by Troy Denning
“Of course.”
Vestara extended a hand toward the crane hook affixed to the rear end of the capsule and used the Force to lift it out of the bypass pipe. Jysella did the same with the front, and together they stowed it atop a growing stack of capsules piled at the far end of the platform.
“Thanks.” Jysella turned to Ben and pointed toward the front of the murk-filled chamber. It was packed with filtering units, pump motors, and purification tanks. “Your father’s somewhere in front. He said to see him for assignments as soon as you arrived.”
Ben acknowledged the message with a quick nod and motioned for Vestara to lead the way. Instead she remained where she was, slowly expanding her Force awareness out into the gloom. Something felt wrong, but she could not quite decide what it was.
The room was the size of a starfighter hangar, but so packed with equipment, cabinetry, and spare parts that it felt more like an underground labyrinth than the huge chamber it was. Everywhere she looked, dripping pipes ran from one processing unit to another, then climbed into the overhead darkness in bundles as big around as tree trunks. Some pieces of equipment were the size of cargo sleds, and the noise level was loud enough to make her wish she had a pair of sonic dampeners handy. The conditions were ideal for hiding a sentry or a spy. Considering the importance of the room—and the direct access to it from outside the Temple—Vestara could not believe the Sith would have failed to take such a basic precaution.
When she did not sense any dark presences lurking in the area, she asked, “How many guards did the first Jedi Knights kill in here?”
“None,” Jysella replied. “The place was empty.”
Vestara turned to look at her. “And that doesn’t strike you as strange?”
“Master Skywalker did have a team search the entire room, just in case,” Valin said. “But right now, there are Jedi-led companies of space marines outside the Temple, assaulting thirty different entrances. Master Skywalker thinks the Sith have moved all their sentries to the exterior doors and down into the underlevels.”
“That was the plan,” Jysella added, flashing a half smile. “And sometimes, plans actually work.”
The joke did little to lift Vestara’s heart. If Master Skywalker’s assault team met a disastrous end here, her life expectancy would drop by a factor of ten—and she had learned enough about the Temple defenses to realize that a determined host of Sith would be able to hold off the space marine assault indefinitely. And even if they could not, the High Lords would have plenty of time to escape alive. Vestara needed Skywalker and his team to succeed and succeed quickly, so they could disrupt the Circle of Lords and make possible a life for her other than pretending to be a Jedi hopeful.
She took Ben’s arm and started toward the far end of the platform. “We need to have a look around,” she said. “The Sith understand diversions as well as the Jedi, and they wouldn’t make the mistake of leaving this room unguarded.”
“Master Skywalker’s orders were clear,” Jysella called after them. “You’re to report at once.”
“Thank you, Jedi Horn,” Vestara said, speaking over her shoulder. “We understand.”
She led the way down a short metal staircase to a durasteel deck grating suspended about a meter above the true floor, which was covered in some sort of dark membrane. Vestara was confused about its purpose, until she noticed that the entire floor sloped toward a depression in the center of the room. Apparently, leaks and flooding were enough of a concern that a central drain had been installed.
Ben stepped off the staircase and stopped at Vestara’s side. “Ves, we need to follow orders. I’m sure they checked the place over.”
“I’m sure they tried,” Vestara said, starting toward a speeder-sized pump motor. “But something is definitely wrong here. Don’t you feel it?”
Ben fell quiet and began to look around, no doubt expanding his own Force awareness into the dark recesses of the room. Finally, he shook his head.
“No, I don’t feel anything,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean much one way or another. I’m sure most Sith know how to hide their Force presences as well as we do.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. It’s just too calm …” Vestara let her sentence trail off as she finally realized what was missing. “Where are the droids?”
Ben frowned. “Droids?”
“You can’t walk a hundred steps on Coruscant without running into a droid,” she said. “And you’re telling me the Jedi didn’t use any to run this place?”
Ben’s brow rose. “I see your point.” He glanced around again. The room was too packed with equipment to see all the way to the front, but that was where Jysella had told them his father was waiting. “Let’s check with Dad anyway. Maybe there’s something he forgot to tell us at the briefing.”
“You go ahead,” Vestara said. “I’m going to have a look around.”
Ben caught her arm and started her toward the front of the room. “Ves, come on.”
Catching the note of warning in his voice, Vestara allowed him to pull her along. “Why, Ben?” As she walked, she continued to reach out in the Force, searching for any hint of the sentry that had to be somewhere in the darkness spying on them. “So the rest of the team won’t grow suspicious of me showing some initiative?”
“Because Jedi obey orders, too,” Ben said, picking up the pace. “Especially in battle situations.”
Vestara started to remind Ben that he had once urged her to think for herself—then felt the deck grating wobble beneath her foot. Normally, she would not have given the sensation a second thought. But her Master, Lady Rhea, had taught her to pay attention to everything going into a fight, to remember that even the smallest detail could save her life, so Vestara dropped her gaze.
She saw the weapons first, a pair of blasters and a trio of lightsabers, all partially hidden in the fold of a black robe or the crook of a dark elbow. The people holding the weapons were on their backs, resting two abreast with their faces wrapped in dark scarves. Their eyes were squeezed to mere slits to prevent the whites from showing, and they were remaining absolutely still to avoid attracting attention.
Vestara glanced away, trying to act as though she hadn’t seen the figures beneath the grating. But she had noted at least half a dozen in a mere glance, and there was no reason to believe that was the entire force. The Jedi were walking into an ambush—and that could only mean the Sith had known they were coming.
Vestara had no idea how her people had learned of the Jedi assault plan, but she did know who would be blamed for it—provided she was lucky enough to live that long. Sith were nothing if not first-rate assassins, and this ambush appeared to be a variation on the Quiet Return. When they expected the target to be alert and wary upon entering the killing zone, Sith assassins preferred to remain somewhere else until the victim relaxed, then return via a secret entrance to launch the attack. She was guessing that this group had come from the chamber below, through a hole cut a few hours earlier, and hidden beneath the drainage membrane.
Vestara continued to walk at Ben’s side, trying to figure out how the ambush affected her. The Sith would be watching her more closely than any of the Jedi except Grand Master Skywalker, so it would be impossible to disappear before the attack began. Besides, she needed the Jedi assault force intact to make her own plan work.
“Ves?” Ben asked. “Wake up, will you? We’re about to go into battle.”
“Oh yes, the battle,” she said. Now that she knew where the ambush was coming from, she just wanted to reach the control panel as quickly as possible. “You’re right, of course.”
“I am?” Ben asked, turning his head to look over at her. “What happened to change …”
His sentence faded into an unexpected silence—as did the sound of their footfalls, and the swishing of Vestara’s robe. But when she glanced over at Ben, she saw that his mouth was continuing to move as though he were still hearing his words inside his own head. Someone was using the Force to q
uiet the air and prevent it from carrying sound waves—and that could mean only one thing.
Vestara reached out to Master Skywalker in the Force, flooding her presence with alarm, then grabbed Ben by the arm and spun around to find a ten-meter section of deck grating flying toward them. A blast wave of shock and confusion raced through the Force as Ben struggled to comprehend what he was seeing, and Vestara knew he would never react in time. She slammed her forearm across his chest and kicked his heels out from beneath him, then flung her own legs out in front of her.
They landed side by side on their backs an instant before the grating slashed past, passing a handbreadth from their faces. Ben’s eyes bulged wide and his mouth opened in a soundless cry of surprise—then Vestara began to slide across the grating back toward their attackers. She raised her head and saw a wall of dark-cloaked ambushers leaping from their hiding places, blasters flashing and lightsabers ignited.
Suddenly Vestara stopped sliding. She glanced back and saw Ben’s hand extended toward her, holding her in the Force, trying to drag her back.
A ferocious ache began to throb through her hips and shoulders, and Vestara felt as though she was coming apart. Then she realized she probably was. She screamed in pain and shook her head, yelling at Ben to let her go.
Whether Ben actually heard her above the battle din—the screaming of blaster bolts and the growling of lightsabers—Vestara could not tell. She simply started to slide faster than before.
Behind her, Ben snapped his lightsaber off its belt hook and sprang to his feet, then quickly dived into a somersault as a flurry of blaster bolts burned into the grating around him. For an instant, Vestara thought he would ignite the blade and get them both killed by attempting to fight his way toward her.
She should have known better than to underestimate Ben Skywalker. He simply continued to somersault, using the Force to trace a zigzag course across the deck. When he came up, his weapon hand snapped in her direction, flinging his lightsaber toward her. Vestara reached for it in the Force, at the same time looking back toward the ambushers.
The first Sith were already charging past, using their crimson lightsabers to bat aside the torrent of bolts coming from a group of Jedi charging back from the front of the room. Ben’s lightsaber landed in her hand. She thumbed the activation switch, then rolled to her belly and swung the sizzling blade through two sets of running legs. When a cold shiver raced down her spine, she continued the roll and brought the weapon up to block.
A shower of sparks erupted as Vestara’s blade clashed with another, and she glimpsed a lavender Keshiri face snarling down from the other side of the blazing cross above her. The two blades locked, and Vestara lay beneath her attacker, struggling to keep the woman’s lightsaber away. The crump-crump of detonating grenades began to sound somewhere near the front of the room, and in the back of her mind she realized the Jedi were being attacked from two sides.
Vestara relaxed her arms a little, and the Keshiri woman’s lightsaber began to descend toward her face.
“First, I take your beauty,” the woman said. “Then I—”
Vestara hit her with a Force blast and sent her flying back into a rank of Sith climbing up through the missing section of grating. The Keshiri’s blade, still ignited, sliced one warrior in half, and her body knocked two more off their feet.
Beyond the tangle of limbs and blades, Vestara glimpsed Valin and Jysella Horn still up on the bypass platform, Valin using his lightsaber to defend Jysella from Sith blaster bolts while she leaned through an open access panel. Vestara traced back the stream of bolts until she spotted a Sith warrior firing from between a pair of pump housings. She sent him tumbling with a Force shove.
That was all the respite Valin Horn needed. He leapt off the bypass platform in a flying cartwheel. Beginning to think she and the Jedi just might survive this ambush after all, Vestara sprang to her own feet—and heard a deep voice behind her.
“Enough.”
The base of her skull exploded into dull throbbing pain as something hard and heavy—the hilt of a lightsaber, no doubt—struck. She spun and caught only a glimpse of black cloth as her attacker moved behind her.
The hilt descended again.
Her knees buckled, spinning her around, away from her unseen attacker. Her vision began to narrow, but fifteen meters away up on the water main bypass platform, she saw a small female Jedi climbing out of an open access panel. The woman ignited her lightsaber, then came leaping over the platform’s safety rail, brown hair flying and violet blade whirling, and Vestara knew the battle was on.
Jaina Solo, Sword of the Jedi, had just arrived.
A FORK OF FORCE LIGHTNING FLASHED PAST BELOW JAINA’S CORKSCREWING body, so close that the sting of its heat penetrated the thin molytex armor beneath her robes. She twisted into another whorl, her wrists turning almost of their own accord as she swung her lightsaber around to catch the next bolt, and then she sensed the floor rising up beneath her. She brought her feet around and landed hard, the durasteel deck grating shuddering beneath her boots as a dozen dark-robed figures spun to face her, their wide eyes betraying the confusion and alarm they felt at seeing a Jedi Knight deliberately jump into the heart of a Sith mob.
How a mission could go sour so fast, Jaina had no idea. The Sith were everywhere, crawling beneath the deck grating, dropping down from the pipes, darting out from between the filter cabinets and pump housings. Clearly, the Jedi had walked into an ambush, and their battle plan had fallen into chaos.
No problem. In a situation like this, Jaina thrived on chaos. She became chaos.
Jaina leapt over an incoming leg slash, then dropped her attacker with a quick snap-kick to the temple. She blocked a strike at her neck and, still in the air, turned her jump into a cartwheel. She shifted to a one-handed grip and swung her free arm in an arc, using the Force to sweep two more Sith off their feet. Landing in their midst, she stomped on the throat of the first and jammed her lightsaber through the chest of the other, then pulled a concussion grenade off her combat harness and thumbed it active.
She dropped it at her feet and began to count. One.
The melee went still. All eyes dropped to the grenade, noted the absence of a safety pin, the arming light blinking red. The Sith looked at her with wide eyes, then spun away and tried to hurl themselves beyond the blast radius.
Jaina’s count reached Two. She caught the grenade on the toe of her boot and kicked it toward a missing section of deck grating, where a fresh stream of Sith warriors were climbing into view.
Her count reached Three, and Jaina dropped.
The detonation hit her like a hoverbus, rolling her across the deck, flinging flesh and durasteel through the air above her. Why the Sith had sprung their trap so early, Jaina could not imagine. The largest part of the Jedi assault force had not even reached the killing zone, and while dozens of Sith were already in the room, they seemed almost as confused and poorly positioned as their targets. Maybe Luke had sensed the danger and forced the issue—or maybe he had been their true target all along. Perhaps they feared Luke Skywalker just that much.
And that was a mistake.
Luke Skywalker was not the Sword of the Jedi. Jaina was, and now the Sith had trapped themselves inside a locked Temple with her.
Jaina stopped rolling and raised her head, trying to decide who to take on next. Strewn with overturned equipment and severed pipes, the chamber was too tangled with streaking bolts and sweeping arcs of color for her to see anything clearly. The floor was littered with bodies, some motionless, more writhing, too many with faces she recognized as fellow Jedi. Her droid, Rowdy, had managed to extract himself from the inspection capsule and descend the stairs from the bypass platform. Now he was working his way toward the computer interface at the front of the chamber, where the original plan had called for him to contact the Temple’s central computer, ordering it to lower the shields and open the blast doors.
Off to one side of the battle, Vestara lay unconscious betw
een a flocculation mixer and the adjacent sedimentation basin. Standing over her was a tall, slender Sith Lord wearing a black cape atop black blast armor. His thin lips were sneering as he spoke into a throat-mike. Luke and Master Horn were nowhere to be seen, but Valin and Jysella Horn were atop a narrow pipe, fighting back-to-back while standing three meters above the floor.
And Ben … Ben seemed to think he was invincible, Force-tumbling through the air toward Vestara, dodging blaster bolts and Force lightning with no lightsaber to protect him. He extended an arm, hooking his elbow around a small transfer pipe that crossed the room about two meters above the deck, and allowed his momentum to swing him downward just in time to avoid a fork of blue Force lightning. He came arcing back up, one hand sending a Force blast back toward the woman who had attacked him. She went flying into the gloom, and Ben released his arm and went arcing away, corkscrewing and somersaulting until he dropped out of sight behind a settling tank.
Three Sith were already leaping up onto the transfer pipe to take the woman’s place, and Jaina had her next set of victims. She used the Force to launch herself off the deck grating … and was still in the air when her targets sensed their danger. The leader jumped off the pipe—another woman, her long red hair trailing behind her as she raced to intercept Ben. The two men, one with a dark beard and one clean-shaven, spun to defend themselves.
Jaina’s lightsaber was already coming down, severing Dark Beard’s sword arm at the elbow. She used the Force to send the limb and lightsaber flying in Ben’s direction, then glimpsed the crimson arc of Square Chin’s blade curving toward her lead leg. She flipped her own weapon down to block the attack … but, before she could Force-stick her boot in place, she felt her foot sliding across the transfer pipe. In the next instant Jaina was plummeting toward the deck, with one Sith screaming in pain below her and the other jumping down from above.
Chaos.
Jaina shoved off in the Force, sending Square Chin floating back toward the transfer pipe—and pushing herself in the opposite direction. She slammed down atop Dark Beard, driving her elbow into his ribs and snapping her head back into his face. She felt his nose shatter, then rolled to her side.
