[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(107)

Ben frowned. But not all arguments had to be logical. Kiara was a little girl, and one who had just lost her father. Her daddy. Never mind that her daddy seemed to have been a small-time criminal and the odds, supported by files of data Ben had seen on the Guard computers, were that Kiara would grow up to be a small-time criminal or another type of drain on society. She might grow up to invent ;I medicine better than bacta, or to write songs or act in holodramas that made things better for people. Or she might have children who did these things, or teach children to do these things.

But not if she died now.

He wasn’t even sure he liked her; they hadn’t had energy enough to talk very often on their long walk. But he felt kid for her, he felt protective of her

He felt.

And it seemed to him that neither thinking nor feeling heeded to be the boss of the other. In a Jedi, they should be mixed, partners. He wondered if that was the case with Guards as well.

None of that answered the question of why the voices had started by suggesting that he protect Kiara and now insisted that he eat her. But the answer - a possible answer, anyway - came to him.

They had told him to protect her because that’s what he had decided to do, and he hadn’t known how. In suggesting that they could get Ben and Kiara off this planet Alive, they had made Ben listen to them. He had begun to understand them … and then had begun to think the way they thought. And now they could suggest different things. They could suggest what they’d wanted all along.

He felt a burst of anger, but clamped down on it. He didn’t have the energy to be angry right now. He noticed that the voices had grown quiet.

And in that quietness, Ben told Kiara the story of a young Force-sensitive slave boy who won a Podrace on Tatooine and earned his freedom.

“Did they feed him when he won?” Kiara asked. “All he could eat, and even more,” Ben assured her.

Not long afterward, Ben sensed the eye in the sky. He looked up into the clouds and pulled his all-weather cloak even tighter around them.

“Is he there?”

“Yes, he is.”

This pilot was not subtle. He sent the TIE fighter into a screaming dive that ended up with the vehicle a mere twenty meters above the ground. Then he had to slow and circle, because Ben’s dummy was not visible from the open spaces around the citadel. He had to climb and then drop into the gap between outer and inner wall … and then he lined his lasers up on Ben’s dummy.

Now. Through the Force, Ben exerted himself against the stones at the top of the inner wall, all along the course of wall above the starfighter.

It was hard going. He felt so tired, and it was almost impossible to focus. But an understanding that this might be the difference between life and death-from cold, or starvation, or mummification-drove him, and he saw the stones high above begin to rock and then fall free.

The TIE fighter fired, and Ben’s dummy fell over, the blankets catching on fire.

The TIE fighter glided forward slowly on repulsors. Ben knew why. The bolt from a laser cannon hitting a human being wouldn’t necessarily destroy his body completely, but it would turn so much of the body to steam that the victim would seem to explode. It wouldn’t simply fall over. The pilot had to be curious about what had just happened.

The TIE fighter was a mere five meters from the burning dummy when the first stone, no larger than a human head, hit its hull. To his credit, the pilot reacted instantly, veering away and climbing

Straight into the thickest portion of falling stone.

The rocks had fallen more than a hundred meters. Some weighed a quarter ton or more. All had sharp right-angled edges, and some of them hit edge-first.

The TIE fighter spun wildly out of control, hit the citadel’s inner wall, and bounced off again. The twin ion engines were still firing, but the starfighter was spinning so fast that they merely added to the energy of its spiral.

It landed beyond the outer wall, its hull collapsing on impact, and continued to roll, shearing off its solar array wings as it did.

It rolled half a kilometer before coming to a stop against a natural rock abutment.

Ben rose and immediately felt light-headed, but drew on the Force to strengthen and stabilize himself. He helped Kiara up. “We have to hurry,” he said. “More fighters may be coming.”

Ben told Kiara to climb a tree while he examined the wreckage. When he saw what was left of the pilot, a pale-skinned Chev in a bronze uniform, he was glad he had.

It didn’t take him long to pry open the hatch into the starfighter’s small cargo bay. Its contents had broken free of the cloth webbing that had restrained them, but were otherwise intact: two days’ worth of rations for a grown man, a medical kit, power packs, a long-range comlink, a self-inflating raft, water purification tablets … He took it all, and scavenged other goods from the Chev’s body. Then, as fast as they could manage, he and Kiara ran from the site of the crash and back toward the dubious safety of the citadel.