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There, he told himself. That’s how Jacen would have done it if he were my age.

As he reached the door, he let his lightsaber drop into his hands, then moved out into the night air.

chapter eleven

DREWWA, MOON OF ALMANIA

In the silvery light of dawn, Ben stood under a sidewalk café awning beside a nearly deserted city street and stared up at the soaring Crossroutes Business Habitat. It was unlovely in the extreme, a greenish column extending eight hundred meters up into the sky, with decorative yellow-white structures like planetary rings situated every five floors. At least Ben hoped they were decorative—what their function might be otherwise was beyond him. Could they slide up and down the building exterior like massive open-air turbolifts?

The data card Seha had given him included a datafile on Drewwa, including a mention that the Crossroutes building was one of the system’s few acknowledgments that there was life outside Almania. Trang Robotics, one of the system’s largest industries, traded a tremendous number of computer systems and droids to the Alliance, the Chiss, and other large collectives of planets and cultures, but the locals by and large ignored the fact that anything existed beyond their star system.

The occasional firm like Crossroutes seemed to exist principally to rub such unwelcome news into the faces of the Almanians. The building housed the local offices of hundreds of offworld firms as they tried, usually successfully, to arrange for advantageous purchase deals from local technological firms or attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to market their own goods in this system.

At this early hour there was already a stream of workers entering the ground-level doors of the Crossroutes building. Most looked to Ben as though they were offworlders like himself. At some point he would have to join them, go up to the 215th floor, find and break into the display case, replace the real Amulet there with the fake he carried in his pocket, and get out undetected.

No, that was too much, he decided. For once, it was his mother’s voice and not Jacen’s that whispered in his ear. “The first step in any intelligence operation,” she had told him more than once, “is gathering information. You gather enough information to make your plan. If you’re planning without information, you’re planning for failure.”

“But that’s not how the Jedi do things,” Ben had protested. “They just go there and solve the problem.”

She’d given him a crafty smile. “Which is why they’re famous, right?”

“Right!”

“Well, when intelligence operatives do their jobs correctly, they never become famous. Because no one ever learns they’ve been there. And sometimes that’s what solving the problem means.”

Ben hadn’t liked the answer then, because it seemed to preclude igniting lightsabers, bouncing off walls, and stuffing the smiles of bad people straight down their mouths. But now he could see that the intelligence way had merit from time to time. Jacen did things that couldn’t always appear on news holocasts; Jacen’s duties seemed to be about half intelligence these days. Suddenly, in Ben’s estimation, Mara got a lot smarter.

So he’d do an information-gathering run and then decide, when he knew more, whether to continue straight into the actual mission or back off and return at a later time.

The wall behind him slid up, revealing the café’s interior. Warm air smelling of fresh-baked goods rolled across Ben, and he abruptly realized that he was hungry.

The proprietor, a tall man with the build and gut of a Gamorrean, stepped out among his tables, looked up and down at the sidewalk foot traffic, and glanced at Ben. “Here to eat, son?” To Ben’s ears, his quaint accent made it sound like, Hierr to eat, sann?

Ben nodded.

The man tapped a tabletop, motioning for Ben to sit there. The tabletop lit up, four points on it revealing themselves to be displays showing the establishment’s morning menu. Ben sat and looked it over, while also watching the front of his target building,