“Anything else I ought to be aware of?”
“Minor procurement issues, but that’s nothing to do with the New Boy.”
“How minor?”
“Griping in the mess about substandard kit and difficult shortages at the moment. You might want to kick a few data pushers before it turns into a problem.”
“I’ll have someone look at it.” It would keep Jacen occupied. He cared about troop welfare. “Matters like kit seem to hit morale hardest.”
It was a brief conversation, two GA personnel who had every reason to be exchanging a few words. Nobody took any notice. The Supreme Commander and senior domestic security staff talked all the time.
Nobody knew that the three individuals who were running the war dared not turn their backs on one another.
That was politics. Admiral Cha Niathal was determined to get used to it.
STAR SYSTEM M2X329O5, NEAR BIMMIEL
There was a presence following her, and Lumiya could pick it out like a beacon even at this range. So could the meditation sphere.
Broken, said the ship.
In the back of her mind, the presence manifested as a jagged, shattered mass of black and white glass. If she concentrated on it long enough, it resolved into a whole vessel again, but the cracks were still visible.
“It’s broken, all right,” Lumiya said. “What shall we do, allow it to catch up? Or shall we see how good a hunter it is?”
The meditation sphere felt elated. The smoldering red flame that seemed embedded in its bulkheads grew brighter and more golden, and Lumiya felt a conspiratorial sense of humor flood her. The ship was enjoying itself. Of course: it had been dormant on Ziost for untold years, a conscious thing waiting for purpose and interaction.
Nothing in the galaxy enjoyed being alone, be it flesh or metal.
Lumiya rocked back on her heels, still a little disoriented by a cockpit that didn’t wrap around her. It didn’t feel like an extension of her body as a starfighter did. Instead of neatly arranged screens and controls within her reach, there was nothing except stark, grainy, stone-like surfaces in which images appeared and then vanished again.
The ship’s bulkhead showed her a pattern of lights. A small craft matched their course at a range of five thousand kilometers. The asteroid belt where her base was hidden appeared as a sprinkling of stars on a dark blue ground as if a hole had been punched in the bulkhead, and she almost expected to feel air rushing past as the vacuum beyond claimed her.
“Time to jump,” she said.
The meditation sphere felt as if it took a deep breath and lunged forward. There was no inertia, no sensation of movement whatsoever, and yet Lumiya was sure her stomach leapt and her head spun with the acceleration. The tracking screen was gone. She was looking at the streaming lights of stars and then velvet blackness, unlit except for random pinprick flares. She could see beyond the ship. It was as if it weren’t there. She knew where she was. She could feel the pursuing vessel dwindling to nothing behind her, and the transparisteel shattering into broken chaos again.
For a moment, she felt panic.
For a moment, she was in a stricken TIE fighter, struggling for lifebroken, fired upon by Luke Skywalker, certain she’d die.
Instantly the bulkheads became red-hot pumice again. She jerked back to the present.
You’re safe, the ship said.
It felt almost guilty for alarming her. She wanted to reassure it: Just a memory, she thought, nothing to concern you. And it seemed reassured. Nobodynothinghad cared about her welfare for a very long time, not since she’d been in Imperial training. Luke Skywalker’s brief affection didn’t count.
The broken -pursuer has jumped, too, said the ship.
“Try not to outrun it too far.” Lumiya searched herself for regret and loneliness, and found none. It was still good to find a sense of kinship with another intelligence. “We don’t want it to lose us.”
It is still following us, said the ship.
“What did you think of your last pilot?” Lumiya asked.
Not like us.
“Not Sith material, then.”
No. The ship knew Ben wasn’t fit to be Jacen’s apprentice. Less like us than the one who follows.
The meditation sphere dropped out of hyperspace and made convincing speed for the asteroid. Lumiya gave it a mental image of marking time until the pilot on their tail had located them again, and then showed it her habitat on the asteroid.
They prepared to dock, Lumiya and the ship, somehow one mind for brief moments. Ben had proven he wasn’t the right apprentice for Jacen. For all his fierce courage on Ziost, the boy had still succumbed to a sentimental Jedi urge and risked his life to rescue that child. He lacked the ruthless edge a Sith needed. But at least he had done something right: without him, she wouldn’t have this rare vessel. It would be instrumental in Jacen’s future. She could see it in the Force. Somehow her own future wasn’t linked with it, but she’d look after it until the time came to relinquish control.