[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(96)

“She wants me to catch up with her. I’ll be extra-ready next time—and there will be a next time.”

He’d promised her. If anyone could take Lumiya, Mara could, and he knew he had to put his own fixation with Lumiya out of his mind—stop it from clouding his judgment. He’d give Mara a little more time, but wondered how he’d feel if she came home battered and bruised like this again.

Chasing individual Dark Jedi was far more difficult and time consuming than he’d bargained for. Sometimes he wondered why Lumiya and Alema had proved so much harder to hunt and deal with than a whole Empire, but that was the answer: the Empire, by its very size and pervasiveness, was everywhere. It was hard to avoid finding it, but two Jedi with concealment skills could vanish very effectively in an entire galaxy. It would always be a case of getting them to come to him—or Mara.

“But you’ll be home for dinner tonight,” Luke said. “Don’t spend all night working again.”

“Believe me, I’ll be home,” she said. “That’s where I’m heading now.”

“I’d better see what Han and Leia have to say about Gejjen, while I hang around the Senate and wait for Omas.”

“If I’m still sitting at home with a congealing plate of nerf casserole at midnight …”

“Okay Dinner at eight. Set in permacrete.”

Luke walked down the corridor with her in silence and she gave him a conspiratorial grin as the turbolift doors closed. He opened his secure comlink and called Han.

“I’m not in mourning,” Han said, utterly callous in that charming way he had. Luke knew he didn’t care for Gejjen and never had: it was hard to weep for a man who approached you to kill your own cousin, even if that cousin was a grade-A scumbag. “No need to spare my feelings. He was a head shot waiting to happen.”

“What’s the public mood like over there?”

“There hasn’t exactly been a run on mourning clothes, but folks are nervous.”

“So who’s at the helm in Coronet now?”

“They’re slugging it out. For the while, it’s going to be a committee job.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“The biggest task CorSec has is to work out how to manage the lines of suspects. Not that they need to dig up any—two different terror groups here have already claimed responsibility for it. Yes, we have ‘em, too.”

“I never realized how divided you all were.”

“We’re never divided about Corellia. Just who’s the best candidate to run it.”

“Are you and Leia okay?”

“Yes, we’re fine, and no, I’m not telling you what we’re doing at the moment. Stop worrying.”

Luke almost raised the topic of a GA smokescreen. It was fairly common to carry out a hit and set it up to look like another faction to achieve maximum discord. But he thought better of it, because it smacked of Jacen, and Han didn’t need to hear that his best friend thought his son—stranger though he was—had a hand in it. Some things were best dealt with by friends, cleaned up, and smoothed over. When Lumiya was finally brought down, Luke would spend his time putting Jacen back on track. It was the least he could do for Han.

Omas couldn’t have picked a worse day to visit his doctor, but it was unusual for him to be so reticent about routine arrangements. Luke hoped it wasn’t something serious.

It was bad enough losing Gejjen, because at least he was a known quantity, and Luke had become used to his way of thinking. If Omas’s future was in doubt, too—well, that was one unknown too many.

CORUSCANT MILITARY SPACEPORT

Ben sat in the cargo hold of the ship long after the ground crew had secured the landing dampers and the drives had cooled completely.

He was almost comfortable staring at the bulkhead opposite, in the sense that he feared taking his eyes off it. If he did that, the numbing meditation he’d slipped into would be broken, and he’d have to think.

Jori Lekauf was gone. It was one of those facts he couldn’t take in even when he saw it happen. The guy had been alive and well the night before, even hours ago, and now he didn’t exist. Ben simply couldn’t feel death.

It was more than the biological facts, and he knew those all too well. The former CSF officers in the GAG had regaled him with fascinating stories from the police forensics labs, but knowing how to cause death and what it looked like, and being able to feel a life wink out of existence in the Force did nothing to hammer home the fact that his friend was gone forever, and that he wouldn’t see him again, and all the things that made Jori Lekauf part of the fabric of the universe, someone who mattered, were so far beyond his reach.