“It’s very different, being the focus of government after you’ve enjoyed the relative freedoms of being a deputy,” she said. “I hope it doesn’t turn out to be a mistake for you.”
“I can always steer the attention to Niathal.”
“Make sure you both have different ambitions. It’s far safer than both wanting the same thing.”
“That sounds like the kind of advice I should wake up sweating about in the small hours.”
“I think the phrase is lonely at the top, Jacen Solo.” She indicated the blaster, lightsaber, vibroblade, and toxin darts in the belt around his waist. “I see you’re getting used to the Hapan level of mistrust …”
“Like you say, it’s lonely.”
He didn’t look back this time. Now that his brief respite was over, the fresh memory of Mara haranguing him—had he handled it right, did she have enough on him to destroy all he was working for?—flooded back in along with Ben’s face.
I want it over with. I can deal with it. I just can’t stand not knowing where and when and how.
The StealthX lifted clear, and Hapes dwindled into a sumptuous quilt of gardens and canals again. He had a good idea now of what he’d face when Ben was gone: Mara, an animal robbed of her young with all the primeval wounded rage that went with it, and Luke—he had no idea how Luke would react, only that a man who could bring down the Empire, and whose blood was closer to Vader’s even than his own, wouldn’t be paralyzed by grief.
Jacen was now more afraid of the Skywalkers discovering Allana’s parentage than of the Hapan nobles. He could probably protect her from the Hapans if he had to, but it would be far harder to protect her from the vengeance of Luke or Mara. Allana was his weak point.
But nobody knew, and it would stay that way until he was certain he’d eliminated every threat she might face. He wasn’t taking chances. He was going to create two of the most lethal enemies any being could have.
“Hapan Fleet Ops to StealthX One-One, safe return,” said the voice on the comm. They had never said that before: being Chief of State had obviously upped their anxiety status to triple-red or something. But he was perfectly safe here. He was still visible in the Force, still all warmed bittersweet feelings, and for a little while he could afford not to care.
As Jacen accelerated toward the hyperjump point, he could have sworn a vessel was close to him. He felt something in the Force for a moment, but it was gone again. He checked his instruments: nothing. If the Hapes Cluster hadn’t been such a maze of hazards, he’d have jumped the moment he passed the planet’s upper atmosphere.
It must be something in the Hapan water. You were never this jumpy.
But there was something out there, and while he hated the imprecision of the phrase something dark, that was the best he could do: something hostile that was trying hard not to be. He hoped it was Hapan, and that they were just trying in vain to track him out of their space. He should have been able to sense that clearly, though, an ordinary vessel flown by ordinary people.
This wasn’t ordinary. He planned for the worst.
If he angled the StealthX right and shut down the head-up display, he could see a panoramic rear view reflected in the viewscreen. Sometimes he needed to see with his eyes to be certain. He killed the display and shifted his focus, and for a moment all he saw was velvet void.
Then the stars winked out.
“Lumiya?”
Silence.
She could hide in the Force, too. She thought he was letting his concentration wander. She probably couldn’t resist finding out where he was going.
If she’d followed him here, then she knew about Tenel Ka. She’d use it.
“It’s okay, Lumiya, I know it’s you.”
But there was still no response. That wasn’t like her.
“Lumiya, I can’t let you live now, you realize that?”
For a moment, even in this crisis, he found himself measuring her death against his prophecy. Was it Lumiya after all? Was she the sacrifice? What could there possibly be about her death that would kill something he loved?
“Lumiya, last chance …”
Then a searing white beam flooded his cockpit and blinded him for a second; he rolled instinctively to break, suddenly aware it was a landing light so close on his tail that the vessel must have nearly collided with him. How did the proximity sensors miss it? How did he miss it?
His Force-senses were flooded instantly with someone else’s ice-cold anger. The comm crackled.
“Game over, Lumiya,” he said, targeting his aft cannon.
“You bet it is,” said Mara.
chapter nineteen
She logged out Five-Alpha at 0036 hours, sir, and she didn’t file a flight plan.
—GA StealthX technician, Coruscant, to Luke Skywalker
HAPES CLUSTER
Jacen couldn’t fire.
It wasn’t regard for Mara, because his first instinct was to lock on and press the button, but she was so close that the detonation would have taken him with her. StealthXs had sacrificed shielding for sensor negators. It was only at times like this—times that should never have happened, would never have happened—that it was a problem.
He jinked left, and she matched him, and right, and left, and still she was so close on his tail that he braced for impact out of reflex, arms locked out on the yoke.
There was no advantage: same starfighter. No edge: she was as good a pilot. No refuge: they were in open space. It was down to who hated who more, and who was more prepared to die to take out the other.
All Jacen could think of was that now it was Mara who’d followed him here and knew about Tenel Ka. Her threats over Ben seemed irrelevant. He had a whole new problem.
His comm crackled again. He braced for a stream of vitriol from his aunt. But it was someone else’s voice.
“I have her, Jacen.”
Lumiya. Savior, maybe, but she shouldn’t have been here either. So Lumiya and Mara probably knew about Tenel Ka and Allana; and Lumiya certainly knew that he couldn’t let either woman live with that knowledge. Now he had two assassins on his tail, and he couldn’t trust either of them not to kill or betray him.
Laser cannons flared across his port side and he felt the impact in the airframe, but he was still in one piece. He smelled smoke. Brilliant white light filled the cockpit. Lumiya—if she was targeting Mara, if she wasn’t trying to kill him in some bizarre Sith test—had the same problem: Mara was flying so close that any explosion put him in her blast radius, or would send her debris punching through his shields at this range.
Jacen did what he’d done many times: he simply dropped away by looping through ninety degrees. He needed to put a second of space between them, and he also needed to come back at her with an advantage.
Mara might have sent a message to Luke by now, revealing everything. She wanted maximum damage. His secret was as good a missile to be used against him as any ordnance.
As he climbed out of the loop, Jacen looked up through the canopy, desperate for any reflection or hint of movement. StealthXs had never been designed to fight one another. Their almost complete lack of sensor trace made tracking Mara impossible. That was why she was so close on his tail, too. They couldn’t detect each other reliably, except through the Force, or by spotting silhouettes against the starfield.
And Mara seemed to be able to dip in and out of the Force, just like him. Just like Ben.
He should never have taught Ben to do it.
The fact that Mara hadn’t said more than four words was the most disorienting thing of all. Now he needed to get her onto ground of his choosing. He could feel Lumiya somewhere off to starboard, moving at high speed, and he had no idea what the Sith sphere was capable of in her hands. All he knew was that it was obsolete—and old tech and brute force could often bypass more complex systems.
“Canopy,” he yelled. Ben’s report had said he’d used a magnetic accelerator in the Sith sphere. “Lumiya, crack her canopy. Weak shields.”
He didn’t have to explain it to her. Suddenly he could see an orange ball accelerating toward him on a collision course and he flipped ninety degrees just in time for it to pass under him. The next thing he heard was Lumiya’s voice saying, “Hull breach, she’s venting atmosphere.”
As Jacen came around again in a loop, orienting by feeling Mara in the Force once more, he could see a thin white trail moving at high speed toward the center of the cluster. Mara was hit, a slow leak either in the canopy or straight through the skin into the cockpit, and she was trying to land before a crack spread and became an explosive decompression. Even with a flight suit, her chances of surviving that were slim.
She was heading for Kavan. That suited Jacen fine. Once he had her on the ground he could take her, because even if she called in support, who would respond to someone in a battle with Jacen Solo? Not the Hapans. Who would believe her? People many hours away.
He felt no violence or malice at all, but then he never did in combat. He just felt an overwhelming desire to win and survive, and all other emotions were pushed into the background.
He turned his attention to Lumiya.
“It’s okay, Jacen,” she said. “I know what you have to keep secret. I’ll make sure it stays that way—”
“You certainly will,” he said, and locked all eight proton torpedoes on the Sith sphere. “This is what you taught me to be.”
Jacen fired on her, and felt no triumph or shame, only temporary relief.
But he saw no explosion, no white-hot ball or glittering cloud of slow-tumbling debris. His onboard sensors picked up nothing.
Where was she? Was it a kill or not?
He’d have to trawl for wreckage later. Right now, his priority was to silence Mara Jade Skywalker.
HAPAN SPACE
Ben couldn’t feel his mother, but he knew she wasn’t dead. She was hiding, just as he’d taught her. Lumiya was here in the Sith ship, though, streaking away on his starboard side, and he wasn’t going to break off the pursuit now. She was the key to this. She’d be the key dead or alive. Ben knew he was capable of doing either.
The ship was speaking inside his head, just as it had before. It might have been talking to itself or addressing both him and Lumiya, but it was deeply unhappy.
He has tried to cause irreparable damage.
“Ship, shut up,” Lumiya said. Ben could hear her, too, as if the ship’s thought processes were an open circuit. “He has to survive. We don’t.”
The rule of ages is that I must not be targeted.
The sphere had clearly decided enough was enough, and looped back in the direction from which it had come. Ben could see it in his forward screens and on sensors, but he could also see it in his head. The general impression was that it was rolling up its sleeves and going back to knock ten bells out of whoever had fired on it.
“Ship, break off.”
I do what I must.
“Ship!”
Ben’s drives were screaming trying to keep up with it. There was no real up or down in space, but it was like plummeting in the slipstream of a raptor.
“Ship, my mom’s down there,” Ben pleaded. “She didn’t fire on you.”
Masters may use their ships to fight but not involve apprentices.
“Ship, Jacen made an error. Do it for me, so I can find my mom again. Please—don’t fire.”
The sphere decelerated dramatically.
Who is the enemy? the ship asked. Unless I know, I can do nothing except evade and protect.
“That’s right,” Ben said. Shevu had told him that humoring nutters, as he called it, was an essential police skill. Keeping them talking was what it was all about—and if Ben had the ship, he had Lumiya. “Ship, what’s your task?”
Once I fought. Now I educate and protect apprentices.
“What do you believe I am?”
Apprentice.
“Who’s the one within you now?”
Apprentice also.
Ben was starting to form a picture of the sphere’s view of the world. It had been buried on Ziost for centuries and possibly millennia. It had reacted to him when he was being targeted from orbit and running for his life with a terrified little girl.
“Ship, what do you mean—educate?”
I teach apprentices to fight.
Ben could sense Lumiya communicating with it. The ship was responding strongly in his mind, but there was a second stream of soundless words running almost like interference on a comlink from overlapping frequencies. She was urging the sphere to fire on Ben, to ram his shuttle, to kill him.
Yes. I am now for apprentices, so they learn and come to no harm. I used to be for Masters at war.
It made sudden sense to Ben. “You’re a Sith training vessel.” It would see him as an apprentice because he was one, in a way, but Lumiya confused him. “Why do you think the woman in you now is an apprentice?”
Because she knows so little of me. Like you.
Ben accepted he wasn’t an intellectual like Jacen, but he could grind through options, eliminating things as he went, just like his mom. He could work out anything by just asking question after question.
“The woman apprentice in you had us shot at when we left Ziost.”
We shot back.
The ship recognized him, and it decided that both he and Lumiya were novices who needed its advice and care. It had stopped his mother from killing Lumiya on Hesperidium because that was its job: teaching apprentices to fight. Ben wondered how many chances it gave Sith apprentices before it decided they were weaklings who deserved what they got.
There was no way he was going to talk it into killing Lumiya—he wondered how it would do that—and she was having no luck getting it to attack him, either. Ben was in no real danger. But his mother was, and not from that ship. Someone else wanted her dead.
He needed to find her. He dropped toward Reboam, and the Sith sphere escorted him, with Lumiya impotent within.
Ben had caught a Sith. And now he had no idea how to use her to his advantage.
KAVAN, HAPES CLUSTER
Mara set the StealthX down in the middle of nowhere and reminded herself that being the target or the assassin was simply a state of mind.
No doubt Jacen thought he’d forced her to land so he could finish her off. She thought she’d ditched to get him where she could use her fighting skills to better advantage.
It was a matter of who found who first.
I can stop this anytime I want.
After all she’d seen and heard, there was still the Mara within who couldn’t really believe her nephew was dangerously and irredeemably evil.
If you don’t do it, who will? And who’ll blame you for not acting while he could be stopped? Palpatine, Palpatine, Palpatine … your lesson in twenty–twenty hindsight.
So here she was, telling herself that she was going to go through a very bad time after she killed him, but it had to be done. And Jacen was probably thinking the identical thing. They were the same. No moral high ground; just a leftover equation that said all other things being equal, Mara preferred to see Jacen dead than Ben, or Luke, or herself. Survival: there was nothing wrong with surviving.
Luke now kept reaching out to her in the Force, increasingly anxious, trying to find her, but she didn’t dare reach back. There was no telling what Jacen could detect. When she wanted to be found by Jacen—he’d know all about it.
She grabbed her bag and everything from the cockpit that could be used as a weapon, then found some cover while she consulted her datapad for charts and surveys of Kavan. It was honeycombed with ruined monuments and tunnels. Fine. If I get him in a confined space, he can’t use all his Force skills, but I can make the most of what I’ve got. She decided to make her way into the maze of buried passages and get Jacen to follow her.
She was nowhere near any centers of population, so she was also a long way from any help. She didn’t intend to summon any, anyway. Not until it was time to remove the body.
She secreted all her weapons in her jacket, belt, and boots, and sprinted for the first tunnel she saw. It was getting easier by the minute to disappear into the Force for as long as she needed. But now she needed to be visible, a beacon for Jacen to lure him onto the rocks.
Come and get me, Colonel Solo.
chapter twenty
From: Sass Sikili, negotiator of Roche
To: Boba Fett, Mand’alor
Murkhana has failed to respond. Because they have failed to respond, and we fear this will encourage others to ignore our patents, we request your support, so that the point may be made that we take our patents seriously. I would very much like to see the Bes’uliik in action; our metallurgists have been looking at ways to produce lighter beskar structures, so when you pound the Murkhana factories to dust, we will be inspired to be more inventive. This is very good for business.
JEDI TEMPLE: CORUSCANT
Luke met Jaina on the steps of the Jedi Temple. He was dashing out as she was dashing in. He caught her arm and steered her back down the path.
“Where did she go, Jaina?”
“Uncle Luke, I swear I’m not covering for her. I don’t know and she’s not answering any of her links. Why are you worried?”
Luke held the crumpled flimsi in his fist. Gone hunting for a few days. Mara had signed out a StealthX just after midnight two days before. He shoved the note in his pocket. The feeling of dread overwhelmed him.
“Come on,” he said. “I have to go look for her. Something’s wrong. And Ben’s gone, too. I’ve had the worst feeling, like she’s walking into a trap.”
Ben wasn’t just missing; Luke could no longer feel him in the Force. And now he couldn’t feel Mara. He’d called everyone, including Han and Leia, and he didn’t kriffing care if the GAG detained him for contacting Corellian agents with a warrant out for their arrest.
He expected Jacen to show up to issue a warning, but Niathal said Jacen was away on “business.” The GAG StealthX was gone again. The man came and went as he pleased, it seemed.