She stared at him for a long moment, and Ben could see in her expression a tragic mask of disappointment, disillusionment. “Jacen, you have a good argument for everything you do. But my gut tells me that you’re doing wrong.”
“Your gut, or the Force?”
“My gut.”
“What does the Force tell you?”
“Nothing. The Force tells me nothing about what just happened.”
“Then it wasn’t the wrong choice.” Jacen turned away to head back to the Jedi speeder.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WITH THE MEANING OF THE TASSELS OFFERING THE JEDI CLUES but no clear path to follow, and with the Toryaz Station shuttle and the mystery of the Jedi-related terrorist encounters lingering in Lorrd City, Jacen put off his departure from Lorrd.
And it was only a day later that the mystery encounters continued.
First, in the morning, the Lorrd Security Forces received an anonymous communication that the kidnapped daughter of a prominent businesswoman was being held in steam tunnels beneath the School of Conceptual Design. The security operatives, after scanning plans of the tunnels, found no access that would give them an approach to the child’s prison chamber without getting the girl killed. So the Jedi were called.
Examining the same plans, Jacen noted that the diameter of one of the steam pipes, while insufficient for a full-grown man or woman to slither through, would provide a tight access for an average-sized adolescent. So the security forces had the steam cut off to that pipe, and after it cooled, Ben crawled through, cutting his way out of the pipe at an appropriate point, dropping into the kidnapped girl’s chamber, and defending it against all corners for the three minutes it then took for Jacen, Nelani, and the security forces to storm and secure the hideout.
The kidnapping’s mastermind, a frustrated radical who wanted to replace the Lorrd planetary government with something ruled by logical, pitiless legal-analyst druids, died during the attack, but his surviving allies said that the girl had appeared to him in his dreams and recommended the kidnapping in the first place.
Later that day, a man dressed in Jedi-style robes and carrying a nonfunctional, pre-Clone-Wars-era lightsaber he’d stolen from a museum, climbed to the summit of the main university’s administration building and perched there, threatening to leap to his death unless he was admitted to the Jedi order. Jacen, Nelani, and Ben went to deal with the situation. Jacen climbed to the summit to talk to the man while the other two remained at ground level.
As it turned out, the desperate Jedi applicant had no Force sensitivity whatsoever, and could not bring himself to believe that Force sensitivity could not be taught. Mindful of Nelani’s desire that he talk things out more with the desperate people who provoked such encounters, Jacen argued politely but fruitlessly with the man for over an hour.
“Tell me,” the man finally said, “how to do your Jedi tricks-one Jedi trick-or I’ll step off this roof.”
“I’m tired of talking, and I don’t have the energy to lie convincingly right now,” Jacen said. “Go ahead and jump.”
The man did.
Nelani, assisted by Ben, caught him, slowing his descent with the Force, and the worst he sustained from his twenty-story plummet was a broken ankle. Security agents bundled him off for medical evaluation, and still he shouted that the Jedi had betrayed him.
But Nelani hugged Jacen, when he reached ground level again, for doing his best to argue the man out of a bad decision.
As they stood there, security agents keeping the crowd and the press at bay, a comlink beeped. Jacen and Nelani sighed and reached for their respective communications devices … but it was Ben’s that had sounded. He pulled it out of his pouch. “Ben Skywalker here… Really? Did she put up a fight? All right, we’ll be there in half an hour or so.” He sought Jacen’s face for confirmation, got a nod, and concluded, “Out.”
“You know,” Jacen said, “the more like a Jedi Knight you act, the more likely your father is to send you off to put down a planetary insurrection or delve into the mystery of a Sith Holocron.”
Ben flushed. “This was stuff I’d been communicating with him about.”
“Him?”
“Lieutenant Samran. That woman showed up. Brisha Syo.”
“The shuttle pilot?”
“Yeah. She’s in custody.”
“Let’s go.” Jacen led the dash for the speeder.
The human woman sitting alone in the security interrogation room did not look like a criminal, at least on the surface. Clad in a purple jumpsuit that suggested both money and a preference for simplicity, she was about the same age as Ben’s parents, at the height of vigorous middle age. She was lean, with well-defined muscles suggesting an active life, and had dark hair, slightly curled, cut short in an easy-to-maintain hairdo.