Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 05_ Allies - Christie Golden [126]
“Physically beautiful?” Luke inquired.
“More than that. You couldn’t stop looking at her, whatever she chose to look like. It was all you wanted to do—look at her, be around her. Like an intoxicant.”
Luke and Ben exchanged glances. “Her looks varied, then?”
“From day to day, or depending on whomever she was around,” Vestara said. “Always more or less human, though. Sometimes fair hair, sometimes brown, sometimes long, sometimes short. The features shifted, the eye color changed a little. Until …” Vestara paused. “Until the moment I really saw her.”
Ben leaned forward. “What happened?”
“I told you, everything obeys Abeloth. That’s why we wanted to be with her—because she kept us safe. But at one point, the plants attacked Lady Rhea. While Abeloth was still there. She let them. That’s when I understood that we had been betrayed, and the next time I saw her—”
Vestara had a great deal of self-control. She was a Sith, from an entire Tribe of them. She had to have self-control. But Luke saw her pale slightly, and her gaze dropped for an instant. And when she spoke, her voice was slightly unsteady.
“Her hair was long and yellow and fell all the way to the ground. Her eyes were tiny, sunk deep into black eye sockets—like two small stars. Her mouth was—it reached literally from ear to ear, and her arms were short, stunted—with writhing tentacles instead of fingers. She was hideous.”
Luke nodded. “She was. She is,” he said. “I’ve seen her.”
“What? And you did not see fit to tell us? When did you encounter her?”
“It wasn’t a literal encounter,” Luke said, “but a sort of spiritual one. The people on Sinkhole Station taught me a technique called Mind Walking. One can leave the physical body and travel elsewhere. I’m beginning to think the places I visited were real. Certainly Abeloth was. And—other things.”
“Leaving the body,” Vestara said. “All those living corpses … that’s what they were doing, isn’t it?”
Luke nodded. “It’s very appealing. Most of them don’t want to go back.”
“And you saw her? Through Mind Walking?”
“You described her perfectly.”
“Well,” said Vestara with false cheer, “at least we three will recognize her when we see her.”
They had entered orbit around Abeloth’s planet having expected to be attacked every light-year along the way. That nothing had happened worried Ben much more than an open attack.
“I still don’t sense her at all,” said Luke. “She’s deliberately concealing herself.”
“A spider in her web, waiting for the flies to come to her,” muttered Ben. “She—”
And then he felt, not Abeloth’s presence, but another one. A familiar one.
Ship.
Vestara’s eyes widened at the same time, and a soft, almost tender smile touched her lips. Ben shuddered at the thought that she felt such affection for the Sith training vessel.
“Ship,” he told his father. “It’s here. And …” He frowned, trying to put a name to what he was sensing from the Sith meditation sphere.
He had expected Ship to be gleeful. It served Abeloth, who was clearly tremendously powerful and utilized dark side energy. Ship was designed to seek out strong wills, and to obey them. It was created to serve the Sith, and presumably, it would be just as “happy” with Abeloth. But instead he sensed …
“It’s despairing,” he murmured. “It’s … lost.”
Vestara’s eyes darted to him. He couldn’t read her expression.
“Elaborate,” Luke said.
“It’s hard to say but … I don’t think it likes having to serve Abeloth very much.”
“She tried to use it against us,” Vestara said. “Abeloth set Ship against the Sith—the beings who created it, whom it was made to serve. It could not perform one duty without betraying another, and this troubles it.”
Ben made an amused sound. “A dark side meditation sphere and training vessel with a conscience,” he said. “Who’d have thought it?”
Ship reminded Ben