It was dirty work, but he should have realized that by now. He couldn't hand it on to someone else if he wanted to think of himself as a man—or an officer.

"I'll send you with good backup," Jacen said. "Shevu and Lekauf.

Our contacts on Corellia are working out a time and place. You'll have to be ready to go at a moment's notice."

Ben wondered how he was meant to kill Gejjen. It seemed a sacrilege to use a lightsaber. He concentrated on the practicalities and logistics, pondering briefly on where the hit would take place, how close he could get, and what would work best—blaster, projectile, or something more exotic.

There was his mother's vibroblade, but Ben wasn't sure he had the stomach to use it in cold blood. He only knew how to defend himself and others, not how to hunt for the sole purpose of killing.

"You can do it," said Jacen, who always seemed to know his thoughts. "Same techniques you use already—just a different mindset. Go talk to the sniper team."

The best person he could have consulted on the finer points of assassination was his mother, once the Emperor's Hands, the best assassin of her day. Hey, Mom, is a head shot best? Double tap or triple? Do you think a silenced blaster is a better option than a lightsaber?

Ben knew that was a conversation he could never have.

Jacen watched Ben leave the briefing room and took a deep breath.

It was all he could do to keep the breath steady and not let it become a sob.

I can't do this.

I can't kill him.

If the Force had made things clearer, explained explicitly what he had to do —go here, kill this, recite that—then it might have been easier.

It was not knowing that was unbearable; not knowing if he was reading too much into the uncertain interpretations of knotted tassels, into Lumiya's vague pronouncements, into parallels with his grandfather that might not

even have been there. He knew his destiny was to be a Sith Lord more surely than he knew anything, but it was this final test that left him in agonized turmoil.

What if I'm wrong? What if Lumiya's wrong? What if I don't have to kill anyone at all, and I kill Ben because I couldn't translate a stupid prophecy straight?

The prophecy said: He will immortalize his love.

It said a lot of other things, too, like he'd make a pet. He still didn't have anything fluffy, scaly, or feathered to his name, and it was stretching it to apply that to the faithful Corporal Lekauf who served him as selflessly as his grandfather had served Vader.

Immortalize doesn't have to mean kill.

But he had no idea what else it might mean. This—this was the worst thing about Sith teaching. There weren't just two possible interpretations of anything, but three, four, five . . .

So only the Sith deal in absolutes, do they, Obi-Wan? You told Vader that, or so Lumiya says. You liar. The Sith deal in anything but absolutes, because—

Because life itself was like that. A million choices to be freely made, all of them to be lived with, and requiring the courage of conviction.

Just a clue. How will I know? What will the sign be?

Lumiya didn't know, either, or if she did—he wasn't going to listen. Enough games; enough guessing. This all rested on his judgment.

I'm looking for signs and portents like a Ryn fortune-teller. It has to be more rational than this.

It was.

Ben's comment from the conversation they'd only just finished leapt into his mind.

An officer has to make decisions that cost lives.

It was for the good of the majority, he said. And if Ben could think it, then Jacen had to, as well.

He thought it, activated the security locks on the briefing room doors, sat down in a corner with his head resting on his knees.

When he put his hand to his face, he found it wet with tears.

chapter five

The main barrier to getting the Galactic Alliance to talk sense is Jacen Solo. He leads Chief Omas by the nose and he makes Admiral Niathal worse by encouraging her short-sharp-shock tendencies. Get him out of the way, and things would calm down enough for us to maneuver around Omas. I think I'll have a statesman-to-statesman chat with him . . . privately.

—Dur Gejjen, Corellian Prime Minister, in private discussion GALACTIC ALLIANCE XJ7, IN NEUTRAL SPACE BETWEEN CORELLIA AND

CORUSCANT

Mara wondered if she'd bother to spin Jacen a line about why she needed to take an XJ7. Look, Jacen, it's like this. You've turned into a thug since Lumiya came on the scene, and the witch is trying to kill my son, so how's about I do what I do best, and kill her for all our sakes?

She would have loved to tell him that. But she still didn't know who Lumiya's accomplices were inside the GAG, and Jacen didn't take kindly to doubts about his precious secret police. He wasn't being helpful. He didn't even seem to believe that Mara and Luke had found convincing evidence of Lumiya's GAG connections.

Jacen might have been a gifted Jedi, but he could also be a very human idiot, too. Or at least she'd thought in those more benign terms before the debacle of Gilatter VIII. She'd never imagined that Jacen would leave his parents to die.

Mara tried Leia's comlink again, hopping from frequency to frequency in case she was being tracked. Old habits died hard, and she didn't want Crazy Woman Two, Alema, to get a fix on her—or Leia.

Or . . . maybe she did.

"We can't go on meeting like this," said Leia's voice. She laughed, and that

was pretty remarkable under the circumstances. She didn't have much to laugh about. "Do I have to give you a password?"

"I'll trust you." Mara checked her cockpit display, watching the frequency shift on the monitor in multicolored bars of light. "You okay?"

"For a woman on the run, I'm doing great."

"I don't know where to start."

"Try, Hey, did your son really abandon you to suck vacuum? Because that'd be my first question . . ."

"I'm so sorry, Leia, I really am. But I'm going to put a stop to this. Take Lumiya out of the equation, and I think you'll see a major improvement in Jacen's attitude."

"Is that where you are now?"

"I'm trying to work out how Lumiya moves around. Forget all this lightwhip garbage. I'm going to find her ship and finish what Luke started. They're always vulnerable in transit."

Leia's end of the link went quiet for a few moments. "Want me to play bait? "

"Don't you think you've been through enough lately?"

"I can guarantee that Alema would show up if I asked nicely," Leia said. "And maybe Lumiya wouldn't be far behind."

"Tell you what, why don't I lob in Ben and make certain of it?"

"Mara . . ."

"Sorry. I don't want to expose you to any more risk. But if I can devise a safer way of exploiting the fact that neither of those crazies can keep away from us, I'll do it."

"We're going to need to break this link soon," Leia said.

"Okay. Look, I have to see Jacen sooner or later. Do you want me to put it to him straight? Ask him why he ran when you'd come to save him?"

Mara couldn't think of a single thing Jacen might say that would sound plausible, but she didn't want to make Leia feel any worse than she did. My fault anyway. I defended him when Luke was telling me he was going dark. If I'd seen what was in front of me and acted then, things might be different now.

She had thought that about Palpatine, too. She was spending too much time looking back, and not enough getting on with the here and now.

The past couldn't be changed, just the future.

"What if he tells you," said Leia, "and it's a reason I won't enjoy hearing?"