“Yes, my friend,” he said aloud. “Because the last thing they need is a big gold-plated droid advertising their presence … wherever that might be.”
Nobody ever said Corellia, but it was very hard to misplace your sister and your best friend in the Force. Luke wished them some kind of peace. He knew how hard it was to find peace when the front line ran through the heart of his own family, even if his misgivings over Jacen’s influence on Ben were a little way short of a full-scale feud.
Luke drank while he watched the constant movement of lights from the window. His discomfort over Jacen was definite in some ways—the lengths his nephew seemed prepared to go, the ways he used the Force—but vague in another way, a far deeper and more troubling one: he feared for Jacen. Maybe the hooded man was someone who would threaten Jacen or attempt to corrupt him. Whatever the man represented, he was a danger: not danger in the immediate sense, like someone wielding a weapon, but something far more general and all-pervading.
Luke didn’t deal in words like evil, but that was the only word that felt as if it fit.
Maybe it’s a vision of war. Well, I don’t need a Force dream to warn me of that. Nobody does.
He felt Mara walk up behind him and give him a soothing touch from the doorway, just a brief warm reassurance at the back of his mind.
“You could have made us both a cup of caf,” she said. “If we’re going to give up sleeping, might as well do it right.”
“You’d think I’d take times like this in my stride by now.”
Mara tidied her hair with one hand as she fumbled with the caf dispenser. “Politics? I don’t think that ever gets easier—not when your own family is tied up in it.”
“It’s Ben I’m most worried about.”
“He gave a good account of himself at Centerpoint.”
“But he’s thirteen. Okay, I let him go, but he’s still a child. Our child.”
“How old were you when you dived headlong into the Rebellion? Not that much older …”
“I was eighteen.”
“Whoa, veteran, huh?” She winked. He saw the grim, cold girl she’d been when he met her, and thought she looked lovelier now that life had been kinder to her for a few years. “Sweetheart, Jacen is taking care of him. He couldn’t have a better teacher.”
“Yeah …”
“Okay, I know we aren’t going to agree on that.”
“You know how I feel. Jacen makes me uneasy. I’ve never felt that way before. I can’t ignore it.”
Her smile faded. “I feel something a little different.”
“I can’t shake it.”
Mara looked about to snap back, but she nodded to herself a few times as if rehearsing a more measured response. “I feel some worrying things in the Force, too, but I’ve got a theory.”
“I’m all ears.”
She paused again, looking down at the carpet. “I think he’s in love and it’s tearing him up.”
“Jacen? In love? Come on …”
“Trust me. I felt something like it before with someone I was pursuing and I read it all wrong then, too. A messy, painful love affair can make people feel pretty dark—all that anger and desperate love.”
“But he’s a Jedi. He can control all that.”
“We’re Jedi. We married, so how much did we control all that?”
He wanted to believe her. Mara was as smart as they came: she would never have survived as the Emperor’s Hand if she hadn’t had a finely tuned sense of danger and the ability to put her own distracting emotions aside. She had to be able to see what was truly there, not what she wanted to see.
Her tone softened. “Shall I tell you what I see? I see Ben becoming someone who’s comfortable with his Force powers and not resenting us for making him a Jedi. We couldn’t put him straight, but Jacen could, and we should be grateful to him for that.”
“Jacen plays fast and loose with his own powers. He projected himself into the future, and don’t tell me that didn’t worry you. I don’t want Ben learning that kind of thing—and do we really know what skills Jacen learned while he was away? He’s changed, Mara. I feel it.”
She pressed a cup into his hand and stroked his hair, but all he could feel now was a distance that shouldn’t have been there, as if she was becoming wary of him—or wary of upsetting him. “Jacen’s grown up, too. He’s taking a different path as a Jedi, that’s all. We don’t have all the answers.”
“It’s more than that. I’m having dreams and they’re about a threat to us.”
“You really believe Ben’s at risk?”
“I feel Jacen is at risk. I don’t want Ben sucked into this with him.”
“The future isn’t fixed.”
“Oh, but it is when Jacen tampers with it.”
“Whoa, let’s not fight about this.”
“I want us to find another mentor for Ben.”
“Luke, did you happen to notice there’s no line forming for the job?”
However strong her defense of Jacen, Luke didn’t feel genuine certainty in Mara. He put the caf aside and pulled her to him, looking into her eyes. A few lines feathered from their corners, and there was a scattering of white in the mass of red hair framing her face, but she was still perfect as far as he was concerned, still his rock, still his heart.
And she was still wrong.
“Mara, I can’t ignore this.”
“Fine.” He felt her shoulders tense. “Go ahead and alienate Ben just when he’s starting to settle down. So what if Jacen’s explored some strange philosophies and communed with bugs? We’ve both been into the dark side, and we came through it.”
“So you can feel the dark side.”
“No, I feel that Jacen’s developing powers way beyond mine, and that he’s good for Ben, and that he would never harm him.” She stepped back from Luke and he sensed she was shutting him out now, perhaps to stop the conversation from degenerating into an argument that would have no winners. “That makes him a good influence. Without Jacen, we’d have a teenage son with strong Force powers who won’t listen to us. Now that’s really dangerous.”
She had a point. It seemed a good moment to concede. “I can’t argue with that.”
“But …”
“I never said but.”
“I heard but and I felt but.”
“… but I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t put some effort into finding out who or what this is in my dreams.”
Mara pursed her lips for a moment, looking to one side of him, and then managed a smile. She knew when she couldn’t shift him from an idea. And he meant it. The dreams were too strong and insistent to ignore, even if it meant causing friction with Mara. She would come around in time; if he ignored his instincts, the consequences might be far worse than a few silent breakfasts and black looks.
Then the smile became broader, as if she knew that. “I’m going to get some sleep. And so should you.”
“I’ll finish my caf. Later.”
Luke took a long time draining the cup. He sat staring out the window, focusing on the bright green light of a distant illuminated sign to be sure that he was meditating and not dreaming. He tried to reach for the hooded man to make him show his face. The green light wavered and filled his field of vision: there were shapes within it, a feeling of familiar things in different guises and somehow unrecognizable, but the figure in the hood remained elusive.
And it was getting light now. Coruscant’s towers and spires were silhouetted against a pink-and-amber sunrise.
Of all the dreaded things that came to Luke in those dreams and visions, the one that plagued him most was the feeling of familiarity.
He had felt something like this before.
He just couldn’t pin it down.
JACEN SOLO’S PRIVATE APARTMENT, CORUSCANT.
I wish you were here.
Jacen could reach out and touch Tenel Ka in the Force, and at that moment he would have given nearly anything to see her and his daughter, Allana, again. He clos
ed his eyes and saw Tenel Ka—the same smile as when he had first left her, cradling the baby—and let his presence expand and merge gently with hers. He felt the warmth spread up from his stomach into his chest: she had felt him, and returned the touch.
Baby? Allana was four now; she was a little girl, walking and talking. Every time he sneaked a visit to see her, she’d grown a lot. Did she ask about her daddy? No, she was Hapan royalty, and even at that age she would have been schooled to remain silent about her parentage. How tall was she now? Was she aware of her Force powers yet? He had endless questions, the kind that a father who saw his daughter daily never had to ask.
I’m not there for her. I’m not seeing her grow up. I don’t even have a holo of her.
It was much easier to reach out when he levitated like this, legs crossed, hands in his lap. Without the sensory distraction of a seat beneath him or the fabric of the chair against his hands, he could focus totally on the ebb and flow of the Force around and within him.
He let the warmth fade before it became a lasting beacon for … he wasn’t sure yet. But Tenel Ka would understand that he had to be discreet even in the Force these days. He drew his touch back to the here and now. It felt like a final good-bye.
Jacen wasn’t sure just how much Lumiya could detect, and his secret family had to be protected.
But the person he most wanted to have at his side then was his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, a man he had never known but who had stood where Jacen stood now—on the threshold of becoming Sith.
Once crossed, there was no return. It wasn’t one of his explorations of Aing-Tii flow-walking or some other arcane Force skill that he could dabble in and withdraw from when it suited him. It was everything he had been raised to reject; and yet what Lumiya had shown him was so true, so inevitable, and so necessary that he had no choice but to believe it.
But can I believe Lumiya?
Her skills were prodigious. He’d been taken aback by the Force illusion in her asteroid habitat. Lumiya might well have been a true Sith follower fighting to prove to Jacen that history was a one-sided story written by the Jedi; or she might have been a clever, manipulative, and infinitely patient woman with her own agenda, seeing Jacen as a useful stepping-stone along the way.
But the part about the Sith way being a force for order and peace if used selflessly … it’s true. I feel it. I know it—and I wish I didn’t.
But is it me?
Jacen still scoured his heart and soul for the slightest sign that his motivation was ambition. He could only feel fear and dread: he didn’t want this burden.
That’s why it’s been given to you.
He lowered himself until he was sitting normally, and took deep breaths until he felt ready to reenter the everyday world. But given the choice right then between a chance to be with Tenel Ka and a moment to speak to Anakin Skywalker—yes, he would have opted for the latter. Just a few minutes, to ask this one question: Did you feel the doubt and reluctance that I feel before you crossed that line?
You had a secret love, too, didn’t you?
Jacen’s state of reluctant acceptance was punctured all too often now by wondering if he was falling into the same trap as his grandfather. He needed to know if it was different, because the outcome two generations ago had been disastrous for the galaxy. He just needed to be absolutely sure.
Many other beings in the galaxy’s history had believed they were the Chosen One of their particular culture, born to create order, and all of them had clearly been wrong. Jacen never forgot that.
But while he was wondering, events weren’t waiting for him and the war was coming closer. He needed to talk to Admiral Niathal. She was a hard-liner: ample proof that you couldn’t judge every member of a species by its general reputation. For a peace-loving people, the Mon Calamari had produced an awful lot of tough naval officers.
But you couldn’t maintain peace without the capacity for war. Everywhere he looked, Jacen saw the certain truth of Lumiya’s words. The Sith way was neither evil nor dangerous in the hands of the sincere. He just wasn’t sure about her sincerity.
And he had to be sure of his own.
Ben was still asleep in the suite next door. The boy had done a lot of growing up in the last few weeks, and Jacen saw the man he would become—strong, but measured and able to control his passions—but today’s work was for Jacen alone. He summoned an air taxi and headed for the Senate Building.
The taxi dropped him in the plaza, where a few people were already entering and leaving the huge domed structure. Senate delegates kept odd hours. There was always activity in the building, always a debate or a select committee or some business in progress twenty-four hours a day. The Mon Calamari started their day early, and Jacen wanted to simply run into Niathal without arranging a meeting and so attracting attention.
And he could do that.
He knew where Niathal was. When he had seen her the day before, he had formed a lasting Force impression of her as someone who wanted to talk to him very badly. She wanted Omas’s job, although she was going to have to go through the office of Supreme Commander first. Admiral Pellaeon, new in the post but a veteran in the world of military politics, was not about to cede his office yet. Of course she wanted to talk to Jacen. Word of his willingness to solve problems decisively had obviously reached her.
So he could feel her now. And when he walked into the building and made his way along the marble public corridors and then along the carpeted ones accessible only to those with accredited identicards, he was tracking her.
Am I scheming? Jacen was ambushed by the thought. No. I have to know who I can rely on, if I ever need them.
He didn’t need to influence her to get her to walk his way. He simply found the offices where she and other Mon Calamari had gathered, and found somewhere to sit where she would pass him sooner or later. He settled on a padded bench in the lobby and watched the doors.
A naval officer tied to a desk. No wonder she’s frustrated. Jacen wondered how she would handle high office if she got her wish and took Omas’s job. Politics were the ultimate frustration.
He thought of Lumiya while he waited. And Ben had asked if he was going to tell Luke about Brisha and Nelani. Hello, Uncle, Lumiya’s back. Thought you’d like to know—for old times’ sake. No, it wasn’t news he felt he could break to him.
Jacen felt the ripple of disagreement and counterargument around Niathal and her resistance as she stood firm. Sometimes he could almost see it, like a faint ghost image of color and shape and movement as the emotions ebbed and flowed. Niathal was all certainty. That was something he sought, too.
He heard doors part and the muffled sound of voices. Admiral Niathal appeared in the lobby in a white uniform, very formal, and had no choice but to spot him. He was facing the doors. She had to acknowledge him. Jacen stood.
No use of the Force. Let’s see where this leads.
“Jedi Solo,” she said, giving him that sideways stare. He felt her caution. “Are you here on business?”
“Just passing.”
“I’d like to hear your account of the raid on Centerpoint. It would be very helpful.”
Jacen bowed his head politely. “Would you like to continue the discussion outside this building?”
Niathal began walking toward the exit without answering. That didn’t take any persuasion at all. They didn’t speak until they were outside and crossing the plaza. Niathal was not one for small talk, and Jacen liked her forthright manner.
“How far back have we really set Centerpoint Station?” she asked. They headed for the public landing area and got into one of the waiting air taxis. “Cayan Club, driver.”
That was a very exclusive officers’ club that Jacen had never visited. Useful. He closed the partition that separated the passenger cabin from the cockpit to ensure privacy. “Six months,” he said. “No more.”
“Then,” said Niathal, “that’s how long we have until a full war breaks out.”
She left
the stark analysis hanging on the air, as if she was waiting for Jacen to fill the silence.
“I don’t feel the galaxy can take another war so soon after the Yuuzhan Vong invasion,” he said.
“It’ll be the fourth major war in a century, yes. Poor odds.”
“I’d like to be able to look forward to a century without war.”
“And I’d like to be forced to look for another job, Jedi Solo.”
Jacen thought for a moment that she was being brutally open about her political ambitions, but the way she rolled her head slightly and looked at the battle honor ribbons on her uniform made him realize she meant an end to any need for war.
Perhaps the two were the same thing. “My own family is divided over this.”
“Most Jedi never have families,” Niathal said.
“We’ve had an interesting relationship with what we call attachment.” Was she checking out his loyalties? “My duty as a Jedi is to consider trillions of other lives.”
“If we continue to botch actions like the Corellian engagement, then we could be in for a long war.”
“I’ve thought about how successful an attack on their shipyards might be,” Jacen said.
“I doubt the political will could be bent to more than support for a blockade.”
“Ties up a lot of resources.”
“So do assaults on multiple fronts.”
It was one of those conversations that was test and counter-test; but Jacen didn’t blame Niathal for being wary of a Jedi’s political will, given Luke’s indecisive approach.
The taxi headed south from the Senate, through a city of people beginning the day and others returning after a night at work. They were in the heart of the restaurant district that served the Senate, its skylanes lined with smart places to eat and elegant hotels and private clubs where politicians and senior military officers could find rooms and discreet service.