by Troy Denning
The Force was sour with the slaves’ fear, and now that she was inside the chamber, she could literally see Force energy gathering in oily, iridescent swirls. In fact, it was flowing through a pair of bantha-sized doors into the largest room on the right—just about where she sensed Abeloth’s presence.
No one seemed to notice them, and for a moment Tahiri thought that Abeloth’s captives were just too exhausted or terrified to pay any attention to a guy in Mandalorian armor and a tall blonde wearing an Imperial Security Special Tactics vac suit.
Then a bearded human pulled a stubby E-11 blaster rifle from inside his overalls and threw himself to the floor, firing as he dropped. A single bolt pinged off the bulkhead before Fett’s arm came up and a tongue of crimson flame shot out of a sleeve nozzle to engulf the man.
In the next instant everyone in the chamber was diving for cover and pulling blasters. Tahiri ignited her lightsaber and began to bat bolts toward their sources.
“See? Definitely expected,” she said. “Told you it was too late for a plan!”
“These miners are no trouble.” Fett tipped his head forward and sent an arm-sized rocket screaming into the center of the chamber. “It’s the snarkin’ plants that scare me.”
The rocket detonated with a deafening blast. Tahiri was thrown against the bulkhead behind her by a shock wave hot enough to singe her hair. But the battle fell suddenly quiet, and when the blast-dazzle cleared from her eyes, she saw that the entire chamber had been more or less cleared of flora.
Fett’s gloved hand clamped around her forearm. “Move.”
He started toward the right side of the chamber, and a tingle of danger sense raced down Tahiri’s spine.
Fett continued to pull her toward the chamber wall. “I want those—”
“No!” Tahiri yelled. “Down!”
She dived in one direction and shoved Fett in the opposite. In the weak gravity, they both traveled a good five meters before hitting the floor. A chain of plinks sounded next to her as a line of pellets ricocheted off the floor where she had been standing.
Tahiri rolled onto her back and saw two shatter gun barrels protruding through an observation port in the wall. They were located on the second floor, about fifteen meters to the right of the big doors where Abeloth was hiding. One barrel was swinging toward her, the other toward Fett, and peering over the top of each was a pair of beady Squib eyes.
“There!”
Tahiri pointed and used the Force to shove the nearest weapon into the other one.
Fett’s method was more direct, simply raising his arm and loosing a tongue of flame. It shot through the center of the observation port—but not before both Squibs dropped their weapons and ducked out of sight.
“Go!” Fett yelled, springing up. “Don’t let them hide!”
Tahiri was already on her feet, racing for a small door below the port. It was locked, but these were just sliding doors, not hatches. Her lightsaber required only a few seconds to cut through the thin durasteel.
By then Fett had drawn his blaster pistol and caught up to her. He hit the door at a full sprint, planting a boot solely in the center and kicking the panel down almost before Tahiri had finished cutting it free. She followed him through and found him charging up a pedramp, exchanging blasterfire with three pack-burdened Squibs and yelling at them to stop shooting before he got serious.
They continued to fire, of course.
Tahiri and Fett caught them at the top of the ramp. Tahiri took the lead, using her lightsaber to deflect their attacks as she advanced, trying to force them to the back of a service corridor so they would have no choice except to surrender. Fett took a more direct approach, using his height to fire over Tahiri’s head. He downed all three Squibs in barely nine shots—which was very good shooting, considering that he was in the middle of a firefight and had to time his bolts to get them past a whirling lightsaber.
Tahiri started to chastise the bounty hunter for killing their best means of finding his scientists—then noticed that the three Squibs were lying on the floor twitching, their eyes bulging as they helplessly watched their attackers approach.
“Those didn’t look like stun bolts you were firing,” she commented.
“Yeah, I’m full of surprises. You live longer that way.” Fett stepped past her, then jerked a thumb toward the adjacent wall. “You see what we’ve got in there. I’ll handle the interrogation.”
Tahiri did not turn away. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t let you—”
“You have a conscience?” Fett interrupted. “Since when?”
“Prison changed me,” Tahiri replied, knowing it would be a waste of time to explain to Boba Fett that she was trying to make amends for killing Admiral Pellaeon. “And I can’t let you murder helpless captives, Fett. I’m not that person anymore.”
A muffled sigh sounded inside Fett’s helmet, and then he nodded. “Fine. As long as they tell me what we need to know, I’ll let someone else take out the vermin. Good enough?”
One glance at their trembling captives told Tahiri that Fett would have no trouble extracting all the information he wanted from the trio. She nodded and turned toward the door without another word.
The door, of course, had been locked. She used her lightsaber to cut through the durasteel panel, then stepped through the hole.
The room beyond was a basic lab-workroom outfitted with a large table that contained built-in sinks and warming pads at one end. To Tahiri’s left was the observation port through which the Squibs had opened fire. To her right, in the back of the room, were several computer stations with chairs. Two of the chairs were occupied by humans in white lab coats, one a redheaded male and the other a brunette female. They sat staring at her with looks of absolute terror on their faces. Considering the firefight that had just taken place outside their office, Tahiri found it difficult to understand why they had not fled—until she noticed the shackles securing their legs to their chairs.
“Yu and Tarm?” she asked from the door.
The woman nodded. “I’m Dr. Frela Tarm,” she said. “He’s Dr. Jessal Yu.”
“Good,” Tahiri said. “If there’s anything here you need to stop the nanokiller targeting Boba Fett, I suggest you get it together now.”
The man—Jessal Yu—scowled and yanked at his ankle chain.
“In case you haven’t noticed, we can’t exactly move,” he said. “Besides which, there isn’t a way to stop it. You can’t deactivate a nanokiller after you’ve set it loose. You have to design the obsolescence into the original molecules.”
“I wouldn’t admit that to Fett,” Tahiri said. “Because he’s here now, and you’re only going to live for as long as he continues to believe you can stop it.”
Tarm’s eyes went wide, and the Force shivered with such fear that Tahiri almost felt sorry for the two scientists—until she reminded herself what the pair had done. They hadn’t just targeted Fett. They were also the masterminds behind a line of illegal weapons that had wiped out the entire Verpine soldier caste on Nickel One—and killed much of Tenel Ka’s family. Whatever punishment Fett meted out to the scientists, it would never be justice enough.
After a moment of wallowing in fear, Yu turned to Tarm and asked, “Perhaps a counteragent, Doctor?”
Tarm considered this for a moment, then nodded. “It sounds believable,” she said. “And who knows? There might even be a way to make it work.”
“Stranger things have happened,” Yu agreed. He turned toward his computer station. “I’ll download the old data. You gather the samples.”
“Agreed, Doctor.” Tarm turned toward Tahiri, then pointed at her shackles. “Could you?”
Tahiri shook her head. “That chair has rollers,” she said, knowing how Fett would react if he came in and discovered she had actually freed one of his scientists. “And you can tell me where to find a vidcam and an uplink around here—preferably one I can use without Abeloth noticing.”
“Who’s Abeloth?”
Yu asked.
“I think she might be referring to Pagorski,” Tarm said. She looked back to Tahiri. “An Imperial lieutenant, tentacles and some very strange powers?”
“The tentacles and the powers sound right.” Tahiri was not as surprised as she might have been. Pagorski had been acting as Daala’s campaign coordinator since the day the election was announced, and she had reappeared in the Empire shortly after someone very strong in the Force had used her powers to run the blockade at Boreleo. It was certainly not a stretch to conclude that Pagorski and Abeloth were one and the same—or, more accurately, that Pagorski had been possessed by Abeloth. “I think she’s in the next room over. Is there a way I can get a look at her without her seeing me?”
“The lieutenant is in the main lab,” Tarm replied. Her gaze shifted to the wall opposite Tahiri, then slid down its length and finally came to rest on a transparisteel viewing panel about three quarters of the way to the front of the room. “So you can certainly sneak a peek at her.”
“Thanks.” Tahiri pulled the pack off her back and began to transfer combat supplies to the utility pockets on the outside of her vac suit. “About that vidcam?”
Wu looked toward a cabinet above his head. “In the cabinet over here. But you’re going to have to use a hard wire for the uplink.” He pointed to a set of socket receptacles on the side of the big lab table. “We can’t, er, couldn’t have any signal interference in this lab.”
Deciding that it might be wise to make a quick situation check before she spent five of those minutes setting up a vidcam and uplink, Tahiri removed her helmet from her cargo pack. She attached it to the convenience carrier on the back of her vac suit shoulder, then tossed the pack aside and checked her chrono. Eight minutes before midday GST. Whatever happened next, she had to keep Abeloth occupied for at least eight minutes. She leaned out the door into the corridor, where Fett was still interrogating the Squibs, and told him to let them go.
“You found my scientists?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And Abeloth, too.”
Without awaiting his reply, she started toward the viewing panel. As she approached, she could see down into what had clearly been the facility’s primary laboratory. Even from a dozen steps away, she could see the tops of several fermentation tanks and what appeared to be a large walk-in freezer. But those were hardly what caught her eye. Floating in the smoky air in the heart of the lab were the heads of eight Imperial Moffs. She saw square-chinned Jowar, flabby-jowled Quillan, long-necked Poliff, and five more—all of them Daala’s most ardent public supporters.
At well over a meter in diameter each, the heads were too large to be real, of course. But they looked far more substantial than holograms, and their necks were as thin as tentacles. In fact, as Tahiri drew nearer to the viewing panel, she could see that they were tentacles.
The tentacles led down to a pair of stubby arms, which belonged to a thin female human dressed in a tattered uniform. It had originally been an Imperial lieutenant’s uniform, but all that remained was a collection of rags with a rank bar. A river of Force energy was rushing in through the big doors at the front of the room and flowing into the woman. Her short yellow hair stuck out straight and stiff, and her face seemed to be dissolving into flakes and smoke. Her wide, full-lipped mouth stretched into a cruel smile, and her narrow blue eyes rose toward Tahiri.
Tahiri Veila. The voice was deep and resonant with Force power, and it sounded inside Tahiri’s head. How nice of you to come for me.
THE NUMBERS ON LUKE’S CHRONO READ 11:52 GST. AT PRECISELY 12:00 GST, a brigade of Void Jumpers would hit the exhaust port. That meant Luke and his team had eight minutes—eight minutes for three Jedi to do the impossible or die.
The Jedi, obviously, were hoping for the impossible.
Their objective was a small deflector shield generator that protected the main exhaust port in this corner of the Temple. It lay 150 meters ahead, at the end of a long run of ventilation ducting. Between Luke’s team and the objective were two vertical airshafts, which joined the main duct from below. Technically, the shafts were called stack-heads, but in his exhaustion Luke could no longer remember why the engineers used such an odd term. He knew only that the shafts were a pair of broad, windy chasms spaced roughly fifty meters apart, and that the grit they carried was going to make advancing down the cramped duct feel even more like being caught in a Tatooine dust storm.
But at least the duct’s maintenance lighting had been activated, so it was possible to see the biggest problem that Luke and his team faced. At the far end of the run, beyond the second stack-head, four Sith were kneeling behind a tripod-mounted heavy blaster. The deflector shield generator, of course, was behind the Sith, floating on a tethered hoversled in the middle of the exhaust port.
If Luke and his team succeeded in destroying the shield generator, several thousand elite Void Jumpers would come crashing through the exhaust port. Along with their Jedi liaisons, they would disperse throughout the Temple and open other breaches in the Sith defenses, and the rest of Bwua’tu’s space marine volunteers would flood in to finish the job.
This new assault plan would cost many more Galactic Alliance lives than the admiral’s original plan. But the Sith would quickly find themselves cornered and outnumbered, and the Jedi and their allies would, sooner or later, liberate the Jedi Temple.
Liberating the Temple would not win the war against the Sith, or even end the battle for Coruscant. But Luke and his allies were counting on it to be the turning point, when the Sith went from entrenched defenders to hunted quarry, and momentum swung back toward the Jedi.
All Luke’s team had to do was take out that shield generator.
On most days, that would have been an easy job for two Jedi Masters and Jaina Solo, who, as the Sword of the Jedi, had proven time and again that she was the combat equal of anyone in the Order.
But Luke and his two companions were not at their “normal” best. They had been fighting and retreating—mostly retreating—for far too long. At this point, they were all suffering from serious wounds. Jaina had a broken arm and probably several broken ribs. Corran had lost two fingers to a stray blaster bolt, and he was limping around on a knee swollen to the size of a hubba gourd. Luke had taken a blow to the head that still had him seeing stars, and he had a painful lightsaber burn along his left side. They were all drawing on the Force so heavily that they were virtually glowing with cell overload. Jaina had already entered a stage of Force euphoria, and it would not be long before she experienced a crash every bit as severe as a spicehead coming down from an overdose.
Corran Horn tapped Luke with a three-fingered hand, then tipped his head and croaked, “Company.”
Luke looked in the direction Corran was indicating, down the duct behind them. A lavender-skinned Keshiri woman was rounding a corner about two hundred meters away. The distance was too great to see her features plainly, but Luke had no need. He knew she had dark hair, oval eyes, and a wide, cruel smile. Her name was Korelei, and she was the reason Luke and his companions were on the verge of collapse.
The three Jedi had first encountered Korelei in the corridor outside the computer core, when they had lured the Sith away so Ben and the Horn siblings could get Rowdy inside. Noticing how the other Sith deferred to her, Luke had intentionally waited until she was on top of the first detonite mine before triggering it. Instead of shredding her and every other Sith within three meters, the blast had simply dissipated into some sort of Force shield that she had flung down.
And the situation had deteriorated from there. Korelei and her troops had continued to hound the three Jedi since, never giving them a moment’s rest, always finding them when they hid, continually herding them away from the computer core. It was hard to understand how she could be so cunning and powerful and not be the Grand Lord of the Lost Tribe, but so far she had kept her quarry too busy for such speculation. She had made it impossible for Luke’s team to reunite with Ben and the Horn siblings—or even to
discover what had happened to them. Luke and Corran knew only two things about the fate of Ben, Valin, and Jysella. First, they had not succeeded in getting the blast doors open, or the primary shields down. Second, neither he nor Corran had felt anything in the Force to suggest that any of their children had died. Beyond that, the two fathers were left to fear the worst and hope for the best.
Luke drew his blaster pistol. “Time to go.”
“No-we-have-to-wait!” Jaina’s voice was rapid and full of excitement, a symptom of the Force euphoria that was the only thing preventing her collapse. “It’s still five minutes before midday.”
“I know,” Luke said. “But we can’t wait.”
“But if we blow the generator early,” Jaina insisted, “every gunner on this side of the Temple will be taking aim up the assault corridor!”
“Jaina, they are now.” Corran’s voice was gruff and impatient, a sign that he was in such bad shape himself that he didn’t seem to recognize what was happening to Jaina. “When have we done anything to surprise that she-voork chasing us?”
“We haven’t.” Luke watched Korelei pause in the duct. Perhaps sensing the blaster in his hand, she waved several of her followers ahead of her. “She’s the first Sith who actually worries me.”
“Thanks,” Jaina said. “Didn’t need to hear that.”
“Sorry.” Luke winced at his slip; obviously, he was not in top form, either. “I thought you would have noticed. But we can’t wait, not with her behind us.”
“Better to blow the shields early than not at all,” Corran agreed. “I’ll take out the generator.”
“Good,” Luke agreed. “Take Jaina with you. I’ll handle rear guard.”
“Alone?” Jaina sounded confused. “How can you stop them alone?”
