Jacen knew it was a lot to take in at one sitting. Shevu had absorbed it quite well, all things considered.
“Technically, it’s my lord,” Jacen said. “But sir is fine on duty.”
He glanced at the chrono on the wall, feeling a lot more positive than he had for days. The debacle at Fondor was a temporary setback, rapidly receding into the past; he had the Imperial Remnant at his side now, a shadow of its former glory but still a massively powerful force to be reckoned with. And Shevu understood him and his motives.
Caedus smiled at him as he got up to leave. “You know, Captain, I feel the hand of history on my shoulder. I really do.”
chapter nineteen
Ben, I’m so very sorry. You’ll hate me if I don’t send you this, and you’ll hate me when you hear it anyway, so better that you have the evidence than not. It’s going to be hard to listen to, my friend, like recorded interviews with suspects often are. Their reasons for what they do—well, they make sense to them, that’s all I can say. I can tell you that it took everything I had to keep my reactions under some sort of control. Here’s the bad news before you play the recording—his factual account of what went on at Kavan matches the physical evidence.
Comm me if you need anything else. I’m always here for you.
—Captain Lon Shevu, GAG, in an encrypted comm to Ben Skywalker, following an interview with the suspect
FORMER IMPERIAL OUTPOST, ENDOR
Ben had spent an hour working himself up to playing the holorecording Lon Shevu had risked his life to get.
Han and Leia had found a new, safer location for the Jedi base. Now Ben stood in the center of the stark room that had been his quarters, all the fixtures and equipment crated for the pullout from Endor. The rickety folding chair had gone. He was sleeping on a GAG-issue bedroll, with just his mess tin to eat from and a basic hygiene kit, but sitting on a comfortable seat wouldn’t have changed a thing.
Sooner or later, he would have to move off that spot. He’d have to walk down the dusty passage, picked clean of anything that might be a clue to where the Jedi resistance had gone, and say to his father, uncle, and aunt that he had things he needed to show them.
Here’s Jacen, Dad. Here’s Jacen telling my buddy how he killed Mom, and why he had to do it, and why he isn’t a bad guy.
Ben willed himself to move. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, not like some weird psychiatric paralysis, but he knew that the moment he shifted his weight and began walking, the short journey would end with showing his family—his poor dad—that awful, awful conversation between Jacen and Shevu. The image wasn’t good, because Shevu had been forced to use a holocam with an aperture like a pin-head, just so it would sit on his tunic unnoticed. The sound was perfect, though. Shevu risked wearing the wire, as he called it, because Jacen was so used to GAG officers carrying surveillance kits that nothing like that struck him as unusual.
Ironic: the Jedi danger senses that Jacen had, the ability to sense weapons and threats, had proved pretty useless to him in the end, because he was constantly surrounded by war and deceit, saturated in it. He’d grown too used to it all as background noise to be filtered out.
Do I wish I’d killed him now?
He wouldn’t have been able to spew out this garbage to Lon about his duty, and how much he cares about the galaxy. So just as well I didn’t.
Ben checked himself. When he had thoughts like that, and bile literally rose in his throat, he concentrated on his father and asked if he thought ugly thoughts. It did the trick, usually. Ben forced himself to pass beyond impotent, furious grief.
Move. Now.
Ben walked. He went to find his father first.
On the lower floors, the local Ewok tribe had hauled in temporary furniture so the Jedi and their support staff could have some creature comforts while they waited for the final preparations to be completed. Ben found Jag and Zekk in the former briefing room, with their boots up on a rough plank table about knee-high, chatting in dejected tones.
“Hi, Ben.” Jag gestured to the seat next to him. “You coming in, or what? Are you all right?”
“No, he’s not all right,” Zekk said. “I could feel him seething two floors up.”
Ben needed to take a run at it if he was going to do it at all. “No offense, guys, but can you leave? Please?”
“Yeah, but are you sure we can’t help?” Zekk sat up straight and shuffled himself to the edge of the seat. “Whatever it is?”
“Actually, you could go find Dad, Uncle Han, and Aunt Leia for me. Tell them I’ve got stuff to show them, and they all need to see it together.” He thought of Jaina, a little later than he should have done. “And Jag—can you try to get hold of Jaina? I need to set up a comm so she can hear and see what I show everyone else.”
Both men shut up right away. There was no more gentle ribbing for Ben these last few days, no attempt to play older brother when he looked so ground down by events. They responded to his officer voice, as Jori Lekauf had called it, and knew he was serious.
Jori didn’t have to die, either. He didn’t, Jacen. You made me carry out the Gejjen assassination to make me just like you, and Jori was only some detail, one of the small people.
Ben didn’t want anyone else dying for him. All this, all over me?
He set up a table so he could lay out evidence on it and stand the comlink where it could best transmit the session to Jaina. He simply couldn’t face having to repeat it to her. Everyone would think he was doing things by the book, and presenting the same case to everyone like a professional would; but the real reason was that he could only hold it together long enough to do this once.
He could hear Leia’s voice getting closer outside, saying how it would be handy for seeing more of Allana, which he took to mean the new location for the base. When she walked through the door, she stopped in her tracks for a second. Han nearly piled into the back of her.
“Hey, sweetheart,” she said. “Whatever it is, we’re all here. And we’re going to listen to you carefully, okay?”
“It’s not me talking,” Ben said. “The evidence can do that.”
Han, hands on hips, blew out a breath, then walked up and hugged Ben with one arm in that half-embarrassed male way. Luke came in a few minutes later with his hair disheveled as if he’d been running.
Ben shunted the datapads around the tabletop. “Plenty of time, Dad,” he said quietly. “Just waiting for Jag to track down Jaina and get a stable comm connection, then we’ll start.” It struck Ben that he’d just pointed Jag at the Jaina issue, and never thought what Zekk might feel about it. “Take a seat.”
He couldn’t turn and face them all yet, so he must have shuffled those ’pads and charts a dozen pointless times before Jag came back brandishing a live comlink. He set it down where Ben showed him.
“Can you see all this, Jaina?” Ben said.
She looked as if she was standing in a storage room. Behind her, the walls were covered with shelves loaded with cans and boxes, and the doors were slightly parted. Noisy conversation and the clinking of metal and transparisteel wafted through; a restaurant, maybe.
“I can see all of you, and the table,” she said.
“Okay …” Ben had to warn them. “This isn’t easy to hear. I’m going to show you the physical evidence first, and then a recorded conversation. I’m going to show you things that link Jacen to Mom’s death, and then what he told Captain Shevu about it. Remember that folks sometimes confess to things they haven’t done to look tough or to get attention, so compare the physical evidence with what Jacen says so you’re sure what’s true. I’m not going to say what I think. I’ll just show you what I’ve got.”
Ben took a breath. Oddly, it was easier from this point than he’d had expected. Using the datapads, and projecting the images onto the screen they used for small holocharts, he showed them a copy of the GAG StealthX log that proved when Jacen had left Coruscant, and when he’d returned the vessel to the hangar. He showed them the logs for Mom
’s flight. He showed them the charts, with Mom’s known movements in Hapan space, provided by Hapan ATC, and Tenel Ka’s note confirming when Jacen had arrived at the palace and then left. He showed the forensics droid, cracked open, and explained how he and Shevu had used it to collect trace evidence from Jacen’s StealthX.
When Ben got to the data about his mother’s blood-contaminated hair, he caught his father’s eye after managing to avoid it so far, and then he nearly wavered. The locket. I’ve still got it. Dad needs that back. But Ben carried on, through the recordings he’d made at Kavan showing Mom’s body and the surrounding crime scene, to his own brief, detached statement that Jacen Solo had found his exact location even though he had no beacon, made no comms, and was shut down in the Force.
Then … he played the conversation between Shevu and Jacen, and sat back in silence.
He couldn’t watch this time, and just stared into his lap at his clasped hands, hearing Uncle Han inhaling every so often as if he was about to cough. When he risked a quick glance at Dad and Aunt Leia, both of them had adopted the same posture, right arm across the waist, right hand cupping the left elbow, left hand loosely held to lips.
The recording ended. Nobody said anything for a while. It was Jaina who jerked them out of it.
“Ben,” she said softly. “Ben, can you transmit that recording to me now, please? I need some time to study it.”
“Yeah, sure. Sure.”
It was an excuse to stand up and occupy his hands while he thought of something to say. Aunt Leia, always the one who said the perfect thing at the perfect time and got everyone organized in a crisis, walked up to him, turned him around slowly by his shoulders, and just held him in silence. When she drew back, there were tears in her eyes. Ben had never seen her cry before.
“Thanks, Ben,” she said. “You did a good job, and you did it right.”
Ben hung on long enough to send Jaina the recording, and then just had to get outside. He scrambled up one of the nearest trees to a platform that had been part of an Ewok walkway into the forest and sat with his legs dangling, staring out into the haze over the valley.
Whether it was a few minutes later or much longer, Ben couldn’t remember, but he heard someone climbing the creaking ladder of twisted vines. Then his dad sat down next to him, letting his legs hang over the edge of the platform, too, but with a little less ease, as if his knees were stiff. Ben leaned against his shoulder. They ended up propped against each other, just looking out across the forested slope and watching the day run out of things to say to itself.
They didn’t talk, either. There was nothing to add, and both of them no longer needed words anyway.
It was a flame and garnet sunset, spectacular even by Endor’s standards.
BRALSIN, NEAR KELDABE: FENN SHYSA’S MEMORIAL
Jaina knew she should have commed Fett and told him she was going to be late for their training session.
He’d be annoyed; he never got angry, but his annoyance was bad enough. And she was professional enough to get a grip, however bad the news, and simply tell him she might be a little distracted today.
Instead, she ended up here under Fenn Shysa’s imagined scrutiny, cross-legged on the turf with a datapad playing a nightmare in her lap.
She replayed Jacen’s sweetly rational, polite explanation of why people had to die half a dozen times before she found that she didn’t get a pang of recognition when she saw his face, and his words sounded like an alien language, in the way that all words did when you repeated them incessantly.
He did it.
He really did.
“Shysa was always a magnet for the ladies,” said the voice she was dreading. “He’s got better luck dead than I have alive.”
Jaina didn’t look up. At least it was some kind of humor, not a dressing-down at a time when she wasn’t really up to one. Bursting into tears in front of Fett was out of the question. “Sorry, Fett. Should have commed you.”
“I add wasted time to my invoice.”
He squatted back on his heels with his arms loosely folded on his knees. It seemed to be a comfortable way of sitting in armor. Jaina wanted to explain what had made her bolt up here for solitude, but showing Fett the recording was probably the quickest and easiest way of getting the message across. Was she betraying her family by showing him the Solos’ lowest ebb? Would he gloat? She wasn’t sure how she’d react if he did. Right now, she was as raw and emotionally devastated as if Jacen had died. Her Jacen had, of course.
“Before I show you this,” she said, holding the ’pad out to Fett, “it’s going to make you mad because it’s my brother. And however callous you look, you’ve got to be devastated by Ailyn’s murder.”
Fett took the datapad and thumbed the controls. “First time anyone’s called it that.”
“Clear cut. Unarmed prisoner.”
“Unarmed interrogator …”
“Don’t go all reasonable on me. Jacen killed your daughter.”
“I don’t do reasonable. Sure you want me to see this?”
Jaina hadn’t expected that consideration. But maybe he was even more unfeeling than she thought; gloating took some emotional attachment. Even his lifetime of Jedi hunting seemed to lack the passion and triumph of full-blooded vengeance.
“Yes,” she said. “Tell me what you see. And remember that what he says is corroborated by forensics.”
“Jacen telling the truth? Well, well.”
Fett’s tilt of the head suggested he was mulling it over. Then he flicked the key and squatted absolutely motionless while the conversation played. When it ended, he didn’t move. Jaina waited for a reaction.
“Well?”
“What do you want to know?” Fett said. “Whether he’s crazy? Whether he’s better dead, or locked up?”
“Anything.” Suddenly Jaina almost slapped her hand to her mouth, appalled by her own lapse of judgment: Shevu was easy to identify as the man who’d set Jacen up. Stang, she really wasn’t on top form today. “You know the officer risked his life to get that …”
“I know how to keep my mouth shut. You should have noticed by now.” Fett still seemed to gaze at the static image on the small holoscreen, although it was hard to tell with a man in a helmet; he could have been talking on his internal comlink for all she knew, because they could switch in and out of audio channels in those sealed buy’cese literally in the blink of an eye. But she guessed he was chewing something over that bothered him.
“Here’s what I see,” he said. “A sane man. Because they all slide down that path when they get power, and then they have to tell themselves lies to explain how they got there, and how it wasn’t their fault. That’s when reality becomes a stranger to them. And there’s you, ashamed of yourself because you’re thinking that maybe Mara Skywalker started the ruck, but you want to see her as some uncomplicated completely innocent victim.”
Jaina knew it was true, because it hurt so much. “And?”
“That’s a barve who nearly got his backside handed to him by Skywalker’s wife. He still looks scared when he remembers it. Because she went at him like a maniac. Just like Beviin showed you.”
It was the most she’d heard him say in one conversation; he’d need to shut up for a couple of years now to even out his average word count. Jaina was smart enough to recognize uncomfortable truth, though, and began unpicking all the implications in what he’d said. For a man who didn’t seem to have a heart or any normal emotions, he knew plenty about everyone else’s. It could have been just the sharp eye of a hunter, or he might have felt things more keenly than he let on. Jaina bet on the latter.
“Yes, I didn’t want to think Jacen killed Mara, but if he did, I wanted him to be completely to blame,” she said.
“Mara didn’t ask for it.” Fett put his arm out behind him and shifted into a proper sitting position, legs stretched. “She just went to do some necessary pest control. She nearly succeeded.”
“You’re saying he needs … that I have to
kill him.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why haven’t you ever gone after him personally? Why did you tell your men to leave him for me?”
“Because if I put him down like the vermin deserves, your family can blame that rotten Boba Fett again when the truth wears off, when you need an excuse to stop feeling bad about what you had to do. No, you clear up your own mess. I wondered—am I standing back to let the Solos and Skywalkers fight each other because I want them to suffer? No. It’s only Jacen who deserves it, and on balance I’d prefer to see him live a long time in a lot of pain. Like I’ve said before … he’s no use to me dead.”
Jaina tried to work out if she was on the receiving end of a subtle gloating lecture from Fett, or if he’d brooded about this long enough to have a lot of words looking for an outlet. Even her Force senses strained to pick up clues. He really did seem to be thinking aloud, trying to find some answers.
Jaina felt suddenly irrelevant. “You can manage quite long sentences, can’t you?”
“It’s all billable time, Solo.”
“You hate Jedi, I understand that. Seeing your father killed, having to survive on your own—”
“No. You don’t get it. But if any of your kind could, it’d be you.”
Fett put his weight on one arm and jumped to his feet, looking pretty fit for his age. He walked off down the slope toward Keldabe and didn’t look back. With the 360-degree sensor in his HUD, he didn’t need to. Jaina wasn’t sure she’d had an answer at all, but she had a stack of extra questions. She broke her own rule and scrambled after him.
“Hey, don’t give me the cryptic treatment, Fett.” Jaina reached up from behind for his right shoulder, and a little Force pull made him turn. That probably didn’t help, given the topic. “Jedi killed your father. You hunted mine. I went on hating you and feeling pretty unfriendly about Mandalorians for a long time. We all do it.”