by Troy Denning
“Yeah,” Han said. “Who are we going to tell?”
chapter eixteen
Luke woke with the same troubled spirit he did every time he dreamed of the face, his chest heavy with the weight of a duty unanswered, his stomach churning with premonitions of failure. The face always came to him half hidden beneath a raised hood, betraying only a hint of its appearance—a mouth frozen into a lopsided grimace of anguish, a jagged brow fixed in a permanent scowl of disapproval, a pair of ebony eyes shining with perpetual malice. He never saw enough of the face to know whether it was the same one each time, but the emotions always came in order: pain, condemnation, spite. Luke had no idea what the pattern meant, but he felt sure it was a storm warning.
A beckoning whistle sounded from the far side of the Jade Shadow’s elegant master cabin, where R2-D2 stood in the hatchway, rocking back and forth on his support arms. Luke allowed himself the fantasy of using the Force to push the little droid back into the corridor and closing his eyes again. Since learning of Lumiya’s involvement with GAG, he had been so worried about Ben that he had barely been able to sleep—and even when he did, he was so troubled by dreams that he never woke feeling refreshed.
R2-D2 let out an impatient bleat, then extended his charging arm and started across the floor.
“All right—no need for the ronto prod.” Luke swung his feet around and sat on the edge of the bunk. “I’m awake.”
R2-D2 issued a doubtful whistle, but stopped and retracted the charging arm as Luke pulled on his boots. The steady thrumming in the deck suggested that the Shadow had emerged from hyperspace and was decelerating hard, presumably on its final approach to the planet Hapes. Luke could sense Mara’s impatience through their Force-bond, though not the cause. Perhaps she was having a hard time securing approach clearance from the Hapan defense forces—or perhaps she was simply eager to get Ben away from any influence Lumiya might be exerting over Jacen and GAG.
Once his boots were fastened, Luke grabbed his robe and started forward through the observation salon. The cratered faces of two silver moons were sliding past outside the Shadow’s starboard viewport. Outside the other, the ion tails of half a dozen starships were crawling across the star-flecked velvet. In the distance hung a white motionless disk—no doubt one of the Battle Dragons that would be screening Hapes after the attempt on Tenel Ka’s life.
Luke continued forward onto the flight deck, where the cloud-mottled disk of the planet itself hung dead ahead. Its sparkling oceans and forested islands were as beautiful as ever, but Luke was more interested in the thumb-sized wedge slowly drifting toward the center of the canopy. Instead of the customary white, the Star Destroyer’s hull was matte black, with the telltale dome of a gravity-well generator bulging beneath its belly and a cloaking cone rising midway down its spine.
It was the first time Luke had seen the new GAG Star Destroyer. He didn’t much like it—and he really didn’t like that it had been named the Anakin Solo, after his dead nephew.
A canopy section opaqued into a mirror, and Mara’s face appeared in the reflection, looking focused and worried. The Shadow had a drop-deck helm, with the pilot seated down in the nose of the cockpit, so she had to tilt her head slightly upward to meet his gaze.
“We just received a very interesting holorecording,” she said.
“From Jacen?”
Mara shook her head. “From Han, relayed over the HoloNet from the Jedi Temple.”
“Really?” Luke lifted his brow; before leaving the Jedi Temple, they had been briefed on the Solos’ “participation” in the assassination attempt. “Explaining how they’re being impersonated by clones and weren’t even on Hapes when someone tried to kill Tenel Ka? Because that’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Not exactly,” Mara said. “And it only gets more confusing. Han and Leia are spying on the coup plotters.”
“Spying?” Luke frowned, trying to work out the course of events that would lead the Solos from Corellia to the assassination attempt to becoming spies for the Galactic Alliance. “You’re right, it is confusing—but whatever Han and Leia do usually is. What was in the message?”
“They’ve learned the identity of one of the ringleaders,”
Mara said. “Han wants us to pass the information to Tenel Ka as soon as possible.”
Luke looked out the front of the canopy, where the Anakin’s silhouette now hung dead ahead of the Shadow. “Then why are we heading for the Anakin?”
“I tried to relay the message to Tenel Ka. My signal was routed to Prince Isolder. He suggested I try again after we were aboard the Anakin.”
“The Anakin?” Luke closed his eyes and expanded his Force-awareness toward the Star Destroyer. It did not take long to find the familiar, levelheaded presence of Tenel Ka. “What’s she doing there?”
“Protecting Allana, I’m sure. I doubt she needed Han to tell her there was a traitor on her staff—or that her daughter is just as much a target as she is.”
“So she turns to Jacen,” Luke said. He was struck—as he so often was—by how lonely and sad Tenel Ka’s life had become, how much she was sacrificing to ensure a stable and humane government for her father’s people. “I guess that makes sense.”
Mara nodded. “When you can’t trust your new friends, you go to your old ones.” She fell silent a moment, then added, “Especially if one of them happens to be a very close friend.”
Luke raised his brow. “You think Jacen and Tenel Ka are lovers?”
“He sneaks off to see someone every few months,” Mara said.
“Tenel Ka?” Luke frowned, trying to imagine Tenel Ka having secret trysts with someone as dangerous to her throne as Jacen, then shook his head. “If she weren’t the Queen Mother, maybe. But there’s no future in it.”
“And you think that would stop them?”
“Maybe not Jacen,” Luke said. “But a Jedi lover would cause too many problems for Tenel Ka. She wouldn’t take such a foolish risk—no matter how she felt about him.”
Mara’s expression remained doubtful. “Tenel Ka has to have something for herself. She’s giving everything else to the Consortium.”
“Okay, it’s possible,” Luke said. He did not understand why he found the idea so alarming; was it merely because of his fears concerning Jacen? Or did his misgivings go deeper than that? Perhaps it made him fear that Lumiya’s corruption was spreading faster than he could contain it. “And that’s all the more reason we shouldn’t speculate. We could be putting Tenel Ka’s life at risk.”
“All right,” Mara said, taking the point. “But aren’t you even a little curious about Allana?”
“Of course,” Luke admitted. “But Jacen can’t be the father. The timing is just wrong.”
Mara put on a pout that looked completely out of place on her strong face. “Spoilsport.”
“I’m just saying that it’s impossible.” Suddenly Luke felt the need to spell out his reasoning—perhaps because now Mara had him wondering about Allana’s paternity. “For six months after the Battle of Qoribu, Jacen was confined to the academy on Ossus, along with the rest of the Jedi Knights involved—and that’s when Allana had to have been conceived. If Jacen had been slipping off to visit Tenel Ka, we would have known.”
Mara let out an exaggerated sigh of disappointment. “Killjoy.”
“Okay, okay.” Realizing that Mara was teasing him now, Luke smiled and raised his hands. “I surrender. I’m sure we can think of another explanation. We know he visited Tenel Ka when he asked for the fleet she sent to Qoribu. Maybe Allana’s gestation took a whole year.”
Mara winced in empathic discomfort. “Now you’re just being cruel.” She flicked her gaze toward the reflection of the copilot’s chair. “Take a seat. You look like you’ve been wrestling rancors in your sleep.”
“I wish.” Luke slipped into the copilot’s seat behind her. “It was the face again.”
Mara’s expression grew serious. “Jacen?”
Luke shrugged
. “Maybe. I never see it clearly enough.”
“Then you can’t be sure.”
“It was male,” Luke replied. He could feel through the Force how worried Mara was about Ben, how alarmed she was by the relationship they had discovered between GAG and Lumiya—so he did not understand why she still refused to see what was happening to Jacen. “Who else could it be?”
“That’s the point, Luke,” Mara said. “We don’t know. So far, the only connection we have between Jacen and Lumiya is some evidence suggesting she’s been working with GAG.”
“And you don’t find that alarming?”
“Like a gundark in a petting zoo,” Mara replied. She turned her gaze back to the Anakin Solo, which was steadily growing in the center of the canopy. “But there’s a big difference between suspicion and fact. What if Lumiya wasn’t working for GAG? What if someone in GAG is working for her?”
“You think she subverted one of Jacen’s subordinates?”
“I think we need to be open to the possibility,” Mara corrected. “You don’t like what Jacen’s doing with GAG, so you’re predisposed to assume the worst. All I’m saying is we can’t let emotion color our judgment.”
Luke fell silent a moment, then let out a long breath. “You’re right—maybe I’m assuming the worst because I don’t like Jacen’s methods. But your advice is good for both of us, you know. I think you blind yourself to what’s happening with Jacen because he’s the one who convinced Ben not to hide from the Force.”
Mara nodded. “Guilty as charged,” she said, keeping her eyes forward. “That’s why we have to work together on this, Skywalker. We need to keep each other honest … and if we don’t like what we find, we’re going to need each other more than ever.”
Her tone made Luke frown. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I mean, Skywalker,” she replied. “If you’re right—if Jacen has been making a fool of me—he won’t be easy to handle. It’ll take both of us.”
Luke raised his brow, surprised by the ice in Mara’s voice. “What about that sense of certainty you experienced back at the Sparring Arena? You said we had to let Ben follow his own path, that you thought the Force had drawn him to Jacen for a reason.”
“I still think that,” Mara said. “But we have a path to follow, too. Maybe this is where all our paths converge—where Ben’s path finally joins ours.”
“Only Ben’s?” Luke asked. He was beginning to sense some of the old ruthlessness in Mara, some of her old assassin instinct—and it scared him. “What about Jacen?”
“If I’m wrong, Jacen won’t have a path,” Mara said. “We’ll have to end it.”
“Now I think you’re the one who’s assuming the worst,” he said. “I’m worried about Jacen, but I’m not ready to kill him.”
“Then you’re not being realistic,” Mara said. “If he is working with Lumiya, we won’t have a choice. I won’t let him take Ben down that path with him.”
“Of course not—but whatever Jacen has become, it’s due to what happened after he was captured by the Yuuzhan Vong—and I’m the one who sent him on that mission.” Luke paused, still struggling with the decision that had cost the life of his nephew Anakin and so many other young Jedi Knights—still wondering what else he could have done to save the Jedi. “I won’t give up on Jacen just because he’s lost his way. If he has fallen under Lumiya’s sway, I’m going to bring him back under mine.”
Mara’s gaze strayed back to Luke’s reflection in the mirrored panel. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Luke flashed an innocent smile. “Because you’re used to me doing the impossible?”
Mara sighed. “Something like that.” She looked back to the Anakin, which was now an arm-length wedge silhouetted against the sparkling waters of a Hapan ocean. “But you’d better not be intending to redeem Lumiya, too. I draw the line at ex-girlfriends.”
“Don’t worry,” Luke said. “Even I’m not that naïve. Lumiya is going down.”
The comm channel squawked as a traffic controller issued approach clearance for the Shadow. For the next few minutes, as the dark mass of the Anakin continued to swell in the canopy, they were kept busy making course corrections and providing identity verifications. A pair of XJ5 ChaseXs flew by to confirm their identities visually, then irritated Mara by looping around to fall into the kill zone directly behind the Shadow.
Finally, when the Shadow had drawn so close they could see nothing ahead except the dark tiers of the Star Destroyer’s blocky superstructure, the traffic controller gave them clearance to berth in the Command Hangar. Mara dropped beneath the sky of black durasteel that was the Anakin’s belly, then angled aft to a small launching bay defended by two quad cannon laser turrets.
She used the attitude thrusters to rise through the barrier shield into the hangar, where a set of beacon lights led her to the designated berth.
No sooner had the Shadow set down than an honor guard of twenty GAG troopers emerged from an access hatch. They arrayed themselves in two columns and came to attention facing each other, and a moment later Jacen appeared and strode down the aisle between them. A black cape billowed from the shoulders of his black colonel’s uniform.
“Oh, boy,” Mara said, unbuckling her crash webbing. “Does he know who he looks like?”
“He does if he bothered to look in a mirror.” Luke was disappointed to see that their son was not accompanying Jacen, but hardly surprised. He had not felt Ben’s presence when he reached out to see if Tenel Ka was aboard the Anakin. “I just hope that’s not the point. He might as well be a recruiting holo for Corellian terrorists.”
As they shut down the Shadow, Luke expanded his Force-awareness to the entire Star Destroyer, searching for any hint that Lumiya was aboard. He felt a second presence near Tenel Ka’s that seemed very strong in the Force—her daughter, Allana, he suspected—but nothing dark enough to be Lumiya. Of course, that didn’t mean much. Jacen was standing right there in front of him, and Luke couldn’t sense his presence, either.
Once all systems had been placed on standby, they went aft and found Jacen waiting at the bottom of the boarding ramp. His face was gray and furrowed, and the purple circles beneath his eyes suggested that he had not been sleeping well, if at all. He bowed first to Mara, then to Luke.
“Masters Skywalker, welcome aboard the Anakin Solo.” Jacen’s voice sounded genuinely warm, though it was impossible to read his true feelings. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“You might want to reserve judgment on that,” Mara said. “We need to talk.”
“Of course.” Jacen remained at the foot of the boarding ramp, making no move to allow them any farther aboard. “Is something wrong?”
“You’d be safe to assume that,” Luke said. “Where’s Ben?”
“On a mission,” Jacen replied. “He’s in a comm blackout zone at the moment, but if it’s important, I could dispatch—”
“We’ll talk about that later—in private.” Luke had to struggle to keep his voice even; with Lumiya on the loose, he did not like the thought of Ben being on a mission anywhere. “First, we need to speak with the Queen Mother. We have an urgent message for her.”
Jacen’s eyes widened with surprise. “Tenel Ka?”
“Now, Jacen,” Luke said. “And we’ll need a holoprojector.”
Jacen let out his breath. “Very well.” He stepped aside and led them and R2-D2 up the aisle between the honor guard. “I’m sorry for hesitating, but she asked me to keep her presence confidential. Aside from the chamberlain she brought along, Prince Isolder is the only Hapan who knows she’s aboard.”
They passed through a hatchway into a small foyer, where four GAG troopers stood guard over a bank of lift tubes. Most of the tubes had a small sign next to them listing a destination such as ENGINEERING or COMMUNICATIONS, but at the far end of the foyer a tube large enough for five people remained unlabeled.
“It descends to the Detention Center,” Jacen explained, apparently notici
ng what Luke was looking at. “We find that prisoners are less likely to resist if they don’t realize they’ve reached the end of the journey.”
“Very … practical,” Luke said, trying not to be alarmed by how proficient his nephew had become at the art of imprisonment and interrogation. “I assume it results in fewer injuries to the prisoners.”
Jacen nodded. “That, too.”
A shudder of revulsion ran down Luke’s spine, but if Mara was alarmed by Jacen’s apparent indifference to his prisoners’ welfare, she did not show it. She merely followed him across the foyer to a lift labeled BRIDGE, then stepped into the tube and rose out of sight.
Jacen turned to Luke. “After you.”
Luke waved R2-D2 into the lift ahead of him, then followed without replying. His stomach sank as the tube walls blurred past. A moment later he came to a stop and stepped out into a sparse durasteel anteroom, where another detail of GAG sentries stood guard over several hatchways leading into a maze of blue-white corridors.
A single transparisteel wall, the only one without any openings in it, overlooked the flight deck one level below. Most of the officers there still wore the blue-and-gray uniforms of a normal Galactic Alliance Star Destroyer complement, but Luke could not help noticing the sense of pride and purpose that they radiated into the Force. Whatever Jacen’s other faults, he was clearly a good leader.
Jacen stepped out of the lift behind Luke and spoke to an ebony-skinned trooper standing directly across from them. “Sergeant Darb, take an escort detail to the Situation Room and inform the Queen Mother that the Masters Skywalker would like to speak with her. We’ll be waiting in the Briefing Cabin.”
“Very well, Colonel.”
The sergeant saluted sharply and left to obey. Jacen turned away from the flight deck, leading R2-D2 and the Skywalkers down a short corridor into a state-of-the-art Briefing Cabin with a large holocomm unit at one end of a sunken speaking stage. The area was enclosed by a circle of flowform chairs, each with a panel built into the arm to control individualized comm units, vid displays, and even automatic caf dispensers.