She walked out of the office with a more rigid spine. Perhaps she’s choosing pain, too.
“You did well with Admiral Pellaeon, by the way, “he called after her. “Good job, Lieutenant.”
Something else had just shifted in the Force, a small thing, a cog turned by just a single tooth, but it had moved, and with it the rest of the machine was subtly altered. That was the nature of destiny. Caedus felt around in the Force for where Luke and his entourage might be. But his mind was too restless now, fixed on the need to bring down Fon-dor.
It will be a short siege, I promise. A decisive one.
He tried to search out his twin sister, just out of… curiosity.
Jaina. I can’t believe how easy it is to forget people. I can go for days without even remembering you exist. Jaina…
He reached out in the Force, but something else in the great machine had changed, too. He couldn’t feel Jaina, not the familiar mix of temper and passion and-always applied too late-the urge to control it all. Perhaps Ben had taught Jaina how to shut down in the Force, too, like he’d probably taught his mother so she could kill Jacen Solo more efficiently. Caedus checked himself as he realized that he saw Jacen as a separate entity. It was more than having changed: it was separation. Jacen still existed for the family who tried to understand him, but he wasn’t the man sitting here now.
Better not teach Tahiri to Force-hide. It just complicates matters.
Jacen Solo. Gone, now; not concealed. Gone, and never coming back.
Caedus spent the afternoon moving assets around imagined Fondor space, feeling fresh pleasure each time his fin-ger connected with the amber lights representing the new assets, the battleships and fighter squadrons of the Imperial Remnant. This would not be the long, groaning, humiliating failure of trying to subdue Corellia. He had a good chunk of the Fourth Fleet, and nobody else was placed to come to Fondor’s aid. Everyone else now had their own woes and war to keep them busy.
This time, it’ll be different.
It would be different because there was no more Jacen Solo, or any of his levers left to pull.
And if there was no more Jacen Solo, then Darth Caedus had no twin sister. Caedus relaxed.
GA FLEET HANGAR, GALACTIC CITY: SIX HOURS LATER
“We’re on, “said Shevu. “The Anakin Solo has cleared orbit.”
Ben could see Shevu on the monitor that was set in the CSF speeder’s dash. He didn’t know-or ask-how the captain had managed to borrow a police traffic patrol vessel, but it was handy cover for anyone who wanted to sit waiting at a skylane intersection near a military installation without drawing the wrong kind of attention.
It was also linked to a network of skylane surveillance holocams. All Ben had to do was sit there and monitor the images that the forensics droid relayed from the interior of the StealthX cockpit.
“Okay, “Ben said. “Let me know if you need a spot of disruption.”
Shevu adjusted his helmet as he walked toward the hangar’s open doors. Yellow light spilled out onto the permacrete ramp. “If you ever take up a life of crime, Ben, you’ll do staggeringly well at it. Just as well Jedi are pretty honest.”
Ben had learned that, even for him, there was a principle of need-to-know-and he didn’t need to know how far CSF was involved now. The police looked after their own, no questions asked; and as far as they were concerned, Shevu was still one of the lads, even if he now wore the black of the Galactic Alliance Guard.
It was just a matter of slipping the CSF forensics droid into the StealthX. It was a small sphere about the size of a smashball, disturbingly like a thermal detonator, and packed into its innards were probes, spectrometers, reagents, sample packs, and a full array of sensors that recorded everything at the crime scene it was sent to record. It was perfect for sending into dangerous or inaccessible places that a flesh-and-blood CSF scenes-of-crime officer couldn’t reach, and it was also small enough to be discreet.
The only problem was that it didn’t look like a maintenance droid, and someone might notice. Ben’s job was to make sure they didn’t.
Shevu, in uniform and taking advantage of the fact that GAG officers could do as they pleased in Jacen’s new galactic order, ambled into the hangar, and the external traffic remote lost him in the shadow. There was a brief fog of sta-tic on the monitor as Ben switched from the traffic-control holocam to Shevu’s helmet cam.
“Here we go, “said Shevu. The forward image showed Jacen’s personal StealthX sitting in its bay, canopy closed, in a line of X-wings connected to the diagnostic grid by ca-bles and wires. Maintenance droids and a couple of human technicians walked in and out of eyeshot looking harassed. “Got the droid ready.”