[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(73)

Caedus stood in his cabin and wondered how he had managed not to vent his anger. He started working mentally through the sequence from deciding the hyperspace exit points to the minelayers actually emerging, and whose eyes had seen the detail. He thought of flow-walking back into the ops center and listening, but it was effort he wasn’t prepared to expend when he had a shortlist of fools-no, traitors-and an invasion to replan.

He caught his own reflection in a mirror as he sat down, and suddenly realized why the young lieutenant on the bridge couldn’t look away from his gaze.

Caedus’s eyes were yellow. He had that brief disoriented moment when he thought he was looking at someone else, but then his own face-his own eyes-grew rapidly familiar, and he watched the citrine yellow darken into his normal brown irises.

Then he sat down and began work with the holochart, and a new but equally harsh plan for Fondor.





Chapter 10


Yes, I regret that we did hear Mara Jade Skywalker threaten Chief of State Solo. She told him to “leave Ben out of it” and that she would “skin him alive, “and that it was his last chance to drop something called Sith, or “take what was coming.” It seemed most unlike her.

-Senator Nab H’aas, Bith delegation, to Captain Lon Shevu, GAG, logging threats against joint Chiefs of State Solo and Niathal

FREIGHTER SPIRIT OF COMMERCE, EN ROUTE FOR ENDOR: CARGO BAY

Ben Skywalker reached inside his jacket to touch the small forensics droid again, avoiding the eye of the flight engineer. He wasn’t in the mood to chat.

But the two freighter crew were bored out of their skulls, and seemed to preserve their sanity by interrogating any ad hoc passengers. Ben was the only one hitching a ride this trip, huddled in a space between giant sealed containers lashed down to the deck of the cargo bay. He settled on looking angst-ridden and teenaged.

“I can only drop you at the trading base, you know that, don’t you?”

Ben looked up. The uncommunicative teenager act didn’t work any longer; he was tall, showing the first fluffy traces of beard, and he was suddenly aware that nobody had called him kid in passing these days. He must have looked as old as he now felt. “I know, “he said. “Thanks.”

“Have you actually been to Endor before?” Ah, the engineer was worried for him. “Yes, I know folks there. Someone’s meeting me.”

“Just checking. I wouldn’t dump my worst enemy in that place. Ewoks. Savages. I’d shoot them all, to be honest.”

“Some of my friends are Ewoks, “Ben said mildly, no-wanting a fight, but unable to let it pass. “And I feel safer in the forest than I do in Galactic City.”

“No offense.”

“None taken.”

The engineer walked away slowly, gripping hand-over-hand along the deckhead rail to pick his way between the tanks and containers that would be filled with plants and fungus for the pharmaceutical industry on the return journey. “Coruscant… yeah, I know what you mean. If it’s not the lowlifes and gangsters, it’s the secret police.”

And some of my best friends are secret police. They truly are. But Ben kept his mouth shut this time. It was the last leg of a tortuous route back to the Jedi base, and in a cou-ple of hours he’d be safely among family and friends.

And so would the forensics droid, still holding its samples from Jacen’s StealthX in its sealed compartments. It was encased in flexiwrap, just in case. Ben felt it was his last tenuous link to resolution and some kind of peace. Where do I start with Dad? Have I got all the evidence I need? And when-how-do I tell him that Mom came hack to see me?

Out of all the things that plagued Ben in his quiet moments, when there was no distraction to stop him picking over events until they were just jumbled bones, that one was the most frequent. It was a privilege he was pretty sure Luke hadn’t been given, and it made Ben more uncomfortable as the days passed. Why just me? He’d become less accepting of mysteries and the will of the Force since he’d lived in Lon Shevu’s world of show-me and prove-it. He wanted to know why these days, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and maybe every time from now on. The Spirit of Commerce set down in a clearing a fevV hundred meters from the trading post buildings; Ben did diplomatic hand-shaking and promised to use the service again sometime. He walked through saplings trying to re-claim the cleared land for the forest, bag over one shoulder, aware of eyes everywhere in the undergrowth and above him in the branches, and found himself thinking tactical thoughts about what a tough planet this would be to in-vade and occupy. Luke was already waiting for him; his fa-ther sat on a sawn-off stump as big as one of the huge circular park seats in the Skydome Botanical Gardens at home, wearing his flight suit. Home.