Inferno (32 page)

“Because she’s been spying on the Jedi for Jacen, I think,” Leia said. “And she doesn’t want you to hear what he’s doing now.”

To Han’s surprise, Tenel Ka merely nodded. “This is what I was afraid of.” She stepped into the lift compartment and waved the Solos in after her, but held out her hand to stop Espara and the rest of her bodyguards. “You may join us in the anteroom, Major. The Solos pose no danger to me.”

Espara nodded and closed the doors. As the lift began to rise, Tenel Ka’s eyes grew wet, and her lip began to quiver.

“So the intelligence reports I have been getting from Kashyyyk are true?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Leia said. “I wish there was a better way to put this, but there isn’t. Jacen is burning the planet to the dirt.”

A single tear ran down Tenel Ka’s cheek. “Why?”

“Who knows?” Han couldn’t figure out why Tenel Ka was taking this so hard; she was acting like Jacen was
her
kid or something. “Because he’s Jacen, and he doesn’t like it when people say no to him.”

This was too much for Tenel Ka. The tears started to flow more freely, and she touched a button on the wall. The lift stopped immediately, trapping them all inside the small compartment.

“Forgive me,” Tenel Ka said, shaking her head in despair. “I don’t know what to make of so much sad news.”

Leia scowled at Han behind Tenel Ka’s back, silently scolding him for being so callous—even if he
couldn’t
figure out what he’d said wrong—then nodded at Tenel Ka, signaling him to fix the mess he’d made.

Han laid a tentative hand on Tenel Ka’s shoulder, and suddenly she had her head buried in his chest, sobbing as the tough little girl he remembered from the Jedi academy probably never had. Forgetting for the moment that she was the sovereign of the largest independent realm in the galaxy, he wrapped his arms tight around her and stroked her red hair.

“It’s okay, kid.” Han looked over her shoulder at Leia, searching for some hint about what to do next. But Leia was only staring at Tenel Ka’s back, struggling to hold back her own tears. “We should have found a better way to break it to you. I didn’t think losing Luke would hit you so hard.”

Tenel Ka muttered something unintelligible into Han’s tunic, then pushed herself away shaking her head.

“It’s not Luke.” She cast a quick glance at Leia, then added quickly, “I’m very sad to lose him, but it’s more than that—it’s Jacen, too. The galaxy is coming apart around us, and he used to be the one person who seemed strong enough to hold it together.”

“His methods are a little too brutal,” Leia said gently.

Tenel Ka nodded. “He promised to make peace with the Jedi. Instead, he tries to arrest you at Mara’s funeral and takes over the academy on Ossus. Then he sends Ben to assassinate Cal Omas, and now he
burns
Kashyyyk.” She shook her head with what seemed equal parts sorrow and disgust. “He took my
last
fleet, Han. He left Allana and me vulnerable—
us.
”

Given the other promises Jacen had broken, Han saw no reason Tenel Ka should have been surprised to be left hanging with no planetary defenses. But this hardly seemed like the time to rub her nose in past mistakes. Instead, he merely nodded sagely.

“You can’t trust him, Tenel Ka,” he said. “It took us a long time to figure that out, too.”

“Yes, he has been fooling us all for far too long.” Tenel Ka pulled a small hand mirror from her pocket and began to examine her tear-streaked face. “I think the time has come for someone to do the same to him, don’t you?”

Han lifted his brow. “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“That
is
why you came here, is it not?” Tenel Ka continued to study herself in her mirror, using the Force to reduce the puffiness around her eyes and balance her skin tone. “To convince me to change sides?”

“At least to withdraw your support,” Leia clarified. “Given Corellia’s recent interference in Hapan internal affairs, I’m not certain it’s fair to ask you to support the Confederation actively.”

“Come now, Princess.” Tenel Ka lowered the mirror, her face now perfectly composed, with no hint of the tears she had been shedding just a minute earlier. She pressed a button on the wall, and the antique lift began to rise again. “We both know that if you aren’t
for
Jacen, you’re against him.”

nineteen

In a bubble of white agony sat a being fighting to hold on to itself, to remember that it was human, the child of two Jedi, a young man who had hoped to become a Jedi Knight himself. The pain was trying to rob him of this, tearing at his resolve with a thousand forms of anguish—acid that licked nerves raw, poison that raised boiling blisters, needles that turned joints into kilns of throbbing inflammation. The only way to end the pain was to surrender to it, to let it melt him down and forge him into something stronger and sturdier and more enduring.

Ben understood this. Each moment would bring a new and exquisite agony, as fierce and startling as the last, and the pain would never let him die, or grow numb, or escape into catatonic oblivion. He understood all this, and
still
he clung to the knowledge that he was Ben Skywalker, son of Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker, cousin and onetime apprentice to Colonel Jacen Solo,
who is the murderer of my mother.

That last part, Ben repeated twice. It was the only way to keep his hate—and he was going to need his hate. Hate would help him escape, and when he escaped, hate would give him the power to kill Jacen Solo.

The chair—if a pulsing mass of white tendrils tipped with black barbs could be called a chair—tightened its grasp, and a cocoon of yellow energy danced up around Ben. The breath left his lungs in a long staccato scream, and he felt his muscles spasm and heard his teeth grinding, then everything went white, and he sank into the timeless anguish of convulsion.

Later, when Ben’s nerves had become desensitized and required a new torment, the darkness returned to the dark again, and he grew aware of someone standing in front of his chair. How exactly he did this in the unlit cell, he did not know. He could see nothing, and the Force had been lost to him since the pain began. Perhaps he had smelled something foul, or heard a boot click in a familiar way.

But Ben
knew.
He lifted his chin, as much as his thorny restraints would allow, and said, “Hello, Jacen.”

“I
asked
you to call me Colonel.”

Ben gathered a mouthful of coppery blood and spat it in the direction of the voice. He did not hear it hit anything.

“Good.” Jacen’s voice had shifted, and now it came from somewhere near Ben’s ear. “Hang on to your hate. It will help you endure.” The voice drew closer. “I
couldn’t
hate, and it nearly destroyed me.”

“
My
hate will destroy you,” Ben said.

“Perhaps, given time,” Jacen allowed. “But it will take decades to develop the power to confront me openly. And I hope you understand the futility of trying to take me by surprise. Surely, your circumstances have made that painfully clear.”

A soft chittering sounded near where Jacen’s hand was, and the tendrils holding Ben captive sprouted tiny bristles and injected droplets of venom under his skin. His flesh immediately began to swell and nettle and—as the tendrils constricted—to split and weep ichor.

The darkness dissolved into a fiery curtain of pain, and Jacen asked, “Do you want to die yet, Ben? All you have to do is ask.”

“More…lies,” Ben gasped. “You enjoy…this.”

“
Enjoy
it?” Jacen sounded genuinely hurt. “You know that’s not true. I don’t
enjoy
any of this.”

An illumination panel flickered to life in the ceiling. Ben’s eyes ached as they struggled to adjust, and he began to make out the shapes of a thorn-coated bed on the adjacent wall, and a tendril-draped rack in the far corner. The chamber was larger than he had imagined, at least ten meters across. To one side, a large door opened into a cavernous darkness that could only be one of the clandestine hangars hidden in the substructure of the
Anakin Solo
’s forward weapons turrets.

Jacen moved into Ben’s line of sight, dressed in his usual GAG uniform with high boots and black cloak. His eyes were sunken and sad, with purple crescents beneath them and a glassy sheen that made him look as though he were on the brink of weeping—or a demented rage. He reached out and took the tendril binding one of Ben’s wrists to the chair.

“How can you believe I
want
to do this?” Jacen pulled the tendril away, not even wincing as it wrapped itself around his forearm and sank its anguish-dripping barbs into his flesh. “I’m
part
of it, Ben. Everything the Embrace of Pain does to you, I feel. We’re in this together.”

“Fine,” Ben said. “How about you take your turn and let me blow things up for a while?”

“Very impressive. I lost
my
sense of humor after the first…” Jacen caught himself and smiled, probably because he had nearly violated one of the cardinal rules of torture and given the subject a way to guess how much time had passed. “But that’s not important, is it? The point is, I’m doing this to save you.”

“
Save
me?” Ben laughed, and aching waves of pain rolled through his chest. “Right. The same way you saved Mom.”

Jacen’s lips tightened. “I don’t know why you insist on believing something so hurtful,” he said. “But very well, let’s pretend for the moment you’re right. Why would I have done such a thing?”

“You can say
killed her,
Jacen. If you can
do
it, you can say it.”

“Perhaps when you start calling me
Colonel,
” Jacen replied. “But however we refer to it, why would I have done such a thing?”

“Because she knew you were working with Lumiya,” Ben replied. “You needed to keep her quiet.”

Jacen shook his head. “
Think,
Ben. If your mother suspected I was working with Lumiya, wouldn’t she have
told
someone? A whole team of Jedi Masters would have come after me, not just your mother.”

Ben frowned at this. He knew why his mother had kept her silence: because
he
had been too embarrassed to tell his father about Jacen’s dalliance with Lumiya and reveal what a nerf-head he had been, and his mother had been trying to keep his secret. But
Jacen
didn’t know that. From his point of view, if Ben’s mother had known about Lumiya, then
of course
she would have told his father—and every other Jedi Master with a working comlink. So Jacen
wouldn’t
have thought that killing her would keep anything quiet.

“I don’t know,” Ben said. “Maybe you just wanted to get even.”

Jacen scowled in disappointment. “You know me better than that. There’s only one reason I would ever do anything so…difficult: for the good of the galaxy.”

An angry fire welled up inside Ben. “Killing Mom
wasn’t
good for the galaxy!”

“And
I
didn’t kill her,” Jacen replied calmly. “But we’re talking hypotheticals here. If you could bring peace to the galaxy by sacrificing your own life—to assassinate me, for instance—would you do it?”

“In a heartbeat,” Ben retorted. “Even if it didn’t save the galaxy.”

“Let’s limit ourselves to meaningful sacrifices,” Jacen said. “Now, if you had to kill someone else instead—someone like your mother—to bring peace to the galaxy, would you do it?”

“That’s a stupid question!” Ben yelled. “Killing my mother didn’t bring peace to anything. The galaxy’s more of a mess now than before you did it.”

“That’s beside the point,” Jacen said. “And I
didn’t
kill her. I asked if
you
would—if you would trade your mother’s life for galactic peace.”

Ben fell silent, afraid that if he answered, he would somehow stop hating Jacen for what he had done, somehow come to accept that his mother’s death was…
necessary.

After a moment, Jacen said, “You won’t find a trap, Ben. There isn’t one.”

Ben still found it difficult to answer. The fact was, he
had
made exactly the kind of trade his cousin was talking about. He had done it twice now. First, he had tried to win Jacen’s confidence by suggesting that Jacen kill the Solusars and other adults on Ossus instead of wiping out the entire academy. And just a short time ago—at least he
thought
it was a short time ago—he had stood next to Jacen on the bridge and suggested that the
Anakin Solo
target the Wookiee cities. And why had Ben done that? To allay his cousin’s suspicions, so he could kill Jacen and end this war.

When Ben remained silent, Jacen pressed on. “You can’t answer because it would be selfish to refuse, even evil. How could you
not
trade one life to save billions? Your mother would have begged you to, if the choice were hers.”

“That’s…not…what…happened!” Ben could feel his hate slipping away—and with it, his identity. He would have liked to think it was because Jacen was using the Force to influence him, but he knew better. He was losing his identity because he was more like Jacen than even Jacen knew. “You didn’t have to kill her.”

“And I didn’t—but I
would
have. That’s the difference between us. I’m willing to carry that burden.” Jacen paused and reached over to stroke a muscle node on the side of the Embrace. “And that’s why this is necessary—to give
you
the strength to make the same choice.”

Ben expected the tendrils to tighten again, or at least to ooze some new kind of toxin that would turn his welts into weeping sores and his weeping sores into boiling abscesses. Instead, the tendrils retracted their barbs and slackened until he was comfortable. Jacen laid a hand on Ben’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“Now I’m afraid I must hurt you in a way worse than anything the Embrace has done.” Jacen continued to clasp Ben’s shoulder, infusing his wounds with soothing Force energy. “A short time ago, your father and my sister made a foolhardy attack on the
Anakin Solo.
Jaina appears to have escaped, but your father’s StealthX was destroyed.”