And it was Ben’s fault. Lekauf had died to protect him.
“Come on, Ben. The techs want to start stripping down this crate.”
Captain Shevu stood in the hatch, fingers hooked over the top edge of the coaming. Ben felt that if he moved, the whole world would come unraveled.
“I’ll be along in a minute.”
Shevu waited for a moment and then came to sit down with him. Ben suspected that if he’d been a grown man, Shevu might have been harsher, but he thought Ben was still a kid, too young to be on this kind of mission whether he was a Jedi or not. In many ways, Shevu was right. But nobody was ever old enough to lose a friend and not feel it cutting through to the center of his chest. If Ben ever got that old, he didn’t want to carry on.
“We don’t lose many troopers in special forces. It makes it harder when we do, I think. It’s hard for me, anyway.”
Ben gambled on whether to speak or not. He took a breath and waited to feel everything around him shatter.
“He didn’t have to die, sir.” Once he heard his own voice, Ben just felt like he couldn’t breathe, nothing worse. “He could have taken off. We could have run for it, or even been captured, and the job would still have been done.”
“Ben … our orders were to make it look like a Corellian schism, and not to get caught or leave a trail. Can’t have Jedi exposed as assassins, especially not you. We had to get you out of there.”
“It didn’t have to be me. Any trooper could have done the job. I wanted to do my duty, but if it hadn’t been me, if Jori hadn’t felt he had to protect my identity, he’d be alive.”
“Ben, what do you think would have happened to him if he’d been taken back to Corellia?” Shevu lowered his voice. “You saw what we do here to prisoners. You think worse than that can’t happen in Coronet?”
“So what if I had been caught? My dad would have been humiliated? So what? Jori’s life for Dad being upset?”
“I could give you a list of reasons why having Corellia think their own kind did it helps the GA. But you don’t want to hear that right now.” Shevu stood up and beckoned to Ben to follow. He meant it. “There are anti-Gejjen factions claiming responsibility, so the mission worked finestrategically. Now go home and take a couple of days off. If you can’t stand being around your folks, or … or around Colonel Solo, come over to my place. My girlfriend won’t mind.”
It was the first time Ben had heard Shevu hint that being around Jacen wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him. Ben didn’t care about Jacen right then, but the rational bit of his mind that wasn’t drowning in shocked grief made a note of it.
“Thanks.”
“Now I’ve got to tell his parents. I’ll have to come up with a really good cover story, and thank providence that there’s no footage of him splashed all over the news right now, because that’d be a really lousy way to find out your son was dead.”
Shevu sounded beaten. He was probably pretty close to Lekauf, but he’d never said. Ben had learned a lesson about being an officer today, and it was that lives were to be spent in pursuit of an objective; it might have seemed obvious, but when you worked alongside the people who might lose their loved ones because of your decisions, it acquired a whole new meaning.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling guilty about this,” Ben said, relieved that he had so far managed not to burst into tears.
“Me neither,” said Shevu. “Because it was supposed to be me who blew the ship if things went wrong.”
“We never planned that”
“You didn’t. We did. Need to know, and all that.” Shevu stopped a passing ground crew speeder and told the driver to get Ben back to HQ. “Wash that stuff out of your hair and go home.”
An hour later, Ben found himself staring at his familiar reflection in the HQ refreshers, toweling his hair and wondering if Jacen had set him up.
I didn’t have to do the job. Any one of us could have passed unnoticed at a spaceport.
But it was hindsight. Jacen had tasked him to do it before anyone knew where the meeting would take place. Ben still felt something was wrong, but couldn’t pin it down.
He’d just lost his buddy. Maybe that made you think crazy things. When he left the HQ building and walked out into the late-afternoon sun, completely disoriented by the shifts in planetary time over the last forty-eight hours, he lowered his head and just walked aimlessly, hands in pockets.
Suddenly he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder. He almost shrieked. He’d shut out everything around him. Then he found he was staring into his mother’s face, and something was terribly wrong.