[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(132)

The sphere decelerated dramatically.

Who is the enemy? the ship asked. Unless I know, I can do nothing except evade and protect.

“That’s right,” Ben said. Shevu had told him that humoring nutters, as he called it, was an essential police skill. Keeping them talking was what it was all about—and if Ben had the ship, he had Lumiya. “Ship, what’s your task?”

Once I fought. Now I educate and protect apprentices.

“What do you believe I am?”

Apprentice.

“Who’s the one within you now?”

Apprentice also.

Ben was starting to form a picture of the sphere’s view of the world. It had been buried on Ziost for centuries and possibly millennia. It had reacted to him when he was being targeted from orbit and running for his life with a terrified little girl.

“Ship, what do you mean—educate?”

I teach apprentices to fight.

Ben could sense Lumiya communicating with it. The ship was responding strongly in his mind, but there was a second stream of soundless words running almost like interference on a comlink from overlapping frequencies. She was urging the sphere to fire on Ben, to ram his shuttle, to kill him.

Yes. I am now for apprentices, so they learn and come to no harm. I used to be for Masters at war.

It made sudden sense to Ben. “You’re a Sith training vessel.” It would see him as an apprentice because he was one, in a way, but Lumiya confused him. “Why do you think the woman in you now is an apprentice?”

Because she knows so little of me. Like you.

Ben accepted he wasn’t an intellectual like Jacen, but he could grind through options, eliminating things as he went, just like his mom. He could work out anything by just asking question after question.

“The woman apprentice in you had us shot at when we left Ziost.”

We shot back.

The ship recognized him, and it decided that both he and Lumiya were novices who needed its advice and care. It had stopped his mother from killing Lumiya on Hesperidium because that was its job: teaching apprentices to fight. Ben wondered how many chances it gave Sith apprentices before it decided they were weaklings who deserved what they got.

There was no way he was going to talk it into killing Lumiya—he wondered how it would do that—and she was having no luck getting it to attack him, either. Ben was in no real danger. But his mother was, and not from that ship. Someone else wanted her dead.

He needed to find her. He dropped toward Reboam, and the Sith sphere escorted him, with Lumiya impotent within.

Ben had caught a Sith. And now he had no idea how to use her to his advantage.

KAVAN, HAPES CLUSTER

Mara set the StealthX down in the middle of nowhere and reminded herself that being the target or the assassin was simply a state of mind.

No doubt Jacen thought he’d forced her to land so he could finish her off. She thought she’d ditched to get him where she could use her fighting skills to better advantage.

It was a matter of who found who first.

I can stop this anytime I want.

After all she’d seen and heard, there was still the Mara within who couldn’t really believe her nephew was dangerously and irredeemably evil.

If you don’t do it, who will? And who’ll blame you for not acting while he could be stopped? Palpatine, Palpatine, Palpatine … your lesson in twenty-twenty hindsight.

So here she was, telling herself that she was going to go through a very bad time after she killed him, but it had to be done. And Jacen was probably thinking the identical thing. They were the same. No moral high ground; just a leftover equation that said all other things being equal, Mara preferred to see Jacen dead than Ben, or Luke, or herself. Survival: there was nothing wrong with surviving.

Luke now kept reaching out to her in the Force, increasingly anxious, trying to find her, but she didn’t dare reach back. There was no telling what Jacen could detect. When she wanted to be found by Jacen—he’d know all about it.

She grabbed her bag and everything from the cockpit that could be used as a weapon, then found some cover while she consulted her datapad for charts and surveys of Kavan. It was honeycombed with ruined monuments and tunnels. Fine. If I get him in a confined space, he can’t use all his Force skills, but I can make the most of what I’ve got. She decided to make her way into the maze of buried passages and get Jacen to follow her.

She was nowhere near any centers of population, so she was also a long way from any help. She didn’t intend to summon any, anyway. Not until it was time to remove the body.

She secreted all her weapons in her jacket, belt, and boots, and sprinted for the first tunnel she saw. It was getting easier by the minute to disappear into the Force for as long as she needed. But now she needed to be visible, a beacon for Jacen to lure him onto the rocks.