Sacrifice Read online

  “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. Nobody took any notice. The Supreme Commander and senior domestic security staff talked all the time.

  Nobody 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 M2X32905, 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 mass of black and white glass. 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 cockpit 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 pinprick 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 reassure it: Just a memory, she thought, nothing to concern you. And it seemed reassured. Nobody—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 hyperspace 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 succumbed 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 anticipating 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 assault 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 attitude 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 assistance.

  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 glass 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 sparsely 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 scrape. 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 passed 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.

  “Luke seems to think that, too, which I find staggeringly arrogant.” Was that a little fear in Alema’s eyes? Sometimes it was interesting to play the madwoman herself. “The galaxy revolves around him, he thinks, but then many men think that way. No, I don’t miss my beauty, you fool, because it would have vanished by now anyway. Once I understood that my injuries freed me from worrying about such trivia, I realized I had a task that only I could fulfill.” She tightened her grip on the flimsy fabric at Alema’s throat. “And that task is close to completion, so if you thwart me in any way, I’ll become very focused on you. Do you understand?”

  For a moment, Alema lost that oddly demented expression and looked like a normal sane person in fear of her life. Lumiya wasn’t sure what she looked like herself at that moment, but it seemed to work.

  “We will … respect your wishes,” Alema said imperiously.

  Lumiya decided not to backhand her, but it took an effort. She didn’t have time for this nonsense.

  “Do yourself a favor,” she said, and let Alema’s collar slide out of her grasp with a hiss of sheer fabric over her gloves. “Ask yourself what you have against Leia Solo other than the fact that she made you ugly. If there’s nothing beyond that, then your quest for Balance is a waste of time.”

  Alema blinked as if she’d been slapped. Maybe it was the first time anyone had used the word ugly to her. She wasn’t; she wasn’t anything. In a galaxy of vastly diverse life-forms, Lumiya had ceased to be able to judge appeal, or even want to. It was fascinating how the once beautiful fared so much worse than lesser mortals when age and disfigurement overtook them. It was all illusion. The millions of species in the galaxy couldn’t agree on what constituted beauty anyway.

  But Alema looked as if she was thinking it over.

  “We still wish to help you achieve your objective.”

  “Good,” said Lumiya. The way Alema used we gnawed away at her patience for some reason. She knew it was a hive-mind remnant of her Joiner days, but it irked her. “Because if hurting Leia is what you want most, letting Jacen get on with what he has to do is going to hurt her most of all.”

  “Do you want to hurt Leia?”

  “She’s done nothing to me. I have no feelings either way. There might be something you can do to help me, something you do better than anyone.” Appeal to her vanity. It’s big
enough. “Keep tabs on Jacen for me. Covert observation.”

  “We will, but can you not locate him anytime you want?”

  “Not closely enough.” Lumiya didn’t have the complete Sith ability to see all the pieces in the game, every element in the battle. That was for a full Sith Master. But she didn’t need to let on that she had fewer powers than Alema might think. “I don’t have time to log his movements, but for his own safety, I need to know exactly where he is at all times, especially when he leaves Coruscant. Do you think you can do that? It’s tedious work, but necessary.”

  “We can.”

  “And lose the Conqueror. I’ll find you a less conspicuous ship.”

  “The orange sphere?”

  “No.” Alema seemed to have taken a fancy to the Sith vessel. Perhaps it was because she could communicate with it: once Lumiya penetrated the jagged chaos in her mind, there was a sense of isolation in the Twi’lek that made her recoil. “Something more suitable. And cover your tracks when you leave—don’t lead anyone back to this asteroid.”

  “Our expertise is surveillance and assassination,” Alema said stiffly. “We aren’t an amateur.”

  Lumiya took her through the winding passages that honeycombed the asteroid and brought her to the emergency access—even in space, she thought of it as the backdoor—where a few small ships were standing idle. Once she’d had a battle fleet, but it was long gone in the Yuuzhan Vong war. Her needs were different now anyway. She needed stealth, not firepower.

  “There.” She pointed Alema to a decidedly scruffy shuttle, the kind that priority couriers used to ferry urgent consignments between worlds. It was fifteen meters long, and a third of that was now given over to a hyperdrive and discreet armaments. A courier shuttle needed to be fast and able to defend itself against piracy, but this one had considerably more than the standard specifications. Lumiya waited for Alema to complain about it.

  “We won’t be noticed in this,” the Twi’lek said, appearing satisfied.

  “You can change the identification transponder and the livery panel to any of a hundred courier companies.” That configuration was actually standard, but Lumiya had added a few bogus and untraceable companies for good measure, “It’s not luxurious, but it does the job.”