Darth Plagueis - James Luceno [38]
Having lived a surreptitious life for so many years, Hego found the notion of sharing the secret only with his parents completely natural.
No one held him responsible for his playmate’s plunge from the window, but, soon after, the steady stream of playmates began to dry up. Worse, his father began to grow distant—even while Hego found himself becoming more and more a part of Caar’s world. He considered that his father might be lying about having the power, or had come to think of Hego as some kind of monster. And yet he observed his father employing his eldritch powers of persuasion and manipulation in business dealings.
Like Muunilinst, Mygeeto received many important visitors, and at times it struck Hego that, in lieu of his being able to explore the galaxy, the galaxy was coming to him. On several occasions, his father met with Jedi Knights and Padawans who came in search of Adegan crystals, which the Jedi Order used in the construction of training lightsabers. Hego had long since perfected his ability to mask his powers from others. Even without revealing his true nature to the Jedi he was able to sense in them a kind of like-minded power, though one that was clearly at cross purposes with his own. From early on he knew that he could never be one of them, and he began to abhor their visits, for reasons he couldn’t grasp. Even more puzzling, he came to sense a power closer to his own in a Bith visitor named Rugess Nome. Nome wasn’t a Jedi but a starship engineer, who arrived in a luminous vessel of his own design. Before long, however, Hego began to suspect that his mother was the reason for Nome’s frequent visits. And the suspicion that there was something between them incited feelings of anger and jealousy in young Hego, and a kind of conflicted despondency in his father.
Hego had made up his mind to bring his power to bear on the intolerable situation when, during one of Nome’s visits, he was summoned to his father’s office, where Caar, his mother, and the Bith were waiting. Without looking at his wife, Caar had said, “You are of our blood, Hego, but we can no longer raise you as our progeny.”
Hego had looked from his father to his mother in mounting distress, fearing the very words Caar added a moment later. With a nod toward Nome, he said, “In truth, and in ways that you will eventually come to understand, you belong to him.”
A decade later, Hego would learn that while Caar had, in fact, done his best to keep his Force abilities to himself, he had come to the attention of Nome when the two had chanced to meet on High Port Space Center. Years would pass before Nome found Hego’s mother, whom he had conscripted not as an apprentice—for she wasn’t strong enough in the Force—but as a disciple, whose task it had been to romance Caar and bear the fruit of that seduction: a child whom Nome and Bith science predicted would be born strong in the Force. Hego’s parents had safeguarded the secret until his power had begun to reveal itself. And then a deal had been brokered: Hego, in exchange for the realization of Caar Damask’s lifelong dream of being accepted into the upper echelon of the InterGalactic Banking Clan.
Five years after the revelation in the office, Caar was recalled to Muunilinst to become director of the treasury branch of the IBC. Hego’s mother vanished, never to be seen again by either husband or son. And Hego’s apprenticeship to Sith Lord Darth Tenebrous commenced.
In addition to being widely respected as a savant engineer and starship