[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(109)

Shaker, whose legs straddled the crack, gave a tweetle of alarm and quickly moved to one side. Kiara joined him.

The gap widened more quickly at the room’s center than toward the edges. There it became circular, and up from it, inadequately illuminated by Ben’s glow rod, came a segmented metal arm several meters long … and then the top portions of a vehicle’s spherical main body. Its circular central viewport, lit from behind and glowing an unhealthy yellow, seemed to be an eye regarding them. The sphere was some ten meters in diameter, half of it protruding above floor level; a gap of three meters separated the edge of the floor from the nearest portion of vehicle hull.

Ben swayed, both from weakness and relief. The vehicle was here, it was real … and if the presence he felt within it, a malevolent set of emotions detectable through the Force, was any indication, it was functional, even after centuries in the ground.

“Open,” he commanded.

After a moment, a vertical line appeared beneath the viewport and lowered as a hatch, its near end just reaching the edge of the floor.

Ben bounded across and up into the vehicle.

But if he’d anticipated finding a control couch, a pilot’s yoke, hyperspace and weapons controls, he was disappointed. The interior, which could have occupied only a fraction of the vehicle’s volume, was a single diskshaped chamber, four meters across and two and a half high. The corridor channel leading to the ramp was the only exit. The walls looked like orange pumice, glowing as though they were thin sheets over molten lava, and the vehicle’s interior was very warm.

When he got to the center of the diskshaped chamber, Ben turned around and around, looking for the controls. But he found nothing.

And now even the voices were gone. In their place was a powerful expectation, a sense of waiting.

Ben closed his eyes and tried to get a sense of this place, this vehicle … and he did. For a moment he saw a red-skinned woman in robes of volcanic hues kneeling, her golden polearm on the floor beside her.

That was it, then. The pilot had to communicate with the vehicle through the Force. Quickly he knelt where the woman in his vision had been.

Command. The voice, male, rich in expectant malice, spoke directly into his mind.

Ben looked down the ramp and beckoned for Kiara and Shaker. “Time to go.”

The little girl shook her head. The astromech tweetled at her.

“Kiara, we have to leave.”

“I don’t want to go in that thing,” she wailed. “It’s going to eat me.”

Ben shot her a reassuring grin. “And if it does?”

She took a moment to answer. “You’ll jump down its throat and we’ll cut our way out together.”

“That’s right.”

Still reluctant, she came forward, tentatively took her first step onto the ramp, and ran up into the room. She flopped down to sit beside him. A moment later, Shaker rolled into place on his other side and locked its wheels.

“Close,” Ben commanded, and the ramp lifted.

Now was the part he wasn’t sure of. “Launch,” he said.

For long moments nothing happened, and Ben wondered how many words he would have to go through before he found the correct command. But apparently intent was enough-intent, and visualizing what he wanted to happen.

The light outside the vehicle brightened. Suddenly, blinding white, it reached all the way to the niches in the walls. Ben looked up, seeing only the ceiling above him. Then he closed his eyes again and attempted to see as the vehicle saw.

And he did. The ceiling above the vehicle had drawn aside in two pieces, and sunlight shone down into the chamber. The vehicle began to tremble like a wild animal preparing to spring.

“Get ready,” Ben said, “I think it’s going to…”

The vessel accelerated straight upward, its movement pressing Ben and Kiara down onto the floor.





CHAPTER TWENTY


GILATTER SYSTEM


APPROACHING GILATTER VIII ORBIT

The greatest reward came from the greatest risks, Jacen had said, and Lumiya had agreed with him. “So long as you accurately assess the reward and the risks,” she’d added.

And then she had volunteered to accompany him on this expedition to infiltrate the Confederation election ceremony.

Setting it up had been easy enough. It had been Galactic Alliance Intelligence that had discovered there would be representatives of the Hapes Consortium Heritage Council the conspiracy that had collaborated with Corellia to kill Tenel Ka-at the meeting. And Admiral Niathal had been the first to propose that authenticated independence groups, even from worlds most devoted to the Galactic Alliance, might find admission.

It hadn’t been too much work for Jacen to persuade Niathal that he be the Galactic Alliance agent assigned to attend the meeting-his status as the Jedi with the closest ties to the military ensured him that right. Manipulating things so that Lumiya could accompany him had been trickier, but she admitted to maintaining a number of fully detailed false identities that would withstand scrutiny from either side’s intelligence division, and one of them, that of smuggler Silfinia Ell, had a registered world of birth that would fit the profile GA Intelligence needed. So Jacen had arranged for documents for himself and “Silfinia” from the Ession government, and now, his features heavily disguised under dark spray-on skin color and a beard, he carried an identicard showing him to be a member of Ession’s most violent revolutionary party. Working through Captain Lavint and her mysterious contacts, he had been able to wrangle an admission to the ceremony … but not a vote.