Star Wars - Edge of Victory - Book 1: Conquest

by Greg Keyes

  The two young Jedi touched down, feather light, on top of the turbolift.

  "Wow!" Tahiri said. "It's been a long time since we did that. That was terrific. And the way you got the gren­ades, too—that was artl"

  "I-"

  The car of the lift suddenly started again.

  Desperately Anakin cut into the power couplings and superconductor casings in the walls. The lift jarred to a stop. Meanwhile, Tahiri sliced into the roof of the car it­self and jumped back, in case there was blasterfire.

  But there was none.

  "I don't feel anyone on the lift," Tahiri said.

  "No. I sent it down to the third hangar level below the temple. I think Valin and Sannah got off, and then some­one called it back up—probably someone on the ground level. Judging by our drop, we're probably somewhere between—"

  An explosion six meters above him cut him off as one of the outer lift doors blew in.

  "'There's the ground floor, right there," Anakin said. •Come on!"

  He jumped down into the car. With his lightsaber, he cut through the car and the wall beyond, revealing an un­derground hangar that hadn't been used since the battle against the first Death Star.

  " You block their shots," Anakin told Tahiri.

  As bolts rained down and Tahiri deflected them, Ana­kin cut the fail-safe magnetic bolts that had locked the turbolift in place. He flicked off his lightsaber.

  "Cut your lightsaber, now!"

  "But—"

  "Quick!"

  She did, flattening against the lift walls as blasterfire poured through the hole above them. Another grenade plinked against the lift floor.

  "There. Throw that back at them," Anakin said.

  The grenade whizzed back up the hole. "Why didn't you do it?" Tahiri asked.

  "Because I'm holding the lift car up."

  Above them, the glop grenade went off, and Anakin let gravity have the car.

  It dropped like a stone.

  "Remember to jump up just before we hit bottom," Anakin gritted, as the lift hurled down through the layers of hangars and Massassi caverns below the temple.

  "Somebody wasn't paying attention in physics lec-rures," Tahiri said.

  "Nope. Mind the roof." And then they did jump, push­ing away from the lift floor with the Force, up through

  the jagged hole, into the turbolift shaft. Below them, the car hit bottom with a terrific din. Once again they drifted each other down upon it, but this time the car wasn't ex­actly level. It had wrenched the lowest doors from their hinges, and they were able to step through.

  The Rebel Alliance had converted square kilometers of Massassi caverns into hangars, but below that there were chambers and caverns more or less untouched. The turbolift went down only as far as the Alliance had used the caverns. After that it was stairs, winding corridors, and secret panels.

  "They'll look up there first," Anakin said. "They'll think we went through into the hangar where I cut the wall. By the time they think to look down here—in fact, hang on." He activated his wrist comm.

  "Fiver."

  affirmative. Fiver's response scrolled across the small display.

  "I need you to fly the X-wing out of the hangar. Avoid all pursuit until I call you again. Got that?"

  AFFIRMATIVE.

  "Good luck, Fiver," Anakin whispered.

  After a long descent, Anakin stopped in front of a blank wall. "Remember this?"

  "Is Dagobah up to its neck in mud?" Tahiri pushed a patch in the wall and it swung open. The two stepped through and closed it behind them. Anakin felt around in the rocks and came up with one of the two glow lamps that were usually secreted there.

  "Master Ikrit has already been here," he murmured. "With Valin and Sannah."

  "Yeah. I can feel them."

  "That was, umm, good back there," Anakin admitted. "Where did you get the lightsaber?"

  "Anakin Solo. You don't think I can build a lightsaber?"

  "I didn't say that. I just didn't think—"

  "Right. You didn't think, and you're still not thinking, and you'd better fix that before you say anything else. Now, let's find Master Ikrit."

  The pungent, rotten-egg scent of sulfur would have led them to their destination if their memories had not. Ikrit, Valin, and Sannah sat on the edges of an underground hot spring, just outside of a shaft of light that fell from a hundred meters or more above, where some long-ago force, natural or artificial, had cut through the soft stone.

  "I've never seen it in daylight," Tahiri murmured.

  When they were younger they had come here with Kam and Tionne to drift in the warm water and turn from in­ward to outward in the Force, to contemplate the stars above and the person within. It was a place all the students knew, but which was never spoken of to anyone else.

  "Good that you have come," Ikrit sighed.

  "You knew I would," Anakin said.

  "Yes. Still, it is good."

  "What will we do now?" Valin asked. He was trying to look brave, but Anakin could feel his fear.

  "Now? You guys will keep waiting here. It should be safe enough. I'm going to climb up there—" Tahiri elbowed Anakin in the side. "I mean," he corrected, "Tahiri and I will climb up there while we have light to see by. Then we'll hide until dark and stea—er, comman­deer one of their ships, one big enough for all of us."

  "And small enough to bring down here," Tahiri added.

  "Right. There's a light transport I think might fit the bill."

  "Do you remember the way up?" Tahiri asked.

  "You two did this before?" Ikrit asked. "Climbed up to the surface from here?"

  "Um, yes," Anakin replied. "When we were bored, once."

  "I thought I always had my eye on you," Ikrit said. "I must be getting old."

  Somehow, the Jedi Master looked old, older than Anakin had ever seen him. He sounded old, too.

  "Are you ill, Master Ikrit?"

  "Ill? No. Sad."

  "Sad at what?"

  Ikrit ruffled his fur. "It is inappropriate, my sadness. It is nothing. Go, succeed as you always do. Remember—" Ikrit paused, then began more strongly in a voice that made Anakin feel, suddenly, that he was eleven again. "Remember. You two are better than the sum of your parts. Together, you two could—" He paused again. "No. Enough. I've said enough. Together, that's the im­portant thing. Now go."

  They reached the top by nightfall and took shelter in a small cavern just under the lip of the pit. It was a tight fit, but impossible to see unless you were hovering right in front of it. They sat shoulder to shoulder, breathing deeply and working the cramps from their muscles.

  "You thought I was going to mess things up," Tahiri said suddenly.

  "What brought that up?"

  "There hasn't been time to talk about it until now."

  "Well, keep your voice down. It's not exactly the bright­est thing for us to be talking."

  "We'll feel them in the Force long before they hear us."

  "Unless they have Yuuzhan Vong with 'em. You can't feel them in the Force."

  "Really? Is that true?"

  "Yeah."

  "So?"

  "So what?"

  Tahiri punched his shoulder lightly. "So you thought I was going to mess things up. Get us all caught."

  "I didn't say that."

  "No, of course not. Wouldn't want to upset baby Tahiri."

  "Tahiri, now you're acting like a kid."

  "No, I'm not. I'm acting like someone whose best friend has completely forgotten she exists."

  "That's ridiculous."

  " Is it? When you left the academy with Mara, did you even bother to say good-bye? And since then, have you sent me a single message, or even reached out in the force? And just a while ago, when we did our old falling dance—you didn't like it. I almost had to catch myself!"

  "You're the one who resisted," Anakin said. "We were tailing like rocks, and you resisted me."

  "That was you, you big dumb gundark."

&nb
sp; "That's crazy. You—" But the whole scene flashed suddenly though his mind again. Maybe it had been him. When he and Tahiri worked together it was sometimes hard to tell who was feeling what.

  "See?" she said frostily.

  Anakin was silent for a moment, and so, miraculously, was Tahiri.

  "I did miss you," Anakin finally said. "No one knows me the way—" He broke off.

  "Right," Tahiri said. "No one knows you like I do, and you don't want anyone to. You want to keep all of that stuff in you, where no one can touch it. Chewbacca— even last time you were here you wouldn't talk about him. Now you pretend you're past it. And the thing at Centerpoint—"

  "You're right," Anakin said. "I don't want to talk about that. Not right now."

  Tahiri's shoulders began to shake, just a little, and Anakin realized she was crying.

  "Come on, Tahiri," he said.

  "What are we, Anakin? A year ago you were my best friend in the world."

  "We're still best friends," he assured her.

  "Then the way you treat your other friends must really stink."

  "Yeah," Anakin admitted. Almost without thinking, he reached for her hand. For a few seconds, she didn't re­spond. Her fingers were cold and motionless in his, and he suddenly believed he had made some kind of mistake. Then she gripped back, and warmth rushed around him like a whirlwind. She nodded her head over onto his shoulder, still weeping, and silence folded around them again. But this time it was an easier silence. Not happy or even quite content, but easier.

  After a while her breathing became regular, and Ana­kin realized she was asleep. By the faint orange light of the gas giant outside, he could make out traces of her fea­tures, so familiar and yet somehow different. It was as if, below the girl's face he had always known, something else was pushing up, like mountains rising, driven by the internal heat of a planet. Something you couldn't stop, even if you wanted to.

  It made him want to hang on and run away at the same time, and in a mild epiphany he realized he had felt that way for some time.

  As children they had been best friends. But neither of them was a child anymore, not exactly.

  His arm had gone numb from her weight, but he couldn't bring himself to shift, for fear of waking her.

  Anakin woke Tahiri an hour before the orange planet set. The sun was not yet out.

  "It's time, "he said.

  "Good," Tahiri mumbled. "It's getting cramped in here." She shifted into a crouch. "Are the others still okay?"

  "I haven't heard or felt anything. Are you ready?"

  "Ready as rockets, hero boy."

  Carefully they climbed from the pit and padded through the jungle. The spicy scent of bruised blueleaf shrubs sug-

  gested a lot of searching had been done in the area, but for the moment it was quiet. Anakin and Tahiri made it to the ship landing clearing without incident.

  "I like that one," Anakin whispered, pointing at a light transport a little apart from the rest. "I don't think I'll have trouble flying it, and we can get it down the pit."

  "You're the captain, Captain."

  Anakin peered more closely at the ship and then began sneaking across the clearing. A guard several hundred meters away glanced in their direction, but it took only a faint suggestion to turn Anakin and Tahiri into shadow and planetlight.

  They found a guard in front of the ship, too, sitting on the open ramp. He came quickly to his feet when they saw him.

  •'You're needed around the other side of the temple," Anakin told him, with a slight wave of his hand.

  The fellow hesitated an instant, scratching his chin. "I'm needed elsewhere," he allowed. "I'll go, then."

  "See you later," Anakin said as the man started away, pace quickening as he went.

  "What the—?" A young man's face stuck around the corner. He looked as if he had just awakened. Seeing Anakin and Tahiri, the fellow's eyes went wide and he reached for his blaster. He stopped with the snap-hiss of Anakin's lightsaber igniting, probably because the glow­ing purple tip was centimeters from one of his gray eyes.

  "Easy," Anakin said.

  "Hey," the fellow said. "I'm always easy. Ask anyone. Would you, uh, mind getting that a little farther from my race?"

  " You have restraining cuffs here somewhere?"

  "Maybe."

  Anakin shrugged. "I can cut your arms off and get more or less the same effect."

  "In the locker over there," the fellow said, pointing.

  "Get them, Tahiri. What's your name?"

  "Remis. Remis Vehn."

  "You pilot this thing?"

  "Sure."

  "Any surprises I need to know about before I fly her?"

  Vehn winced as Tahiri pulled his arms back and snapped them in the cuffs. "Not that I can think of," he said.

  "Good. I'll keep you aboard though. If any occur to you, let me know."

  Anakin shut his lightsaber down, made his way to the controls, and looked them over. They weren't that different from those on the Millennium Falcon, his fa­ther's ship.

  Vehn cleared his throat. "I just remembered. Before you engage the repulsorlift you have to enter a clearance code."

  "Really? Or what happens?"

  "The cabin will sort of electrify."

  "I'm glad you remembered that," Anakin said dryly. "The code, please?"

  Vehn recited it while Anakin entered it. Then the young Jedi turned back to his captive. "Let me explain something to you," he said. "My name is Anakin Solo, and this is my friend Tahiri Veila. We are Jedi Knights, some of the people you came here to betray to the Yuu­zhan Vong. If you lie to us, we'll know it. If you try to keep something from us, we'll find it out. The only un­certain factor is how much we'll have to damage you to do so."

  Vehn snorted. "They were right. You Jedi and your high-minded ideals—it's all smoke screen."

  Anakin shot him a withering glance. "Next time I'm trying to capture children for Yuuzhan Vong sacrifices, I'll be sure to have a talk about 'high-minded ideals' with you. Until then, or until you have something useful to say, you keep your garbage lock cycled shut."

  He turned back to the controls. "Hang on, Tahiri. This

  might go a little rough until I get the feel of it. And pay attention to Vehn. If you feel the slightest twinge from him, dig it out."

  "Yes, sir, Captain Solo."

  Anakin engaged the repulsorlifts, and the ship began to rise. Before he closed the ramp, he heard someone shout­ing outside.

  "Call out to Master Ikrit," Anakin told Tahiri. "Use the force to let him know we're coming."

  And it's going to be tight, he finished, to himself.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Talon Karrde clasped his hands beneath his goatee and studied the scene on the Wild Karrde's command deck viewscreen through pale blue eyes.

  "Well, Shada," he told the striking woman at his right hand, "it appears that our baby-sitting chore has become somewhat more . . . interesting than anticipated."

  "I would say so," Shada D'ukal replied. "The sensor shroud shows at least seven ships in orbit around Yavin Four and another six on the surface."

  "None of them are Yuuzhan Vong, I take it."

  "No. A mixed bag, but I'd lay odds that they are Peace Brigade."

  "Gambling is a foolish occupation," Karrde said. "I want to know. And I want to know what they're doing." He ticked his finger against the armrest. "I knew we should have found some way to leave sooner. Skywalker was right." He sighed and leaned forward, studying the long-range sensors.

  "There's some sort of firefight on the surface, yes, H'sishi?"

  "Looks like it," the Togorian mewled.

  "Solusar?" Karrde wondered. "Maybe. How long be­fore we can be there?"

  "They outnumber us badly," Shada pointed out. "We should call the rest of our ships before we do anything."

  "We should certainly call them, but we can't wait for them. Someone down there is fighting for his life, most

  likely one of the people I told
Skywalker I would protect. What's more, the fact that there are still ships on the sur­face suggests they haven't finished what they came here to do. That is, they don't have the Jedi children yet. If we wait until they have them aboard, in space, the job of res­cuing them will become much more complicated."

  "I see that," Shada said. "But it will be more compli­cated yet if they blow us out of the sky."

  Karrde laughed. "Shada, when will you learn to trust my instincts? When have I ever gotten you killed?"

  "You have a point there, I suppose."

  Karrde pointed at Yavin 4, at the moment a dark disk silhouetted against the larger orange profile of its pri­mary. "So I want to be there, now. Dankin, keep full cloak, but let me know when they notice us."

  "Of course, sir."

  That point came an hour later, when they were almost sitting on the nearest of the orbiting ships.

  "They're hailing us, sir," Dankin told him. "And pow­ering up weapons."

  "Put them on."

  A moment later, a thick-featured human male with thin, graying hair appeared on the communication holoscreen.

  "Transport, identify yourself." He chopped the words out in even syllables.

  "My name, sir, is Talon Karrde. Perhaps you've heard of me."

  The man's eyes pinched warily. "Yes, I've heard of you, Captain Karrde. It's rude to sneak up on someone like that. And dangerous."

  "And it's rude to be given a name and not offer one," Karrde returned.

  A look of annoyance crossed the fellow's face. "Don't try me, Captain Karrde. You may call me Captain Im-satad. What do you want?"

  Karrde favored the man with a wan smile. "I was going to ask you the same question."

  "I don't follow you," Imsatad said.

  "You seem to be having some sort of trouble. I'm of­fering my assistance."

  "We need no assistance, I assure you. And to be blunt, Captain Karrde, I don't believe you. I remember you as a smuggler, a pirate, and a traitor to the Empire."

  "Then perhaps you remember, as well, what became of those who treated me with disrespect," Karrde said icily. "But if we are being blunt—and perhaps that is best here, since you seem to lack the education for more civi­lized discourse—I am undoubtedly here for the same reason you are—to collect the bounty on the young Jedi below."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."