Sacrifice

  Ben … I’m here, Ben …

  The more Jacen relaxed and let the Force sweep him up—and it was now hard to let go and be swept, much harder than harnessing its power—the more he had a sense of Ben being accompanied. Then … then he had a sense of Ben seeking him out, groping to find him.

  He has something with him. Can’t be the Amulet, of course. He’ll be angry I sent him on an exercise in the middle of a war. I’ll have to explain that very, very carefully …

  It had just been a feint to get him free of Luke and Mara for a while, to give him some space to be himself. Ben wasn’t the Skywalkers’ little boy any longer. He would take on Jacen’s mantle one day, and that wasn’t a task for an overprotected child who’d never been allowed to test himself far from the overwhelmingly long shadow of his Jedi Grand Master father.

  You’re a lot tougher than they think. Aren’t you, Ben?

  Jacen felt the faint echo of Ben turn back on him and become an insistent pressure at the back of his throat. He took a breath. Now they both knew they were looking for each other. He snapped out of his meditation and headed for the bridge.

  “All stop.” The bridge was in semi-darkness, lit by the haze of soft green and blue light spilling from status displays that drained the color from the faces of the hand-picked, totally loyal crew. Jacen walked up to the main viewport and stared out at the stars as if he might see something. “Hold this station. We’re waiting for … a ship, I believe.”

  Lieutenant Tebut, current officer of the watch, glanced up from the console without actually raising her head. It gave her an air of disapproval, but it was purely a habit. “If you could narrow that down, sir …”

  “I don’t know what kind of ship,” Jacen said, “but I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  They waited. Jacen was conscious of Ben, much more focused and intense now, a general mood of business-as-usual in the ship, and the undercurrent of Lumiya’s restlessness. Closing his eyes, he felt Ben’s presence more strongly than ever.

  Tebut put her fingertip to her ear as if she’d heard something in her bead-sized earpiece. “Unidentified vessel on intercept course. Range ten thousand kilometers off the port beam.”

  A pinpoint of yellow light moved against a constellation of colored markers on the holomonitor. The trace was small, perhaps the size of a starfighter, but it was a ship, closing in at speed.

  “I don’t know exactly what it is, sir.” The officer sounded nervous. Jacen was briefly troubled to think he now inspired fear for no apparent reason. “It doesn’t match any heat signature or drive profile we have. No indication if it’s armed. No transponder signal, either.”

  It was one small vessel, and this was a Star Destroyer. It was a curiosity rather than a threat. But Jacen took nothing for granted; there were always traps. This didn’t feel like one, but he still couldn’t identify that otherness he sensed. “It’s decelerating, sir.”

  “Let me know when you have a visual.” Jacen could almost taste where it was and considered bringing the Anakin Solo about so he could watch the craft become a point of the reflected light of Contruum’s star, then expand into a recognizable shape. But he didn’t need to; the tracking screen gave him a better view. “Ready cannons and don’t open fire except on my order.”

  In Jacen’s throat, on a line level with the base of his skull, there was the faint tingling of someone’s anxiety. Ben knew the Anakin Solo was getting a firing solution on him.

  Easy, Ben …

  “Contact in visual range, sir.” Tebut sounded relieved. The screen refreshed, changing from a schematic to a real image that only she and Jacen could see. She tapped her finger on the transparisteel. “Good grief, is that Yuuzhan Vong?”

  It was a disembodied eye with double—well, wings on each side. There was no other word to describe them. Membranes stretched between jointed fingers of vanes like webbing. The dull amber surface seemed covered in a tracery of blood vessels. For a brief moment, Jacen thought it was precisely that, an organic ship—a living vessel and ecosystem in its own right, of the kind that only the hated Yuuzhan Vong invaders had created. But it was somehow too regular, too constructed. Clustered spires of spiked projections rose from the hull like a compass rose, giving it a stylized cross-like appearance.

  Somewhere in his mind, Lumiya had become very alert and still.

  “I knew the Yuuzhan Vong well,” said Jacen. “And that’s not quite their style.”

  The audio link made a fizzing sound and then popped into life.

  “This is Ben Skywalker. Anakin Solo, this is Ben Skywalker of the Galactic Alliance Guard. Hold your fire … please.”

  There was a collective sigh of amused relief on the bridge. Jacen thought that the fewer personnel who saw the ship—and the sooner it docked in the hangar, to be hidden with sheeting from curious eyes—the better.

  “You’re alone, Skywalker?” Technically, Ben was a junior lieutenant, but Skywalker would do: Ben wouldn’t, not now that he had the duties of a grown man. “No passengers?”

  “Only the ship … sir.”

  “Permission to dock.” Jacen glanced around at the bridge crew and nodded to Tebut. “Kill the visual feed. Treat this craft as classified. Nobody discusses it, nobody saw it, and we never took it onboard. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll clear all personnel from Zeta Hangar area. Just routine safety procedure.” Tebut was just like Captain Shevu and Corporal Lekauf: utterly reliable.

  “Good thinking,” Jacen said. “I’ll see Skywalker safely docked. Give me access to the bay hatches.”

  Jacen made his way down to the deck, resisting the urge to break into a run as he took the shortest route through passages and down durasteel ladders into the lower section of the hull, well away from the busy starfighter hangars. Droids and crew going about their duty seemed surprised to see him. When he reached Zeta Hangar, the speckled void of space was visible through the gaping hatch that normally admitted supply shuttles, and the reflection he caught sight of in the transparisteel air lock barrier was that of a man slightly disheveled from anxious haste. He needed a haircut.

  He could also sense Lumiya.

  “So what brings you down here?” he asked, deactivating the deck security holocam. “Hero’s homecoming?”

  She emerged from the shadow of an engineering access shaft, face half veiled. Her eyes betrayed a little fatigue: the faintest of blue circles ringed them. The fight with Luke must have taken it out of her.

  “The ship,” she said. “Look.”

  A veined sphere ten meters across filled the aperture of the hatch, its wing-like panels folded back. It hovered silently for a moment and then settled gently in the center of the deck. The hatch doors closed behind it. It was a few moments before the hangar repressurized and an opening appeared in the sphere’s casing to eject a ramp.

  “Ben did very well to pilot it,” Lumiya said.

  “He did well to locate me.”

  She melted back into the shadow, but Jacen knew she was still there watching as he walked up to the ramp. Ben emerged from the opening in grubby civilian clothing. He didn’t look pleased with himself; if anything, he looked wary and sullen, as if expecting trouble. He also looked suddenly older.

  Jacen reached out and squeezed his cousin’s shoulder, feeling suppressed energy in him. “Well, you certainly know how to make an entrance, Ben. Where did you get this?”

  “Hi, Jacen.” Ben reached into his tunic, and when he withdrew his hand a silver chain dangled from his fist: the Amulet of Kalara. It exuded dark energy almost like a pungent perfume that clung and wouldn’t go away. “You asked me to get this, and I did.”

  Jacen held out his hand. Ben placed the gem-inlaid Amulet in his palm, coiling the chain on top of it. Physically, it felt quite ordinary, a heavy and rather vulgar piece of jewelry, but it gave him a feeling like a weight passing through his body and settling in the pit of his stomach. He slipped it inside his jacket.

/>   “You did well, Ben.”

  “I found it on Ziost, in case you want to know. And that’s where I got the ship, too. Someone tried to kill me, and I grabbed the first thing I could to escape.”

  The attempt on Ben’s life didn’t hit Jacen as hard as the mention of Ziost—the Sith homeworld. Jacen hadn’t bargained on that. Ben wasn’t ready to hear the truth about the Sith or that he was apprenticed—informally or not—to the man destined to be the Master of the order. Jacen felt no reaction from Lumiya whatsoever, but she had to be hearing this. She was still lurking.

  “It was a dangerous mission, but I knew you could handle it.” Lumiya, you arranged this. What’s your game? “Who tried to kill you?”

  “A Bothan set me up,” Ben said. “Dyur. He paid a courier to take the Amulet to Ziost, framed him as the thief, and the guy ended up dead. I got even with the Bothan, though—I blew up the ship that was targeting me. I hope it was Dyur’s.”

  “How?”

  Ben gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “It’s armed. It seems to have whatever weapons you want.”

  “Well done.” Jacen got the feeling that Ben was suspicious of the whole galaxy right then. His blue eyes had a gray cast, as if someone had switched off the enthusiastic light in him. That was what made him look older; a brush with a hostile world, another step away from his previous protected existence—and an essential part of his training. “Ben, treat this as top secret. The ship is now classified, like your mission. Not a word to anyone.”

  “Like I was going to write to Mom and Dad about it … what I did on my vacation, by Ben Skywalker, age fourteen and two weeks.” Ouch. Ben was no longer gung-ho and blindly eager to please … but that was a good thing in a Sith apprentice. Jacen changed tack; birthdays had a way of making you take stock if you spent them somewhere unpleasant. “How did you fly this? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Ben shrugged and folded his arms tight across his chest, his back to the vessel, but he kept looking around as if to check that it was still there. “You think what you want it to do, and it does it. You can even talk to it. But it doesn’t have any proper controls.” He glanced over his shoulder again. “It talks to you through your thoughts. And it doesn’t have a high opinion of me.”

  A Sith ship. Ben had flown a Sith ship back from Ziost. Jacen resisted the temptation to go inside and examine it. “You need to get back home. I told your parents I didn’t know where you were, and hinted they might have made you run off by being overprotective.”

  Ben looked a little sullen. “Thanks.”

  “It’s true, though. You know it is.” Jacen realized he hadn’t said what really mattered. “Ben, I’m proud of you.”

  He sensed a faint glow of satisfaction in Ben that died down almost as soon as it began. “I’ll file a full report if you want.”

  “As soon as you can.” Jacen steered him toward the hangar exit. “Probably better that you don’t arrive home in this ship. We’ll shuttle you to the nearest safe planet, and you can get a more conventional ride on a passenger flight.”

  “I need some credits for the fare. I’m fed up with stealing to get by.”

  “Of course.” Ben had done the job, and proved he could survive on his wits. Jacen realized the art of building a man was to push him hard enough to toughen him without alienating him. It was a line he explored carefully. He fished in his pocket for a mix of denominations in untraceable credcoins. “Here you go. Now get something to eat, too.”

  With one last look at the sphere ship, Ben gave Jacen a casual salute before striding off in the direction of the store’s turbolift. Jacen waited. The ship watched him: he felt it, not alive, but aware. Eventually he heard soft footsteps on the deck behind him, and the ship somehow seemed to ignore him and look elsewhere.

  “A Sith meditation sphere,” said Lumiya.

  “An attack craft. A fighter.”

  “It’s ancient, absolutely ancient.” She walked up to it and placed her hand on the hull. It seemed to have melted down into a near hemisphere, the vanes and—Jacen assumed—systems masts on its keel tucked beneath it. Right then it reminded him of a pet crouching before its master, seeking approval. It actually seemed to glow like a fanned ember.

  “What a magnificent piece of engineering.” Lumiya’s brow lifted, and her eyes creased at the corners; Jacen guessed that she was smiling, surprised. “It says it’s found me.”

  It was an unguarded comment—rare for Lumiya—and almost an admission. Ben had been attacked on a test that Lumiya had set up; the ship came from Ziost. Circumstantially, it wasn’t looking good. “It was searching for you?”

  She paused again, listening to a voice he couldn’t hear. “It says that Ben needed to find you, and when it found you, it also recognized me as Sith and came to me for instructions.”

  “How did it find me? I can’t be sensed in the Force if I don’t want to be, and I didn’t let myself be detected until—”

  A pause. Lumiya’s eyes were remarkably expressive. She seemed very touched by the ship’s attention. Jacen imagined that nobody—nothing—had shown any interest in her well-being for a long, long time.

  “It says you created a Force disturbance in the Gilatter system, and that a combination of your … wake and the fact you were looking for the … redheaded child … and the impression that the crew of your ship left in the Force made you trackable before you magnified your presence.”

  “My, it’s got a lot to say for itself.”

  “You can have it, if you wish.”

  “Quaint, but I’m not a collector.” Jacen heard himself talking simply to fill the empty air, because his mind was racing. I can be tracked. I can be tracked by the way those around me react, even though I’m concealed. Yes, wake was the precise word. “It seems made for you.”

  Lumiya took a little audible breath, and the silky dark blue fabric across her face sucked in for a moment to reveal the outline of her mouth.

  “The woman who’s more machine, and the machine that’s more creature.” She put one boot on the ramp. “Very well, I’ll find a use for this. I’ll take it off your hands, and nobody need ever see it.”

  These days, Jacen was more interested by what Lumiya didn’t say than what she did. There was no discussion of the test she’d set for Ben and why it had taken him to Ziost and into a trap. He teetered on the edge of asking her out-right, but he didn’t think he could listen to either the truth or a lie; both would rankle. He turned to go. Inside a day, the Anakin Solo would be back on Coruscant and he would have both a war and a personal battle to fight.

  “Ask me,” she called to his retreating back. “You know you want to.”

  Jacen turned. “What, whether you intended Ben to be killed, or who I have to kill to achieve full Sith Mastery?”

  “I know the answer to one but not the other.”

  Jacen decided there was a fine line between a realistically demanding test of Ben’s combat skills and deliberately trying to kill him. He wasn’t sure if Lumiya’s answer would tell him what he needed to know anyway.

  “There’s another question,” he said. “And that’s how long I have before I face my own test.”

  The Sith sphere ticked and creaked, flexing the upper section of its webbed wings. Lumiya stood on the edge of the hatch and looked around for a moment, as if she was nervous about entering the hull.

  “If I knew when, I might also know who,” she said. “But all I feel is soon, and close.” Something seemed to reassure her, and she paused as if listening again. Perhaps the ship was offering its own opinion. “And you know that, too. Your impatience is burning you.”

  Of course it was: Jacen wanted an end to it all—to the fighting, the uncertainty, the chaos. The war beyond mirrored the struggle within.

  Lumiya was telling the truth: soon.

  MEETING OF THE CLANS, MANDALMOTORS HALL, KELDABE, CAPITAL OF MANDALORE

  A hundred or so of the hardest-looking males and females that Fett had ever seen we
re gathered in the stark charcoal-gray granite building that MandalMotors had donated to the community.

  The hardest face of all was that of his granddaughter. Mirta Gev watched him from the side of the meeting hall with his father’s eyes.

  My own eyes.

  Fierfek, she really did have the Fett eyes. Maybe he was seeing what wasn’t really there, but the look bored through into his soul anyway. It was a look that said: You failed. He didn’t hear the murmur of voices around him, just the soundless accusations that his daughter Ailyn was dead, that he had never been there for her until it was too late, and that he might also be too late to start being a worthy Mandalore. His father had groomed him to be the best, and even if he’d never mentioned being Mandalore one day, it went with the legacy. Jaster’s legacy.

  Better be quick, then. I’m dying. I’ve got business to take care of. Priorities: a cure, then find out what happened to my wife, what happened to Sintas Vel.

  It wasn’t that Mirta wouldn’t tell him.

  She didn’t know. She had the heart-of-fire gem he’d given Sintas as a wedding gift, but it had turned up at a dealer’s shop. It was just bait. And he’d taken it.

  But, Fett being Fett, it was more than bait. It was a motivator: it was another piece of evidence.

  It’s never too late to find out. I thought it was, but it’s not.

  The hubbub of the chieftains of the clans, heads of companies, and an assortment of veteran mercenaries faded voice by voice into silence. They watched him warily. Not all of them were human, either: a Togorian and a Mandallian, both wearing impressive armor, leaned against the far wall, massive arms folded across their chests. Species didn’t matter much to Mandalorians. Culture defined them. Fett wondered what that made him.

  “Oya!” It was muttered at first, then shouted a few times. “Oya!” It was a word with a hundred meanings for Mandalorians. This time it meant “Let’s go, let’s get on with it.” They always started their gatherings this way, and this was the nearest Mandalorians ever came to a senate. They didn’t go in for procedural nicety.

  A chieftain with an ornately shaved beard and an eye patch stood up to speak without ceremony. “So, Mand’alor,” he said. “Are we going to fight or what?”