[Legacy Of The Force] - 02(99)

Ben had always called him Dad. Suddenly he had become sir. Luke caught Mara’s reaction, a little mental flinch beneath the reassuring smile that seemed set in place.

“It’s violent, Ben.”

Ben swallowed. “Jedi do violent things. We fly starfighters with laser cannons. We use lightsabers. How many people did you kill when you fought the Empire?”

Luke was stopped in his tracks. He found himself forming the words, “But they were all …”

All what? All evil? All people who didn’t matter? Most of them had just been swept up on the wrong side-soldiers, pilots, people in uniform, even civilians, just cannon fodder-and it had been easy to see the good guys and the bad guys back then. Now he couldn’t put his hand on his heart and say that he truly believed he had killed only evil men.

“I killed a lot of people,” Luke said.

“And so did I,” said Mara pointedly. “And I was on the other side.”

Ben looked as if he was measuring his words. He’d acquired a little gesture-a habit of looking down at the floor, chin on his chest, and pursing his lips-that was pure Jacen. “But I haven’t killed anyone. I know I’ve saved a couple of lives in the last few weeks. Just because it looks bad, it doesn’t mean it is bad.”

Luke had no answer. His gut instinct and his recurring dream of the hooded figure had not changed one bit, but his intellect was saying something else. It was whispering hypocrite. Mara caught his eye.

“Ben, how would you feel if I asked you to go to the academy for a while?” Luke asked.

“Now?”

Luke had expected an instant eruption of indignation, not merely a one-word question. “I’d thought that, yes.”

Ben looked down again, an echo of Jacen. “Are you going to make me?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Then I’d like to carry on with the Guard a bit longer. There are things I need to understand before I study again. Things I can’t work out at any academy.”

Luke’s Force-sense told him that Ben meant exactly what he was saying. He wasn’t playing for time or manipulating the situation.

“Okay, son,” said Luke. “We’ll talk about it later.”

They had a meal together, their first as a family in what seemed like a long time, and for a while Luke could almost pretend that nothing was wrong. Ben got ready to leave.

“Could we spend some more time together when all this stuff has calmed down?” Ben asked.

It was the assumption of an innocent child that the situation would resolve itself in a time scale he could imagine: days, weeks, months. Luke wished it were true.

“That would be great,” he said.

When Ben had gone, Luke waited for Mara’s reaction. It took a while.

“Now look me in the eye and tell me that Jacen is corrupting Ben,” she said.

“I never used that word.”

“You didn’t tell him you wanted him to stay away from Jacen, either.”

“Okay, Ben has grown up very, very fast.”

“And he’s making sense. Nobody’s ever asked that question before.”

“What?”

“How we can justify what we’ve both done in the past. It’s easy for me to look back and know what I did, but what about you? Ben’s got a point.”

“You’re remarkably tolerant these days,” said Luke.

“I’m a lot older now, and I’m more concerned about my own family than the galaxy’s problems,” said Mara. “It knocks the edges off a girl.”

For a moment Luke wanted to believe that he’d overreacted to Ben and Jacen, and that Mara was right. His mind said that what he saw on the surface was true. But his gut said otherwise. It said that what he saw in his dreams was more real than his waking hours.

“I’m glad we could sort that without having a fight and Ben storming out,” said Mara.

Everyone believed what they wanted to believe. If it hadn’t been for that echo of Lumiya-and he couldn’t have been mistaken about that-then Luke would have believed it, too.

KEBEN PARK, CORONET, CORELLIA.

He’s going to have your wife and kids killed. That’s all you need to know.

Han Solo wasn’t one of life’s natural-born killers and he knew it. For all the times he had fantasized about killing his cousin Thrackan, from his teenage years right up to a few hours ago, he now wondered if he could actually aim a blaster at him in cold blood and pull the trigger.

The man deserved it. But that didn’t mean Han could do it.

He was going to try, though. Jacen might have intercepted Ailyn Habuur, but there was another potential assassin out there, this woman Gev. And if there wasn’t, then Thrackan would just keep coming anyway, year after year. He’d blighted Han’s life for as long as he could remember.