Apocalypse

by Troy Denning

  “Thank you.”

  Wynn stepped forward, deliberately tripping over a nearby heel. He cried out and went sprawling, grabbing the first sleeve within reach to prevent himself from falling. Of course, that sleeve belonged to the Sith with the hold-out blaster, Master Tsiat.

  Tsiat roared in rage and used the Force to fling Dorvan back into the corner. “Clumsy ugwum!”

  Dorvan wailed and cowered, curling into a ball—to hide the little weapon he had just stolen. “It was an accident!” He slipped the blaster into the sleeve of his tunic. “I apologize!”

  He heard a boot step toward him, and then Tsiat’s foot slammed into his ribs. “Apology accepted.”

  The foot drew back as though to kick again, but Lady Korelei’s voice split the rising din. “You’ve made your point, Master Tsiat. I’m sure Chief Dorvan will be more careful in the future.”

  Wynn felt himself rising off the floor, and he continued to rise until he was above the heads of the Sith. When he glanced back, he found Korelei’s oval eyes watching him with the same cold emptiness he had often seen in those of the Beloved Queen. His stomach began to churn with a queasy terror as a pair of silver flickers appeared in the depths of her gaze. Her smile grew as wide as her face. All her teeth suddenly seemed to be fangs, and a relentless tide of despair welled up inside Wynn. He knew what he was seeing.

  The Beloved Queen of the Stars had taken a third body.

  Now Abeloth had three manifestations—Roki Kem, Lydea Pagorski, and Lady Korelei. Wynn grew so cold that he started to shake, and he did not recognize the sensation as despair until he found himself praying that he was hallucinating, that he had finally lost his mind under Korelei’s torture and escaped into the oblivion of insanity.

  Because even madness would be better than three Abeloths.

  Wynn stopped descending, and he found himself hovering in the air before the Roki Kem manifestation, fighting hard not to burst out wailing, too frightened to meet her gaze and see, written in the cruel truth of her face, the pitiful futility of his resistance.

  “Chief Dorvan, will you please put your feet down?” the Roki Kem manifestation asked. “Or do you expect Lady Korelei to continue holding you there for the rest of the day?”

  Wynn put his feet down and was a little surprised to feel a solid floor beneath his shoes. His fear had grown so strong that he was starting to doubt his own perceptions, and it occurred to him that perhaps this was how Abeloth invaded minds, by terrifying and confusing people so badly they finally went insane.

  “Thank you,” said the Roki Kem manifestation. Waving a dismissive hand toward the others, she used the Force to pull Wynn a few steps forward. “Chief Dorvan and I will continue alone.”

  Wynn heard the decontamination chamber hiss close behind him, and then he found himself standing in the Jedi Temple’s computer core, staring at Roki Kem’s back … at Abeloth’s back … with a hold-out blaster up his sleeve.

  Wynn experienced no sudden wave of relief. The situation had the stink of a trap to it, like having a sabacc hand that was nearly the best possible and an opponent happy to call any bet. It felt too good to be true, and it probably was. The blaster might well have a depleted energy cell or a disabled XCiter chamber, but he was determined to play the hand he had—and that meant staying patient until he knew which card he was holding up his sleeve: the Legate or the Idiot.

  So Wynn followed the Kem manifestation forward into the computer core. It seemed to be a vast, spherical cavity filled with drifting clouds of radiance and flashing streaks of light. He and the Beloved Queen were on a transparisteel service balcony that protruded about a dozen meters into the chamber. At the forward end of the balcony sat several banks of display screens and interface consoles. There was no sign anywhere of the systems administrators who had once used the equipment to communicate with the Temple’s computer core.

  The Kem manifestation went to the primary equipment bank and took a seat in a swiveling chair, the middle of a trio.

  “Don’t lag, Chief Dorvan,” she said. “You have no reason to be frightened. You’re still much too valuable for me to kill.”

  “I’m not frightened, just confused,” Wynn lied. He continued forward until he was standing at the arm of the chair adjacent to the one the Beloved Queen now occupied. “Might I ask what am I doing here?”

  “Remaining available,” she said. “I will need your advice again soon.”

  “About what?”

  “You will know when I am ready for you to know.”

  “My apologies,” Wynn said. Either the Beloved Queen was lying about needing his advice, or she did not yet know what kind of advice she would be seeking. “I didn’t realize you were unaware yourself.”

  A pair of silver points began to burn deep in the Queen’s eyes, and for a moment her arms seem to writhe like tentacles. “I said you were too valuable to kill,” she warned. “Now be silent.”

  Wynn remained standing, confident that the blaster was no test. The Beloved Queen had a habit of covering her weakness with a threat whenever she felt vulnerable. And the only time she ever seemed vulnerable was when she entered one of her revelatory trances. He had no idea where her mind went during such episodes, whether she was flow-walking like Jacen Solo had done or simply spying on her enemies through the Force—but he did know that while she was away, she was oblivious to her surroundings.

  Wynn waited as the Beloved Queen’s breathing turned shallow and her eyes grew distant and glassy. And then he continued to wait, counting to a hundred and watching for any movement that would suggest she was not deep in her trance.

  When he saw none, he asked, “Beloved Queen?” He waited another twenty heartbeats, then spoke louder. “Beloved Queen!”

  She remained motionless, her blue Jessar skin as smooth as stone and her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the chamber. Wynn stepped behind the chairs, then pulled the hold-out blaster from his sleeve and checked the energy cell.

  Charged.

  He checked the gas canister. Full.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the decontamination chamber door. Closed. Wynn pointed the blaster at the chair, and the Beloved Queen did not stir. Was it really going to be this easy?

  Wynn pulled the trigger, and an energy bolt screamed into the seat back. He pulled the trigger again. This time, the bolt shot completely through the chair and through her body, then vanished into the darkness above the equipment bank.

  He smelled scorched flesh and began to hope that it really was that easy. He circled to the front of the chairs and saw the Beloved Queen slumped in her seat, her hands hanging over the armrests, her chin on her chest, and a smoking hole through the center of her torso. Clearly dead.

  Still, better to be sure.

  Wynn stepped closer and pointed the blaster at her head.

  A low animal groan rumbled up from her chest, and then blood splashed his face and tunic. He heard someone screaming and realized it was him, and he pulled the blaster trigger again. A screaming bolt burned through her forehead just above the eyes. Her head rocked back, fell forward again, and then rolled to the side.

  Wynn pulled the trigger one more time and sent another bolt burning into her head, this time through the temple. Her head did not move, and he stumbled back, away from the smoke and the smell and the oozing gore.

  For a moment, he stood there. Waiting.

  Nothing happened.

  The Beloved Queen was dead, and Wynn had survived. He couldn’t really believe it.

  He felt the equipment bank against his back and realized he was still backing away. He stopped and shifted his gaze toward the decontamination chamber, remembering the dozens of Sith who were setting up their ambush out in the corridor. He had no idea what to do about them. He hadn’t expected to survive the assassination attempt, so he hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  A voice behind him, cold and familiar, said, “You will never slip past them, Chief. There is no escape.”

  Wynn sprang away from th
e equipment bank, moving faster and leaping farther than he would have believed possible, and landed beyond the chairs. He spun around, already knowing what he would see … and he saw it: a face of pure radiance, the size of a bantha and as wispy as a cloud, floating out in the darkness of the computer core. She appeared vaguely human, with a long cascade of coarse yellow hair and tiny, deep-sunken eyes that shone from their sockets like stars at the bottom of a well. She had a nose so small it was almost absent, and a large, full-lipped mouth so broad that it reached from ear to ear

  Abeloth.

  “Yes,” she assured him. “Your Beloved Queen of the Stars.”

  Wynn shook his head. “You’re no queen of mine.” He raised the blaster pistol and pressed the emitter nozzle to the side of his head.

  “And you’re wrong. There is an escape.”

  He pulled the trigger in the same instant he felt his hand jerk. A blaster bolt screamed past above his temple. He felt searing heat across the top of his skull and smelled his own singed hair, and Wynn knew he had failed. He had survived.

  “I am never wrong,” Abeloth said.

  The blaster twisted free of Wynn’s hand and went flying. Then a blast of Force energy hit him in the chest, and he went flying, too.

  “There is no escape … for any of you.”

  CARGO DID NOT NEED LIGHT OR FRESH AIR. IT DID NOT GRAY OUT DURING high-g accelerations, nor did it suffer ringing ears every time it shot through a grav-control halo. Cargo did not feel its gorge rise when the transfer tunnels took an unseen turn, and it did not grow dizzy with dehydration as it sailed through the stifling heat of a repulsor-driven freight-handling system.

  But Ben did.

  And that made the journey from the water-intake plant a real test of endurance and courage. For what seemed an hour, Ben sailed through the sweltering cargo tube, lurching and turning through the darkness, consumed by his growing fear for Vestara. He could only imagine the agony she would suffer at the hands of her Sith captors, the punishments she would endure for killing so many of her own kind—especially High Lord Taalon and her father. But it was more than just fear eating at him. It was anger, too. Everyone had been so fast to blame Vestara for the ambush … and no one faster than Corran Horn. Considering how his own children had betrayed the Jedi while under Abeloth’s control back on Nam Chorios, Master Horn ought to have known better than to pass judgment based on nothing but a guess. Vestara deserved better than that.

  A spine-jamming deceleration jerked Ben’s thoughts back to his own situation, and he felt the air stir ahead as a freight canister sped through an unseen intersection just centimeters from his head. He hung there motionless for a few moments, listening to surprised groans and involuntary grunts echoing through the passage as his five companions endured their own sudden stops and unexpected accelerations. Then he felt his face beginning to stretch as he shot forward again, and once more he was flying helplessly through the darkness.

  The worst part was the control rings. Every hundred meters, Ben would pass through one of the repulsorlift control rings that lined the shaft. If he was lucky, the ring would be on standby, and he would suffer only a moment of unpleasant queasiness as he passed through a wafer-thin antigravity field. But as he approached an active ring, a crashing roar would fill the tunnel. There would be a moment of silence as he passed through, then an excruciating pop deep inside his ears, followed by a maddening ringing that made his whole head ache.

  So far, Ben had passed through fifteen active rings and endured more twists and turns than he could track. His stomach felt like he had been practicing wingovers with a deactivated inertial compensator, and he was so thirsty that he was almost ready to start sucking the sweat out of his own robes. And he had no idea how much longer the journey would last—or what they would find when they finally reached the computer interface located at the other end.

  Ben felt his stomach flutter as he passed through an inactive control ring; then the muffled thump of a shifting guidance door sounded in the darkness ahead. A moment later his spine bent backward as he was drawn upward into a vertical shaft. A cloud of blue light appeared above his head and rapidly brightened into a reflection on the interior wall of another bend in the tube—this one back to the horizontal. Ben barely managed to spin around before passing through a final pair of control rings. He decelerated so hard his kidneys ached, and then he was spat out of the freight tunnel and dropped onto the padded bed of a receiving bench.

  A bar of brilliant white light appeared a few centimeters ahead and started to glide along the pad toward Ben. He rolled away, only to find himself trapped on his side, his back pressed against the guide-rail on the far side of the bench. The beam swept across his face, bright and blinding as it shone into his eyes, then continued toward his feet. As his vision began to clear, Ben saw that the light was being projected from a saucer-shaped silhouette sitting atop the squat, blocky torso of an STK-CLR stock-keeping droid.

  The subtle whine of a pneumatic motor sounded from the droid’s shoulder and waist areas, and four telescoping arms extended toward the guide-rail. Ben rolled beneath them, then swung his legs around and dropped off the bench to stand next to the droid.

  It spun around its head-disk so that the projection slot was facing Ben. “Your universal stocking code is not evident,” it said, speaking in a deep, clattering voice. “Please display it for proper shelf assignment.”

  Ben shook his head. “I’m not a stock item.”

  “Of course you are,” STK-CLR responded. Another whine sounded, and before Ben could react a set of servogrips closed around his wrists and ankles. “You came through the freight system.”

  “Not everything that comes through the freight system is a stock item.” When Ben tried to pull free, the droid’s arms suddenly extended farther, and he found himself hanging spread-eagled in the gloom. “Put me down! And that’s an override command.”

  “Stock items are not authorized to issue override commands,” STK-CLR countered. A small panel opened in the droid’s chest, and a slender hose ending in a tiny nozzle shot out and sprayed a bar code down the front of Ben’s robe. “You have been marked DEFECTIVE UNIT. Present yourself to the routing station on the far side of the delivery portal for return to your supplier.”

  Rather than continue the argument, Ben simply hung his head. “Sure, whatever you want.”

  “Good.” The droid lowered Ben to the floor. “And relay my displeasure to your manufacturer. This is the Jedi Temple. We have acceptance specifications.”

  As soon as his boots hit the floor, Ben pivoted around and tripped the primary circuit breaker in the back of the droid’s neck. A surprised squawk sounded from the STK-CLR’s vocabulator; its arms retracted into their sockets, and its frame hissed down to settle over its legs. Ben pushed the droid away from the receiving pad, then snapped his lightsaber off its belt hook and turned to see if he could figure out where the freight-handling system had deposited him.

  He was not surprised to find himself in a dimly lit warehouse filled with row after row of high, gloom-swaddled shelves. The Jedi Temple had at least a hundred such rooms, devoted to storage for laboratories, armories, fabrication shops, communications centers, even routine maintenance functions necessary to keep any building of its size in good repair. But this room smelled faintly of Tibanna gas and hyperdrive coolant, and it was reverberating to the muffled thunder of artillery strikes crashing against the shields outside a nearby chamber.

  All of that told Ben that he was in the parts locker of a spacecraft repair bay. Judging by the size of the locker, and by the steady battle rumble he was hearing, it was a repair bay that served an extremely large and busy hangar.

  The muffled growl of activating control rings sounded deep within the freight-handling system and grew instantly louder, and Ben looked back in time to see the meter-long silhouette of an astromech droid shooting out of the delivery portal. It decelerated almost instantly, then settled gently onto the receiving pad.

&nbs
p; Ben used the Force to lift the little astromech onto the floor next to him. “Rowdy?”

  The droid responded with an indignant tweedle.

  “Sorry,” Ben said. “Not much light in here.”

  A ceiling lamp activated, illuminating the vicinity in a cone of brightness—and leaving no doubt about the identity of the battered little unit in front of Ben.

  “Turn that off!” Ben ordered. “We’re trying to stay hidden here.”

  The lamp remained on, and Rowdy whistled a question.

  “From the Sith, of course,” Ben hissed. “I can’t believe you brought us to the Main Operations Hangar! There are probably a couple hundred Sith manning the cannon batteries—right out there!”

  Rowdy tweedled in agreement. Then, without deactivating the lamp, he dropped his third tread and began to roll along behind the shelving units. Ben followed along until they reached the eighth row, at the far end of which he saw another cone of light shining down on his father and Corran. The two Jedi Masters were twenty meters away, standing next to a computer interface panel, but staring over the parts counter out into a massive repair bay as brightly lit as it was empty. Given their lack of caution, it seemed apparent that Ben’s fear of discovery was unwarranted. The Sith were simply too busy defending the exterior of the Temple to worry about what was in the parts locker behind them.

  “Okay, Rowdy. Sorry.” Ben pointed toward the interface panel. “You obviously know what to do. I’ll go back and let the others know the situation.”

  Rowdy replied with a good-natured trill, and Ben returned to the receiving area, where Jysella Horn stood peering into the delivery portal with her lightsaber in hand. Her jaw was set, her feet were braced, and her Force aura was humming with anticipation.

  “There was a lot of blasterfire behind me,” Jysella said as Ben approached. “I think Jaina and Valin have been trading bolts with the enemy the whole way.”

  “Blasted Sith.” Ben vaulted over the receiving bench, then turned to face the delivery portal. “Don’t they recognize a desperate escape when they see it?”