“My folks and the other Jedi think it was Alema Rar.”
“Who’s she?”
“A crazy Dark Jedi with a grudge against Aunt Leia. She liked using poison darts, and we know that was … the cause of death.” If Ben avoided personalizing the crime for just a few hours while he was working, he could hold it together. I’m not forgetting you, Mom, I just have to do this. “Alema’s dead now, so we can’t corroborate anything.”
Shevu snorted in mock amusement. “You have to learn not to mislay suspects, Ben. It’s a bummer when it comes to squaring the custody records.”
“She slugged it out with one of the Jedi sent after her. It was her or us, really. She kept trying to kill Aunt Leia.”
“That explains why you look so much older these days.” Shevu made that huh noise again. Ben knew he disapproved of boys of Ben’s age being sent into live-fire situations, but he didn’t understand that it was different for Jedi. “Okay, Jacen is the prime suspect. A couple of days ago, he killed a lieutenant on the Anakin Solo, just like that, in full view of the bridge crew. He snapped Lieutenant Tebut’s neck without even touching her, and threw Captain Nevil across the deck.” Shevu emerged from the kitchen with two steaming cups. “See what I mean about fingerprints?”
Ben should have been shocked. He tried hard, but all he had was a sinking feeling that the only beings who couldn’t see Jacen for what he was were Jedi, and his family at that. Jacen was leaving a trail of bodies.
“He even tortured me,” Ben said, realizing it sounded self-pitying as soon as it left his lips. At least he was still alive. “Dad fought with him and stopped me killing him.”
Shevu’s face was instant cold control, as if he was reining in an outburst. “He should have let you. Jacen Solo’s a nutter. A psychopath.”
“Jacen’s not mad. He’s a Sith. You know what that is?”
“Frankly, no.”
“It’s a Jedi who uses only the dark side of the Force. Not a Jedi at all, really.”
“A bad guy. But not illegal. Wrong cult.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“Okay, crazy, Sith, ethically alternative, whatever you want to call it—Jacen demonstrates a tendency to extreme personal violence, and my cop’s gut tends to take notice of that. What’s your theory on your mother?”
Ben could deal in basics with Shevu. “Jacen was in the right place, he had the means to do it, and I think his motive was that she found out he was a Sith. I don’t have evidence linking him to the scene except he found me with her body, and he shouldn’t have been able to. The only thing I can pin down is location.”
“Crime scene’s compromised now, I suppose.”
“I recorded it.”
“Good man. We’ll make a CSF detective of you yet.”
“I’ve been telling everyone Jacen did it, but with Alema firmly in the frame, they all think it’s my grief talking. I suppose it’s easier to think the perpetrator wasn’t a member of the family. So I need your help, sir.”
“Drop the sir. It’s Lon.” Shevu slurped his caf. “The vast majority of murders are carried out by people who are close to each other—family, lovers, close friends. Emotions run high, they have easy access, one thing leads to another … you get the idea. The random homicidal maniac is still pretty rare, even in the lower levels of Galactic City. And yeah, I’ll help you. This is a murder investigation.”
Ben never expected otherwise. He’d judged Shevu right, but he was also putting the man in danger. “Can I ask what happened to Shula? Looks like you scrubbed the place clean of her.”
“I sent her back to her parents on Vaklin, for her own safety. We got married in secret and then I got her off Corsucant, and got rid of everything here linking her to me.”
“Why?”
“Because people who oppose Jacen Solo end up a bit dead, and I’m building a file on him. The situation’s going to get a lot worse. Once I got Shula to somewhere safe, my only dilemma was whether I wanted to see him impeached and charged by the Alliance, or whether it would be more satisfying to see Fett or the Jedi Council get him. I think Fett’s revenge might be more fun.”
Shevu’s dislike of Jacen’s methods had been obvious since the time Jacen had killed Fett’s daughter under interrogation. Ben hadn’t realized it had developed into full-blown hatred. “Let’s do it together, then.”
“Whatever it takes, and I’ll stay on the inside as long as I possibly can.” Shevu looked resigned. “And he likes to have me around, even on the Anakin Solo.”
Ben wondered when his father would notice he hadn’t checked in, and start asking where he was. He’d switched off the comlink, just in case Luke commed him and the signal was spotted. He’d tell Dad soon. He felt better about that now; he had ways of expressing it—just tying up loose ends, Dad, just making sure we didn’t miss anything, it’s okay, Lon Shevu’s stopping me doing anything crazy—but at that moment it made him realize that Dad would want Shevu to help, to be a spy in Jacen’s inner circle. And Shevu would agree to it, because he couldn’t get justice from the GA for the foreseeable future, and he was too decent and honest to turn to the Confederation.
Everything Jacen touched became corrupted. Ben took a deep breath, downed some caf, and concentrated on not letting his anger about that taint and all the people it was poisoning—boil over.
“Let’s pool our resources.” Shevu slammed his cup down on the low table and propped a blank holochart against the chair opposite. He took a stylus and began drawing columns on one side and the beginnings of a chart on the other. It was how the CSF detectives worked on a crime, Ben knew. “Let’s write down everything we know … discreetly, of course.”
Ben tried to imagine how utterly miserable it must have been for Shevu and Shula to marry and then have to part. He got the feeling that Shevu had been in a rush to marry her so that if anything happened to him, she would be taken care of as a service widow. It was depressing, but folks had to think that way these days.
Jacen really knew how to tear families apart.
ADMIRAL’S PRIVATE LAUNCH, EN ROUTE FOR N’ZOTH
Niathal was never convinced that Jacen wouldn’t change the locks when she turned her back on him, but she refused to be tainted with the culture of paranoia that she could see developing in the civil service and among Senators.
Even so, she broke her journey to N’Zoth and switched vessels two, three, four times, on the pretext of inspections across a number of ships from auxiliaries to troop carriers, then left in her private launch alone, without a pilot. There was healthy unparanoia, and then there was just asking for trouble. She could still manage to pilot a vessel without ten officers to carry out her every command. It was the safest way. She rather hoped that the buzz around the fleet would suggest that Old Iceberg Face was having secret assignations with a lover. It was always a handy story to float.
And she had to see Luke Skywalker.
It was the first time she’d been completely on her own, without crew on the other side of a thin bulkhead or security close to her quarters, for what seemed like years. It was probably a matter of months. She’d become wary of who she was seen talking to, who she commed, and who she ate lunch with; even Senator G’Sil, a man she had been relatively close to in political terms, just acknowledged her in the corridors and went on his way. The Security Council had no real function now beyond worrying what Jacen was going to do to it, and he certainly didn’t consult it; he seemed to need reminding that he had a duty to consult her.
Well, she wasn’t consulting him now. She took up position at the rendezvous point, fifteen thousand kilometers off N’Zoth, checking her scanners for vessels and wondering if it was always going to be this way. The Rebels had lived like this for twenty years trying to overthrow the Empire. It seemed daunting.
She was joint Chief of State, and here she was fretting as if she were helpless.
“Stang …” she said aloud, disgusted with herself. “It’ll only be twenty years if you let it.”
Luke Skywalker was late. She kept checking her scanner, increasing the range and looking for a wider spectrum of signals, and feared the worst right up to the moment the launch’s proximity alarm sounded and she nearly ejected.
The short-range comlink buzzed. “Admiral Niathal, permission to come aboard …”
“Master Skywalker, you almost gave me a cardiac arrest.”
“StealthX. No point taking chances.”
“I’ll tell the manufacturer that they work just fine, shall I?”
The pragmatist in Niathal told her to make a note that stealth technology like that was great as long as the people you gave it to were always on your side. The fleet had even found it hard to search for Mara Skywalker’s downed StealthX; it was a two-edged sword. She waited until all the docking lights showed green and then opened the aft hatch to the tiny cargo bay.
The top canopy of the StealthX was wedged into a vacuum-tight docking skirt that made it look as if it had rammed the launch from the rear at a ninety-degree angle, canopy first. Luke dropped out of the fighter’s open cockpit and landed on his feet.
“I braked too hard,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Remind me to ask Incom to fit a docking tube.” Luke grasped her hand as if he was grateful to see her. “Sorry, I just don’t take chances these days.”
“None of us do. Thank you for seeing me.”
“This is mutual, Admiral. I’ll have a favor to ask of you, too.”
“I’ll be brief, then. If you haven’t already heard, Jacen has taken to killing members of his wardroom in full view of others. Using Force methods.”
Luke shut his eyes for a moment. He looked older than Niathal recalled, with noticeable folds in his cheeks and a dull gray tone to his skin. She dared think something unthinkable about Jacen, that he might have been behind Mara’s death—no, that was an outrage too far, even for him—and waited for Luke to say something. He didn’t.
“I know he’s fairly cavalier about killing,” she said, “but I suspect I was right in assuming this would mark some threshold for you, too.”
“It does.”
“Depending on how you look at it, then, it could lead to some advantage, and poor Lieutenant Tebut’s life won’t have been spent in vain—Jacen may lose the loyalty of his troops. Or it could simply consolidate a reign of fear.”
Luke rubbed one hand across his face, brow to chin. “I think I recall how that morale-boosting technique played out in my father’s generation.”
“Well, I still have a duty to the Alliance and my personnel, and I’m still prepared to pass intelligence to you provided you can use it to remove him. I don’t care what you do with him—restraint-jacket therapy at some quiet monastic retreat, or shove him out the nearest air lock—but I want him gone.” That sounded harsh, but Niathal wasn’t sure how far humans would go to bring wayward relatives into line. “And out of office. Another coup is impossible at the moment, so the best I can achieve is to help neutralize his impact on the GA and hope I don’t lose the lives of too many good beings doing it.”
She wouldn’t have been the first officer faced with a terrible choice when her leader pursued a course of mutual destruction. Her loyalty was to the common good of the GA, not to Jacen Solo.
Hang on, I’m talking and thinking as if I’m his deputy, not his joint and equal colleague. What am I doing—absolving myself of responsibility? I helped put him in power.
“I have Jedi working hard to seize him, Admiral,” said Luke. “Do you think he’s insane?”
“No.” Niathal had no hesitation. “I’ve seen too many perfectly sane beings become utterly corrupted by power. Jacen’s not insane. He’s just had his own way once too often, and now he can’t see the world any other way.”
“Do you know what I mean by a Sith?”
“I’ve heard the term. But I know nothing about them.”
“They’re Force-users who prefer the dark side. Like Palpatine.”
“Oh … I see. Fallen Jedi.”
Luke pressed his lips into a little humorless smile and looked away for a moment. “Oddly, that’s just what the Mandalorians call them. Their word means ex-Jedi, although that’s not always the case.”
“And does this make any difference to how we approach him? Does he have different powers from regular Jedi?”
Luke looked strangely embarrassed. She wasn’t sure why. “Not really. He’s just very strong, and he has an ability to use a battle meditation technique that gives him a remarkable awareness of the battlefield.”
Ah, I noticed that. “He has a young woman called Tahiri Veila running his errands now.”
“Which brings me to Ben.” Luke moved closer to Niathal and looked into her face, which required some head tilting on Luke’s part because of the set of a Mon Cal’s eyes. He clasped her hand again as if he were searching for a pulse. “Apologies, Admiral, we’re all scared of our shadows these days. I might be putting a man’s life at risk, so I have to be certain. Ben has gone off again, and I believe he’s back on Coruscant. He thinks I don’t know, but he’s probably trying to build a case against Jacen for killing Mara.”
Niathal almost sighed with relief. So she wasn’t the only one who thought Jacen could kill his own relatives. “If I see him, I’ll make sure he gets every assistance to stay out of harm’s way. Especially if he goes after Jacen to take revenge.”
“He already tried that, after Jacen tortured him.”
“Just when I thought the man couldn’t get any worse …”
“Revenge isn’t the Jedi way, and Ben’s come to terms with that, but stubborn persistence is Ben’s way, and he may come to your attention. He might be with Captain Shevu. They were close.”
“You trust Shevu?”
“Yes. There’s such a thing as Force certainty, and I have it in that young man.”
Niathal revised her view of the GAG captain. His attitude was courageous dissent, then. She’d have to persuade him out of that. “A GAG insider would be helpful to us all.”
“We become exploitative for all the right reasons, don’t we?”
“We do.”
“Until next time, then.”
Luke swung back into the StealthX cockpit in a gymnastic move that would have taxed a much younger man, and braced his body using his knees while the seat restraints closed around him. Then the canopy closed, he gave her a thumbs-up gesture as if he were just an ordinary pilot taking a fighter for a test flight, and the safety bulkhead closed to release the vacuum in the docking skirt. He was gone.
Poor Ben, Niathal thought. She wished him luck, and decided she would make some for him if she got the chance.
No, Jacen. You won’t get away with this. Not in my navy.
PHAEDA, IMPERIAL SECTOR: TREASURY REPOSITORIES, DERAPHA
The slab of carbonite lay on a trestle draped in synthetic gray velvetweave, looking for all the world like a funeral bier.
Fett inhaled the musty air and held out his chip from the Registry of Testaments and Legacies, his authorization to collect the belongings of a dead scumbag called Rezodar. The lawyer’s minion took it, checked it, and stood back to let Fett and Mirta cross the threshold of the storeroom.
Fett didn’t know Rezodar, and didn’t care. He could guess the gangster’s lifestyle. This was Phaeda, after all. On a bad day it made Nar Shaddaa look classy. He hadn’t been back here since the height of the Empire, another element of his past come back to haunt him on this difficult day.
“I’ll leave you to clear the store, sir,” said the minion. “Three hours maximum. Everything must go. A droid is available if you need help loading.”
There was only one thing Fett wanted. The rest … he’d jettison it, even give it to the deserving poor, or—given that this was Phaeda—the undeserving criminal classes.
“That’ll be all,” he said, and took a few steps forward. The distance to the trestle felt almost as impossibly long as the expanse of sand in the arena at Geonosis that he’d had
to cross to retrieve his father’s body. And then there had been Ailyn’s body, and reinterring his father’s remains—Fett had played pallbearer far too often in the past year. He wasn’t a squeamish man, but he was coming close to the limit of his tolerance.
But Sintas is alive. And so are you, although you might as well be dead some days.
“What order do you want to do this in?” Mirta asked.
She’d been quiet since he’d dropped his bombshell on her about Shysa. She stood on the opposite side of the shrouded carbonite slab and took off her helmet, the new one that Orade’s father had made for her to match armor plates she had now painted a deep saffron. When she tidied her short curly hair with one hand, there was a brief moment when she looked a lot like her grandmother. It was the mouth. The eyes were definitely from his side of the family.
“Let’s check the carbonite first,” Fett said. It wasn’t what he meant, but it was easier than saying that he only cared about Sintas and everything else was ballast.
He took the top edge of the velvetweave. The drape of the fabric clung to the little mountains and valleys of a face, a once-familiar land. Then he drew back the sheet; and it felt like the moment he saw Ailyn’s battered face when Mirta opened the body bag, the shock of the face of a stranger he ought to have known, but whose life he had missed almost completely.
“Oh …,” said Mirta.
It took a lot to shut the girl up, but it was the second time Fett had heard that choked-off gasp today.
Even in the monochrome contours of the carbonite shell, Sintas was recognizable. Worse: she was beautiful. He bent his knees slightly to check her profile against the light, but she looked much as he’d remembered—high cheekbones, long straight hair, a small pointed chin. Her arms were at her sides; her eyes were closed as if she were sleeping. He’d seen a few carbonited beings in his time and they had been frozen in some paroxysm of pain or terror, because it wasn’t a pleasant way to be put into suspended animation, but Sintas looked peaceful.
Revelation Page 5