Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 04_ Backlash - Aaron Allston [114]
“You’re right.” Luke frowned. “It was awfully easy for us to discover where Vestara’s yacht was. I mean, Amelia’s a clever girl … but should she have been able to find that ship?”
Ben shrugged. “But we know no message large enough to contain the Maw navigational data Vestara had acquired was transmitted off-world. So she’s got to be thinking about how she gets offworld to join her people. And that means a ship. The only ships she could be confident would be on hand are her stolen yacht and Jade Shadow. And she’s made no effort to get back to either one.” Ben blinked as a new thought settled into place, an unpleasant one. “Unless …”
“Say it.”
“She’s shown no sense of urgency. Zero. None. Her time spent with the clans here feels an awful lot like a delaying tactic.”
“Meaning?”
“She has no intention of returning to the spaceport for either ship. Because the Sith are coming here for her.”
Luke gave an approving nod. “So when she got to Dathomir in the first place, she staged an approach that looked like it might end in a crash landing. But she really just landed.”
“She sneaked into the spaceport, no harder for a Sith to do than a Jedi, and she struck a deal with the best mechanic in port. Here, take my ship, it’s all yours. My asking price …”
“Is just enough credits to send off a hypercomm message. Very short, easy to encrypt and conceal, comparatively inexpensive to bounce around a number of comm stations to conceal its destination from investigators, and small enough that it couldn’t contain the Maw navigational data.”
Ben smacked himself in the forehead. “Because if only she has the nav data, the Sith have to come for her. She remains valuable. Good tactics for dealing with the Sith, even when you are Sith. So then she runs off into the rain forest to act as a diversion, to keep us away from the spaceport and Monarg.”
“In the meantime, she really gets a good look at the Dathomiri and likes what she sees. She may even run into the Nightsisters first, as you speculated. So she could have been playing the Nightsisters against the Raining Leaves.”
Ben looked around and spotted Vestara. She was seated with Kaminne and Olianne, and was holding Halliava’s daughter, Ara, in her lap. They were chatting, laughing. Had they been dressed in modern clothes and surrounded by the trappings of a tapcaf, they could have been a gathering of family members anywhere in the galaxy. “Dad, if we’re guessing right, time could be very, very short.”
“I know. When the hunters and scouts move out, we need to have someone watching Vestara. Preferably both of us, trading off, so if she detects one of us, she may lose that sense when we switch.”
Ben kicked another rock and watched it fall. “Blast it. I was almost starting to like her.”
Halliava, trainer of scouts for the former Raining Leaves, was naturally among those who assembled to enter the forest and search it for signs of the Nightsisters. Vestara was not. After a quick, private consultation, Luke and Ben decided to enter the forest and shadow Halliava while Dyon, remaining on the hilltop, would keep a surreptitious eye on Vestara. “But don’t forget,” Luke told Dyon, “you’re no safer on the bare hilltop than we are in the forest. Remember the example of Tribeless Sha. Danger is everywhere.”
A bare minute after Halliava and other Dathomiri scouts and hunters entered the forest verge, so did the Skywalkers. Initially they chose an angle that would theoretically carry them away from Halliava, but, once concealed by trees, they vectored toward her.
* * *
For Vestara, the problem was a simple one to solve. She waited until the Skywalkers were gone and until Dyon was distracted.