“It’s not good, is it?” said Corran.
“I’m betting they’ll step up for Corellia in the next few days.”
“Fett’s said to have killed Sal-Solo, or at least one of his Mando thugs did. Where does that leave them?”
Luke had heard the real story from Han. Never had he missed the good old clear-cut days of Rebellion versus Empire, good against demonstrable evil, as much as he had right then. The trouble with taking away the certainty of evil was that its vacuum was filled by all kinds of more nebulous threats, rivalries, and feuds. It became increasingly hard to judge where the threat was coming from.
If it hadn’t been so ingrained in the nature of most species, Luke would have seen it as a Sith plot. It would have been so much simpler.
“I think we should offer Jedi mediation to both the GA and Corellia, as far as the assassination goes,” he said. “I know it sounds bizarre in the middle of a war, but there’s war with rules, and then there’s war with no holds barred, and we need to—”
The doors opened and Mara walked in. “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Ran into a few problems.”
She managed to stop the meeting dead. Luke stared in horror at her face. She had a black eye and split lip; she was holding herself as if her ribs hurt. She settled into her seat in the circle with slow care.
“Ran into an armored division, more like,” said Kyp, staring. “What happened to you, and where shall we send the flowers for the other guy?”
“And this is after a healing trance.” She smiled, and it was genuine, but there was definite anxiety. Luke could feel it. It was all he could do not to abandon the meeting there and then, and go to her. How had he not felt what was happening to her?
“Sorry to interrupt,” she went on. “I assume we’re worrying about the implications of Gejjen’s death.”
“And Mandalorian rearmament.”
“Forget that for just a second,” Luke said. “Mara, I need to know what happened to you.”
“Why, darling, thank you for asking! I’m very well. Just a flesh wound.” She shook her head in disbelief, but it seemed aimed at herself. “Look, I caught Lumiya. She’s in a worse state than I am, believe me.”
“And?”
“The situation’s under control.”
“Where is she?”
“I’m tracking her to her base.”
All eleven Council members were waiting in complete silence for Mara’s next words. She looked at the other Jedi around her, gently pushed Luke’s unspoken inquiry and concern out of her mind with a firm later, and settled back in her chair. Luke couldn’t pin it down, but she was in turmoil under that façade.
“It’s no good looking at me like that,” she said. “I’m not discussing it, I’m not sharing the mission, and I’m not going to take it easy, which I’ll bet is going to be someone’s suggestion. Yes?”
“Mara hath spoken,” said Kyp. “But that doesn’t stop me asking where Lumiya is, and what she’s driving.”
“Nice try, but go find your own deranged dark sider to play with, because Lumiya’s mine.”
Corran gave Luke a knowing smile. “She’s fine.”
Mara was certainly satisfied about something, but not so content about something else. Luke would find out later. He moved the meeting on.
“Can we actually do anything about the Gejjen situation here and now?” There was a chorus of a reluctant “no” around the circle. “Okay, then, all we can do is keep an eye on the situation, and I’ve got a request in with Omas’s secretary to see him as soon as he gets back.”
“You know what happens if heads of state are away when a crisis breaks,” Kyp pointed out. “They take a pounding in the polls, and it’s the beginning of the end. Let’s make the most of Omas while we can.”
“Who’s friendly with Niathal?”
They all turned to look pointedly at Cilghal. She tilted her head slightly to fix Luke with one eye, always a disconcerting thing in a Mon Calamari. “Just because we’re Mon Cals, Luke, it doesn’t mean we have guaranteed harmony. We come from different schools of thought.”
“You’re Ackbar’s niece, and I bet that counts for a lot with a Mon Cal admiral …”
“I’ll do my best, then.”
The meeting broke up, Mara remaining seated. Corran patted her on the head like an indulgent uncle as he passed, and then wagged a silent warning finger: Get that black eye seen to. Luke waited until everyone was well out of earshot and then walked over to squat in front of Mara and put his hands on her knees.
“You can’t keep this from me.”
“I head-butted her, that’s all. Metal jaw, nonmetal head.”
“If you got that close, how did she get away?” Oh, bad question: Luke braced for an onslaught about shaking hands again. “I mean …”
“I think she has a droid with her. Something jumped me from behind, and it wasn’t organic.” Mara showed him a discolored mark like a rope burn at the front of her neck. “Whatever it is, it can pay out a metal cable. And she has this weird spherical ship like a disembodied orange eye.”
“Don’t you think all that’s a good case for not hunting her alone?”
“She wants me to catch up with her. I’ll be extra-ready next time—and there will be a next time.”
He’d promised her. If anyone could take Lumiya, Mara could, and he knew he had to put his own fixation with Lumiya out of his mind—stop it from clouding his judgment. He’d give Mara a little more time, but wondered how he’d feel if she came home battered and bruised like this again.
Chasing individual Dark Jedi was far more difficult and time consuming than he’d bargained for. Sometimes he wondered why Lumiya and Alema had proved so much harder to hunt and deal with than a whole Empire, but that was the answer: the Empire, by its very size and pervasiveness, was everywhere. It was hard to avoid finding it, but two Jedi with concealment skills could vanish very effectively in an entire galaxy. It would always be a case of getting them to come to him—or Mara.
“But you’ll be home for dinner tonight,” Luke said. “Don’t spend all night working again.”
“Believe me, I’ll be home,” she said. “That’s where I’m heading now.”
“I’d better see what Han and Leia have to say about Gejjen, while I hang around the Senate and wait for Omas.”
“If I’m still sitting at home with a congealing plate of nerf casserole at midnight …”
“Okay. Dinner at eight. Set in permacrete.”
Luke walked down the corridor with her in silence and she gave him a conspiratorial grin as the turbolift doors closed. He opened his secure comlink and called Han.
“I’m not in mourning,” Han said, utterly callous in that charming way he had. Luke knew he didn’t care for Gejjen and never had: it was hard to weep for a man who approached you to kill your own cousin, even if that cousin was a grade-A scumbag. “No need to spare my feelings. He was a head shot waiting to happen.”
“What’s the public mood like over there?”
“There hasn’t exactly been a run on mourning clothes, but folks are nervous.”
“So who’s at the helm in Coronet now?”
“They’re slugging it out. For the while, it’s going to be a committee job.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“The biggest task CorSec has is to work out how to manage the lines of suspects. Not that they need to dig up any—two different terror groups here have already claimed responsibility for it. Yes, we have ’em, too.”
“I never realized how divided you all were.”
“We’re never divided about Corellia. Just who’s the best candidate to run it.”
“Are you and Leia okay?”
“Yes, we’re fine, and no, I’m not telling you what we’re doing at the moment. Stop worrying.”
Luke almost raised the topic of a GA smokescreen. It was fairly common to carry out a hit and set it up to look like another faction to achieve maximum discord. But he thought be
tter of it, because it smacked of Jacen, and Han didn’t need to hear that his best friend thought his son—stranger though he was—had a hand in it. Some things were best dealt with by friends, cleaned up, and smoothed over. When Lumiya was finally brought down, Luke would spend his time putting Jacen back on track. It was the least he could do for Han.
Omas couldn’t have picked a worse day to visit his doctor, but it was unusual for him to be so reticent about routine arrangements. Luke hoped it wasn’t something serious.
It was bad enough losing Gejjen, because at least he was a known quantity, and Luke had become used to his way of thinking. If Omas’s future was in doubt, too—well, that was one unknown too many.
CORUSCANT MILITARY SPACEPORT
Ben sat in the cargo hold of the ship long after the ground crew had secured the landing dampers and the drives had cooled completely.
He was almost comfortable staring at the bulkhead opposite, in the sense that he feared taking his eyes off it. If he did that, the numbing meditation he’d slipped into would be broken, and he’d have to think.
Jori Lekauf was gone. It was one of those facts he couldn’t take in even when he saw it happen. The guy had been alive and well the night before, even hours ago, and now he didn’t exist. Ben simply couldn’t feel death.
It was more than the biological facts, and he knew those all too well. The former CSF officers in the GAG had regaled him with fascinating stories from the police forensics labs, but knowing how to cause death and what it looked like, and being able to feel a life wink out of existence in the Force did nothing to hammer home the fact that his friend was gone forever, and that he wouldn’t see him again, and all the things that made Jori Lekauf part of the fabric of the universe, someone who mattered, were so far beyond his reach.
And it was Ben’s fault. Lekauf had died to protect him.
“Come on, Ben. The techs want to start stripping down this crate.”
Captain Shevu stood in the hatch, fingers hooked over the top edge of the coaming. Ben felt that if he moved, the whole world would come unraveled.
“I’ll be along in a minute.”
Shevu waited for a moment and then came to sit down with him. Ben suspected that if he’d been a grown man, Shevu might have been harsher, but he thought Ben was still a kid, too young to be on this kind of mission whether he was a Jedi or not. In many ways, Shevu was right. But nobody was ever old enough to lose a friend and not feel it cutting through to the center of his chest. If Ben ever got that old, he didn’t want to carry on.
“We don’t lose many troopers in special forces. It makes it harder when we do, I think. It’s hard for me, anyway.”
Ben gambled on whether to speak or not. He took a breath and waited to feel everything around him shatter.
“He didn’t have to die, sir.” Once he heard his own voice, Ben just felt like he couldn’t breathe, nothing worse. “He could have taken off. We could have run for it, or even been captured, and the job would still have been done.”
“Ben … our orders were to make it look like a Corellian schism, and not to get caught or leave a trail. Can’t have Jedi exposed as assassins, especially not you. We had to get you out of there.”
“It didn’t have to be me. Any trooper could have done the job. I wanted to do my duty, but if it hadn’t been me, if Jori hadn’t felt he had to protect my identity, he’d be alive.”
“Ben, what do you think would have happened to him if he’d been taken back to Corellia?” Shevu lowered his voice. “You saw what we do here to prisoners. You think worse than that can’t happen in Coronet?”
“So what if I had been caught? My dad would have been humiliated? So what? Jori’s life for Dad being upset?”
“I could give you a list of reasons why having Corellia think their own kind did it helps the GA. But you don’t want to hear that right now.” Shevu stood up and beckoned to Ben to follow. He meant it. “There are anti-Gejjen factions claiming responsibility, so the mission worked fine—strategically. Now go home and take a couple of days off. If you can’t stand being around your folks, or … or around Colonel Solo, come over to my place. My girlfriend won’t mind.”
It was the first time Ben had heard Shevu hint that being around Jacen wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him. Ben didn’t care about Jacen right then, but the rational bit of his mind that wasn’t drowning in shocked grief made a note of it.
“Thanks.”
“Now I’ve got to tell his parents. I’ll have to come up with a really good cover story, and thank providence that there’s no footage of him splashed all over the news right now, because that’d be a really lousy way to find out your son was dead.”
Shevu sounded beaten. He was probably pretty close to Lekauf, but he’d never said. Ben had learned a lesson about being an officer today, and it was that lives were to be spent in pursuit of an objective; it might have seemed obvious, but when you worked alongside the people who might lose their loved ones because of your decisions, it acquired a whole new meaning.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty about this,” Ben said, relieved that he had so far managed not to burst into tears.
“Me neither,” said Shevu. “Because it was supposed to be me who blew the ship if things went wrong.”
“We never planned that—”
“You didn’t. We did. Need to know, and all that.” Shevu stopped a passing ground crew speeder and told the driver to get Ben back to HQ. “Wash that stuff out of your hair and go home.”
An hour later, Ben found himself staring at his familiar reflection in the HQ refreshers, toweling his hair and wondering if Jacen had set him up.
I didn’t have to do the job. Any one of us could have passed unnoticed at a spaceport.
But it was hindsight. Jacen had tasked him to do it before anyone knew where the meeting would take place. Ben still felt something was wrong, but couldn’t pin it down.
He’d just lost his buddy. Maybe that made you think crazy things. When he left the HQ building and walked out into the late-afternoon sun, completely disoriented by the shifts in planetary time over the last forty-eight hours, he lowered his head and just walked aimlessly, hands in pockets.
Suddenly he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. He almost shrieked. He’d shut out everything around him. Then he found he was staring into his mother’s face, and something was terribly wrong.
“Mom! Who hit you?”
“Forget that, Ben.” She hugged him to her, a really desperate and crushing embrace. “I’ve got some questions and I will absolutely not be stalled this time.” She had hold of his shoulders, eyes scanning his face as if she was looking for injury. “This is between you and me, I swear, not your father.”
They ended up in a tapcaf in the Osarian quarter. The table was greasy and the elbows of Ben’s jacket stuck to it every time he leaned on them, but nobody knew them here. Even if the food had been appetizing and not searingly hot, Ben wasn’t hungry.
Mara lowered her voice. “I want to know why you’ve been to Vulpter.”
Ben was stunned. How could she possibly know? Who’d talked? It was completely classified. Most of the GAG hadn’t even been briefed on it.
“I haven’t.”
“You can stop the game. I know where you’ve been, and I have a horrible feeling I know why. The whole planet’s seen the news.”
Mara just stared at him, not blinking, suddenly not his mom at all. He was supposed to deny everything. He stared back, silent.
“I could ask Jacen, sweetheart, but I’m not sure I could believe him if he told me what the time was.”
“You know I can’t talk about my work, Mom.”
“Oh, I know. I’ve never hidden my past from you, so I know exactly what your work entails. I can talk to you like a grown-up, Ben, because once you do the kind of job you’re doing, you’re not a kid any longer. Do we understand each other?”
Ben thought of Jori Lekauf and felt his stomach starting to knot a
nd shake. He desperately wanted to blurt out that his buddy had died and that he wanted to roll time back to before he’d fallen into this mess, and that—that—
“Mom …” He couldn’t get it out. She put her hand on his and squeezed. “Mom, if I tell you, will you tell me who hit you?”
“Okay, it was Lumiya. I caught her, but she got away. I gave her a good hiding, and she won’t get away next time. Now—your turn.”
Ben took a deep breath. This was either going to make everything better, or be the start of something disastrous. He couldn’t tell: all his Force impressions had deserted him.
“I did it, Mom.”
“Involved … or did it?”
Ben’s mouth took over without his permission. “Folding-stock Karpaki, frangible round.”
Mara actually sat back in her chair and her left hand moved as if she was about to put it to her mouth. Her right hand was still clamped tight on his.
“Okay,” she said.
“Lekauf was killed, Mom.” Ben couldn’t remember if she knew Lekauf or not. It didn’t matter. He needed to say his name and tell someone. “Jori got killed—he got killed to save my skin.”
Mara busied herself sipping from the cup in front of her. Osarians liked very strongly scented herbs, and Ben knew he’d never be able to smell that aroma again without being dragged back to this awful moment.
“Why did you do it, Ben?”
“Orders. I was the best person to do it.”
“Your whole company is suddenly short of snipers? Whose orders?”
“Jacen.”
Mara was doing a reasonable job of not reacting, but Ben wasn’t fooled. She was furious. He could see it in the whiteness of her skin, and the contrast with the yellowing bruise around her eye made it even more noticeable.
“Okay, sweetheart,” she said. “Let’s not tell your dad because he’ll rip Jacen’s head off in the mood he’s in at the moment. Can you face coming home?”