Come and get me, Colonel Solo.
chapter twenty
From: Sass Sikili, negotiator of Roche
To: Boba Fett, Mand’alor
Murkhana has failed to respond. Because they have failed to respond, and we fear this will encourage others to ignore our patents, we request your support, so that the point may be made that we take our patents seriously. I would very much like to see the Bes’uliik in action; our metallurgists have been looking at ways to produce lighter beskar structures, so when you pound the Murkhana factories to dust, we will be inspired to be more inventive. This is very good for business.
JEDI TEMPLE, CORUSCANT
Luke met Jaina on the steps of the Jedi temple. He was dashing out as she was dashing in. He caught her arm and steered her back down the path.
“Where did she go, Jaina?”
“Uncle Luke, I swear I’m not covering for her. I don’t know and she’s not answering any of her links. Why are you worried?”
Luke held the crumpled flimsi in his fist. Gone hunting for a few days. Mara had signed out a StealthX just after midnight two days before. He shoved the note in his pocket. The feeling of dread overwhelmed him.
“Come on,” he said. “I have to go look for her. Something’s wrong. And Ben’s gone, too. I’ve had the worst feeling, like she’s walking into a trap.”
Ben wasn’t just missing; Luke could no longer feel him in the Force. And now he couldn’t feel Mara. He’d called everyone, including Han and Leia, and he didn’t kriffing care if the GAG detained him for contacting Corellian agents with a warrant out for their arrest.
He expected Jacen to show up to issue a warning, but Niathal said Jacen was away on “business.” The GAG StealthX was gone again. The man came and went as he pleased, it seemed.
I can imagine. Jacen was permanently invisible in the Force now, that was for sure. Luke hailed an air taxi, and they headed for Starfighter Command.
“I’ve spent more time there since I left the military than when I was in uniform,” Jaina said.
“Can you feel her, Jaina? Can you feel Mara?”
She looked slightly to one side of Luke, defocused, and shook her head slowly. “Nothing.”
“I haven’t felt her now for hours.”
When they reached Starfighter Command, they headed for the chart room. Luke found that he could look at charts and pick up strong correlations in the Forcesomething Ben had proved to have a talent for, too. He stood in front of the banks of holocharts and tried to relax enough to let the Force steer his attention. He made an effort to put out of his mind where he thought she might have been heading.
After a while, when the glowing lines and clusters of dots began to blur and lose their perspective, he found himself drawn to one sector in particular.
“I’m sure she’s in the Hapes Cluster,” he said at last.
When Luke had first felt Mara drop out of the Force, it was so sudden and uncontrolled that he thought she’d been killed. It woke him in a panic. The three seconds of pure agonized paralysis lasted until she faded back in again, and again, and he worked out that she was doing it deliberately.
“Ironically, it would have been better if she’d taken a regular X-wing,” Jaina said. “The starfighter techies say it’s almost impossible to locate a StealthX by any of the usual search methods.”
She was right. Unless someone happened to eyeball Five-Alpha or Mara had left a transponder or comlink active, the starfighter would simply vanish.
A visual search was all that was leftthat, or finding Mara herself. Luke headed for the hangars, and Jaina followed.
“How do we recover StealthXs that ditch, then?” Luke asked, trying not to vent his frustration on hardworking ground crew.
The technician stepped back from the starfighter. “Rescue beacon or the Mark One pall of smoke and flame, sir,” he said warily. “The GA asked Incom to make them very hard to detect, and they did.”
“Okay, I’ll stop harassing people with work to do and go out there myself.” Luke reminded himself that Mara was hunting Lumiya, and so he had to expect her to use every trick in the book. That didn’t stop him from worrying. “After all, I’m the one who shook Lumiya’s hand, and not her throat…”
Then Mara was suddenly there, not just back in the Force but magnifying her presence, as if she wanted to be found. She was defiant, unafraid, and spoiling for a fight. She’d found Lumiya all right.
“Why’s she doing that, though?” Jaina had her own huntfor Alema. Now she was keen to help find Mara. “It’s like she’s taunting her.”
“Or she’s in trouble and she wants me to find her.”