Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [174]
“Mine was a twisted form of Ben,” Mara said. “Rather cruel of an enemy to try to kill you in the image of your own son.”
Luke, on his knees by the bed, looked up at her. “Why didn’t they send a Ben against each of us? Wouldn’t that improve the odds that one of us would hesitate, at least in theory?”
Mara shrugged. “What did this?”
Luke rose. “A dark side Force-user of some sort. Or a group of them. Something new? I don’t know.” He moved back to the closet and pulled out his off-white pants and tunic. “Something’s happening out there, where Leia is, maybe where Jacen and Ben are. I’m going to get on the comm and see what I can find out.”
“Give me my robe. I’ll join you.” Mara tried to push aside her sense of unease. It had gripped her the moment she’d kicked the mutated image of her son, and it hadn’t left her.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Around the rock outcropping, Jacen came face-to-face with another rock—a boulder of black stone, its surface shiny and smooth. It was unlike any other surface he’d seen while in these caverns.
And it reeked of dark side energy.
“A door,” he said.
Beside him, Brisha nodded.
Jacen reached out to explore the barrier with his Force-attuned senses. The stone seemed to be resting on a pivot of pure energy. The slightest exertion would swing it to one side…but the exertion had to be made through the Force. Through the dark side of the Force. Perhaps a light-side exertion would swing it open as well, but he sensed that such an exertion would have to be much greater.
He shrugged, gestured, exerted himself minimally along dark paths. The boulder swung obediently to one side. There was darkness beyond.
Brisha moved into the darkness and Jacen followed her. Just past the boulder entrance, on the similarly smooth stone to the left, a set of sturdy metal levers and controls was revealed, and she flipped several of those switches from the bottom to the top position.
In the distance a light came on—bright, golden light, cheerful and warm in hue, revealing that Jacen and Brisha stood in an irregular stone corridor, triangular, wide at the base, coming to a point a couple of meters above their heads. The corridor widened a few meters before them, and the cavern beyond was being illuminated by the new light.
Gravity, too, was asserting itself. Jacen’s second step was half the floating, bouncing distance of the first, and the next was almost correct for Coruscant-standard gravity. After that, he felt that he could have been on Coruscant, except for the coldness of the air.
“The heaters are now on,” Brisha said, as though reading his mind. “But it takes awhile to warm a space as large as this.”
“Of course,” Jacen said.
They moved out from the corridor and into the open cavern, and Jacen blinked at what he saw.
The cavern was open, its walls slightly irregular but still of the same dark, smooth material as the boulder-door. The cavern ceiling was perhaps 50 meters up at its lowest point, 60 at its highest, and the space was longer than it was high, some 200 meters in length in one dimension, 150 in another.
But none of that registered at first. Jacen’s eye was drawn to the building that occupied the cavern’s center.
It was a mansion, five stories of stony construction, and it did not seem in the least ominous. The building’s outer surfaces were rock, but dressed white and green marble slabs rather than the ponderous dark stone of this asteroid. Its windows were wide, unshuttered, inviting.
At each corner of the building was a tower, the chamber at its summit roofed but open to the sides, and figures moved there and in various windows of the building. In one tower window, a figure painted; in another, one played an oversized harp, and distant notes, soft and true, reached Jacen’s ears; in one of the lower windows, a figure juggled three glowing yellow balls. At the center of the fifth floor a huge mechanism, all gigantic gears and levers, operated, its whole purpose apparently being to drive a single dial on the face of the building; it turned at a rate of two or three times