[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(58)

Ben closed his eyes and tried to feel something, anything about the theft. But he couldn’t. There was no tragedy here to detect, no vast outpouring of emotion concerning the amulet. He could not see the perpetrator’s face or get a sense of his spirit. And he could detect no one in these offices, meaning that the thief had already made good his escape. With only a few minutes’ head start, he could be anywhere in the city, and he could have had much more than a few minutes.

Ben opened his eyes and sighed. He’d failed. He’d failed Jacen, and now all the Jedi were at risk.

No, wait a minute-maybe he hadn’t, not yet. Perhaps, instead of slinking home and admitting to failure, he could continue the mission, improvising. He might be able to follow this Faskus and take the amulet back from him.

But where would Faskus take it? Ben took out his datapad and accessed files that he hadn’t read before, those pertaining to the amulet’s origin and history.

The main file on the subject said that it had been fabricated on Ziost some two thousand standard years ago, and that the dark side energies invested in it kept it from corroding or showing wear. Ben frowned. Jacen didn’t believe in dark side energies, or the dark side of the Force per se, and so Ben didn’t, either … but so many of the Jedi they dealt with were so old-fashioned on that point that Jacen did grudgingly employ terms like light side and dark side to communicate with them effectively.

Stolen by a man from Ziost, crafted on Ziost-Faskus was obviously going to take the amulet back to Ziost.

Ben recognized the name of that planet, and it gave him a little shiver. Ziost was the homeworld of the Sith-the species that had given their name to the later order. In subsequent centuries Sith referred to Force-users of any species who followed the order’s traditions.

His datapad yielded a little information on Ziost, and Ben was surprised to discover that, as galactic distances went, Ziost was not far from Almania-a few hours’ ride away by shuttle. But no shuttles would be going there; worlds noted for their inhospitable weather and ancient horrors just were not common tourist destinations. He’d have to acquire transport some other way.

But what to do now? Leave the display case as he’d found it?

Jacen had said that his core mission was to put the amulet in his, Jacen’s, hands. If it were reported stolen, it might be harder to acquire. If the authorities picked up this Faskus of Ziost, it might be very hard indeed.

Ben pulled his copy of the amulet from an inner pocket and laid it on the velvet pillow. He took several looks at the holo of the real amulet on his datapad and was careful to arrange the fake and its chain on the pillow just as they appeared on the image. Then he took Faskus’s note and remounted the display case top.

There. Now no one would know that the real amulet had been stolen, unless they took out the fake and studied it. Maybe not even then; it was clear the local Tendrando office had no idea what they’d had, and perhaps they’d never recorded enough information about it to tell the real one from a fake.

Ben spent extra minutes covering his tracks. At the viewport by which he’d entered the offices, he used the Force to untie the cable and drag it in to him, then closed the viewport again.

Now there would be no sign that any unauthorized person had been here.

He left the offices by the front way, summoned the turbolift, and descended to street level.



Two minutes after Ben’s departure, the protocol droid in the reception area came alive. Its optics lit up, and its head swiveled to look at the display case. The image its visual sensors picked up was compressed and transmitted over a specific comm frequency.

Kilometers away, at the Drewwa Spaceport, a hundred-meter-long bulk freighter rested in one of the outlying hangars. In the days it had been in port, the in offensive-looking vessel had attracted little attention, her minimal crew carrying on a small-scale disinterested trade in droids from discontinued lines.

But the squat, inelegant vessel would have attracted more interest had anyone gone aboard to examine her. Inspectors would have found that half the cargo bays had been converted to starfighter bays, and that the black-and-bronze starfighters were well known on the space lanes as pirate vehicles.

The freighter’s name of record was false. Her transponder indicated that she was the High Tide, while her crew, and victims, knew her as the Boneyard Rendezvous.

The comm board’s computer received the distant droid’s message, interpreted it, and popped a text message onto the display of its captain, whose name was Byalfin Dyur. Dyur, an underfed-looking Bothan with lovely bronze-colored fur, looked away from his holodrama and read aloud to the other crew members on the bridge: “Red Braid in motion. Tracker activated. Confirm handoff.” He sat back and sighed, glad that the stopover on this overly lawabiding moon would not be protracted.