Leia finished smoothly, “…protest too much, after all the help you gave us.” She shot Han a bewildered look. “Are we done here?”
“I think so.” Han gave Lavint a professional, pleasant smile and led Leia to the door. “Try to stay out of trouble.”
“Soon, soon,” Lavint said. “Nice meeting you at last.”
Out in the corridor Leia said, “All right, I’m completely confused. As much as you’ve supported the Corellian cause…”
“…why have I suddenly turned traitor?” Han finished.
“Sweetheart, I didn’t have as much trouble as I should have in getting that information. Which means one of two things. Either security’s not what it should be for that meeting, meaning the Galactic Alliance will have it soon anyway, meaning all I’ve done is to give her a couple of days’ head start in getting the information to them, or there’s a lot of disinformation out there. Meaning that everybody who gets deep enough is getting a different wrong answer. If it’s the first one, then Lavint gets her reward from her government contact. No loss to me or to Corellia. If it’s the second one, Lavint and her government contact will want her into a trap, probably a Dur Gejjen trap set up for us.”
Leia nodded. “You know, if you could apply that smuggler’s brain to real politics, you’d be my equal.”
“Meaning I wouldn’t be able to just draw my blaster and fire at the politicians? What kind of a deal is that?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
ZIOST
This set of ruins was no heap of rubble.
Which was good, since Ben wasn’t sure he could reach the next place on the map.
He had been three days without food, Kiara one. Shaker was down to draining energy from the various batteries Ben had brought from Faskus’s camp; of them, he retained only a partial charge in the primary blaster pistol. The datapads didn’t count-their batteries didn’t contain enough energy to permit an R2 unit to walk four steps.
But this set of ruins…
It clustered high on a mountain ridge, built just below a cliffside hundreds of meters tall. The cliff looked like a portion of the mountain had been sliced away by a giant lightsaber millions of years in the past, leaving the stone to weather until some species decided to build a citadel here.
Not some species. The original Sith species.
The citadel was made of black and mottled gray stone and looked large enough to house a thousand people. But no one lived there now, Ben thought. Not that he could be sure. He detected little flickers of life through the Force, but those impressions were always washed away by the flow of dark side energy that emanated from the place. Like the planet itself, the citadel was suffused in such energy, but more so.
Still, the voices were pleased that he was here. He heard them even when he was awake now. And when he dreamed, they taught him how to fly the eye-shaped craft they had shown him.
Desire, focused the right way, would cause the craft to lift off, to fly. Anger would direct its weaponry-weapons he didn’t understand and could not quite visualize. And he could reach out through it, make contact with his ships, direct them on their missions of
“Ben … Ben …”
He was tired of the voices, and didn’t know why they even bothered to speak his name, since they had his attention all the time now.
Then he realized it wasn’t the voices. It was Kiara.
He looked down at her and frowned. “What?”
She took an involuntary step away. “You’re that way again.”
“What way?”
“Scary.”
He considered his answer. I have to be this way sometimes. It’s how I’m learning. He imagined Jacen saying it to him, back when he was just learning the ways of the Force, luck when the Force had frightened him.
Wait a minute. How can she tell? And what is she feeling? He tried to clear his thoughts-something that he hadn’t really been able to do well since he had gotten hungry and stayed that way.
Because she walked behind him, she had to be sensing something in the change of his body language-either that, or she was sensing something through the Force. Perhaps she was Force-sensitive.
And if that was the case, then she was probably being spooked by manifestations of the dark side. In him.
Again, he shoved away notions of dark side and light side. It was all in what one did with the power.
And yet, since he’d been here, he’d been surrounded by an insinuating malevolence that didn’t come from anything alive. It was energy that had been shaped and left here by hundreds of generations of Sith and followers. And if the energy had definite shape, even when not being generated by the living, was that not the dark side?