About the Book
About the Author
Also by Troy Denning
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The Star Wars Novels Timeline
Dramatis Personae
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Book
Luke and Ben Skywalker arrive in the mysterious part of space called The Maw in search of more clues as to what caused Jacen Solo’s downfall into the dark side. But they are not the only ones exploring The Maw: a Sith Master and her apprentice arrive there, too, having followed the delinquent ancient Sith ship found by Ben in The Legacy of the Force – and they’re thrilled to find Luke there, because they are determined to kill him. But there’s another powerful being hiding in The Maw. It’s enormously strong, purely evil, and it has its own plans for Luke Skywalker ...
About the Author
Troy Denning is the author of the New York Times bestselling Star Wars novels Dark Nest: The Joiner King; Dark Nest: The Unseen Queen; Dark Nest: The Swarm War; Tatooine Ghost; and The New Jedi Order: Star by Star, as well as Waterdeep (under the pseudonym Richard Awlinson) and over nineteen other novels, including Pages of Pain, Beyond the High Road, and The Summoning. His most recent Star Wars novels are Legacy of the Force: Tempest; Legacy of the Force: Inferno; and Legacy of the Force: Invincible. A former game designer and editor, he enjoys hiking, mountain climbing, judo, and any sport that involves going fast with boards strapped to his feet. He lives in western Wisconsin with his wife, Andria.
ALSO BY TROY DENNING
Waterdeep
Dragonwall
The Parched Sea
The Verdant Passage
The Crimson Legion
The Amber Enchantress
The Obsidian Oracle
The Cerulean Storm
The Ogre’s Pact
The Giant Among Us
The Titan of Twilight
The Veiled Dragon
Pages of Pain
Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad
The Oath of Stonekeep
Faces of Deception
Beyond the High Road
Death of the Dragon (with Ed Greenwood)
The Summoning
The Siege
The Sorcerer
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Star by Star
Star Wars: Tatooine Ghost
Star Wars: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King
Star Wars: Dark Nest II: The Unseen Queen
Star Wars: Dark Nest III: The Swarm War
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Tempest
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Inferno
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Invincible
For my niece Jennifer Jane Denning
The smile behind Allana’s
Acknowledgments
Many people contributed to this book in ways large and small. I would like to thank them all, especially the following: Andria Hayday for her support, critiques, and suggestions; James Luceno, Leland Chee, Pablo Hidalgo, Keith Clayton, Christine Cabello, Scott Shannon, Frank Parisi, and Carol Roeder for their fine contributions during our brainstorming sessions; Shelly Shapiro and Sue Rostoni for everything, from their remarkable patience to their insightful markups to their great ideas; to my fellow Fate of the Jedi writers, Aaron Allston and Christie Golden, for being such a blast to work with and for their myriad other contributions to this book and the series; to all of the people at Lucasfilm and Del Rey who make writing Star Wars so much fun; and, finally, to George Lucas for sharing his galaxy with us all.
Dramatis Personae
Ahri Raas; Sith apprentice (Keshiri male)
Ben Skywalker; Jedi Knight (human male)
Han Solo; Captain, Millennium Falcon (human male)
Jagged Fel; Head of State, Galactic Empire (human male)
Jaina Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)
Leia Organa Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)
Luke Skywalker; Jedi Grand Master (human male)
Olaris Rhea; Sith Lord (human female)
Vestara Khai; Sith apprentice (human female)
Yuvar Xal; Sith Master (human male)
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. …
BURIED DEEP INSIDE the Jedi Temple on Coruscant was the Asylum Block, a transparisteel cube standing in its own hidden atrium, bathed in artificial blue light and surrounded by tidy rows of potted olbio trees. Peering up through the leaves to a second-story wall, Leia Solo could see Seff Hellin kneeling in his cell. He was in the near corner, staring at his bloody knuckles as though surprised that hours of hammering at a fusion-welded seam might actually have damaged them. In the adjacent cell, Natua Wan was endlessly scratching at her door lock, trying to slip her splintered talons into a magnetic seal that a nanoscalpel could not have breached.
Seeing the pair in such a state made Leia’s heart ache. It also terrified her, for both of Corran Horn’s children had fallen victim to the same condition. Now, with Temple scientists no closer to identifying a cause, she was beginning to fear that this strange insanity might claim an entire generation of Jedi Knights. And that was something she would not allow—not when every new case reminded her of how confused and helpless she had felt losing Jacen to the madness of the Sith.
The golden outline of an access portal appeared in the invisible barrier field that enclosed the atrium. With Han and C-3PO following behind, Leia stepped into the leafy-smelling interior. She was not surprised to feel a subtle pang of loss and isolation. The olbio trees were filled with ysalamiri, small white reptiles that hid from predators by creating voids in the Force. The adaptation was an invaluable tool for anyone who wished to incarcerate rogue Force-users—and all too often lately, that included the Jedi themselves.
As the portal crackled shut behind them, Han leaned close and warmed Leia’s ear with a whisper. “I don’t think cutting them off from the Force is helping. They look crazier than ever.”
“Seff and Natua are not crazy,” Leia reprimanded. “They’re ill, and they need our understanding.”
“Hey, nobody understands crazy better than me.” Han gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. “People are always calling me crazy.”
“Captain Solo is quite right,” C-3PO agreed. The golden protocol droid was standing close behind the Solos, his metallic breastplate pressing cold against Leia’s left shoulder. “During our association, Captain Solo’s sanity has been questioned an average of three times per month. By the psychiatric care standards of many conformist societies, that fact alone would qualify him for a cell in the Asylum Block.”
Han shot a frown back at the droid, then turned to Leia with his best smirk of reassurance. “You see? I’m probably the only one in the whole Temple who receives on their channel.”
“I wouldn’t doubt that,” Leia said. She gave him a wry smile, then patted the hand grasping her arm. “All joking aside, I just wish you really did know what’s going on with them.”
Now it was Han who grew serious. “Yeah. Seeing ’em slip away like this brings bad memories. Really bad memories.”
“It does,” Leia acknowledged. “But it’s not the same thing. By the time anyone realized what was going on with Jacen, he was running the Galactic Alliance.”
“Yeah, and we were the enemy,” Han agreed. “I just wish we could have stuck Jacen in a deten—”
“We would have, had there been some way to take him alive,” Leia interrupted. They didn’t turn down this lane often, but when they did, it devastated her, and she couldn’t let herself be devastated now. “Let’s just focus on the Jedi we can save.”
Han nodded. “Count me in. I don’t need anybody else’s family getting caught in the kind of plasma blast we did.”
Han was still speaking when Master Cilghal and her assistant Tekli appeared, walking between two rows of potted olbios. In their white medical robes, the pair made a somber impression: Cilghal a long-headed Mon Calamari with sad bulbous eyes, Tekli a diminutive Chadra-Fan with her flap-like ears pulled tight against her head fur.
Cilghal extended a web-fingered hand first to Leia, then to Han, and spoke in her rippling Mon Calamari voice. “Jedi Solo, Captain Solo, thank you for coming. I trust you were able to find someone to watch Amelia on such short notice?”
“No problem,” Han said. “Barv’s keeping an eye on her.”
“Barv?” Tekli squeaked. “As in, Bazel Warv?”
“Yeah, Amelia just loves the big guy.” Han smiled. “I’m beginning to think that girl’s going to marry a Ramoan when she grows up.”
The glance that Tekli shot up at Cilghal was almost imperceptible, as was the answering dip from the Mon Calamari’s near eye—but not quick enough to escape the notice of a former diplomat.
“Is that a problem?” Leia asked. “Barv has always been very good with her.”
“I truly doubt there’s anything to worry about,” Cilghal said. “It’s just that the only link we’ve been able to establish among patients is one of association.”
“What kind of association?” Han asked.
“Age and location,” Tekli supplied. “All four victims were among the students hidden in Shelter.”
Leia nodded. Shelter was the secret base where the Jedi had sequestered their young during the last part of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong. Located deep inside the Maw cluster of black holes and cobbled together from the remnants of an abandoned weapons lab, it had been a gloomy place to care for young Jedi—and now, it appeared, perhaps a dangerous one.
“Are you thinking environmental toxins?” Leia asked.
“We decontaminated the place pretty well,” Han added. “But I suppose we could have missed something. The Imperials were making some strange stuff there.”
Cilghal spread her hands. “It’s impossible to say. At the moment, all we have is a simple observation.” She lowered an admonishing eye toward her assistant. “The sample is too small to establish a statistical correlation.”
“True, but it’s the only firm link we have,” Tekli countered. “And whether it’s causative or not, Bazel does associate closely with both Valin and Jysella.”
“Yeah, along with Yaqeel Saav’etu,” Han said. “I’ve heard Barv call the four of them ‘the Unit.’”
Leia raised a brow. “Did this Unit include Seff?” She glanced up and saw that Seff was still staring at his hands; in the adjacent cell, Natua continued to worry at her lock. “Or Natua?”
“Not that I ever heard,” Han said.
Tekli confirmed this with a shake of her golden-furred head.
“You see?” Cilghal asked. “There are plenty of facts and connections, but which are significant? Are any?”
“If anyone can sort it out, it’s you,” Leia said. “In the meantime, there’s nothing wrong with being careful.”
“Of course not,” Cilghal said. “So if you’d rather return to Amelia right away—”
“No, I don’t think that will be necessary,” Leia interrupted. “Artoo-Detoo is there, and he has standing orders to contact us if anything starts to look out of the ordinary. And we’re very eager to help you.”
“Yeah.” Han glanced toward the cell block. “Judging by the looks of those two up there, you need it.”
“Thank you.” Cilghal turned and waved them toward the cell block. “But actually, the reason I asked you here is that Seff has begun to improve.”
Han looked doubtful. “So he didn’t tear up his hands punching walls?”
“He did,” Cilghal admitted.
“But he has stopped,” Leia noted. “Is that the improvement?”
Cilghal nodded. “A few days after we isolated them from the Force, both Seff and Natua began to exhibit symptoms of violent psychological withdrawal. Seff’s present calmness suggests he may have entered a recovery phase.”
“Wait a minute.” Han cast an uneasy look toward Leia. “You mean they’re addicted to the Force?”
“All we know is that there appears to be a connection,” Cilghal said carefully.
“We’re wondering if the Force acts as some sort of carrier for the madness,” Tekli explained. “Or maybe a trigger.”
Cilghal fixed a disapproving eye on her assistant. “That’s all speculation at this stage, of course.” The other eye swung toward Leia—a Mon Calamari ability that Leia still found a bit unsettling. “So far, we haven’t been able to confirm either the withdrawal or the recovery.”
“And that’s why you need us?” Leia surmised.
Cilghal nodded. “We’d like to conduct a furtive encephaloscan to determine just how calm Seff truly is—”
“And you want us to distract him,” Han finished.
“Would you mind?” Cilghal asked. “We can’t establish a baseline stress pattern unless we keep his attention focused elsewhere. And you’re the best con artists in the Temple.”
“On Coruscant,” Han corrected, a bit too proudly. He hitched a thumb toward C-3PO. “But Goldenrod here isn’t going to be much help tricking anyone. Why’d you want him along?”
“Natua has been hissing as she works,” Tekli explained. “I’m beginning to think she’s talking to herself.”
“That’s entirely possible,” C-3PO offered. “The phonetics of many reptilian languages have sibilant root patterns. I’d be happy to assist you in identifying the language, if you wish.”
“A translation would be much more useful,” Tekli said. “It might be helpful to know what she’s saying.”
“See-Threepio is entirely at your disposal,” Leia said to Cilghal. “As are Han and I.”
Cilghal thanked them and led the way to the Asylum Block. Tekli disappeared into the control room to retrieve a pair of stun sticks for the Solos and a tranquilizer pistol for Cilghal, then announced she would join them with the encephaloscanner once Seff was distracted. Leia and Han secured the stun sticks in the small of their backs, under their belts, then followed Cilghal to a turbolift and ascended to the second-story catwalk.
The cells arrayed along the catwalk were clearly designed to confine rather than punish, for they were furnished with flowform couches, holographic entertainment centers, and privacy-screened refreshers. Judging by the muffled screel of fingernails coming through the second door, the distinction of purpose was no comfort to Natua Wan.
The first door stood open. Inside the cell, a tall, powerful-looking human Jedi sat meditating, with an upturned palm resting on one knee and a wrist stump on the other. On the floor beside him rested an artificial hand, palm-up, with the thumb and middle finger touching. Dozens of surgeries and skin grafts had repaired his burn scars to the point where his face looked merely plastic instead of horrific, but his ears remained flat and misshapen, and the bristly texture of his short blond hair betrayed its synthetic origins.
As the group approached his door, the Jedi’s blue eyes popped open, fixing first on Leia, then Han. “Princess Leia, Captain Solo,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“You, too, Raynar,” Han said. “You doing okay in here?”
“Very well,” Raynar said. “Thank you.”
A sad reminder of the price young Jedi too often paid for their service to the galaxy, Raynar Thul had gone missing on the same strike mission that had claimed the life of the Solos’ youngest son, Anakin. Years later, Raynar had reappeared as UnuThul, the badly disfigured, insane Joiner who was leading the Killik Colony’s expansion into the Chiss territories. Fortunately, Raynar had not proven too powerful to capture alive, and he had been residing in the Asylum Block for more than seven years while Cilghal helped him put his mind back together.
Had Natasi Daala been the Galactic Alliance Chief of State at the time, Raynar would probably have been frozen in carbonite and hung up in the nearest detention center—just as Valin and Jysella Horn had been when they fell ill. And that thought made Leia about as angry as a wampa in a sauna. Anyone whose mind came undone because of what they had suffered for the Alliance deserved to be nurtured back to health, not labeled a “danger to society” and treated like wall art.
Leia stopped at the entrance to Raynar’s cell. “Hello, Raynar. Cilghal has told us how much progress you’ve made.” Actually, the Mon Calamari had told the Solos that all that remained was for Raynar to realize he was recovered. “Is there anything you need?”
“No, I’m free to visit the commissary myself,” Raynar said. He glanced toward the adjacent cell, where Natua was still scratching at her door, then grinned a bit mischievously. “Unless you care to do something about all that racket? It’s enough to drive a man crazy.”
“No problem,” Han said, reaching for the control pad on the exterior of the cell. “It’ll be quieter if we close this—”
“On second thought,” Raynar interrupted, “I may be growing fond of the noise.”
Han smirked. “I thought that might fix your problem.”
“You should apply for therapist credentials, dear,” Leia said drily. She turned to Raynar. “But seriously, Raynar, if the noise bothers you, why don’t you just change your quarters?”
Raynar’s eyes widened as much as his rigid brows would allow. “Leave my cell?”
“The door has been open for quite some time,” Cilghal said. “And if matters continue to deteriorate with the younger Jedi, we may be needing your room.”
“There are plenty of empty quarters up on the dormitory level,” Han prompted.
Raynar retrieved his artificial hand, then rose and stepped toward the door. “Would I be welcome?”
“That depends,” Han said with a smirk. “Are you going to do your own chores?”
“The days when I considered myself above doing chores are long past, Captain Solo.” Raynar’s tone was more distracted than indignant, as though he was so consumed in thought that he had failed to notice Han was joking. He stood at the door, considering his options, then shrugged and began to reattach his artificial hand. “I don’t know if I’m ready. I don’t know if they’re ready.”
Leia started to suggest there was only one way to find out, but before she could speak Raynar started toward the interior of his cell. Cilghal shook her head in disappointment, Han sighed, and Leia bit her lip in frustration.
“Relax,” Raynar called over his shoulder. “I’m just going to pack. I have been here awhile, you know.”
Leia’s relief was bittersweet. As happy as she was to see Raynar leaving his cell, it made her wish that incarceration and rehabilitation had been possible for her son Jacen. But Jacen had been too powerful to capture and too destructive to leave free, and in the end there had been no choice except to hunt him down.
There had been no choice.
Leia reminded herself of that almost daily. Yet she knew that she and Han would go to their graves asking why they had not seen Jacen’s peril in time to save him, why they had not realized until it was too late that their son was falling to the dark side.
Once Raynar had begun to pack his few possessions, Cilghal smiled and led the way down the catwalk again. As they passed the next cell, Natua stopped scratching at her door locks and pressed herself to the transparisteel, her narrow eyes fixed on Han. A ruddy flush began to creep up her delicate face scales, and she slid a hand along the wall, reaching out in his direction.
“Captain Solo.” Even through the electronic speaker that relayed the words to the catwalk, Natua’s voice was soft and cajoling. Leia was just glad that the Falleen’s powerful attraction pheromones were safely trapped inside her own cell. “Please … get me out of here. They’re hurting me.”
“Not as much as you’re hurting yourself,” Han said, pointing to the crimson streaks that her bloody fingertips were leaving on the wall. “Sorry, Nat. You need to stay here and let them help you.”
“This isn’t help!” Natua slapped the wall so hard that the resulting pung caused C-3PO to stumble back into the safety rail. She began to curse in the strange hissing language Tekli had mentioned earlier. “Sse-orhstki hsuzma sahaslatho Shi’ido hsesstivaph!”
“Oh my!” exclaimed C-3PO. “Jedi Wan is promising to kill Captain Solo and his fellow impostors in a terribly unpleasant way. Fortunately, it appears that she hasn’t thought through her plan very well. I don’t even have intestines.”
“Then you recognize the language?” Leia asked.
“Of course,” C-3PO said. “Ancient Hsoosh is still the Language of Ceremony in the best houses of Falleen.”
“Language of Ceremony?” Han echoed. “Like one they’d use to make formal vows?”
“Precisely,” C-3PO said. “The elite classes have kept it alive for more than two thousand standard years to distinguish—”
“Threepio, that’s not important at the moment,” Leia interrupted. She could tell by the way Han was clenching his jaw that he was truly disturbed to have a mad Jedi making death vows against them. A lecture on the history of ancient Hsoosh just might be enough to make him yank out C-3PO’s inner machinery. “Wait here and let us know what else Natua has to say.”
C-3PO acknowledged the command, and Leia and Han followed Cilghal to the next cell. Seff had moved to the far corner, where he was kneeling, facing away from the door with his battered hands on his thighs. The barely perceptible rise and fall of his shoulders suggested that he was meditating, perhaps trying to calm his troubled mind and make sense of what had been happening to him.
Cilghal glanced back down the catwalk toward the turbolift, where Tekli was waiting with what looked like a meter-long recording rod that ended in a large parabolic antenna. When the Chadra-Fan nodded her readiness, Cilghal stepped closer to Seff’s cell and rapped gently on the wall.
Seff, a sturdily built young man with square shoulders and light curly hair, answered without looking away from the corner. “Yes, Master Cilghal?”
His voice came from the small relay speaker near the door, and when Cilghal answered, she angled her mouth toward the tiny microphone beneath it.
“How did you know it was me?” she asked.
“It’s …” Seff struggled for an explanation, then finally said, “It’s always you … or Tekli. And Tekli wouldn’t reach that high when she knocked.” He shrugged. “So, to answer the question clearly on your mind: no, I have not yet developed the ability to touch the Force through an ysalamiri void-bubble.”
“But you do seem to be feeling better,” Cilghal said.
“I’ll have to take your word for it.” Seff remained facing the corner, but his tone softened. “I don’t have a clear memory of how I was feeling before.”
Cilghal rolled a hopeful eye in Leia’s direction, then spoke to Seff again. “Do you remember why you’re here?”
“That would depend on the meaning of here. I remember trying to rescue Valin Horn from a GA Security facility. And I remember being ambushed by someone who looked a lot like Jaina Solo.” Seff stopped and shook his head. “I assume that I’m in the Jedi Temple detention center’s Asylum Block, but none of it makes much sense.”
“It probably shouldn’t make sense,” Cilghal said. She smiled with a relief that Leia did not quite share. “I’m afraid you’ve been suffering paranoid delusions lately.”
Seff’s head and shoulders slumped in a fairly convincing manner, and he continued to look into the corner without speaking.
“Seff, you’re going to get better,” Cilghal said. It was something any good mind-healer would say to a patient, whether or not it was true. “This is an encouraging sign.”
Leia couldn’t read Mon Calamari faces well enough to know whether Cilghal was sincere. But she did know that she herself wasn’t convinced. Leia didn’t like the way Seff continued to hide his face. And if he was having trouble remembering what had happened to him, how had he known earlier that it was always Cilghal or Tekli who visited?
Cilghal continued speaking into the relay microphone. “Seff, you have visitors. Would it be okay if we came inside?”
“Visitors?” Seff finally looked away from his corner, his pale eyes gleaming in curiosity. “Absolutely. Come inside.”
Before Leia could express her concerns, Cilghal reached over and entered a code to deactivate the lock. As the door slid aside, Leia glanced toward Han and was relieved to see the same wariness in his eyes that she felt in her gut. If Cilghal was being too optimistic, at least there would be someone else ready to jump on Seff.
“Jedi Solo, Captain Solo …” Cilghal waved them into the cell. “After you.”
“The Solos?”
Sounding more cynical than delighted, Seff rose and turned toward them. To Leia’s surprise, there were no alarming glints in his eyes or twitches on his lips, nor anything obvious to suggest that Cilghal’s relief was anything but warranted. But his brow rose just a little too slowly for his astonishment to be sincere.
“What are you two doing here?”
“We just wanted to check up on you,” Han said. To prevent Seff from approaching the door, he held out his hand and crossed to the corner. “Good to see you’re feeling better.”
As Seff reached out in return, Leia readied herself to spring into action at the first hint of trouble. But Seff merely remained in the corner and looked slightly bewildered as the two shook hands.
Leia moved her own hand away from the stun stick in the small of her back and went to stand with Han. “You do look much better than the last time we saw you.”
Seff’s eyes shifted in her direction. “From what I’m gathering, that wouldn’t be difficult.”
He flashed a self-deprecating smile, and Leia began to wonder if all the betrayals and disappointments she had suffered over the decades were beginning to make her too suspicious.
“Do you remember when you saw the Solos?” Cilghal asked. She remained just inside the door, as though her presence was an unpleasant requirement and she didn’t want to intrude. “Aside from here on Coruscant, I mean.”
Seff frowned for a moment, and Leia thought he was going to say that he couldn’t recall.
But then he flashed that awkward smile again and said, “Wasn’t it on Taris, at that pet show?”
“That’s right,” Han said. He clapped a hand on Seff’s shoulder and slipped smoothly around into the corner, so the young Jedi would have to face away from the door as they spoke. “The one where the ornuk took the grand prize.”
“Han, it wasn’t the ornuk,” Leia said in a reproachful tone. She slipped around to Seff’s other side and stood opposite Han, so they had the young Jedi flanked on both sides and could quickly redirect his attention with a gentle touch. “It was the chitlik.”
Han scowled. “What are you talking about? It was that big ornuk. I should know. It nearly bit off my ankle!”
Leia rolled her eyes and—seeing by Seff’s slack jaw that their distraction was working—shook her head vehemently. “That was the cannus solix! You would’ve known that if you hadn’t been off starting fights when the judges explained the difference.”
“Hey, I didn’t start that fight,” Han countered, the edge in his voice so sharp that even Leia wasn’t sure he was acting. “Is it my fault if—”
“How many times have I heard that?” Leia interrupted. Across the cell, she could see Tekli standing in the door, pointing the funnel-shaped antenna of the portable encephaloscanner at the back of Seff’s head. “According to you, it’s never your fault.”
“That’s right—it never is.” Han turned to Seff. “You were at the show, kid. Who did they arrest?”
But Seff was no longer paying attention to Han. He was looking at the same corner he had been facing when they arrived, staring at a wavy blur in the transparisteel that Leia did not recognize as a reflection—until she realized why Seff had known it was Cilghal knocking earlier. Hoping to draw his attention back to her, Leia laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Seff, please forgive us,” she said. When he continued to watch the reflection, she squeezed hard. “After you’ve lived together as long as Han and I have, you develop a few tender—”
Leia did not realize Seff was attacking until she felt his arm snaking over hers, trapping her elbow in a painful lock that she could not slip without snapping the joint. She whirled away, screaming in alarm, and barely managed to keep him from grabbing the stun stick secured in the back of her belt. In the next instant, Han was between them, bringing his own stun stick down across Seff’s shoulder.
Seff pulled back, dragging Leia into the path of the strike. He still took most of the blow across his biceps, but she was jolted so hard that her knees locked and her teeth sank deep into her tongue.
Incredibly, Seff did not drop. He drove Han back with an elbow to the face, then sent him slamming into the wall with a side kick to the gut. Spinning toward the door, he finally released Leia’s arm and launched himself at Tekli and Cilghal.
“No, you don’t!” Seff yelled, landing two meters away. “I won’t be copied!”
Both of Leia’s legs and one arm had turned to noodles, but she still had one good hand with which to grab her stun stick.
By that time, Seff was only a pace from Tekli and Cilghal.
The phoot-phoot of a tranquilizer gun sounded from the doorway. Seff stumbled, one arm trying to slap the darts from his chest as he struggled to keep his balance. He took one more step, then Leia activated her stun stick and sent it spinning into the back of his legs. He crashed to the floor just centimeters from Cilghal’s feet, then lay there twitching and drooling.
Cilghal turned to Tekli, then let out a gurgling sigh. “You may as well deactivate the scanner,” she said. “I think we’ve learned what we need to know.”
IN THE JADE SHADOW’S forward canopy hung twin black holes, their perfect darkness surrounded by fiery whorls of accretion gas. Because the Shadow was approaching at an angle, the two holes had the oblong appearance of a pair of fire-rimmed eyes—and Ben Skywalker was half tempted to believe that’s what they were. He had begun to feel like he was being watched the instant he and his father had entered the Maw cluster, and the deeper they advanced, the stronger the sensation grew. Now, at the very heart of the concentration of black holes, the feeling was a constant chill at the base of his skull.
“I sense it, too,” his father said. He was sitting behind Ben in the copilot’s seat, up on the primary flight deck. “We’re not alone in here.”
No longer surprised that the Grand Master of the Jedi Order always seemed to know his thoughts, Ben glanced at an activation reticle in the front of the cockpit. A small section of canopy opaqued into a mirror, and he saw his father’s reflection staring out the side of the canopy. Luke Skywalker looked more alone and pensive than Ben ever remembered seeing him—thoughtful, but not sad or frightened, as though he were merely trying to understand what had brought him to such a dark and isolated place, banished from an Order he had founded, and exiled from a society he had spent his life fighting to defend.
Trying not to dwell on the injustice of the situation, Ben said, “So maybe we’re closing in. Not that I’m all that eager to meet a bunch of beings called the Mind Drinkers.”
His father thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I am.”
He didn’t elaborate, and he didn’t need to. Ben and his father were on a mission to retrace Jacen Solo’s five-year odyssey of Force exploration. At their last stop, they had learned from an Aing-Tii monk that Jacen had been bound for the Maw when he departed the Kathol Rift. Since one purpose of their journey was to determine whether Jacen had been nudged toward the dark side by something on his voyage, it only made sense that Luke would want to investigate a mysterious Maw-dwelling group known as the Mind Drinkers.
What impressed Ben, however, was how calm his father seemed about it all. Ben was privately terrified of falling victim to the same darkness that had claimed his cousin. Yet his father seemed eager to step into its depth and strike a flame. And why shouldn’t he be? After everything that Luke Skywalker had suffered and achieved in his lifetime, there was no power in the galaxy that could draw him into darkness. It was a strength that both awed Ben and inspired him, one that he wondered if he would ever find himself.
Luke’s eyes shifted toward the mirrored canopy section, and he caught Ben’s gaze. “Is this what bothered you when you were at Shelter?” He was referring to a time that was ancient history to Ben—the last part of the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, when the Jedi had been forced to hide their young at a secret base deep inside the Maw. “Did you feel like someone was watching you?”
“How should I know?” Ben asked, suddenly uneasy—and unsure why. By all accounts, he had been an unruly, withdrawn toddler while he was at Shelter, and he recalled being afraid of the Force for years afterward. But he had no clear memories of Shelter itself, or what it had felt like to be there. “I was two.”
“You did have feelings when you were two,” his father said mildly. “You did have a mind.”
Ben sighed, knowing what his father wanted, then said, “You’d better take the ship.”
“I have the ship,” Luke confirmed, reaching for the copilot’s yoke. “Just close your eyes. Let the Force carry your thoughts back to Shelter.”
“I know how to meditate.” Almost instantly, Ben felt bad for grumbling and added, “But thanks for the advice.”
“Don’t mention it,” Luke said in a good-natured way. “That’s what fathers do—offer unwanted advice.”
Ben closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deliberately. Each time he inhaled, he drew the Force into himself, and each time he exhaled, he sent it flowing throughout his body. He had no conscious memories of Shelter that were his own, so he envisioned a holograph of the facility that he had seen in the Jedi Archives. The image showed a handful of habitation modules clinging to the surface of an asteroid fragment, their domes clustered around the looming cylinder of a power core. In his mind’s eye, Ben descended into the gaudy yellow docking bay at the edge of the facility … and then he was two years old again, a frightened little boy holding a stranger’s hand as his parents departed in the Jade Shadow.
An unwarranted sense of relief welled up inside Ben as he grew lost in a time when life had seemed so much easier. The last fourteen years began to feel like a long, terrible nightmare. Jacen’s fall to the dark side had never happened, Ben had not been molded into an adolescent assassin, and his mother had not died fighting Jacen. All those sad memories were still just bad dreams, the unhappy imaginings of a frightened young mind.
Then the Shadow slipped through the containment field and ignited her engines. In the blink of an eye she dwindled from a trio of blue ion circles into a pinpoint of light to nothing at all, and suddenly Ben was alone in the darkest place in the galaxy, one child among dozens entrusted to a small group of worried adults who—despite their cheerful voices and reassuring presences—had very clammy palms and scary anxious eyes.
Two-year-old Ben reached toward the Shadow with his free hand and his heart, and he sensed his mother and father reaching back. Though he was too young to know he was being touched through the Force, he stopped being afraid … until a dark tentacle of need began to slither up into the aching tear of his abandonment. He thought for an instant that he was just sad about being left behind, but the tentacle grew as real as his breath, and he began to sense in it an alien loneliness as desperate and profound as his own. It wanted to draw him close and keep him safe, to take the place of his parents and never let him be alone again.
Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver-haired lady who was holding it.
Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow, staring into the fire-rimmed voids ahead. Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.
“Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”
Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”
Luke raised a brow. “So it is familiar.”
“Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”
“Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle. “Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”
“I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the Shadow departed Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some … thing keeping tabs on me at Shelter.”
Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother. Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a ‘friend’ to take her place.”
“A tentacle friend?”
“You said it was a dark tentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about replacing us with an imaginary friend.”
“And maybe you don’t want to believe the tentacle was real because it would mean you left your two-year-old son someplace really dangerous,” Ben countered. He caught his father’s eye in the mirrored section again. “I hope you’re not going to try to psychoanalyze this away, because there’s a big hole in your theory.”
Luke frowned. “And that would be?”
“I was two,” Ben reminded him. “And by all accounts, I didn’t feel guilty about anything at that age.”
Luke grinned. “Good point, but I still don’t think we should worry too much about this tentacle monster of yours.”
“It’s not my tentacle monster,” Ben retorted, miffed at having his concerns mocked. “You’re the one who made me dredge it up.”
Luke’s expression hardened into admonishment. “But you’re the one who’s still afraid of it.”
The observation struck home. Whether or not the dark presence he remembered was real, he had emerged from Shelter wary of abandonment and frightened of the Force. And it had been those fears that had allowed Jacen to lead him into darkness.
Ben sighed. “Right. Whatever this thing is, I’ve got to face it.” After a moment, he asked, “So how do we find these Mind Drinkers?”
“‘The Path of True Enlightenment runs through the Chasm of Perfect Darkness.’” Luke was quoting Tadar’Ro, the Aing-Tii monk who had told them that Jacen had left the Kathol Rift to search out the Mind Drinkers. “‘The way is narrow and treacherous, but if you can follow it, you will find what you seek.’”
Ben swung his gaze back toward the black holes ahead. The brilliant whorls of their accretion disks were burning hottest and brightest along their inner rims, where a mixture of in-falling gas and dust was being compressed to unimaginable densities as it vanished into the sharp-edged darkness of twin event horizons.
“Wait. Tadar’Ro said perfect darkness, right?” Ben started to have a bad feeling about the monk’s instructions. “Like, beyond an event horizon?”
“Actually, it’s probably very bright on the way down a black hole,” Luke pointed out. “Just because gravity is too strong for light to escape doesn’t mean it can’t exist, and there’s all that gas compressing and glowing as it’s sucked deeper and deeper.”
“Yeah, but you’re dead,” Ben said, “and everything is dark when you’re dead. Still, I see what you mean. I doubt Tadar’Ro expects us to fly down a black hole.”
“No, not down one.”
There was just enough anxiety in Luke’s voice to make Ben glance into the mirrored section again. His father was frowning out at the two black holes, staring into the fiery cloud between them and looking just worried enough to twist Ben’s stomach into a cold knot.
“Between them?” Ben could see what his father was thinking, and it didn’t make him happy. In any system of two large bodies, there were five areas where the centrifugal and gravitational forces would neutralize each other and hold a smaller body—such as a satellite or asteroid—in perpetual equilibrium. Of those five locations, only one was directly between the two bodies. “You mean Stable Zone One?”
Luke nodded. “The Chasm of Perfect Darkness is an ancient Ashla parable referring to the twin perils of ego and ignorance,” he explained. “The Tythonians spoke of it as a deep dark canyon flanked by high, ever-crumbling cliffs.”
“So life is the chasm, darkness is falling all around,” Ben said, taking an educated guess as to the parable’s meaning, “and the only way to stay in the light is to go down the middle.”
Luke smiled. “You’ve got a real feeling for mystic guidance.” He lifted his hands away from the yoke. “You have the ship, son.”
“Me? Now?” Ben considered pointing out that his father was by far the better pilot—but that wasn’t the issue, of course. If Ben was going to face his fears, he needed to handle the flying himself. He swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, then confirmed, “I have the ship.”
Ben deactivated the mirror panel and accelerated toward the black holes. As the Shadow drew closer, their dark orbs rapidly began to swell and drift toward opposite sides of the cockpit, until all that could be seen of them were tall slivers of darkness hanging along the rear edges of the canopy. Ahead lay a fiery confluence of superheated gas, swirling in from two different directions and so bright it hurt Ben’s eyes even through the Shadow’s blast-tinting.
He checked the primary display and found only bright static; the navigation sensors were awash in electromagnetic blast from compressing gas. The Shadow’s internal sensors were working just fine, however, and they showed the ship’s hull temperature rising rapidly as they penetrated the cloud. It wouldn’t take long for that to become dangerous, Ben knew. Soon the fierce heat inside the accretion disk would start fouling guidance systems and control relays. Eventually, it would compromise hull integrity.
“Dad, how about doing something with those sensor filters?” Ben asked. “My navigational readings are snow.”
“Adjusting the filters won’t change anything,” Luke said calmly. “We’re flying between a pair of black holes, remember?”
Ben exhaled in exasperation, then cursed under his breath and continued to stare out into the fiery ribbons ahead. At best, he could make out a confluence zone where the two accretion disks were brushing against each other, and the painful brilliance made it difficult to tell even that much.
“How am I supposed to navigate?” Ben complained. “I can’t see anything.”
Luke remained silent.
Ben felt the hint of disapproval in his father’s Force aura and experienced a flash of rebellion. He let out a cleansing breath, allowing the feeling to run its course and depart on a cushion of stale air, then saw how he had been blinded by his anxiety over the navigation difficulties.
“Oh … right,” Ben said, feeling more than a little foolish. “Trust the Force.”
“No worries,” Luke said, sounding amused. “The first time I tried something this crazy, I had to be reminded, too.”
“Well, at least I have an excuse.” Ben took the navigation sensors offline so the static wouldn’t interfere with his concentration. “It’s hard to focus with your dad looking over your shoulder.”
Luke’s crash webbing clicked open. “In that case, maybe I should get some—”
“Who are you kidding?” Ben shoved the yoke over, flipping the Shadow into a tight barrel roll. “You just want to bite your nails in private.”
“The thought hadn’t crossed my mind,” Luke said, dropping back into his seat. “Until now, ungrateful offspring.”
Ben laughed, then leveled out and checked the hull temperature. It was climbing even faster than he had feared. He closed his eyes and—hoping the gas was not so thick that friction would aggravate the problem—shoved the throttles forward.
It did not take long before Ben began to sense a calm place a little to port. He adjusted course and extended his Force awareness in that direction, then started to feel a strange, nebulous presence that reminded him of something he could not quite place—of something dark and diffuse, spread across a great distance.
Ben opened his eyes again. “Dad, do you feel—”
“Yes, like the Killiks,” Luke said. “We might be dealing with a hive-mind.”
A cold shudder was already racing down Ben’s spine. His father had barely uttered the word Killiks before the memory of his stint as an unwilling Gorog Joiner came flooding back, and for the second time in less than an hour he found himself desperately wanting to withdraw from the Force. Gorog had been a dark side nest, secretly controlling the entire Killik civilization while it fed on captured Chiss, and Ben had fallen under its sway for a short time when he was only five. It had been the most terrifying and confusing time of his childhood, and had Jacen not recognized what was happening and helped Ben find his way back to the Force and his true family, he doubted very much that he would have been able to break free at all.
Thankfully, the presence ahead was not all that similar to Gorog’s. There was certainly a darkness to it, and it was clearly composed of many different beings joined together across a vast distance—most of space ahead, really. But the distribution seemed more mottled than a Killik hive-mind, as though dozens of distinct individuals were joined together in something vaguely similar to a battle-meld.
Ben was about to clarify his impressions for his father when a familiar presence began to slither up inside him. It was cold and condemning, like a friend betrayed, and he could feel how angry it was about the intrusion into its lair. The Force grew stormy and foreboding, and an electric prickle of danger sense raced down Ben’s spine. He could feel the darkness gathering against him, trying to push him away, and that only hardened his resolve to finally face the specter. He opened himself up, grabbed hold in the Force, and began to pull.
The presence jerked back, then tried to shrink away. It was too late. Ben already had a firm grasp, and he was determined to follow it back to its physical location. He checked the hull temperature and saw that it was hovering in the yellow danger zone. Then he focused his attention forward and saw—actually saw—a thumbnail-sized darkness tunneling through the swirling fires ahead. He pointed their nose toward the black oval, then shoved the throttles to the overload stops and watched the fiery ribbons of gas stream past the cockpit.
The ribbons grew brighter and more deeply colored as the ship penetrated the accretion disk, and soon the gas grew so dense that the Shadow began to buck and shudder in its turbulence. Ben held on tight to the yoke … and to the dark presence he was clasping in the Force.
His father’s voice sounded behind him. “Uh, Ben?”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Ben said. “I’ve got an approach lane.”
“A what?” Luke sounded genuinely surprised. “I hope you realize the hull temperature is almost into the red.”
“Dad!” Ben snapped. “Will you please let me concentrate?”
Luke fell silent for a moment, then exhaled loudly. “Ben, the gas here is too dense for these velocities. We’re practically flying through an atmo—”
“Your idea,” Ben interrupted. The black oval swelled to the size of a fist. “Trust me!”
“Ben, trust me doesn’t work for Jedi the way it does for your uncle Han. We don’t have his luck.”
“Maybe that would change if we trusted it more often,” Ben retorted.
The black oval continued to expand until it was the size of a hatch. Ben fought the turbulence and somehow kept the Shadow’s nose pointed toward it, then the ship was inside the darkness, flying smooth and surrounded by a dim cone of orange radiance. Startled by the abrupt transition and struggling to adjust to the sudden change of light, Ben feared for an instant that the dark presence had led him off course—perhaps even out of the accretion disks altogether.
Then the cone of orange began to simultaneously compress and fade, becoming a dark tunnel, and a far worse possibility occurred to him.
“Say, Dad, would we know if we were flying down a black hole?”
“Probably not,” Luke said. “The time–space distortion would make the journey last forever, at least relative to Coruscant-standard time. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” Ben said, deciding not to alarm his father any more than necessary. If he had flown them past an event horizon, it was too late to do anything about it now. “Just curious.”
Luke laughed, then said, “Relax, Ben. We’re not flying down a black hole—but will you please slow down? If you keep this up, you really are going to melt the hull.”