by James Luceno
The one hitting the starboard viewport shattered. In her peripheral vision, Syal had a momentary impression of arms and legs flying in all directions.
The one hitting the port viewport, directly in front of her, didn’t shatter. It held on, its face right there in the center of the transparisteel, and it offered Syal what seemed to her like a reproachful expression. In that moment she recognized it as a type of standard spotter droid.
Then Syal’s involuntary sideslip carried the Aleph far enough that its starboard laser turret began scraping along the building fronts there, tearing marquees and signs off edifices. She jerked the yoke to port, trying to free herself from that deadly friction before it spun her right into a building, and felt the shuddering end as she broke free.
No time to think, now she was traversing toward the buildings to port, and the droid was still looking at her. Gently she corrected her course, noting absently that the bomber had gained scores of meters on her.
“Great flying, Gray Four.” The voice was male, unknown to her, the accent Coruscanti.
Syal couldn’t risk taking her attention from the avenue ahead long enough to consult her comm board. “Who’s that?”
“You’ve got Ax Three as your wing.”
“Ax, you tear him up while I get my life in order here.”
“Will do. Be advised, I’m picking up a huge pursuit squadron on our tail, and it’s not ours.”
Zueb unbuckled and leaned forward. With his fist, he pounded on the inside of Syal’s viewport. The droid outside turned its head to look at him, and this change in its aerodynamics was apparently enough—the Aleph lurched and the droid was suddenly gone, whipped away by the altered air flow across its surface.
“Thanks,” Syal said.
“No problem.” The Sullustan eased back into his gunner’s seat and rebuckled. “Right turret is jammed. Ax Three correct, huge cloud of incoming vehicles on our tail.”
Syal gave the control yoke a tentative adjustment. The Aleph moved back to the center of the avenue, responding correctly. Only then did she check her sensor board.
It showed the E-wing high overhead, and in her peripheral vision she could see red lasers from the fast-moving starfighter hammering the bomber ahead of her. Far behind was an immense cloud of vessels moving up at tremendous speed—it would be on her in thirty seconds or less, and the sensor board still couldn’t tell her what the individual vehicles in it were.
And up ahead, beyond the first of the bombers but too close, was the end of the avenue, a huge, newly constructed housing building.
Syal looked up and her eyes widened. If she pulled up into a climb right now she might—might—be able to clear the tops of the surrounding buildings. But the foremost bomber was so close to the building there was no way it could avoid a collision—
She saw that bomber fire missiles ahead and downward. The street just before the big building erupted in smoke and dust. And in the split second before it was swallowed by the dust cloud, she would have sworn she saw the bomber dive toward the street.
The second bomber, the one she’d been harassing, lost altitude. Its pilot had no distractions—Ax Three was now climbing away from the engagement, ascending to safety.
Syal became aware that Zueb was screaming at her, something about climbing, about continuing to live. She ignored him and glanced at her sensors. The zone where the missiles had hit was still only partly realized on the screen, but it was a big hole, and the first bomber was gone. It wasn’t hitting the building, wasn’t veering right or left in a futile attempt to get free of the surrounding construction—it was just gone.
Into the hole.
Syal aimed her Aleph along the second bomber’s wake.
Zueb was shouting something about insanity and destruction. She ignored him. She took the control yoke in both hands.
The second bomber disappeared into the smoke cloud. On the sensor board, it dropped into the hole in the street.
As Syal reached that point, she slammed downward on the yoke, compressing it for a fraction of a second. Her top-mounted vents fired, jolting the Aleph downward.
It didn’t hit anything. Through the viewports there was only smoke and darkness. On the sensor screen was the tail end of that chewed-up bomber blasting forward between banks of heavy-looking columns. There was debris, heavy dust and particulate matter, ahead of it. It rose toward the debris.
As her Aleph reached the point where the bomber began its rise, she jerked upward on her yoke and the bottom-mounted vents fired. She added some repulsorlift kick. The Aleph jolted upward, compressing her backbone and cutting off Zueb’s shrieks, and suddenly they were in sunlight again.
Green parklands and the shimmering dome of a military energy shield lay ahead. The first bomber was circling to port around the shield, the second bomber to starboard. Both were dropping their bomb loads—spotter droids floating to the ground, their descents slowed by the sort of short-use repulsorlift plates used by airdrop commando troops. Above circled squadrons of X-wings, Eta-5 interceptors, E-wings—the complete ground complement of the Rellidir garrison.
Zueb was shrieking something about great flying and having children and holodramas. Syal ignored him. Something was adding up in her head, cold numbers and facts.
She slammed on the reverse thrusters to slow the Aleph, jerking Zueb forward in his seat, and switched her comm board over to the general fleet frequency. “This is Gray Four to all GA forces,” she said. She felt curiously emotionless, but she knew that she had merely contained her emotion, not eliminated it. “Incoming enemy squadrons traveling east to west toward Rellidir central are missiles, and they have an unobstructed path to the interior shield. Be ready.” She switched back to squadron frequency. As the front end of the Aleph swung around and the building they’d just flown beneath was framed by their viewports, she brought the Aleph to a dead halt in the air. “Zueb, fire missiles. Bring that building down. Hit the base first.”
“What?”
“That’s an order. Bring that building down, from ground level up.”
Zueb’s hands reached for his weapons controls.
CORUSCANT
The Not-Jacen came at Luke again and again, making prodigious leaps, bounding from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor, as if immune to gravity. With each pass he hurled one, two, three lightsaber blows at Luke, striking again and again until, thrown back by the impacts, he was too far away to engage.
Luke countered every blow and pitched attacks of his own. He felt the skin of his left forearm pucker a little from the heat of a near hit, saw the Not-Jacen’s robes catch fire just under the right armpit from an especially close thrust of Luke’s … but Not-Jacen patted the flames out and merely grinned at him.
Not-Jacen seized a ceiling glow rod fixture and hung there as though his weight were nothing. “You’re just about as good as my true Master,” Not-Jacen said.
Luke gave him a quizzical look. “And who is that?”
“You know,” Not-Jacen said. “By the way, you’d look good with a beard.”
“You think so?” Luke ran his free hand over his clean-shaven chin. “Well, I’m not sure what our disagreement is, but perhaps it could be settled by talking.”
“I try not to negotiate with phantoms, with things that don’t exist. Better to just cut them in half and watch them disappear.” Not-Jacen kicked off from the wall and flew forward again.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
As the Sith Mara’s Force attack swept him away from her, Ben switched his lightsaber off. Whirling within the power of her attack, instead of fighting against it, he added some Force energy of his own—shoving him laterally across the direction of her attack, and suddenly he was being swept at almost right angles to the direction she’d sent him. For half the duration of each spin he was making, he could see her, illuminated by her lightsaber, and now she was looking in the wrong direction; his maneuver had worked.
He slammed into a wall of stone, managed to keep f
rom grunting in pain. He rebounded off the surface and began to drop toward the floor below; he calculated it as only ten meters down, an easy drop in this gravity. When he hit the ground, he did so with a silence that would probably please his real mother.
In the distance, the Sith Mara stood ready, her head turning this way and that, seeking for him with her Force-senses as well as with her eyes. Ben tried to blank out his mind, to erase his thoughts, to give her nothing to look for. And he wasn’t using the Force; that would help.
But he was the only person within hundreds of meters of the Sith Mara. That should make it child’s play to find him … yet somehow it didn’t, and she kept looking.
Ben made one long lateral bound, circling the Sith Mara’s position. In that time, Sith Mara stopped moving; she stood stock-still, her lightsaber down at an angle suited to bringing it up in a blow or an umbrella-style defensive posture, and Ben suspected that her eyes were closed.
Silently, he launched himself forward. He brought his unlit lightsaber back at a ready-to-strike angle and kept his thumb on the power stud.
His jump was accurate; he didn’t need to correct it with little Force adjustments. He flew directly toward her, closing the gap between them as fast as a thrown zoneball.
Then he was near enough to see her face, her features. She was at rest, her eyes closed.
At peace. This wasn’t his mother, but it was his mother’s face, and there was no evil in it, no Sith malevolence.
He couldn’t thumb on his lightsaber and kill her. He just couldn’t.
She turned toward him and her eyes opened, red-glowing as before. She continued her turn into a spin. A chill of fear cut through his middle and he knew that her lightsaber blade would follow where the chill had been.
But it was her foot that came up, snapping into his gut with the power of a combat droid’s pistoning arm.
In slow motion, he felt the wind leaving his lungs, felt himself folding over her foot, felt his internal organs compress and bruise. Then he was flying away, blackness washing across his eyes where the image of his mother had been.
chapter thirty-two
Jacen seized a rock outcropping and held it, keeping him from dropping once more toward the man with the face of Luke Skywalker. “You’re just about as good as my true Master,” Jacen said. And it was true—the phantom he fought had the speed and moves of a Jedi Master. He’d be a fair match for Luke.
The bearded man gave him a mocking look. “And who is that?”
“You know,” Jacen said. “By the way, you look good with a beard.”
“You think so?” His opponent stroked his facial hair. “Well, I’m not sure what our disagreement is, but perhaps it could be settled by talking.”
Jacen considered that. This combat was not just pointless, being carried out at someone else’s wish for someone else’s ends, but also dangerous—the false Luke was potentially good enough to kill Jacen.
Still, the false Luke reeked of the dark side of the Force. There could be no enduring benefit in cooperating with him. Could there? For a moment Jacen was confused, weighing the preponderance of Jedi history and claims about dark-siders against his own limited experience.
But he decided in favor of history and tradition. “I try not to negotiate with phantoms, with things that don’t exist. Better to just cut them in half and watch them disappear.” Jacen kicked off from the wall and flew forward again.
He knew that this solidly planted, gravitationally advantaged Luke had adapted to Jacen’s low-gravity tactics, so he altered them—the instant he touched down before the false Luke, he planted his feet and used the Force to brace him there, then threw a flurry of hard blows.
It was no use. The false Luke adapted instantly to his change in tactics, reverting to a softer, defensive style, turning away each of Jacen’s all-out attacks. And he did so grinning, silently mocking.
The false Luke, instead of countering Jacen’s fifth blow in sequence, sidestepped it, luring Jacen forward and off-balance. Luke’s counterstrike whipped around and down toward Jacen’s unprotected back—
“Enough,” Brisha said, and the false Luke vanished. Jacen, straightening, still felt a tremor of pain from the area where the blow would have landed, and looked down to see a portion of his robe, a long black mark, on fire. He patted it out and looked up at Brisha. “Who was that, really?”
She shrugged. “A combination of the real Luke Skywalker and the dark side energy of this place. A combination that would have beaten you, since you weren’t utilizing the same energy, the resources available to you.” She still held on to one of the rails—sagged against it, actually. She was perspiring.
“You’ve been using a lot of energy yourself,” Jacen said. He switched his lightsaber off.
She nodded. “Coordinating the actions of several Force phantoms at once? Very tiring. Try it sometime.”
“So you admit that you’re behind this assault on me.”
“Oh, it was no assault. Just a test. If it had been an assault, I would have let the Luke phantom kill you. Don’t you think?”
Jacen frowned. Her words had the ring of truth to them. “I think it’s time for you to tell me your whole story.”
“Of course.” She pushed off from the rail and floated toward the stone outcropping where the false Luke had originally arrived. She bounced lightly past Jacen and beckoned for him to follow. “All the answers are this way.”
He followed.
RELLIDIR, TRALUS
Han grinned as he completed his circuit around the shield-protected Center for the Performing Arts. His spotter droids were raining down on the ground, sustaining but ignoring small-arms fire from GA ground crews and infantry, and already his board was lighting up with the data the droids were feeding to the Corellian operations HQ. On the wire-frame representation of the local area, the top of the shield was a hot spot where numerous droids had their laser sighting rifles trained. Above, many of the starfighters trapped within the outer range of shields were also being targeted.
Han’s and Wedge’s Shrieks were on the spotter droids’ matrix, as well—as nontargets. Missiles that detected and turned toward the Shrieks were supposed to move away to find new targets. Missiles that came in too fast to divert their flight paths were supposed to detonate prematurely. In theory, the Shrieks were safe from the missile barrage.
In theory.
Han didn’t rely much on theory. He’d prefer to have some buildings between him and the incoming missiles—
There was something wrong. Ahead, as he completed his circuit, was an Aleph where no Aleph should be. This one was battle-scarred, its fuselage scraped, its forward viewports scratched and dented.
Han’s eyebrows shot up. This had to be the Aleph that had pursued them on the approach boulevard, Syal Antilles’s craft. Inexplicably, it had managed to follow them in. And now it was slowing, turning toward the Terkury building.
Alarm bells went off in Han’s head. If he were in Syal’s position, he would know that missiles were roaring up behind. He would be figuring out how to stop them before they got here. And that meant dropping a rackful of missiles into the Terkury building, collapsing it so the missiles would hit the falling debris, never making it past the outer shield zone.
That’s what Syal was doing, and he had to stop her. He switched his weapons board over to missile fire and dropped his targeting brackets over the Aleph.
And hesitated.
This was Wedge’s little girl. He couldn’t kill her.
If he didn’t, the mission would be a failure, and the GA wouldn’t leave, and war might break out.
He heard a howling, and realized, as if his mind were functioning at a distance, that it was no cockpit alarm, but his own voice, an inarticulate roar of anger and frustration, filling his ears.
There was no time to find the perfect solution. His thumb settled on the firing button.
No perfect solution—but the fraction of a second’s delay let him find a possible answe
r. He pushed the weapons control forward. The targeting brackets clicked off the Aleph and dropped to the ground several meters beneath the hovering starfighter. The brackets skittered around, trying to identify anything on the ground that might constitute a target.
Han fired. His concussion missile flashed forward to hit the duracrete beneath the Aleph.
Syal watched impassively as Zueb targeted the building just above the huge hole in the ground that the Aleph and the two bombers had emerged through. He seemed to be moving in slow motion. Everything seemed to be in slow motion.
The astromech beeped an alarm—a targeting lock on the Aleph. Syal frowned. She kept her hands steady on the controls. A sideways jerk might cause Zueb to miss his target, and she couldn’t afford for that to happen. Besides, the incoming fire was probably a laser barrage by an opportunistic X-wing pilot, and she could survive a few seconds of that—
The world exploded around her. The Aleph was kicked as if by a rancor the size of a skyscraper. She felt her backbone compress, like one of the Aleph’s vent-based upward jumps but worse, like ejecting from a doomed starfighter but worse. Redness filled her vision and she clearly saw the control yoke of her starfighter. Her hand was not on it. She tried to reach for it but couldn’t seem to make her body move.
Outside the viewports, banks of buildings spun, sometimes above, sometimes below, intermixed with enemy starfighters and the sky and the ground.
The Aleph disappeared in the dust-and-debris cloud of Han’s concussion missile, and for a moment Han thought the starfighter had gone to confetti from the force of the blast. But the Aleph leapt up out of the cloud, spinning, out of control, on a ballistic arc that would carry it within seconds back to the ground and its final destruction.
Han’s curved flight path carried him past the dust cloud. His Shriek and Wedge’s crossed each other, heading in opposite directions. He could hear Wedge’s voice, chiding: “Han, you missed.” The words weren’t making sense; he ignored them.
