The Jedi leapt, winging another attacker. The accursed tunics were no match for her lightsaber, but they made it more difficult for her to withdraw it. She couldn’t do this with body shots. This was messy enough work already.
The floor shook. There was no mistaking it now: there were explosions coming from the north, in the direction of Patriot Hall. Shooting a look up to the upper floor, Kerra saw that Arkadia was noticing it, too.
“That’s enough,” the Sith Lord said, directing her snipers back to the ledge. “No blasters. Thermal detonators!”
A Citizen Guard looked up at her. “But our people are down with her—”
“And doing their job! Now do yours!”
From his perch on the track of the parked icecrawler, Rusher could see Diligence climbing into the thin Synedian air toward Patriot Hall. Red lights glimmered on the great conical tower to the north, one of the two tractor beam emitters he’d seen on landing.
“That’s it,” Rusher whispered. Make them think you’re coming for us.
The warship had covered half the length of the ice sheet outside when the lights on the north tower suddenly went green. Diligence seemed to struggle against an unseen force, urging the transport and its attached cargo pod clusters toward the parking area, already littered with ships. The ship wobbled, straining to rise higher over the tractor beam emitter.
Rusher tapped his space helmet to activate the comlink. “That’s it! Cut it loose!”
Diligence dipped and yawed—and suddenly the entire starboard cargo assembly separated from the ship, plummeting like a colossal bomb toward the emitter and Arkadia’s parked fleet.
KRAKKA-BOOOM!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Syned shook!
Narsk grabbed the landing gear and held on. He looked out through the magnetic field to the inferno beyond. The mercenary had signed on all right. With a vengeance. The northern tractor beam emitter was a memory. And even as the deadly blossom of exploding ordnance rose and expanded, it fell in on itself, creating another caldera in the ice where the landing field had been.
As the surface ice beneath it distributed the kinetic energy, Embarkation Station 7 rode up and down as if on an uncoiling spring. Above, massive chunks of ice fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing the stumbling Wookiee. Around the quaking shuttle, technicians staggered toward the walls, away from Quillan in his deadly burgundy chair.
Narsk leapt from behind the landing gear and lunged for the teenager. Half visible in the shower of ice, the Bothan forced his arm underneath the heedless boy’s shoulder and heaved.
“Hang on, kid. This is for your own good!”
Farther south through the tunnels, the explosion rocked Reflection Prospect, knocking Arkadia and her snipers to the ground. From beneath the balcony, Kerra saw it: reverberating through Calimondretta’s glacial skeleton, the shock wave ripped the icy pillars suspending the second floor to pieces.
She dived for the only shelter she could see—the threshold of the hallway she’d entered through, littered with bodies. At once, up ahead of her, the entire second floor of the grotto heaved and gave way, shaken by subsidiary blasts as it went down.
Kerra shielded her face against the rush of chilly debris. Those were the thermal detonators, she thought. But no thermal detonator could shake an entire city!
“Boy, that was pretty,” Rusher said gleefully.
“I don’t know,” Dackett responded over the comlink. “Novallo’s gonna take my other arm for this.”
Rusher had told the Bothan right: it had been an insane idea. All Diligence’s armaments were deployed on the floor of Patriot Hall around him; not nearly enough weapons to consume all the munitions socked away in the ship’s clawed, four-chambered cargo clusters. Neither Rusher’s ground team nor the ship had any way to fire those.
But Vichary Telk had once been a ship to itself, before being welded to the cargo pods. Severing one of the two cargo compartments that served as Diligence’s feet had been a simple matter of sealing the accesses and setting off the explosive bolts holding the hydraulic system in place. The engineer had, indeed, invented some new words on hearing Rusher’s plan in the secure comlink exchange. But the plan had worked, making an astounding impact.
“You’re beautiful, Bothan—whoever you are!”
Now Diligence looked stunted, half its footing amputated. The ship would never land again in this condition. “Losing lateral control, Brig!” Dackett called over the comlink.
“Hang on,” Rusher said. Opening a pack on his belt, he looked at the homing sensor. Nothing. “Dack, you got anything on our wanderers up there?”
“Negative. The tags aren’t strong enough to penetrate the ice!”
There goes that gambit, Rusher thought. Beadle had delivered more than just the stealth suit and the lightsaber. They’d welded a comm-frequency tag just like the one all his troopers wore to the base of the Jedi’s weapon. But neither Beadle nor the lightsaber were showing up on his register. “We’re going to have to do this the hard way. Let me make my call!”
Switching from the secure channel to the one he’d used to contact Calimondretta Control, Rusher slid down off the icecrawler and placed his call. “Lord Arkadia, this is your deliveryman,” he said. “Give me the Jedi—or I’m gonna crack your city open and let you all die!”
In the rapidly disintegrating hangar, Arkadia’s technicians listened as the brigadier repeated his message. Or tried to listen—as the blasts kept coming from the south. The intruders in Patriot Hall were shooting again, doing their best impressions of the miners who had originally hollowed out Calimondretta’s tunnels.
Abruptly, a muscular human mechanic turned to see a surprising sight in the frigid haze: a bipedal snowman, pushing Quillan and his hoverchair up the ramp to the shuttle. “Hey!”
So much for this, Narsk thought, slapping a wrist control and deactivating the stealth suit. Suddenly appearing in the shower of ice crystals, Narsk yelled back through his mask to the mechanic. “Saboteurs!” he implored, pushing the chair higher. “Hurry, we’ve got to complete the mission!”
“I don’t think we should do anything without asking—”
Narsk faced the mechanic, the suit and mask serving to make him look menacing and mysterious. “Look around! Don’t you know your job?” He jabbed his gloved claw toward the shuttle. “Now help me load him up!”
Befuddled, the mechanic dashed to the top of the ramp, pushing Quillan and his conveyance inside the hatch. Seeing the worker secure the passenger section, Narsk dashed down the ramp, headed for the hidden compartment he’d tried so hard to escape from just moments earlier.
The stepladder gone, Narsk leapt, grabbing hold of the tail section and pulling himself up. Straining, he reoriented himself and backed his body, serpent-like, into the chamber. Reaching for the compartment’s tube-like oxygen feed, he routed it under his mask. The vehicle shook around him, beginning to taxi toward the exit. The droid pilot had been given the go signal.
Reaching for the control to cycle the compartment shut, Narsk saw chaos on the receding floor of Embarkation Station 7. The Wookiee guard and two of the techs were there, screaming at the seemingly paralyzed mechanic. After a second the man realized his mistake and began yelling at Narsk.
“Wait a minute! You’ve got the wrong hoverchair!” The mechanic dashed past the booby-trapped chair, still parked on the hangar floor, its rich color obscured by frost. “Quick! Raise the magnetic field! Order the droid to stop the ship!”
Feeling the sluggish shuttle lift from the ground, Narsk found the remote control Arkadia had given him and pressed the button.
The last thing he saw before his hidden compartment cycled shut was the burgundy chair spiraling into the air, riding a volcano of blue gas. And the bone-chilling screams were the last thing he heard, before the sound of the accelerating engines on either side of him claimed his hearing forever.
* * *
Kerra puffed, sprinting the long meters up the hallway. Ark
adia’s guide had led her this way earlier, on their way to the museum. It was the only path out of the grotto now; the collapse of the second level had ruined the route up to Patriot Hall. And while she’d seen Arkadia on the terrace before, she hadn’t seen her fall. Kerra was taking no chances. No more than she already had, anyway.
Although the pumps no longer worked, the algae still lit the way, fluorescing in their tubes. Even back in the ruins of Reflection Prospect, the giant pipes had held, although several now tilted at dangerous angles. Arkadia’s society really was formidable in its accomplishments. She represented a great threat to everyone around her—and the Jedi and the Republic didn’t even know she existed. Kerra had to change that, had to stop Arkadia.
But she already had a job. She had to get the refugees out.
Reaching the anteroom, Kerra dove toward the opulent museum door. Cracking it open, she found what she expected inside: Arkadia’s museum, in all its vast circular majesty. Several of her prized artifacts had fallen to the floor, shaken by the tremors in the ice.
Kerra searched for exits. The stars shone through the skylight twenty meters above—far too high to reach, even jumping from the pylon at the room’s center. But there were six other entrances. One of them had to have—
Arkadia.
The Sith Lord stood in the doorway to the left, her ornamented staff in both hands, her face smudged with smoke, her once-proud armor scratched and singed.
“I don’t know what you’ve done or how you’ve done it,” Arkadia said, activating the control transforming her staff into a double-bladed lightsaber. “But it stops here.”
* * *
Rusher swore. Minutes had passed, with no response. He’d held his fire on the city, but the city had nothing to say to him. Only Team Zhaboka was still firing; Rusher had sent them and their more portable weapons out onto the tundra to target land vehicles approaching over what was left of the ice sheet.
Certainly someone could hear him; he heard the panicked chatter on the comlink channel. But none of it seemed directed at him. If Arkadia was out there, she was probably busy.
And if Kerra was out there, that’s where Arkadia was, too.
“Stop shooting! Stop shooting!”
Rusher looked to the north, where the tunnel leading into the glacier had collapsed between their fire and their impromptu bomb. A space-suited figure clambered awkwardly through a tight gap between the crushed gate and several ice boulders.
“Lubboon!” Rusher dashed across the crunchy depot floor. Two of his troopers pulled chunks away, helping the recruit past.
“I gave the Bothan the lightsaber like you said, sir,” Beadle said, breathlessly.
“The Jedi, trooper! Did you see her?”
“No, sir. But the Bothan gentleman did go after her,” Beadle said, pointing ahead of him. “North.”
“That’s south.”
Rusher stalked the debris-strewn floor, trying to remember. The big grotto was directly south, at the juncture of passageways leading east, to Arkadia’s museum, and farther south, down a series of escalators. The Citizen Guards had taken Kerra that way, deeper into the bowels of the glacier. With the damage they’d done to the passageways, there was no reaching the grotto, much less anything leading down from there.
No, if Narsk had reached Kerra, the Jedi would have tried to go up. That meant either Patriot Hall—or up the long, climbing hallway to Arkadia’s museum. Was there some exit at that end? More important, could they ever find it? There wasn’t any time for picking through the rubble. If Arkadia had any other ships in the system, they’d be on their way by now.
A call on the secure channel interrupted him. “The other tractor beam’s got us, Brigadier!”
“Give ’em the other barrel, Diligence,” Rusher said, waving to his crew to stop firing. Looking south, he clicked the comlink again. “You can’t land, anyway, until you do. We’ll assemble outside.”
“You don’t sound happy. No Jedi?”
“No,” Rusher said, “and no route to the Republic.”
“Let’s use the coordinates the Sith lady gave us,” Dackett said. “We’ve got ’em punched up and ready to go as soon as we recover everyone. I don’t think we’re going to be very popular here after this.”
As usual, the ship’s master made sense.
Rusher sighed. He’d tried.
Kerra parried one lightsaber stroke after another, backing toward yet another doorway in the circular room. All the exits were locked from the outside, including the one she’d entered through. Arkadia had her trapped.
“You’re little more than a Padawan,” her opponent said, weapon whirling in her hands. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. You’ve never known!”
The ruby blade came down, streaking against the ice floor. Leaping, Kerra bounded past the holoprojector pylon, which now provided the only cover in the room.
“You’re not the first Sith I’ve faced,” she said, fighting for time. “You’re just another petty dictator, like the rest. You’re not special.”
“Don’t compare me with them,” Arkadia snapped. “Mine is an enlightened regime!”
Kerra laughed. “Well, it’s true then, what I’ve always heard. An ‘enlightened’ Sith would kill her own grandmother!”
Ignoring the taunt, Arkadia raised her weapon high over her head and charged. Kerra darted out of the way, causing the tip of the Sith Lord’s lightsaber to spark off the pylon.
“I’m just taking what’s mine. What should have been mine!” Pressing a control on her weapon, Arkadia detached the ends from the meter-long staff, dropping the ornamented bar to the floor. One weapon had become two.
Kerra leapt, only to be repelled by Arkadia’s gleaming defense. Incredibly, the woman seemed as coordinated with two lightsabers as with one, using the first to parry while preparing a counterstroke with the other. Forced back, Kerra fell, stumbling over the raised tiles set in the icy floor. Pressing her advantage, Arkadia brought both lightsabers forcefully against Kerra’s green blade.
Straining in the crackling battle of strength, Kerra looked into her atatcker’s eyes. The calculating intelligence remained, but anger was taking hold.
“I was a fool to expect you to help,” Arkadia said, mashing her lightsabers against Kerra’s. “Too smart by half. But it’s done. The assassin is on his way.” Shimmering red light danced across her face. “They’re both gone.”
Eyes transfixed on Arkadia, Kerra suddenly caught a feeling through the Force. Both gone.
“You … you sent Quillan to die. Didn’t you?”
Arkadia froze—and the world around her rumbled. The Sith Lord looked up to see a flash of light over the skylight. The stunted Diligence screamed overhead, releasing something from beneath. Kerra recognized it: the port-side cargo cluster, fully a quarter of the ship’s mass, spiraling toward the surface.
Syned shook again, harder than before. The southern wall of the museum erupted, forced inward by the cataclysmic meeting of megatons of explosives and ice. Arkadia staggered with the impact. Kerra kicked out, taking the Sith Lord’s legs out from under her.
Abruptly, the floor itself fractured, two-thirds of the ice jutting upward. Forced to the northern wall, Kerra deactivated her lightsaber and clambered across the icy rubble, looking for an open passageway beyond the askew doors. Aftershocks and secondary explosions continued to shake the dome. Clouds of frost fell from above.
And there, in the snowfall, she saw Arkadia, bruised but advancing.
“How could you?” Kerra yelled, reaching in vain for some handhold to climb the wall. “You sent your brother to die—in a trap against your grandmother? How could you?”
Stepping over a crevasse in the floor, the Sith Lord waved her hands. Both lightsabers returned to her from the rubble. She ignited them. “There can be only one Sith Lord,” she said. “And no Jedi.” Arkadia leapt …
… and above, the sky ripped away in a blinding flash.
Kerra struggled to open h
er ice-crusted eyes. The top third of the dome was gone. Arkadia’s museum, shattered from above and below, was open to the stars and Syned’s deadly cold.
Hearing creaks as she tried to move, she couldn’t tell whether they came from the collapsed pit around her or her own bones. Fumbling in the ice, she found a metal bar and jabbed it into the snowy wall, using it to pull herself up. A tool, from what had once been a museum of tools. Slamming the makeshift piton into the wall again, she scaled the frozen slabs, desperate to escape. Something was moving in the debris behind her.
With a heave, Kerra lunged onto the surface of Syned and inhaled. Frigid air, only barely laced with oxygen, stabbed at her lungs. Around her, she saw only devastation. Most of the buildings on the surface were gone, and majestic Patriot Hall was now a leaning frame of pillars. The tractor beam emitters were gone. The field once strewn with ships heaved, tossing and refreezing.
Hearing footsteps in the ice behind her, she tried to run, only to stumble and fall, choking at the cold.
Diligence was gone. But she had seen it in the air, earlier. Was it escaping? Cheek against the ice, she decided to think that it was.
It had been a good fight. She’d done her part.
She closed her eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The light of the medbay was warm and reassuring, everything one would expect from a classy spaceliner. Kerra blinked at the room through her oxygen mask.
“Looks like she’s thawing out,” a familiar voice said.
Stretching against the pillow, Kerra watched a medical droid remove her mask. The silver model stepped aside to reveal Rusher, leaning inside the doorway. Overcoat gone, the redhead wore a black shirt beneath a worn rust-colored jacket.
Star Wars: Knight Errant Page 32
