Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [161]
A mynock, its eyes glittering with unusual intelligence, stared at him from the distance of centuries. the Sith are not what you think
Leia, her features smoothed by grief so great it could not be expressed, fell forward, folding over as she did. dark dark I will not be afraid of the dark
Han, regret on his face, a vibroblade in his hand, lunged forward and slammed the blade between the ribs of a pretty young woman with dark hair.
I loved you in my own way, I would have repaired the harm I did you
Instinctively, Luke reached out through the Force to offer support and strength to Leia. The others he wasn’t sure about, whether they were really the individuals the visions represented, but he could feel the true Leia within the vision of her. He just wasn’t sure whether he was extending his gesture to the Leia of here and now, the Leia of some future time, or the Leia of a future that would actually never occur.
His attention was drawn back to Mara. Now her eyes were open, staring sightlessly upward, her body cut and butchered, the edges still black and steaming, by a lightsaber blade.
Luke shook his head and exerted himself through the Force, willing the visions, the voices away. They faded, leaving him in the dark with his wife asleep and unharmed.
He took his lightsaber from the nightstand and moved out into the hallway. He didn’t want his perturbation to awaken Mara.
Something was happening; events at distant points of the galaxy and even of time were focusing toward him and those he loved. The confusion, the turbulence of those thoughts and emotions pressed down on him, soured his stomach.
On the cold stone floor outside his chambers, he sat cross-legged and tried to sink into a meditative state—a state to give him real knowledge, a state to grant him peace.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Ben took his lightsaber into his hands and thumbed it on. Its snap-hiss was less welcome than the blue light it emitted—suddenly he could see all around him, even if dimly.
He floated through open space, but ahead of him, thirty or forty meters, was a broken stone wall, and he floated toward it at a rate of several meters a second. He was also losing altitude, slowly—though gravity was weak here, it wasn’t entirely absent.
“Two-handed form,” Nelani said, behind him, “makes it rather hard to hold on to stone walls.”
Ben twisted to look behind him. Nelani floated there, following his aerial path, at least as comfortable in the minimal gravity as Ben was.
He turned back to face the onrushing wall. “Did you pull me out of the railcar?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid. Don’t be snide.”
“Sorry, I’m upset.” Her tone changed. “Nelani to Jacen, come in.”
As the stone wall came nearer, Ben spotted a feature on it he thought he could grab, a rocky projection that narrowed to a needle-like point. He held his lightsaber back and to one side with his right hand, extended his left, and as he reached the projection he grabbed it, swinging his feet ahead of him to sustain the minimal shock of impact.
A moment later Nelani hit a few meters down, her fingers slipping into a crack in the stone, her hips and shoulders taking the impact.
“So who did it?” Ben persisted. “The Sith?”
“We have company.”
Ben looked down at her, then around, then up.
Above him, ten meters up, a pair of eyes stared down at him. They glowed blue in the reflected light of his lightsaber blade. They were not human eyes, but slitted and triangular.
Beyond them were more, hundreds of pairs of eyes, cool and unblinking.
Ben shook his head. He’d had that portion of stone wall in sight as he’d approached the wall. There had been no creatures there at the time. He reached out for them within the Force, and could feel them there, hundreds of them, strong in dark side energy. “Not good,” he said.
“Drop,” Nelani said.
“Yeah.” Ben released his hold on the