[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(31)

“Yeah.”

“And you got him out.” Ben floundered, dropped from a height into an ice-cold pool of doubt. “But he was armed and shooting at cops…”

“Yeah, and you don’t have to feel guilty about informing on him. The law’s the law.”

“But you bent it. You let Barit go.”

“Ben, everything Jacen did to grab power was within the law. There’s law, and there’s justice, and sometimes they’re not the same thing. Barit was just a kid talking through his backside, like teenage lads do.”

Ben’s certainty wavered. He’d seen Barit fire at the cops during a riot. He’d deflected the bolt. He wondered if he was clinging to that to make himself feel better about turning him in. “And you needed an informant.”

“Don’t you? Isn’t that what I’ll be doing for your dad?”

The adult world that Ben had been catapulted into had no safety net if anything went wrong. Nobody would call time on it like a training session, and the weapons weren’t modified lightsabers designed just to sting. He’d woken up to that fast; he was playing by dirty, violent, grown-up rules. What still left him struggling, though, was the compromises, and he lay awake at night walking the endless maze of right and wrong, and wondering if two wrongs could make a right, and if he might have learned that at the Jedi academy. Dad always seemed to know what was right, even if he couldn’t explain why. Ben realized at that mo-ment that you never learned a foolproof formula for right and wrong, that there was no checklist of good and bad, and that you had to keep an eye on yourself every minute of the day and ask: Should I be doing this? Would I want someone to do this to me?

“You don’t have to spy for the Jedi Council, “he said.

“Of course I do, “Shevu said. “Who else is going to be able to get rid of a Sith? You think the GA courts can bring the full majesty of galactic law down on his head? As long as we both know the score, that’s fine.”

Ben went back to his datapad, understanding how tense Shevu was. He could have told Tenel Ka what they were doing, but that would have meant official Hapan Security involvement, and Shevu didn’t trust anybody. Ben saw his point. He’d trusted Jacen, after all. Now he was back in the land of hard evidence, running through all the data he’d gathered in a stunned haze while his mother lay dead in the tunnel on Kavan.

She was, of course, in most of the holovid recordings.

Ben had watched those over and over until he could look past his mother’s body and the pain of reliving the discovery. He saw instead the position of the body, the surrounding area, what material was dislodged or broken, the unoxidized bright color of the smashed bricks that told him the damage was new; he reconstructed a savage fight, so much destruction of the tunnel complex on that abandoned world that Force-use was obvious. There were no traces of detonite, the only other explanation for that much damage, and Mara Skywalker would never have had to use that much effort against a run-of-the-mill attacker. She’d fought someone at least as powerful as herself.

Ben checked the profiles of the air samples he’d taken. There was the trace of high-energy vaporization from lightsabers and a lot of trace elements released by smashed brick, wood, and stone. He’d almost hoped for a whisper of the air from Jacen’s lungs, but the datapad-sized device couldn’t do magic.

What could he have missed? His mother’s body had been examined thoroughly by Cilghal. Other Jedi had combed the tunnels for evidence, picking up on all the possible clues that ordinary technology might have missed, but there was nothing discarded except the sterile-pack of poison darts that were so like Alema’s weapons of choice, and the echoes of dark energy, which were equally likely to have come from Alema.

But they hadn’t picked up echoes of Alema herself. Was she adept enough to disguise her passage through Kavan? Jacen certainly was. He could hide in the Force, and even cloak Lumiya’s presence right under the Jedi Council’s nose.

But it was still all what wasn’t there at the scene, not what was.

The Hapan deep-space security sensors picked up the university transport as soon as it came within range, and the only thing that seemed to concern the control center was whether the survey was looking for gemstones. They seemed touchy about that. Shevu put on a very convincing droning voice, explaining that gemstones weren’t anywhere near as interesting as the Carlanian volcanic pipes and surrounding igneous rocks that would shed more light on the latest theory about the origins and formation of the Hapes Cluster. He was reading off a datapad. It did the trick. The control center stopped him midway through a riveting explanation of the outcropping of cylindrical dia-tremes, and gave them clearance to land on Kavan.