[Legacy Of The Force] - 03(83)

After the Rover had descended to an altitude of two hundred meters, Ioli circled around to the front of the ruins, where a cluster of flooded craters sat in what had once been the villa’s foreyard. Ben suddenly experienced a sensation of frustration, so faint and muted that he thought at first he might be imagining it. As they swooped over the craters, however, the feeling grew stronger, and he recognized it as a reverberation in the Force.

“They were here,” he said.

“Who?” Tanogo demanded over the headset. “Be precise, son!”

“Sorry,” Ben said. “Jaina and Zekk. Those craters were a big problem for them.”

“I’ll say.” Tanogo’s voice was sarcastic. “Getting blasted back to your molecules is always a big problem.”

“Chief!” Ioli brought the skiff’s nose up and wheeled around to land. “That’s his cousin you’re talking about.”

“It’s okay-death isn’t what I’m sensing,” Ben said. As they swung back toward the villa ruins, the feeling of frustration and anger began to grow weaker. “Turn back to our old heading, Lieutenant. I think that’s the way we need to go.”

Ioli started to swing the skiff back around.

“Ma’am, we don’t have time for the kid’s guessing games,” Tanogo said. “If we’re going to look around, we need to get on the ground now. That squadron is only twenty minutes out, and it just went from bogey to bandit.”

“Why?”

“The squadron leader answered your inquiry about what happened here,” Tanogo said. “She’s saying a pair of Jedi bombed the place.”

Ioli glanced over at Ben. Her Duros face remained unreadable, but he could sense her uncertainty through the Force.

“We need to resume our previous heading,” Ben said. “Jaina and Zekk aren’t here. I’d feel them if they were.”

“Even if they’re dead?” Tanogo’s tone was not cruel, just pragmatic. “Ma’am, if we can’t locate these two Jedi, our orders are to determine what happened to them.”

“And to use Ben as a resource,” Ioli said, continuing to bring the skiff’s nose around to the heading Ben had requested. “Are you going to be the one who tells Colonel Solo we didn’t trust his apprentice’s instincts?” Tanogo fell instantly silent, suddenly pouring uncertainty and worry into the Force. Ben felt both secretly thrilled and vaguely unsettled by the response-thrilled to realize that he had been invested with a certain measure of power simply by being associated with Jacen, unsettled to realize that the reaction to this power was fear instead of respect.

Once the Rover had returned to her original heading, the sensation of frustration and anger grew more discernible in the Force. Ben twisted around in his seat and looked back at Tanogo’s age-flaked face.

“I’m not imagining this, Chief Tanogo,” he said. “The Force is real.”

Tanogo rippled his cheek flaps in what seemed to be amusement. “It’s your call, son. You don’t have to explain it to an old spacecan like me.”

“Okay,” Ben said, still wondering whether he had smoothed things over. “Thanks.”

He turned back around to find a rain-blurred plain of mud and grass sweeping past beneath the skiff. It was impossible to see how far the terrain extended ahead, but Ben knew from the intelligence file that the bog extended for more than three hundred kilometers in every direction-farther than even Jedi could trudge through soft mud in so short a time.

He closed his eyes and pictured Jaina’s face, at the same time focusing his attention on the frustration he felt in the Force. The ripples grew stronger almost instantly, striking him more noticeably from a direction about twenty degrees to their starboard. Without opening his eyes, he pointed. “That way.”

Ioli hesitated for only an instant before swinging the craft in the direction he indicated. The ripples grew even stronger, but now it seemed to Ben that they were coming from about ten degrees to port. He pointed back in that direction.

“More that way.”

Tanogo’s snort came over the headset, and Ioli hesitated a little longer before correcting their course. Ben tried not to let their doubts trouble him, but the ripples began to grow weaker and more difficult to sense.

“Back the other way, I think.”

This time, loti did not correct the course at all. “Ben, you’re moving us back and forth,” she said. “If you don’t know where they are, we need to go back to the villa.”

Ben opened his eyes and frowned at Ioli. “Trust me, Lieutenant. It’s not like I’m seeing a waypoint, but they are out there.”