Jacen waited, staring through the shifting displays and readouts that mirrored those on the operations consoles at the heart of the ship. He’d started to lose the habit of waiting for the Force to reveal things to him. It was easy to do after taking so much into his own hands and forcing destiny in the last few months.
Somewhere in the Anakin Solo, he felt Lumiya as a swirling eddy eating away at a riverbank. He let go and magnified his presence in the Force.
Ben … Pm here, Ben …
The more Jacen relaxed and let the Force sweep him upand it was now hard to let go and be swept, much harder than harnessing its powerthe more he had a sense of Ben being accompanied. Then … then he had a sense of Ben seeking him out, groping to find him.
He has something with him. Can’t be the Amulet, of course. He’ll be angry I sent him on an exercise in the middle of a war. I’ll have to explain that very, very carefully…
It had just been a feint to get him free of Luke and Mara for a while, to give him some space to be himself. Ben wasn’t the Skywalkers’ little boy any longer. He would take on Jacen’s mantle one day, and that wasn’t a task for an overprotected child who’d never been allowed to test himself far from the overwhelmingly long shadow of his Jedi Grand Master father.
You’re a lot tougher than they think. Aren’t you, Ben?
Jacen felt the faint echo of Ben turn back on him and become an insistent pressure at the back of his throat. He took a breath. Now they both knew they were looking for each other. He snapped out of his meditation and headed for the bridge.
“All stop.” The bridge was in semi-darkness, lit by the haze of soft green and blue light spilling from status displays that drained the color from the faces of the handpicked, totally loyal crew. Jacen walked up to the main viewport and stared out at the stars as if he might see something. “Hold this station. We’re waiting for … a ship, I believe.”
Lieutenant Tebut, current officer of the watch, glanced up from the console without actually raising her head. It gave her an air of disapproval, but it was purely a habit. “If you could narrow that down, sir . . ,”
“I don’t know what kind of ship,” Jacen said, “but I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Right you are, sir.”
They waited. Jacen was conscious of Ben, much more focused and intense now, a general mood of business-as-usual in the ship, and the undercurrent of Lumiya’s restlessness. Closing his eyes, he felt Ben’s presence more strongly than ever.
Tebut put her fingertip to her ear as if she’d heard something in her bead-sized earpiece. “Unidentified vessel on intercept course. Range ten thousand kilometers off the port beam.”
A pinpoint of yellow light moved against a constellation of colored markers on the holomonitor. The trace was small, perhaps the size of a starfighter, but it was a ship, closing in at speed.
“I don’t know exactly what it is, sir.” The officer sounded nervous. Jacen was briefly troubled to think he now inspired fear for no apparent reason. “It doesn’t match any heat signature or drive profile we have. No indication if it’s armed. No transponder signal, either.”
It was one small vessel, and this was a Star Destroyer. It was a curiosity rather than a threat. But Jacen took nothing for granted; there were always traps. This didn’t feel like one, but he still couldn’t identify that otherness he sensed. “It’s decelerating, sir.”
“Let me know when you have a visual.” Jacen could almost taste where it was and considered bringing the Anakin Solo about so he could watch the craft become a point of the reflected light of Contruum’s star, then expand into a recognizable shape. But he didn’t need to; the tracking screen gave him a better view. “Ready cannons and don’t open fire except on my order.”
In Jacen’s throat, on a line level with the base of his skull, there was the faint tingling of someone’s anxiety. Ben knew the Anakin Solo was getting a firing solution on him.
Easy, Ben …
“Contact in visual range, sir.” Tebut sounded relieved. The screen refreshed, changing from a schematic to a real image that only she and
“You did well, Ben.”
“I found it on Ziost, in case you want to know. And that’s where I got the ship, too. Someone tried to kill me, and I grabbed the first thing I could to escape.”
The attempt on Ben’s life didn’t hit Jacen as hard as the mention of Ziostthe Sith homeworld. Jacen hadn’t bargained on that. Ben wasn’t ready to hear the truth about the Sith or that he was apprenticedinformally or notto the man destined to be the Master of the order. Jacen felt no reaction from Lumiya whatsoever, but she had to be hearing this. She was still lurking.