[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(4)

“It was a dangerous mission, but I knew you could handle it.” Lumiya, you arranged this. What’s your game’? “Who tried to kill you?”

“A Bothan set me up.” Ben said. “Dyur. He paid a courier to take the Amulet to Ziost, framed him as the thief, and the guy ended up dead. I got even with the Bothan, though—I blew up the ship that was targeting me. I hope it was Dyur’s.”

“How?”

Ben gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “It’s armed. It seems to have whatever weapons you want.”

“Well done.” Jacen got the feeling that Ben was suspicious of the whole galaxy right then. His blue eyes had a gray cast, as if someone had switched off the enthusiastic light in him. That was what made him look older; a brush with a hostile world, another step away from his previous protected existence—and an essential part of his training. “Ben, treat this as top secret. The ship is now classified, like your mission. Not a word to anyone.”

“Like I was going to write to Mom and Dad about it … what I did on my vacation, by Ben Skywalker, age fourteen and two weeks.” Ouch. Ben was no longer gung-ho and blindly eager to please … but that was a good thing in a Sith apprentice. Jacen changed tack; birthdays had a way of making you take stock if you spent them somewhere unpleasant. “How did you fly this? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Ben shrugged and folded his arms tight across his chest, his back to the vessel, but he kept looking around as if to check that it was still there. “You think what you want it to do, and it does it. You can even talk to it. But it doesn’t have any proper controls.” He glanced over his shoulder again. “It talks to you through your thoughts. And it doesn’t have a high opinion of me.”

A Sith ship. Ben had flown a Sith ship back from Ziost. Jacen resisted the temptation to go inside and examine it. “You need to get back home. I told your parents I didn’t know where you were, and hinted they might have made you run off by being overprotective.”

Ben looked a little sullen. “Thanks.”

“It’s true, though. You know it is.” Jacen realized he hadn’t said what really mattered. “Ben, I’m proud of you.”

He sensed a faint glow of satisfaction in Ben that died down almost as soon as it began. “I’ll file a full report if you want.”

“As soon as you can.” Jacen steered him toward the hangar exit. “Probably better that you don’t arrive home in this ship. We’ll shuttle you to the nearest safe planet, and you can get a more conventional ride on a passenger flight.”

“I need some credits for the fare. I’m fed up with stealing to get by.”

“Of course.” Ben had done the job, and proved he could survive on his wits. Jacen realized the art of building a man was to push him hard enough to toughen him without alienating him. It was a line he explored carefully. He fished in his pocket for a mix of denominations in untraceable credcoins. “Here you go. Now get something to eat, too.”

With one last look at the sphere ship, Ben gave Jacen a casual salute before striding off in the direction of the stores turbolift. Jacen waited. The ship watched him: he felt it, not alive, but aware. Eventually he heard soft footsteps on the deck behind him, and the ship somehow seemed to ignore him and look elsewhere.

“A Sith meditation sphere,” said Lumiya.

“An attack craft. A fighter.”

“It’s ancient, absolutely ancient.” She walked up to it and placed her hand on the hull. It seemed to have melted down into a near hemisphere, the vanes and—Jacen assumed—systems masts on its keel tucked beneath it. Right then it reminded him of a pet crouching before its master, seeking approval. It actually seemed to glow like a fanned ember.

“What a magnificent piece of engineering.” Lumiya’s brow lifted, and her eyes creased at the corners; Jacen guessed that she was smiling, surprised. “It says it’s found me.”

It was an unguarded comment—rare for Lumiya—and almost an admission. Ben had been attacked on a test that Lumiya had set up; the ship came from Ziost. Circumstantially, it wasn’t looking good. “It was searching for you?”

She paused again, listening to a voice he couldn’t hear. “It says that Ben needed to find you, and when it found you, it also recognized me as Sith and came to me for instructions.”

“How did it find me? I can’t be sensed in the Force if I don’t want to be, and I didn’t let myself be detected until—”

A pause. Lumiya’s eyes were remarkably expressive. She seemed very touched by the ship’s attention. Jacen imagined that nobody—nothing—had shown any interest in her well-being for a long, long time.