Apocalypse (61 page)

They were still two meters apart when the first tentacle touched Saba’s face, then her entire head was webbed in tentacles. They were trying to push in everywhere, into her nostrils and her eyes and her mouth, tapping against the tympanic membranes that covered her ear canals, even trying to slip up beneath her scales.

Saba ignited her lightsaber and brought it sweeping up, cutting all of the tentacles away at Abeloth’s shoulder. Expecting a geyser of Abeloth’s Force essence to come spraying out of the wounds, she immediately sealed the membranes that protected her eyes and nostrils. But the heat of her blade seemed to cauterize the wounds, and all that happened was that the tentacles flew off in every direction. There was an instant of stunned silence, then Abeloth released an ear-piercing shriek of pain and rage.

In the next millisecond they both slammed down atop an interface console. Saba felt metal buckling and clearplas shattering, then they tumbled off on opposite sides, Saba hitting the deck near Tahiri and Abeloth landing on her feet by the balcony’s edge. Fearing that her prey would attempt to retreat into the computer core, Saba grabbed at Abeloth in the Force, at the same time slashing her lightsaber through the console that separated them.

The blade suddenly died. For an instant Saba thought the pulse bomb had detonated early. She cursed her pack’s lack of faith in her
skill, but then Abeloth was racing toward her, coming in faster than she was being pulled, and Saba realized that her prey had extinguished the blade.

Even with no arms left to fight with, Abeloth remained determined to take Saba’s body. Her huge mouth gaped open, revealing two rows of fangs—fangs sharp enough to shred blast armor, set in jaws wide enough to bite through a rancor neck.

That was no way to fight a Barabel.

Saba brought both fists up together, jamming them into Abeloth’s mouth in a Force-enhanced double punch. The blow knocked a ten-centimeter hole through both sets of fangs, and when Abeloth bit down there was nothing but toothless gum clamping Saba’s scaly forearms.

Still, the pain was excruciating, and Saba came close to stopping before she felt her forearms snapping. Hissing in pain, she balled her fists anyway, locking her talons deep into the back of Abeloth’s throat. In one smooth jerk, she pulled her prey’s head down sideways and exposed the neck.

Then Saba sank
her
fangs in deep. They sliced through skin and gristle and just kept sinking, cutting through muscle and bone and spinal cord. Abeloth’s body went limp with shock. Saba used her broken arms to jerk the head down farther, exposing even more neck. She ripped flesh. She gnashed sinew. She crushed vertebrae. She whipped her muzzle back and forth, and she felt the prey’s head pop loose.

Only then did Abeloth’s jaws open and release Saba’s broken arms. She let her hands open, and her claws slipped free. The head went flying across the balcony and landed at the feet of Tahiri and the two Void Jumpers. All three stared at the gruesome thing in open shock, until Tahiri finally seemed to recover her wits and look toward Saba.

“Master Sebatyne?” she gasped. “Is she … did you get her?”

“Yes, Jedi Veila,” Saba said, struggling to her feet. “Now we have
both
killed an Abeloth.”

Ben’s brain was so muddled—and his vision so blurry—that at first he took the flickering blue ball to be a sun about to go nova. Next, he thought it might be the efflux nozzle of a departing starship. Then he
noticed the arch of a stone arcade before him, and the cobblestone courtyard all around him, and he recalled that he was on a planet somewhere in the Maw. He had been taken there by a Sith meditation sphere named Ship, at the command of a being called …

Abeloth
.

His eyes went back to the column of yellow fog at the heart of the courtyard.
That
was the source of the flashing. There was a ball of blue energy dancing inside it, crackling and drifting back and forth. And there was a voice, too, a familiar female voice … calling his name.

“Ben?”

Vestara Khai’s voice.

“Ben!”

His girlfriend’s voice.

“Ben, where
are
you?”

She sounded terrified.

“
BEN!
I need you!”

Her voice began to quaver …

“Ben, don’t give … up … on … me.”

She was panting for breath.

“Please, not … don’t let this …”

Ben sprang to his feet. His head began to throb so hard he thought it would split, and he felt warm blood cascading down the back of his neck. He staggered forward anyway—and nearly vomited when he entered the yellow cloud and took his first breath of acrid steam.

The blue ball was dancing toward him now. As it drew closer, he could see that the glow was being caused by a crackling cage of Force lightning. Inside the cage, two figures were locked in hand-to-tentacle combat, one a beautiful young woman with brown eyes, the other a hideously battered thing with a mass of smashed skull and spilled brains. It looked as though a Keshiri had grown tentacles and stepped into a threshing machine.

The beautiful young woman—Vestara—was blasting away with a constant stream of Force lightning, trying to use it to hold her attacker at bay. The Keshiri mess was grasping at her with two sets of arm-tentacles, using one set to keep them bound together while the other set probed at her mouth and nostrils. Protruding from a small scabbard on the Keshiri’s belt was the handle of a glass dagger. Ben recognized
it as one of the favorite weapons of the Lost Tribe of Sith, a thin glass stiletto known as a shikkar.

Ben did not even hesitate. He used the Force to pluck the shikkar from its scabbard, then drove the tip up through the center of the Keshiri’s back, angling the blade so that it passed through her spinal cord, straight into her heart.

A spray of dark blood erupted around the shikkar’s handle, and the Keshiri collapsed to her knees, then threw her smashed head back and let loose with an eerie wail. Her tentacles slid free of Vestara and started to swing around toward her back.

Ben used the Force to snap off the shikkar’s handle.

Vestara hit the Keshiri in the face with a blast of Force lightning.

The Keshiri toppled over backward and lay writhing, apparently helpless, but somehow still alive. Ben used the Force to drag her out of the yellow fog, away from the Font of Power and out into the light of the planet’s bright blue sun.

The Keshiri stopped struggling, and her eyes grew vacant and glassy. Her tentacles fused back into arms, then her entire body went slack. Ben used the Force to summon the pillar fragment that he had used to smash her skull earlier and dropped it across her chest. He heard bones snapping and air fluttering from her lungs, but no screams or groans or half-heard wails to suggest the woman was anything but dead.

Then Vestara stepped out of the yellow fog. Her face was wild, and the font’s dark power was swirling around her legs so thickly that it looked as though she were floating on a black cloud. She raised her hands and pointed them at the corpse. Clearly, she intended to hit it with another blast of Force lightning—to burn it to a crisp and destroy every last trace of the thing that had tried to take them.

“No, Vestara.” Ben quickly stepped to her side and placed a hand across her wrists, then gently forced her arms down. “There’s no need for that. We’re done with her now.”

Ship hung in the exit to the choke point, a small dark spot silhouetted against a blue giant sun. Jaina knew her opponent had to be as battered as the
Rude Awakening
. It had stopped returning fire after she
had hit it with the double baradium strike and driven it out of the narrows. But it had refused to give up entirely, always remaining just close enough to remain a threat, to make one last suicide run and take them both out.

Unfortunately, the shock waves had taken a toll on the
Awakening
herself. She had at least three hull breaches, and Jaina had been forced to close her helmet and seal the medbay cabin where Luke lay strapped into a bunk. Now she truly had only one way to save him—assuming that was still possible. She had to set down on a planet with an atmosphere—and this deep in the Maw, that meant Abeloth’s own world.

Jaina fired the last baradium missile. Then, praying that the
Awakening
could take one more battering, she accelerated after it … and watched in disbelief as the distant dot suddenly began to shrink and vanished into nothingness.

Finally, Ship had turned and run.

T
HE
L
AKE OF
A
PPARITIONS WAS NEITHER WARM NOR COLD, STILL NOR
roiling. It simply
was
, beyond time and sensation, beyond fear or desire or duty. It embodied surrender and attainment, death and immortality, and Luke had never felt more ready to slip below its dark surface and join his beloved Mara, to wrap himself in her liquid embrace and let the Depths of Eternity wash away the anguish of his wounds, the ache of his lonely despair.

But something would not let him sink.

He lay on the water for a year or a minute, hurt and exhausted, watching Abeloth’s pale form vanish. Her eyes were empty and dark, her tentacles curled into loose balls. Her golden hair was fanned about her head in a floating halo, and she did not seem to be sinking so much as merely shrinking. Luke continued to watch as she dwindled to the size of a thigh, a foot, a finger, then a mere sliver that seemed to hang below him, wavering and flickering, before it finally slipped from sight.

And still Luke did not sink. He was too weak to rise, and he could
feel nothing of himself except the aching void Abeloth had torn in his chest. It occurred to him that he might well be dying, and it was not a thought that brought him any fear. Even if his life had not been as long as Yoda’s, it had been a good one filled with close friends and much-loved family. He had been of some small service, at least, to his fellow sentient beings. And in the new Jedi Order, he had rekindled a light that had once gone out in the galaxy. He had few regrets for anything he had done, and if the time had come to let another Jedi carry the torch, he was ready.

“Not yet, Skywalker.”

The voice was warm and familiar, and it came from beside Luke. He turned to find Mara’s face breaking the surface of the water. Then he saw a hand gripping the back of his biceps and realized that she was floating beneath him, preventing him from sinking.

“Mara, it’s okay,” Luke said. “I’m ready. I want to be with you.”

“Too bad.” He felt his upper body rising as she tried to push him upward. “I don’t want to be with you—not here, not yet.”

“What?”
Luke asked, feeling more confused than resentful. “Mara, I’m wounded … badly. Abeloth took something out of me.”

“She wounded
him
, too.” Mara’s other hand rose out of the water and pointed past Luke’s head, toward the tattooed Sith who had helped Luke kill Abeloth. The stranger was on his feet, limping toward the far shore with both hands clutched to his chest. “If he can do it, so can you.”

Luke forced himself to sit upright. The effort made his head spin and his whole being ache, but he refused to collapse back into the water. He had no idea of the Sith’s true identity, but it did not seem wise to let him return to the physical galaxy alone.

“That’s ridiculous. Their injuries may be different.” This voice came from Luke’s other side, sinister and cajoling … and
also
familiar. “Besides, Sith are stronger. They have the dark side.”

“Who
is
he?” Luke asked, turning to find Jacen looking up from the water on his other side. “You know, don’t you?”

“I told you,” Jacen replied. “He’s the one I saw sitting on the Throne of Balance.”

“The dark man of your vision?” Luke asked. This was the best opportunity he would ever have to learn for certain why Jacen had turned
to the dark side, and he was determined to take advantage of it. “The one you sacrificed yourself to stop?”

“I saw only one,” Jacen replied. “And you’re letting him win.”

Luke shook his head. “He
can’t
win, Jacen. Whatever damage you caused to the Force, you accomplished that much. The Sith will never rule the galaxy … not now.”

The tattooed man stopped and whirled, and Luke found himself preparing to dodge a fork of Force lightning. But the stranger was in no better shape to fight than Luke. He had a gaping wound in his chest, just like Luke, and Luke could see that his entire form was shuddering. Instead of attacking, the Sith just stood staring at them, one eye shining yellow and the other an empty socket, his right arm a useless ghost of a limb.

Then, after an eternity that might have been a mere second, he said, “You must not be so certain of yourself, Master Skywalker. You may think you have stopped the Sith, but you know nothing of us … nothing at all.”

“I know that Jacen changed the future,” Luke retorted. “And you know it, too—or you wouldn’t have been here to help me fight Abeloth.”

The stranger dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “There is
that
,” he said. “But can you be sure the change will last? Perhaps Caedus did not
change
the future. Perhaps he only
delayed
it.”