by Troy Denning
Square Chin was dropping toward her again, his eyes narrowing as she extended her sword arm, pushing the tip as high into the air as she could. He brought his own weapon around to block, and Jaina used the Force to spin him backward, making his parry impossible.
The tip of her lightsaber caught the Sith just below the shoulder blade, then he was sliding down the blade to land atop her, as heavy and limp as a sack of gravel. Jaina’s breath left her in a pained gasp, and her chest felt like a rancor had stomped it. But she had no time to wonder about broken ribs. She deactivated her lightsaber and, using the Force to boost her strength, flung the body off.
The silver arc of a glass parang was already slicing toward her from the direction of Dark Beard’s belt, held in the invisible grasp of the Force. Jaina reactivated her lightsaber, intercepting the weapon—and barely altering its trajectory as her blade melted through it. The two halves flashed past her face, so close they stung her jaw before they shattered against the deck grating.
Jaina brought her lightsaber down across the Sith’s torso. The stench of charred flesh grew overwhelming, and only adrenaline kept her from gagging. She jumped to her feet and raced after the red-haired Sith who had gone to attack Ben.
She needn’t have worried. Ben had collected the lightsaber that Jaina had sent flying his way, and now he was using it to press his attack, combining strength and speed to push Red Hair back. Jaina extended a hand, hitting the Sith with a Force shove that sent her stumbling into Ben’s lightsaber.
Ben staggered, then quickly finished the woman by flicking his weapon up through her torso. She seemed to peel away from the blade, dropping to her knees and collapsing backward onto the grating. He kicked her weapon aside, then gave a quick salute with the crimson lightsaber in his hand.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Glad to help,” Jaina said. She pointed down a narrow aisle between two nearby settling basins. “Let’s go.”
Ben turned in the opposite direction. “They have Vestara.”
He started to add something else, but Jaina stopped listening when a tall figure in a dark robe dropped onto an evaporation cabinet behind him. By the time the Sith raised a hand to launch a Force attack, Jaina was leaping to her cousin’s defense.
Ben must have sensed his danger, too, because he was already moving. They bumped shoulders as he pivoted around, then a deafening crackle split the air and Jaina found herself flying backward on a bolt of Force lightning. She slammed into the wall of a settling tank and remained pinned there, teeth grinding, nerves burning, limbs paralyzed—until Ben shoved his crimson lightsaber into the dancing fork of energy.
Jaina collapsed to her knees, muscles throbbing and quivering and generally useless. Her attacker let his lightning sizzle out and reached for his lightsaber, but she was already grabbing him in the Force. She jerked him off the cabinet and down into the aisle. The Sith was still crying out in shock when her cousin finished him off.
Ben took a heartbeat to check for other attackers, but the battle had progressed from the initial “confusion-and-carnage” phase to the “hidden-death” stage, and there were no longer any Sith out in the open. Even the din of the battle had dwindled to sporadic outbreaks of thunder, shriek, and sizzle.
Ben stepped to Jaina’s side. “You okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Jaina tried to stand, but her still-quivering legs wouldn’t obey. She extended her hand for help—and felt her entire shoulder erupt in a fiery ache unlike anything she had ever felt before.
“Just a little shaky,” she added. “Get me up.”
Ben pulled her to her feet, then cast a furtive glance back toward the basin where they had last seen Vestara. Her captor had retreated deeper behind cover, but one of Vestara’s feet could still be seen lying against the wall of the mixing station.
“Hold on, Ben.” Jaina slipped an arm around Ben’s waist, then grabbed a handful of robe and put more weight on him than was really necessary. “You’re not going to help her by getting yourself killed.”
“Who’s going to get himself killed?”
“Who do you think?” Jaina demanded. “We’re outnumbered ten to one here, and that guy with Vestara looks like he’s in charge.”
“So?”
“So that makes him at least a Lord, and probably a High Lord,” Jaina said, realizing her objective had changed from killing the enemy to keeping Ben from being killed by the enemy. Battles were unpredictable like that. “Are you really ready to go after a Sith High Lord? Because I’m not—not when he has all the advantages.”
Ben sighed, but continued to look toward the basin. “What if it was Jag?” he asked. “Would you leave him behind?”
He was right, of course. If it had been Jagged Fel back there, Jaina wouldn’t be wasting time talking about it. She would be working her way toward the mixing station to rescue him—or to die trying.
But it wasn’t Jag. It was a Sith girl who had betrayed Ben half a dozen times already, who had been working her way into the Skywalkers’ confidence for months—and who might actually be waiting for a chance like this one to deal a body blow to the entire Jedi Order. Unfortunately, Jaina couldn’t say as much to Ben. He was a teenager in love, and teenagers in love did not like to hear that their sweethearts might be lying, cheating assassins.
Chaos.
“You have a point,” Jaina said, pretending to consider his argument. “But if that were Jag, he would want me to do the smart thing and not get myself killed while attempting an impossible rescue.”
She turned away, trying to get Ben started in the opposite direction.
Ben stayed where he was. “I didn’t ask what Jag would do. I asked what you would do.” He tried to free himself from Jaina’s grasp, but she clamped down hard and pulled him back. He scowled and said, “I thought you were shaky.”
“I’m getting better,” Jaina said, grabbing a handful of molytex armor through his robe. “And whatever I might do, it would be smart. So I wouldn’t charge in without a plan, and I wouldn’t get someone else killed with me.”
Ben frowned. “I’m not asking you to come.”
“Right,” Jaina replied. “And you expect that to square me with your father? That you didn’t invite me to walk into an obvious trap right along with you?”
Ben stopped pulling, and Jaina knew she had him. He might be willing to throw away his own life on a lost cause, but he wouldn’t take her with him.
“Trap?” Ben asked.
“Think, Ben. The Sith commander alone, Vestara lying unconscious at his feet? It’s too much temptation. He wants you to go after her.” Jaina tugged him toward the circular wall of a sludge tank. “Come on. We need to find the others and regroup. Then we’ll figure out how to save Vestara.”
Ben reluctantly allowed her to pull him along. “You’d better mean that, Jaina. I’m not going to abandon her.”
“Ben, I can’t promise we’ll save her,” Jaina said. “You know better. But we’ll do what we can, okay? We just need to be smart about it.”
Taking care to keep their heads beneath the top edge of the tank, they crept around to the other side—and found themselves facing a metal ladder affixed to a large feeder pipe rising into the darkness above. A narrow catwalk ran between the ladder and the chamber’s forward wall, about eight meters above their heads. Kneeling at the near end were two black-robed figures, one holding a long-muzzled version of a Verpine shatter gun, the other wearing a pair of night-vision goggles. The sludge tank had prevented them from seeing the area Jaina and Ben had just departed, but both Sith were scanning the killing zone in front of Vestara’s still-motionless feet.
Jaina glanced over and saw that Ben’s face had gone pale. He clearly understood what he was seeing—a sniper nest waiting to attack anyone who tried to reach Vestara. Jaina started to pull a frag grenade off her combat harness, but Ben touched her forearm and shook his head, signaling her to move on. He knew as well as she did that taking out a single sniper
nest was unlikely to defang the Sith trap. And even if it did, as soon as Vestara’s captor realized what had happened, Vestara would change from bait to liability, and her likelihood of being killed would rise tenfold. If they wanted to rescue Vestara alive, they needed a plan—and now Ben knew it, too.
Jaina motioned her cousin to follow, then slipped away from the settling basin and began to work her way toward the front of the chamber. Their best hope of saving themselves—and Vestara—lay in giving the Sith something else to worry about. The best move was to complete their mission and get the Temple’s blast doors open. To do that, they would have to find her droid, Rowdy, and get him plugged into the computer interface panel—then keep him in one piece long enough to convince the Temple computer to override the lockdown command.
The interface station came into view. A meter-wide panel with a display screen and a keyboard located above a row of droid-accessible dataports, it had two rows of status lights running down one side. Most of the lights were blinking or glowing in colors ranging from red to amber, but there was nothing on the display screen to suggest that Rowdy had already contacted the Temple computer.
“At least it’s been activated already,” Ben observed. “Now all we have to—”
The sentence came to an abrupt end when a brilliant flash lit the chamber. The deafening crackle of a thermal detonator filled the air, and the chamber grew instantly damp and cold. Then the deck grating started to vibrate beneath their feet, and the muffled roar of a waterfall began to rise from the direction of the bypass platform. They ducked behind a pump motor, then carefully raised their heads high enough to peer back over the top.
Shooting into a hole where the platform used to be was a column of water two meters thick.
Chaos.
“No more reinforcements,” Ben observed. “A break like that’s going to trigger gate shutdowns all the way back to the main.”
Jaina nodded. “It’s just as well,” she said. “We can’t bring in enough Jedi to outnumber them, so a large force only makes us easier to locate.”
As she spoke, a shiver of danger sense chilled her spine. She reached for Ben’s collar and ducked back down—only to hear his lightsaber already sizzling to life. She activated her own weapon, barely bringing it around in time to catch the fork of Force lightning that came dancing her way. At the other end stood a lavender-skinned Keshiri female, flanked by a cadre of human Sith, six on each side. Their crimson blades snapped to life as one, and they began to fan out, cutting off all hope of slipping past.
“Go your way, Ben,” Jaina ordered, still fighting to hold the Force lightning back. “Now!”
“Can’t!” Ben said. “We’ve got a dozen Sith here.”
He put his back against Jaina’s, but making a stand was the last thing she wanted to do. She glanced over at the pump and, seeing that it was still running, came up with a different idea.
“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, ign
iting 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.