The police officer stared at his lightsaber for a moment, one hand on his own blaster.
“It was a rock,” Ben lied. “Someone threw something at you.”
The officer pulled him to his feet. His face was streaked with gas-induced tears, too; he hadn’t put on his respirator in time. “You’re fast, kid. Let’s get you back to the Temple, shall we?”
“I’ll call my Master. He’ll collect me.” Jacen wasn’t a Master, but the small detail of Jedi life wasn’t important right then. Ben wanted to get away and follow Barit. “Thank you, Officer.”
“Thank you, Jedi.” The officer wiped his nose on the back of his hand and coughed painfully. “You saved me from a pounding, too.”
Ben knew he had saved someone from something, but it was more than a man’s life. However little he understood of politics, he was sure that a Corellian shooting a CSF officer would turn a bad situation into a disastrous one. Barit was in deep; Ben now felt a personal connection to the widening gulf between Corellian and Coruscanti, and sensed that Barit would play a part in something awful.
He wiped his face on the sleeve of his robe, nose streaming, and opened his comlink again. “Jacen? Can you hear me?” There was just the usual quiet hiss of a link that wasn’t being answered, and the click of the message recorder. “Jacen, something terrible is happening.”
Chapter Six
The bigger the galaxy, the sweeter the homecoming.
-Corellian proverb
JEDI TEMPLE PRECINCTS, CORUSCANT.
Ben was trying to contact him, but Jacen had his own problems at that moment. He sensed they were more critical: his mother was in trouble.
He felt her reach out to him. He felt both her fear and her determination, and the latter was winning.
Where is she? What’s happening?
Jacen slipped into an alcove flanked by bushes in square ceramic pots and sat down to concentrate. Eyes closed, he could sense where she was, and she wasn’t on Coruscant, but very near. It took him a few moments to realize she might be in a vessel.
Listen. Listen.
During his studies, Jacen had mastered a Theran technique that let him use the Force to hear remotely. He slowed his breathing and felt the buzz in his sinuses as if he were being woken too soon from an exhausted sleep. The buzzing filled his head, and then behind it, within it, he could pick out words and sounds.
He heard his mother’s voice; and then he heard his father’s.
“… try another braking burn.”
“Five seconds …”
Metal groaned. An engine boomed and sighed, a rhythmic rising and falling note, and it wasn’t a reassuring sound. Jacen reached out with one word, the most that even he could send through the Force.
Together.
He visualized the Millennium Falcon. In his mind, he could see the plates of her underside and the transparisteel of the cockpit mounted on the starboard flank. He saw her as she should have been, whole and sound. He could feel Leia straining to use Force telekinesis, but he couldn’t sense exactly where she was trying to apply it. He could only hear the tension in her voice and taste her growing anxiety.
And he could feel another presence, too: his sister, Jaina.
They hardly spoke these days, but twins could never cut themselves off from each other for long. She must have sensed their parents’ crisis, too.
Whatever his mother was trying to do, Jacen could only guess. And guessing wasn’t good enough when one was using the physical might of the Force.
Still in his Theran sound trance, he heard the bip-bip-bip of a sensor alarm, the kind that announced that a hull had been breached-or worse.
” … drive’s shaking loose and it’s going to take the plates with it …”
That was what he needed to know. He was certain now that his mother was using the Force to stop the cracks in the drive housing from spreading and ripping the Falcon apart as the ship reentered the atmosphere. It was a massive task. She needed help.
Jacen filled his lungs with a long, slow breath and centered himself to try something he had never attempted before.
Mom, I hope you can handle this.
He pictured Leia sitting in the copilot’s seat. Her emotions and her presence in the Force washed over him and he visualized himself in her place, behind her eyes, seeing what she saw. For a moment he was simply observing; but then a feeling like a sigh drained out of him and it was as if he were exhaling an infinite breath into his mother-no, through his mother. Now he was no longer sitting in the alcove between two topiary bushes, but staring at an array of lights and readouts and at hands that weren’t his. Beyond the console, Coruscant loomed in the viewport.
If Jaina had joined the effort, she was hardly detectable. He had drowned out her presence in his own mind with the sheer strength of the telekinesis he was projecting.