[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(140)

Ben took his lightsaber into his hands and thumbed it on. Its snap-hiss was less welcome than the blue light it emitted-suddenly he could see all around him, even if dimly.

He floated through open space, but ahead of him, thirty or forty meters, was a broken stone wall, and he floated toward it at a rate of several meters a second. He was also losing altitude, slowly-though gravity was weak here, it wasn’t entirely absent.

“Two-handed form,” Nelani said, behind him, “makes it rather hard to hold on to stone walls.”

Ben twisted to look behind him. Nelani floated there, following his aerial path, at least as comfortable in the minimal gravity as Ben was.

He turned back to face the onrushing wall. “Did you pull me out of the railcar?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not stupid. Don’t be snide.”

“Sorry, I’m upset.” Her tone changed. “Nelani to Jacen, come in.”

As the stone wall came nearer, Ben spotted a feature on it he thought he could grab, a rocky projection that narrowed to a needle-like point. He held his lightsaber back and to one side with his right hand, extended his left, and as he reached the projection he grabbed it, swinging his feet ahead of him to sustain the minimal shock of impact.

A moment later Nelani hit a few meters down, her fingers slipping into a crack in the stone, her hips and shoulders taking the impact.

“So who did it?” Ben persisted. “The Sith?”

“We have company.”

Ben looked down at her, then around, then up.

Above him, ten meters up, a pair of eyes stared down at him. They glowed blue in the reflected light of his lightsaber blade. They were not human eyes, but slitted and triangular.

Beyond them were more, hundreds of pairs of eyes, cool and unblinking.

Ben shook his head. He’d had that portion of stone wall in sight as he’d approached the wall. There had been no creatures there at the time. He reached out for them within the Force, and could feel them there, hundreds of them, strong in dark side energy. “Not good,” he said.

“Drop,” Nelani said.

“Yeah.” Ben released his hold on the projection and drifted downward. He gave the rock surface a little shove to open up a few more centimeters’ room between himself and the stony surface.

Above, the eyes began to descend, staying at their respective distance from the gleam of his lightsaber, but definitely following.

The railcar slowed to a halt, curving around in a circle. Brisha and Jacen were in a well-lit chamber, large enough to house a good-sized transport, but the only thing present was the end of the rail line. The track here curved around in a teardrop shape and rejoined itself on the way up, allowing the railcar to head back up the track it had just descended.

Jacen didn’t bother with the scenery. He stared at Brisha. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

She gave him an innocent stare. “Do what?”

“Shove Ben and Nelani out of the car. Did you think I couldn’t feel your pulse of Force energy?”

“I suspected you could.” She stood and stepped out of the car. She floated for a moment beside it, then slowly drifted down to the stony surface of the floor. “I separated them from us for their own good. What they’ll face will be dangerous, but not as dangerous as what we’re going to encounter-if they accompanied us here, they’d probably die.”

“Your Sith.” Jacen pushed off from his seat and drifted upward a dozen meters. From this altitude he could see all corners of this chamber, with its natural stone walls and glow rods all over them. There were no menaces, no strange beings to confront them. “What can you tell me about him?”

“His knowledge is of the lineage of Palpatine, but is broader than the Emperor’s. He’s young. He was not yet born when the Emperor died.”

“How was the Sith knowledge transmitted to him?” Jacen began to float back down toward the railcar. “Through a Sith Holocron? Through loyal retainers?”

“Through disloyal retainers. Through Sith trainees who could never achieve Mastery themselves … and who rejected Palpatine and his teachings as too selfish, too controlling, too destructive.”

Jacen gave her a curious look. “You make them sound benign. If they’re benign, isn’t he?”

She shrugged. She kept one hand on the railcar so that casual motions would not propel her across the chamber. “All the same, he must be found and mastered. Ah.” She turned toward a shadowy corner of the chamber, a place where a huge, rounded outcropping came within meters of the curved section of rail.

From around that outcropping walked a man. He was tall, slender, garbed in a traveler’s robe of black and dark gold; it was styled like a Jedi’s but made of expensive silks. A lightsaber, its hilt also in black and gold, swung at his belt. His hands were gloved, and his face was in the deep shadow cast by the hood of his cloak, though his eyes-a liquid, luminous orange-gold-glowed from within that darkness.