Crucible: Star Wars

by Troy Denning

  AND FUTILE.

  Craitheus had not armed his own weapon systems yet, no doubt because the attempt would force Marvid to make a preemptive strike.

  “Calrissian certainly knew that I would never cut you out.”

  Craitheus spoke aloud, no doubt because he hoped to elicit support from Gev. Perhaps he could sense Marvid’s confusion and thought a smallhead opinion might actually influence him.

  “It was only an attempt to create strife between us,” Craitheus continued. “We’ve used the same divide-and-conquer strategy a hundred times. I was determined not to let it affect us.”

  YET IT HAS, Marvid transmitted, BUT ONLY BECAUSE YOU KEPT IT FROM ME. WHAT AM I TO THINK, EXCEPT THAT YOU WERE CONSIDERING IT?

  So WHAT IF I WAS CONSIDERING? Craitheus countered. CONSIDERING IS NOT DOING.

  There lay the truth, Marvid realized. Craitheus had been tempted. The one being Marvid had always trusted—the one being he would never betray—had been thinking about turning against his own brother.

  For what? Certainly not for money. Craitheus was already wealthier than most interstellar empires. No, Craitheus wanted power. He wanted to be the sole holder of Galactic Syndicated—and all it controlled.

  Marvid considered his options. Given the limited confines of the conference room, he decided the blaster cannon would be best—then felt his head rocked by an invisible Force slap.

  “Marvid, stop that,” Savara ordered. “So your brother was tempted to sell you out. Disarm your weapons and deal with it. We need to talk about the real reason Calrissian made the offer, and we’re running out of time.”

  Marvid did not disarm his weapons. “We know the reason,” he said. “Calrissian was trying to drive a wedge between us. It worked.”

  “Better than he ever imagined, I’m sure,” Savara said. “But that’s not our problem at the moment.”

  “Then what is?” Craitheus asked, eager to change the subject.

  “Reverse the vid, and I’ll show you,” Savara said.

  She waited until the image showed the transport resting on its struts again, with Gev and her companions disappearing inside. She ordered him to stop, then to magnify the image and restart the vid in slow motion.

  “Watch carefully.” She pointed at the wall screen, then said, “Right … here.”

  A tiny gray disk appeared on the screen and began to accelerate toward the transport. By the time the vessel was gliding out through the hangar exit, the disk had caught up and attached itself to the hull.

  “You’re looking at a Jedi tracking beacon,” she said. “And that is our problem.”

  Eleven

  The asteroid crusher Ormni hung in the distance ahead, a gray wedge silhouetted by the fiery glow of its own smelter vents. Beneath its belly billowed a dust cloud three times its size—all that could be seen of the asteroid it was slowly devouring. Both ship and cloud were surrounded by a swirling mesh of blue slivers—the efflux tails of the Ormni’s tender craft going about their business.

  Sitting in a little ScragHull spyboat on loan from Lando, Leia was still too far away to see the tender craft with her naked eye. But on her dimly lit tactical display, she saw the transponder codes for dozens of blasting yawls and ram galleys—the slaveships that broke the asteroid apart and pushed the pieces into the Ormni’s processing maw. She also counted four huge cargo transports clustered around the Ormni’s stern, five Bes’uliik starfighters on patrol, and three assault transports departing on a mission.

  By now Han could be aboard any one of those vessels, being moved from the Ormni to a new location before she had a chance to rescue him.

  Leia longed to reach out in the Force and search for him. But during the last moments of the firefight at the Blue Star, both she and Luke had felt a dark presence working against them, and now it seemed entirely possible that the Qrephs might be working with Sith. If so, using the Force would alert the enemy to their approach just as surely as firing the ScragHull’s engines. Leia had no choice but to watch and worry as they drifted toward the Ormni, unpowered, all the while terrified that Han would be gone—or already dead—by the time they arrived.

  Leia was no stranger to worry, of course. During the Rebellion, she and Han had risked their lives almost daily. As a diplomat of the New Republic, she had seen her children kidnapped and used as political hostages. Later, she had watched those same children become Jedi Knights and leave on dangerous missions of their own. Twice she had suffered the anguish of losing a son to war. And now, with her daughter known as the “Sword of the Jedi,” a month seldom passed when Leia did not find herself wondering whether her last surviving child would return from a mission alive.

  So Leia knew all about worry, and she knew how to handle her fears—even how to use them.

  But this time felt different. Han called on luck the way Jedi called on the Force—and luck wasn’t the Force. The Force was all-encompassing, eternal, and infinite. Luck was fickle. It came and went, favored some and spurned others. Luck was mathematics, the rules of probability. Mathematics said you simply could not win every long shot.

  And yet Han had been taking long shots his whole life. If this turned out to be the time his luck finally ran out, the Qrephs and Mirta Gev would pay dearly for taking him. Leia would see to that—even if she had to spend the rest of her life hunting them down.

  “Careful,” Luke said. He was seated next to her in the cockpit’s dim blue light, monitoring the tracking beacon they had attached to Gev’s transport as she fled with Han. The vessel was still aboard the Ormni—that much they could be sure of. But who knew where Han was? “Hatred leads to the dark side. So does vengeance—even plotting it.”

  “Who says I’m plotting?” Leia asked.

  Luke only looked at her through the dim light—patiently.

  “Sorry,” Leia said, realizing she must have been allowing her rage to seep into the Force. “I wouldn’t call it plotting … but it’s hard not to dwell.”

  “I understand,” Luke said. “But you know there’s no sense in it. Han has been in worse situations, many times over.”

  “This feels different. The Qrephs are always two steps ahead of us. And that scares me.”

  “Me, too,” Luke admitted. “And I keep asking myself, Why Han? What makes him worth a million-credit bounty, when they were trying to kill Lando and us?”

  Leia considered the question for a time, trying to recall anything in her husband’s past that might explain the Qrephs’ interest in him, then finally shook her head.

  “All I can think of is a hostage situation,” she said. “They probably know that Ben and Tahiri are in the Rift looking for Ohali. Maybe they were hoping to have some leverage after they killed you and me.”

  Luke shook his head. “They’re too smart to believe that would work,” he said. “And that spider-bomb operation was a mess. I still don’t know why Dena Yus was trying to hold on to those things.”

  “You don’t?” Leia asked. The Blue Star surveillance vids had gone “missing” by the time R2-D2 could access the casino’s security computer. But she and Luke had managed to piece together a decent picture of Dena’s actions during the firefight from their own memories and Lando’s account. “It’s pretty obvious—she froze.”

  Luke considered this, then nodded. “I guess, but why? She’s been working with the Qrephs from the beginning, that much is clear. And she’s the one who set us up for the ambush. So why hesitate to finish us, when she just helped the Qrephs kill thousands of refinery workers?”

  “Maybe she was supposed to hit us somewhere else, or maybe the firefight vacced her brain, or maybe the purse latch was stuck.” The speculation was beginning to frustrate Leia, for it only served to remind her how little they actually knew about the Qrephs and their organization. “She didn’t stick around to take questions, so all we can say for sure is that Dena Yus works for the Columi. And whatever they have planned, by the time we figure it out, it could be too late for Han.”

  “It
won’t.”

  Luke’s hand settled on Leia’s arm and squeezed, and she began to feel a little less helpless—if not entirely confident.

  “Han is going to be fine,” Luke said. “I promise.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate the reassurance.” Leia patted Luke’s hand, then removed it and said, “But I don’t want you making promises that may get you into trouble. These guys are too dangerous for that.”

  “You seem to be forgetting who I am, Jedi Solo,” Luke said sternly. “We are going to get Han back. And we are going to stop the Qrephs.” He paused for a moment, then let out an exaggerated sigh. “Once we figure out what they’re doing here, of course.”

  Leia had to smile. “Well, at least you have a plan—sort of,” she said. “I feel like Han is back already.”

  An alert chime sounded over the cockpit speaker, then a standard distress message scrolled across the pilot’s display. INCOM RECONNAISSANCE CRAFT X396 REQUESTS EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE. ALL SPEED.

  Leia’s brow went up. “Three ninety-six,” she repeated. “Isn’t that—”

  “Ohali Soroc,” Luke finished. Over nonsecure comm networks, Jedi StealthXs were currently identified only as Incom Reconnaissance Craft. “Artoo, give us the coordinates.”

  R2-D2 replied with a negative chirp, then loaded a routing report onto the pilot’s display. It showed that the message had passed through only one repeater beacon.

  “Wherever that came from, it’s definitely close,” Leia said, already starting to feel torn. She wasn’t about to leave without Han, but the first law of space travel was Respond to a distress signal. And this was a Jedi in distress. “She has to be less than a light-year away.”

  R2-D2 gave a confirming tweet. A schematic appeared on the display, showing the repeater beacon within a quarter light-year of the ScragHull, somewhere within a 140-degree arc to the stern.

  “Why behind us?” Leia asked.

  Another chart appeared on the display, this one showing the location of every repeater beacon nearby. The Ormni was hanging at the absolute edge of the ’Mesh, with nothing beyond it but a huge bubble of uncharted Rift. Since the message had come over a RiftMesh repeater beacon, it had to have come from behind them.

  Leia began to feel even more worried and lonely. She could not count the number of times that she had stood on the edge of the abyss, staring down into its black heart. But it had never felt quite so literal before—perhaps because Han had usually been there, staring down into the darkness along with her.

  Leia’s contemplation was interrupted when Luke asked, “Artoo, is there any indication that Jedi Soroc is still with her craft? Or whether she’s still alive?”

  The droid responded with a negative chirp.

  “So, maybe a trap,” Luke said. “Gev could have found our tracking beacon.”

  “Probably a trap,” Leia corrected, her heart climbing into her throat. If the Qrephs knew about the tracking beacon, they would be expecting Luke and her to make a rescue attempt on Han. “It seems very unlikely that Ohali Soroc just happened to run into trouble nearby while you and I are trying to sneak aboard the Ormni.”

  “Right. And if something had just happened to her this close, we would have felt it in the Force.” Luke paused to think, his face growing more sad and worried as he worked through Ohali’s possible fates. “This is no coincidence. They’ve captured Ohali’s StealthX, and they’re trying to use it to draw us out.”

  “And if the Qrephs have Ohali’s StealthX …” Leia let the sentence trail off as she sorted through the implications of the distress signal, then finally asked, “Luke, what about Ben and Tahiri? If they’ve been looking for Ohali, they might have run into the Qrephs themselves.”

  Luke shook his head. “They’re fine,” he said. “At least, Ben felt fine when I tried to summon him.”

  “When did you do that?” Leia asked. She did not need to inquire how Luke had tried to summon his son. Force-sensitive relatives could usually sense each other across vast distances. “After they took Han?”

  Luke nodded. “Before we left the Blue Star,” he said. “I thought we could use some backup.”

  Luke did not need to add that it was impossible to know whether Ben had actually understood what he wanted. For all its power and mystery, the Force could provide only a vague impression of a loved one’s condition—it wasn’t a comm network.

  “Backup couldn’t hurt,” Leia said. “But even if Ben and Tahiri haven’t tangled with the Qrephs yet, I’m worried about that distress signal. We need to warn them off.”

  “Maybe,” Luke said. “Let me think.”

  He fell silent, no doubt contemplating the same dilemma as Leia. Trying to warn Ben now—even by reaching out in the Force—would probably alert the enemy to their own presence. That would compromise their attempt to rescue Han and probably put him in even greater danger. Leia did not think she could bear turning back, but neither could she risk her teenage nephew’s life to save her husband’s.

  “Luke,” Leia said. “There’s nothing to think about. Ben will respond to that beacon—”

  “Ben is a Jedi Knight,” Luke interrupted. “So is Tahiri. If I didn’t trust them to handle situations like this, I wouldn’t send them out.”

  “Luke, we know this is a trap. Han wouldn’t want us to risk Ben—”

  “And Ben wouldn’t want us to sacrifice Han,” Luke said, cutting her off again. “But it’s not their decision, or even yours. It’s mine—and I have faith in Ben and Tahiri.”

  Leia fell into silence, unsure of whether to thank Luke or defy him. No matter what they did, they were putting someone in grave danger—which was probably exactly what the Qrephs intended.

  As Leia struggled to adjust her thinking, Luke turned to R2-D2 and asked, “How long will it take that distress signal to reach the Falcon?”

  Even before he had finished the question, Leia’s stomach sank. Lando and Omad were waiting aboard the Falcon, just two light-years away—and they didn’t have the Force to warn them off. When Ohali’s distress signal reached the Falcon, they would no doubt respond—and fly straight into the Qrephs’ trap.

  R2-D2 spent a few moments calculating, then tweedled in uncertainty. A brief message scrolled across the pilot’s display. MINIMUM TWENTY MINUTES. MAXIMUM UNKNOWN.

  They pondered the droid’s answer for a moment, then Luke said, “I think we proceed as planned. Even if the distress signal reaches the Falcon in just twenty minutes, it will take time for Lando and Omad to pinpoint the source and plot a course. And then they’ll still need to make the trip. So we have at least forty minutes—and, more likely, four or five hours.”

  Instead of answering immediately, Leia paused to think. Beyond the forward viewport, the Ormni had already stretched to the length of her forearm—large enough that she could see tiny specks of astrolith tumbling down the intake maw in its bow. But there was nothing to suggest that she and Luke had been spotted yet—which was not surprising, given the nature of their borrowed vessel.

  Lando’s little ScragHull spyboat used some of the same sensor-defeating technology as a Jedi StealthX—and it was better armored. Its biggest drawback was the lack of low-visibility sublight engines, but that deficiency could be overcome by simply drifting to the target—as Leia and her brother were successfully doing at that moment.

  Leia glanced back at R2-D2. “Artoo, if we get jumped, the first thing you do is warn Lando and Omad off that distress signal. I don’t like gambling with their lives.”

  R2-D2 emitted an acknowledging bleep.

  “Good,” Luke said. “And may the Force be with us—all of us.”

  But it seemed the Force wasn’t with them. A few moments later, a spray of blue darts exploded from a hangar mouth on the near side of the Ormni. Leia recognized the sight as a launching starfighter squadron, and her assessment was confirmed when the designator symbols for ten Mandalorian Bes’uliiks appeared on the tactical display. She reached for the engine igniter switch—but instead of fann
ing out to attack, the Bes’uliiks arranged themselves into a delta formation and circled back over the Ormni.

  “They’re forming up for escort duty,” Leia said. “Someone is getting ready to leave.”

  As she spoke, the silvery crescent of a personal transport rose from a docking berth atop the Ormni. The tactical display identified the vessel as the Marcadian luxury cruiser Aurel Moon, but its transponder code quickly grew unreadable as its escorts swarmed around it. Leia looked up again to find the entire formation turning away, heading deeper into the Rift—beyond the RiftMesh.

  “The Qrephs must be more frightened of us than we thought,” Leia said. “That’s uncharted Rift they’re heading into.”

  Luke remained silent and stared out the viewport, his face clouding with worry. Leia needed only a second to realize what was bothering him. The Qrephs had paid handsomely to take Han captive—and Leia didn’t see them leaving their investment behind.

  “They’re taking Han with them,” she said.

  Luke nodded but said, “Assuming that’s actually them in the Aurel Moon.” His gaze remained fixed out the window. “But these are Columi. If we try to outthink them, we’ll lose.”

  “So we need to locate Han,” Leia said, coming to the same conclusion. “Which means using the Force.”

  “We don’t have a choice anymore,” Luke said. “The only way our drift approach makes sense now is if we assume Han is still aboard the Ormni—and how likely does that seem?”

  “Not very.”

  “Not at all,” Luke said. “You’ll have a better feel for where Han is, so you take the yoke. I’ll ready our weapons.”

  Luke armed their entire magazine of proton torpedoes and began to designate targets. Leia watched just long enough to see that he was preparing a close-range shock attack, then closed her eyes and extended her awareness toward the Aurel Moon.

  She sensed dozens of Force auras around and aboard the yacht. There was the cold focus of the Mandalorian escort pilots, the embittered anxiety of the Moon’s crew and domestic staff, the arrogant self-satisfaction of the Qrephs themselves … and a groggy, slumbering, cranky presence that had slept next to Leia for decades.