Would you prefer not to join him? I know some of the Moffs are more expansionist than you."

"If I were to say that I wouldn't shed tears if Jacen were to crash and burn, in any sense, and that I would accept re-sponsibility for cleaning up the mess he's left, would that answer your questions?"

"So you'll wait for his next big mistake and go in for the kill."

"If I felt it stabilized the galaxy." Pellaeon didn't think it was the time to explain that he doubted the GA's ability to hold down the job with or without Jacen, given that it had enabled Jacen to thrive; Niathal probably knew that any-way. "But one thing I'll promise you is that I have a line I will not cross, and while the Moffs and I might be pursuing the same course at this moment, we don't all share one ide-ology."

"Stiff upper lip and do the decent thing..."

"Yes. If you want to put it that way."

"I'll join you in that."

Pellaeon now knew how she felt but not what she might do. "Let's hope for a better outcome."

"Indeed. I'll be in touch."

Pellaeon closed the link and sat chewing over Niathal's words for a while, wondering how much worse Jacen might become if Niathal were taken out of the picture for any reason. She seemed still to be a brake on Jacen-no small measure of her own strength-and Pellaeon could do business with her.

The Imperial interest is served by supporting her. Keeping moderates in power is a lot cheaper all round than battling down despots every few years.

If push came to shove at Fondor, and Niathal was sal-vageable, then Jacen might find himself alone.

How much support did Solo have from his officers and in the ranks after the Tebut incident? That would be the critical factor. Sith, Jedi, or G.o.d, he was still one man.

Pellaeon got up and walked the pa.s.sages and flats of Bloodfin, noting where fitters were still sealing covers on conduits and engineering droids were busy in shafts.

"Sir? Sir!" The Junior Officer of the Deck-Lieutenant Lamburt on the current watch-strode as fast as he could without committing the sin of actually breaking into a run. "Sir, security has a visitor at the brow asking for you, but she's reluctant to present ID."

"Any cause for concern? Armed? Jealous? Blond or red-head?"

The officers laughed politely, seeming to think Pellaeon was joking about his eye for an attractive female, undimmed even now. He couldn't have known that the blonde-Tahiri-was not someone he wanted on board, however charming, because she was Jacen Solo's creature, and almost certainly not as sweet as she looked, or that the redhead was probably someone he was very anxious to see indeed.

The OOD let out another nervous laugh. "Good call, sir. The lady has red hair."

Pellaeon tugged his cuffs to smooth his sleeves and walked aft toward the brow, a renewed man. "Then I shall welcome her on board personally. Have the steward droid serve tisane in my day cabin-perhaps some confits and a decanter of syrspirit, too."

"Very good, sir."

There was always a heady sense of optimism in a new ship, and Pellaeon could feel it. Junior ratings pressed flat against bulkheads to let him pa.s.s, even though there was quite enough room to walk by. He liked smaller ships. There was something tight and purposeful about them, the difference between a vessel with a starship's lines and what might as well have been an office tower. The ship's comple-ment was small enough to get to know all hands properly. This was a ship he wanted to fight, a real warship, just for the exhilaration of being closer to the vibration, noise, and sheer mechanical life of a great fighting beast.

Pellaeon paused a moment before turning into the pa.s.sage to face the hatch, and ran his forefinger over his mus-tache. It had been a long time. He took a breath and walked out to the brow. By now, a small knot of engineer-ing ratings had gathered and were taking an excessive time to check hatch status lights while they stared at a woman who had been walking the decks before any of them were born.

"You haven't changed one bit, "Pellaeon said, gesturing her on board with a sweep of his arm. "It's good to see you again, Admiral Daala."

ANAKIN SOLO, FONDORIAN s.p.a.cE, TAPANI SECTOR: 0500 GST.

When the Star Destroyer jumped out of the comm silence of hypers.p.a.ce, Caedus knew that something had not gone precisely to plan.

Battles never do. So we adapt the plan.

The comm boards and screens on the bridge burst into new life with restored connections; officers and senior rates caught up with signals and sitreps delayed by five hours. Caedus felt the mood change on the bridge in the ten paces it took him to reach the status screens, and it wasn't gener-ated by fear of him. The crew's attention and growing dismay was fixed on the updating status reports.

They hunched over scanners and monitor. Caedus walked to the viewport and looked into the starfield, seek-ing out the disk of Fondor in the foreground. At this distance, it looked as if nothing was happening.

"Sir, we can't contact the minelayers."

Caedus glanced over the shoulder of the nearest sensor operator to check the holochart image built up from the real-time scan. There was no sign of the five minelayers; they were supposed to disgorge their clouds of Vigilante mines and pull back to beyond Fondorian s.p.a.ce to the RV coordinates. The Anakin Solo should have dropped out of hypers.p.a.ce right on top of them.

Tahiri hovered at his elbow. He reached into the Force and felt the usual background disturbances of wars: there was fear, anger, danger, destruction, faint echoes of explo-sions, the same mix of collective emotions and aftermaths that he could sense any day, any hour, if he stopped to think about it.

A Force-user's ability to sense danger and concealed weapons was a wonderful a.s.set in a Coruscant tapcaf or a strange city, but it was next to useless on a battlefield. Everything was danger and instruments of death; Caedus was a few hundred thousand kilometers off a planet that built warships and was on a high state of alert.

"Sir, Fleet Ops says they had last contact with the minelayers before the jump to hypers.p.a.ce." The lieutenant at the electronic warfare station didn't dare blink as he met Caedus's eyes. He radiated anxiety, and this time it was personal. "Then nothing, not even an emergency beacon. If they'd returned to Coruscant, they'd be back in port by now."

The stealth minelayers were small vessels with dispro-portionately powerful drives to enable them to punch in and out of hypers.p.a.ce close to their target zones; the aim was to spend as little time as possible in reals.p.a.ce to avoid detection, drop the surprise on the enemy's doorstep, and jump back into hypers.p.a.ce. With self-deploying networked mines that needed no conventional laying, it should have been a hit-and-run.

"Let me talk to them." Caedus, still only mildly concerned, took over the comlink to Ops and called up the data flooding in from them with a movement of his forefinger. It disgorged a shimmering list of blue text with times and coordinates of pa.s.sive position checks of the whole task force, including the outbound minelayers. "Ops, what happened?"

"Colonel Solo, we should have had confirmation of the minelayers'

position and intended movement by now if they completed their mission. We wouldn't have pinged them at the Fondor end as long as they were on stealth mode, obviously." There was a brief pause. While the ops room commander seemed to be taking a deep breath, Cae-dus felt a welling of dread around him as if the crew had seen something he hadn't. "I know this might sound obvious, sir, and I apologize for asking, but can you detect any mines in position?"

Caedus switched back mentally to the ordinary world of the measurable and the detectable. n.o.body on the bridge said a word. Yes, they had seen something tangible.

Your fault, Lumiya. You nagged me to stop relying on my mundane senses. I used to check scanners first and the force second. What happened to my intellect?

"Sir, there's no signal from the mine net for us to activate it, so they never left the hold, and this is the medium-range scan of Fondorian s.p.a.ce out to Nallastia." The lieutenant switched display modes so Caedus could see it not in columns of numbers, but in color-enhanced density and temperature mapping.

Fondor appeared as a patchy disk of temperature gradu-ation with the orbitals pa.s.sing across its face picked out as more regularly patterned bars-the side-on view of flattened arrowhead-shaped shipyards.

But beyond the limb of the planet, the enhanced image showed distinct patches like miniature nebulae. When the lieutenant zoomed in to show Caedus a finer resolution, the patches resolved into concentric rings showing particle density and tiny temper-ature variations in s.p.a.ce.

"What am I looking at?" Caedus asked, knowing per-fectly well but needing to hear it because he wanted to be wrong for once. The rest of the bridge seemed to recede from his field of view; the scanners and sensors in front of him were all he could see. He was angry, getting angrier, but it was silent and smoldering.

"The residual traces of an explosion, sir. The spectrome-ter a.n.a.lysis of the particle cloud shows it matches the ma-terial used for the Nonvideor-cla.s.s minelayers." The man swallowed. He was new: Tebut's replacement. "The data-base, sir. We have a materials database to aid rescue and re-covery missions, so we can tell which ships have been..."

All Caedus could hear was the faint machine chatter of the bridge instruments, and the quiet throb of drives and generators that was as rea.s.suring as a heartbeat to the crew.

He felt they were expecting an explosion from him, too. But that would have been weakness. He felt that they were as shocked and angry as he was.

"How many are there... Loccin?" he asked, reading the man's name tab. "I see three."

"I'd have to get us line-of-sight with the other side of Fon-dor to be sure, but there may well be two more debris clouds out of vision. Just so you know I'm treble-checking... three of the jump exit coordinates match the three areas of debris."

"Bridge to Flight Commander, "Caedus said. "Flight, get an X-wing out Core side of the planet and confirm debris fields and coordinates, please."

The response filled the silent bridge over the shipwide comm, even though the flight commander was a soft-spoken woman. "Very good, sir."

"Thank you, Flight. Now, someone tell me what's happening on Fondor. What are they saying? Any HNE news feeds? Diplomatic protests?"

"Nothing from the Chief of State's office, sir..."

"Yes, get me Niathal. She's been sitting around with full comms for at least five hours, so she should be updating us, should she not?"

The bridge started coming back to life. The buzz of normal working conversation rose from whispers to normal volume.

"Sir, absolutely no mention of any incidents on HNE."

"GA External Relations says no diplomatic contact, offi-cial or unofficial, sir."

"GAG monitoring says their agents are reporting a con-tinued high state of alert on Fondor, and a lot of military traffic between the surface and orbitals, but that's been steady for several months."

They'd been waiting for the GA to kick them back into line; it was only a matter of when.

Tahiri, who'd been watching Caedus with the expression of someone waiting for a live detonator to blow, edged up to him. "The minelayers were intercepted as soon as they dropped, then. They didn't even get a chance to disperse."

"Correct, Lieutenant Veila, subject to the findings on the two ships unaccounted for."

"A hundred crew, yes? Complement of twenty per ship?"

"Yes." The size and spread profile of the debris particles indicated ma.s.sive explosions, as Caedus would have expected with mine-laden ships taking direct hits. The end was at least mercifully instant.

I still care about my people. I'm not a monster. "Betrayed."

"Fondor knew we were coming."

"Lieutenant, Fondor knew we were coming for weeks, but they knew where and when we were arriving." Caedus walked the width of the bridge and let his gaze fall on crew at random. All handpicked, screened for loyalty and the right att.i.tude; and little opportunity to spy for Fondor this time. He felt no treachery, he really didn't. If the leak wasn't in this ship, the specific location could only have come from Fleet HQ, Comms, or someone directly in touch with the minelayers' crews after they received their orders, and there had been very little time for that information to per-colate through the system. It wasn't enough for someone to tip Fondor off that minelayers were coming. They'd had completely accurate coordinates that enabled them to de-stroy all the minelayers the instant they emerged into real-s.p.a.ce. Fondorian patrols, even if they got very lucky, wouldn't have been waiting close to the precise points.

"Ship's company, "Caedus said quietly. "We have, at best, a criminally careless fool in the fleet, and, at worst, a traitor."

Loccin turned to him. "Sir, we're continuing with the mission, are we?"

"We are, "said Caedus. "We're not turning tail and slinking home just because we haven't established a cor-don. Battle plans always change. This is a setback, nothing more. I'll be in my day cabin. Let me know when you get Admiral Niathal, and if Admiral Pellaeon makes contact, tell him nothing and patch him straight through. Let's not alarm the Moffs, shall we?"

Caedus stood in his cabin and wondered how he had managed not to vent his anger. He started working men-tally through the sequence from deciding the hypers.p.a.ce exit points to the minelayers actually emerging, and whose eyes had seen the detail. He thought of flow-walking back into the ops center and listening, but it was effort he wasn't prepared to expend when he had a shortlist of fools-no, traitors-and an invasion to replan.

He caught his own reflection in a mirror as he sat down, and suddenly realized why the young lieutenant on the bridge couldn't look away from his gaze.

Caedus's eyes were yellow. He had that brief disoriented moment when he thought he was looking at someone else, but then his own face-his own eyes-grew rapidly familiar, and he watched the citrine yellow darken into his normal brown irises.

Then he sat down and began work with the holochart, and a new but equally harsh plan for Fondor.

Chapter 10.

Yes, I regret that we did hear Mara Jade Skywalker threaten Chief of State Solo. She told him to "leave Ben out of it" and that she would "skin him alive, "and that it was his last chance to drop something called Sith, or "take what was coming." It seemed most unlike her.

-Senator Nab H'aas, Bith delegation, to Captain Lon Shevu, GAG, logging threats against joint Chiefs of State Solo and Niathal FREIGHTER SPIRIT OF COMMERCE, EN ROUTE FOR ENDOR: CARGO BAY Ben Skywalker reached inside his jacket to touch the small forensics droid again, avoiding the eye of the flight engineer. He wasn't in the mood to chat.

But the two freighter crew were bored out of their skulls, and seemed to preserve their sanity by interrogating any ad hoc pa.s.sengers.

Ben was the only one hitching a ride this trip, huddled in a s.p.a.ce between giant sealed containers lashed down to the deck of the cargo bay.

He settled on looking angst-ridden and teenaged.

"I can only drop you at the trading base, you know that, don't you?"

Ben looked up. The uncommunicative teenager act didn't work any longer; he was tall, showing the first fluffy traces of beard, and he was suddenly aware that n.o.body had called him kid in pa.s.sing these days. He must have looked as old as he now felt. "I know, "he said. "Thanks."

"Have you actually been to Endor before?" Ah, the engineer was worried for him. "Yes, I know folks there. Someone's meeting me."

"Just checking. I wouldn't dump my worst enemy in that place.

Ewoks. Savages. I'd shoot them all, to be honest."

"Some of my friends are Ewoks, "Ben said mildly, no-wanting a fight, but unable to let it pa.s.s. "And I feel safer in the forest than I do in Galactic City."

"No offense."

"None taken."

The engineer walked away slowly, gripping hand-over-hand along the deckhead rail to pick his way between the tanks and containers that would be filled with plants and fungus for the pharmaceutical industry on the return jour-ney. "Coruscant... yeah, I know what you mean. If it's not the lowlifes and gangsters, it's the secret police."

And some of my best friends are secret police. They truly are. But Ben kept his mouth shut this time. It was the last leg of a tortuous route back to the Jedi base, and in a cou-ple of hours he'd be safely among family and friends.

And so would the forensics droid, still holding its sam-ples from Jacen's StealthX in its sealed compartments. It was encased in flexiwrap, just in case. Ben felt it was his last tenuous link to resolution and some kind of peace. Where do I start with Dad? Have I got all the evidence I need? And when-how-do I tell him that Mom came hack to see me?

Out of all the things that plagued Ben in his quiet mo-ments, when there was no distraction to stop him picking over events until they were just jumbled bones, that one was the most frequent. It was a privilege he was pretty sure Luke hadn't been given, and it made Ben more uncomfortable as the days pa.s.sed. Why just me? He'd become less ac-cepting of mysteries and the will of the Force since he'd lived in Lon Shevu's world of show-me and prove-it. He wanted to know why these days, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and maybe every time from now on. The Spirit of Commerce set down in a clearing a fevV hundred meters from the trading post buildings; Ben did diplomatic hand-shaking and promised to use the service again sometime. He walked through saplings trying to re-claim the cleared land for the forest, bag over one shoulder, aware of eyes everywhere in the undergrowth and above him in the branches, and found himself thinking tactical thoughts about what a tough planet this would be to in-vade and occupy. Luke was already waiting for him; his fa-ther sat on a sawn-off stump as big as one of the huge circular park seats in the Skydome Botanical Gardens at home, wearing his flight suit. Home.

What did that mean?

"Dad..." Ben had no problem throwing his arms around his father now and crushing him to his chest. He couldn't remember why he'd felt awkward about it even a year ago. Grown men in the GAG, the toughest guys he knew, hugged and cried and didn't care what they looked like doing it. "I can't tell you how glad I am to get back." "You look whacked."

"Been busy." He'd tell me if Mom had appeared to him. Wouldn't he?

Ben prodded Luke's flight suit, trying to get the banter going. "Been putting in flying hours, then? Wor-ried about skills fade?"

"Going to be putting in more, Ben."

"What did I miss?"