Apocalypse (10 page)

“Can we
take
this kind of damage?” Taryn asked, clearly looking at the same thing Han was.

“Sure, no problem,” Han assured her. “As long as the shields hold—”

Both rear shield-overload alarms began to buzz.

Han started to pull the throttles back in an effort to trick his pursuers into overflying them—then recalled that the blastboats were being piloted by
Sith
, and they would see through that maneuver just as easily as their gunners were anticipating his evasive rolls.

“Okay,” Taryn said. “So what happens if the shields don’t hold?”

“Did you get that heat-lock yet?”

“Don’t get testy, old man,” Taryn said. “I’m working on it.”

“Well, stop,” Han said. “Set a pair of fuses for half a second and dump two missiles without—”

“Igniting their propulsion units,” Taryn finished. Her voice assumed a note of admiration. “You
were
a pretty good smuggler once, weren’t you?”

Before Han could answer—or add
on my mark
—he felt the drag of the Ossan atmosphere rushing into the open missile tubes. He shoved the throttles past the overload stops, then heard the muffled
bang … bang
of the launching charges expelling two missiles from the weapons bay.

Han did not even hear the detonation. The steering yoke simply pushed itself back into his lap, and the
Falcon
went into a slewing, almost-vertical climb as the vector plates were lifted by the shock wave. Damage alarms began to ring in all corners of the control panel, and Leia’s voice came over the intercom.

“Han? How bad is—”

“We’re fine.” Han began to slap the damage alarms silent, looking at each indicator just long enough to be sure that the
Falcon
hadn’t taken any catastrophic damage. “I think.”

“Captain Solo had me dump a pair of concussion missiles on our pursuers,” Taryn said, smiling across the flight deck at him. “You did well when you chose him, Jedi Solo. He’s quite an asset in a bad situation.”

“He does have his moments,” Leia agreed.

A deactivated damage alarm began to chime again, and Han saw that they were losing pressure in the number two sleeping cabin.

“All right, enough with the flattery.” He eased the yoke forward again—and was alarmed to feel more resistance than he should have. “We didn’t come through that exactly untouched, so keep those blastboats off our tail.”

“What blastboats?” Zekk asked. “I don’t see any down here.”

“And there aren’t any above us,” Leia added. “I think you must have gotten—”

The viewport went crimson as a pair of cannon bolts blossomed against the underpowered forward shields, and then the golden light of dissipation static began to strobe through the entire flight deck.

“They’re up here!” Han yelled, trying to figure out how the blastboats had managed to get ahead of him so quickly. He shoved the sluggish yoke forward, forcing the
Falcon
into an unstable dive, then glanced over and saw that Taryn was not nearly as good at reading his mind as Leia was. “What are you waiting for? Shift power to the forward shields. Launch some concussion missiles!”

A negative tweedle sounded from the comm station behind him, then a message from R2-D2 scrolled across Han’s display.
HOLD YOUR FIRE. THE ATTACK IS A MISTAKE
.

“A mistake?” he echoed. “Who makes a mistake like that?”

A flurry of blaster bolts flashed through the fog, missing the
Falcon
by more than a dozen meters, and Han realized that whoever was shooting at them didn’t have the Force—and if they didn’t have the Force, they couldn’t be Sith. He opened a hailing channel.

“Miy’til squadron, hold your fire!” he said. The blue dots of a dozen starfighter engines appeared in the fog ahead, growing larger and brighter as they approached. “We’re the good guys!”

There was a short silence, during which time the blue dots resolved themselves into blue rings, then the icy voice of a Hapan officer replied, “How do we know that?”

Taryn activated her mike and said something in ancient Lorellian.

Another pause followed, and then the woman responded in a chastened tone. “We apologize for the misunderstanding,
Millennium Falcon
, but you
did
stray into the free-fire zone.” The squadron veered away. “Continue climbing on your former vector. You’ll be clear of the sensor jamming in a minute, and then you can catch the rest of the convoy.”

“So they made it?” Leia asked. “All of them?”

“You’re number ten,” the officer replied. “So far.”

Han’s heart sank. “We were the last to launch,” he said. “If you haven’t seen the other two, that means they’re in trouble.”

The officer fell silent for a moment, then said, “We outnumber the enemy four to one, and we’re flying the latest Miy’tils. If anyone is still down there, we’ll find them.”

It was Taryn who asked the obvious question. “What if you find them too late?”

“Then the Sith
will
pay,” the woman said. “That I promise.”

S
TARING OUT ACROSS
F
ELLOWSHIP
P
LAZA
, W
YNN
D
ORVAN SAW LITTLE
evidence that war had come to Coruscant. Pedestrians still wandered through the Walking Garden, inhaling the sweet scent of lycandis and blartree blossoms. Tourists still lingered at their tables in Wenbas Court, enjoying a leisurely lunch in the shadow of the Jedi Temple. Children continued to float in the air above Mungo Park, laughing and squealing as they turned somersaults above the giant negrav trampoline. Everywhere he looked, beings were out enjoying themselves, blissfully ignorant of the hundreds of little battles secretly raging in every corner of the planet.

And Wynn intended to keep it that way—provided, of course, he could convince his Beloved Queen of the Stars that letting her capital world slip into open warfare would not win the hearts of her subjects.

Without looking from the window, the Beloved Queen said, “I do not like all these Jedi on my planet.”

To everyone else, she appeared to be Roki Kem, an elegant Jessar female dressed in a formal white gown. But Wynn saw her in her true
form. To him, she was Abeloth, a tentacle-armed monster with eyes as tiny as stars and a mouth so broad it could swallow a human head.

The Beloved Queen turned away from the window, facing a tall Keshiri woman with dark lilac skin almost as blue as Roki Kem’s. “How many of the creatures have infested us, Lady Korelei?”

A glimmer of fear showed in Korelei’s long oval eyes. “That is difficult to say, Beloved Queen,” she said. “The Jedi attack us everywhere, and yet we have not been able to find
them
anywhere.”

“Because you are on
their
world, Lady Korelei.” Wynn forced himself to meet his torturer’s gaze as he spoke, then could not quite suppress a shudder as he turned to address the Beloved Queen herself. “There can be a few hundred warriors at most. The whole Jedi Order numbers barely more than a thousand, and that includes the students they removed from beneath the Lost Tribe’s guard at Ossus.”

The Beloved Queen’s tentacle-arms rippled with her displeasure. “And yet they have slain how many Sith, Lady Korelei?”

“Less than a thousand, Beloved Queen.” As Korelei spoke, her gaze remained fixed on Wynn. “The number remains uncertain.”

“But near enough to call it a thousand?” the Beloved Queen clarified. When Korelei nodded, she continued, “Still, that leaves you five thousand Sith. I would think that would be enough to clear the problem by dawn tomorrow.”

The Beloved Queen’s words were, of course, less a question than an order. But that did not stop Korelei from dropping her chin in shame. “That I cannot do, Beloved Queen.”

“You cannot?” Her voice turned as sharp as a Sith shikkar. “I fail to see the problem.”

“The Jedi have intelligence on us.” Korelei raised her chin again. “They know our secret identities, and we know nothing of them. It gives them a permanent advantage of surprise.”

“And you have done nothing to nullify that advantage?” the Beloved Queen asked. “Surely, you have captured one?”

Unable to force herself to answer, Korelei merely looked away.

“I see.” The Beloved Queen stared at the Sith just long enough to make the woman grow pale, then asked, “What are you going to do about that?”

Korelei fixed her gaze on Wynn. “There is much that your adviser has not told us.”

“How can that be? You had more than a month with him.” The Beloved Queen turned on Wynn and studied him for many moments, until he could see nothing but the silver pinpoints of her gaze. Cold tentacles of fear began to snake down inside him, and still she did not look away. Finally she said, “Yes, there is much he has hidden from you. But if you could not get it from him in a month, you will not get it from him tonight—and by tomorrow it will be too late.”

Korelei’s slender face went gaunt with fear. “Then we have only one option, Beloved Queen,” she said. “We must reveal ourselves to the people of Coruscant. We must tell them that they are now ruled by Sith.”

Wynn’s chest tightened. “Why would you do that?” he asked. “So the entire population of Coruscant will rise against you?”

“The people of Coruscant will rise against nothing,” Korelei retorted. “They will suffer and obey—and we will know the Jedi by those who fail to tremble beneath our lash.”

Wynn’s pulse began to pound so hard it felt like his temples might burst. There was a cruel simplicity to the Sith’s plan—and one that just might succeed. If the invaders began to behave brutally enough, the Jedi would be forced to reveal themselves—to step onto the field and fight in the open, no matter how bad the odds.

The Beloved Queen smiled, her gruesome mouth stretching wide. “It will not work quickly,” she said. “But it
will
work.”

Wynn could tell by the excitement in her voice that it was more than Korelei’s plan his Beloved Queen liked. He had accompanied her into the undercity several times in the past day alone, and he did not need to be a Jedi to recognize how she fed on the fear and the suffering down there. It literally seemed to flow into her, making her stronger and healthier—and the more she drank in, the more she seemed to want. Korelei’s plan would give her an endless supply of fear and pain, and the entire planet would become her feeding grounds.

And that, Wynn Dorvan could not allow.

Taking a deep breath, he asked, “Beloved Queen, is this what you really want? To win the battle … and lose the war?”

The Beloved Queen’s eyes blazed white. “Lose
how
? The people will obey the Sith.” She turned to Korelei. “Is that not so?”

Korelei dipped her chin. “We will make it so.”

Wynn shook his head. “The people will fight,” he said. “And they won’t stop until they’re dead.”

“Then we will oblige them,” Korelei said. “They will stop fighting when we have killed enough of them.”

Wynn was not surprised to see the Beloved Queen scowl in disapproval. She was a being who fed on fear and anguish, not on death, and anything that reduced the population of Coruscant also reduced
her
. He stepped to the viewport and peered out across the crowded plaza, trying to think of a way to use her dark hunger to prevent all those innocent beings from being drawn into the secret war between the Jedi and the Sith—or at least to keep them ignorant of it for a while longer.

“Those beings are
Coruscanti
,” Wynn said, touching a finger to the transparisteel. “They’re accustomed to being the masters of the galaxy, not its slaves—and if Korelei does not understand that about your subjects, she understands nothing.”

Korelei’s expression did not darken, nor did she hiss a curse or telegraph her attack by stepping toward Wynn. Her shikkar simply slipped from its sheath and sailed toward his belly in a glassy gleam so fast he barely had time to go cold inside.

But one of the Beloved Queen’s tentacles was already curling through the air in front of him, and in the next instant Wynn was not crying out in anguish, or gasping for breath—he was, in fact, still standing on his own two feet, not even bleeding and hardly even shaking.

He forced himself to meet Korelei’s hate-filled eyes. “You need to add some new problem-solving strategies to your repertoire, Lady Korelei,” he said. “Silencing the opposition is not always the best solution.”

Korelei’s face grew stormy, and she started to raise a hand to hit Wynn with some sort of Force blast.

“Not yet,” the Beloved Queen said, stopping Korelei’s attack with a glance. “If Chief Dorvan has a better idea, I wish to hear it.”

“I do,” Wynn said, forcing himself to breathe again. He and the
Bwua’tus had discussed many times how to save Coruscant from the Sith without destroying it, and it had always come down to keeping the battle confined, to setting the fight someplace from which there could be no withdrawal … for either side. “If you want the people to remain docile, Beloved Queen, you must defeat the Jedi quietly. The people must never know what you have done.”

“That’s impossible,” Korelei protested. “The only way to kill the Jedi is to find them, and the only way to find them is to flush them into the open.”