“I can give you proof of one who wasn't,” Lumiya said.
Nelani glared at Jacen. “Don't listen.”
Jacen shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Lumiya looked dispirited. “Should I? Why bother? With sweet Nelani whispering in your ear, you're certain to automatically disbelieve every word I say.” Then the forlorn look left her face, replaced by a slight smile. “After all, everything I tell you is a lie.”
Jacen stared at Lumiya, but she did not continue. Nelani looked between them, confused, sensing that something had changed in the conversation, something she had missed.
Jacen cleared his throat. “An interesting turn of phrase,” he said.
“Not an accidental one.” Lumiya turned to look at Nelani. “Turn that thing off, dear. You'll run the battery down.”
Nelani didn't budge. Her blade remained lit and glowing. “Jacen, something's wrong. What is she saying?”
“She's saying nothing.”
“Then I'll give you a name,” Lumiya said. “Vergere. She said that, didn't she? When she was training you to be a Sith?”
“She was training me to survive,” Jacen said. He thought of his onetime mentor, the diminutive bird-like alien who'd been born in this galaxy but had lived for years among the Yuuzhan Vong, accompanying them back when they swept into the galaxy on their mission of conquest and destruction.
“Yes,” Lumiya said. “To survive. Survival is a Sith trait. Jedi train themselves for self-sacrifice, for union with the Force, and they can afford to be suicidal, because there are so many of them. Sith train to survive.”
“Now you're making things up,” Jacen said. “Nelani, keep her here while I go find Ben.”
Lumiya shook her head. “You don't want Ben to be here. Someone's about to die. It might be you, it might be Nelani, and it might be me. Bring Ben here, and it might be him. Death is here among us, and it will be a very distressing one.”
Frowning, Jacen cast out his senses like a net, sampling the present and the future. Pathways led in all directions, but in each of them one of the three people present fell dying. Jacen, head severed by a pliant whip of light. Lumiya, Nelani's lightsaber cutting her in half—lengthwise, so there was no chance of missing the organic parts. Nelani, her heart speared by Jacen's lightsaber. Jacen, stabbed from behind by Ben, the boy's uncomprehending features making it clear that he was seeing something very different from the reality before him. Lumiya, swept into a marble wall by Jacen's control of the Force, her skull shattered‑
Jacen shut his eyes against the parade of tragedy. He opened them to view reality. “You're right. I can't see a path that doesn't lead to death. Let's revise our circumstances and see if any more options open to us in a minute or two.”
“Good,” Lumiya said. “Now. Vergere. A Jedi, but one who was quietly resentful of the hidebound ways of the old Jedi Council, its resistance to any learning outside the rote procedures that had been part of the order for so long. She was a rogue student of the Force, of techniques and pathways that are not all part of the Jedi school. You agree?”
Jacen nodded.
“In her investigations, she studies Count Dooku, and his trail leads her to Darth Sidious, who has just taken Dooku as apprentice. Darth Sidious, who, the galaxy learns decades later, is Palpatine. Sidious accepts her as a student and candidate. There can be only two Sith at any time, the Master and the apprentice, but there can be many candidates, and she is one.”
“Proof,” Jacen said.
“You'll find the proof in your feelings.” Lumiya spared a look for Nelani. “Assuming the good Jedi girl doesn't kill me for saying things she doesn't like.”
“She won't,” Jacen said.
“Vergere learns from Palpatine . . . and she learns about him. She observes. She sees his weakness, his greed, his compulsion to rule and manipulate. She realizes that he could be the most destructive living force in the galaxy. And she decides to kill him.”
Jacen didn't answer. It troubled him that there was nothing in Lumiya's words inconsistent with the Vergere he knew. Had Vergere been a student of the Force in that time period, which he knew she was, he was certain that she would have studied every facet of the Force she could find. And if she became certain that her teacher was a force for destruction, she would have tried to find some way to doom him.
“But Vergere strikes too soon,” Lumiya continued. “Palpatine survives, and puts killers on her trail. She uses Jedi order resources to keep her a step ahead of her pursuers, and soon accepts a Jedi mission that may get her clear of her enemies. It takes her to the world of Zonama Sekot, and from there she chooses to leave with the mission that eventually reaches the galaxy of the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“That doesn't make her Sith,” Jacen said. He kept his voice even, but he could feel the doubt growing within him. Lumiya's words made so much sense, casting Vergere within a context that finally made her comprehensible to him .. .
. . . but only if Lumiya's claims about the nondestructive, noncorruptive basis to the Sith were actually true.
Lumiya's tone turned chiding. “Think about it, Jacen. She cared for you, cared for the fate of the galaxy, cared for everyone. She gave Mara Jade the healing treatment that allowed her to carry that boy. She was a Sith, and yet she helped give Luke Skywalker a son. She could be cruelly ruthless, couldn't she? And yet each act of ruthlessness improved matters. Improved her surroundings. Improved you.”
Nelani gave Jacen one more look, and in her glance there was worry and anguish. “That's it,” she said.
She struck at Lumiya.
Chapter Thirty-Three
NELANI'S LIGHTSABER BLOW WAS LIGHTNING-QUICK, BUT BY THE time it landed the older woman had twirled to one side, positioning herself behind a bust. The glowing blade sliced off the marble top of the head of some long-dead Rodian scholar.
Nelani advanced. Lumiya retreated, slapping her thigh—digging her fingers through the cloth and into her thigh. She yanked, and suddenly in her hands was a whip. She flicked it back, preparatory to striking with it; its tendrils, for there were several instead of just one, spread out into something that moved like a weaponized cloud, some of them shining iron-like and jagged, some of them glowing like a lightsaber's blade. Lumiya cracked the weapon forward; Nelani, her body language suggesting confusion as she faced this unusual weapon, twisted to one side, but one of the lashes, a metal one, grazed her face, drawing blood all along her left cheek. Nelani took a step back, shaking her head.
“I don't just talk, Jedi girl,” Lumiya said. “And, you'll notice, unlike you, I don't strike at a target who doesn't have a weapon in hand.”
“Let Lumiya talk,” Jacen said.
“Can't you feel yourself wavering?” There was a shrill tone of desperation in Nelani's voice. “She's bending your mind, bending your will.”
Jacen shook his head. “No, she's not. If I'm wavering, it's before a presentation of fact, not mind tricks. Come on, Nelani. If mind tricks were involved, don't you think you'd feel them?”
“Here's the truth about the difference between Jedi and Sith,” Lumiya said.
“Shut up.” Nelani lunged forward again, spinning her lightsaber into a defensive shield.
Lumiya's lightwhip flicked around the edges of the shield. Ends of several tendrils rapped into Nelani's chest and right bicep, creating small blood and burn spots. Nelani cried out and danced back again, baffled by the older woman's superior technique.
“Both Jedi and Sith gravitate toward rule,” Lumiya continued. “But the Jedi believe it's contrary to their nature, so they create guidelines that are only supposed to govern their own actions . . . until the inevitable day when the secular governments fall so short of Jedi ideals that they feel they have to impose their own rules on the others, to save them. That's what happened at the end of the Old Republic. But the rules they put together are strange, ascetic, not designed for ordinary people, and they can't be sustained as a form of government.
“The Sith recognize from
the start that they can choose to impose their rule on others . . . or not. If society is functioning well, a Sith doesn't have to act. Vectivus didn't. If it's not, he should act. And since he knows that fixing a broken government is his mission, he can design a system of government that works, that is fair, orderly.”
Nelani gestured with her free hand. The bust of Darth Vectivus's mother flew forward, hurtling toward Lumiya like a marble missile. Lumiya flicked her lightwhip toward it, and nine or ten tendrils converged on it. The bust exploded into countless marble shards, raining down on the floor.
“The galaxy is dissolving into chaos,” Lumiya said. “Its leadership can't save it; they're the leftovers of what failed fifteen years ago during the Yuuzhan Vong war. The Jedi can't step in and fix things—you know their methods, the way they think. What has Luke Skywalker told you? Have his tactics, his recommendations fixed anything? No. As good a man as he is, he and his order are just tools of the Galactic Alliance.”
Nelani tried again, this time with the bust of the Bothan. It reached a halfway point between her and Lumiya, but the older woman reached out with her own free hand and the bust stopped in midair. Now it strained forward toward her; a moment later, it crept back through the air toward Nelani. It was a piece in a game of push-of-war between the women, and neither was winning.
The strain showed in Lumiya's voice, causing it to hoarsen. “Vergere sacrificed herself so you could assume the Sith mantle she wanted for you. That's the kind of self-sacrifice no Jedi would admit is possible for the Sith, but it's the truth. Take what I have to teach you, Jacen. Take this place and the dark side power it contains. Take the knowledge that rests in its tombs on the world of Ziost. And use them against the forces that are trying to tear this galaxy apart. Restore order. Give your cousin, give the children in your family and your life the chance to grow up in a galaxy without war.”
“You're still withholding the truth,” Jacen said. His voice was hard now, his manner uncompromising, unconfused. “You killed the security chief on Toryaz Station, didn't you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I caught up to him too late to prevent the attack on you—it was already under way. But I could force from him an admission of who he was working for, and avenge the dead.”
“Who was he working for?”
“Thrackan Sal-Solo. Who else?”
“And all those situations on Lorrd—you didn't 'dream' about them, did you? You had direct access to the perpetrators.”
Lumiya cast a sideways glance at the bust hovering between her and Nelani. It was beginning to creep back toward her, and the strain of keeping it at bay was showing on her face. “Yes. My visions were waking visions. I could have interfered directly with their plans—probably with exactly the same results you experienced.”
“Why didn't you?”
“I used them as a test for you.” Lumiya closed her eyes and strained, but the bust still moved toward her. “Sith, like Jedi, have to determine the fates of others. Unlike Jedi, they know that sometimes this means sacrificing one so that twenty may live. I had to find out whether you understood that. And you do.”
“How about your confederate?” Jacen asked. “The man Master Skywalker keeps glimpsing but can't quite see? The man he says doesn't exist?”
Lumiya managed a laugh that was half-exhausted gasp. “Jacen, that's you, visions of you. The Sith you will become. Luke can't make out his features because he's not willing to accept what he sees through the Force—your face where the next Lord of the Sith stands.” Her last words were little more than a gasp, and her control slipped at that point. The bust of the Bothan hurtled toward her. She cracked her whip at it, a foreshortened stroke that might have missed in any case, but the bust's trajectory changed, sending the statuary beneath the tendrils. Instead of striking Lumiya's head or chest, the bust cracked into her right hand, sending the whip spinning from her grip; its tendrils twisted across the floor like living things, scarring it with their passage.
Nelani leapt forward, slashing at her enemy. Her blade came down
On Jacen's. His blade held hers, his eyes held her eyes. “I'm not through here,” he said.
There was despair in Nelani's voice. “I don't know how, but she's turning you. Can't you see it?”
“Stop listening with just your ears,” Jacen said. “Look into the Force. Do you really see any flow from her to me, from me to her, something that could alter my mind or my perceptions?”
Nelani held his gaze for a moment more, then closed her eyes.
For that moment, she was vulnerable to a counterattack. But Jacen merely kept his blade before hers. Lumiya did not attack, did not even summon her whip back to her; she merely held her forearm and hand where the bust had hit them. Finally Nelani's eyes opened again and she seemed calmer. “No,” she admitted. “Lumiya isn't using any Force techniques against you. You're not being influenced by the dark side energies here. I don't understand what's happening.”
“Turn off your lightsaber,” Jacen said.
She did.
He turned his own off. Now the only sound of menace came from Lumiya's lightwhip. The older woman looked at the weapon and the glowing tendrils faded to darkness, to almost invisible threads.
“There,” Jacen said. “Now we can work things out.”
“Yes.” Nelani turned toward Lumiya. “Shira Brie, I arrest you in the name of the Galactic Alliance. You will be tried for—”
“No,” Jacen said. “I've decided to learn what she has to teach me. That means she needs to remain free. To remain here.”
Nelani looked at him, disbelieving. “Jacen, the law—”
“The law is what we make of it.” He shrugged. “She has said she's Lumiya, Nelani, but she hasn't proven it. All we have to do is not believe her, to leave that claim out of our reports, and we've followed the letter of the law.”
Nelani moved slightly, stepping back, bringing the hilt of her lightsaber a few centimeters up. “I am arresting her.”
Lumiya interrupted. “I'll consent to be arrested.”
Both of the Jedi looked at her. “You will?” Jacen asked.
“Of course.” Lumiya looked sober, unhappy. “I know my fate is no longer my own. I want to see the Sith rise with you at the head of the order, Jacen, and for that reason I swear myself to your service.” She knelt as she spoke, lowering her head—an invitation for a blessing, or for a killing stroke. “But whichever one of you is in charge here will choose my fate, my future.”
Her voice low, Nelani said, “Put your hands behind your back.” As Lumiya obeyed, Nelani pulled a pair of stun cuffs from her belt pouch.
Jacen frowned. There was something wrong about this situation, and for a moment he suspected treachery on Lumiya's part, but a glimpse into the likely immediate future dispelled that notion. He saw Lumiya obedient, unresisting, being led back to the shuttle.
His mind flickered forward through the likely time streams. The future, as Yoda had said so frequently and famously that the quotation littered the Jedi archives, was always in motion, and many potential futures led from this event.
But they began congregating in certain areas. Nelani testifying against Shira Brie, also known as Lumiya, also known as Lumiya Syo. Lumiya convicted, being executed, being locked up in solitude, being locked up in a mass prison and assassinated by someone whose father she had killed decades ago. All she knew vanishing, dying with her.
Along all these paths, the galaxy continued to come unhinged, rebellion sparking in all corners, the Galactic Alliance crumbling, like a cancer-racked body, eating itself from the insides out, whole populations dying.
Detonators destroying this place, blowing the asteroid into millions of pieces, scattering the knowledge hidden here. An ancient Star Destroyer raining turbolaser destruction down on the surface of Ziost, purging it of knowledge lingering there.
Scores of time lines congregated on Jacen Solo and Luke Skywalker, bringing them together. The two of them faced each other, their
surroundings changing every second as the scene slipped from time line to time line, yet their poses and the lightsabers lit in their hands remained the same, as did the anger and tragic loss twisting both their faces.
They spun, they struck, the impacts of their lightsabers causing flares of light to cast the walls and floors behind them into greater darkness. On and on they fought, their loss giving them strength, until‑
Jacen cut Luke down. Sometimes it was a blow across the shoulder, down into the chest. Sometimes it was a slash, too fast to see, across the throat that sent the older man's head from his shoulders. Sometimes it was a thrust to the stomach, followed by minutes of agony, Luke writhing in a futile struggle for life while Jacen, tears running down his cheeks, knelt nearby.
Luke died.
Luke died.
“No,” Jacen whispered. He summoned himself back to the here and now.
Nelani and Lumiya were walking away. The younger woman held the older by the shoulder, guiding her.
Jacen lit his lightsaber and struck. Nelani jumped away, but the glowing blade merely parted the cuffs that held Lumiya's hands together behind her back.
Both women looked at him.
“She remains free,” Jacen told Nelani. “If you take her . . .” He could not say the rest of the words. Luke dies. And I kill him.
There was more to it than that. For a moment, he was drawn back into the streams of probability that led him into the future.
Nelani could leave without her prisoner. She would return home to Lorrd and tell all to her superiors. To Luke.
Jacen cut Luke down. Luke died.
Nelani could be persuaded not to tell. She would rethink her promise later and break it, telling all to Luke.
STAR WARS: BETRAYAL Page 41