[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(94)

He’d never killed anyone.

What was a lightsaber for, then, if you couldn’t face the fact that it killed people? He tried to think of Jacen as using a weapon-his Force powers-to defend the Galactic Alliance against people like Ailyn Habuur, but all he could feel was that Jacen, a man he respected more than his own father, was hurting a woman who couldn’t defend herself.

He heard things he knew no kid should have heard. But still he couldn’t walk away. He sat there for an hour, then two, staring at his hands, hearing the raised voices, then the thuds and occasional cries of pain, and then only Jacen’s voice repeating the same question over and over again: Who sent you, and who were you sent to kill?

Ben couldn’t bear it. Jacen, you have to stop.

Girdun and Shevu appeared at the double doors at the end of the corridor and took one look at Ben before walking briskly to the interrogation room.

“Jacen’s in there,” Ben said weakly.

“Oh, boy.” Shevu nudged Girdun. “Come on, we can’t let this go on.”

“He’s the commander.”

” ‘Dun, you moron, he’s going to kill her. That’s not how we do things.”

“It was how we did things.”

“Really? Not on my kriffing watch.” Shevu appeared to have lost his cool. Ben watched, not wanting to stop them because he knew deep down that he should have stopped Jacen somehow. Shevu overrode the lock and Ben tried hard not to look inside the cell. “Medic! Get a medic, someone.”

Jacen snapped at Shevu to get out, but Girdun bundled in behind him and the two officers laid Habuur flat on the floor and tried to revive her mouth-to-mouth. Ben watched as they took turns pumping her chest, hand on fist, checking her breathing and pressing fingers on her throat to try to find a pulse. Jacen stood back.

“Where’s the kriffing medic?” Shevu demanded.

Girdun felt her neck, then her wrist. “No pulse.”

“Ben, call the medic.”

Girdun shook his head. “Too late. She’s gone.”

Ben stared in horror. Habuur looked terrible. He’d never seen a dead person before, not like that, not with his own cousin standing over her as if it was just a little inconvenient for her to die before she’d answered his questions.

“What were you thinking, sir? We can’t handle prisoners like this. You’ve got to report it. If you don’t-“

“I’ve entered people’s minds before and they’ve always been fine afterward,” said Jacen. He seemed surprised that his Force technique had caused so much damage to Habuur, but not sorry. Ben noted that. Ben was forgotten in the brief panic, invisible once again to adults having a fight. “We have to know who she was working with.”

Shevu stood his ground. He didn’t seem in awe of Jacen at all. “You should have left this to me, sir.”

“Time is critical in assassination attempts. They could be out there now.”

“I know that, and I also know that you don’t let prisoners die during questioning. I have to report this.”

“You report it, then, Captain, but right now I have to find out who she was after, and my only lead is some woman called Mirta Gev.”

“There’s the Corellian agent, sir,” Girdun said, straightening up. “He doesn’t know who Habuur was after, only that Corellian Intelligence told him to give her a safe house and provide weapons.”

“Some agent, if he yielded that much.”

“I’m very persuasive, sir,” said Girdun.

Shevu rounded on him. “We don’t want another dead prisoner.”

Jacen looked through Shevu as if he weren’t there. “Get working on him, Girdun, just in case.”

I have to do something. Ben couldn’t bear to think of someone else dying like that woman had. He had an idea: work through the information again, just like the ex-CSF men had told him. It was stupid, because Jacen was smart enough to have spotted anything useful, and the World Brain’s network of Ferals-enslaved spies-knew plenty. If his Force powers couldn’t shake the information out of Habuur, then Ben stood little chance of doing any better. But he decided to use the tricks that ordinary people had to when sorting through information.

“Can I see the datapad, please?” Ben fought to stay calm. He had moved from disbelief to shock. He didn’t know why Jacen had done what he did, but he had to have a reason. It had to be that Ben just didn’t understand it yet. He had to stay calm. But he wanted to run back home to his mother and-yes, his father.

You can’t keep doing that. It’s not a game. You’ve grown up now. You can’t do the things you do and then run home when it gets scary.