Arisster blinked at him, obviously taken aback. “I hadn’t considered that. But … no.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you might be lying. Jedi lie. Also, the disease might kill me early, before I saw any action. And third, as a sidekick, I’d merely be a footnote, and I could be forgotten trivially. This way, I’ll be firmly attached to any account of your career.”
“I see.” Jacen fell silent, pondering.
Ben could feel a sorrow, a solemnity growing within Jacen. His mentor was not doing anything to conceal it, and it flowed from him through the Force. It made Ben jittery, and he crossed his arms as if against a cold wind.
“Oh, please.” Arisster stared a rebuke at Jacen. “You can’t have given up already. You haven’t tried any tricks, unless that sidekick offer was a trick, and you haven’t begged.”
“I haven’t given up,” Jacen said. There was a faint sadness in his voice. “Can I speak to your captive, please?”
“Of course.” Obligingly, Arisster swung around, whirling the other man to face the Jedi. The man was pale and looked as though he was on the verge of throwing up.
“Your name is Haxan?” Jacen asked.
“Yes, Serom Haxan.”
“I’m very sorry, Serom.” Jacen began backing away from the aquarium.
Ben and Nelani backed up, too, keeping pace with Jacen. “What are you doing?” Nelani asked.
“What I have to.”
They’d taken half a dozen steps before Arisster noticed. Arisster swung around to face them. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Getting to what I hope is a safe distance,” Jacen said.
Arisster stood there, transfixed, for a long moment, long enough for the Jedi to take another half a dozen steps backward. Then he turned as if to charge toward the other captives.
Jacen reached out with his open hand and squeezed it into a fist.
Arisster and Haxan disappeared, engulfed in a misshapen ball of fire.
Fire and smoke filled the aquarium, and the crack of the explosion rolled across the plaza-but, confined as it was by the transparisteel walls of the aquarium, it hurt Ben’s ears far less than the detonation at the spaceport had.
And the transparisteel held. The near wall buckled outward slightly under the force of the explosion, but the other three merely distorted for a moment before returning to their proper shapes, and most of the force of the explosion was channeled upward.
Immediately the Jedi charged forward again, up to the transparent wall, and tried to peer through the smoke obscuring the tank’s contents. But the smoke was already thinning, rising, and they could see men and women beginning to emerge from behind the scorched ruins of the reproduction of Lorrd’s downtown. None of them seemed badly injured-Ben saw smoke on faces, some blood from gravel shrapnel.
“Emergency crews!” Nelani shouted, waving toward Samran and his agents. “Get up here!”
The emergency crews used a portable winch to lower medics into the tank and begin extracting Arisster’s hostages from its floor. None ventured near the gruesome blood slick that represented the largest portion of what was left of Arisster and Haxan.
Meanwhile, meters away, Ben listened to Nelani and Jacen argue again.
“Are you insane?” Nelani asked. “We didn’t explore a single option other than your I’ll-make you-my-sidekick offer.”
“There were no options,” Jacen said. “He was right. He had won. The only thing we could do was limit the scope of his victory. That meant limiting him to one life instead of several.”
“You don’t know. We didn’t try-“
“You could feel his determination, his strength.” Jacen’s tone chided her. “He had decided to die today. When someone decides to die, it’s hard to dissuade him.”
“Haxan hadn’t decided to die.”
“True. But he was going to, no matter what we did.”
“No-“
“What was the blaster pistol for, Nelani?”
That brought her up short. “What?”
“The blaster pistol he held. What was it for?”
“To compel obedience?”
Jacen shook his head. “He had his bomb for that. The bomb was all he needed, and he knew it. So what was the blaster for?”
“What do you think it was for?”
“To shoot hostages, one by one, as the afternoon wore on. To shoot them, and to mock us for our helplessness.”
She considered that. “Maybe.”
“Definitely. And with the first one he shot, our loss, our failure, would have been already equal to the one we eventually did face-one innocent life. With two shot, we’d have been worse off than we are now. And so on.”