"I won't ask you to do anything." Mara had let her drink get cold.

She couldn't swallow it anyway, even if it hadn't tasted like the Millennium Falcon's hydraulic overflow, because her throat was tight with rage. "Ben, you have a choice. I told Jacen that Lumiya was trying to kill you, and he was all innocence."

"So you knew about Ziost, then . . ."

"No, I don't know anything about Ziost. But you're going to tell me."

Ben's face fell. She had to gather what intel she could, but it was also good for Ben to learn that it was all too easy to give away information accidentally. Just the word Ziost made all the pieces start to fall into agonizing place.

"Jacen sent me on a mission to Almania to recover an Amulet that had some dark side power. I ended up on Ziost and a ship attacked me, but I found a really weird vessel and got away."

"Just like that."

"It wasn't Lumiya, actually. It was a Bothan."

"And how did you find this ship?" Mara was trying to work out the scam. She knew what she'd done to Lumiya's ship, and that the transponder was now showing it was stationary on Coruscant. If the last thirty-six hours hadn't been total mayhem, she'd have paid her another visit by now.

"Just parked, hatch open, with the key in the drive?"

"It . . . look, I'm not insane, but it spoke to me."

"Ohhhh . . ." Mara had enough pieces in the puzzle now to see the rough shape of the picture that would emerge. "Spherical. Orange. Like a big eye."

Ben's face drained completely of color. "Yes."

"Tell me about it."

He struggled visibly with something. Mara guessed he'd been sworn to secrecy. It was way too late for all that loyalty bunk.

"I've seen the ship, Ben. It spoke to me, too. It said it thought I was the 'other one' like me, and I thought it'd mistaken me for Lumiya, but it meant you, didn't it? Somehow it picked up on our similarities."

Ben gulped in air as if the relief of being able to share the awful experience were saving him from drowning.

"I worked out how to pilot it. It communicates through the Force."

"And it's soaked in dark energies. I know. Go on."

"I don't know how it works, but if you visualize what you want it to do, it does it. It sticks out parts of itself and forms them into cannons, all kinds of weapons."

Perfect. Perfect. Mara was getting a better picture by the second.

Lumiya could think at the ship and it'd rush to do her bidding-maybe even extrude a cable, whip it around Mara, drag her away, and nearly throttle her.

It wasn't a droid. I got bushwhacked by a living ship, a Sith ship.

That old, cold clarity and pitiless sense of purpose flooded Mara's body, and instead of making her gut churn, as any mother's might at hearing the kind of risk her son had been subjected to, it settled her into a calm and rational state close to transcendence. She was the Hand again, planning her move.

"So what happened to the ship between the time you found it and when I came across it the other day?"

"Where did you see it?"

"Hesperidium. When I caught up with Lumiya."

Ben's shoulders sagged. He folded his arms on the table and lowered his head onto them. Mara waited, stroking his hair because she a.s.sumed he was crying again.

He straightened up, face stricken but eyes dry. "I flew it back to the Anakin Solo and handed it over to Jacen."

Everything fell into place. The only pieces missing now were how she would put an end to this, but that was her specialty, and it could wait awhile until she'd made sure Ben was safe.

"Okay, I think you know how serious this is," she said. Their heads were almost touching over the table. To the Osarians who used the restaurant and who spoke very little Basic, they probably looked like mother and son having a tearful argument over homework and poor grades.

They would never have guessed that it was about the fate of the galaxy.

No, it's not about the galaxy. Enough of the galaxy. The galaxy can look after its own problems for a while. This is about my child, my only child, and some Sith sc.u.m trying to kill him while his own cousin, my own nephew who should be looking after him, helps her do it.

It all became very clear and simple from that moment onward.

"Ben, will you accept a suggestion from me?"

"Anything, Mom. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry-"

"Hey, I'm the one who should be sorry." I trusted a monster. I shouted down my husband. I ignored every single sign that Jacen was trouble. "But you're in real danger, and it's going to be more than you can handle, so I want you to be very cautious. I want you to behave like a coward for a change. Take no risks. In fact, I'd like you to report in sick, and get as far away from Jacen as you can until I get this fixed."

Ben nodded, grim, very old eyes in a terribly young face. He really was just a kid even if he behaved like a man now. Mara was instantly so proud of him and so fiercely protective at the same time that the only cogent emotion she could identify was the instinct to seek out and kill whatever threatened him.

She could do that. It was her calling.

"I'll do it carefully," he said. "So Jacen doesn't realize I've found out that Lumiya is making him do all this."

Oh, sure she is. "That's right, sweetheart."

"I promise I won't hide in the Force from you, but ... I might have to do it to hide from her. Or even Jacen, if she's got him so far under her control that he's . . . taken over the government."

Sometimes you had to hear someone else say it to believe it.

"Tell you what," said Mara, smiling, "why don't you show me how you do it? Then maybe I'll get a better sense of when you're just hiding, and when to worry."

Ben nodded, eyes downcast.

There would be no holds barred now. Mara would use every means and weapon at her disposal, and there would be an end to this.

They spent the rest of the day doing something that they hadn't done in a very long time: just wandering around the Skydome Botanical Gardens, talking and having fun-or as much fun as could be had with a galactic civil war in progress and a military junta running the GA. The only evidence of the huge upheaval was that the CSF officer on patrol in the plaza had a Galactic Alliance Defense Force sergeant walking the beat with him.

Apart from that, n.o.body seemed troubled. Mara wondered if all cataclysmic events in history were noticed only by a handful. Like Ben had said-prophetically-over lunch only days before, perhaps it had been that way during the Empire, too, and most people's lives were the same under Palpatine as they had been under the Republic. She didn't want to think it was true. Luke certainly didn't.

"Come on, Mom," Ben said. "Let's go find a nice spot on the lawns and I'll teach you how to vanish."

They said it was a sure sign of imminent old age when your kids could teach you things. It was a simple thing, hiding in the Force, but then so was dieting, and not many people could knuckle down to that and make it work, either. Ben was a remarkably patient teacher. After a couple of hours, she could manage a minute or two without needing to grab something solid.

"I'm sorry about Lekauf," she said, putting her arm around him as they walked. "I'm sorry I wasn't very kind to him. Sounds like he was one of the best."

"He did it to make sure I got away. How do I live with that kind of sacrifice, Mom?"

"By making your life count, I think, so that his wasn't wasted."

It was the closest she'd ever felt to Ben, and probably the first time they'd really related as adults. It left her feeling profoundly happy. The irony wasn't lost on her that it was in the midst of some of the worst events and greatest threats they'd ever faced. Times like this made you painfully aware of what truly mattered.

"Ben, you're probably going to see a side of me soon that isn't good old Mom." He smelled wonderfully of that indeterminable Ben-ness that she had enjoyed when he was tiny, and that was still there under the scent of military-issue soap and weapon lubricant. "But I want you to know that whatever I do, however much of a stranger you think I become, I love you, and you're my heart, every fiber of it. Nothing matters to me more than you."

She stopped to hug him, and he hugged her back rather than just submitting to the indignity as he usually did. It went on for a while.

"You know why I believe you, Mom? Because you didn't tell me to trust you. Everyone else tells me to trust them, and that's usually the cue that I shouldn't."

Mara got another glimpse of the man her son would be, and the mother she'd been so far. It hadn't worked out so badly after all.

She knew only too well what the stakes were now, and what she had to do.

JACEN SOLO'S APARTMENT, CORUSCANT.

Ben?" Jacen looked around the apartment, but there was no sign of his young cousin. He'd probably gone back to see his parents. He still needed rea.s.surance about the dark necessity in life, pa.s.sing through that stage between being oblivious of consequences with the careless cruelty of a child, and the more sensitive but responsible acceptance that life dealt harsh and unavoidable hands to many. At the moment, Ben both felt too much and had too little life experience to handle the pain.

Jacen looked through the contents of the conservator and decided to order a delivery from a restaurant instead. There was a pattern now, he realized, and it was becoming less of his making; he'd put the pieces in place, the Force had responded, and now it was his turn to make choices when it offered them. It was a dialogue.

Lekauf was part of the pattern, too. But Jacen was still working out why it hadn't been Ben who'd died. He'd almost been sure that was the way it would end.

So I thought my destiny would let me off the hook with him. It won't.

Jacen comlinked an order for a three-course Toydarian low-fat banquet, and ran a tub of hot foaming water in the refresher. The steam condensed on the mirrored wall, and he found himself writing in the haze with his fingertip.

HE WILL IMMORTALIZE HIS LOVE.

It still didn't make sense. If it meant killing the person he loved most, as Lumiya said, then there was no question: he would have given his life for Allana. But at every turn in the last few months, he'd ended up protecting her. You'll know when it happens. Lumiya was certain of that, and Jacen believed it, too.

Immortalize. Make immortal. Write into history. Make permanent. Why not just kill ? Maybe I translated the ta.s.sel wrong.

People read holozines in the tub to relax, but Jacen found himself behaving like a bachelor slob and eating his take-out banquet. He was exhausted. He had the feeling he was coming to the peak of a wave, struggling up the gradient, and that when he hit the crest-that final hurdle to his Sith destiny-things would ease and make sense.

Jacen laid his fork on the edge of the tub and overwrote the prophecy again in the condensation.

HE WILL IMMORTALIZE HIS LOVE.

Killing what you loved was the ultimate act of obedience and submission to higher duty. He'd seen a feature on the holochannels about a tribe-couldn't recall which, where, when-who trained their elite troops by giving them a nusito pup when they entered the cadet program. They were encouraged to bond with the pup, to race it against other cadets'

nusitos, and to generally learn to love it. Then, before the cadet could graduate, he was ordered to strangle his pup. If he couldn't, or wouldn't, he was kicked out. He had to be able to put duty before emotion.

That's me. That's what I have to do.

Full of too much Toydarian sourfry, tired, and lulled by hot water, Jacen let his mind wander, and reached out in the Force to touch Allana and Tenel Ka. He risked this with decreasing frequency now. The latest attempt on their lives had been a stark warning of how precarious his family's position was. He'd never heard Allana call him Daddy. He probably never would.

My family. Yes, that's who my family is. Not Jaina, not Mom, not Dad; my little girl and her mother. Trust me to fall for a woman whose customs prevent her ever naming the father of her child.

He could have sworn Allana reached back at him. He was so thrilled that he opened his eyes, and then realized that it was one more chance for someone to find her and harm her. Lumiya wasn't above that. It was the Sith way. Making someone suffer and hate only strengthened their Sith powers.

He'd visit Tenel Ka as soon as he was certain that he and Niathal had consolidated the takeover and that the war would be fought more logically and with less regard for keeping insignificant worlds happy.

Got to deal with the Bothans next. Lumiya can earn her keep again.

But he couldn't keep his eyes open. He wasn't dozing, but Force-visions wouldn't leave him alone. It was as if the Force was shaking him by the shoulders and telling him to pay attention and get on with it, because time was running out. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw the trust that Ben placed in him, and the lies he'd told the boy, and the danger he'd put him in. And Ben still kept coming back for more. He was desperate to do the right thing. Now Jacen saw him clearly, head in his hands, sobbing: "It's too high a price. "

What was? Lekauf? No. There'd be many, many Lekaufs. Wars were full of them. It was one reason why Jacen had to put an end to fighting, any way he could.

Maybe ... it wasn't Ben, but about him.

Why have I thought this over so many times? Why is it obsessing me?

Because I'm denying it. Because I can't accept it's him. Because it has to be him.

It would be easy to kill Ben, because Ben trusted him. Jacen knew how bad that would make him feel. It was strangling a nusito pup.

You don't want to see the inevitable. Do you?

Jacen dried himself and spent the rest of the evening a.s.sembling his personal armory. He examined his lightsaber and blaster, and knew that those still wouldn't be enough when Luke and Mara came after him to exact vengeance for Ben. He took out the box of a.s.sorted poisons and pathogens that could be delivered by dart or projectile, yet another range of weapons that might make it past the defenses of his most persistent enemies. He had all the bases covered: chemical, biological, mechanical.

He just wanted it all over with.

And when Ben was gone, who would be his apprentice then? Just before he fell asleep, it crossed his mind that Admiral Cha Niathal had demonstrated an excellent grasp of the rule of two.

It was just as well she wasn't a Force-user.

chapter fifteen.

This has to be about more than getting tough on chaos and disorder.

I need to be tough on the causes of chaos and disorder-greed, corruption, and ambition.

-Jacen Solo, joint GA Chief of State, speaking at a lunch for the heads of Coruscanti industry BEVIIN-VASUR FARM, MANDALORE.

Mirta put her finger to her lips, and the four of them stacked around the door as if getting ready to storm Fett's stronghold.

"I'll check," she said to Orade. Beviin winked at her. Medrit just kept glancing at his chrono as if he didn't have time for all this. "You can hide behind me if you like."

Orade licked his lips nervously. "Cyar'ika, when Fett says he'll break my legs, he's just looking for an excuse."