Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [146]
“Emergency crews!” Nelani shouted, waving toward Samran and his agents. “Get up here!”
The emergency crews used a portable winch to lower medics into the tank and begin extracting Arisster’s hostages from its floor. None ventured near the gruesome blood slick that represented the largest portion of what was left of Arrister and Haxan.
Meanwhile, meters away, Ben listened to Nelani and Jacen argue again.
“Are you insane?” Nelani asked. “We didn’t explore a single option other than your I’ll-make-you-my-sidekick offer.”
“There were no options,” Jacen said. “He was right. He had won. The only thing we could do was limit the scope of his victory. That meant limiting him to one life instead of several.”
“You don’t know. We didn’t try—”
“You could feel his determination, his strength.” Jacen’s tone chided her. “He had decided to die today. When someone decides to die, it’s hard to dissuade him.”
“Haxan hadn’t decided to die.”
“True. But he was going to, no matter what we did.”
“No—”
“What was the blaster pistol for, Nelani?”
That brought her up short. “What?”
“The blaster pistol he held. What was it for?”
“To compel obedience?”
Jacen shook his head. “He had his bomb for that. The bomb was all he needed, and he knew it. So what was the blaster for?”
“What do you think it was for?”
“To shoot hostages, one by one, as the afternoon wore on. To shoot them, and to mock us for our helplessness.”
She considered that. “Maybe.”
“Definitely. And with the first one he shot, our loss, our failure, would have been already equal to the one we eventually did face—one innocent life. With two shot, we’d have been worse off than we are now. And so on.”
She stared at him for a long moment, and Ben could see in her expression a tragic mask of disappointment, disillusionment. “Jacen, you have a good argument for everything you do. But my gut tells me that you’re doing wrong.”
“Your gut, or the Force?”
“My gut.”
“What does the Force tell you?”
“Nothing. The Force tells me nothing about what just happened.”
“Then it wasn’t the wrong choice.” Jacen turned away to head back to the Jedi speeder.
chapter twenty-eight
With the meaning of the tassels offering the Jedi clues but no clear path to follow, and with the Toryaz Station shuttle and the mystery of the Jedi-related terrorist encounters lingering in Lorrd City, Jacen put off his departure from Lorrd.
And it was only a day later that the mystery encounters continued.
First, in the morning, the Lorrd Security Forces received an anonymous communication that the kidnapped daughter of a prominent businesswoman was being held in steam tunnels beneath the School of Conceptual Design. The security operatives, after scanning plans of the tunnels, found no access that would give them an approach to the child’s prison chamber without getting the girl killed. So the Jedi were called.
Examining the same plans, Jacen noted that the diameter of one of the steam pipes, while insufficient for a full-grown man or woman to slither through, would provide a tight access for an average-sized adolescent. So the security forces had the steam cut off to that pipe, and after it cooled, Ben crawled through, cutting his way out of the pipe at an appropriate point, dropping into the kidnapped girl’s chamber, and defending it against all comers for the three minutes it then took for Jacen, Nelani, and the security forces to storm and secure the hideout.
The kidnapping’s mastermind, a frustrated radical who wanted to replace the Lorrd planetary government with something ruled by logical, pitiless legal-analyst droids, died during the attack, but his surviving allies said that the girl had appeared to him in his dreams and recommended the kidnapping in the first place.
Later that day, a man dressed in Jedi-style robes and carrying a nonfunctional,