"Ship, my mom's down there," Ben pleaded. "She didn't fire on you."

Masters may use their ships to fight but not involve apprentices.

"Ship, Jacen made an error. Do it for me, so I can find my mom again. Please-don't fire."

The sphere decelerated dramatically.

Who is the enemy? the ship asked. Unless I know, I can do nothing except evade and protect.

"That's right," Ben said. Shevu had told him that humoring nutters, as he called it, was an essential police skill. Keeping them talking was what it was all about-and if Ben had the ship, he had Lumiya. "Ship, what's your task?"

Once I fought. Now I educate and protect apprentices.

"What do you believe I am?"

Apprentice.

"Who's the one within you now?"

Apprentice also.

Ben was starting to form a picture of the sphere's view of the world. It had been buried on Ziost for centuries and possibly millennia.

It had reacted to him when he was being targeted from orbit and running for his life with a terrified little girl.

"Ship, what do you mean-educate?"

I teach apprentices to fight.

Ben could sense Lumiya communicating with it. The ship was responding strongly in his mind, but there was a second stream of soundless words running almost like interference on a comlink from overlapping frequencies. She was urging the sphere to fire on Ben, to ram his shuttle, to kill him.

Yes. I am now for apprentices, so they learn and come to no harm. I used to be for Masters at war.

It made sudden sense to Ben. "You're a Sith training vessel." It would see him as an apprentice because he was one, in a way, but Lumiya confused him. "Why do you think the woman in you now is an apprentice?"

Because she knows so little of me. Like you.

Ben accepted he wasn't an intellectual like Jacen, but he could grind through options, eliminating things as he went, just like his mom.

He could work out anything by just asking question after question.

"The woman apprentice in you had us shot at when we left Ziost."

We shot back.

The ship recognized him, and it decided that both he and Lumiya were novices who needed its advice and care. It had stopped his mother from killing Lumiya on Hesperidium because that was its job: teaching apprentices to fight. Ben wondered how many chances it gave Sith apprentices before it decided they were weaklings who deserved what they got.

There was no way he was going to talk it into killing Lumiya-he wondered how it would do that-and she was having no luck getting it to attack him, either. Ben was in no real danger. But his mother was, and not from that ship. Someone else wanted her dead.

He needed to find her. He dropped toward Reboam, and the Sith sphere escorted him, with Lumiya impotent within.

Ben had caught a Sith. And now he had no idea how to use her to his advantage.

KAVAN, HAPES Cl.u.s.tER.

Mara set the StealthX down in the middle of nowhere and reminded herself that being the target or the a.s.sa.s.sin was simply a state of mind.

No doubt Jacen thought he'd forced her to land so he could finish her off. She thought she'd ditched to get him where she could use her fighting skills to better advantage.

It was a matter of who found who first.

I can stop this anytime I want.

After all she'd seen and heard, there was still the Mara within who couldn't really believe her nephew was dangerously and irredeemably evil.

If you don't do it, who will? And who'll blame you for not acting while he could be stopped? Palpatine, Palpatine, Palpatine . . . your lesson in twenty-twenty hindsight.

So here she was, telling herself that she was going to go through a very bad time after she killed him, but it had to be done. And Jacen was probably thinking the identical thing. They were the same. No moral high ground; just a leftover equation that said all other things being equal, Mara preferred to see Jacen dead than Ben, or Luke, or herself. Survival: there was nothing wrong with surviving.

Luke now kept reaching out to her in the Force, increasingly anxious, trying to find her, but she didn't dare reach back. There was no telling what Jacen could detect. When she wanted to be found by Jacen- he'd know all about it.

She grabbed her bag and everything from the c.o.c.kpit that could be used as a weapon, then found some cover while she consulted her datapad for charts and surveys of Kavan. It was honeycombed with ruined monuments and tunnels. Fine. If I get him in a confined s.p.a.ce, he can't use all his Force skills, but I can make the most of what I've got. She decided to make her way into the maze of buried pa.s.sages and get Jacen to follow her.

She was nowhere near any centers of population, so she was also a long way from any help. She didn't intend to summon any, anyway. Not until it was time to remove the body.

She secreted all her weapons in her jacket, belt, and boots, and sprinted for the first tunnel she saw. It was getting easier by the minute to disappear into the Force for as long as she needed. But now she needed to be visible, a beacon for Jacen to lure him onto the rocks.

Come and get me, Colonel Solo.

chapter twenty.

From: Sa.s.s Sikili, negotiator of Roche To: Boba Fett, Mand'alor Murkhana has failed to respond. Because they have failed to respond, and we fear this will encourage others to ignore our patents, we request your support, so that the point may be made that we take our patents seriously. I would very much like to see the Bes'uliik in action; our metallurgists have been looking at ways to produce lighter beskar structures, so when you pound the Murkhana factories to dust, we will be inspired to be more inventive. This is very good for business.

JEDI TEMPLE, CORUSCANT.

Luke met Jaina on the steps of the Jedi temple. He was dashing out as she was dashing in. He caught her arm and steered her back down the path.

"Where did she go, Jaina?"

"Uncle Luke, I swear I'm not covering for her. I don't know and she's not answering any of her links. Why are you worried?"

Luke held the crumpled flimsi in his fist. Gone hunting for a few days. Mara had signed out a StealthX just after midnight two days before.

He shoved the note in his pocket. The feeling of dread overwhelmed him.

"Come on," he said. "I have to go look for her. Something's wrong.

And Ben's gone, too. I've had the worst feeling, like she's walking into a trap."

Ben wasn't just missing; Luke could no longer feel him in the Force. And now he couldn't feel Mara. He'd called everyone, including Han and Leia, and he didn't kriffing care if the GAG detained him for contacting Corellian agents with a warrant out for their arrest.

He expected Jacen to show up to issue a warning, but Niathal said Jacen was away on "business." The GAG StealthX was gone again. The man came and went as he pleased, it seemed.

I can imagine. Jacen was permanently invisible in the Force now, that was for sure. Luke hailed an air taxi, and they headed for Starfighter Command.

"I've spent more time there since I left the military than when I was in uniform," Jaina said.

"Can you feel her, Jaina? Can you feel Mara?"

She looked slightly to one side of Luke, defocused, and shook her head slowly. "Nothing."

"I haven't felt her now for hours."

When they reached Starfighter Command, they headed for the chart room. Luke found that he could look at charts and pick up strong correlations in the Force-something Ben had proved to have a talent for, too. He stood in front of the banks of holocharts and tried to relax enough to let the Force steer his attention. He made an effort to put out of his mind where he thought she might have been heading.

After a while, when the glowing lines and cl.u.s.ters of dots began to blur and lose their perspective, he found himself drawn to one sector in particular.

"I'm sure she's in the Hapes Cl.u.s.ter," he said at last.

When Luke had first felt Mara drop out of the Force, it was so sudden and uncontrolled that he thought she'd been killed. It woke him in a panic. The three seconds of pure agonized paralysis lasted until she faded back in again, and again, and he worked out that she was doing it deliberately.

"Ironically, it would have been better if she'd taken a regular X-wing," Jaina said. "The starfighter techies say it's almost impossible to locate a StealthX by any of the usual search methods."

She was right. Unless someone happened to eyeball Five-Alpha or Mara had left a transponder or comlink active, the starfighter would simply vanish.

A visual search was all that was left-that, or finding Mara herself. Luke headed for the hangars, and Jaina followed.

"How do we recover StealthXs that ditch, then?" Luke asked, trying not to vent his frustration on hardworking ground crew.

The technician stepped back from the starfighter. "Rescue beacon or the Mark One pall of smoke and flame, sir," he said warily. "The GA asked Incom to make them very hard to detect, and they did."

"Okay, I'll stop hara.s.sing people with work to do and go out there myself." Luke reminded himself that Mara was hunting Lumiya, and so he had to expect her to use every trick in the book. That didn't stop him from worrying. "After all, I'm the one who shook Lumiya's hand, and not her throat. . ."

Then Mara was suddenly there, not just back in the Force but magnifying her presence, as if she wanted to be found. She was defiant, unafraid, and spoiling for a fight. She'd found Lumiya all right.

"Why's she doing that, though?" Jaina had her own hunt-for Alema.

Now she was keen to help find Mara. "It's like she's taunting her."

"Or she's in trouble and she wants me to find her."

"No." Jaina closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. "Doesn't feel like a call for help. Feels like ... a fight."

Luke decided to warn Tenel Ka that he was on his way purely as a precaution. Eighteen-standard-hour transit. Given the number of planets in the Hapes Cl.u.s.ter, it would probably take even the Hapans a lot longer than that to find a StealthX, but the more eyes that were out looking out for Mara, the better.

Luke tried to appear casual as he climbed into his c.o.c.kpit. Jaina stood looking up at him.

"I know I'm officially out of the service," she said, "but if someone authorizes it, I'm happy to join in. Please."

Luke gestured to the ground crew. "Thanks."

"It's Lumiya we should be worrying about." Jaina was trying to rea.s.sure him. "I can see Aunt Mara going in for braided scalps like Fett.

Red ones. Does Lumiya dye her hair, do you think? Will the stuff have icky gray roots?"

Luke knew she was trying to make him laugh, and he tried to oblige.

But just hearing the name Fett reminded him that pretty well every member of his family, Solos or Skywalkers, was at the top of someone's must-kill-today list.

Luke didn't want or expect to be loved by everyone. He just wanted to wake up one morning and find his loved ones left alone to get on with their lives.

When Mara came home-scalps or no scalps, war or no war-he was going to book a vacation for the two of them, somewhere soothingly uneventful.

He balled the flimsi note she'd left for him and wedged it into a gap in the c.o.c.kpit fascia. The StealthX's drives whined into life.

It wouldn't be Hesperidium, though.

KAVAN.

Jacen had expected to have to deal with an angry Mara after he killed Ben, not before.

He was still looking for meanings and patterns in the events around him, and he now saw in himself a certain desperation to try whatever was placed in his path to see if that did the trick and sealed his Sith status.

Will I notice? What does it feel like?

How will I know ?

There had to be something that changed the fabric of the galaxy-a tipping point. Meanwhile, Mara was challenging him, pinpointing herself in the tunnels that ran deep under the Kavan countryside, thinking she was still an A-list a.s.sa.s.sin and that she could take someone who had complete mastery of the Force.

She was a superb a.s.sa.s.sin, but her Force skills were crude compared to his. Once Jacen removed her, it would be easier to deal with Ben. And Luke . . . he'd cross that bridge when he had to.

Jacen checked his belt, pockets, and holster, and decided to oblige Mara. Lumiya and Ben seemed to be elsewhere having their own showdown.

Now it all fitted. Lumiya had to be silenced for what she knew, and Ben would do it. It was tidy. It was a food chain.

Jacen loaded four poisoned darts into an adapted blaster and slipped the others into slots on his belt, wondering how he could think such things so calmly. He approached the tunnel mouth with slow care.

While he could sense the layout, Mara had vanished from the Force again.

There was about a meter of headroom as he edged carefully along the central tunnel, and he could see horizontal shafts at about hip height branching off. It had been built to drain storm water; in harsh winters, local Kavani had once made emergency homes down here.

Jacen stood and listened.