by Troy Denning
“… local north at a seventy-degree climb. Don’t stray out of that ascension corridor, or you’ll be entering the free-fire zone.”
“What free-fire zone?” a Hapan pilot asked. “No one mentioned any free-fire zones in the briefing.”
“Plan B,” Han said. “Our fighter cover is going to zone defense.”
“Plan B called for us to drop into the rift valley and wait for an escort,” a second pilot reminded him.
“This is the new Plan B,” Han replied. “Trust me, the last thing you want is to be down in that valley with a bunch of Sith hunting you in the fog.”
Han tried to raise Leia again on the cargo hold intercom, but all he got was dead air. “Blast!” He turned to R2-D2. “Take a holo.”
The droid spun his dome around until the cam lens was pointed in Han’s direction. When the red RECORD light activated, Han began to speak.
“Leia, we’ve got a bunch of blastboats on their way. We need to be locked down and launched in five minutes. And while you’re at it, reactivate the intercom back there!” He paused until the RECORD light darkened, then addressed R2-D2 himself. “Show that to Leia—and don’t let her ignore you. Get in her way if you have to.”
Another alert chime sounded from the main display, and Han turned to find another message from R2-D2.
FIVE MINUTES CUTS THE ESCAPE SAFETY MARGIN TO ZERO.
“I hate to break this to you, Artoo,” Han said, “but we never had a safety margin.”
UNDERSTOOD. EVACUATION PROCEEDING AS PLANNED.
The droid retracted his interface arm and started down the access corridor toward the main cabin. Han began to prep the Falcon for a hot launch. The fusion core was already on standby, so he slowly began to feed it more fuel, trying to preheat the inner housing to minimize temperature stress when the big laser cannons began to suck power. At the same time, he brought the targeting computers online and engaged his active sensors. The Sith would be using the Force to find their targets anyway, so he had nothing to lose by pinging electromagnetic signals off their hulls. Finally, he activated the ion drive and brought the throttles up until the Falcon dropped her nose and began to rock and shudder on her struts.
Beyond the viewport, the blocky gray shape of a departing transport began to move through the fog on the invisible cushion of its repulsor drives. A few hundred meters ahead, a trio of blue circles flared to life and began to glow more brightly as a second vessel activated its ion engines, preparing, like Han, for an emergency launch that would turn a wide swath of Jedi academy grounds into a kilometer-long furrow of charred dirt. Given the tons of Jedi equipment that the convoy would be leaving behind on the parade ground to be captured, Han wished he’d thought to instruct all of the transports to make emergency launches—but it was already too late. The gray rectangles of two more transports began to rise through the fog, and another set of ion engines flared to life off to port.
An alert buzzer chimed from the Falcon’s control panel, and Han glanced over at the tactical display to see a line of jamming static rolling out of the nearby rift valley. He hit the general-quarters alarm—and that was when he saw Taryn Zel’s reflection in the viewport.
“Captain Solo.” She bustled onto the flight deck, with R2-D2 close behind. “We’re doing the best we can back there. If you think you can—”
She was interrupted by the distant thunder of accelerating ion engines. Han activated both sets of upper shields—forward and aft—and was still pushing the control glides to FULL when the fog grew crimson with shrieking cannon bolts. The Falcon reverberated with the crackle of shields taking hits, and the lights dimmed as power was diverted to the shield generators.
“Stang!” Taryn gasped. She spun and started back down the access corridor, already yelling back toward the main cabin. “Zekk, get those ramps up and take the belly turret. I’ll take top.”
“No, stay here and take the copilot’s chair.” Han had to yell loudly to make himself heard above the battle noise. “Have Leia take top turret. Artoo, hook yourself into the tactical net.”
Taryn paused two steps down the corridor and turned to meet his gaze in the viewport reflection. “But the Princess is—”
“A Jedi. And the Force is going to work a lot better than a targeting computer when our sensors are being jammed.” Han pointed at the copilot’s seat. “So sit.”
Taryn’s reply was lost to the deafening crackle of half a dozen simultaneous hits, and the entire flight deck strobed gold and white with dissipation static.
Taryn merely nodded and yelled something into the main cabin that Han could not hear, then hurried into the copilot’s seat and strapped in. Han checked the tactical display and found that the wall of jamming static had advanced to the edge of the academy grounds.
“Do we have everyone aboard?” he asked, still yelling to make himself heard.
Taryn shot him a tense look. “I hope so.” She fixed her attention on the ramp indicator lights, then finally nodded. “We must. The ramps are up, and I can’t imagine Zekk or Princess Leia leaving any Woodoos behind.”
Han activated the intercom again and was relieved to hear the voice of a young Jedi issuing orders in the cargo hold. There was still too much noise to make out exactly what he was saying, but he seemed to be giving orders rather than shouting in alarm, and that was good enough for Han.
He opened the shipwide channel and said, “Grab something and hold on back there. This is gonna be a very rough ride.”
As he spoke, two columns of boiling blue ions appeared in the fog and shot skyward. A heartbeat later a dozen Sith-piloted blastboats opened fire on the fleeing transports, their efflux tails curving sharply as they turned to pursue. Han checked his tactical display and saw only one Sharmok left on the ground. It launched before his eyes, vanishing from the screen, then streaked past so low overhead that it left the Falcon rocking in thrust-wash.
Han pulled the yoke back and slammed the throttles forward. The Falcon leapt after the departing convoy, though not quickly enough to prevent a dozen blastboats from slipping into line between them and the last Sharmok.
“Taryn, retract the struts and bring up the belly shields,” Han ordered. “Leia, you and Zekk clear those Skiprays off that—”
A cacophony of lock alarms screeched to life, and a series of sharp thuds reverberated through the hull as cannon bolts stitched a line of hits across the Falcon’s belly armor. Taryn hissed something angrily in Hapan, then the cabin lights flickered as the lower shields finally began to absorb damage.
Han resisted the urge to blame Taryn for being too slow and settled for a muttered curse instead.
“Not my fault, Solo,” she said anyway. “You’re the one who said retract the struts first.”
“You hear me complaining?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Taryn said. “What is a three-fingered shenbit wrangler, anyway?”
“Seven fingers too slow,” Han replied. “Shift seventy percent of power to our rear shields, then arm the concussion missiles. See if you can get a heat-lock on one of those blastboats.”
As he spoke, all eight of the Falcon’s big laser cannons began to chug, and the blastboats ahead started to blossom into fireballs. At the same time, the crackle of stressed shield generators began to reverberate through the ship. Han held a steady course, giving Zekk and Leia a stable firing platform that allowed them to destroy eight blastboats in as many breaths.
Finally, the load meters on both rear shields shot into the danger range, and Han knew they had run out of time. He rolled into an evasive helix, then activated the aft landing cams. He was not at all surprised to find a swarm of blue rings—blastboats silhouetted by their own exhaust plumes—glowing in the fog behind the Falcon. The gunners were obviously using the Force to aid their targeting, as his corkscrewing climb was doing nothing to diminish their accuracy.
“Can we take this kind of damage?” Taryn asked, clearly looking at the same thing Han was.
“Sure, no pro
blem,” 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.”
STARING OUT ACROSS FELLOWSHIP PLAZA, WYNN DORVAN 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.