Sacrifice

acceleration. The tracking screen was gone. She was looking at the streaming lights of stars and then velvet blackness, unlit except for random pinprick flares. She could see beyond the ship. It was as if it weren't there. She knew where she was. She could feel the pursuing vessel dwindling to nothing behind her, and the transparisteel shattering into broken chaos again.

For a moment, she felt panic.

For a moment, she was in a stricken TIE fighter, struggling for life —broken, fired upon by Luke Skywalker, certain she'd die.

Instantly the bulkheads became red-hot pumice again. She jerked back to the present.

You're safe, the ship said.

It felt almost guilty for alarming her. She wanted to reassure it: Just a memory, she thought, nothing to concern you. And it seemed reassured. Nobody—nothing—had cared about her welfare for a very long time, not since she'd been in Imperial training. Luke Skywalker's brief affection didn't count.

The broken -pursuer has jumped, too, said the ship.

"Try not to outrun it too far." Lumiya searched herself for regret and loneliness, and found none. It was still good to find a sense of kinship with another intelligence. "We don't want it to lose us."

It is still following us, said the ship.

"What did you think of your last pilot?" Lumiya asked.

Not like us.

"Not Sith material, then."

No. The ship knew Ben wasn't fit to be Jacen's apprentice. Less like us