by Troy Denning
Jysella took the chance to comm Ben. “Are you missing something?”
“Rowdy.” Ben sounded exasperated. “He went out the door about ten seconds after you did, then started to make too much noise when I tried to haul him back. In the end, Valin and I decided it was safer just to let him follow.”
“I guess it worked out,” Jysella said. “There was nothing in the corridor, and I would have needed him to slice the decontamination chamber lock anyway. I’ll let you know how it feels once I’m in the core.”
“Okay,” Ben replied. “We’re moving up for support now.”
Jysella closed the channel, and five seconds later she and Rowdy were standing inside a small chamber being air-blasted and coated with a dust fixative. Once the decontamination ended, the inner door opened, and Jysella found herself looking out into a huge, spherical chamber lined by flickers of blue current.
A semicircular service balcony extended about fifteen meters into the chamber, supporting several display banks and interface stations. Just beyond the balcony rail, constellations of holographic status indicators hung twinkling in red and green and yellow; in the distance, the soft blue glow of memory clouds floated between the crackling orbs of processing clusters.
Jysella’s heart began to hammer as she realized how close they were to achieving the mission. All they had to do was cross a dozen meters and plug Rowdy into a computer interface console. The droid clearly realized the same thing, for he emitted an excited chirp and rolled out onto the balcony floor.
“Not so fast, Shortstuff.” Jysella used the Force to draw him back into the decontamination chamber. “This feels too easy.”
The droid whistled in protest, but Jysella ignored him and began to expand her Force awareness into the room. There was a weak, anguished presence floating somewhere above her, near the entrance. But there was also a dark presence in the chamber, diffuse and powerful and everywhere, as though the computer core itself had become Sith.
Unable to use her comlink inside the mag-shielded confines of the computer core, Jysella reached out in the Force and found Ben and Valin close by, coming up the corridor toward the decontamination chamber. She filled her presence first with a sense of accomplishment—to let them know she had entered—then with uneasiness. She felt her brother’s presence respond almost at once, cautious and worried. Ben added patience, and she knew they wanted her to wait.
“No arguments there,” Jysella said aloud.
Still not leaving the chamber, she reached over Rowdy toward the control panel. He emitted a disappointed chirp and sank onto his treads. Then, as Jysella pressed the button to close the airtight door, the little droid emitted a taunting buzz and shot out onto the balcony.
“Rowdy!”
Jysella barely had time to dive through the opening before the door snicked shut behind her. She landed just outside the decontamination chamber and rolled to her feet in a fighting crouch, alert for the faintest prickle of danger sense. She felt only the anguished presence above and behind her, weak and barely alert, and beyond the balcony railing, the same miasma of dark energy she had detected before.
Rowdy continued forward. His goal seemed to be a trio of swiveling chairs that sat facing the primary interface console. On the back of the middle chair was a star-shaped scorch, surrounding a dark hole about where the heart of a seated human would be. Jysella pressed her back against the door of the decontamination chamber and again expanded her Force awareness. She still felt no hint of an impending attack.
When Rowdy reached the primary administration console and plugged into the droid socket with no hint of trouble, Jysella decided she could risk looking away from him for a moment. She stepped away from the door and turned back toward the decontamination chamber.
A familiar figure was hanging a few meters away, suspended upside down and watching her from a pair of eyes that had been blackened by a severe beating. His face was bruised and swollen almost beyond recognition, and one of his shoulders was jutting out from the socket at an impossible angle. But there was no mistaking the conservative cut of his short brown hair or the reserved style of his gray business tabard.
“Chief Dorvan?” Jysella gasped. She resisted the urge to rush to his aid, preferring instead to remain where she was until she had some idea of what had happened. “What happened?”
“She … she underestimated me,” Dorvan answered. A crease that might have been a smile crept across his swollen face. “Everyone does.”
“Who?” Jysella asked.
Dorvan’s gaze shifted toward the primary interface console, where Rowdy was still at work—and where the chair with the scorch hole was located.
“She did.”
“Who?” Jysella asked.
“Her.” Dorvan looked as though he wanted to point, but it was impossible in his position. “Look.”
Jysella spent a moment debating the possibility of a trap, then finally decided that whatever had happened there was already over. Being careful to stay alert to Dorvan’s presence, she advanced until she came to the primary interface console, where Rowdy was blinking and beeping with the computer core.
She turned to inspect the administrators’ chairs. Two of the seats were empty, but the one in the center was occupied by a blue-skinned Jessar female. There was a blackened scorch hole in the center of her chest, another between her eyes, and yet a third in the side of her head.
Roki Kem.
“Be … careful.” From this far away, Dorvan’s voice was so weak and filled with pain that it was barely audible. “She’s not dead.”
Jysella turned back to the man, whom she was beginning to think had lost his mind to Sith torture. “Did you kill Roki Kem?”
“I told you!” Dorvan snapped. “She’s not dead! And that’s not Chief Kem.”
Before Jysella could reply, Rowdy interrupted with an urgent whistle. She raised a hand for Dorvan to wait and turned back to Rowdy.
“What’s wrong?”
The droid emitted an impatient tweedle, then a display screen above the interface station suddenly snicked to life. The image was dark and fuzzy, but it looked to Jysella as if the droid was showing her a corridor. Judging by the dim lighting and the curtains of corrosion and moss clinging to the durasteel walls, it was probably deep in the depths of the Jedi Temple—or possibly even in some other building.
“Don’t be fooled,” Dorvan called from the back of the balcony. “That isn’t … Roki Kem!”
“Okay, if you say so.” Jysella did not look up as she replied, for she already knew what Dorvan probably wanted to tell her—that Roki Kem was a powerful Sith impostor. Still looking at the display screen, she asked Rowdy, “What am I supposed to be looking at here? Does it have something to do with the shields or the blast doors?”
A message began to scroll down one side of the screen, next to the image of the corridor. I FOUND VESTARA KHAI. As the words appeared, so did a small female figure dressed in a Jedi robe, running along the passage from the screen bottom toward the top. SHE IS FLEEING INTO THE TEMPLE SUBSTRUCTURE, CURRENTLY ON LEVEL 30 CORRIDOR N300X.
“The substructure?” Jysella echoed. “What the blazes is she doing down there?”
Even before she had finished asking the question, a dozen Sith warriors appeared on the display, racing up the corridor in pursuit of Vestara.
RUNNING FOR HER LIFE, Rowdy replied.
“So I see,” Jysella said. “Okay, keep an eye on her if you can—Ben’s going to want to know what happens to her. But our priorities are the shields and the blast doors.”
She felt Valin reach for her in the Force, puzzled and concerned. Clearly, he and Ben had entered the decontamination chamber and were alarmed not to find her there. She replied with a short burst of frustration—Rowdy—followed by a feeling of calm.
The exchange came to an abrupt end when a pained screech erupted from the wall where Dorvan was suspended. Expecting to see something more horribly wrong than what was already hanging there, Jysella loo
ked—and was surprised to see that it was merely the tormented bureaucrat, trying to get her attention.
“You’re playing into her hands!” Dorvan cried.
“Whose hands?” Jysella motioned at Kem’s corpse. “Hers?”
“Yes!” Dorvan replied. “Don’t you see? She’s manipulating you!”
Jysella looked at the body. Finding it still dead, she decided that Dorvan’s mind had clearly snapped.
“Chief Dorvan,” Jysella asked in a deliberately calm voice, “I already know who Chief Kem really is.”
Dorvan’s eyes widened in fear. “You do?”
Jysella nodded. “Yes. She’s a High Lord of the Sith.” As she spoke, Rowdy tweedled for attention. She motioned the droid to wait a moment, then added, “She might even be Heir Grand Lord on Coruscant.”
The fear in Dorvan’s face changed to terror. “No.” His complexion went gray, and it looked like he might be going into shock. “You don’t understand!”
Rowdy asked for attention again, this time with an urgent screech. Deciding to focus on her mission rather than a prisoner’s shattered mind, Jysella reached out to Dorvan in the Force.
“I do understand, Chief Dorvan,” she said, bathing him in a heavy flow of the same soothing Force energies that she used to make any kind of Force suggestion. “Everything will be fine.”
Dorvan’s voice trailed off into incoherence—which was close enough to calm for Jysella’s purposes. She turned back to the display above Rowdy’s interface socket. Almost immediately, words began to scroll across the screen.
THE COMPUTER CORE IS MALFUNCTIONING. SHE INSISTS THAT SHE IS THE MASTER OF THE JEDI TEMPLE. SHE INSISTS THAT SHE IS THE BELOVED QUEEN OF THE STARS, AND SHE INSISTS THAT SHE HAS LOCKED ALL SHIELDS AND DISABLED EVERY BLAST DOOR IN THE JEDI TEMPLE.
Jysella began to have a sick, hollow feeling inside. “The Beloved Queen of the Stars?” Her voice was a mere gasp, so low that even she barely heard it. “Ask the computer for her name.”
A gout of flame shot from the interface socket, and Rowdy shot across the balcony trailing sparks, smoke, and the acrid stench of melting circuit boards. He continued until he slammed into the balcony safety rail, then toppled over and began to ooze molten metal and extinguishing foam from every seam in his casing.
An attention chime sounded from the display, and an answer to Jysella’s question scrolled across the screen.
YOU KNOW WHO I AM.
And Jysella did know.
The Jedi had come for the Sith—and found Abeloth.
Jysella’s entire body went cold. Her thoughts grew sluggish and her emotions became muddled, and she began to tremble. Abeloth had taken her mind once already. She could not let that happen again—would not. She snapped a thermal detonator off her combat harness and disengaged the safety, then began to back toward the air lock …
… and remembered her brother and Ben.
They should have been standing at her side by now, lending her strength and courage and helping her decide what to do. But she had heard nothing yet—not even a distress cry in the Force.
Jysella spun around and saw that the light above the air lock remained yellow. The exchange pumps were still engaged, filtering air—or simply removing it.
She reached for them in the Force—and found only a single presence, too weak and near death to tell whether it was Ben or her brother.
Jysella set the thermal detonator’s fuse to one second, then turned back toward the computer core … toward Abeloth.
“Open the air lock … now.”
To Jysella’s surprise, the door slid aside at once, emitting a loud, hissing pop that suggested the air lock had already been depressurized. Ben was nowhere to be seen, but her brother’s body lay motionless on the floor. She reached out to him in the Force and, finding that he was still alive, started to shake him.
“Valin! Wake up!” Still holding the detonator in her hand, she stepped into the air lock and knelt at his side. “Where’s Ben?”
A loud keen sounded from over the air lock door, and Wynn Dorvan’s voice rang down from above.
“Didn’t I warn you?” he cried. “She sees the future!”
THE PEARLY IRIDESCENCE OF HYPERSPACE COALESCED INTO STREAKS OF blue light, then the lines became stars, and the Millennium Falcon was in realspace again. Coruscant went from a distant fleck to a beldon-sized disk in less than a minute. By the time Leia brought up the sensors, the planet filled the entire viewport—a vast ball sparkling so bright it flooded the flight deck with its golden glow.
She activated the tactical display and was astonished to see a schematic that she could actually understand at a glance. That just wasn’t normal. Usually, the Coruscant approach was so choked with traffic that only an astromech droid could work through the swirling layers of designator symbols and find a safe trajectory.
But today Leia could have chosen a route just by looking. There were the usual bands of satellite designators, which marked orbital facilities such as manufacturing plants, battle platforms, and solar mirrors. Most of the other symbols represented military task forces, usually a single Star Destroyer surrounded by its escorts.
The military vessels were arrayed across the planet in no deployment pattern that Leia could recognize. In places, three or four task forces seemed to be circling one another, as though a battle might erupt at any moment. In other areas, there were huge unprotected voids where the sparse civilian traffic was making mad dashes both to and from the surface.
Han barely seemed to notice the unusual pattern. He simply swung the Falcon toward one of the unguarded areas, then tipped his head back toward the navigator’s station.
“Go ahead and send that message now, Jayk,” he said. Jayk was one of thirty brand-new Jedi Knights aboard the Falcon. The Masters Solusar had sent them along to reinforce the Jedi on Coruscant. “Amelia’s got to be worried sick about her furry buddy.”
“Very well, Captain,” Jayk said. A slender Ryn female, she had red hair and a nose so small that it barely resembled a beak at all. Like most of the young Jedi aboard, she had been promoted from apprentice to full Jedi Knighthood just before the hastily repaired Falcon parted ways with the Dragon Queen II at Taanab. “I’ve already prepared a burst transmission with a vid of Anji playing with Jedi Rivai. I hope that will reassure her.”
The pet nexu had shown up in Allana’s empty bunk just before the last hyperspace jump. Unfortunately, the Falcon had been under strict comm silence until now, so this was their first chance to send word to Allana, aboard the Dragon Queen II, that they had Anji.
“Let me know if they acknowledge,” Han said. He hit the deceleration thrusters so hard that Leia was thrown against her crash webbing. “I’m expecting a message.”
“Hey, flyboy, take it easy,” Leia said. “Slamming the passengers around isn’t going to make Amelia apologize to you.”
“Who’s asking for an apology?” Han replied. “I just wish she had shown up to say good-bye.”
“She was angry with us,” Leia said. “And maybe she had reason to be. We did end the discussion pretty quickly.”
Han glanced over. “What’s to discuss? Coruscant is a war zone. We weren’t going to take a nine-year-old into a war zone—and certainly not her.”
“Of course not,” Leia agreed. “But there’s more than one way to say no.”
“I think my way worked pretty well.” Han glanced around the cabin. “You don’t see her here, do you?”
“That’s not the point,” Leia said. “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye before we left the Dragon Queen. How do you think she’ll feel if we don’t come back from this?”
Han rolled his eyes at her. “Like that’s going to happen.”
They hit Coruscant’s atmosphere much too fast, and the Falcon decelerated again, harder than before. Friction flames began to shoot past the viewport, then the ship began to buck and grow warm inside. Because of the Sith occupation, they were literally coming in as hot and bright as a meteo
r, trying to take advantage of the enemy’s disorganization so they could disappear into the city before anyone jumped them.
Leia returned her gaze to the tactical display. The nearest task force was a light cruiser escorted by three frigates. They were wheeling around and spraying a squadron of XJ5 ChaseX starfighters in the Falcon’s direction. Leia plotted an estimated interception point and was relieved to find that the Falcon would already be down in Coruscant’s skylanes.
“How are we doing?” Han asked.
“We’ll make it,” Leia said. “But don’t slow down.”
“What if our hull starts to melt?”
“Find rain.” Leia studied the designator symbols on the display, trying to figure out whether the task force’s commanding officer was allied with the Jedi or the Sith. “Any idea who commands the Regalle?”
Han shook his head. “Artoo, see if you can access the Fifth Fleet database and—”
A message chime sounded from the navigator’s station, and Jayk said, “Hold on. We’re being hailed.”
“By the Regalle?” Leia asked.
“By the Lady Worbi,” Jayk replied. “She’s a Charubah Stella-class frigate from the—”
“I know who flies Stellas, Jayk,” Leia interrupted mildly. “What I don’t know is why the Hapan Royal Navy is here.”
“Shall I ask them?” Jayk inquired.
“Just open the channel,” Han said, clearly impatient with the young Jedi Knight’s inability to read his mind. “It’s not like we’re trying to dodge them.”
“Very well, Captain.”
A soft pop sounded as Jayk opened the channel, then Taryn Zel’s familiar Hapan voice came over the cockpit speaker. “I hope you’ll forgive the interruption,” she said. “But we seem to have misplaced one of our female passengers. And our, uh, commander dispatched the Lady Worbi to inquire if she might have sneaked aboard your vessel while no one was looking.”
Leia could not help smiling at the careful choice of the word commander. Almost certainly, Taryn was referring to Allana, who had no doubt been raising quite a fuss on the Dragon Queen II over her lost nexu. She activated her mike.