You darknesses should never fight. So few of you. I stopped her fighting.

"You certainly did." It was fascinating that the ship could still sense the dark side in Mara, even though she'd abandoned her roots. But to taste it in Ben, too ... it might have been in his genes, or perhaps the ship was reacting to his new career as a state assassin. Like mother, like son; Lumiya almost thought she'd written off Ben too soon. "Do you sense dark ones near?"

The broken one is looking for the Lord-to-be.

"If she looks as if she's going to interfere, remove her—dark or not." Lumiya had told Alema to track Jacen, but now wasn't the best time for Alema to interfere. "Jacen Solo is our priority."

The ship went quiet. It was impossible to get an accurate sense of speed in a vessel with no instruments in hyperspace, but she could measure the duration of the journey on her chrono, and the ship could tell her where its equivalent location was in realspace.

Past Arkania. Past Chazwa.

Where was Jacen going? Not Ziost, unless he was taking an extraordinary route. He'd be brushing the Roche sector, if he dropped out of hyperspace, and for a moment she wondered if he was simply panicking about the possibility of the Roche-Mandalorian arms deal turning the war in the Confederation's favor, and going to the Verpine to undermine the pact: but that was routine work for minions, for his admirals and agents, and she'd be annoyed if he was wasting his energies on that.

He leaves hyperspace, the ship said at last.

"Where is he?"

Hapes Cluster.

"Follow him."

Perhaps he was going to enlist the Queen Mother's help. The Verpine seemed to be troubling him; that meant Lumiya hadn't heard the full story about the arms deal.

"This is beneath you, Jacen." She sighed. "Priorities. You really can't delegate, can you? That's one thing that your grandfather could do."

Jacen was heading for Hapes itself. Lumiya encouraged the Sith sphere to leave more distance between them by imagining a cord stretching to a hair's thickness. Eventually Jacen reached the edge of the Hapans'

security area, and slipped through.

He lands. He has an entry code.

Lumiya debated whether to use the code to follow him more closely, then decided against it. She didn't know if that would attract attention.

"Maintain position until he leaves."

She decided to sit it out, and hoped she wasn't misjudging the situation and that Niathal and G'Sil weren't now declaring the Glorious Third Republic or some such nonsense. The trouble with the small people was that they often left little in the Force for her to feel at this distance, and Coruscant's citizens were so passive and compliant that there would be no great disturbance for her to detect even if Niatfial declared martial law in Jacen's absence. It was nothing that couldn't be put right on her return, but she'd have to explain why she'd been goofing off as Ben might call it, and Jacen would become petulant and uncooperative.

Jacen's like a moody teenager at the moment. When he makes the

transition to Sith Lord, he'll settle down fast.

And she'd be no more use to him after she found him a replacement for Ben Skywalker. Lumiya accepted that her days were numbered.

She lost herself in meditation, wondering who might be Jacen's apprentice to come, when an explosion of feeling shook her as if she'd been grabbed by the shoulders and kissed by a total stranger. The Sith sphere reacted, too, a great soaring excitement that seemed to bounce between her and the ship's bulkheads.

"What's happening? Ship? What is it?"

But she already knew: it was Jacen, slipping out of his permanently repressed Force state and allowing himself intense, overpowering emotion for the first time in ages. The image the ship threw into Lumiya's mind was one of gulping down an icy glass of water after weeks in a burning desert. The sensation was intense enough to bring Lumiya to the point of gasping.

He has love, said the ship. He has loves there.

So Jacen Solo had a lover.

Stupid boy.

He could have had any number of lovers—after he achieved his full power. Passion was fine, attachment could magnify strength, but running around the galaxy for a secret assignation smacked of a teenager's total surrender to hormonal crisis.

Jacen, you're thirty-one, thirty-two, and a grown man doesn't have to sneak light-years away for a little romance, not even one in your position.

Unless . . .

Lumiya could think like Jacen now, even if his more vulnerably human side caught her wrong-footed.

Hapes. This was Hapes. And it involved something he'd kept secret even from her.

His lover was part of the Royal Court, then, the epicenter of paranoia when it came to alliances of any kind, because indiscretion often meant a blade between the ribs or a sprinkling of poison in the wine. That would explain a secret dash across hyperspace at sporadic intervals.

And Queen Mother Tenel Ka was a Jedi to whom Jacen had been close for years. It was conjecture, but Jacen wouldn't consort with a palace maid. He was conscious of his lofty station in life; he would be drawn to a Jedi queen.

Lumiya risked searching the Force more closely for him to try to get an impression of exactly where he was. The sphere said he was in the palace itself, and although the tidal wave of emotion that had burst through had ebbed, it was still powerful enough to focus on. She shut out everything else—even her constant obsession, Jacen's destiny—and just opened her mind to the most basic impressions. His Force presence could be strong enough to drown out everyone else's around him. Now that he thought he was unseen and undetected, his presence was as deafening as a shout.

Lumiya couldn't even feel the ship around her.

The sense she was wrapped up in now wasn't taste or sight or sound, but. . . touch.

There was something soft, silky, and furry in her hands—Jacen's hands —and it yielded when he closed his fingers. It meant nothing to her, and then—then she understood.

"Ship, you said loves."

Two, the ship said. Yes, two.

The ship could detect Force-users, and it felt there were two more on Hapes, two more whose link with Jacen Solo had to be kept secret at any cost, and who would have an emotionally overwhelmed Jacen clutching

A toy. A soft toy. Jacen had come back to the apartment with a plain package gripped tight under his arm, and left with it. He'd bought a cuddly toy for a child he loved with his entire being.

Lumiya snapped herself out of the connection, and managed to stop short of beating her fists on the stark red deck of the sphere in sheer frustration. The ship might have taken it the wrong way.

Oh, Jacen, you had a child with Tenel Ka.

Lumiya now understood his fear and desperation. She thought of all the conversations she'd had with him about immortalizing his love, and suddenly realized who was in his mind when he looked so utterly tortured and desperate as she explained that he had to destroy what he loved most.

It explained everything. Lumiya never thought she could pity someone again enough to weep, but she found her vision blurred by tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks.

She settled in for a long wait in a state of mental silence, not even wanting to occupy herself with getting to know this extraordinary ship. She'd need to be there for Jacen after this. It seemed insultingly banal to kill time when he was about to make a sacrifice that almost no mundane being—or Jedi —would understand or forgive.

Yes, it was a very high price indeed.

chapter eighteen

The Roche government has given Murkhana twenty-four hours to cease production of weapons command systems that are allegedly in breach of patents, or face what it describes as "immediate enforcement." GA Chief of Staff Niathal tonight warned Roche against military action and said GA fighters would be patrolling the system in a peacekeeping role.