[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(83)

“Let’s call in Zekk and Jag, because I’m betting Alema’s in town again, and—”

“No offense, Jaina, but I think it’s me she wants. You go find Bug Girl.”

Jaina’s pursed lips looked like she’d decided to swallow an argument. “Okay,” she said at last.

“It’s just an old dark side feud. ” Mara didn’t want Jaina to feel that she was snubbing her. Relations were edgy enough at the moment. “Let’s not allow her to divert both of us.”

So Lumiya was taunting her. com get at your husband. I can get at your son. If she was so set on killing Ben for the death of her daughter, she still seemed to be missing chances. So what did Lumiya want from her?p>

Mara returned to base to find one of the ground crew waiting patiently by her allocated XJ7. She climbed into the cockpit and started her instrument check.

“Is Lumiya really a Shh?” the technician asked.

“The very last of her kind,” said Mara, not asking what he’d heard and how he knew the name anyway. She felt a pang of guilt at her sloppiness for arguing loudly and forgetting there were other personnel around. She sealed the XJ7’s hatches. “I’ll make sure of that.”

Mara ignored military air traffic regulations and circled over the area where she’d last picked up Lumiya’s powerful wake. If she concentrated, it was relatively easy to follow, and she found herself leaving Coruscant orbit on a bearing for one of the moons, Hesperidium.

“Oh, yes, Palpatine loved that place,” she said aloud. “You heading there for old times’ sake?”

Lumiya was definitely playing a game. But she wasn’t stupid enough to think she could offer Mara her hand and find it still intact like she had with Luke.

The wake led to Hesperidium’s main resort, which wasn’t quite as splendid as Mara recalled. She wondered if it was feeling the pinch of postwar recovery, and if there still weren’t enough tastelessly wealthy folk to go around. Port traffic control was surprised—to say the least—to find a military vessel on its scanners.

“I need to put down for a while,” Mara said, knowing they had no choice about the matter. They could hardly stop her landing. “Getting weird readings on my instruments. I have to check it out.”

“Let us know if you need help,” the ATC controller said. “We pride ourselves on doing anything and everything for all our visitors.”

“Classified,” Mara said, and ended the conversation in the way that only she could.

When she landed and saw the selection of vessels standing on the private strips of the hotels, she realized that a XJ7 probably looked like an eccentric billionaire’s toy, and a small one at that. Some of the craft here were staggering in their size and opulence; she wondered how they even managed to land. There was clearly a thriving class of the ultrawealthy that had come through the last decade pretty well unscathed, and life was going on uninterrupted for them now, regardless of another war. Credits seemed to operate like deflector shields: if you had enough of either, nothing could touch you.

She checked around her—in the Force, and visually—before sliding out of the cockpit and jumping to the ground. At least she’d managed to dress like eccentric wealth, and few would look at her.

Yes, there were definitely some bizarre-looking flying palaces here …

And then she felt darkness touch her shoulder in the brilliant morning sunshine.

It was so tangible, so dense, that she spun around with her hand on her lightsaber hilt expecting to find Lumiya ready to swing at her. But there was nobody.

You want to play games?

It was early. A couple of hotel guests in sports clothes jogged by and glanced at her, but ran on. She prowled between the vessels on the strip, feeling the darkness pressing on her sternum like a coronary. Something dark was here—and that meant Lumiya. The crushing sensation in her chest was getting so powerful that she ignited her lightsaber’s blade, ready to fight when she rounded the next hull.

This is it, Lumiya. No more games.

She sprang into the gap, lightsaber humming.

Staring back at her wasn’t a veiled figure with a lightwhip but a single, disembodied, flame-red eye ten meters wide. Her instinct said it was alive, an alien being, but it was clearly a ship of some kind, and that meant only one thing: Lumiya was inside.

It was a trap, Mara was sure of that.

Fine. But sometimes traps swallow prey that’s way too big for them …

She looked over the hull for a hatch, but the roughly textured surface—was it stone?—was unbroken.

Come inside.

Mara wondered why she was thinking that and then realized that the thought was actually a voice inside her head, in the fabric of the Force itself. It was inanimate, yet sentient; and it wasn’t a droid.