[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(16)

Ben wondered when his father would notice he hadn’t checked in, and start asking where he was. He’d switched off the comlink, just in case Luke commed him and the signal was spotted. He’d tell Dad soon. He felt better about that now; he had ways of expressing it-just tying up loose ends, Dad, just making sure we didn’t miss anything, it’s okay, Lon Shevu’s stopping me doing anything crazy-but at that moment it made him realize that Dad would want Shevu to help, to be a spy in Jacen’s inner circle. And Shevu would agree to it, because he couldn’t get justice from the GA for the foreseeable future, and he was too decent and honest to turn to the Confederation.

Everything Jacen touched became corrupted. Ben took a deep breath, downed some caf, and concentrated on not letting his anger about that taint and all the people it was poisoning-boil over.

“Let’s pool our resources.” Shevu slammed his cup down on the low table and propped a blank holochart against the chair opposite. He took a stylus and began drawing columns on one side and the beginnings of a chart on the other. It was how the CSF detectives worked on a crime-Ben knew. “Let’s write down everything we know…. discreetly, of course.”

Ben tried to imagine how utterly miserable it must have been for Shevu and Shula to marry and then have to part. He got the feeling that Shevu had been in a rush to marry her so that if anything happened to him, she would be taken care of as a service widow. It was depressing, but folks had to think that way these days. Jacen really knew how to tear families apart.



ADMIRAL’S PRIVATE LAUNCH, EN ROUTE FOR N’ZOTH

Niathal was never convinced that Jacen wouldn’t change the locks when she turned her back on him, but she refused to be tainted with the culture of paranoia that she could see developing in the civil service and among Senators.

Even so, she broke her journey to N’Zoth and switched vessels two, three, four times, on the pretext of inspections across a number of ships from auxiliaries to troop carriers, then left in her private launch alone, without a pilot. There was healthy unparanoia, and then there was just asking for trouble. She could still manage to pilot a vessel without ten officers to carry out her every command. It was the safest way. She rather hoped that the buzz around the fleet would suggest that Old Iceberg Face was having secret assignations with a lover. It was always a handy story to float.

And she had to see Luke Skywalker.

It was the first time she’d been completely on her own, without crew on the other side of a thin bulkhead or security close to her quarters, for what seemed like years. It was probably a matter of months. She’d become wary of who she was seen talking to, who she commed, and who she ate lunch with; even Senator G’Sil, a man she had been relatively close to in political terms, just acknowledged her in the corridors and went on his way. The Security Council had no real function now beyond worrying what Jacen was going to do to it, and he certainly didn’t consult it; he seemed to need reminding that he had a duty to consult her.

Well, she wasn’t consulting him now. She took up position at the rendezvous point, fifteen thousand kilometers off N’Zoth, checking her scanners for vessels and wondering if it was always going to be this way. The Rebels had lived like this for twenty years trying to overthrow the Empire. It seemed daunting.

She was joint Chief of State, and here she was fretting as if she were helpless.

“Stang…” she said aloud, disgusted with herself. “It’ll only be twenty years if you let it.”

Luke Skywalker was late. She kept checking her scanner, increasing the range and looking for a wider spectrum of signals, and feared the worst right up to the moment the launch’s proximity alarm sounded and she nearly ejected.

The short-range comlink buzzed. “Admiral Niathal, permission to come aboard…”

“Master Skywalker, you almost gave me a cardiac arrest.”

“StealthX. No point taking chances.”

“I’ll tell the manufacturer that they work just fine, shall I?”

The pragmatist in Niathal told her to make a note that stealth technology like that was great as long as the people you gave it to were always on your side. The fleet had even found it hard to search for Mara Skywalker’s downed StealthX; it was a two-edged sword. She waited until all the docking lights showed green and then opened the aft hatch to the tiny cargo bay.

The top canopy of the StealthX was wedged into a vacuum-tight docking skirt that made it look as if it had rammed the launch from the rear at a ninety-degree angle, canopy first. Luke dropped out of the fighter’s open cockpit and landed on his feet.