[Legacy Of The Force] - 07(18)

Aros reentered the chamber. “It was an automated elevation of the alert status, Queen Mother. When enough random events occur that the security computers register them, the programs do what is known, I believe, as ‘raising flags,’ simply indicating…”

Tenel Ka gestured to cut off her explanation. “What random events?”

“Small static interruptions in security holocam feeds. But none has lasted more than a few seconds. Security says that during intrusions, holocam interruptions last for much longer periods, a minimum of half a minute or a minute…”

“They’ve checked to be sure that the holocam views, once they resume, are current images? Not recordings?”

“Yes, Queen Mother.” Aros’s voice was endlessly, unnecessarily patient.

Tenel Ka frowned, not convinced, and opened herself to the Force. First she sought out Allana and found her-nearby, calm, sleeping. Then she broadened her perceptions, looking for anything amiss.

She felt it almost immediately, a short, distinct pulse in the Force.

Her eyes snapped open. “There is a Force-user in the palace.” She punched additional buttons on the keypad of her vanity, and her own image in the mirror suddenly faded, to be replaced by an overhead view of a child’s playroom.

She breathed a sigh of relief. Allana was there, undisturbed, sitting at her modeling table, head down as she worked intently at the controls. Her hair spilled around her face, obscuring it. The bantha that had been her newest creation now had four giant bulbous feet.

Then Tenel Ka frowned. A moment earlier, an instant earlier, Allana had been asleep.

She keyed in another location and the view changed to that of the door outside her daugher’s play chamber. It was closed, sealed, innocuous.

Except for the fact that the two guards who should have been on duty there were missing.

Coldness, hard as an ancient ice comet, froze her stomach. Tenel Ka stood fast enough to hurl her chair backward. It thumped down on the carpeted floor. She spun on Aros. “Alert security. Intruders in the palace. They’re making an attempt on Allana…” From beneath her robes, suited to an afternoon’s lounging beside an artificial waterfall, she pulled her lightsaber and dashed past Aros, her father behind her.

Security chimes were sounding as the two of them reached the main corridor accessing the secondary royal quarters. Rightward, it led toward Allana’s playroom. Leftward, it led to security stations that in turn gave way to less secure areas. Security agents dashed in either direction as noblewomen, pursing their lips in disapproval of the confusion, stayed out of their way. Tenel Ka paused and extended her senses into the Force once more. It took only seconds-seconds that dragged on like hours-and then she felt her daughter again.

To the left, and down.

She spun in that direction and ran, allowing the Force to lend her speed, leaving her father far behind.





Chapter 6


It was as though an invisible thrill killer had been on a spree within her palace. Tenel Ka ran past a group of courtiers huddled around an open door; beyond was a uniformed guardswoman, her throat slit, blue eyes open and fixed, blood pooling beside her. A few meters past, in a nook frequented by lovers and conspirators, a musician held the curtain aside to reveal a male courtier lying on the floor, his neck at an unnatural angle.

Tenel Ka felt a ripple in the Force at the next nook beyond. She tossed the curtain aside. No scene of murder met her eyes, but there was a hole in the floor, roughly circular, a meter across, its edges smoking.

A security officer running in her wake panted, “Queen Mother, we must precede you!” Ignoring her, Tenel Ka dropped through the hole.

She fell ten meters. Drawing on the Force to soften the impact, she landed on the hard, uncarpeted flooring of a service corridor, a gray-walled, cheerless passageway she had never seen before. The plug that had been cut out of the ceiling above was beside her.

Up and down the corridor kitchen workers and food servers, the subdued colors they wore indicating their lowly status, stood as if paralyzed by shock. There was no sign of the assassin’s passage. But a serving boy of perhaps sixteen years, his eyes more alert than most of those around him, jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. … then shielded his eyes from the sight of the Queen Mother racing past him.

Ahead, around a bend in the corridor, there were more workers circling and staring at the body of a cook.

A minute later Tenel Ka took another ten-meter drop, this time to the roof of a stopped turbolift. She stepped into the access hatch and fell two meters to the turbolift floor.

The lift doors were open; beyond was the visitors’ hangar. Here, nothing as delicate as chimes indicated a security breach; shrill alarms screeched. Security and maintenance personnel ran toward her, away from her, some rushing to their alarm-situation duties, some just panicking.