The Final Iteration
Chapter 11
Lord Luke caught the boy right outside his hotel. The mop-headed little ragamuffin did not even struggle as Lord Luke picked him up with one hand, not even using the Force so as not to attract attention. He brought the child's face right up to his own and examined his eyes in the sunlight. Always dull, the eyes of the spies. Slow to track.
Lord Luke's gaze pierced right through those dull hazel eyes and into the boy's confused mind. He did not know where the searchers were. Or who they were. The child did not even know he was a spy; that was the way it always was. Whoever was looking for Lord Luke knew they could not get close to him without Lord Luke being able to detect their Force presence. They knew they could not use any spy who knew anything, for his unprotected mind would alert the Dark Lord. They must conceal their presence with the White Current when they planted commands in their spies' minds with the Force; and that meant whoever was looking for Lord Luke was a Sith. Or Jacen, but Lord Luke was confident Jacen did not yet suspect his existence. How the searchers managed to rendezvous with and retrieve the spies they sent, Lord Luke did not know.
Lord Luke sighed and let the boy go. Clearly, just keeping switching hotels all the time was not going to do the job. He hoped he did not really have to go live in a cave in order to affect Jacen's visions. He liked being able to order a morning plate of toast, local lizard eggs, and hot chocolate from room service. But affecting Jacen's visions meant attuning perfectly with the Force, exactly the way he would attune to the White Current. He did not see how, but clearly he must be leaving distinctive ripples in the Force, because the searchers kept finding him.
So far they had not come close enough for Lord Luke to identify them, because he kept leaving whenever he caught a spy. Perhaps he should follow the spy this time, hunt the hunters, and take care of the problem. The regularity with which they kept chasing him off was starting to annoy him.
Annoyance was a form of anger, if a mild one. It turned easily to hate, and brought with it a vast dark pool of shadows, lapping over each other with a whispering sound like lost souls: the lake of potential of the Dark Side, an endless battery pack just waiting for him to plug in. The only cost, everything he was.
Lord Luke shook off those morbid thoughts and followed the boy. He kept the child's black, curly hair in sight, not bothering to be subtle. He reined in his power, using only normal senses and passive noticing in the Force and the White Current, like a starship using only passive sensors to hunt a wary enemy. Whoever the searchers were, he was sure he would alert them faster by trying to use a White Current disguise than by simply walking along like anybody else on the street, drawing as little power as possible. Even so, he supposed he was an anomaly to their senses, like a whirlpool in the White Current, or else how could they keep finding him again and again?
There they were: two Force presences, dark as Vader's cape, one on either end of the street. This was too easy. It was a trap, and they had been waiting for him. No matter. He was more powerful than they were. His opponents must know that, hence their elaborate caution.
Lord Luke turned around and scanned the street, drawing power. He was unsure if it were the dark side or the light, nor did he care. It was all grey now.
He noticed something now, with all the power of the Force drawn to him, that he had not noticed before. There was a Force-null bubble right in front of him. The boy disappeared from the underlying reality of the Force as he walked through it, an image only, an empty shell without the shining consciousness of the Force connecting him to all things.
Lord Luke looked all around. The street was not particularly empty; the Sith who hunted him apparently had no regard for innocent bystanders. People walked on grey presscrete sidewalks, while dusty landspeeders and wheeled carts trundled down the middle of the road, and aircars whizzed overhead. Buildings rose all around, around 5 or 6 stories high, all full of life. A major wizard war here would have a lot of collateral damage. Perhaps that was part of the trap? Did they count on Luke caring about minimizing the loss of innocent life?
If so, Lord Luke mused, they were counting on an earlier Luke. He had cared about such things once. For the first few hundred years or so. Now, he had learned to be laser-focused on his goal, so as not to be distracted again by trying to fix all the unrelated problems of the universe. What was his goal again? Yes, right: stop Caedus. Save Ben.
Boom!
The wind hit him first. Gritty, hot, choking, full of unidentifiable shrapnel. Then came the sudden loss. He experienced it as a loss of his own power, for a moment, because he was so connected to the Force, so attuned to everything around him. That was the truth of the Sith proverb, "the Force is Life." It took him an instant to realize it was the loss of other peoples' lives he was sensing, lives of which he had not been aware a moment before, because they had been in the Force-null bubble. The explosion had killed the ysalamiri, too, and the Force came roaring back to the dead zone right when the dying was happening.
A dull thunk near his feet made Lord Luke look down. It was a head. A child's head—a baby's, really—human, red hair. Ben!
"Stop! Stop it!" Lord Luke shrieked.
Everything stopped. Dust motes hung in air. Bits of wrecked building stopped in mid-arc. Even sound stopped. The screaming went silent.
Lord Luke realized the child was not really Ben at about the same time he realized everything was quiet. At first he thought his eardrums had been blown out by the explosion. But that would not explain the wheeled ground vehicle stopped right beside him, one of its four wheels a few centimeters above the roadway, black skid marks leading back from it with a crazy jag in the middle, evidence of maneuvering to avoid the chunk of presscrete falling right in front of it.
Correction, the chunk of presscrete that HAD been falling right in front of it. It was stopped too, hanging in the air like a snapshot.
Lord Luke looked around, confused. "I did that," he whispered. "I stopped time."
He took a step forward, and nothing happened. The spell was not broken. He realized he could just walk away from this trap.
But he did not want to. "If I can control time, really control time, not just slip timestreams like the Great Machine, I could roll this all back and do it over. Prevent the explosion."
Lord Luke looked down again at the child's head. The truth was, he did care. He had told the other Luke that he did not posture when he was by himself, but that had been exactly what he had been doing. Posturing had become such second nature that he had nearly convinced himself that he was a selfish, uncaring Sith Lord out only for himself. But deep down, he was still Luke Skywalker.
He walked out of the path of the explosion first, prudently, in case this did not work. Then he concentrated hard on the previous hour, willing everything to wind backward like a recording. And it did. Right in front of him.
The Sith who were hunting him were still there, waiting. Lord Luke did not pop in on them from outside time to fight them. He was too rattled to fight up to his full ability right now, and he did not feel like killing anyone. The loss of life that had not happened yet, that would not happen at all now, was still too fresh for him. The Force reverberated with his shock. He could barely stand to touch it at all, at least for the next few minutes.
Instead, Lord Luke flowed into the White Current, and disappeared. He felt the Siths' attention on him immediately; he had made a mistake. They were masters of illusion as well, and had only drawn their gaze. He felt the near one's intention of harm, reaching for the button to detonate the bomb again. It was all going to happen over again.
"No! Stop!" And time stopped for him again. Everything went silent.
He reached out in the Force for the bomber, following that narrow focus of intent. Lord Luke closed his eyes to concentrate better. He dragged the Sith bomber out of his hiding place and pushed him into the Force-null bubble. Now he could not detonate his bomb without blowing himself up.
Lord Luke walked away, down the silent street. He wove in and out around stopped-still pedestrians, until he came to the spaceport and got into his stolen X-Wing. He had to let go of time and let it start again to take off. The engine would not start unless time flowed. Then Lord Luke flew away. Just away. He picked a course at random from preprogrammed selections. Stars turned to streaks, and he entered hyperspace.
Then the first time ripple caught up with him. It was like the aftershocks of an earthquake. It went through his mind, through his soul.
He was in an X-Wing. Where was he? Where was the rest of Rogue Squadron?
Luke spoke into his comm. "Wedge?" He got only static back. "R2?" He was alone.
Then the second time ripple passed through him.
