"I'll bear that in mind," she said.

Omas was a consummate statesbeing who'd survived attempts on his life and his career several times. He'd understand the entire conversation that was packed into that one line: that she knew Jacen was a loose cannon, that she knew he was ma.s.sively, overwhelmingly ambitious, and that she knew she might find herself sidelined by him if she didn't keep on her toes. And that she knew Omas was aware that her eyes were on his job, and that he might make that accession easier for her one day if she worked with him rather than with Jacen Solo.

Us. Political code was a very economical way of imparting delicate information without actually using incriminating words. It saved a lot of time and trouble.

Niathal took the silence as a cue that the meeting was over. As the doors closed behind her, she glanced back at Omas; her last glimpse was one of a man who shut his eyes for a second as if completely exhausted.

He'll strut back into the Senate in a couple of hours as if everything's under control. Do I really want a job like that?

She still thought she did.

She had lunch in one of the Senate's many eateries. There was always at least one tapcaf or restaurant open at any time of the day or night, some of them relaxed, some of them formal, all of them hotbeds of gossip, debate, and deal making. More government business went on in these places than ever transpired in the Senate chamber. They were also relatively safe places to talk to beings who might attract attention if she met them at the officers' club. Hiding in plain sight worked remarkably well now, and n.o.body took much notice of the fact that she happened to be grabbing a snack at the same table as a Gossam called Gefal Keb, a senior civil servant in the public protection department.

Their voices were drowned in the general chatter. They referred to Jacen as the New Boy, the GAG as the Club; Omas became, inevitably, the Boss.

It was unoriginal, but for ears attuned to picking out names from across the room, it seized no attention.

"Is the New Boy under any threat from our boisterous friends in Keldabe?" she asked.

"Not a word coming out of there." Keb had a way of slowly taking in everything around him, 360 degrees. "But if they were planning anything, they wouldn't tell CSR Word is that Shevu is seriously hacked off with his way of doing business, too."

"Shevu's very old-fashioned about losing prisoners. Anyone else in the Club unhappy with the management?"

"Oddly, no. The New Boy's willingness to lead from the front does breed loyalty, I admit."

"Who's he spying on now?"

"Not you, as far as I can tell. I'd be very surprised if he wasn't keeping an unauthorized eye on the Boss, but I don't have any hard evidence yet. The Club's good at covering its tracks, as you'd expect."

"Anything else I ought to be aware of?"

"Minor procurement issues, but that's nothing to do with the New Boy."

"How minor?"

"Griping in the mess about substandard kit and difficult shortages at the moment. You might want to kick a few data pushers before it turns into a problem."

"I'll have someone look at it." It would keep Jacen occupied. He cared about troop welfare. "Matters like kit seem to hit morale hardest."

It was a brief conversation, two GA personnel who had every reason to be exchanging a few words. n.o.body took any notice. The Supreme Commander and senior domestic security staff talked all the time.

n.o.body knew that the three individuals who were running the war dared not turn their backs on one another.

That was politics. Admiral Cha Niathal was determined to get used to it.

STAR SYSTEM M2X329O5, NEAR BIMMIEL.

There was a presence following her, and Lumiya could pick it out like a beacon even at this range. So could the meditation sphere.

Broken, said the ship.

In the back of her mind, the presence manifested as a jagged, shattered ma.s.s of black and white gla.s.s. If she concentrated on it long enough, it resolved into a whole vessel again, but the cracks were still visible.

"It's broken, all right," Lumiya said. "What shall we do, allow it to catch up? Or shall we see how good a hunter it is?"

The meditation sphere felt elated. The smoldering red flame that seemed embedded in its bulkheads grew brighter and more golden, and Lumiya felt a conspiratorial sense of humor flood her. The ship was enjoying itself. Of course: it had been dormant on Ziost for untold years, a conscious thing waiting for purpose and interaction.

Nothing in the galaxy enjoyed being alone, be it flesh or metal.

Lumiya rocked back on her heels, still a little disoriented by a c.o.c.kpit that didn't wrap around her. It didn't feel like an extension of her body as a starfighter did. Instead of neatly arranged screens and controls within her reach, there was nothing except stark, grainy, stone-like surfaces in which images appeared and then vanished again.

The ship's bulkhead showed her a pattern of lights. A small craft matched their course at a range of five thousand kilometers. The asteroid belt where her base was hidden appeared as a sprinkling of stars on a dark blue ground as if a hole had been punched in the bulkhead, and she almost expected to feel air rushing past as the vacuum beyond claimed her.

"Time to jump," she said.

The meditation sphere felt as if it took a deep breath and lunged forward. There was no inertia, no sensation of movement whatsoever, and yet Lumiya was sure her stomach leapt and her head spun with the acceleration. The tracking screen was gone. She was looking at the streaming lights of stars and then velvet blackness, unlit except for random pinp.r.i.c.k flares. She could see beyond the ship. It was as if it weren't there. She knew where she was. She could feel the pursuing vessel dwindling to nothing behind her, and the transparisteel shattering into broken chaos again.

For a moment, she felt panic.

For a moment, she was in a stricken TIE fighter, struggling for life-broken, fired upon by Luke Skywalker, certain she'd die.

Instantly the bulkheads became red-hot pumice again. She jerked back to the present.

You're safe, the ship said.

It felt almost guilty for alarming her. She wanted to rea.s.sure it: Just a memory, she thought, nothing to concern you. And it seemed rea.s.sured. n.o.body-nothing-had cared about her welfare for a very long time, not since she'd been in Imperial training. Luke Skywalker's brief affection didn't count.

The broken -pursuer has jumped, too, said the ship.

"Try not to outrun it too far." Lumiya searched herself for regret and loneliness, and found none. It was still good to find a sense of kinship with another intelligence. "We don't want it to lose us."

It is still following us, said the ship.

"What did you think of your last pilot?" Lumiya asked.

Not like us.

"Not Sith material, then."

No. The ship knew Ben wasn't fit to be Jacen's apprentice. Less like us than the one who follows.

The meditation sphere dropped out of hypers.p.a.ce and made convincing speed for the asteroid. Lumiya gave it a mental image of marking time until the pilot on their tail had located them again, and then showed it her habitat on the asteroid.

They prepared to dock, Lumiya and the ship, somehow one mind for brief moments. Ben had proven he wasn't the right apprentice for Jacen.

For all his fierce courage on Ziost, the boy had still succ.u.mbed to a sentimental Jedi urge and risked his life to rescue that child. He lacked the ruthless edge a Sith needed. But at least he had done something right: without him, she wouldn't have this rare vessel. It would be instrumental in Jacen's future. She could see it in the Force. Somehow her own future wasn't linked with it, but she'd look after it until the time came to relinquish control.

Ben. She bore the boy no ill will, but he was simply surplus to requirements now.

Is it him, though? Is this who Jacen has to kill?

Perhaps the Force had spared Ben from her plot for a reason.

Perhaps it was his destiny to help his Master by sacrificing his life, and so it wasn't Lumiya's to take.

I don't know what Jacen has to do. I just don't know. I can't see the bridge he has to cross to become the Sith Lord he's destined to be.

Did Jacen believe that she had no more answers to that question than he did?

She doubted it.

He had to immortalize his love-to kill it, to destroy what he loved most.

As the meditation sphere slipped into the docking bay of her habitat, Lumiya pondered on what Jacen Solo loved and couldn't bear to lose, the sacrifice that would take him beyond the mundane world and into greatness. His sister, Jaina? No, he'd already tried to have her court-martialed. His parents? He'd ordered their arrest. But punishment was one thing, and killing was another.

Home, said the ship. I can defend you against the one who follows.

"Thank you." Lumiya was taken aback. "It's not necessary. Let the other ship land."

Would it be Ben Skywalker? The boy was the nearest Lumiya had seen to someone Jacen loved. He wanted Ben to succeed. He ignored the weakness in the boy.

Luke Skywalker? No, Jacen cared nothing for Luke, and perhaps even despised him. Mara? She might have been the last person to stand by Jacen, but he had less feeling for her than for his own parents. Ben, then. It was almost certainly Ben.

Or . . . maybe it wasn't a person. Maybe he had to kill an organization, or something abstract. Perhaps he didn't have to kill anything at all. Lumiya fought impatience; whatever Jacen's destiny might be, whatever pivotal act he had to perform, it would be soon. She could almost feel the fabric of the Force antic.i.p.ating it. And perhaps . . .

it's going to be me he kills.

But she was Sith, and any Sith would expect that of her pupil. It was a price she had to be ready to pay.

Very broken, said the ship, snapping her out of her thoughts.

Lumiya got to her feet and stood in front of the bulkhead. The glowing pumice thinned to transparency, but it wasn't a visual illusion; the bulkhead opened to the atmosphere and a ramp formed from the ship's casing. When Lumiya walked down it into the hangar area, an old Conqueror a.s.sault vessel was edging through the air locks. She hadn't seen one of the figure-eight-shaped ships in a long time.

The hatch popped and someone emerged, partly swathed in a cloak but with a distinctive limping gait.

"You take your risks, dancer." Lumiya was beginning to find Alema Rar a liability. "I might have fired on you."

The Twi'lek threw the cloak back from her face and tilted her head.

It was the practiced pose of a woman who had spent so much of her life being coquettish that it had become unconscious habit. She had been used to male attention and still behaved as if she deserved it, even if there were no males around, and even if her looks had been ruined by lightsaber wounds. The severed stump of her lekku gave her a grotesquely comic look.

But Alema wasn't a laughing matter at all. She was, as the ship put it, broken. This was a damaged, vengeful creature that wanted to lash out, and Lumiya had no patience with lack of discipline. Alema was also insane, and a Dark Jedi with those problems was a very dangerous complication.

"But you didn't." The Twi'lek's eyes were on the meditation sphere.

"We find this ship interesting."

"I thought you might." Lumiya indicated the doors leading to her chambers. Home wasn't the word. "Seeing as you're here, you might as well come in."

Alema prowled around the ship, gazing at it from all angles, clearly fascinated.

"It thinks," she said. "This ship thinks"

"Thinking's useful. Try it sometime." Lumiya knew she ought to handle a madwoman more carefully, but she was short on tolerance today.

She strained to sense what the ship might be saying, but all she could detect was its watchfulness, its sensors taking a wary interest in Alema.

It could probably taste her darkness. "What brings you here?"

"We have been tracking the Anakin Solo. We have considered Jacen Solo's att.i.tude to his parents, and we think we might gain access to Han and Leia Solo by working with Jacen."

Alema put a caressing hand on the meditation sphere, and Lumiya felt it flinch, then somehow soften. It knew Alema was damaged. Its duty was to aid, to take care of its pilot. That tendency seemed to make it oddly sympathetic to those in need of a.s.sistance.

Lumiya sighed to herself. That was the last thing she needed: a Sith vessel that felt sorry for a crazy Twi'lek trollop. She sent the ship a sharp image of Alema, face twisted with psychotic rage, crashing the sphere into a jagged mountain. The ship got the idea right away.

Alema pulled back as if burned.

"It would be helpful for all of us," Lumiya said carefully, "if you avoided crossing Jacen Solo's path at the moment. There's a war on, you know . . ."

"We have our task, and you have yours. Ours is to have Balance for what the Solos did to us. Leia will still be trying to bring her precious son back to the light, and that means he remains good bait for our purposes."

"Let me put it another way," Lumiya said kindly, steering her toward the doors. "Get in my way, and I'll kill you."

Alema gave her a curious lopsided smile but allowed herself to be ushered into the living quarters.

"Do you know who you're dealing with?" Alema asked.

Lumiya probed Alema's presence again. It felt like shards of broken gla.s.s in her mouth, as alien as any being she'd ever encountered. She'd been in the minds of the insane before, but never a Jedi, and never one this deluded. It was almost frightening. It was the sense of us that was most disturbing. She found it hard to pick her way between the hive-mind elements and the fragmented personality of one being.

"Yes, I do," Lumiya said. "And I'll still kill you if you let this feud ruin bigger strategies. There'll be time for you to have your revenge later. Interfere with my plans and I'll kill the Solos myself, and then you'll never have your Balance." Lumiya lowered her voice to a soothing whisper. "And you know I can do that, don't you?"

Seemingly unperturbed, Alema gazed around Lumiya's quarters. They were spa.r.s.ely furnished now because she'd taken most of her necessary possessions back to the safe house on Coruscant-or the latest address, anyway-except for duplicates of the equipment she kept to maintain her cybernetic prosthetics, and basic essentials for a brief stay. Alema had the look of someone sizing up an apartment and deciding whether to buy it.

"No, you can't stay here," said Lumiya. Telepathy was beyond her, but she knew a proprietorial look when she saw it. It made sense to keep an eye on Alema: she was so fixated and reckless that she might-just might-put a hydrospanner in the works, and that wasn't something Lumiya was prepared to risk. The stakes were too high, the moment too close.

If I had any sense, I'd kill her now before she becomes too much trouble. But . . .

Alema still had her uses, until her madness became too unmanageable.

"You understand revenge," said Alema. She settled on a sofa, one arm conspicuously limp, and a petulant frown creased her brow for a moment. "Luke Skywalker destroyed your life. He left you scarred, too."

"Oh, much more than scarred." Lumiya pulled her veil from her face and let Alema see the damage to her jaw. Then she placed one boot on a chair, took out a vibroblade, and rammed it into her thigh. There was a metallic sc.r.a.pe. Alema's expression was suitably surprised.

"I'm actually more machine than organic," Lumiya went on. "There's a point, I think, at which a woman ceases to be a human with cybernetic implants and becomes a machine with organic parts. I believe I've pa.s.sed that threshold. And you know what? I'm not unhappy with that."

"You want to punish Luke, as we want to punish Leia."

Lumiya leaned over Alema and caught her by her collar, jerking her face close to hers so she couldn't look away.