Shocked almost beyond understanding by Ben’s blood-thirst, Luke had prevented his son from executing a death blow against Jacen. Nor had Luke chosen to finish Jacen himself. He had led Ben in sudden flight from the Anakin Solo—a flight to prevent Ben from taking the next, possibly irreversible, step toward the dark side that Jacen had planned for the boy.
But was it the right decision? At that moment, it had seemed like the only possible choice. Ben’s future, his decency, had teetered in the balance. Had either Skywalker killed Jacen, Ben would have fallen toward the dark.
Some people came back from the dark. Luke had. Others didn’t. Ben becoming a lifelong agent of evil had not been a certainty.
What was certain was that Jacen was alive. And now, as Jacen furthered his plans for galactic conquest, more people would die. They would die by the thousands at least, probably by the tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps by the millions.
And Luke would be responsible.
So had it been the right decision? Ben against thousands of lives?
Logic said no—no, unless in falling to the dark side, Ben became as great a force for evil as Jacen Solo was or their mutual grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, had been.
Emotion said yes—yes, unless Ben interpreted Luke’s refusal to kill as a sign of weakness, and that decision fostered contempt in him, contempt for Luke and the light side of the Force. That could push him along Jacen’s path despite Luke’s intent.
And either way, those thousands would die.
A translucent white rectangle, tall and very thin, appeared on the viewport ahead of Luke. It rapidly broadened, revealing itself as the reflection of a door opening in the wall behind him. Jedi Master Kyp Durron stood in the doorway, his brown robes rumpled, his long graying-brown hair damp with sweat and unkempt. His expression, normally one of mild amusement layered over what was usually interpreted as a trace of cockiness, was now more somber—neutrality concealing concern. “Grand Master?”
“Come in.” Luke did not turn to face Kyp. The view of Endor’s wilderness was soothing.
Kyp moved in and the door shut behind him, eliminating the illuminated rectangle from Luke’s field of vision. “The door chimes do not appear to be working on this passageway, and you were not responding to your comlink…”
Luke frowned. “I didn’t hear it. Maybe the battery is dead.” He pulled his comlink from the tunic of his white Tatooine-style work suit. The ready light on the small cylindrical object was still lit. A quick examination showed that the device had been shut off. Puzzled, Luke turned it on again and tucked it away.
“Just a routine report. The StealthXs are spread, by wing pairs, across a broad area, under camouflage netting. Many of the pilots found useful landing spots in areas where debris from the second Death Star came down and created burn zones. The younglings are packed into two large chambers, acting as dormitories, on this outpost, but a reconnaissance team of Jedi Knights has found a cavern system not too far away that will provide ample space for a training facility…and some defense against orbital sensors. The Jedi Knights are relocating a nest of rearing spiders there. Once they’re certain the spiders and their eggs are all gone, we’ll begin transferring the younglings.”
“Good. But don’t put too much effort into making those caverns livable. We’ll be leaving Endor before many more weeks pass.”
Kyp nodded. “Otherwise, we seem to be dealing well with the local Ewoks.”
“Any we know?”
“No…Wicket’s family group’s territory is still limited to areas south of here. But your idea of bringing in See-Threepio as an interpreter is paying off. The local clan seems to like him.”
“Good.”
Kyp did not immediately reply, so Luke turned to give him a look. The younger Master seemed to be pondering his next words. Luke cocked an eyebrow at him. “Anything else?”
“There’s been some question about our next action against Jacen.”
“Ah, yes.” Luke turned to look out the viewport again. “I don’t know. Why don’t you arrange that?”
There was a long silence, then: “Yes, Grand Master.”
The rectangle of light reappeared. Kyp’s reflection moved into it and it closed again, leaving Luke in silence and peace.
And confronted by the memory of Jacen, bloodied and battered almost beyond recognition, crawling away from him, Ben’s vibroblade lodged in his back. Ben’s face appeared before him, mouthing the words, This kill is mine.
Luke shivered.
chapter three
KASHYYYK, MAITELL BASE, HANGAR HOUSING THE MILLENNIUM FALCON
There were still bright spots before Han’s eyes, right at the center of his focus, from the brilliance of the turbolaser blast he had almost flown into. He had to scan, traverse his line of sight, in order to work around them.
Directly before him was an old sabacc table with a rusty rim and a grime-spotted felt surface; a brandy bottle and a set of tumblers rested upon it. Beyond was the Millennium Falcon, her boarding ramp down, with Wookiee utility vehicles and Confederation spacecraft parked beside her. The long hangar door the Falcon faced was open, showing riverbank, trees that were stunted and tiny by Kashyyyk standards, and skies filled with haze and smoke clouds dimming the sunlight. Other buildings were visible on the far side of the river, all remnants of a long-abandoned spaceport dating from the years of Imperial occupation.
The medics had said the bright spots would fade within a few hours. Not that this was much comfort. He wanted to be working on the Falcon now, at this instant. Grinning momentarily at his own childlike impatience, he lifted his tumbler and took another sip of the liquid within it. It burned a little as it went down, a smooth, flavorful heat.
“What is it?” Leia, seated in the spindly metal chair next to his, had seen his smile.
“I was thinking that if you’re going to have to put up with enforced downtime, there are worse ways to do it than with a good brandy and your best girl.”
In his peripheral vision, he caught Leia’s smile, but her tone was slightly less agreeable. “So many things wrong with what you said. First, you don’t mention liquor before your wife. Then there’s the whole girl–woman issue, but that’s not relevant because you clearly didn’t mean it in a spirit of dismissiveness or disenfranchisement. But the phrase best girl implies there are other girls…”
“There are. There’s one now.” Han pointed.
Descending the Falcon’s boarding ramp was their daughter, Jaina. As diminutive as her mother, and as beautiful, though with narrower features, she had inherited her father’s knack for mechanics, as suggested by her current form of dress—overalls spattered with spots of lubricant and hydraulic fluid. She had also inherited her mother’s way with the Force, a fact attested to by the lightsaber hanging from her belt. As she descended, she wiped her hands on an oily blue rag, then noticed Han watching. “Dad! All fixed.”
“You’re kidding.”
Jaina shook her head, then took a chair at his table. “Alema’s attack did some damage, but she didn’t have much time to root around in the hyperdrive before Mom interrupted her. I replaced a couple of parts, and it checks out in the green. You’ll want to take her up and do a practice run or two, I expect.”
“I expect. Thanks.” He gave Leia a sidelong look. “I’m getting more obsolete every day. I don’t even have to patch up the Falcon’s battle damage anymore.”
Leia gave him a smile tinged with malice. “You’ll never be obsolete as long as some people prefer old-fashioned tactics and parts.”
“It’s such a shame you can’t spank a Jedi.”
There was a clattering of heels, and Han looked up to see Jagged Fel and Zekk coming down the boarding ramp.
Fel, son of one of the Empire’s most celebrated fighter pilots, and nephew of one of the New Republic’s, was a well-muscled man of middle height, his hair, neatly trimmed beard, and mustache black, a white lock at his hairline marking an old scalp wound. He wor
e a black flight suit; on a dark night, he would look like a face and hands floating in the air.
Zekk, Jaina’s Jedi partner, was unusually tall, his long dark hair currently braided. Like Leia, he was dressed in ordinary Jedi robes.
Jag held a blaster pistol, his finger not in the trigger housing, and as he neared Han he reversed it, offering it butt-first. “Found it.”
Han set down his drink. He took the pistol, twirled it experimentally, and holstered it. “Now I feel dressed again. Where was it?”
“During your acrobatics, a hatch over one of the escape pods must have popped open. Your blaster fell into it, and the hatch closed and locked the next time you were right-side up.”
“Thanks.” Han turned back to Leia. “Actually, I could get used to this. Have the youngsters do all the work, all the time. Hey, somebody get me a drink.”
Zekk sat in the fourth and last chair, picked up Han’s tumbler from where it rested, and moved it two centimeters closer to Han. “Your drink, sir.”
“Well, some chores are easier than others.”
“So.” Leia fixed the three newcomers with a quick, serious look. “Anything? Any sign of Alema?”
Jag, still standing, shook his head. “None.” His voice was thoughtful. “Extra none.”
Leia frowned, puzzled. “What does that mean?”
Zekk cocked a thumb over his shoulder toward the Falcon. “Alema left behind no fingerprints. No threads from her robes. There weren’t any skin cells on any of the bulkheads you said she hit.”
Han scowled. “She had to have left fingerprints on my blaster. She pulled it to her with the Force, caught it in her hand.”
“Her left hand, you said.” Jag’s voice was thoughtful.
“Yeah.”
“She has to have finally accepted prosthetics,” Jag considered. “Though the custom is to obtain prosthetics identical to your original limbs, down to every mole and fingerprint whorl, that’s not because of some unbreakable law of cybernetics. She could have gotten replacements without identifying features.”
Leia shook her head, clearly unhappy. “So there’s nothing to prove Alema was ever there.”
Han snorted. “Nothing but a damaged and repaired hyperdrive.”
“Which still isn’t proof.” Zekk gave Leia an apologetic shrug. “We really don’t have any forensic means to distinguish between the cuts of different lightsabers. But why do you need proof? We believe you.”
“Because I’m not sure I believe myself at this point. I couldn’t even feel her in the Force. Only Lumpy. I mean, Waroo.” Leia looked around guiltily, caught in the act of using a childhood nickname abandoned by its owner. Fortunately, Waroo was not in the hangar. “I don’t even know how she escaped.”
“I have an idea.” Jaina frowned, thoughtful. “But it’s pretty weird.”
“Let’s go with weird. Much better than nothing.” Han paused to refill his tumbler, then waved the bottle around, a want-one? gesture.
Jag nodded. “I’ll have one.”
Zekk looked at him, startled. “Colonel Clean Living accepts a brandy when he might have to fly later in the day?”
“Who is it who says I need to learn to unclench before I lock permanently into a full-body grimace? Seems to me it was a tall Jedi with too much hair.” Jag accepted a tumbler from Han and gave the older man a nod of thanks before sipping.
Jaina gave Zekk and Jag an admonishing look. “Back to the subject. Instead of this attack of Alema’s being some new tactic, a new piece of the puzzle, maybe it’s actually an old one with a new coat of paint.”
Leia leaned back in her chair, which gave off a metallic creak. “Let’s hear it, sweetie.”
“Remember when Jacen and Ben went to Brisha Syo’s asteroid? Ben had a fight with an evil Mara phantom.”
Han and Leia exchanged a glance. Han shrugged. “You’re saying we just fought a phantom.”
“A phantom wouldn’t leave fingerprints, Dad. A phantom could vanish instantly from a sealed freighter.”
Han shook his head. “But Brisha Syo is dead. Her mother, Lumiya, is dead.”
“Right, Dad. But we’re getting reports that Alema is now piloting a craft that resembles an ancient Sith meditation sphere.”
Han stared accusingly at his daughter, then at the liquor bottle. “Sacred brandy, you’ve failed me. My daughter is talking and I don’t understand her anymore.”
Jag smiled. “Like her father, she’s prone to skipping steps when describing her reasoning.” He gestured to quell any protest from Jaina. “She means, the only Sith we’re aware of in all this mess is Lumiya, and we know Alema has been associating with her. Alema probably inherited the Sith ship from Lumiya. What else did she inherit? Perhaps some sort of weird Sith Force technique?” He swirled his tumbler and took another sip. “Plus, I’m not convinced there even was a Brisha Syo.”
It was Zekk’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
Jaina’s voice was soft but insistent. “Stay on target, Jag.”
“I’m on target. I’ll discuss Brisha Syo later.”
Leia considered. “So why was I seeing Alema but feeling Waroo?”
Her daughter shrugged. “I don’t know. But I suspect that your instinct not to cut her down was a very good one.”
“She’s going to use this technique again. And she’ll get better with practice.” Jag set his empty tumbler on the table, shaking his head at Han’s silent offer of a refill. “So our need to find her is more pressing than ever. Especially in light of the fact that she’s the number one suspect in the murder of Mara Jade Skywalker. We don’t want the Grand Master to devote more and more resources to hunting her down, not with the civil war becoming bloodier, more complicated. The Jedi are needed elsewhere.”
Han nodded. “So you’ll need…Colonel Solo’s shuttle. The one he used on the trip to that asteroid.”
Jag looked dubious. “Brisha Syo, or Lumiya, would never have let the shuttle leave with a correct plot of the asteroid’s location.”
Han grinned. “Just because you’re young doesn’t mean you have to be stupid, Jag. Sure, she’d have fixed the coordinates in the shuttle’s memory. But go deeper into the shuttle’s records. Amount of fuel burned, to the milliliter, per burn. Duration in hyperspace for each jump. Amount of time after leaving hyperspace until the shuttle hypercomm receives traffic, to the millisecond, compared with when that traffic was originally dispatched.”
Jag considered, and whistled again. “We’d need some high-end computing and decryption power to process that kind of data.”
“We can get it, sonny. Talon Karrde or Booster Terrik will give it to us, if no one else. But first we’ll have to get aboard…” Han tried to prevent himself from grimacing, but couldn’t, not quite. “Aboard the Anakin Solo. Get a crack at the colonel’s shuttle. Planning session?”
Jag nodded. “A couple of hours. You can comm around and get that computer time for us. We all need some downtime for our brains. Zekk and Jaina wanted to get in some lightsaber training for when we do run Alema down.”
“Two hours.” Han rose, bent to kiss his wife, and marched toward the Falcon, feeling slightly better than he had when the talk had started—better because things now made a little more sense, better because he now had a direction.
Then, vision still faulty, he stumbled over the bottom of the boarding ramp and was reminded that not everything was back to normal yet.
Jaina and Zekk left moments later. Leia debated going with them, getting in some additional training, but decided she’d had enough lightsaber work for one day.
Jag stared a moment at Han’s chair, then sat in it. He glanced at Leia, his posture typically rigid. “Don’t tell anybody I’m doing this.”
“Doing what?”
Slowly, methodically, he leaned back in a typically Han Solo–esque slouch. Once his back was flush against the angled back of the aged chair, he put his elbow up on the table, propped his head against his hand.
Leia laughed at him. “How does it feel?”
“So wrong, I can barely describe it. How has your husband managed not to sustain spinal damage all these years?”
“Stubbornness.”
“Jaina’s certainly inherited it. Stubbornness, I mean. Not bad posture.”
“She got her posture from my side of the family.” Leia sobered. “What did you mean about not being convinced Brisha Syo actually existed?”
Jag took a deep breath before answering. “I can’t say I have all the skills of a security investigator like Corran Horn. But I’m suspicious of anyone who seems to have only one purpose in life and then immediately dies.” He looked off into the distance, past the Falcon, past the walls of the hangar, past the smoke clouds and the burning horizons of Kashyyyk. “Nobody had ever heard of her before she showed up on Lorrd. We’ve been able to trace a few of her movements and have a single garbled message that suggests she was Lumiya’s daughter. She died—according to Jacen, who has never turned in a detailed report of what went on at the asteroid and is no longer available for debriefing. And the only consequence of her death seems to be that it provided motivation for Lumiya to be on Coruscant, breaking into Galactic Alliance Guard security and shadowing Ben, who may or may not have killed Brisha Syo—he certainly doesn’t remember doing so. That’s the sum total of her existence.” He held out a cupped hand as though to catch a falling raindrop. “There’s nothing there. People tend to leave more traces, more memories. It seems more likely that she was a fiction. An agent of, or an alternate identity of, Lumiya herself.”
Leia studied him. Focused on some distant place, Jag seemed unaware of her presence, and in his eyes Leia saw a bleakness, an emptiness she had not previously noticed.
“Jag, you’re leaving memories.”
Startled, he looked at her. “What?”
“You were comparing yourself to her, weren’t you? To Brisha Syo. You have one purpose left to you, and when that’s done you wonder if you’re just going to vanish, leaving no trace behind.”
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Fury Page 3
