Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [105]
Behind his faceplate, Ben’s expression finally began to grow uncertain. “What?”
“I’m Sith.” Vestara put some edge into her voice. “There’s no telling how far I’ll escalate things. It might even get deadly.”
Ben’s shoulders slumped, and he slipped into the passenger’s seat. “Do I at least get to know where we’re going?”
“Sure.” As Vestara spoke, the nose of a SoroSuub landspeeder began to emerge from the spaceport parking garage behind them. She reached over and, sliding down in her seat, pushed Ben’s head down. “We’re following your father.”
“What?” Ben tried to sit up again.
Vestara used the Force to push him back down. “I don’t know about you Jedi, but we Sith are not in the habit of allowing our Masters to go hunting things like Abeloth alone—not without a backup plan.”
Ben stopped struggling. “You think he’s going after her now?”
“I don’t know. But if they have traffic control on this moon, they have entry tracking.” As Vestara spoke, a sleek-sounding landspeeder passed on the street. “So why didn’t the portmaster just tell him where to find the Shadow? This has the feeling of a setup to me.”
“Maybe.” Ben grew more thoughtful. “Something might be up.”
“I think something is,” Vestara agreed. “So we follow at a discreet distance. If Master Skywalker doesn’t need us, we go back to the Emiax with no harm done. But if there’s trouble, we may be just the surprise that tips the balance in your father’s favor.”
“Okay, maybe you’ve got a point.” Ben lifted his head enough to peer over the dashboard. “But I want you to know something.”
“Yes?” Vestara sat up behind the pilot’s wheel, fearing he knew about the message she had sent—and wondering why that felt like a betrayal to her. “What is it?”
Ben shot her a half smile. “You’re a bad influence.”
THE DARK VEIL OF A STORM CLOUD WAS PUSHING IN FROM THE SEA, assailing the base of the cliff with an endless succession of rolling whitecaps. Between waves, hundreds of oval forms appeared from the water, many of them large enough to be starships but probably just boulders. Farther out stood the white spire of a distant island encircled by sea cliffs as high as the one upon which Luke was standing.
When Luke found no sign of the Jade Shadow, he turned to his Pydyrian guide. “I hope you’re not trying to be clever, Sanar. If the Shadow went down at sea—”
“Not at all.” Sanar pointed at the ankle-deep carpet of ground-vines in which they were standing. “Your ship is here, beneath us.”
Luke dropped his gaze, immersing himself in the White Current in case he was seeing another Fallanassi illusion, and found only the same four-pointed ground-vine leaves that he had seen earlier. “Beneath us?”
“In a cave.” Sanar stepped to the cliff’s brink, then leaned out and pointed back under them. “Down there.”
Using the Force to anchor himself in place, Luke stretched over the edge and looked down the sheer face. A hundred meters below, half hidden by a swarm of shrieking, sharp-winged seabirds, he glimpsed the dark shadow of a cavern’s mouth.
“I see.” Luke turned back to Sanar, then asked, “How do we get down there?”
The Pydyrian narrowed his small mouth in what was probably an expression of surprise. “You’re a Jedi, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Luke agreed, “but Jedi don’t fly.”
“No?” Sanar looked more surprised than ever. “Then I have no idea. Perhaps we should go back and rent an airspeeder.”
Luke shook his head. “No time for that. I’ll just do it the hard way.”
He withdrew a palm-sized cable launcher from his equipment belt and sent a stream of liquid wire shooting toward the rocks below. As soon as the line was long enough to reach the cave, he cut the flow and depressed the TEMPER button, sending a small electrical charge down its length. The wire solidified instantly, becoming a metal cable strong enough to carry several hundred kilograms. To secure the top end, he took a thumb-sized ground bolt from a belt pouch, threaded the cable through an eyeclamp, then affixed it to a blaster adaptor and fired the whole assembly into the ground.
A soft