[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(93)

“Faskus is dead,” Dyur said. “The boy and the astromech appear to be heading toward one of the old settlements. And there’s a complication.”

“Go ahead.”

“It looks as though Faskus took his little girl along. She’s still alive. The boy has taken her with him.”

Lumiya sat back and considered. That was … unfortunate.

The orders she had meticulously structured with Jacen didn’t specify what Ben should do in such a case. And while rescuing a little girl might initially give him a warm feeling of satisfaction, continuing to protect her had to be a considerable drain on his attention and energies. Taking her along was not survival thinking, not mission-success thinking, not Sith thinking.

And the boy must know it. He was just too much like his father.

And that meant he’d never be good Sith material. “Kill them,” she said.

“Consider it done.”

“I’ll consider it done when you report that it’s done. Anything else?”

“No, my lady.”

Lumiya made a subtle gesture with her fingers, which would be beneath the view Dyur had of her, and the hologram disappeared.

She winced just a bit, though her servitor droids would not be able to see it beneath her facial scarf. She’d just ordered the death of Luke Skywalker’s son. One more reason for him to kill her if he found out about it.

Ah, well. Perhaps he never would. Even if he did, this was all about Jacen, and now Jacen would not be saddled with an apprentice with a fuzzy, sentimental mind.

ZIOST

The next day, at midmorning, they found the first location marked RUINS on Faskus’s map. It was a mass of collapsed stone-dressed stone blocks that had once formed the wall of a small citadel before some tremendous force had pushed them over. Ben found weathering on all exposed surfaces of the stones, but no sign of blaster scoring, melting, or other recognizable indicators of violence.

And he found no way into the mass. Neither his eyes nor his Force-senses suggested a place he might enter to find intact chambers, nor did Shaker’s sensors.

“We’ll rest and eat here,” he said. “Shaker, set up to detect ion trails and communications, please.”

The droid acknowledged with a musical chirp. And fewer than ten minutes later, just as Ben was finishing a chilled can of nerf steak stew, Shaker beeped again, a complex series of notes.

Ben pulled out his datapad and read: YOU JUST SENT A COMM SIGNAL.

Ben scowled. “I did?”

OF LESS THAN ONE HUNDREDTH OF A SECOND’S DURATION.

“Was there a return signal?”

NO.

Ben glanced at the time in the corner of the datapad’s screen. There were two listings there, one local and one Coruscant, and the local time was exactly one standard hour short of noon.

Could his own datapad be betraying him? Or some other item of his gear? Quickly he unpacked everything from both backpacks, segregating the items into two stacks everything he had examined before, and everything he hadn’t. He attacked the second pile, minutely scrutinizing each item.

He could probably find out the next day if his datapad were the tracking device. Assuming that the communications were taking place at the same time each day, he’d set his datapad aside just before noon, and he and Shaker would move several meters away. If the datapad sent a signal, Shaker could determine that it was that device and not something else on Ben’s person.

He methodically checked all the other items, too, to the point of shaking out his belt pouch over the pile of goods to make sure it was empty.

It wasn’t. Nothing more fell out, but the bottom of the pouch sagged oddly in his hand. The pouch seemed to weigh more than it should, if only fractionally.

He turned the pouch inside out and found the tracking device.

It looked like a small steel marble, albeit one with spindly spider legs that were threaded into the cloth of the pouch, holding it securely in place. One leg stretched to a length of six or seven centimeters.

Ben stared at it, perplexed. When had this been planted on him? Or, more to the point-since it looked like a mobile unit-when had it crawled into his pouch? It could have been at any point between the Jedi Temple and his arrival at Faskus’s camp. His mother’s words about spies accomplishing their tasks without ever being noticed came back to Ben, and he smiled. “Good job, spy,” he said.

Then he felt the eyes in the sky again. He checked his datapad. High noon exactly.

Except this time, the sensation of being watched did not fade after a few seconds. It intensified, and Ben could feel something with it, emotions of wicked amusement, a desire to commit mayhem.

He glanced up. There was a tiny dot up in the sky, in the center of the cloud cover blocking the worst of the sun’s rays from reaching the ground. “Shaker,” he said, “get under cover!”