by James Luceno
Ben floated back to the ground. “You’re not my mother,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Then it won’t be a family crime to cut you down.” She ignited the lightsaber, and its blade glowed red.
RELLIDIR, TRALUS
Han and Wedge lined up on the boulevard that would carry them straight to the Terkury Housing Complex. Far ahead, Han could see the tiny, indistinct shapes of bombers flying over the dome-shield above the beachhead, dropping their explosives charges. Other ships engaged in dogfights with the better, newer starfighters of the Galactic Alliance.
Han, in the lead by a handful of meters, brought his Shriek down almost to the deck—he left just enough clearance for speeders flying at legal altitudes to be clear beneath him and ignored the fact that many Corellians, like himself, disregarded what was legal when blasting around in their personal vehicles.
Han’s sensor board blipped at him uncertainly a few times, telling him that he was being tagged for fractions of a second at a time by someone’s targeting radar. He paid no attention to it. Only when the signal strengthened and became constant would it constitute—
It strengthened, became constant. Up ahead, a pair of starfighters crested a row of skyscrapers and began a plummet toward street level, turning toward the Shrieks. Though they were tiny dots in the distance, Han guessed from the way they were moving that they were E-wings. Tough, fast, fixed-wing spacecraft with a nose similar to the X-wing, the E-wings had only three linked lasers but carried a tremendous load of sixteen proton torpedoes, any one of which could cripple or kill a capital ship under the right circumstances.
Worse yet, a new warble in the sensor alarm indicated the presence of an enemy or enemies coming up from behind. Han glanced at the board again. The new opponent was one of the Alephs, flying, like the Shrieks, at almost street level and roaring up in their wakes.
Han brought his turret lasers to bear on the E-wings. A good laser hit would damage or eliminate them, while a concussion missile could cause wreckage from surrounding buildings to fall into the path of the Shrieks. His targeting brackets chittered around the foremost E-wing, and he fired. The shot missed; kilometers in the distance, the green laser shot hit the face of a building adjacent to the Terkury complex. Incoming laserfire, red streaks, flashed by beneath Han’s bow.
Then the datapad glued to his control board beeped. Han bit back a curse at the timing of this distraction and glanced at the screen.
ALEPH PURSUER IS WEDGE’S DAUGHTER
A cold current seemed to cut through Han’s stomach as he read the words.
They had no way to communicate with the girl, to warn her off. Well, maybe Wedge did—but did he have enough time to dig it out, power it up, and reach her before they were upon their target? Han didn’t think so.
Han didn’t want to kill Wedge’s daughter, even to fire upon her. But it would be worse if Wedge did. Worse still if she killed Wedge, worse for Corellia and their mission.
Almost as soon as he registered Leia’s words, Han kicked in his repulsors, bouncing his Shriek several meters higher, and hit reverse thrusters. Wedge’s Shriek flashed by beneath him and was suddenly in front. “You have more experience with itty-bitty starfighters,” Han said. “You deal with them. I’ll take the tugboat on our tail.”
“Thanks, Grandpa.”
Han’s sensor board howled as the pursuer’s weapons locked on to him. He added a little wobble to his flight path, and the incoming lasers missed, firing off harmlessly into the air above the skyscrapers ahead.
Han brought his turret lasers around and returned fire. As he squeezed the trigger, the ungainly-looking Aleph jerked to port, avoiding his beams, and crept closer, dropped lower, making Han’s next shot even harder.
Blast it. She would have to be a good pilot.
chapter thirty-one
CORUSCANT
Luke felt a presence, the arrival of someone strong in the Force. He opened his eyes.
Hovering over the floor in front of him, meters from him, was his nephew and onetime prize pupil, Jacen, lightsaber lit in his hand. Except it was not truly Jacen; whoever it was reeked of dark side energy, and his stare promised only malevolence. “Not nice,” the false Jacen said.
Luke rose. “Who are you, really?”
The not-Jacen snorted. “You barely exist. You don’t need to know.” He took an odd, gliding step forward—it was only the slightest of exertions, but he floated meters toward Luke.
Luke lit his lightsaber.
The not-Jacen struck, a fast, powerful lateral blow that Luke met with little effort, without conscious thought. Not-Jacen’s blade was immediately in guard position for an anticipated counterstrike, but Luke held back. Oddly, the force of the impact sent his opponent floating backward. Not-Jacen drifted until he hit the corridor wall, which checked his motion, and he floated gently to the floor.
Then Luke heard the humming and chattering of lightsabers in conflict. The muffled noise was coming from his own quarters.
Mara rose, throwing her covers off in a move designed to whirl them over attackers and give her a moment to collect herself. As she came up on her feet, she reached out and pulled through the Force, and was rewarded with the comforting weight of her lightsaber hilt thumping into her hand.
The room was lit in hues of red by the lightsaber blade hovering in the middle of the room. It was held by a small, misshapen form whose feet were well off the ground. The figure was faced away from her as she rose, but now, boosted by a little push in the Force that Mara could detect, it turned in midair and presented glittering red eyes to her.
It was a boy, maybe thirteen years of age. Its features resembled Ben’s but were twisted in anger, an anger that looked like it had years of abuse, jealousy, and rage behind it. The boy’s hair, unlike Ben’s, was blond, styled in a sort of bowl cut with bangs, and Mara realized with a shock that it was the hairstyle of Luke Skywalker in his youth—she’d seen the holos of him in his adolescence. Worse, for she’d seen those holos as well, it was the hairstyle of the juvenile Anakin Skywalker.
The boy drifted gently down to the floor. “You’re not my mother,” he said. His voice was a serpentine hiss, full of loathing.
“Good,” Mara answered. “Then it won’t be a family crime to cut you down.” She lit her lightsaber, and its blue glow clashed with the red already suffusing the chamber.
The blond boy leapt at her, lightsaber extended in a spearlike thrust, but as he came within range he spun the blade around and low in a sweeping cut.
Mara danced back and to one side, out of range of the attack, and negligently waved a hand at the boy. His eyes widened as her wash of Force energy caught him and threw him against a wall.
Against—and through. He disappeared and the glow of his lightsaber vanished with him.
Mara could still feel his presence, his proximity, even if she could no longer say in which direction he was to be found. She brought her lightsaber up in a defensive posture and waited.
Then she heard the clash of lightsaber blades from outside her quarters, in the corridor.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Nelani reached up and struck, her yellow-white blade cutting through dense muscle and other tissues. There was a squeal of pain and her captor, a mynock—but one with grasping, supple hands at the ends of its wings—released her and drifted in two different directions, its halves severed by her blow.
All around her, more mynocks flew; they darted in at her, reaching with those too-wrong hands, lashing with their tail-like appendages. She lashed out at whatever came near her, cutting limbs away, using the Force to turn her around in the air.
She was dropping, too, but the rocky cavern floor was well out of sight beneath her. That was a quandary. Gravity was not strong here, but if she began dropping at a great enough altitude, she could still pick up considerable speed, deadly speed, by the time she hit the stone below.
Why hadn’t Ben reacted when she was grabbed and whisked away from
him? Why hadn’t he responded to her sudden shriek?
The part of her brain still working on problems and logistics arrived at an answer to the problem of falling. A factor that endangered her would also be her salvation.
The next time a mynock drifted in and tried to snap at her with its claws, she grabbed its fleshy wrist and tugged, allowing her to roll up onto the creature’s back. It banked, trying to dislodge her, but she sprang away from it, sending her away from the floor once more.
Now she could move where she chose. She bounced up toward a mynock, eluded its nasty central mouth, and kicked off from its underside, hurtling almost horizontally. The next one she encountered she used to send her downward, onto the back of one dozens of meters below. Each tried to grab her, tail-whip her, or snap at her as she approached, but she was always nimbler.
On one of her descents she saw the stone floor of the cavern. She calculated that her speed was not too great for a safe impact. Instead of bouncing off the next mynock in line, she rolled across its back and allowed herself to fall. She came down on the floor on her feet, sinking into a low crouch to absorb the impact, bouncing up half a dozen meters just from the flexion of her muscles. But she drifted down again, and now the mynocks whirled by overhead, not attacking.
“Well done.” That was a smooth male voice from behind her.
She spun, the move carrying her up a meter into the air.
Behind her stood a human man, dignified of bearing, his dark beard cut close in an elegant style. He was tall and a trifle overweight, but his loose-fitting black garments suggested that he was carrying around some muscle as well as fat. A silver lightsaber hilt, inlaid with polished black stones shaped like diamonds, hung from his belt.
Nelani drifted to the floor again and kept her own lit blade between them. “Who are you?”
He shrugged. “I doubt you’d know my birth name, but the other you may recognize. I am Darth Vectivus.”
Nelani waved a hand at the caverns around them and gave him a smirk. “The Master of all this.”
“Once, maybe. Now I’m merely a ghost. Or perhaps less.”
“What would be less?”
“A remnant. A sliver of a ghost.” He looked just a bit unsettled. “Even as I speak, I am unaware of myself. Of thinking, of decision making. Could I, in fact, be nothing?”
“No, I can feel you. Gleaming in the Force. Shining with the dark side.”
He shook his head. “That’s not me. That’s whomever I am connected to.”
“Connected to?”
Now it was his turn to wave around. “Every phantom you see here, every one you encounter, is connected to something that is distinctly real, distinctly alive—though possibly far, far away. Every time you struck a mynock, a living being somewhere suffered the pain and injury you inflicted.”
With his statement, a knot of sickness formed in Nelani’s stomach. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. You struck, and somewhere, some creature, perhaps a baby bantha, squealed in pain and was severed, killed before the disbelieving eyes of its mother—”
“Stop it.”
“Why? It’s the truth. Baby banthas are quite cute, you know. A terrible shame to see one cut in half.”
“You’re sick.”
“But perhaps it wasn’t cute little baby banthas. Perhaps it was piranha beetles. You wouldn’t mind cutting piranha-beetles in half, would you? Or perhaps Kowakian monkey-lizards.” He shook his head. “They say that every creature is cute when it is a baby. A mechanism of nature to help creatures reach the age of reproduction. But it’s not true of every species. Have you seen immature monkey-lizards? Ugliest little larvae in the galaxy.” He shuddered.
“What do I have to do to shut you up?”
“Oh, that’s simple. Kill me.” He took a bounding, gliding step forward. “Sweep your lightsaber blade across my neck, topple my head from my shoulders. The mynocks will go away, and you’ll be able to find your way back to your friends.” He landed only two meters from her and knelt before her. “Go ahead.”
“You can’t be that anxious to die.”
“I died centuries ago.” Darth Vectivus bowed his head. “So I won’t feel anything. Go ahead and strike.”
“And what about the life you say you’re connected to?”
Vectivus looked up again and grinned at her. “He or she will become a free-floating head, I’m afraid, rather to the surprise of everyone in the vicinity. ‘Why, look, Father, Mother’s performing a new trick. Mummy? Mummy?’ ”
Nelani glared down at him. “Is this taunting necessary?”
“Yes, it is. To goad you into the action you need to perform.” Vectivus bared his neck for her again. “By killing one—whoever it is I’m attached to at the moment—you’ll save scores. Hundreds. Thousands. What you think of as the evil of my dark side teachings will not spread so far. So kill me.”
“No.”
“Would it help if I took on a more hateful form? A piranha-beetle in human guise?” Vectivus’s clothes shimmered and flowed. Suddenly he was in a full-coverage cloak and hood, his face in deep shadow. He reached up with suddenly white, suddenly wrinkled hands to pull back the hood and reveal the pallid, almost reptilian features of Emperor Palpatine, Darth Sidious, dead now for more than thirty-five years.
His voice, too, was Palpatine’s, insidious and cloying. “How about this? Could you strike this down?”
“Not while you’re connected to an innocent life.”
Palpatine rose and, shimmering as he did so, was Vectivus again by the time he was on his feet. His expression was sympathetic, but a bit pitying. “Jedi girl, you’re not strong enough to save lives. You’re not strong enough to sacrifice one to save many.”
“I could sacrifice myself to save many.”
“Yes. But then you wouldn’t have to face the accusing eyes of the survivors of those you sacrificed. You don’t have that kind of strength.”
“That’s ruthlessness. Not strength.”
Vectivus laughed at her. “Strength that is never touched by ruthlessness is touchingly irresponsible. Perhaps you will be fortunate and never have to decide the fate of an innocent life.” He gestured at Nelani—no, beyond her, and she felt a pulse of Force energy in the distance behind her.
She moved, a floating bounce that allowed her to turn but keep Vectivus in the periphery of her vision. In the distance, where Vectivus gestured, the rails that had borne Brisha’s car to these depths were briefly illuminated. Even when the light faded, she could still feel them, could mark their presence in the Force as though they were living things.
“Go there,” Vectivus said. “And climb those rails to safety. Wait for the others to join you once they have made their decisions about their own fates.” His voice took on a kindly tone. “I don’t want you to die unnecessarily … and as weak as you are, if you meddle in the affairs of others, that’s precisely what will happen to you.”
“Go to hell,” Nelani said.
Vectivus shrugged. “Perhaps I did. I wouldn’t know.” Then he faded from sight, and as he disappeared, the susurrating noise of the mynocks wheeling overhead also vanished.
Nelani spared a look upward. They were gone, leaving not even a trace in the Force.
Anxiety welled within her, a fear concerning the fate of her friends, and she began bounding toward the distant, unseen spot where the rails reached the floor of this cavern. They were her path to the surface, true, but also her path into the lower reaches where Jacen and Brisha awaited.
RELLIDIR, TRALUS
Han winced as his pursuer’s lasers hammered at his stern. He’d diverted extra power from his bow shields to reinforce the stern, a dangerous gambit—if laserfire from the oncoming E-wings missed Wedge, it could accidentally smack into Han’s bow and ruin his day. Ruin the rest of his life, in fact.
But Wedge had managed to vape one of the E-wings with laserfire of his own, and the other had peeled off. It was now circling around to drop in behind the A
leph and reinforce it.
Not that the Aleph needed much reinforcing. Wedge’s little girl was good at her job. She’d dropped so low and come in so close behind the Shriek that Han’s turret lasers couldn’t depress enough to attack her, and meanwhile she could chew up his thrusters with impunity. If only he had a stern-mounted weapon—
Wait a minute, he did. He had a bomb bay full of spotter droids.
His fingers flew over his weapons console, punching in a set of unusual commands. He hit the EXECUTE button. Two of his spotter droids would now be sliding into the bomb drop slots …
“Control reports missiles launched,” Wedge said. “They’ll be showing up on our sensors any second.”
“Good,” Han said. He gritted his teeth to keep from continuing, I hope your baby daughter, whom I’ve bounced on my knee, doesn’t shoot my tail off before I see them. I hope she makes a run for it when she sees them. I hope I don’t have to kill her.
The READY light glowed green on his weapons console. He hit the temporary-command button he’d just programmed.
“Got him, got him, got him,” Zueb called, gloating, as his lasers continued to chew the tail end of the mystery bomber to pieces.
“Something’s going on with the underside,” Syal said. She wanted to drop another meter, but suspected she’d bottom out on the street. Even so, she could already see something changing on the bomber’s underside, panels sliding aside, something moving into position there on either side of the bomber’s centerline. “That looks like—does that look like feet to you?”
Zueb ducked his oversized Sullustan head as far as he could. “Yes. Feet. Silvery feet. One pair on either side.”
“What the blazes—”
Those feet, and the humanoid bodies they were attached to, suddenly plummeted from the bomber. Syal had a glimpse of two flailing bodies, like dull-silver protocol droids with oddly shaped rifles, as they dropped into her path and hurtled toward her bow.
Syal couldn’t help it—her hand twitched on the control yoke, an instinctive attempt to avoid the collision. Then came the impact, one droid hitting each of the Aleph’s forward viewports.
