Sacrifice

He struggled visibly with something. Mara guessed he'd been sworn to secrecy. It was way too late for all that loyalty bunk.

"I've seen the ship, Ben. It spoke to me, too. It said it thought I was the 'other one' like me, and I thought it'd mistaken me for Lumiya, but it meant you, didn't it? Somehow it picked up on our similarities."

Ben gulped in air as if the relief of being able to share the awful experience were saving him from drowning.

"I worked out how to pilot it. It communicates through the Force."

"And it's soaked in dark energies. I know. Go on."

"I don't know how it works, but if you visualize what you want it to do, it does it. It sticks out parts of itself and forms them into cannons, all kinds of weapons."

Perfect. Perfect. Mara was getting a better picture by the second.

Lumiya could think at the ship and it'd rush to do her bidding—maybe even extrude a cable, whip it around Mara, drag her away, and nearly throttle her.

It wasn't a droid. I got bushwhacked by a living ship, a Sith ship.

That old, cold clarity and pitiless sense of purpose flooded Mara's body, and instead of making her gut churn, as any mother's might at hearing the kind of risk her son had been subjected to, it settled her into a calm and rational state close to transcendence. She was the Hand again, planning her move.

"So what happened to the ship between the time you found it and when I came across it the other day?"

"Where did you see it?"