Inferno

by Troy Denning

  “Finish it?” Caedus deactivated the lightsaber and tucked it into his belt, then used the Force to pull the boy to his feet. “Ben, we’re just getting started.”

  sixteen

  The smoke in Military Hangar 15 hung gray and gritty, seeping between floor panels and door seams, billowing through the entrance every time the barrier field was lowered. Wookiees with singed fur and patches of blistered flesh were loping back and forth, rushing to ready the Jedi StealthXs before the hangar went up in flames. Leia was alarmed by how quickly the conflagration was spreading across Rwookrrorro, but she was hardly surprised. Even in a damp climate like Kashyyyk, fires of a certain size were self-feeding monsters, drying the surrounding forest so they could devour it. And Jacen was making sure every fire reached the necessary size.

  “Burning the wroshyrs is bad enough,” Han said, stepping off the Falcon’s ramp beside her. “But targeting the cities?” He stifled a cough. “We should have dropped that kid out the medcenter window the day he was born.”

  The bitterness in Han’s voice made Leia’s heart ache. “Han, please.” Her eyes began to water, but she convinced herself it was the smoke to blame. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Oh, no?” Han retorted. “Look around, sweetheart. These beings used to respect me.”

  Leia didn’t bother doing as he suggested. It was impossible to miss the furtive looks being cast their way, or—for a Jedi—not to feel the mix of anger and pity permeating the Force.

  “I’m certain they’ll forgive you for not doing a better job with Jacen,” C-3PO said, clunking down the boarding ramp behind them. “Wookiees tend to be very understanding about difficult children.”

  “It’s been a long time since Jacen was a child, Threepio.” Leia peered into the smoke, searching for her brother, and said to Han, “And if we had dropped him out a window, the galaxy would belong to the Yuuzhan Vong right now. Whatever Jacen has become, he was a hero once. Jacen Solo saved the galaxy.”

  “Yeah? Well, there is no Jacen Solo now.” Han started across the hangar floor toward a quiet corner, where Luke and the Council Masters were barely visible through the smoke, gathered in a tight group plotting strategy. “Jacen Solo is dead. My son wouldn’t do this.”

  “Where have I heard that before?” Leia started after him, shaking her head at his customary hyperbole. “Let me think. We were on the Falcon, inbound toward Corellia, and we’d just learned what he’d done to Ailyn …”

  Leia stopped in her tracks, letting the sentence trail off. Han wasn’t exaggerating, she realized. He was right. After what had happened to Jacen as a prisoner of the Yuuzhan Vong, their son might have been capable of torturing Ailyn Habuur to death. But he would never have been capable of setting an entire planet ablaze, not the compassionate child who used to sneak pets into his room in the Jedi academy on Yavin 4—and certainly not the Jedi Knight who had shown the galaxy how to make peace with a species that didn’t even have a word for it.

  That Jacen was dead. Leia felt it now as clearly as she had when Anakin died, a terrible ripping deep inside that left an aching hole in her heart. But this time the ripping had come slowly, and she hadn’t recognized what was happening. She hadn’t believed she was losing Jacen, not really, until her lungs were burning with smoke from the fires he had set and her stomach was queasy from the smell of singed fur and scorched hide … until she heard Han say the words.

  Jacen Solo is dead.

  It only took about seven steps for Han to realize Leia wasn’t following. “Ah, stang,” he said, marching back. “Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Leia tried to answer, but all that came out was a garbled croak.

  Han frowned. “What’s wrong? I haven’t seen you look like this since …” His jaw dropped, and suddenly he looked as crestfallen as Leia felt. “What is it? Has something happened to Jaina?”

  “No,” Leia managed. She wanted to wail, to tear at her hair and sink into catalepsy, but she could not. Her grief seemed trapped inside, a fuming reservoir of rage and pain that would keep burning her up until it finally exploded. “Jaina’s … she’s fine. It’s Jacen.”

  “Jacen?” Han’s scowl returned, then he glanced heavenward as if to suggest that he knew his greatest disappointment was still up there. “I don’t get it. Are you saying Lowie got him?”

  Leia shook her head. “No, Han. I’m saying you’re right. There’s nothing left to get.”

  Han looked more confused than ever, but before she could explain, her brother arrived with Saba and the other Masters and came straight to her side.

  “Leia, what is it?” he asked. “I felt—”

  “It’s about Jacen,” Han said, answering for her. “I said something stupid.”

  “Han, you’re not listening.” Leia still felt like she had a hole in her heart—or maybe it was an abscess—but she was starting to recover; after all, she had been through this before. “It wasn’t stupid. You were right.”

  Luke looked to Han. “About what?”

  An expression of chagrin came over Han’s face, and he didn’t answer.

  “If Captain Solo is having trouble remembering, perhaps I can help,” C-3PO volunteered. “He said—”

  “I said Jacen is dead,” Han said, cutting off the droid. He put an arm around Leia’s shoulders and pulled her to his side. “Sorry, sweetheart. I thought you’d figured that out by now.”

  There was a lot of bitterness in his voice, but it was directed at the monster who had taken Jacen’s place, and that was how Leia knew he was hurting as much as she was.

  Luke didn’t seem to find either of the Solos’ tones reassuring. His lips tightened in the way they always did when he steeled himself to make a difficult statement, and he made a point of meeting Han’s gaze.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re not in a good frame of mind to fight.” He glanced at Leia, then added, “Either of you.”

  Han’s jaw dropped, his expression changing from disbelief to anger to determination. “Just try to stop us,” he said. “Jacen’s our son, and that makes him our problem.”

  “Master Skywalker is right, Han,” Kyp said. “You’re too angry to fight. If you could feel yourself in the Force—”

  “I don’t need the Force to tell me how angry I am,” Han said. “And I’ve got a kriffing good reason.”

  And then they fell to arguing, Han insisting that nobody was going after Jacen without him, Luke and the Masters using the weakest of all weapons against his stubbornness—logic—to argue otherwise. Leia did not join in. While she knew her brother and the others were right, she also knew it would be easier to hit escape velocity off a black hole than to fight Han on this.

  Besides, Leia was too burdened by her sorrow, by the knowledge that it had finally come to this—Han ready to kill their own son, and she ready to help him. Was that the limit of a mother’s love? Torture and murder were not enough to turn parents against their child, but burning a planet was? She thought back to her last conversation with her sister-in-law, when Mara had asked whether she thought Jacen could be corrupted by Lumiya, and she wondered what had prompted the question. Had Mara sensed then what Han and Leia knew now, or had the coup finally been enough to make her doubt Jacen?

  And then it hit her. Maybe Mara wasn’t the only Jacen supporter who had started to question her own judgment. If an illegal coup was enough to raise doubts in Mara’s mind, how would setting fire to Kashyyyk affect Tenel Ka? Had the colonel finally made a calamitous mistake? The kind that could change the destiny of a galaxy?

  By the time Leia returned her attention to the argument, Tahiri had arrived to join in. With purple circles under her eyes and her StealthX flight suit hanging off her as though it were two sizes too large, she looked anything but rested, and Leia worried that Jacen’s transformation was taking a toll on her, too. The two of them had grown fairly close after Anakin’s death—drawn together, she thought, by their love of him and their common experiences as captives of the Yuuzhan Vong
.

  “… even if the Falcon did have stealth technology,” Tahiri was telling Han, “in your mind frame, it’s a suicide run.”

  “I know,” Han shot back. “I’ve made lots of ’em.”

  “Han, they’re right.” Leia took his arm and squeezed hard, interrupting his rant long enough to make her point. “Getting ourselves killed isn’t going to stop Jacen—or help Kashyyyk.”

  Han scowled down at her. “Yeah, so?”

  “So I don’t know about you, but I’m not big on meaningless death,” she said. “I’d rather do something that actually has a chance of saving some of these wroshyrs.”

  “Like what?” To Leia’s surprise, it was Tahiri who asked this. “If you think you can fool us by saying one thing and doing another, try again.”

  “Jedi Veila!” Saba admonished. “Princess Leia would do no such thing. She is a Jedi Knight, the same as you.”

  “She’s also married to Han Solo,” Tahiri retorted. “And that’s been one of his favorite tactics since before you were hatched. I want to know what she’s got in mind.”

  “Not that.” Leia kept her attention focused on Han. “We’re not ready for the scrap heap yet, flyboy. What do you say we do something useful?”

  Han’s arm finally began to relax. “You’ve got a plan? You’re not just saying that?”

  Leia smiled. “It’s a real beauty.” She started to pull him back toward the Falcon. “Trust me.”

  “This can’t be the place.”

  Alema was staring out through a transparent band of Ship’s hull, studying a dusty wreck of a spaceport. Half the berth space was occupied by rusting transports, and the other half was so saturated with spilled service fluids that the slightest spark might send the whole place up in a toxic fireball. A mixed-species ground crew of slovenly technicians was squatting outside the portmaster’s office, rolling fist-sized knucklebones and making a point of ignoring her.

  “You made a mistake,” she said to Ship.

  Ship did not think so. This was where the navigation string had led. If the Broken One had not wanted to go to Korriban, the mistake was hers.

  “This is Korriban?”

  Alema was horrified … and confused. Every Jedi student read about Korriban and its dark past—especially the Valley of the Dark Lords, where the spirits of ancient Sith Masters were said to still linger. But there was no mention of it being a modern Sith stronghold. In fact, Luke seemed mostly to want to ignore the place, banning all navigation data regarding it from Jedi computers and asking the Galactic Alliance to do the same.

  Looking out at the dilapidated spaceport, Alema could not imagine why he’d bothered. Even if the planet was a nexus of dark side power, it was hardly going to tempt anyone. From what she had seen as they landed, the village that surrounded the spaceport was even more of a ruin.

  “Are you sure this was the only population center?” Alema asked. “There can’t be Sith here.”

  Ship had detected no other concentration of habitations anywhere on the planet. It was not lost on Alema that it said nothing about the Sith. Recalling how devoid of luxury Lumiya’s habitat had been, she closed her eyes, clearing her mind of the prejudice of appearance, and started to meditate.

  It didn’t take long before she began to feel the cold pall that hung over the planet, a miasma of dark side energy that felt as ancient as it was strong. If there were any Sith here, it would be hard to separate their Force auras from that of the planet itself. And that made it the perfect place to hide.

  Alema went to the spot where Ship usually extruded a boarding ramp for her. “We have come all this way,” she said, assuming a casual tone. “It will not hurt us to have a look.”

  The hull remained solid, and Ship seemed to feel vaguely insulted that she thought it could be fooled so easily.

  “We are not trying to fool you,” Alema said, using the Force to push sideways against Ship’s desire to keep her aboard. “We only wish to ask the ground crew where we are, to prove you made a navigation mistake.”

  Ship had not made a mistake. It knew what the Broken One really intended to ask the crew, but it was not going to fight her. Perhaps the Force would grant its wish and let her get herself killed. A section of the hull melted open and shaped itself into a ramp.

  A bit unsettled by the uncustomary ease with which she had won the argument, Alema descended the ramp and crossed the grime-slickened floor to the ground crew. They looked more shabby than tough, with holes in their overalls; gaunt faces suggested they were not eating well. The Bothan’s fur was matted close to his body, the Barabel’s scales were too caked with mold to lie flat, and the human’s skin was pocked with red sores.

  Alema stopped at the edge of their game and watched them play. When the Bothan cursed and passed the bones to the Barabel, she cocked her hip and placed her good hand on it.

  “Hello, boys. We know you’re busy, but maybe you can help a girl out.”

  The Bothan and the human looked her up and down in a way that no male had since before Tenupe. Alema was so flattered that, when the Barabel took advantage of their distraction to roll the bones and turn one so that he had a set of matched suns, she used the Force to roll it back to its proper position.

  The Barabel scowled up at her, while the Bothan bared his fangs in that predatory smile males often got when they realized they were being invited to make an advance.

  “For a bent girl like you, maybe we can find some time,” he said. “What do you need?”

  Alema returned his smile with one just as predatory. “Just an answer,” she said. “And maybe a map to your place.”

  The human stood and stepped a little too close, considering how he smelled. “I’ve got answers, too.”

  Alema cocked her brow. “We’ll bet you do.”

  The Barabel hissed and slapped the knucklebones aside, then sank onto his haunches to wait for the game to resume.

  Alema ignored him and asked, “So where do we find the Sith?”

  The change in the Bothan’s expression was so subtle that Alema barely noticed, and the human did a credible job of looking confused. Their Force presences were another matter, becoming drawn and so frightened that Alema thought they might attack.

  “You don’t.” The Bothan stood and motioned to the others. “Come on, you two. We’ve got work to—”

  “What about our answer?” Alema’s tone was flirtatious, but the strength with which she Force-grabbed him was not. “We just hate being disappointed.”

  The human crashed into his taskmaster’s back and appeared confused for a moment—then he heard the Bothan wheezing for breath and looked back to Alema in dread.

  “The S-sith are d-dead. Have been for c-centuries.”

  “Come now.” Alema put her hand under the man’s chin and drew his face close to hers. “You can’t lie to a Jedi.”

  She crushed his jaw with a Force squeeze and sent him stumbling back into the port-master’s office, then returned her attention to the Bothan.

  “We will ask nicely one more time. Where are the Sith?”

  “Don’t make a difference how you ask,” the Bothan answered—rather bravely, Alema thought. “Whatever you do to us—”

  “Usss?” the Barabel hissed. “Rak’k is not going to hide them. If OneTail wantz to die, it is fine with him.”

  Alema turned to the Barabel. “Thank you. Where do I find the Sith?”

  “Rak’k is risking a living death by telling you,” the Barabel replied. “He should be rewarded.”

  Alema shook her head. “Sorry. We find scales so … disgusting.”

  “Who cares about scales?” Rak’k asked, looking confused. “Rak’k is talking about your ship. When you don’t come back—”

  “If,” Alema corrected. “Why do people always underestimate us?”

  The Barabel lowered his brow ridge. “How would Rak’k know? He just met you.”

  “So you did.” Alema glanced back at Ship, trying to guess what it would do to any non-Fo
rce-user who tried to command it. “Do you think you can handle our ship?”

  Rak’k nodded confidently. “The ship has not been built that Rak’k cannot pilot.”

  Alema wasn’t entirely sure that Ship had been built, but Rak’k clearly thought he was sending her to her death, so it would probably serve the Balance to make the bargain. Besides, about two minutes after she left, her slippery Force presence was going to cause him and his companions to forget all about her—and the bargain. That would not stop them from trying to steal Ship, of course, but at least they would deserve whatever happened to them.

  “Done,” Alema said. “Where do we find the Sith?”

  The Bothan managed to crane his neck around to stare at the Barabel. “Rak’k, you can’t tell—”

  “The Valley of the Dark Lordz,” Rak’k said.

  Alema released her Force grasp on the Bothan and grabbed Rak’k instead, pulling him close. “We mean living Sith, Bonebrow.”

  “So does Rak’k,” the Barabel said.

  “Rak’k!” the Bothan snapped.

  Rak’k ignored him and continued, “Go to the valley mouth. You will find their cloister.”

  The Bothan groaned miserably. “Rak’k, if you didn’t just get us all killed, you’re fired.”

  Rak’k shrugged. “He did not have good hunting here, anyway.” He turned back to Alema. “What are the access codes?”

  “There aren’t any,” Alema said. “Just go to the door and let yourself in. After that, it flies itself.”

  The Barabel glanced toward Ship, who was throbbing crimson with rage, and looked doubtful. “You are not lying?”

  “Of course not.” Alema started to pat his cheek, but saw the curling scales again and drew back her hand. “Haven’t we always been honest with each other?”

  The Barabel considered this a moment, then nodded. “You are going to need transport.” He glanced at the Bothan, then added, “Yas’tua has a working swoop.”

  The Bothan’s eyes grew narrow and cold. “No need to fire you now,” he said. “If they don’t kill you, I will.”

  Rak’k shrugged. “Rak’k does not think so.” He looked toward Ship and bared his fangs. “He will be leaving soon on his new starship.”