“Stang, “said Shevu.
When Ben switched his attention back to Shevu’s monitor, he saw what had made him curse. Captain Girdun was walking toward him, hands deep in pockets, whistling soundlessly.
“Walk him away, “said Ben. “I’ll extract the droid.”
“Wait until he goes. I’ll get rid of him.”
“No, just get him away from the StealthX. Leave it to me.”
“Okay.” Shevu’s voice was now totally different, external, addressing Girdun. “Keeping you up, are we?”
“Don’t see you down here often, “Girdun said.
“Just making sure Solo’s toy is ready if he decides to come back early. Don’t want him to shake me warmly by the throat, do I?”
Girdun made a snorting sound. “Hah, you’re his little Master Perfect. He won’t throttle you. Besides, he’s going to be stuck at Fondor for a long time.”
Shevu began walking away from the StealthX very slowly, getting Girdun to follow him without even thinking. Ben watched Shevu’s helmet cam shift perspective from the speckled, irregularly shaped fiberplast airframe of the fighter to a long view of the hangar with the X-wings staggered along the length of both walls, and waited until it had passed three of them before extracting the droid.
Am I stopping it too early? Will there be other evidence in there?
No, Ben had what mattered. The droid was self-Propelled, but he gave it a little Force assistance and plucked it out of the cockpit, moving it to the floor and then sending it out of the doors and into the night. Once it was clear of the hangar ramp, he lifted it into the air and pulled it to him as fast as he could, almost smacking it into the side of a passing repulsor truck in his haste. When it plopped onto the seat next to him in the traffic speeder, he couldn’t stop himself clenching both fists and hissing, “Yes, yes, yes!” in triumph.
Now all he had to do was wait for Shevu to get away from Girdun and meet up with him. He moved the speeder onto the next intersection and sat with one hand on the droid as if it were an obedient pet that had done a clever trick. Eventually he heard Shevu said, “Hang this, I’ll come back in the morning…, “and relief flooded his body.
By the time Shevu called him for a pickup from the next skylane, the captain was wearing plain black coveralls without insignia or rank, looking like a CSF tactical weapons officer. He dropped Ben and the droid off two blocks down from the apartment and disappeared to return the CSF speeder. Ben wondered how flexible the CSF admin system had to be for some officer to loan vehicles to a buddy for a highly irregular operation that had nothing to do with CSF-not officially.
Back in the apartment, Ben placed the droid on the table and sat staring at it as if it might make a dash for freedom, and almost expected his mother to appear to him again with some gesture of congratulation. But she didn’t, and he was disappointed. For the first time since finding her body, though, he felt that she wasn’t totally gone. She was simply in another place. Unlike most beings in the galaxy, he actually knew that to be true and real, not just a sincere hope. It meant he could go on now. He would, as he promised himself, live for her, and live well.
That evening, he and Shevu ate their supper in silence. There was a sense of anticlimax.
“I’ll play Palpatine’s advocate, “Shevu said, chewing slowly. “The hair. First you have to match it to your mother’s - “
“Dad grabbed most of her stuff before he got out. He’s got her brushes. Plenty of hair to match up DNA.”
“I was going on to say that you’d need to prove there was no other way that the trace could have got into the StealthX.”
“It was on Jacen’s clothing.” Ben tried to imagine how his mother’s hair got pulled out. She’d bled, though; he could see that when he found her. “They must have fought hand-to-hand. That’s…. grim.”
“She hadn’t got any traces of his skin under her nails or anything, so what were they doing for him to have grabbed her hair? Did he ambush her?”
“I don’t know.”
“A defense lawyer would say that Jacen might have picked up the hairs from you.”
“I didn’t touch her body. It was a crime scene. I wanted to, but I knew it was important to leave things alone.”
“They’d say it’s your word against Jacen’s.”
Ben felt irrationally angry. “And I’d say, Look at the body of evidence I’m building up. But it’s Dad, isn’t it? You’re asking me if this is going to be enough to convince him.”
“If I were still in CSF, I’d say it was enough for me to arrest him for questioning. At least.”