by Timothy Zahn
"Yes, sir." Oissan's mouth twitched. "Thank you, sir."
"And your preliminary battle prep will begin right now," Nalgol continued, gesturing at the datapad. "I want you to make up a priority/threat list for every one of those ships out there. Put in everything you have about their capabilities, defenses, and weaknesses, and include details of captain and crew species where possible."
He smiled tightly. "When we finally come from under this cursed cloaking shield, I want to be able to slice straight through whatever's left without losing so much as a single turbolaser or Preybird. Understood?"
"Understood, Captain," Oissan said. "I'll have it ready for you by tomorrow."
"Very good," Nalgol nodded. "Dismissed."
Turning smartly, Oissan headed aft at a quick walk along the command walkway. Nalgol watched him for a moment, then turned back to the empty view through the viewport. Four days. Four days, and they would finally have their chance to slaughter Rebel scum. He smiled into the darkness. Yes, he was indeed feeling very traditional today.
CHAPTER
34
With a start, Luke woke up.
For a moment he stayed where he was, fighting against the usual floundering of trance-induced disorientation as he made a quick assessment of his situation. He was seated in a slightly uncomfortable seat, he recognized, with an unfamiliar control board in front of him and a curved canopy in front of that. From somewhere behind him, a handful of soft night-lights glowed; in front of him, outside the canopy, it was completely dark outside...
He blinked, coming suddenly fully awake. Completely dark outside? He fumbled with his restraints, throwing a glance at his chrono as he did so.
And paused, giving the chrono a second look. He'd been in the healing trance for nearly five hours.
Five hours?
"Mara, I said to wake me in two hours," he called back toward the rear of the ship, getting free of the restraints and stumbling to his feet. "What happened, you fall asleep back there yourself?" But there was no answer, only the sudden frantic twittering from Artoo.
And there was also no Mara.
"Oh, no," Luke breathed, stretching his mind out to flick through every corner of the ship. Mara was nowhere to be found. "Artoo, where is she?" he snapped, dropping to one knee and lifting up the datapad translator still hooked up to the droid. The words scrolled across it—"What do you mean, she left?" he demanded. "When? Why?"
Artoo moaned mournfully. Luke gazed at the words flowing across the datapad, his heart sinking inside him. Mara had left five hours ago, right after he'd settled into his trance. Artoo didn't know where she'd gone, or why.
But both of those Luke could already guess.
"It's all right," he sighed, patting the droid reassuringly as he got back to his feet. "I know there was no way you could have stopped her."
He crossed to the hatch, the taste of terrible fear mixing with the bitter knowledge that whatever she had gone off to do, it was far too late now for him to stop her, either. "Keep an eye on the ship," he told the little droid, popping open the hatch. "I'll be back as soon as I can." He stepped outside, not bothering with the ladder, but simply dropping to the ground. Directly overhead between the surrounding cliff peaks, patches of stars shone brightly down through the gaps between drifting clouds; everywhere else, all was darkness. Mara, he called out, shouting her name hopelessly into the silent night with his mind.
It was as if a cloaked and hooded figure had stirred. Somewhere not far away a dark, hiding presence seemed to shift. A crack opened between cloak and hood— Up here, her thought came back.
Luke peered up at the blackness of the cliff directly ahead, caught between the sudden relief that she was still alive and the sobering sense that something terrible was still about to happen. The glimpse faded as Mara seemed to pull her mental cloak back around her—
Where are you? Luke sent the thought outward, fighting back the temptation to break through this cocoon she had suddenly and inexplicably retreated into.
He sensed her hesitation, and her almost resigned sigh. Then, flashing into his mind like glimpses seen in a flickering light, he caught a series of images of the rock face in front of him, marking the route she'd taken up. Sending an acknowledgment and encouragement back toward her, he crossed to the cliff and started up.
The climb wasn't nearly as tricky as he had thought it would be, and with Jedi-strengthened muscles behind it the trip took less than ten minutes. He found Mara sitting on a rough ledge near the peak, braced sideways against the partial shelter of a rugged upthrust of rock. "Hello," she called quietly as he came up onto the final ridge. "How are you feeling?"
"Completely healed," he said, frowning at her as he maneuvered his way along the ridge and sat down beside her. Her voice had been quiet and controlled; but beneath the dark cloak of her mental barrier he could sense the edge of an incredible sadness. "What's going on?" In the faint sheen of starlight, he saw her right hand lift and point ahead. "The Hand of Thrawn's over there," she said. "You can see the four back towers against the clouds when the light's right." Luke gazed that direction, running through his sensory enhancement techniques. The towers and back wall of the fortress were indeed visible, along with a hint of something between the leftmost towers that was probably the flat roof of the hangar they'd fought their way out of a few hours ago.
"What have they been doing?" he asked.
"Nothing much," Mara said. "That ship that was out—remember the gap we saw in the parking array? It got in about three hours ago."
Luke grimaced. A functional ship, sitting right there in front of the ones he'd sabotaged. Ready to head off to Bastion at a moment's notice. "It hasn't left again?" He sensed the shake of her head. "Not that I could tell. Anyway, Parck said they'd be debriefing the pilot before he made a final decision."
"I see," Luke murmured. A debriefing that, under the circumstances, Parck and Fel would undoubtedly be hurrying along as quickly as they could. A fast decision, a fast lift back into the sky, and the Empire would have the Hand of Thrawn and all its secrets.
And yet here he and Mara sat. Waiting.
But for what?
"It's funny, you know," Mara murmured from beside him. "Ironic, really. Here we are: the woman who's spent ten years trying to build a new life for herself, and the man who's spent those same ten years rushing madly around trying to save the galaxy from every new threat that reared its ugly face."
"That's us, all right," Luke said, eyeing her uneasily. The twisting darkness in her was growing stronger... "Not sure I see the irony, though."
"The irony is that with the New Republic ready to tear itself apart, you rushed off to save me," Mara said. "Ignoring your self-delegated responsibilities in order to save that one woman and her one life."
He felt her take a deep breath. "And that one woman," she added, almost too quietly to hear, "is now the one who has to sacrifice that new life she wanted. To save the New Republic." Abruptly, a distant flash of pale green light illuminated her face. A face carved from stone; a face gazing with terrible pain and loneliness into the night. "Looks like you got here just in time," she said as a faint thundercrack echoed in the distance.
There was a second green flash. With an effort, Luke tore his eyes from her tortured face and turned to look.
The towers were firing. Even as he focused on them, another pair of green turbolaser flashes lanced out from the top of one of them across the sky, followed by a pair from one of the other towers. Firing across the landscape in the opposite direction from where he and Mara sat. "Ranging shots, probably," Mara said, her voice the deceptive calm of an overly taut spring. "Trying to gauge the distance. It won't be long now."
Luke looked back at her. The pain within her was growing, pressing outward against her mental barrier like flood waters against a dam. "Mara, what's going on?"
"It was all your idea, you know," she continued as if he hadn't spoken. "You're the one who wanted so much for me to become a Jedi." She sn
iffed loudly, the sound of someone fighting back tears. "Remember?"
And then, from the fortress, a flurry of turbolaser shots abruptly burst out, the green fire accompanied this time by a counterpoint of blue from Chiss-style weaponry. All four towers were firing now, firing madly and persistently, all in the same direction. Luke craned his neck, trying to see, wondering what in the worlds they could be shooting at. Had Karrde sent in a backup force after all?
Had the New Republic found them, or the Empire? Or one of those hundred terrible dangers Parck had talked about? He looked back at Mara—
And in that single, awful heartbeat, he knew.
"Mara," he breathed. "No. Oh, no."
"It had to be done," she said, her voice trembling. In the backwash of light from the enemy fire Luke could see she was no longer even trying to hold back the tears. "It was the only way to keep them from taking all of this and handing it to Bastion. The only way." Luke looked back at the fortress, the knife of Mara's grief digging in beneath his own heart, a sudden frenzy of thought and urgency swirling through his mind. If he'd woken up earlier—if he'd forced his way through her mental barriers back in the fortress and learned her private plan—if he even now stretched out with the full power of the Force—
"Don't," Mara murmured, her voice infinitely tired. "Please, don't. It's my sacrifice, don't you see?
The final sacrifice every Jedi has to go through."
Her fumbling hand reached out to touch his. It felt very cold. "There's nothing you can do. Nothing at all."
Luke inhaled raggedly, the cool night air digging like the ice of Hoth into his lungs, his hands and mind and heart aching with the overwhelming desire to do something. To do anything. But she was right. He could hate it, he could bitterly oppose it; but down deep, he knew she was right. The universe wasn't his responsibility. Decisions made by other people—their actions, their consequences, even their sacrifices—they weren't his responsibility, either. Mara had made her choice, and had accepted the consequences for it. And he had neither the duty nor the right to try to take it away from her.
Which left only one thing he could do. Moving closer to her on the ledge, he put his arm around her.
For a moment she resisted, old fears and habits and loneliness mixing together with her roiling pain to stiffen her muscles away from him. But only for a moment. Then, as if that part too of her life had now been lost, she melted against his side, her so carefully constructed barriers bursting aside as she finally poured out the grief and loss she had held so deeply and privately inside her. Luke wrapped his arm tighter around her, murmuring meaningless words as he fought with her through the storm of pain and misery, absorbing what he could of it and offering what comfort and warmth he could in return. In the distance, the firing from the towers increased—
And then, above the edge of the cliff, he saw it. Cutting low over a distant hill, its hull burnished by the surrealistic effect of full shields operating in atmosphere, it twisted and writhed like a living thing as it evaded or dodged or simply shrugged off the withering firestorm savaging the air around it, firing back steadily but uselessly in return at the impenetrable black stone rising before it. Drawn like a mynock to a power cable by the beckon call Mara had spliced into one of the alien ships' comm systems, it was driving its single-minded way toward the open hangar entrance, the one single weak point in the entire fortress. Mara's personal ship, the one thing in the universe she truly owned. The Jade's Fire.
The tears had stopped now, Mara's shoulders tensing beneath Luke's arm as she leaned tautly forward to watch. The Fire was almost to the Hand of Thrawn now, and Luke could see that beneath the burnishing effect the hull had been torn open in a dozen different places, some with the yellow swirling of raging flames blazing behind them. The towers intensified their attack; but it was too late. The Fire dipped one final time, vanishing from their view—
And with a brilliant yellow-orange fireball that blasted outward toward the far mountains, lighting up the landscape like daylight on Coruscant, it reached its goal.
The sound of the explosion a second later seemed curiously muffled, as if the containing wall of Hijarna stone was as unaffected by the sound as it presumably had been by the explosion itself. A few seconds later another even softer blast washed over them, echoed back from the mountains. The towers, almost reluctantly it seemed, ceased their firing.
And once again, the silence of the night settled in around them.
They sat there in the quiet a long time, clinging to each other as they gazed out at the twisting yellow glow that was the Fire's funeral pyre. Slowly, as the hangar bay fire burned itself out, Luke felt Mara's pain similarly fade away.
But to his surprise, it was not a hopeless bitterness or even simple weariness that rose within her to fill the space left by the pain. She had mourned her loss and spent her grief; and now, as it would always be with her, it was time to put feelings and emotions aside and focus again on the task that needed to be done.
And indeed, a minute later, she stirred in his arms. "We'd better go," she said, her voice slightly ragged with the aftereffects of her crying but otherwise calm and clear. "They're going to be fighting that fire for a while. This is probably our best chance to sneak back in."
* * *
"From the size of that blast, I figure we ought to have knocked out everything in the hangar," Mara commented as they made their way back down the cliff toward their ship. "At least as far as flyability is concerned. There may be something way in the back they'll be able to salvage, but it's going to be a job to even get it out."
She was babbling, she knew, her words tumbling out every which way in the aftermath of the exhausting emotional hammering she'd just gone through. She'd never much liked babblers herself, and the thought that she'd become one, even on a temporary basis, rather annoyed her. But oddly enough, it didn't actually embarrass her. That part wasn't a mystery, either. If dumping everything on Luke the way she had up there hadn't totally ruined his opinion of her, a little babbling wasn't likely to do it, either.
And it hadn't destroyed that opinion. That was probably the most surprising part of it all. It truly and genuinely hadn't. Picking her way down the cliff, she could still feel the same warmth and acceptance flowing from him that he'd wrapped so tightly around her up there. There was also, to be sure, a bit more concern and overprotectiveness in the mix than she really felt comfortable with. But that was okay. That was just Luke, and it certainly wasn't anything she couldn't handle.
"I still don't know how we're going to do this," Luke said, stumbling briefly on a patch of loose rock behind her before he caught himself. "It'll take way too long to go in through the cave again."
"I know," Mara agreed. "Parck mentioned there were gaps in the wall. I guess we'll have to go cross-country and then somehow climb up the side to one of them."
"That's going to be tricky," Luke warned. "They're not going to be nearly as kindly disposed toward us as they were before."
Mara snorted. "That's okay," she said grimly. "I'm not exactly all that kindly disposed toward them, either."
Ahead and below now, barely visible in the faint starlight, she could see their borrowed ship, just beyond one last narrow fissure in the rock. Gathering herself, she leaped across the gap to a flat-topped boulder—
And abruptly halted, flailing for balance on the rock as shock froze her muscles. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a strange thought or sound had flashed into her mind.
Jedi Sky Walker? Are you there?
She lost the fight for balance and dropped rather awkwardly off onto the ground, barely able to keep her feet under her as she landed. But she hardly noticed. There at the ship, perched atop the TIE fighter-style panels, were a dozen nervously fluttering shadows. Even as Luke landed on the ground beside her, one of the shadows detached itself from the ship and flew to a landing on the rock they'd just vacated. It is you, indeed, the thought echoed through her mind, the words framed by excitement and relief. I saw the great
fire, and feared you and Mara Jade had perished. It was Child Of Winds.
And she could hear him.
She looked at Luke, saw her own surprise reflected in his face and mind. "You do go in for the dramatic changes, don't you?" she managed, nodding toward the young Qom Qae. "Nice touch. Really."
Luke lifted his hands, palms outward. "Hey, don't look at me," he protested. "I had nothing to do with this."
Listen to me, please, Child Of Winds cut in impatiently. You must go to the aid of the Qom Jha. The Threateners have invaded their home.
"You mean the cave?" Luke asked, frowning.
"All the way in?" Mara added. "Or are they just at the front?" There was a flurry of conversation back and forth between the alien and the others still hanging from the ship. We do not know, Child Of Winds said. My friends from this nesting of the Qom Qae saw them enter the cave with large branches and machines.
Mara looked at Luke. "Large branches?"
"Heavy weaponry, I'd guess," he said. "How long were these branches?" Some were twice as long as a Qom Qae, Child Of Winds said, stretching out his wings for comparison.
"A little big for cleaning out a cave," Mara said. "Sounds like they've figured out that was how we got in."
"And are setting up in case we come back," Luke said grimly. "Well, we knew we couldn't get in that way, anyway. I just hope the Qom Jha were able to clear out of their way."
"Nothing we can do about it now," Mara said. "And sitting here dithering will only give them more time to get ready for us."
"You're right," Luke said reluctantly. "Let me go get Artoo and we'll get moving." Do you not go to help the Qom Jha? Child Of Winds asked anxiously as Luke started past him.
"There's nothing we can do," Mara told him. "We have to get back into the High Tower right away."
