn’t political fervor or a desire for glory. It was devotion based on shared risk, on knowing that comrades—whatever the rank—looked out for each other.

  But Jacen hadn’t looked out for him. He’d tortured him. Ben couldn’t imagine doing that to someone he was supposed to care about, especially for their own good.

  Do you really know how much he’s changed, Jaina?

  “Ben, stand by.”

  Shevu’s helmet link showed he was at the StealthX now. It was one of three left. The Jedi had taken the others with them, and a StealthX wasn’t much use to non-Force-users, seeing as they had to use comlinks. Ben watched Shevu’s field of view shake with the one, two, three of climbing the small ladder up to the cockpit, and the flash of a transparent canopy lifting followed by the dark interior and matte instrument panel as Shevu looked inside.

  “In the hole …,” Shevu muttered into his helmet link. Then he climbed back down and wandered apparently aimlessly around the hangar. “Droid on the case.”

  Most of Ben’s attention shifted to the monitor showing the droid’s-eye view of the cockpit; a fraction of it remained on Shevu’s monitor, watching for complications that might require a little Force ingenuity from Ben. He could see the smooth matte-black curves of the instrument panel, and the small brush-like projections from the droid skimming over plastoid and durasteel, picking up traces and analyzing them before storing the swabbed samples inside the case. An icon on the monitor showed the results as the droid worked; there were traces of skin cells, machine lubricant, microscopic shavings of metals, and sweat from hands. There was even dust with the mineral profile of Kavan, but then Jacen had landed to find Ben. It wasn’t evidence.

  The droid worked methodically, covering the cockpit deck and bulkheads. It was picking up the odd hair, too, five-centimeter lengths—short, and male. Ben’s heart sank; the cockpit must have been cleaned several times in the last few weeks.

  Then the droid worked over the apparently clean seat. Again, the icons showed skin cells, dust, oils. The probes worked down into seams, and then between the sections that formed the angle of the seat, deep folds of fabric.

  The icons changed.

  PARTICLES: BRICK, ORIGIN UNKNOWN. CLAY. SILICATES.

  ORGANIC MATERIAL: HAIR, FEMALE, 29 CMS. FOLLICULAR TAG PRESENT. TRACES OF BLOOD ON HAIR SHAFT. DNA MATCHES HAIR.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Ben whispered.

  “Got it?” Shevu’s view showed he was near the doors, head moving slowly as if watching nothing in particular. “What is it, Ben?”

  “Hair with blood, and a follicular tag. Female hair.”

  “If it’s got a tag, Ben, it’s probably been pulled out.”

  Ben saw his mother in his memory, tugging her hair and dropping strands into his palm as he stared dumbfounded at her ghost on Kavan.

  You did it, Mom.

  “Let’s get out,” Ben said. “We’ve got it.”

  “Stang,” said Shevu.

  When Ben switched his attention back to Shevu’s monitor, he saw what had made him curse. Captain Girdun was walking toward him, hands deep in pockets, whistling soundlessly.

  “Walk him away,” said Ben. “I’ll extract the droid.”

  “Wait until he goes. I’ll get rid of him.”

  “No, just get him away from the StealthX. Leave it to me.”

  “Okay.” Shevu’s voice was now totally different, external, addressing Girdun. “Keeping you up, are we?”

  “Don’t see you down here often,” Girdun said.

  “Just making sure Solo’s toy is ready if he decides to come back early. Don’t want him to shake me warmly by the throat, do I?”

  Girdun made a snorting sound. “Hah, you’re his little Master Perfect. He won’t throttle you. Besides, he’s going to be stuck at Fondor for a long time.”

  Shevu began walking away from the StealthX very slowly, getting Girdun to follow him without even thinking. Ben watched Shevu’s helmet cam shift perspective from the speckled, irregularly shaped fiberplast airframe of the fighter to a long view of the hangar with the X-wings staggered along the length of both walls, and waited until it had passed three of them before extracting the droid.

  Am I stopping it too early? Will there be other evidence in there?

  No, Ben had what mattered. The droid was self-propelled, but he gave it a little Force assistance and plucked it out of the cockpit, moving it to the floor and then sending it out of the doors and into the night. Once it was clear of the hangar ramp, he lifted it into the air and pulled it to him as fast as he could, almost smacking it into the side of a passing repulsor truck in his haste. When it plopped onto the seat next to him in the traffic speeder, he couldn’t stop himself clenching both fists and hissing, “Yes, yes, yes!” in triumph.

  Now all he had to do was wait for Shevu to get away from Girdun and meet up with him. He moved the speeder onto the next intersection and sat with one hand on the droid as if it were an obedient pet that had done a clever trick. Eventually he heard Shevu said, “Hang this, I’ll come back in the morning …,” and relief flooded his body.

  By the time Shevu called him for a pickup from the next skylane, the captain was wearing plain black coveralls without insignia or rank, looking like a CSF tactical weapons officer. He dropped Ben and the droid off two blocks down from the apartment and disappeared to return the CSF speeder. Ben wondered how flexible the CSF admin system had to be for some officer to loan vehicles to a buddy for a highly irregular operation that had nothing to do with CSF—not officially.

  Back in the apartment, Ben placed the droid on the table and sat staring at it as if it might make a dash for freedom, and almost expected his mother to appear to him again with some gesture of congratulation. But she didn’t, and he was disappointed. For the first time since finding her body, though, he felt that she wasn’t totally gone. She was simply in another place. Unlike most beings in the galaxy, he actually knew that to be true and real, not just a sincere hope. It meant he could go on now. He would, as he promised himself, live for her, and live well.

  That evening, he and Shevu ate their supper in silence. There was a sense of anticlimax.

  “I’ll play Palpatine’s advocate,” Shevu said, chewing slowly. “The hair. First you have to match it to your mother’s—”

  “Dad grabbed most of her stuff before he got out. He’s got her brushes. Plenty of hair to match up DNA.”

  “I was going on to say that you’d need to prove there was no other way that the trace could have got into the StealthX.”

  “It was on Jacen’s clothing.” Ben tried to imagine how his mother’s hair got pulled out. She’d bled, though; he could see that when he found her. “They must have fought hand-to-hand. That’s … grim.”

  “She hadn’t got any traces of his skin under her nails or anything, so what were they doing for him to have grabbed her hair? Did he ambush her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A defense lawyer would say that Jacen might have picked up the hairs from you.”

  “I didn’t touch her body. It was a crime scene. I wanted to, but I knew it was important to leave things alone.”

  “They’d say it’s your word against Jacen’s.”

  Ben felt irrationally angry. “And I’d say, Look at the body of evidence I’m building up. But it’s Dad,
isn’t it? You’re asking me if this is going to be enough to convince him.”

  “If I were still in CSF, I’d say it was enough for me to arrest him for questioning. At least.”

  “And then it’s circumstantial.”

  “Take the droid,” Shevu said. “And let’s get you back to wherever it is you’re hanging out.” Ben opened his mouth to say Endor, but Shevu held up a hand for silence. “I don’t need to know. Okay?”

  Ben pondered the nature of reasonable doubt. He was sure now. He didn’t know if Dad would be.

  He really needed one more clincher. But he had no idea what else there could possibly be that would prove beyond any doubt that it wasn’t Alema Rar who had killed Mara Jade Skywalker, but Jacen Solo.

  FLEET HQ OPERATIONS CENTER, CORUSCANT

  Niathal made sure she was a daily visitor to Fleet HQ, but this was her second trip today, made without notice.

  Her arrival had thrown the center into a quiet, barely noticeable panic, but it was panic all the same. Personnel tidied consoles and emptied cups of caf discreetly, thinking she wouldn’t notice their attempt to bring the place up to captain’s walk-through standards by the time she looked up from the screen she was studying. They never seemed to realize how wide a field of vision a Mon Cal had.

  It’s just caf. Forget it. We have much bigger problems.

  “Admiral, is there anything I can do?” The Sullustan op center commander hovered, uneasy at having a full Admiral of the Fleet ensconced in the ops room at a terminal, let alone one who was also joint Chief of State. He had the air of someone who was waiting for the ax to fall, and to be told that he had failed a surprise inspection for reasons he would never grasp. “There’s always a private office available for you.”

  Niathal could also have sat back in her own chair and watched Jacen’s progress on the repeater holochart in her suite at the Senate, but the big picture wasn’t what she was interested in. She wanted to see the detail. She wanted to see the way crews were prepped and briefed before Jacen jumped to hyperspace, and she wanted to see if he’d slipped in any little extras that he’d neglected to mention—like the way the timing of the assault had slipped his mind.