The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Ben heard and felt the boom, distant and muffled, originating somewhere well beneath his feet, and was diverted enough to use the Force to seek out Jacen. Dimly, he could feel his Master, could sense movement and vitality from him.

  But the distraction was long enough for Ben to run clean into someone. He banged into rigid body armor, bounced off, and hit the metal floor butt-first.

  He looked up into the face of a CorSec officer glowering down at him.

  “Back the way you came, son,” the officer said. “This area is under lockdown.”

  “I’ve got to see my father,” Ben said, swiftly improvising. “He’s guarding the repulsor control room. I have to be sure he’s all right.”

  “No, kid, it’s off-limits.”

  “I have to know he’s all right.” Ben made the words a child’s frightened wail. He darted around the CorSec officer, eluding the man’s grab, and continued running down the corridor.

  He couldn’t keep his shoulders from riding up, tensing. He reached out with the Force, searching out the guard’s response to his action.

  Ben felt no intimation of danger—the guard didn’t aim his blaster. The man’s emotions were a mix of irritation and sympathy. Ben felt the man weigh a decision, and it took the boy a few moments to figure out what it was: whether or not to communicate with his fellows, warn them that the boy was headed their way. Then Ben felt the man choose against that course of action. The guard turned away.

  Ben grinned to himself. That was easy. But then he sobered. If his mission was a success, that nice, sympathetic guard might die in the destruction of Centerpoint Station.

  But if Ben hadn’t tricked the man, even more people might die.

  It was a small wrongdoing to prevent a bigger one. It was all in the interest of the greater good, the needs of the many. Ben had heard these words hundreds of times, mostly from Jacen, and finally he began to have a sense of what they meant.

  Still, deep down, he remembered his father once saying, There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you’ve constructed an entire philosophy of evil.

  Troubled, Ben ran on.

  With his lightsaber, Jacen batted away the blasterfire coming from the right-hand probot. He couldn’t aim his deflections; that would require too much concentration. Instead, with his left hand, he reached out through the Force and found the projectiles being fired by the left-hand probot. He seized them and redirected them in two streams, one stream toward each droid.

  They flew only as far as the droids’ deflector shields, out about a meter from their bodies, and adhered there. Then, one after another, they detonated.

  Jacen saw the deflector shields weaken with each explosion. He charged forward, relying on his speed and sudden motion to throw off the aim of the probot with the blaster. When the last of the projectiles had detonated, before the probot shields had time to strengthen, he lashed out, first right and then left.

  Two probots, sliced in half at the narrowest portions of their bulbous bodies, crashed to the metal floor.

  In the silence that followed, Jacen heard Thrackan say, “Open fire.”

  The rear rank of CorSec agents opened up with their blaster rifles. Each was set to full automatic fire and they filled the air with blaster shots.

  Jacen went into a fully evasive mode—running, leaping, dodging, spinning his lightsaber in a defensive shield that intercepted shot after shot.

  It wasn’t enough. He felt a burn against his left calf as a blaster shot grazed it. Another shot, almost as close, tugged at his right sleeve and left a char-lined hole in it.

  He leapt up and back, cartwheeling, and as he cleared the zone of heaviest fire, before the security agents could adjust their aim, he reached against the ceiling with the Force. He yanked against that simple, immobile metal surface for all he was worth.

  It came free, yielding to his pull. As he landed, a huge sheet of metal ceiling tore free from its housing almost directly overhead and crashed to the floor a mere two meters ahead of him. The far end of the same sheet remained adhered to the housing above, so what Jacen faced was a crude ramp leading upward—and acting as an angled shield between him and the blaster line.

  He looked up and frowned. His ramp led nowhere. Above the area where it had rested was heavier metal, a full bulkhead. But at least the metal sheet would give him a few moments’ rest.

  Even now, though, it was shuddering under the blaster impacts, turning bright in one spot where some of the security agents were concentrating their fire.

  Jacen peered out from around his impromptu shield, drawing fire, but gathering valuable information about his enemies’ tactics.

  He saw three of the blaster wielders changing out power packs simultaneously—obviously part of a scheduled rotation. So they were carrying enough power packs to maintain constant fire for a long time, to keep him pinned down.

  Jacen moved across to the other side of his shield and paused a moment before peeking out again. His enemies’ strength was also their weakness, and he’d use it against them—

  His comlink bleeped, three quick musical notes. The signal jolted Jacen. It was Ben, and it meant Target in sight.

  Jacen nodded. He wouldn’t just march forward in an effort to reach his objective. He’d continue drawing the station’s defensive resources toward him, giving Ben some time.

  He closed his eyes and looked with other senses for sources of power, of heat.

  There they were, several of them, so close together that they seemed to form a single line of energy: the blasters of his enemies. Rugged weapons doubtless kept in tip-top condition, they were doing a decent job of handling the tremendous heat demands of the constant fire.

  Well, he needed to change decent to poor. He reached out to those glowing energy sources, finding one at the end of the line. He poured his own power into it, pushed around to find weak spots, cracks, exits …

  He found one and exerted himself against it. It held against him for long moments. Then he heard a cry of alarm from one of the security agents … and the crack as the power pack of her blaster rifle exploded.

  Jacen dared a look. The agent was down, injured, her body smoking, and two other CorSec agents, a shield bearer before her and a rifleman next to her, were down, too. Now there was a small gap at the right side of the blaster line. Before the CorSec agents became aware of him, Jacen drew back … and went searching for the next power pack in line.

  The second one was even hotter and weaker. It took less of an exertion to make it detonate. He looked again and saw four more CorSec agents down, the rest slowing their rates of fire or switching to single-shot firing mode.

  Behind the lines, Thrackan turned and began trotting in the other direction, a comlink held to his lips.

  Jacen grinned humorlessly. Another few moments and this firing line would be a thing of the past … and he’d see what surprises his cousin had in store for him next.

  At a distance of fifty meters, Ben began to make out what guarded the door into the repulsor control chamber: two CorSec agents, one male and one female, and a floating ball-shaped droid with four arms dangling from it. Even as Ben saw them, the floating droid drifted out from the doorway, its repulsorlift humming, into the middle of the corridor as if to bar his passage.

  Two of its arms, ending in bulbous pods with barrels, rose to aim at him. Ben raised his own arms and shouted, “Don’t shoot! I’m only a kid!”

  Embarrassing words. He wanted to grow up so that he’d never be able to use an excuse like that again. But for now, it was useful.

  He heard the female guard say, “Hold your fire,” and then she stepped out to beckon Ben forward. He moved toward her at a quick walk. “I’m lost,” he wailed.

  “How did you get this deep into restricted areas?” she asked. Ben moved nearly ten meters closer to her as she spoke.

  “I was exploring in the tubes, and I got tired and hungry, and I fe
ll asleep, and then there were explosions and alarms and sounds of people running, and I finally found a real corridor, but I don’t know where I am.” He made it most of the way to the guards in the course of that speech; now only five meters separated them. He tried to summon tears, but they didn’t come. He decided he needed more practice.

  “Do you have a datapad?” the woman asked. “I can transmit you a map out of here.”

  “No,” Ben said. Now he stood in front of her and the hovering droid.

  It looked pretty sturdy, and he could see nodules on the top surface that probably indicated deflector shield generators. But he didn’t think its shields were up. Even without them, its bronze-colored metal hide suggested that it could withstand a blaster shot or two.

  “You stay right here,” the woman said. “I’ll get a printout of the map.”

  Her companion, who hadn’t budged from in front of the door, finally spoke. “No,” he said. “Protocol is we call it in and they send someone to escort him out of the area.”

  “There’s no one available to escort him,” she said. There was a slight edge of condescension to her voice. “Everyone’s been pulled off for Target Alpha. So we can babysit here until they send someone, maybe hours from now, or we can send him off with a map.”

  Her partner sighed, exasperated, but didn’t reply.

  Ben felt his pulse quicken. If the woman agent got her way, she’d be opening the door for him—one less task for him to undertake.

  Still, he’d have to take her out, and her partner, and the big floating ball in order to get into the room.

  Prioritize your steps, Jacen always told him.

  Priority One was the floating droid. It had to be some sort of combat model, so it was going to be tough, and maybe alert to attack, even from as unlikely a source as a redheaded urchin. Ben let his pouch gape open so he could look down at his lightsaber. If he reached for it, the droid might correctly interpret the motion as the herald of an attack. But he didn’t have to reach. After the droid, he’d take out whichever of the human agents was more alert to him, then the one less alert, but he’d wait for the moment to decide which was which.

  Another of Jacen’s lessons was Plan and time your steps. The woman was stepping up to the doorway and preparing to insert her identicard into a security board slot. The man wasn’t moving. It was a staredown.

  That gave Ben a moment to plan. He’d need to wait until the door was just opening. Then he’d take out the droid. His next priority would be getting into the chamber before the door closed again, and any security monitor might shut it as soon as it was open. So he’d rush through the door and deal with the human guards as he passed.

  After that—Jacen would be disappointed in him if he didn’t figure out some way off this station, but Ben didn’t have time right now. The staredown between the guards ended. Irritably, the man stepped out of the way and the woman inserted her identicard in the slot.

  Everything began to move in slow motion, as though the entire corridor were suddenly submerged in thick, invisible fluid. Ben saw the door begin to slide upward. Doors like this opened almost instantly, but his time perception was so dilated that he watched it as it rose a meter.

  He held his hand above his pouch and tugged through the Force. His lightsaber leapt up into his hand, and he snapped it on, swinging it at the hovering droid even as the distorted snap-hiss noise announced that the blade was coming live.

  Instead of slashing, he leapt upward and thrust down, aiming for one of the deflector shield nodules. The point of his lightsaber blade sheared through the bronze hull there, punching into the droid’s insides. Ben kept his hands on the lightsaber handle, letting his weight drag the weapon down through the droid.

  The droid fell almost as fast as he did—with agonizing slowness—and Ben could see the male guard reacting to the attack, bringing his rifle barrel up.

  Ben’s heels hit the ground and he continued downward, going into a sideways roll toward the now fully open doorway. The male guard tried to track the boy with his blaster rifle. The woman, her face distorted in surprise, was punching the CLOSE button on the security panel. Her identicard was still in the panel’s card slot.

  Ben came up on his feet between the man and the woman, so close that the man’s blaster barrel now protruded safely past him, and lashed out at the control panel. His lightsaber blade slashed into the controls and into the identicard, burning and fusing it into place. The blade came so close to the back of the woman’s hand that he saw her skin blacken along a four-centimeter patch. Her knuckles still hit the CLOSE button, even as the near edges of that button melted from the lightsaber’s heat. Ben continued his forward roll, going head over heels into dimness—and, as the door came slamming down behind him, into darkness illuminated only by the glowing blue blade of his weapon.

  He couldn’t make out much of the chamber’s interior. There was a large mass in front of him, as if someone had parked a small groundspeeder on its tail there—it didn’t correspond to anything Dr. Seyah had shown him in the simulations. There were little lights in various colors all over the walls.

  First things first. He spun and lunged back at the door, thrusting with his lightsaber at the top, where the lifter mechanism should be. He shoved the lightsaber blade in well above his head, cutting upward and sideways, trying to sever the mechanism or, failing that, fuse it. This would give him time to accomplish his mission.

  His mission. That thought almost made him dizzy. It was his mission now.

  His cutting done, he slapped the light control on the door control panel. White overhead lights came on and he spun, lightsaber ready, in case enemies waited there in the dark.

  No living enemies did. But the room was still not as it was supposed to be.

  The banks of lights, computers, and secondary control tables, some original equipment and some installed by the Corellians, lined the walls as they had in Dr. Seyah’s simulations.

  But where the main control table was supposed to be rested something else entirely.

  It was a mound of machinery as big as half a dozen Hutts engaged in a no-rules wrestling match. Roughly human-shaped, it had a desk-sized head that looked like a sensor node whose surface was thickly crusted with antennae, light monitors, and holocam lenses. Its torso was made up of mismatched modules, each at least as big as the head, connected with durasteel cables and light-bearing transparisteel fibers. Dangling torso units surrounded—perhaps incorporated—the control board Ben needed to access. The machine’s arms appeared to be the heavy-duty cylindrical limbs from a wrecker droid, and ended in the same clumsy, destructive manipulator hands. Instead of legs it had a thick bottom plate whose skirted edges probably concealed repulsorlift machinery. All these components were of different colors, some black, some silver, some industrial green.

  Fully upright, it would probably be four meters tall, but it sat hunched forward, like a lazy student kneeling with bad posture.

  Its head turned to bring two oversized holocam lenses to bear on him, and it spoke from somewhere in that head unit, its synthesized tones strikingly reminiscent of Jacen Solo’s voice: “Who are you?”

  “I’m Ben Skywalker,” the boy said. He didn’t add, I’m here to destroy this whole installation.

  “Wonderful,” the droid said. “I’m so happy to meet you. I’m Anakin Solo.”

  chapter fourteen

  CORONET, CORELLIA

  The Behareh Spaceport, though a minor one by the standards of Coronet or any decent-sized city, still sprawled for many acres, even though it was located only a couple of kilometers from the urban heart. Unfortunately for Jaina and the team members, it differed from the city’s main spaceport in a significant way: there was no central parking or hangar area for visitors’ groundspeeders, no large common-arrival point where it would be comparatively easy to remain inconspicuous. Instead, Behareh was divided into dozens of smaller commercial properties, usually with the offices and hangars of three or four firms clustered around
common launching and parking areas.

  Kolir directed Thann to a cluster of businesses whose parking area was surrounded by tall trees. He landed. Here, the city’s space raid sirens were not as loud as in the government districts, but continued to blare into the skies.

  As the groundspeeder slowed to a stop, Zekk’s eyes came open, alert, untroubled, unclouded by pain. “Are we on Corellia yet?” he asked.

  “Quiet, you,” Jaina said, but brushed a lock of his hair from his forehead, a gentle gesture robbing any sting from her words. “Thann, Kolir, status?”

  “Skywalker’s squadron is making a run over the government center,” Thann said. “To disguise the real purpose of their arrival and to give us some time to get airborne. As soon as we are, he’ll disengage and come over to escort us into space. Tahiri’s speeder will be here in a couple of minutes.” He frowned. “I think there’s something she’s not telling us.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not sure. She wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I have a likely proshpect,” Kolir said, and held up her datapad; on its diminutive screen was a red-and-yellow company logo that read: DONOSLANE EXCURSIONS. “Female human manager on duty. The offishes should be over—” She looked around and spotted a curve-topped yellow duracrete building straight behind the ground-speeder. “Over there.”

  The others looked in that direction but were diverted—another groundspeeder, this one an inconspicuous blue, settled down on the parking pad adjacent to theirs. At the controls was Tahiri Veila, blond-haired and green-eyed, a few standard years younger than Jaina; she was dressed in a utility worker’s gray jumpsuit. Beside her was Doran Tainer—tall, fair-haired, brown-eyed, square-jawed, and blandly handsome as any holodrama leading man, but incongruously dressed in brown grass-stained field-worker’s garments. Both were Jedi. At the moment, neither looked like it.

  In the speeder’s backseat was something roughly the size of a grown human woman, wrapped in a brown cloak from its calves to the crown of its head. Only feet protruded, clad in brown leather boots.