“Hello, Jedi,” he said, and drew a blaster.
chapter five
In Mandalorian lore, the color blue represents reliability; green, duty; gold, vengeance; black, justice; gray, mourning a lost love; and red, honoring a father.
Mandalorians: Identity and Language, published by the Galactic Institute of Anthropology
EN ROUTE FOR THE HAPES CLUSTER
“You sure this isn’t a trap?” Ben asked.
“I told you Jacen was nuts.” Shevu was heading for the Perlemian Trade Route in a small transport bearing the livery of the geological survey team of the University of Coruscant. Ben felt confident about pulling off this ruse if they were questioned, because they really did look like a student and an earnest young lecturer in some arcane branch of the study of igneous rocks. Ben certainly wanted to look very closely at Kavan. “But he had no way of knowing that I was going to do this before he told me to take a break.”
“He had some other motive, though.”
“Well, he didn’t know we’d go to Kavan. And he won’t know we’ve been.”
“Who got you this crate?”
“Jacen’s ticked off a lot of people.”
“Yes, I think he’s off the party list at a lot of embassies now …”
“If you have to know—a lot of the Corellians he rounded up were professors and students. The uni took it badly. And … Barit Saiy comes in handy, with that engineering company of his dad’s.”
The name slapped Ben in the face. Barit Saiy. He was Corellian, from an ordinary working family who’d lived on Coruscant for generations; but he did something dumb with a blaster, talked tough about fighting the Galactic Alliance, and Ben had turned him in to Jacen. When he vanished from GAG custody, like so many Corellians during those awful weeks, Ben had assumed the worst.
A memory came back to him, Shevu hunched over a custody record, angry at losing prisoners from the list without proper procedure.
“You found him?” Ben asked, as the memory resolved into realization.
“Yeah.”
“And you got him out.” Ben floundered, dropped from a height into an ice-cold pool of doubt. “But he was armed and shooting at cops …”
“Yeah, and you don’t have to feel guilty about informing on him. The law’s the law.”
“But you bent it. You let Barit go.”
“Ben, everything Jacen did to grab power was within the law. There’s law, and there’s justice, and sometimes they’re not the same thing. Barit was just a kid talking through his backside, like teenage lads do.”
Ben’s certainty wavered. He’d seen Barit fire at the cops during a riot. He’d deflected the bolt. He wondered if he was clinging to that to make himself feel better about turning him in. “And you needed an informant.”
“Don’t you? Isn’t that what I’ll be doing for your dad?”
The adult world that Ben had been catapulted into had no safety net if anything went wrong. Nobody would call time on it like a training session, and the weapons weren’t modified lightsabers designed just to sting. He’d woken up to that fast; he was playing by dirty, violent, grown-up rules. What still left him struggling, though, was the compromises, and he lay awake at night walking the endless maze of right and wrong, and wondering if two wrongs could make a right, and if he might have learned that at the Jedi academy. Dad always seemed to know what was right, even if he couldn’t explain why. Ben realized at that moment that you never learned a foolproof formula for right and wrong, that there was no checklist of good and bad, and that you had to keep an eye on yourself every minute of the day and ask: Should I be doing this? Would I want someone to do this to me?
“You don’t have to spy for the Jedi Council,” he said.
“Of course I do,” Shevu said. “Who else is going to be able to get rid of a Sith? You think the GA courts can bring the full majesty of galactic law down on his head? As long as we both know the score, that’s fine.”
Ben went back to his datapad, understanding how tense Shevu was. He could have told Tenel Ka what they were doing, but that would have meant official Hapan Security involvement, and Shevu didn’t trust anybody. Ben saw his point. He’d trusted Jacen, after all. Now he was back in the land of hard evidence, running through all the data he’d gathered in a stunned haze while his mother lay dead in the tunnel on Kavan.
She was, of course, in most of the holovid recordings.
Ben had watched those over and over until he could look past his mother’s body and the pain of reliving the discovery. He saw instead the position of the body, the surrounding area, what material was dislodged or broken, the unoxidized bright color of the smashed bricks that told him the damage was new; he reconstructed a savage fight, so much destruction of the tunnel complex on that abandoned world that Force-use was obvious. There were no traces of detonite, the only other explanation for that much damage, and Mara Skywalker would never have had to use that much effort against a run-of-the-mill attacker. She’d fought someone at least as powerful as herself.
Ben checked the profiles of the air samples he’d taken. There was the trace of high-energy vaporization from lightsabers and a lot of trace elements released by smashed brick, wood, and stone. He’d almost hoped for a whisper of the air from Jacen’s lungs, but the datapad-sized device couldn’t do magic.
What could he have missed? His mother’s body had been examined thoroughly by Cilghal. Other Jedi had combed the tunnels for evidence, picking up on all the possible clues that ordinary technology might have missed, but there was nothing discarded except the sterile-pack of poison darts that were so like Alema’s weapons of choice, and the echoes of dark energy, which were equally likely to have come from Alema.
But they hadn’t picked up echoes of Alema herself. Was she adept enough to disguise her passage through Kavan? Jacen certainly was. He could hide in the Force, and even cloak Lumiya’s presence right under the Jedi Council’s nose.
But it was still all what wasn’t there at the scene, not what was.
The Hapan deep-space security sensors picked up the university transport as soon as it came within range, and the only thing that seemed to concern the control center was whether the survey was looking for gemstones. They seemed touchy about that. Shevu put on a very convincing droning voice, explaining that gemstones weren’t anywhere near as interesting as the Carlanian volcanic pipes and surrounding igneous rocks that would shed more light on the latest theory about the origins and formation of the Hapes Cluster. He was reading off a datapad. It did the trick. The control center stopped him midway through a riveting explanation of the outcropping of cylindrical diatremes, and gave them clearance to land on Kavan.
I can do this. Ben concentrated on detached calm as the windswept surface of Kavan expanded rapidly beneath the vessel. I can face this.
“You okay, Ben?”
“I’m fine.”
“Think cop. Just keep thinking cop.”
It was a lot less desolate than Ben recalled. The season had moved on, and the ground was covered in different plants, tussocks of tiny star-shaped red flowers with amber spikes for leaves. Shevu set the geo-survey droid to explore and drill some convincing core samples, just in case, and they walked the course—the CSF’s slang for revisiting a crime scene and pacing out distances and angles in the hope of getting fresh insight. They stood at the location where Mara’s StealthX had been found, looking for inspiration.
“Jacen must have landed here in his StealthX,” said Shevu. “His was signed out from the GAG hangar during the relevant time frame, and we know your mother called Hapan ATC to say she knew he was in the area. So unless he switched vessels, we’re looking for traces of that special Tibanna isotope.”
“Cilghal’s team did the sweep.” Ben had covered every angle. He was sure of that, but he wanted to be wrong and for an unforeseen forensic revelation to emerge. “StealthXs kick so much of it around on takeoff that traces were spread over five hundred meters. If Mom landed hers anywhere n
ear Jacen’s, which is likely if she was going after him, then she wiped out his isotope footprint.”
“Just checking.”
“Let’s do the tunnels.”
It was the hardest thing of all, but Ben thought cop as Shevu advised, and saw only what was in front of him, not what might have taken place there. Cilghal had found traces of blood on rubble that had fallen from a collapsed ceiling, as if it had hit someone below, but it had been too degraded by the energy of blasterfire to identify its source. It might even have been his mother’s.
The sequence of events seemed clear, though. Someone—at least two people—had fought their way through the tunnels, causing huge damage. Some was blasterfire, and some showed no signs of its cause, which Ben guessed might have been massive Force pushes. It’s you, Jacen, I know it, we all know it, but I have to have hard evidence. Shevu looked more and more exasperated as he rescanned walls and floors, shaking his head as he looked at the readouts. The crime scene was months old.
“I think that’s all we’re going to get,” said Ben. “Let’s go.”
“No, I’m not done,” said Shevu.
“I’ll try another route. You don’t have to—”
“If I just wanted him for murder, I’ve already got a case with real live witnesses—Lieutenant Tebut. I’m doing this for you, Ben. You need to know for sure.”
Did Mara Skywalker’s death matter more than Patra Tebut’s? It did to Ben, and he felt a little guilty about having so many resources to throw at his search for justice. He knew nothing about Tebut—whether she had a family and what they might be going through now, or even what story her next of kin had been told to explain her death. He reasoned that he was doing it for her, too, and all the beings who’d died because of Jacen, even Boba Fett’s daughter, criminal or not.
I should have known what he was then. I should have known when I sat outside that interrogation room and heard Jacen kill her.
“You’re right,” said Ben. “We keep going.”
They were back outside now. The sky was filling with clouds, threatening to spit light rain. Shevu went off to pace the distance from the StealthX’s last known location—seeing the terrain through Jacen’s eyes, he said—and Ben concentrated on his datapad again.
It was hard to ignore the image of Mom. He thought of all the things he’d never had the chance to say to her, and magnified the picture so that the screen showed a close-up of her face. The injuries were fresh; if only she’d gouged a chunk out of Jacen with her nails, then there’d have been tissue to match with his, but Cilghal had said her wounds were peppered with dust as if bricks had hit her in the face. As Ben gazed at her image, he could have sworn it shifted slightly, as if something was wrong with the datapad’s display.
The screen reflected a short-lived shaft of sunlight. Ben angled it slightly to see better. And then his mother’s face on the screen really did move, reflected from behind him, and he gulped in a silent gasp of air as he spun around and she was there, right there, looking straight into his eyes. She was a touch away from him. She looked just as she had in life, but bathed in a haze of faint blue-white light like a faulty hologram. She smiled, a little sad frown of a smile but a smile nonetheless, and buried the fingers of her right hand in her thick red hair to yank at it. Still smiling, she held out torn strands as if to drop them into his hands. Ben couldn’t make a sound: he cupped his palm to catch the hairs but nothing fell, and suddenly she was walking slowly away from him. He tried so hard to yell at her to stop, to wait, to talk to him, to come back, that he loved her so much, but she kept on walking, and all he could say was, “Love you …”
Then she turned, tugged at a lock of her hair, and he read her lips: Love you too, Ben.
And she was gone.
Ben could hear only his hammering pulse now. His scalp felt stretched tight across his skull, and he couldn’t move. “Ben?” Shevu called. “Ben, are you okay?”
Get a grip. “Did you see anything?”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No, there’s nothing here that I can see that was missed the first time, and if there was … it’s weeks ago, and it’s gone.” He caught Ben’s shoulders with both hands. “You look terrible. Come on, let’s sit you down in the transport. Get your bearings again.”
Ben knew that Shevu thought he was overcome by his memories. Shevu hadn’t seen Mom, and Ben had no idea how to tell him that he had. Bereaved people saw their loved ones everywhere they looked when the loss was fresh, and that was probably the explanation, except she’d looked at him, and her gestures had been so clear; and she’d spoken, even though he couldn’t hear the sound. He didn’t know much about Force ghosts—nobody did—but that weird bluish haze … if his brain had been playing tricks on him, he’d have seen her as he remembered her, not with stuff he didn’t understand added to it all.
She came back. She came back to tell me.
“I’m … fine,” he said.
He thought desperately. He had to grab this while it was still vivid and every detail was fresh. The hair. Why had she torn out hairs from her head? Why had she appeared to him here? Why here? Why not back on Endor, or at home? If she could contact him like that, why didn’t she just tell him Jacen killed her?
Did she even know who killed her? She could have been ambushed. And then why didn’t she know now, now that she was one with the Force—but Ben stopped there. He was off chasing the nebulous world of ghosts, when he needed evidence in the mundane world to show everyone.
“Ben, I’ve got a flask of caf. Nice hot cup will make you feel better.”
Why here? Because we’re doing an investigation. She was telling him hair was significant.
“Lon,” he said, “when people fight, they leave all kinds of traces on each other, don’t they?”
“Yes, but it’s too late to ask for swabs from Jacen. And do Jedi actually land punches?”
“No, but …”
“Stang.” Shevu was furious. Something had occurred to him, and he was angry with someone, or maybe even himself. “Stang, the StealthX. We didn’t test the StealthX. In CSF, we’d normally go over that with a fine-tooth comb as a matter of course—”
“Nobody thought it was Jacen at the time. Nobody thought that there might have been anything to look for anyway, because we don’t fight like non-Force-users. And—”
“What would we be looking for?” Shevu asked. “Come on, Ben, what’s on your mind?”
Ben swallowed. “Hair. Mom’s hair.”
“Could she ever have flown in Jacen’s StealthX? If we find anything, is there any other way it could have ended up there apart from being transferred on his clothing? I know she came to see him at GAG HQ, but did they have any contact outside work that would have led to transfer?”
“Not that I know.”
“Then we’ve got to go for that, Ben.”
“How are we going to get a chance to go over the thing? And he’s had weeks to clean the cockpit.”
“We’ll think of something.” Shevu looked torn between staying and doing more searching while they had the light, and heading back home. “If we come up empty, fine, but I’m not leaving that stone unturned. Come on.”
They retrieved the droid and took off toward the hyper-space lane. A hundred times on the journey back, Ben shut his eyes to replay that memory of his mother and saw her lips moving.
Love you too, Ben.
Too. She’d heard him. She’d heard, seen, sensed, whatever—but she knew he’d said he loved her. He burst into tears and sobbed until his abdominal muscles ached.
“Sorry,” he said at last, wiping his face on his sleeve. “I’m a bit crazy.”
“Your mother was murdered,” Shevu said quietly. “You’re entitled to go as crazy as you like.”
Ben wondered whether to tell Shevu about the apparition, but thought better of it. Later, maybe. He might not even tell his dad for a while. He didn’t know how. But he’d call hi
m and let him know where he was as soon as they dropped back out of hyperspace. He missed Luke, and couldn’t imagine why he’d spent so much effort in the past trying to escape his attention. He cherished every second with him now.
“The dead talk, Ben,” Shevu said. “They bear witness.”
“Yes,” said Ben. “They do.”
BEVIIN-VASUR FARM, OUTSIDE KELDABE
Dr. Beluine gave Sintas another shot of tranquilizer and checked her pulse. This time, she didn’t lash out.
“I wouldn’t usually administer this,” he said, “but she’ll injure herself knocking into things if she isn’t sedated.”
Fett saw the open maw of the sarlacc a split second before he plunged into the lightless, hopeless pit of acid. Thanks, Solo. “They do say.”
“Stop talking about me as if I’m dead,” Sintas snapped. “Everything’s so loud. Where am I? Why can’t I see?”
She looked dazed now, but it was an improvement on stumbling around the room. She sounded sane enough, too, but sanity was a fragile thing and Fett knew the odds. It was fifty-fifty that she’d ever be completely normal again. He didn’t know where to start explaining, and even Mirta, who usually had all the smart answers, erred on the side of extreme caution. Sintas sat on the bed, hugging her knees, blind gaze wandering unsteadily between voices.
How did you tell a woman she’d been frozen down for thirty-odd years, and that while she was busy being unconscious, her daughter had gone after her ex-husband, bent on deadly revenge, and then that daughter had been picked up by the secret police and tortured to death, and that she had a granddaughter, and … Fett had rehearsed it in his mind. Stang. It sounded just as bad now as it had three months ago: worse, maybe.
If she remembered that all on her own, it was going to be bad enough.
Medrit, to his credit, did what Beviin would have done had he not been out chasing another potential problem. He saved his Mand’alor from embarrassment and handled the diplomacy.
Revelation Page 9