Abyss

by Troy Denning

  “Okay, I’m sure,” she said. “Whoever they are, they know what’s going on in there.”

  Han nodded. “Something is interfering with the reflective overlay, that’s for sure. But if it’s any consolation, unless PsiCor got the flash-damping fixed, the poor ruk who was looking through their scope just now is going to need a new set of retinas.”

  “Remind me to send him a box of bomb-bons,” Leia said. She raced back toward the balcony. “Come on. We need to get our patients out of there now, before Daala realizes Jaina is a diversion.”

  “Right behind you,” Han said, pounding along at her heels. “The first thing we need to do is take out those BeamStreaks.”

  “And every other speeder on that rooftop,” Leia agreed. “They’re going to want to follow us, and they won’t hesitate to steal something.”

  Leia reached the balcony and continued toward the stairs at the other end, but Han stopped long enough to place his thumb over the security pad next to the door. She heard the door slide open, then Han calling to the Jedi Knights inside.

  “Jaden, Avinoam, we need backup! Everyone else, get that crate fired up and out of here. We’ve got peepers across the way.”

  By the time he had finished, Leia was bounding up the stairs toward the pedbridge three levels above. She was in contact with the Force again, and she could feel waves of ire and pain rolling toward them from the Krabbis hostel. It was impossible to tell from their presences whether they were Mandalorians, but there seemed to be about half a dozen of them, all relatively calm and focused on the task at hand.

  When Han started to pound up the stairs behind her, Leia paused long enough to look down and give him a situation report. “I feel about six to eight of them, one in pain.”

  “The one that got blinded,” Han surmised. He was taking the stairs two at time, coming fast—even for a man who wasn’t in his seventies. “Are they on the move?”

  “Hard to …” Leia let her reply trail off as a cold chill of danger sense blossomed between her shoulder blades, then yelled, “Take cover!”

  She threw herself flat against the stairs, at the same time glancing down to make sure Han was doing the same.

  Leia found him already back down on the balcony, swinging around behind the staircase with his old DL-44 blaster pistol in hand. A trio of loud krumphs sounded from the Krabbis as a series of charges blew out three of the inn’s top-story viewports, then a flurry of colored bolts began to ring and ping off the durasteel around her, filling the air with the acrid stench of molten metal.

  “What the blazes?” Han yelled. “They’re firing at us!”

  “That’s what Mandalorians do, dear,” Leia called. “Cover me!”

  “Cover you?” Han immediately began to fire across the hoverlane, dribbling bolts back through the deluge pouring out of the Krabbis’s freshly shattered viewports. “Are you crazy?”

  “I married you, didn’t I?”

  Leia ignited her lightsaber, then sprang up and began to ascend the stairs two and three at a time. She hung her arm over the safety rail and wielded her weapon in one hand, her wrist swiveling and pivoting as her blade windmilled back and forth, deflecting bolts.

  Leia had barely reached the top of the stairs when she sensed a new danger and looked across the skylane to see the coil-wrapped barrel of a magrifle protruding through one of shattered viewports. She made a slapping motion with her free hand, and the weapon came free of the gloved hands holding it, then went flying along the face of the building. In the next heartbeat she used the Force to grab hold of one of the empty hands, then jerked a figure in red Mandalorian armor out through the viewport and sent him tumbling down through the skylane into the dark chasm beyond.

  Leia reached the pedbridge and started across the traffic-filled abyss toward the Krabbis. She was now several stories above its rooftop parking lot. The durasteel decking and side panels of the pedbridge were shielding her, preventing the snipers with a nearly impossible firing angle. For the first half a dozen steps, she could scarcely bring herself to believe that they had really opened fire. Though gloomy, the freight lanes beneath Fellowship Plaza were hardly the undercity. A firefight directly outside the Jedi Temple was going to draw instant attention from a lot more than the usual law enforcement agencies.

  By the tenth step, Leia realized why opening fire was the perfect strategy for the Mandalorians. Now that they had been discovered, the PsiCor wallscope was a real problem. If they let it fall into Jedi hands, it would be huge embarrassment for Daala. She would be forced to admit that she had shared top-secret technology with the Mandalorians—to use against the Jedi. The firefight gave the Mandos the chance to secure the wallscope. Even more important, the fight was drawing a lot of attention, and that would make it harder to sneak their patients out of the Temple without some nosy reporter or security team getting in their way.

  Leia had to finish this, and she had to finish it fast. She pulled her comlink out and, still running, opened a channel to Tekli. “How close are you?”

  “Not very,” Tekli reported. “The firefight has upset Barv. He won’t go into the FloatVan.”

  Leia exhaled in anger, then checked her chrono. “All right. We’ve probably got five minutes before the enforcement services start showing. If you don’t have him aboard in three, leave without him.”

  “Princess Leia, I don’t know if that’s—”

  “Just do it,” Leia ordered. “Better to leave one patient in the Temple than all four.”

  A lucky blaster bolt squeezed between the bridge’s decking and a side panel. It zinged past mere centimeters from Leia’s knees, then ricocheted off the other side panel and burned a painful graze across her shoulder blades. Kriffing Mandalorians. She clicked off the comlink without awaiting a reply, then reached the end of the bridge and turned to start down the stairs toward the Krabbis. On the rooftop below, a pair of armored figures were just emerging from a turbolift into the parking area. One of them, a sturdy-looking blond woman with rugged features, was helmetless and watery-eyed. In her hands was a large crate, which Leia assumed to be the PsiCor wallscope surveillance kit.

  The other, a tall masculine figure in blue armor, was using one hand to lead the blond by the arm and the other to hold a BlasTech R-20 scatterblaster. With an instinct worthy of a Jedi, he raised the scatterblaster the instant he cleared the door and sent a couple of quick volleys howling toward the tops of the stairs. Unable to deflect so many tiny bolts at once, Leia dropped behind the bridge’s side panels and, cringing as the fiery hail ricocheted off the durasteel, reached for her hold-out blaster.

  By the time she had pulled the little weapon from its hidden holster, the two Mandalorians were halfway to the closest BeamStreak and partially obscured by the staircase. She took the shot anyway, then saw her bolt burn through the crate in the blond’s hands.

  Showing no indication of even feeling the hit, the woman disappeared behind the staircase with the crate still clutched in her hands. Leia rose, intending to Force-spring down to the rooftop—then heard the cracking whooshes of igniting jetpacks. She spun toward the side panel in time to see five armored streaks come flying out of the Krabbis’s shattered viewports.

  Had these Mandalorians been attempting to flee, Leia would certainly have let them go and followed the crate. Had they been coming after her, she would have been happy to send them tumbling away with a series of Force shoves, so they could take their chances bouncing through the freighter traffic below. But all five were going for Han, and they were pouring so much blasterfire toward him and Jaden and Avinoam—who had come out to join him—that, in places, the balcony was red and starting to melt.

  Leia extended her hand toward the leading Mandalorian and sent him streaking downward with a violent Force shove. He shot through the traffic lane below in a streak of white flame, causing several booming crashes as startled freighter pilots slammed their vehicles into one another and the surrounding buildings. A couple of heartbeats later a distant blossom o
f orange erupted in the darkest depths.

  The whine of a repulsorlift engine sounded from the Krabbis’s rooftop. Leia did not need to look to confirm what she already knew: the blond woman and her escort were fleeing. The entire jetpack assault had been a diversion to help them escape with the PsiCor wallscope, and the Mandalorians were too disciplined—too cold—to waste a fellow commando’s sacrifice by risking the mission just to save a couple of lives.

  Leia raced back toward the balcony, where the last four Mandalorians were locked in hand-to-hand combat with Han and the two Jedi. Jaden and Avinoam were laying slash after slash across their foes’ armor and doing no more than melting shallow furrows into the impenetrable beskar’gam. Yet every time the Mandalorians tried to bring their own weapons to bear, they found themselves on the verge of losing either their balance or an arm. Clearly, the two young Jedi were going easy on their attackers, trying to convince them to surrender before it became necessary to kill them.

  And that would have been fine with Leia, except that these were Mandalorians, not your average run-of-the-processing-plant pirates. They prided themselves on being ruthless, treacherous, and efficient. The entire time Jaden and Avinoam were making nice trying to capture their attackers, they had failed to notice Han fighting for his life against the other two. Leia cringed, and Han ducked a line of blaster bolts, took a pistol butt across the spine, then came up cussing and punching, landing a vicious foreknuckle jab in an attacker’s throat armor.

  Still only halfway back across the bridge, Leia reached out in the Force toward the same commando. As his head rocked back, she gave it a powerful tug and sent him somersaulting over the safety rail. The Mando’s jetpack ignited almost instantly, but that merely sent him into a second-long spiral, which ended in a crimson plume as he crashed through the bed of a passing hoversled.

  The second attacker swept Han’s feet from beneath him and sent him crashing down on his back. The Mandalorian swung the emitter nozzle of his blaster rifle toward Han’s head, at the same time lowering his helmet toward Han’s face. In response, Han sneered and spat an ounce of phlegm across the commando’s eye plates.

  Shaking her head at Han’s defiance in the face of death—and loving him for it—Leia reached out in the Force and jerked the blaster rifle aside, though not quickly enough to tell whether the red spray that erupted beneath the muzzle was Han’s blood or the balcony’s molten durasteel. The Mandalorian’s helmet turned toward the barrel in momentary puzzlement; then he grabbed the weapon with both hands and swung it back toward Han’s head.

  But Han was already swinging his hips around and driving his knee into the back of the Mandalorian’s leg. A series of white blaster flashes stitched up the wall beside them, and Leia raced along, close to the pedbridge side panel, trying to gauge the distance to the balcony and whether she had any chance of Force-jumping that far.

  She was spared the necessity when a huge jade form came flying out of the mirrfield, a long chain flying from each of its four limbs. The figure landed on the balcony with a crash, and everyone, including Han’s attacker, spun around to find Bazel Warv’s immense head glaring down at them.

  The two Mandalorians fighting Jaden and Avinoam took full advantage of the distraction, leaping over the safety railing backward, then disappearing on pillars of jetpack flame. The one standing over Han was not so lucky. One of Bazel’s long arms lashed out and caught the fellow by his ankles.

  Bazel smashed the Mandalorian against the wall repeatedly, until the blaster rifle finally flew free, then he closed one hand around the fellow’s chest and began to squeeze. At first the Mandalorian remained silent inside his armor, no doubt confident that even a Ramoan’s great strength could not crush beskar steel.

  Then Bazel pushed past Han, still carrying the Mandalorian and leaving the Force void created by the ysalamiri. Jaden and Avinoam went after him, their lightsabers deactivated but in hand, yelling orders for him to stop. Bazel ignored them. Chains dragging on the balcony deck, he continued toward the staircase.

  Leia briefly lost sight of him as she neared the end of the pedbridge, but she heard a tremendous clatter of chains, and she could tell by the way Han’s jaw dropped—and the shock that Jaden and Avinoam radiated into the Force—that something strange had just happened. She reached the stairs and descended three stories in as many steps, Force-jumping from one landing to the next.

  When Leia reached the last landing, she found herself staring at something she did not quite understand. Bazel was standing on the balcony below. His chains were heaped at his feet, and the Mandalorian was still in his grasp. There was blood seeping from every seam in the man’s armor, and the Ramoan’s fingers were somehow inside the chest plate, having sunk through the beskar steel without so much as denting it. Obviously, he was using a Force-power—and one that Leia hadn’t even heard of.

  Bazel suddenly tipped his head back to look up at Leia. His beady eyes widened with alarm, then he finally seemed to notice Jaden and Avinoam behind him. He shook his massive wrist and sent the Mandalorian crashing to the balcony deck. To Leia’s amazement, there was not even a hole where Bazel’s fingers had pushed through the armor; the dead man’s beskar’gam remained perfectly intact.

  Leia was still contemplating how such a thing could be possible when Bazel’s deep voice rumbled up the stairs. “Princess Leia?”

  Brow rising at the note of recognition in his voice, Leia nodded. “Yes, Bazel.” She started down the stairs, moving slowly and cautiously to avoid alarming him. “Do you recognize—”

  Bazel raised one of his massive, stubby-fingered hands. “Stay there!” He glanced back at Jaden and Avinoam, then quickly added, “They’ll get you!”

  Leia stopped, then shook her head. “No, Bazel, they’re our friends.”

  It was exactly the wrong thing to say. A glimmer of suspicion returned to Bazel’s eyes, and his gaze shifted toward the staircase leading down. Han pointed his blaster pistol at the Ramoan’s back, and Jaden and Avinoam flipped their lightsabers around so they could use the hilts like clubs.

  None of this was lost on Bazel, of course. He glared up at Leia with unconcealed anger, then snarled, “You’re one of them!”

  He stepped toward the staircase, moving toward the down flight beneath Leia. Han glanced up, silently asking if he should open fire—with stun bolts, Leia assumed—while Jaden and Avinoam gathered themselves to spring.

  But Leia was spared the necessity of giving the order when Raynar Thul called out from the far end of the balcony.

  “Of course she is, Barv!”

  Raynar started up the balcony toward Leia and the others, his unblinking eyes fixed on the stairwell below her. As he moved, the FloatVan’s dome-shaped nose began to emerge through the mirrfield.

  “We’re all with them,” Raynar said. “You know that.”

  There were no heavy steps from the stairs below, and Bazel’s deep voice rumbled, “I do.”

  Raynar stopped and gestured at the FloatVan, which had now emerged far enough that its mid-body door was visible, hanging open above the balcony railing. Bazel’s empty stasis bed could just be seen, too, lying beneath a pair of olbio trees secured to the walls with cush-straps.

  “And you also know that you need to board the FloatVan,” Raynar continued. “No!”

  A single heavy step rang off the stairs, and Leia almost nodded to Han.

  Then Bazel suddenly stopped and asked, “Why?”

  Raynar smiled, or tried to. The stiffness caused by his burn scars made his expression a little cruel and forced, and it sent a chill down Leia’s spine.

  “Are you willing to leave Yaqeel alone with us?” Raynar asked. “When you don’t even know who we are?”

  A low, sad croak sounded from the stairs below, and for a moment Leia thought Bazel might actually abandon his best friend. She waited in silence, not even daring to search his Force aura for some sense of his thoughts, while the Ramoan contemplated his options.

  But Raynar had giv
en Bazel a choice that was no choice at all. To flee now was to abandon Yaqeel to the mysterious evil that ran rampant through the Jedi Order. And whether it was the benzodi in his system, making him more vulnerable to Raynar’s suggestion, or his own steadfast loyalty, Bazel simply could not abandon his friends.

  When Leia did not hear another heavy footstep descending the stairs, she motioned Han and the others to stand aside.

  Once they had obeyed, she called down, “Bazel, the choice is yours—but you need to make it now. We’re taking Yaqeel and the others away. They won’t be harmed, I promise you—”

  “As long as you go along.” Raynar also stepped aside, giving Bazel a clear path to the FloatVan. “If not …”

  Raynar let the threat hang. Bazel let out a long, anguished croak, then pounded across the balcony and hopped into the FloatVan, his tremendous weight actually causing it to list momentarily to one side. Tekli, Tesar, and the others quickly surrounded him and, through a combination of firm threats and gentle promises, began to cajole him toward his stasis bed.

  As the FloatVan closed its door, Leia descended the stairs. Seeing that Han was already standing—to her relief, seemingly in one piece—at Raynar’s side, she went over to join them.

  “That was incredible, Raynar,” she said. “Thank you.”

  A hint of red actually came to Raynar’s cheeks. “It was nothing, Princess.”

  “Hardly,” Leia replied. “Maybe you should consider helping Tekli on Shedu Maad.”

  Raynar looked back toward the Temple, then shook his head. “I don’t think I’m ready to leave yet.”

  “You sure?” Han pressed. “It looked to me like you kind of have a knack for dealing with cra—” He cringed as Leia stomped on his foot, but quickly finished, “er, mental illness.”

  “Anyone can manipulate our crazies, Captain Solo. You just need to work in their reality.” He watched as the FloatVan glided out into the traffic chasm and began to drop toward the hoverlane below, then turned to Leia and tried to grin. “And to remember that in their reality, you are evil.”