“You’re from Intelligence, aren’t you? I would have thought that my own squadron leader would have been the sympathetic one and you would have been a plasteel nek about the whole thing.”
The woman nodded. “Never can tell how the past is going to affect things, can you?” She rose. “I don’t know what your squadron leader’s problem is. Jealousy, or maybe he needs to be in complete control, and the fact that you didn’t divulge about your famous father constitutes a betrayal. As for me …” She offered Syal a slight smile. “Once upon a time, not long after the New Republic won Coruscant that first time, I flew with your father for a few months. I’ve known some of his pilots considerably longer. I know what sort of children he’ll have raised. If you’re really Syal Antilles, I suspect you’re in the clear.”
On her way out the door, she added, “And you might as well legally change your name back. Your secret’s out.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
LORRD CITY, LORRD
SHE WAS WILLOWY-TALL, WITH LONG BLACK HAIR IN A FLOWING ponytail. Ben saw her first from the cockpit of Jacen’s shuttle as the vehicle drifted down on repulsorlifts. The woman was neither distinct nor interesting at that time, merely a shadowy figure leaning, arms crossed, against the hangar pit wall.
But once they were grounded, cleared to emerge, and descending the shuttle’s boarding ramp, she strode forward out of the shadows, and Ben suddenly found her very interesting indeed. Her robes-a green and tan-yellow combination not commonly seen on Jedi-were tailored to her, flattering her figure, and her widemouthed smile was a celebration that invited all who saw it to join in.
Sadly, Ben’s sudden interest was one-sided. She walked quickly to the ramp’s base, her attention fixed on Jacen, her hand extended toward the adult Jedi. “Jacen!” she said. “It’s good to see you.”
Jacen reached the bottom of the ramp and took her hand, but did not draw her into an embrace, not even the cordial embrace of old friends-though her body language, even to Ben’s inexperienced eye, suggested that this was what she expected. “Nelani,” Jacen said. “When I heard that you were the Jedi assigned to the Lorrd station, that you’d be the one meeting us, I was glad-“
“Really?”
“Glad to realize that you’d passed your trials and were fully vested as a Jedi Knight,” he continued. “Congratulations.”
Her smile faltered slightly. “Thank you.” She released her grip on his hand, and her attention finally turned to Ben. “And this must be Ben Skywalker.”
Ben stood silent. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to say anything. It was just that his entire vocabulary, including some choice swear words in Rodian and Huttese he’d gone to great pains to memorize, had just vanished. He wondered where it was.
Nelani cast a worried glance at Jacen. “Does he talk?”
Ben’s vocabulary suddenly returned. “You’re being condescending,” he said.
Absently she ruffled his hair. “Certainly not. You just had me puzzled for a moment.” She returned her attention to Jacen. “So what did you want to do first? Get settled in your quarters at the station?” She gestured toward the exit from the hangar pit, then led them in that direction.
“Have you researched the matter I commed you about?” Jacen asked.
Ben fell into line behind them, furiously smoothing his hair.
“Yes, and I’ve found a contact who seems to know something about your tassels, a Doctor Heilan Rotham. Tactile writing and recording methods are her specialty …”
Dr. Rotham’s offices-also her quarters-were on the ground floor of a university building built of duracrete bricks and falsewoods, then comfortably aged for a couple of centuries. The walls of the corridors and chambers were dark-either soothing or shadowy and threatening, depending on one’s attitude toward such things-and so somber that it seemed to Ben that they could swallow all humor.
Not that, in the office chambers, the walls were all that easy to see. Shelves lined the room, displaying books, scrolls, figurines of strangely misshapen males and females of many species, coils of irregularly knotted rope, and small wooden boxes with hinged lids.
He looked over to the table where Dr. Rotham sat with Jacen and Nelani. Dr. Rotham was a human woman, tiny and ancient. Her hair was white and wispy; her skin was pale, traced with blue veins, and almost transparent. She wore a heavy maroon robe, even though Ben found the temperature in these chambers to be on the warm side, and her eyes were a piercing blue unclouded by age. She sat on a self-propelled chair, a wheeled thing with a bulky undercarriage that suggested it was equipped with short-range repulsorlifts. She held Jacen’s mass of tassels up before her eves, scrutinizing them from a distance of only four or five centimeters.