Apocalypse (17 page)

“Ben, follow me!”

By the time Jaina said this, a trio of glass parangs were flying in her direction. She reached out to Ben, making sure he sensed where she was going, then dived toward a twenty-centimeter outflow pipe that exited on her side of the pump.

As soon as her blade tipped down, the Force lightning blasted her in the leg and sent her spinning. Concentrating on keeping her fists clenched around the hilt of her weapon, she allowed the lightsaber to slice through the outflow pipe where it turned to pass down through the deck grating.

Water sprayed in all directions, and the Force lightning died away. Ben brushed past behind her, amid the tingling of shattering parangs. Jaina rolled onto her back, bringing her blade around until it was above her head. She slashed through the outflow pipe again, this time closer to where it left the pump housing. A meter-long section of pipe exploded outward, riding a jet of water as big around as Jaina’s leg, and went spinning toward the Keshiri woman.

The ear-piercing cracks of two grenade detonations sounded from the far side of the pump, announcing that Ben had been busy himself. Then Jaina’s entire body began to prickle with danger sense. Shouting for him to come along, she sprang to her feet and executed a series of Force flips more or less following the column of water toward her first attacker.

Having just redirected the flying pipe, but still struggling to keep her balance in the water jet, the Keshiri was in no position to defend herself. Jaina beheaded the woman on the way past, then felt the invisible punch of a concussion wave as a Sith grenade exploded back at the pump.

Jaina tumbled through the air, completely out of control, ears aching and head spinning, then crashed down on a hip. Her entire leg exploded in pain, and she continued to roll, sometimes sideways and sometimes over her shoulders, until she finally slammed into the curved wall of some sort of settling basin.

She was still trying to orient herself—and find Ben—when she felt something ping off the basin wall next to her head. She spun away and came around in a crouch, searching for the source of her attacker. A spark flashed off the deck where she had been sitting, and a dent appeared in the grating.

The shatter gun.

Jaina rolled again, and this time, she came up looking back toward the sniper nest. The shatter gun barrel was swinging in her direction.

Where was Ben?

Jaina backflipped away, keeping her hand extended, and felt the air whisper as the pellet passed beneath her.

The sniper was good.

Then Jaina came around again and saw the barrel trying to follow her, and this time it was the Sith who was slow. Jaina grabbed the shatter gun in the Force and jerked, hard. The sniper pitched forward out of his firing crouch, following his weapon toward the sludge tank below. They hit the edge and broke together.

Jaina had no time to look for her cousin. A wall of Sith was charging in her direction, their crimson lightsabers dancing in their hands as they ran. Hoping to find some hint of what had become of Ben, she reached for him in the Force, then crouched down below the edge of the settling basin—and felt Luke reaching out to her, urging her to leave the cover of the basin and turn toward the interface panel.

But there remained no sign of Ben.

Jaina paused just long enough to take one last look back toward the pump motor. Half a dozen glass blades came flying in her direction. She swept them aside with a Force blast, then turned and sprinted for the interface panel, dodging and somersaulting as Force lightning and blaster bolts streaked into the gloom ahead.

Then she was only a step away from the interface panel, with only two places to go—right toward the main door, or left down a small service aisle flanked by two banks of equipment cabinets. She felt Luke
pull her to the left, and so she charged down a passage so narrow she would have almost no hope of dodging anything after she entered.

Jaina managed three steps before her spine grew icy with danger sense and fear. She dropped to her belly and felt the heat as a flurry of blaster bolts shrieked past overhead. Then she rolled to her back—and saw Ben somersaulting down the aisle toward her, just three steps ahead of the Sith who had opened fire.

Jaina sprang up, using the Force to launch herself high enough for Ben to tumble past beneath her, then ignited her lightsaber—and barely managed to catch a fork of Force lightning on the blade. She yelled for Ben to keep going and started to advance on her attacker.

She felt Luke touch her in the Force again, gently tugging her down the aisle. She retreated as quickly as she could, running backward and pivoting from side to side, pressing her back and shoulders flat against the equipment cabinets whenever blaster bolts and Force-hurled parangs went sailing past.

The aisle opened up into a comparatively small storage room cluttered with stacks of enormous spare valves and pipe fittings—most over a meter in diameter. Luke continued to draw Jaina onward, so she kept dodging and retreating, and an instant later she was one step from the back wall, standing at Ben’s side. They were trapped, with nowhere to go.

Then Luke and Corran Horn emerged from behind a stack of giant valves, igniting their lightsabers and stepping forward to ricochet bolts toward her attackers. Instead of charging directly to the attack, the Sith began to spread out again, hoping to outflank the Jedi and attack from all sides at once.

Jaina glanced over at the two Jedi Masters. Both were watching the Sith with smug expressions on their faces.

“Thanks for coming,” Luke said, speaking in a Force-enhanced voice. “I’m Luke Skywalker, Grand Master of the Jedi Order. And I’m only going to say this once: drop your weapons.”

Most of the Sith looked confused or worried, but their apparent leader—a stocky blond man with a dagger-shaped beard—glared in open hatred.

“I don’t care who you are.” He raised his hand, preparing to wave the others forward. “You can’t be
that
good.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Luke replied.

He glanced into the darkness above the enemy’s head—and drew a scornful snort from the Sith.

“Come now, Master Skywalker,” he said, raising his hand to wave his warriors forward. “If that is the best—”

His retort was cut short when a pair of figures in dark molytex armor dropped out of the gloom above the narrow aisle. The
snap-hiss
of igniting lightsabers sounded behind the band of Sith, and startled voices began to cry out in pain.

Jaina did not wait for Luke to order the attack. She simply leapt forward, Force-hurling the closest Sith into the one behind him, bringing her blade down in a vicious overhand slash that he managed to block despite the confusion. He spat at her eyes in a desperate attempt to blind her and then, as she leaned away, drove a knee into her ribs so hard it rocked her up on one foot.

Jaina swept her other foot across in front of her, hooking his ankle just as he shifted his weight back to catch his balance. His foot flew out and he went down on his side, trying to twist around so he could bring his lightsaber back up to block.

Jaina planted her boot on his hip, driving him into the deck face-first. At the same time, she whipped her lightsaber up to block a strike from a dark-haired woman stepping forward to take the spitter’s place. Still standing on his back, Jaina pivoted around and snapped her foot up sideways, catching the woman at the base of the chin. She felt the sharp crackle of shattering jawbones, and the Sith flew backward off her feet.

Not even taking the time to lower her foot, Jaina flipped her lightsaber down and drove it into the man upon whom she was standing. She whipped the tip around inside—just to make sure the Sith was done fighting for good—then brought her leg down and turned back to the dark-haired woman.

A blue lightsaber was already protruding from the Sith woman’s sternum, slicing down toward her hip. The anguish in her eyes faded to emptiness, then she collapsed and landed in a heap on the deck. Behind the corpse, standing shoulder–to-shoulder with Valin Horn and staring at the dead body with an expression halfway between horror and relief, was Jysella.

Jaina dipped her head in acknowledgment, then spun to meet her next attacker—and found Luke picking his way toward her. His lightsaber was already deactivated, and his expression was serene, as though fighting Sith at three-to-one odds was only meditation for him. Following a step behind him was Ben. The young man looked a bit awestruck, but he was spattered with enough blood to suggest he had not been idle.

In the opposite direction, Jaina found Corran coming to join them. His nose was wrinkled at the stench of so much death, but he seemed no more troubled by the fight than did Luke. Jaina deactivated her own lightsaber and turned back to Valin and Jysella, who must have cut their way through at least four Sith before reaching Jaina’s side.

“Nice work, guys,” she said. “Even I didn’t feel you hiding up there.”

Jysella smiled. “It’s easy to be stealthy when the enemy is focused on you and Dad and Master Skywalker.”

“Not that easy,” Luke said. “You did well. Both of you.”

Valin beamed, but distant boots could already be heard running in their direction. More Sith.

“We’d better get going,” Luke said. “The way Rowdy has been acting, he’s going to leave without us.”

Jaina’s brow shot up. “You’ve seen Rowdy?”

Luke nodded, then waved them toward the back of the storage area. “We managed to hold the computer interface long enough for him to learn that it’s been disabled.”

“Disabled?” It was Ben who asked this. “But it looked active when we saw it.”

“It certainly did,” Corran replied. “And I think we know what that means.”

“They had time to plan this ambush,” Jaina said, not quite able to keep from glancing in Ben’s direction. “A
lot
of time.”

Ben scowled. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But it couldn’t have been Vestara. She didn’t even know where we were going.”

“And you know that
how
?” Corran asked.

“Because she asked me about it while we were in the capsule,” Ben replied. “About two minutes before the ambush.”

“Questions are not always what they seem,” Corran said. “You’re a good enough investigator to understand that.”

“And I’m good enough to know that assumptions aren’t facts,” Ben replied. He turned to his father. “Vestara is
not
the one who betrayed us. You know that.”

Luke remained silent for an instant, then shrugged. “All I know is we’re going after a Sith Grand Lord. Whatever we think we know, we’re probably fooling ourselves.” As he spoke, muffled Sith voices began to sound from the far end of the aisle. “We’ll sort that out later. For now, we just need to keep moving.”

He motioned to Corran and Valin, and the two Horns quickly moved a two-meter stack of valves and pipe elbows away from the wall. Behind it, at the end of a short aisle, a freestanding lift tube emerged from the floor and vanished into the gloom above. A crude portal about one and a half meters high had been cut into the wall of the tube, revealing a sporadic flow of canisters, crates, and soft-sided bags rising inside it. Next to the opening stood Rowdy, rocking back and forth and trilling impatiently.

“A
cargo
tube?” Jaina asked.

“Rowdy seems to think it will take us to another interface station,” Corran said, glancing back to Jaina. “At least, I assume that’s why he had us cut a big hole into it.”

Rowdy gave an affirmative tweedle, and the voices grew louder and more urgent as Sith began to come down the aisle toward them. A heartbeat later the first blaster bolts started to ping around the storage area, ricocheting off pipe fittings and equipment cabinets.

“It’s got to be better than staying here,” Jaina said. Worried that Ben would do something foolish, she turned to find him staring back down the aisle. “Ben—”

“I know,” he said. Ben’s Force aura began to sizzle with frustration and anger, then he waved a hand and sent a control valve tumbling down the aisle toward the Sith. “We have to go.”

H
OW THE SCOUTSHIP HAD MANAGED TO SLIP INSIDE THE BLOCKADE
, Head of State Jagged Fel could not imagine. He had a thousand Sienar Sentinel picket boats watching all approaches to the planet Exodo II. He had six Star Destroyer task forces crowded into an area of space barely a thousand kilometers in diameter. He had a hundred turbolaser crews pouring fire into the cluster of sunlit megaliths that had once been Exodo II’s moon Boreleo, and he had three sensor crews monitoring every cubic meter between the target zone and the cordon perimeter. And yet there it was on the bridge display: the golden sliver of a KDY Star Ranger, slipping into a dark chasm between a trio of kilometer-long moon fragments.

The most likely explanation for the infiltration was also the most alarming: that someone had deliberately allowed the craft through. His siege of ex–Galactic Alliance Chief of State and would-be Imperial Head of State Natasi Daala was about to enter its second month, and Jag was acutely aware that his power was hanging by a thread. Every Moff in the Empire was mobilizing his private fleet, and there had already been several
border clashes as old enemies took advantage of Jag’s distraction to make star grabs. His spies reported that the Moffs who were not attacking one another were as likely to join the fight against him as to support him against Daala. The Imperial Navy itself could not be trusted, either. In fact, Jag had been forced to dispatch entire fleets to the most remote corners of the Empire, for fear that their officers would side with Lecersen or Vansyn rather than Jag, the legitimate Head of State.