But only in part. Lumiya smiled. The enemy’s techniques were nowhere near as effective as hers.
She approached the mind until it filled her vision, and she planted herself there, making its location an anchor point for her consciousness.
Now for the second phase of this elaborate Sith technique. She drew back from her target mind, seeking other mentalities in the area. And there they were, glows of various hues, none of them, sadly, decorated with the red sparks of her influence.
She sampled each in turn. Most were awake—firm, more resolute than she could affect at this distance. Others were too fragmented; when she touched them they tended to drift apart into smaller, incoherent glows, and she knew that these were the minds of the inmates … the patients.
Then she found one that was firm, grounded, but not so resistant to her touch. Its owner was asleep. Lumiya sampled it further, found it to be the mind of a Quarren female.
Like a spectral parasite, she affixed herself to that mind, forging a connection, drawing energy out of it and the body that sustained it. She could not draw that energy into herself, though she badly needed sustenance now; she could feel her own body begin to shake from the strain. But she could, and would, put the energy to use.
Finally she flowed into the distant Quarren’s mind, flowed out through its memory of its surroundings … and she could see.
She hovered above the Quarren. The amphibious female was dressed in medical scrubs and leaned across a desk, sleeping there. This was a small office packed with, and lit solely by, computer displays. A window looked out over a facing wall of building fronts, and there were, for once, no traffic streams to be seen. A door, ajar, led into a brightly lit corridor.
Lumiya got to work. Into the woman’s sleeping mind, she whispered, “Open your eyes. Stand up. We have work to do. Records to read. Instructions to issue.”
And the Quarren rose, her eyes glazed, her face-tentacles twitching.
Minutes later Lumiya restored the Quarren to her desk and true sleep, then drifted from the chamber to find someone. A very useful someone.
GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT, VETERANS’ MENTAL CARE HOSPITAL
Matric Klauskin, former commander of the Second Fleet’s Corellian task force but for the last several weeks a patient in this too-sympathetic prison, awoke. The small room he’d been given was, as always, dark and quiet, its few items of furniture reflecting white gleams from the city lights filtering in through the transparisteel viewport. Everything was as it should be.
Or perhaps not. The door was open.
He frowned. The door opened only when the doctors or nurses came for him, or when his caseworker from the Alliance’s naval administration visited to reassure him that all was well; they hadn’t forgotten him.
But now the door was open and no one was entering.
He sat up, his sheet falling from his chest, and realized that someone was standing beside his bed. He looked up.
It was Edela. Of course it was Edela. His treatment here was all about his wife. Now she smiled down at him, patient and loving as always. Tonight she wore a shimmering synthsilk gown of burgundy.
She had lost weight, diminishing from the pretty but distinctly overweight woman she had been the last time he’d seen her to a figure he could describe as “pleasingly plump.” The gray was gone from her hair, too, and he realized belatedly that she wasn’t just slimmer, she was younger—she looked as she had a mere five or ten years into their marriage.
“Hello, dear,” he said. “You realize you’re dead.”
Her smile broadened. “Of course I’m dead. I’ve been dead for years. But it doesn’t mean I don’t exist.”
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? The doctors all say that you don’t, that your very existence rests only in my mind. But they say I’m getting better.”
“I don’t exist just in your mind. I exist in fact. Phantoms of the mind can’t open a door and free you, can they?”
Klauskin looked again at the door. It remained resolutely open. “That just means I’m dreaming again. It’s really not open.”
“It is, as you’ll find out in a moment.” Her voice became urgent. “Darling, you’ve been lied to, we’ve all been lied to. The Corellians have been in the right all along, and we’ve betrayed our own people by opposing them.”
Klauskin frowned. He knew his thinking was muddled, but he couldn’t see how he was harming his homeworld of Commenor by opposing Corellia. True, Commenor’s government had offered words of encouragement to Corellia, but that was just politics at work.
Edela continued, “Commenor and Bothawui are coming into the war on Corellia’s side. And you, darling, have been imprisoned here and convinced that you’re ill … just so the Alliance can keep you from helping our world.”
Klauskin sighed. Truth was such a slippery concept these days that he found it hard to trust—even his dead wife. “You’re either here or not.”
There was a little curiosity in Edela’s voice. “True.”
“And I’m either a prisoner or a patient.”
“True.”
“And Commenor and Bothawui are either in the war or not.”
“True.”
“I have to know the truth, and the truth is in what can be verified. I’m sorry, darling. I’m going to go through that open door and then wake myself up. If I don’t wake up, then what you say is true.”
“Don’t apologize, Matric. I know these are difficult times for you.”
Klauskin rose. His bare feet were cold on the tile floor. He walked out through the door, looking up and down the corridor at the other doorways; they were all closed. Edela followed and joined him.
Klauskin raised his hand to his lips and bit the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It hurt. He kept the pressure on, biting deeper, and tasted blood. He held the bite until he couldn’t stand the pain anymore, and finally he let his arm swing to his side again.
Weary, he said, “I’m convinced.”
“Good. Because you have a lot to do. I’m going to lead you out of this prison. Outside, a friend will give you clothes, transportation, and documents.” Her expression turned to one of sympathy. “You’ve been a hero of the Alliance for so long. But they turned against you, and it’s time to be a hero of Commenor again.”
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Lumiya gave Klauskin one last, sweet kiss as he stood on the walkway outside the mental hospital. The shaking her real body was experiencing almost reflected itself in trembling in Edela’s arms, but she maintained ruthless control.
Then she let Edela fade away to nothingness. Her consciousness roared back into her own body.
That’s when the pain and weakness hit hard. She spasmed, sitting upright, and nearly rolled out of her reclining chair. She forced herself to lie down again. She lay there, her limbs twitching—even the artificial ones.
“My lady?” the medical droid asked. “Can you hear me?”
“Yessss.” Feebly, she waved fingers at him, trying to dissuade him from unnecessary conversation.
This session had gone longer than most, and had been worse than most. It would take her longer to recover. She wondered what would have happened if she had continued it to the point of her own collapse. Would she have died? Or would she be trapped on Coruscant, in the phantasmal body of a long-dead military wife, forever hovering around a man she had deliberately driven crazy?
She didn’t know the answer, and it didn’t matter. She had succeeded, and Klauskin would now dutifully go about accomplishing her plans.
The Galactic Alliance had been so circumspect about covering up the details of Klauskin’s mental breakdown. They thought they were being merciful; that if Klauskin was able to effect a recovery he could someday resume command, even if a lesser one. His official record said only that he was on administrative leave, which could result from a physical injury or an urgent family problem. He still held his admiral’s rank and command rating.
And in not i
nforming the fleet that Klauskin was dangerously delusional, they had doomed—
—had doomed—
On that thought she fell asleep.
DREWWA, MOON OF ALMANIA DREWWA SPACEPORT
Customs inspections, Ben decided, are very inconvenient.
The transport ride to the Outer Rim system of Almania had been long and dull. Ben spent most of it reading Jedi texts on his datapad—texts about his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, he’d been given as preparation for the document he was supposed to write—or sleeping. He interacted very little with his fellow passengers, preferring not to become memorable to them.
Finally the transport had landed on the heavily industrialized moon of Drewwa, with its high-security spaceport and its carefully regimented customs facility. Ben stood in the inspection line, his small pack and his belt pouch in hand, and prepared to enter the twenty-meter-long sensor tube. There he would be scanned a dozen different ways, and at the end his belongings would be laid out on a table and hand-inspected, with anything the sensors had flagged receiving special attention.
There was no way his lightsaber would remain undetected if he carried it through the tube.
The tube allowed access through a security wall that was seven or eight meters tall, and there was a three-meter gap between the top of the wall and the drafty-looking shell of the ceiling. There were lots of glow rod pods up there on either side of the wall.
Ben could bound to the top of the metal awning above the tube entrance and might be able, with a prodigious leap, to make the top of the wall. He could then run along the top of the tube, clear the wall on the far side, and run out into the nonsecure portion of the customs building to vanish into the night.
Assuming it was night out there. And the holocams all over the facility would record his face, and his image would be on every guard’s datapad in an hour. That would be inconvenient.
Then he thought about the Jedi Temple practice droid and its foamsteel balls, and he knew what to do.
He looked up and found a glow rod pod well behind him. He reached out through the Force to grab it, yank it…
It rocked a bit.
Ben frowned. It was firmly rooted. He focused harder, putting all his intensity into his concentration.
The pod snapped free of its mooring and crashed to the permacrete floor, its cluster of dozens of glow rods shattering and sending glass pieces skidding along the floor in every direction.
As everyone looked, and one armed guard trotted over to see what had happened, Ben used the Force to send his lightsaber up to the ceiling. There, above the glow rods, it was barely visible. He caused it to slide across the ceiling until it came to rest above a pod on the far side of the wall … and then, with meticulous care, he lowered it until it nestled into the cluster of rods.
“You’re holding up the line, stupid.” The speaker was an elderly woman, as lean as though she were made up just of bone and rawhide, a disapproving look on her face.
“Sorry,” Ben said. He trotted forward into the tube.
“Sorry doesn’t mean anything. If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”
“Sorry.”
“Now you’re being insolent.”
“Sorry.” Ben thought about using his powers to cause her to trip. A face full of permacrete might scrub the disapproval off her face.
No, she was old, and she might really be hurt.
On the other hand, it would teach her a lesson, and she could stand to be taught a lesson.
At the far end of the tube, he handed over his bag and pouch to the gray-uniformed inspection officer and waited, frowning over the question of the old woman. What would Jacen do in this situation? Ben shook his head. The question didn’t apply. No one would have spoken to Colonel Jacen Solo that way, even before he was famous.
Why not? Because he was tall and handsome? No, Luke wasn’t tall and was only as handsome as his scarred face let him be, and yet everyone treated him with respect.
Luke and Jacen commanded respect because everyone knew it was a bad idea to mess with them, from either their appearance or their history. Which meant that Ben was out of luck, because he had neither fame nor formidable looks.
The old woman fussed her way up behind Ben. “You’re a very nasty little boy,” she said.
Ben glared up at her. “I take it back.”
“You take what back?”
“My apology. I apologized, but you didn’t accept it. You just used it as an excuse to keep being rude. You have the manners of a bantha with digestion problems. If you had children, I hope they were raised by piranha-beetles so they’d be nicer than you.”
The woman loomed up over him, her face distorting with anger, and Ben saw in her mind her intent to slap some of what she considered courtesy into him.
But he intensified his glare, and added to it a little push with the Force. Try it, he all but said. See what I become.
A bit of grayness crept into her complexion, and she took an involuntary step back. She turned stiffly away from Ben, handing her bag to her inspections officer, and looked at everything but Ben, muttering to herself.
Ben’s inspections officer handed his bag back to him. He also offered a silent smile and a thumbs-up.
Surprised, Ben offered a shy smile in return. He turned and trotted toward the door out of the customs facility.
There, he told himself. That’s how Jacen would have done it if he were my age.
As he reached the door, he let his lightsaber drop into his hands, then moved out into the night air.
chapter eleven
DREWWA, MOON OF ALMANIA
In the silvery light of dawn, Ben stood under a sidewalk café awning beside a nearly deserted city street and stared up at the soaring Crossroutes Business Habitat. It was unlovely in the extreme, a greenish column extending eight hundred meters up into the sky, with decorative yellow-white structures like planetary rings situated every five floors. At least Ben hoped they were decorative—what their function might be otherwise was beyond him. Could they slide up and down the building exterior like massive open-air turbolifts?
The data card Seha had given him included a datafile on Drewwa, including a mention that the Crossroutes building was one of the system’s few acknowledgments that there was life outside Almania. Trang Robotics, one of the system’s largest industries, traded a tremendous number of computer systems and droids to the Alliance, the Chiss, and other large collectives of planets and cultures, but the locals by and large ignored the fact that anything existed beyond their star system.
The occasional firm like Crossroutes seemed to exist principally to rub such unwelcome news into the faces of the Almanians. The building housed the local offices of hundreds of offworld firms as they tried, usually successfully, to arrange for advantageous purchase deals from local technological firms or attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to market their own goods in this system.
At this early hour there was already a stream of workers entering the ground-level doors of the Crossroutes building. Most looked to Ben as though they were offworlders like himself. At some point he would have to join them, go up to the 215th floor, find and break into the display case, replace the real Amulet there with the fake he carried in his pocket, and get out undetected.
No, that was too much, he decided. For once, it was his mother’s voice and not Jacen’s that whispered in his ear. “The first step in any intelligence operation,” she had told him more than once, “is gathering information. You gather enough information to make your plan. If you’re planning without information, you’re planning for failure.”
“But that’s not how the Jedi do things,” Ben had protested. “They just go there and solve the problem.”
She’d given him a crafty smile. “Which is why they’re famous, right?”
“Right!”
“Well, when intelligence operatives do their jobs correctly, they never become famous. Because no one ever learns they’ve been there. A
nd sometimes that’s what solving the problem means.”
Ben hadn’t liked the answer then, because it seemed to preclude igniting lightsabers, bouncing off walls, and stuffing the smiles of bad people straight down their mouths. But now he could see that the intelligence way had merit from time to time. Jacen did things that couldn’t always appear on news holocasts; Jacen’s duties seemed to be about half intelligence these days. Suddenly, in Ben’s estimation, Mara got a lot smarter.
So he’d do an information-gathering run and then decide, when he knew more, whether to continue straight into the actual mission or back off and return at a later time.
The wall behind him slid up, revealing the café’s interior. Warm air smelling of fresh-baked goods rolled across Ben, and he abruptly realized that he was hungry.
The proprietor, a tall man with the build and gut of a Gamorrean, stepped out among his tables, looked up and down at the sidewalk foot traffic, and glanced at Ben. “Here to eat, son?” To Ben’s ears, his quaint accent made it sound like, Hierr to eat, sann?
Ben nodded.
The man tapped a tabletop, motioning for Ben to sit there. The tabletop lit up, four points on it revealing themselves to be displays showing the establishment’s morning menu. Ben sat and looked it over, while also watching the front of his target building, noticing the way many people heading toward the building instead veered toward the café.
“Caf, please,” Ben said. “And kruffy pot pie.”
“Tap it out, son. And put in your credcard. No mistakes that way.” The proprietor tapped his ear as if suggesting he were hard of hearing. “You sound Coruscanti.”
Ben entered his order and slid his credcard into the slot at the table’s center. “I am. Mostly.”
“Two kinds of Coruscanti there are. Those that are happy for big open spaces, and those who can’t stand not being surrounded by close walls and tight streets.”
“I suppose so.” The table surface went ding and the word DECLINED, in red, was superimposed over the menu. Below it, more text read, ACCOUNT NOT FOUND. PLEASE INSERT ANOTHER CREDCARD.
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