by James Luceno
Now Ben could feel the concentrated dark side energy that waited below. It didn’t feel so much malicious as merely ominous—less an enemy threatening death than a somber realist reminding him that death was what he ultimately faced.
The rail noises, suddenly close and echoing, then distant and quieter, told Ben that they’d passed through a narrow region and emerged into another cavern, this one unlit.
He was grabbed by the collar from behind and yanked up out of his seat. He found himself floating, drifting through the darkness, perhaps hurtling at dangerous speeds toward sharp rock formations, and was so startled by the sudden transition that he didn’t even cry out.
RELLIDIR, TRALUS
“Incoming starfighters.” The voice of the leader of one of the two squadrons now escorting the Shriek bombers crackled in Han’s ears. “You two stay put, we’ll handle them.”
One of the fighter squadrons broke away from the formation. The other stayed in array around the Shriek bombers.
Han didn’t reply. His comm board was fixed to broadcast on a frequency and encryption code that would allow only Wedge and the mission controllers to hear him—it wouldn’t do for someone to recognize his all-too-distinctive voice. But Wedge said what Han was thinking, his tone ironic: “Thanks, sonny. I was mighty scared until you spoke up.”
On the sensor board, Han could see the dozen attack fighters head out southeastward against the incoming flight of half a dozen starfighters, unknown type.
Unknown type. Han frowned over that. He liked surprises, but only when he was springing them on someone else.
The outbound attack fighter formation neared the enemy formation and their lines blurred for a moment, then suddenly there were nine fighters instead of twelve, frantically turning in the wake of the unknown enemy. The enemy still numbered six.
“Not good,” Han said.
“Lasers to power,” Wedge answered.
Han checked his weapons board. The lasers in his topside turret were charged and ready to go.
Half the remaining attack fighter escort broke away from the Shrieks and turned toward the incoming fighters, forming a defensive screen. Red laser flashes, missed shots by the incoming enemy, flashed by laterally ahead of Han’s viewport.
Suddenly the six attack fighters that had just turned away became four on the sensors, and Han’s targeting alarm shrieked with the news that one of the enemy had a weapons lock on him. Han kicked his thruster, then fired repulsors, tactics to vary his speed and throw off the aim of his enemies. He spun so that his Shriek was presented edge-on to the enemy, dropped his own targeting brackets over the foremost enemy, and fired. The too-informative sensor board responded with an almost comical ding indicating he’d hit his target.
Six enemy starfighters, oversized silver balls trailing narrowing twin thruster pods, flashed by from right to left, pursued by a flight of Corellian attack fighters. In the distance to the left, the enemy craft began a slow turn back toward the fight.
Han blinked. “What the fierfek are those?”
“Sienar Aleph-class starfighters,” Wedge said. “Originally nicknamed Pondskippers because they were to be countermeasures to coralskippers. The current nickname is Twees. They’re out of prototype and in limited production.”
“Great. I hit mine with a good quad-linked punch and it didn’t even shudder.”
“Yeah, they’re supposed to be like shooting solid metal ball bearings.” Wedge switched over to the squadron frequency. “Nebula Flight, Panthers are making our break. Good luck.”
“Panther One, this is Nebula Leader. Blow something up for us.”
Han anticipated Wedge and broke first from formation, a dive that took him down, still eastward, toward the start of their approach to Rellidir’s downtown district. Wedge slipped neatly into his wake.
BATTLE CARRIER DODONNA,
ABOVE TRALUS
The starfighter control chamber was an exercise in controlled chaos—a sight familiar to Leia, who’d helped coordinate many starfighter skirmishes, starting with the Battle of Yavin.
Aboard Dodonna, they had bells and whistles she’d never enjoyed in the control room at Yavin. The entire battle was being reproduced via holograms over their heads, the skirmishes not exactly to scale but with each individual starfighter or vessel shown in a wire-frame form color-coded to whichever side the fighting vehicle represented. The GA forces were blue; Corellian forces, red; unknowns—including several vehicles, probably civilian, above Rellidir and heading away from that endangered city—in yellow. As they moved around, firing, sustaining damage, disappearing, the disconcerting combination of colorful icons and event noises made the whole display seem like an oversized console game experiencing delirium tremens.
Equipped with a specialized datapad handed to her by the chamber’s coordinator, a black-furred Bothan colonel by the name of Moyan, Leia could gather all sorts of data about the various forces. By pointing the datapad at any vessel or vehicle and tagging it with a beam of light from the device, she could display information about the target on the datapad screen.
For example, the fighter that had just winked out in the fight above Rellidir was designated Nebula Eleven, its pilot Gorvan Peel. The Corellian vessels were equipped with ejectors, and a moment after the fighter vanished, Leia’s screen was updated: EJECT SUCCESS, LIFE SIGNS OPTIMAL, QUEUE RESCUE #37.
As several of the coordinators in the chamber were doing, she pointed at one of the “mystery bombers” descending on Rellidir and sampled its information:
F/F: ENEMY
CLASS: CEC YT-VARIANT (UNKNOWN), EST. BOMBER
PILOT: UNKNOWN
Information on the other Shriek was identical.
Leia spoke quietly into her datapad, allowing its speech-to-text translator to add a notation to the data on the bomber: “Believed damaged, as it is turning away from GA targets. Recommend concentration on fighter escort.” She tapped the screen to send that datum to Dodonna’s database.
A flash of guilt washed across her. She was pretending to be helping the GA forces, and instead she was protecting her husband as he bombed them. She shook her head, trying to force the emotion away from her. No matter what she did during this fight, she’d be coping with guilt, and not keeping an eye on Han’s back would be worst of all … especially if he was hurt.
She turned her attention to the Alephs skirmishing with Han’s fighter escort.
CORUSCANT
His head filled with a baffling mix of emotions and images, Luke sat up in bed. He spared Mara a glance, saw that she was still asleep, and rose.
So pounded was he by sensations reaching him through the Force that it was actually difficult to think. Cautious, he opened himself to them, trying to sort them out.
betraying trust, to act is to betray, not to act is to betray
A mynock, its eyes glittering with unusual intelligence, stared at him from the distance of centuries.
the Sith are not what you think
Leia, her features smoothed by grief so great it could not be expressed, fell forward, folding over as she did.
dark dark I will not be afraid of the dark
Han, regret on his face, a vibroblade in his hand, lunged forward and slammed the blade between the ribs of a pretty young woman with dark hair.
I loved you in my own way, I would have repaired the harm I did you
Instinctively, Luke reached out through the Force to offer support and strength to Leia. The others he wasn’t sure about, whether they were really the individuals the visions represented, but he could feel the true Leia within the vision of her. He just wasn’t sure whether he was extending his gesture to the Leia of here and now, the Leia of some future time, or the Leia of a future that would actually never occur.
His attention was drawn back to Mara. Now her eyes were open, staring sightlessly upward, her body cut and butchered, the edges still black and steaming, by a lightsaber blade.
Luke shook his head and exerted himself through the
Force, willing the visions, the voices away. They faded, leaving him in the dark with his wife asleep and unharmed.
He took his lightsaber from the nightstand and moved out into the hallway. He didn’t want his perturbation to awaken Mara.
Something was happening; events at distant points of the galaxy and even of time were focusing toward him and those he loved. The confusion, the turbulence of those thoughts and emotions pressed down on him, soured his stomach.
On the cold stone floor outside his chambers, he sat cross-legged and tried to sink into a meditative state—a state to give him real knowledge, a state to grant him peace.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Ben took his lightsaber into his hands and thumbed it on. Its snap-hiss was less welcome than the blue light it emitted—suddenly he could see all around him, even if dimly.
He floated through open space, but ahead of him, thirty or forty meters, was a broken stone wall, and he floated toward it at a rate of several meters a second. He was also losing altitude, slowly—though gravity was weak here, it wasn’t entirely absent.
“Two-handed form,” Nelani said, behind him, “makes it rather hard to hold on to stone walls.”
Ben twisted to look behind him. Nelani floated there, following his aerial path, at least as comfortable in the minimal gravity as Ben was.
He turned back to face the onrushing wall. “Did you pull me out of the railcar?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m not stupid. Don’t be snide.”
“Sorry, I’m upset.” Her tone changed. “Nelani to Jacen, come in.”
As the stone wall came nearer, Ben spotted a feature on it he thought he could grab, a rocky projection that narrowed to a needle-like point. He held his lightsaber back and to one side with his right hand, extended his left, and as he reached the projection he grabbed it, swinging his feet ahead of him to sustain the minimal shock of impact.
A moment later Nelani hit a few meters down, her fingers slipping into a crack in the stone, her hips and shoulders taking the impact.
“So who did it?” Ben persisted. “The Sith?”
“We have company.”
Ben looked down at her, then around, then up.
Above him, ten meters up, a pair of eyes stared down at him. They glowed blue in the reflected light of his lightsaber blade. They were not human eyes, but slitted and triangular.
Beyond them were more, hundreds of pairs of eyes, cool and unblinking.
Ben shook his head. He’d had that portion of stone wall in sight as he’d approached the wall. There had been no creatures there at the time. He reached out for them within the Force, and could feel them there, hundreds of them, strong in dark side energy. “Not good,” he said.
“Drop,” Nelani said.
“Yeah.” Ben released his hold on the projection and drifted downward. He gave the rock surface a little shove to open up a few more centimeters’ room between himself and the stony surface.
Above, the eyes began to descend, staying at their respective distance from the gleam of his lightsaber, but definitely following.
The railcar slowed to a halt, curving around in a circle. Brisha and Jacen were in a well-lit chamber, large enough to house a good-sized transport, but the only thing present was the end of the rail line. The track here curved around in a teardrop shape and rejoined itself on the way up, allowing the railcar to head back up the track it had just descended.
Jacen didn’t bother with the scenery. He stared at Brisha. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
She gave him an innocent stare. “Do what?”
“Shove Ben and Nelani out of the car. Did you think I couldn’t feel your pulse of Force energy?”
“I suspected you could.” She stood and stepped out of the car. She floated for a moment beside it, then slowly drifted down to the stony surface of the floor. “I separated them from us for their own good. What they’ll face will be dangerous, but not as dangerous as what we’re going to encounter—if they accompanied us here, they’d probably die.”
“Your Sith.” Jacen pushed off from his seat and drifted upward a dozen meters. From this altitude he could see all corners of this chamber, with its natural stone walls and glow rods all over them. There were no menaces, no strange beings to confront them. “What can you tell me about him?”
“His knowledge is of the lineage of Palpatine, but is broader than the Emperor’s. He’s young. He was not yet born when the Emperor died.”
“How was the Sith knowledge transmitted to him?” Jacen began to float back down toward the railcar. “Through a Sith Holocron? Through loyal retainers?”
“Through disloyal retainers. Through Sith trainees who could never achieve Mastery themselves … and who rejected Palpatine and his teachings as too selfish, too controlling, too destructive.”
Jacen gave her a curious look. “You make them sound benign. If they’re benign, isn’t he?”
She shrugged. She kept one hand on the railcar so that casual motions would not propel her across the chamber. “All the same, he must be found and mastered. Ah.” She turned toward a shadowy corner of the chamber, a place where a huge, rounded outcropping came within meters of the curved section of rail.
From around that outcropping walked a man. He was tall, slender, garbed in a traveler’s robe of black and dark gold; it was styled like a Jedi’s but made of expensive silks. A lightsaber, its hilt also in black and gold, swung at his belt. His hands were gloved, and his face was in the deep shadow cast by the hood of his cloak, though his eyes—a liquid, luminous orange-gold—glowed from within that darkness.
He came to a stop just at the edge of that outcropping, several meters from Jacen and Brisha.
“So you’re the Sith,” Jacen said.
The dark figure bowed.
Jacen gave him a scornful look. “How am I supposed to take you seriously? You’re not even here.”
The hooded man’s voice came back as a whisper. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you walked. As if we were in Coruscant-standard gravity instead of a tiny fraction of it. You’re an illusion.”
“Yes, I’m an illusion. But I’m also here. Right here.”
“Care to explain that?”
“No.”
“Ah.” Jacen thumbed his lightsaber into life. “Well, I suppose I should be cutting you in half now.”
“I am a Master. You are a Jedi Knight. Do you know what that means?”
“That I can’t win?” Jacen punctuated his question with a mocking laugh.
“No. That you must go through my subordinates to get to me. Allowing me to test you, to evaluate you. That’s tradition, you know.”
“If you say so.”
The reflection of the Sith’s gold-orange eyes disappeared—and then the Sith himself vanished, ghost-like.
But there was a sound from beyond where he had stood, a slight scrape, and another figure moved forward into view. This one walked, as the Sith had, in a fashion appropriate for a standard-gravity environment, and stepped out to stand where the Sith had stood.
He was not tall, but he was well muscled and agile. He wore black pants, tunic, boots, and gloves, and held an unlit lightsaber.
His features were those of Luke Skywalker, but rakishly bearded and twisted into a grin that was all malice and scorn.
“Not nice,” Jacen said.
Nelani reached the bottom of the cavern first, taking the minor shock of impact on bent legs and being propelled a few meters back up into the air. On his way down, Ben passed her on her upward bounce, but he had eyes only for the creatures clustered on the stone wall above. He hit stony floor, bounced upward a few meters, passed Nelani again as she descended. Soon enough, both had their feet none too firmly on the surface beneath.
Now Ben could hear rustling, hissing that sounded like muffled, sibilant speech, from above—from hundreds of sources above.
“They’re going to swarm us,” Nelani said. She sounded r
attled.
As if her words were a cue, a form of permission, the eyes above suddenly descended en masse, pouring downward as if carried by a waterfall. Nelani’s lightsaber snapped into life, adding a yellow-white glow to the proceedings. Ben raised his own blade in a high defensive stance.
The first wave of descending creatures broke before it reached the Jedi, splitting into two streams, each headed a different direction parallel to the stone face. But two of the creatures did not veer away. One came at Ben, one at Nelani.
Ben darted to one side—or tried; despite having some experience in low-gravity environments, he wasn’t accustomed enough to them for appropriate movements and tactics to be instinctive. He pushed off but floated mostly upward, straight toward his attacker.
No matter. The creature—revealed in the light of Ben’s lightsaber to be a fleshy stretched wing with eyes at one end, a tail at the other, and a wet mouth toward the center of its underside, something like a mynock—flew straight at him. Ben swung, felt his blade cut into skin and meat, and was propelled back down by the impact as the two halves of the beast hurtled lifelessly past him, one to either side.
The soles of his feet hit stone again. He absorbed as much of the impact as he could with his knees and did not bounce up very far this time.
The two mynock halves were partly embedded in the stone, and as he glanced at them, they slipped beneath the stone’s surface like two halves of a boat sinking. They left nothing behind—no blood, nothing.
“They’re not real,” Ben said.
“Projections of the Force,” Nelani answered from behind.
“So they can’t really hurt us, right?”
“Wrong.” Her tone chided him. “You know better than that. It’s like saying A laser beam can’t hurt me—it’s only light, right?”
“I was just hoping.”
“Oof.” Nelani sounded as though she’d taken a shot to the gut, and her lightsaber winked out instantly.
Heedless of the swarms of mynocks overhead, Ben spun, the motion bouncing him a couple of meters up.
Nelani was gone. In her place stood Mara Skywalker. Her eyes glittered with anger and her body language suggested punishment to come. Her lightsaber, in her hand, was unlit.
