Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [106]
The next day at noon, he was waiting for the sensation, and it did not fail him. In the few seconds he had, he sought the viewer through the Force.
And he was successful. Whoever was staring at him was doing so from straight up. Ben peered up through the canopy of leafless branches. But there was nothing for him to see, just the sun gleaming dimly through a layer of clouds. He said, “Shaker, passive sensors only, look straight up.”
The astromech chirped an affirmative.
Again the sensation faded. Ben pulled out his datapad. “Did you see anything?”
I DETECT A FAINT ION TRAIL.
“The ion trail—the kind that a TIE fighter would leave?”
CORRECT.
So the person who had blown up both the YT-2400 and the Y-wing was shadowing them. But why—and, just as importantly, how?
Ben spent part of the afternoon disassembling and checking every piece of equipment he had taken from Faskus’s camp, especially the electronics. He found no mystery transmitters in or on them.
There was Faskus’s datapad, of course, and it, like Ben’s, was a short-range transmitter. To determine whether it was transmitting to their shadow, Ben would have to catch it in the act—its programming could cause it to transmit a single recognition pulse at great intervals, and Ben would have to have Shaker listen on all comm frequencies all the time to detect it.
But instead he could simply remove the battery from the device, restoring it on those occasions he needed to consult its files. That he did. Then, no more informed than before, he led the way onward, through the snow and the twisted trees.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
The hologram of the scrawny, bronze-hued Bothan flickered and jittered. Lumiya pretended not to notice. She’d chosen Dyur and crew in part because their ship had a holocomm, but it clearly wasn’t a very good one. “Right on time,” she said, forcing a note of commendation into her voice. “What do you have to report?”
“Faskus is dead,” Dyur said. “The boy and the astromech appear to be heading toward one of the old settlements. And there’s a complication.”
“Go ahead.”
“It looks as though Faskus took his little girl along. She’s still alive. The boy has taken her with him.”
Lumiya sat back and considered. That was…unfortunate.
The orders she had meticulously structured with Jacen didn’t specify what Ben should do in such a case. And while rescuing a little girl might initially give him a warm feeling of satisfaction, continuing to protect her had to be a considerable drain on his attention and energies. Taking her along was not survival thinking, not mission-success thinking, not Sith thinking.
And the boy must know it. He was just too much like his father.
And that meant he’d never be good Sith material.
“Kill them,” she said.
“Consider it done.”
“I’ll consider it done when you report that it’s done. Anything else?”
“No, my lady.”
Lumiya made a subtle gesture with her fingers, which would be beneath the view Dyur had of her, and the hologram disappeared.
She winced just a bit, though her servitor droids would not be able to see it beneath her facial scarf. She’d just ordered the death of Luke Skywalker’s son. One more reason for him to kill her if he found out about it.
Ah, well. Perhaps he never would. Even if he did, this was all about Jacen, and now Jacen would not be saddled with an apprentice with a fuzzy, sentimental mind.
ZIOST
The next day, at midmorning, they found the first location marked RUINS on Faskus’s map. It was a mass of collapsed stone—dressed stone blocks that had once formed the wall of a small citadel before some tremendous force had pushed them over. Ben found weathering on all exposed surfaces of the stones, but no sign of blaster scoring, melting, or other recognizable indicators of violence.
And he found no way into the mass. Neither his eyes nor his Force-senses suggested a place he might enter to find intact chambers, nor did Shaker’s sensors.
“We’ll rest and