Read Invincible Online

Authors: Troy Denning

Tags: #Star Wars, #Legacy of the Force, #40-41.5 ABY

Invincible (28 page)

BOOK: Invincible
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Taryn cringed. “Looks like
I’ll
be needing the sanisteam next.” She followed Ben aft and pulled a pair of grease-stained utilities from the sleeping cabin closet, then started forward to change in the lounge area. “No peeking, Ben.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” Ben was starting to see her flirtatious humor for what it was—a way to put others both at ease and a bit off-guard. Clearly, the sisters were the
best
kind of intelligence operatives…the kind that nobody would suspect. He reached for the door, then added, “On my own, anyway. Thanks for the idea!”

Taryn’s jaw dropped.

Ben smiled and closed the door, then undressed and stepped into the sanisteam. As he washed, he kept Tahiri’s lightsaber at hand and his Force senses vigilant, alert for any presences in the hangar that might explain his uneasy feelings—or the communication problems with the security team. The only beings he detected were Trista and Taryn, busy doing their checks and inspections, and a few droids.

Ben was better at detecting droids than most Jedi, but his awareness of them was never very distinct. In this case, he just sensed concentrations of electrical energy that seemed to be moving around on their own. Droids, in other words. But there was nothing unusual about their presence inside a space hangar.

What worried Ben far more was the likelihood that Tahiri had learned how to hide her presence in the Force. If she had, she might have caught up to him on Coruscant and been tracking him ever since. And
that
would explain why it was so hard to pinpoint the source of his uneasiness. But that would also mean it had been a mistake to spare Tahiri’s life, and Ben did not want to believe that. Preemptive killing was a GAG practice, the way of the dark side. Ben had no intention of backsliding toward either one.

Ben sighed and eyed the lightsaber. Unfortunately, doing the right thing was no guarantee that your actions weren’t going to haunt you later. Sparing a foe’s life did not mean that she was going to become your friend; likely as not, it just meant she would be back later, trying another attack. Nobody ever said the light side was easy—it definitely required a lot of patience.

By the time Ben had finished his sanisteam, Trista was warming the engines for departure. He wrapped a towel around his waist and slipped out of the refresher compartment—then noticed that the door to the main cabin was slightly ajar.

“Sorry!” Taryn called. “I don’t know
how
that was left open!”

“Must have been a stowaway,” Ben answered with a sly smile.

He knew she hadn’t actually peeked—he would have sensed
that
in the Force—but he liked the way she talked to him. She treated him like an adult instead of a boy. He could imagine her joking the same way with Zekk…but definitely
not
Jag. Jag was too full of himself for joking around. Ben honestly couldn’t understand how Jaina could stand his
I’m a big ace pilot
routine. Maybe it was just because Jag was the first eligible man Jaina had met who was nearly the pilot her father was.

As Ben slipped into the clothes Taryn had left out for him, the mouthwatering aroma of nerf steak and yobas began to fill his nose. He quickly pulled on his boots and stepped into the lounge to find a meal steaming on the table.

“I took a guess,” Taryn said, placing a glass of golden goff-milk next to the plate. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Mind?”
Ben dropped into a seat. “I think I’m in love!”

“Silly man—royal cousins don’t
do
love.” Taryn chuckled. She motioned at the fork and knife. “I’m afraid you’ll have to eat fast. It won’t take us long to reach the prince’s starcutter.”

Trista announced their departure over the intercom, then the skiff slipped from its moorings with a small downward jolt. It was the slightest of bumps, barely perceptible, but it caused Taryn to raise her brow and look toward the flight deck.

“And she won’t let
me
do the flying.” She leaned closer to Ben and asked, “Why does being born five minutes earlier make
her
the senior team member?”

“I heard that,” Trista said over the intercom.

“Heard
what
?” Taryn asked innocently. “We were talking about the Cheruban glach races.” She gave Ben a conspiratorial wink. “Isn’t that right, Jedi Skywalker?”

Ben didn’t answer. The prickle that said he was being watched had returned, and this time it was stronger than ever. He reached out in the Force and—to his relief—did
not
sense nothing. There was a concentration of electrical energy on the upper hull of the skiff—a concentration that was slowly moving back toward the tail fins, where it would be able to take cover from an unexpected visual inspection.

Ben returned his unused fork and knife to the table. “There’s no reason an auxiliary droid should be crawling around on your outer hull, is there?”

“There’s a
droid
on the hull?” Trista’s voice was sharp enough that Ben would have heard her even without the intercom. “What kind?”

“The kind that shouldn’t be there,” Taryn replied. “Hit the hull scrubber.”

A soft warning chime sounded, then the lights dimmed and the ambient whirring of the ventilation fans slowed to a near stop. An instant later a melodic crackling sang through the hull as the
Blue Slipper
’s antitheft system was activated. Ben concentrated on the droid’s presence—and sensed no difference.

“Didn’t work,” he reported. “It’s probably pulse-shielded.”

“Pulse-shielded?”
Trista echoed over the intercom. “What
is
it, a battle droid?”

“Yeah, probably.” Ben rose and turned to Taryn. “Where’s your EV locker?”

Taryn raised thin brows. “No way you’re going out there, Ben. Our orders are to deliver you to the prince safe and sound.”

A loud clanging echoed from the stern as the droid went to work on the hull with a tool or weapon—Ben could not tell which.

He looked toward the noise, then said, “Well,
someone
has to go out there. And since I’m the only one who can Force-stick himself to the exterior of a hull, it should probably be me.”

Trista’s voice came over the intercom. “He may have a point, Taryn. The droid just sent a message back to Nova Station, and something in the docking bays just made an S-thread transmission.”

No one bothered to state the obvious: the droid’s message had been relayed to something waiting outside the Carida Nebula.

“Fine.” Taryn led the way forward and opened a hidden locker that served as a combination emergency equipment closet and air lock. “Just don’t get yourself killed. Her Majesty would hold it against us.”

Ben smiled. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “Keep me posted on our tactical situation.”

“Any idea who we’re expecting?” Trista asked.

“No, but it was calling
someone,
” Ben said, climbing into one of the EV suits. He was glad to see that the suit was one of the best available, with self-adjusting body gloves and a tough eletrotex shell that not even a blaster bolt could penetrate. He glanced toward the clanging again. “And it seems pretty clear that the droid would rather have me dead than let me escape.”

Once Taryn had removed the rest of the EV suits from the locker, Ben stepped inside and began to evacuate the air. By the time the procedure was finished, Trista was reporting over the helmet comm that the prince’s starcutter, the
Beam Racer,
had appeared on the tactical display and was dispatching its squadron of Miy’tils to support them. She also warned him to be careful leaving the air lock because the banging sounds had stopped—but Ben had known that much already. He could sense the droid lurking on the hull above the air lock, a ball of hot, quivering energy.

Ben opened the hatch but stayed inside, borrowed lightsaber in hand, as blasterfire split the wispy red curtain of nova gas.

Less than a second later the flurry of bolts died away and a droid hand—a
black,
skeletal droid hand—shot down from the upper edge of the hatch and opened fire with a standard blaster pistol. Ben activated Tahiri’s lightsaber and began to bat blaster bolts back out into space, but his mouth had suddenly gone dry, and he felt an irrational panic rising inside.

He recognized that hand—could
never
forget that particular hand. Inside those fingertips were a dozen different anguishes—electrodes, needles, tiny torches, acid pads, and so much more. It was all he could do to keep analyzing the droid’s firing patterns—to just keep batting bolts aside and not lash out with his borrowed lightsaber—because he was
terrified
of that hand on a level far below thought, on a level so deep he associated the mere sight of it with suffering the way a ronto associates its driver’s face with food.

Trista’s voice came over Ben’s helmet speaker. “Jedi Skywalker, are you
always
this much trouble?” she asked. “A Star Destroyer just came out of hyperspace between us and the
Beam Racer.

An instant later another voice came over Ben’s helmet comm—this one thin and raspy, the voice of his nightmares in prison. “Did you really think you could escape
me,
Ben?”

“D-Double-Ex?” Ben didn’t have to work very hard to sound scared.

“Who else, Ben?”

Double-Ex continued to pour fire into the air lock. Ben dropped into a corner where the droid’s firing pattern did not seem able to reach, deliberately landing with a heavy thud. Then he let Tahiri’s lightsaber roll from his hand, still activated, and tumble through the open hatch out into space.

The blasterfire stopped, and an instant later the glossy black figure of a thin droid with a skull-like face and blazing blue photoreceptors came swinging through the hatchway.

Ben was waiting with his hand already outstretched. “Hello, Double-Ex,” he said.

With only comm waves to carry the sound, the droid had no idea where the words were coming from, and its head swiveled toward the opposite corner of the air lock.

“Good-bye, Double-Ex.”

Ben hit the droid with the hardest Force shove he could manage. Double-Ex let out a comm squawk of surprise, then flew out of the air lock backward. It instantly began to pour blasterfire back through the hatch, but only a moment passed before the difference between its momentum and that of the
Blue Slipper
made the angle impossible.

Ben stuck his head around the edge of the hatch and was relieved to see a helix of bright dashes still pouring from the blaster pistol as the droid tumbled into the blood-colored gauze of the Carida Nebula.

Then he noticed the matte-black hull of the
Anakin Solo
sliding past in the distance, the cloaking cone and gravity generator dome leaving no doubt about its identity. To his surprise, the hulking Star Destroyer seemed to be turning away from them, pouring ion cannon fire toward a target he could not see. The squadron of Miy’tils that had been sent to escort the
Blue Slipper
were flittering around its exhaust ports, no doubt trying to land a lucky missile and disable the
Solo
before it captured its target.

“Fierfek!”
Ben cursed. “Are they going after the
Beam Racer
?”

“I wouldn’t say going
after,
” answered Trista. “Their tractor beam already has a lock.”

“So they’re going to capture Prince Isolder?” Ben gasped.

“They already
have,
” Taryn replied. “There’s only one escape now, and I truly hope he doesn’t take it. Isolder has always been a good uncle to us.”

As the
Solo
drifted out of sight behind the
Slipper
’s tail, it finally dawned on Ben that they were turning
away
from the confrontation.

“What are you doing?” Ben asked. He pulled the air lock’s exterior hatch closed and sealed it. “Maybe I can help him.”

“You Jedi,” Taryn said, “always thinking you can do the impossible. No wonder you get in so much trouble.”

Ben scowled and started to cycle air back into the lock. “But—”

“Not a chance,” Trista said. “Her Majesty is going to be angry enough about losing her father.”

I heard two droids talking the other day. The first one asked, “Did you beat the Wookiee at sabacc?” And the second said, “Yes, but it cost me an arm and a leg.”
—Jacen Solo, age 14


I
SN’T MEDICINE MIRACULOUS TODAY
?” C
AEDUS ASKED
. N
O ONE
answered, of course. It was a rhetorical question. “A being is more likely to die of a meteor strike than of old age or disease.”

Little more than a standard week after losing his arm, Caedus was pacing—actually
pacing
—back and forth across the ward room. With his good arm, he was waving a hypo filled with a special preparation of protocells and neural growth stimulants. His mind was alert, focused, and filled with an energizing optimism that he had not experienced since his days at the Jedi academy on Yavin 4.

BOOK: Invincible
5.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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