Apocalypse

by Troy Denning

  “Could it be anything else?” Jaina replied, the tension already thick in her voice.

  “Not really.” Luke clicked out of his crash harness, then rose and turned to go aft. “Don’t get vaped, but try to get past him. Make it look good.”

  “Wait, look good?” Jaina glanced over at his departing form. “Where are you going?”

  “To strap into a medbay bunk,” Luke replied. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, so I should probably make sure my body is lying down when I leave it.”

  AS THE RUDE AWAKENING SPED ONWARD, THE FIRE-RIMMED ORBS ahead rapidly began to swell and drift apart, leaving the area between them webbed with blazing whorls of accretion gas. Against this brilliant backdrop, Ship also began to swell, growing from a propulsion halo the size of a dust mote to a dark sphere as large as Jaina’s thumb.

  A constant stream of fire streaked back and forth between the two vessels, cannon bolts from the Awakening and plasma bulbs from Ship. Both vessels were taking the attacks dead center in the forward shields, making no attempt to evade. With the grasping hand of a black hole reaching from both sides of an ever-narrowing safe corridor, there was no room to maneuver, or even to flee. Flying skill did not matter, nor even combat training. Pilots had one choice and one choice only: punch it out head-on.

  And in that kind of fight, it was usually the pilot who attacked quickest and hardest who survived. Jaina checked the range and, seeing that the two vessels were closing in even faster than she thought, armed the Rude Awakening’s first missile.

  Jaina had chosen the Rude Awakening for good reason: it was a Void Jumper assault pinnace. That meant it could get in fast, evade detection, take a beating, and deliver a devastating attack. In fact, it was one of the most fearsome tactical combat vessels in the galaxy, designed to go head-to-head with a Mandalorian Bes’uliik and be the craft that emerged from the fireball. Jaina could not imagine any better combat transport to fly head-on against Ship—especially not after she had fitted the entire missile magazine with baradium warheads. Talk about a rude awakening.

  The targeting computer chimed once, announcing that the two crafts had closed to effective missile range. Jaina did not bother to try for a target-lock—Ship would defeat it anyway, and in this fight a quick attack was everything. She simply launched, then pulled the throttles back so the Awakening would not be inside the lethal radius when the baradium detonated. The blazing white disk of a thrust ring appeared in front of the cockpit then, as the missile streaked away, quickly shrank to a white dot.

  In the next instant a tiny gray dot appeared in front of the Awakening. In an eyeblink, it expanded into the gray, oblong lump of one of Ship’s Force-hurled stones. Fighting the urge to dodge—a mistake that might well have carried them across a nearby event horizon—Jaina held the pinnace steady and thumbed the intercom pad on her control yoke.

  “Brace for impact back there,” she said. “This one is going to take down our shields.”

  Luke rose out of his body with a jolt, then hung floating above it, staring at the underside of the bunk above. A week passed, or maybe it was a second—he had no idea. Time had no existence outside the body. A heartbeat lasted a week, a lifetime flashed by in an instant. But Luke Skywalker remained, a manifestation of Force essence that embodied mind and form, more real than the material husk he had left strapped in the bunk below.

  He exhaled, or imagined himself exhaling, and his connection to his body grew more tenuous. There is no life, there is only the Force. It was the code of the Mind Walkers, an assertion that the corporeal was illusion, that a living being was nothing but a luminous swirl in the Force. And perhaps they were right.

  Luke exhaled again, and a purple radiance appeared above, shining down through the crude matter of the upper bunk as though it were a hologram. He reached, and the light came flooding in, filling him with a calm as deep as space. He became the Force, and the Force became him, and he knew only the pure, eternal joy of existence.

  Luke called to mind a lake he had once visited, a narrow mountain lake nestled between a granite dome and a boulder-strewn meadow with hummocks of knee-high moss, and he started to walk. Whether the journey took a week or an instant was impossible to say. But then he was there, standing on the shore of the Lake of Apparitions, looking across its still, black waters toward the silver mists that concealed the far end.

  There was no silhouette floating in the fog, no half–hidden woman beckoning him onward. Abeloth was nowhere to be seen.

  Of course she wasn’t. Luke was the one looking for a fight, not Abeloth. She was too busy trying to create her divine family, to transform Ben and Vestara into a twisted version of the Son and the Daughter who had once kept the Balance in the Force. The last thing Abeloth wanted now was to face Luke in a final combat that she just might lose.

  But the choice wasn’t hers.

  Luke stepped into the water and began to wade forward. He did not make any sloshing sounds or disturb the dark surface as he moved. Soon, the hummocks and boulders along the shore began to cast reflections not of themselves, but of the faces of the dead—Wookiees, Barabels, humans, a hundred other species. Their eyes all seemed to be watching Luke as he passed, sometimes showing disappointment when his features did not turn out to be those of a loved one, often lighting in recognition and curiosity as they realized they were looking on the Grand Master of the new Jedi Order.

  Many of the faces Luke saw belonged to old friends—Ganner Rhysode, Numa Rar, Tresina Lobi, and a dozen others—but he continued by them without pause. During his four decades as a Jedi, Luke had lost a hundred good friends and more acquaintances than he could count, and he was certain they would understand if he did not have time to stop and greet them all.

  Finally, he came to the face he had been looking for—a slender female face framed by auburn hair, with high cheekbones, full lips, and large green eyes. It watched Luke approach with longing, and with growing concern. He stopped beside her and squatted on his heels, waiting for her face to float to the surface, wishing that he were not in such desperate need of the help he was about to request.

  As soon as her face broke the surface, she raised her brow and said, “We can’t keep meeting like this, Skywalker.”

  Luke smiled despite himself. “Last time, I promise,” he said. “Mara, I need your help.”

  “There’s not much I can do for you anymore,” Mara said, looking more disappointed than sorry. “You know that.”

  “Can you help me draw Abeloth out?”

  Mara studied him in silence for a moment, then shook her head. “You can’t kill her, Luke. She’s one of the Old Ones.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she is,” Luke said, more sternly than he had intended. “She’s taken Ben.”

  Mara’s eyes went wide, but she said nothing.

  Instead it was a scornful voice to Luke’s left that spoke. “How did you let that happen?”

  Luke turned to find Jacen Solo’s gaunt face peering out of the dark waters. “We were trying to stop the cataclysm you caused.”

  Jacen’s lip curled into a sneer. “You Jedi never tire of blaming the Dark Lord for your own failings, do you?”

  “My failings have nothing to do with this,” Luke said. “You’re the one who set Abeloth free.”

  “Me?” Jacen scoffed. “I was dead.”

  “Thuruht says you did it when you changed the future,” Luke explained. “They say that’s how Abeloth is always freed.”

  Jacen began to look less certain of himself. “Who’s Thuruht?”

  “The oldest Killik hive,” Luke explained. “The one that helped build Centerpoint Station and imprisoned Abeloth the last time she escaped.”

  “Then you should be talking to Thuruht, not Mara and me,” Jacen replied, growing haughty again. “There’s nothing we can do. We’re dead.”

  Luke turned back to Mara. “I just need to know her weak points, or how to find her in the Mists of Forgetfulness,” he said. “Anything that will he
lp me stop her before she … before she does something terrible to Ben.”

  Mara’s eyes grew glassy with sorrow. “Luke … Jacen is telling the truth this time,” she said. “We can’t help you.”

  I can. It was a voice that Luke felt rather than heard, a darkness that pulled at him from behind. And I will.

  Luke turned to find the form of a shadow-wrapped human approaching from the shore by which Luke had entered the water, the same shore by which all mortals came to the Lake of Apparitions. The silhouette was tall and broad-shouldered, with a head hooded in darkness and glowing eyes that never seemed to match colors, that went from brown to orange and yellow to blue, that sometimes grew dark as ebony and seemed to be not there at all. As the silhouette drew nearer, it began to resemble a man Luke had seen many years before, a man who had appeared only in his dreams—and always shortly before he awoke feeling uneasy and frightened.

  Luke glanced back at Mara, then said, “It’s him.”

  “Who?”

  “The man I kept seeing in my dreams, before Jacen turned Sith.”

  Mara looked confused. “But the man in your dreams was Jacen.”

  “I thought so,” Luke replied. “Who else could it have been?”

  He turned back to the figure and saw that the cloaking shadows had coalesced into a suit of dark, spiked armor. The newcomer’s right arm seemed a mere ghost, as though he had only a holographic projection where there should have been a limb. And his left eye had become an empty white circle that looked more like a window into another universe than an actual organ. His face was weathered and chiseled, though—with a web of tattoos radiating outward from an angry gaze and deeply etched scowl—he could not be considered handsome. He stopped three paces away and stood staring, as though trying to decide whether to attack Luke or speak to him.

  “You,” Luke said. It was the man with the tattooed face—the one who had been behind Luke’s team in the Manarai Heights Spaceport, and who had later disarmed Yaqeel Saav’etu near Fellowship Plaza. “Who are you?”

  “No one whose help you want,” Jacen said. “That’s the dark man I saw on the Throne of Balance.”

  “And the only one who can help you,” the stranger said. “With the Ones gone, there is only one way to stop Abeloth … Jedi and Sith together.”

  Luke studied the stranger without answering for a moment, trying to imagine him without the scowl. The man was hardly ugly, but he certainly did not share the Lost Tribe’s usual obsession with careful grooming and good looks. And the tattoos were unusual, too. Vestara had claimed that while the Lost Tribe enjoyed painting their bodies with decorative vor’shandi markings, they would never defile themselves with permanent ink. Of course, she might have been lying—it certainly wouldn’t have been the only time—but Luke couldn’t see how that would have benefited her.

  At last, Luke said, “I recognize your face. You’ve been watching the fight on Coruscant.”

  “And that surprises you?” the stranger asked. “What happens on Coruscant shapes the fate of the entire galaxy. Of course we are watching. We are always watching.”

  “Which is how you know so much about Abeloth,” Luke surmised. “You have a spy.”

  “What makes you think there is only one?” the stranger said. “We Sith are legion … as you now know.”

  Luke shook his head. “If you were Lost Tribe, your appearance would be more refined. And you wouldn’t have tattoos.”

  “Too much talk, Master Skywalker,” the stranger said, stepping past Luke. “I came to fight. Let us find her.”

  Luke turned to follow—and there she was, a gray silhouette just emerging from the Mists of Forgetfulness, her long saffron hair cascading almost down to the water, her tiny pinpoint eyes shining out of sockets as deep as wells.

  Luke’s hand dropped to his hip, automatically reaching for a lightsaber that did not exist beyond shadows. He tried to continue the motion and bring it up to deliver a blast of Force energy, but Abeloth had already launched her own attack by then, delivering a bolt of Force lightning that blasted straight through the stranger into Luke. He felt himself fly backward, consumed by pain, his entire being a column of blue, crackling Force flame.

  * * *

  What Saba felt in the Force was not exactly a go-command. It was a blast of fiery anguish so intense that it lifted her scales and made her fear for Master Skywalker. Still, the message was clear. The hunt was over and the kill was at hand—even if the prey had drawn first blood. Saba leaned forward and peered around the corner, looking up a dark, dead-end corridor toward the computer core. To her Barabel eyes, which could see well into the infrared spectrum, the passage was a long rectangular tube of cool blue walls ending in the orange glow of the computer core air lock. A couple dozen green lumps lay scattered along the floor, Sith bodies that had been dead long enough to start cooling.

  Satisfied that nothing had changed since their initial assault here, Saba pulled her head back and turned to look at the survivors of her own pack. Tahiri had obviously sensed the change in Saba’s disposition and alerted the four Void Jumpers. They had all pulled their thermal imaging goggles over their eyes, and they were looking in Saba’s direction.

  Five survivors, out of an original pack of fifteen. The battle to blind Abeloth and cut her power feeds had been as bloody as it was long. The Void Jumpers had lost all of their infiltrators, both snipers and tech sergeants, and one of the demolition men. But Olazon was still leading the Void Jumpers and in good health, as were both of the power-armor Stompers. The surviving demolition man had lost one leg below the knee, but he had still been able to rig enough chain explosives—and instruct others in strategic placement on adjacent levels—to prevent Sith reinforcements from reaching the final staging area.

  It was still a good pack.

  Saba dipped her chin in a curt nod. Her companions—save for Braan, the injured demolition man—rose to their feet and brought their weapons to the ready. Olazon spoke into his throat-mike, and Stomper One stepped into the middle of the formation. In his suit-mandibles, he held an oblong orb that was about a meter in length. On top was a covered activation pad, with a digital counter that read 0:05:000.

  Saba bared her fangs in approval. “It is time to deliver our egg to itz nest,” she said. “May the Force be with you.”

  “Thanks.” Olazon disengaged the firing safety on his shatter gun. “You, too.”

  He started to step forward to lead the way around the corner, but stopped when Tahiri used the Force to pull him back and wagged a finger in his direction.

  “Where are your manners, Sergeant Major?” She ignited her lightsaber and stepped to Saba’s side. “Ladies first!”

  Saba sissed at the joke and ignited her own blade, then charged around the corner … into a corridor filled with the red eyes of Sith shadow-ghouls.

  If anything, the steam had grown thicker. Ben was only five meters from the Font of Power, and he could tell its location only by the sound of its gurgling waters. Even Vestara, standing halfway between him and the fountain, looked more like a gray Force shadow than the woman he loved.

  “Ves, we’re not drinking,” Ben said. “You saw what happened to Taalon after he fell into the pool. The same thing—or something even worse—will happen to us if we drink from the Font. You know that!”

  “Maybe we’re meant to change,” Vestara said. “Abeloth is the Destroyer of Keshiri legend, and we’re the Protectors, Ben—you and me. That’s why the Force brought us together in the first place. We’re the only ones who can stop her.”

  Ben shook his head. “Not by drinking from the font.” He stepped closer to Vestara and pointed toward the fountain behind her. “That thing is a dark side nexus—probably the most potent one in the entire galaxy. You don’t use something that powerful. It uses you.”

  “So instead we let Abeloth just take us?” Vestara countered. “Use our bodies to raze the galaxy?”

  “No, Ves—we fight back,” Ben said. “But we do it without
drawing on the font—without touching the dark side at all. That’s the only way we don’t become the thing we’re trying to destroy.”

  Vestara studied Ben with a look that was equal parts pity and admiration, then finally said, “You’re a noble fool, Ben.” She turned away and started toward the fountain. “But I’m through discussing this. We can’t beat Abeloth without the font’s power.”

  Ben remained where he was. “And you can’t beat her alone, Ves.”

  He waited for her to glance back, or at least to hesitate. When she didn’t, he turned away … straight into Abeloth.

  Her tentacles were on him before he could cry out, entwining his body and pulling him close, slithering over his eyes and probing at his ears, sliding past his lips and into his mouth.

  Ben bit down hard and felt a gristly tip about the size of his small finger come off. Immediately, his mouth was filled with a thin, foul-tasting oil. He exhaled fiercely, spewing both the tentacle tip and the rancid blood into Abeloth’s bottomless eye sockets.

  She only pulled him closer. A tentacle curled around the back of his neck, then slithered into his nose and started to ascend. He punched and kicked, slamming fists and elbows into her body and stomping at her legs, driving knees into her thighs and abdomen. But he was still too close to the font to use the Force, and without the Force his blows were nothing to her. Abeloth took them all without flinching or groaning—with no reaction save a smile. The tentacle wormed its way up Ben’s nose into his sinuses, and his face flared with unbearable pressure and pain.

  “You will drink, young Skywalker, or you will serve me another way,” Abeloth said, speaking in her multitude of voices. “That choice is the only—”

  The threat came to a crashing end, and Abeloth’s tentacle tore free as she went flying backward on a bolt of Force lightning as thick as Ben’s leg. He dropped to his knees, his agony fading quickly. Blood poured from his nose.