[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(77)

Ben walked on a few paces before it struck him that he’d just slipped automatically into the organizing, order-giving role that his dad often did. Because Dad never doubted I could do it. That was the kind of confidence his father could instill in him.

But he still had a task to complete first. Back in his quarters, he washed down all the surfaces with stericlean, then laid out clean flimsi sheets to cover the table so he could open the droid’s sphere.

Did a sterile area matter? The instruments and sensors had already analyzed what they needed, so contamination wasn’t an issue. He had the readouts on his datapad; he knew the chemical composition of every trace the droid had collected. But he felt he had to show some respect-it was the only word he could think of-for the procedure, and set the sphere down with a degree of reverence. It held destinies.

Hair. Ben needed a hair from his mother’s brush.

It was all he had to do to confirm that the hair collected from the StealthX was hers. Grubbing around in his fa-ther’s quarters felt like an intrusion. Luke kept the brush, a utilitarian gray plasteel thing with bristles extruded from the material, in a box with a few trinkets and other personal effects he’d grabbed from the bedroom, and Ben suddenly found himself worrying about the apartment, and if it had been left intact. His mother’s clothes and possessions were still there. He didn’t care about his own. He just couldn’t bear to think of Jacen’s bureaucrats clearing out the place or even touching anything personal.

It’s just stuff. Forget it. Shrines are unhealthy. You know Mom’s okay where she is. You’ve seen her.

Just thinking that lifted his spirits more than he would ever have believed possible. I know. I really know. Jedi suddenly seemed the luckiest beings in the galaxy. Ordinary beings never knew for sure what happened after death; many sentient species believed in some existence when the body was no more, and some didn’t, but only Jedi had the absolute proof of what happened to them-at least some, anyway. There were all kinds of priests and mystics who claimed they could put grieving families in touch with their loved ones in some afterlife, and maybe they could; but only Jedi knew and could prove it.

It seemed both a breathtaking comfort and privilege, and also sadly unfair for everyone else. Certainty. There was so little of it in life, but Ben had his.

Apart from the brush, its bristles tangled with a few-long, curled, copper-red and white hairs, there were two rings, a datachip-family holoimages, Ben decided-and a platinum locket. Inside was tiny, meticulously folded flimsi sheet; when he smoothed it out on his knee, it showed signs of having once been crumpled. His mother’s writing was on it: Gone hunting for a few days. Don’t be mad at me, farmboy.

Ben stared at it, imagining her hand moving across the surface, and put it back in the locket. He took the whole box back to his quarters and laid out the brush on the flimsi to tease out a hair with a pair of forceps.

It was just a matter of inserting the hair into a small slot in the casing of the droid and letting the mechanism re-move a section to process it. It took a minute or so.

Ben waited.

The droid flashed indicator lights and transmitted the analysis to his datapad. POSITIVE MATCH.

That was it, then: all over. Once he cracked the security seal on the droid, the sterile environment inside was compromised, and-if he played by the Justice Department and CSF rules of evidence-anything else tested by the same droid would not be admissible as evidence. If he wanted to test more material after that, he’d have to sign out a new unit, sealed and authenticated.

“No, that’s it, my friend, “he said, and overrode the contamination warnings. “I just want the hair.”

The droid was tiny, and its internal mechanisms were like some intricate chrono maker’s art. Ben had to use the forceps to extract the sealed chamber with an almost invisible length of his mother’s hair inside. Instead of being the glossy, coiled lock he had somehow imagined-which was crazy, there was no room for something that big even if it had been lying around in Jacen’s cockpit-it was a single hair. Ben had a brushful of them, but somehow this one mattered; he wanted to keep it. He wound the hair around his finger into a ring shape and shut it in the locket with the flimsi note. He’d tell Dad he had it when the squadron returned from Fondor.

Dumb thing for a guy to carry around, but I want to.

While Ben was copying the data to another pad for collation into a report, he checked his encrypted messages. Shevu had sent an update.

Ben, this might upset you, but you need to see it. I spoke to two Bith Senators. They witnessed an argument between your mother and JS shortly before she left Coruscant for Hapes.