by Troy Denning
“Isolate this deck,” Luke ordered. “And see if anyone knows where we are yet.”
“You’re kidding, right?” said a Mandalorian.
Luke turned back to find that the now-helmetless guards appeared to be brother and sister, with the same blue eyes, golden-blond hair, and broad flat faces.
“Vestara has already put out an alert?” he asked.
The woman, who looked no more than twenty-two, frowned in confusion. “Vestara?”
“The Sith girl giving orders around here,” Leia said. “The one who flies that round spacecraft with the pulsing veins and hawk-bat wings.”
“They mean Lady Raine,” the young man said to his sister. He turned to Luke. “And, yeah, she just ordered us to hold you. The entire security force is on its way up.”
As the Mandalorian spoke, a bitter note came to his Force aura, and Luke knew the claim was a lie.
He leaned close. “That had better be the last time you try to bluff me …” Luke paused, waiting for a name to rise to the top of the Mandalorian’s mind, then finally said, “Joram.”
Joram’s eyes widened in alarm, but he said, “It hardly matters, Jedi.” He glanced at the floor. “With the trail you two are leaving, the Nargons will be on you in about three minutes flat.”
Luke looked down to find a pool of red spreading around his feet and a similar one around Leia’s.
“The kid has a point,” Leia said. “We need to do something about these wounds—and soon.”
R2-D2 gave a whistle, then rolled out from behind the reception counter and stopped in the mouth of an adjacent corridor. Before following, Luke stepped behind the counter and tripped the RC-7’s circuit breaker, then used his lightsaber to disable the computer interface sockets.
R2-D2 tweedled impatiently.
“What’s down there?” Leia asked the female Mando.
“The executive infirmary,” she replied.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Luke asked, motioning the Mandalorians after R2-D2. “We’ll all go. Pick up your helmets and fall in.”
Joram glanced at his sister, then shrugged and did as he was told. Luke and Leia retrieved the pair’s blaster pistols and followed, using Force flashes to momentarily blind the surveillance cams they passed every ten meters or so. Soon, the maleristone floors and walls gave way to polished durasteel, and they came to a pair of transparent doors that automatically drew aside as they approached.
Inside, an FX-2 nursing droid stood behind a circular counter packed with medical monitors. Most of the equipment was inactive, but three sets of displays did seem to be tracking a patient’s vital signs. As Luke and the others drew nearer to its workstation, the FX-2 turned and began to run its photoreceptors over first Leia, then Luke. It raised an arm and pointed to a pair of rooms directly adjacent to the station.
“Female to examination room one, male to examination room two. The Two-One-Bee will be in to evaluate you shortly.” It picked up a datapad and started out from behind its counter. “Please have your identification badge ready for verification of executive status.”
R2-D2 whistled something loud and rolled past the counter.
“You can’t go back there,” the nursing droid responded. “Access to that area is restricted.”
R2-D2 buzzed a rude reply and continued down the corridor.
“Stop!” The FX-2 turned to whir after him. “Don’t force me to summon the security contractors! Stop at once, or—”
The protest came to an abrupt end as Leia put a blaster bolt through the back of the FX-2’s brain housing. The droid continued down the corridor in silence, veering left until it finally struck a wall and crashed to the floor. Leia quickly followed, then knelt down behind the wreck and tripped the FX-2’s primary circuit breaker to be sure the droid would not be sending any messages via an internal comm unit.
As Leia started to rise, Joram looked over at his sister and cocked a conspiratorial brow.
Luke grabbed them both in the Force and slammed them into the wall. “Don’t make me regret letting you live,” he said. “It’s not too late to change my mind.”
The woman’s eyes flashed in alarm, and she raised her hands in placation. “Why would we try anything? You’re never getting off this ship alive anyway.”
“I remember when I was your age,” Leia said, peeling an identity badge off the FX-2 droid’s torso. “I was wrong about a lot of things, too.”
She stepped over to the storeroom and pressed the badge to the control panel. The door slid aside and an interior light activated, revealing a cool, compact chamber lined by drawers filled with medical supplies. Leia entered and began to load a steel medical tray with supplies—wound glue, bacta salve, antibiotics, hypos.
Luke saw her studying the anesthesia section and realized what she intended. He glanced back to their prisoners. The brother was probably a size smaller than Luke was, and the sister a couple of sizes larger than Leia—but close enough.
“Okay, helmets on the floor,” Luke said. He waved his blaster at their torsos. “The rest of your armor, too.”
The woman’s eyes flashed in anger. “You can’t take our beskar’gam,” she said. “Do you know what that means to a Mandalorian?”
“It means you need better training.” Luke pointed a blaster at her head. “But we can do it the hard way, if you’d rather.”
Joram began to open his torso armor. “Just take it off, Jhan,” he said. “Gev will cancel our contracts either way.”
Jhan glared daggers at Luke but began to open her own armor, as well. “I hope you cook in it.”
“Thanks for that,” Leia said. She stepped out of the storeroom with a pair of hypos. “That makes this easier.”
She jabbed the hypo into Jhan’s neck and activated the injector.
“Hey!” Jhan turned to look at her. “What was …”
Her eyes rolled up, and she collapsed.
Joram caught his sister, then checked her pulse and turned to Leia. “Knockout drug?”
“You’d rather I used something stronger?” Leia asked.
“Of course not,” Joram replied. “But why don’t you settle for just locking us in the storeroom? No need to put me out, too. I won’t try to escape.”
“Sure you won’t,” Leia said. She waited until he had removed the last of his armor, then motioned for him to do the same with his sister’s. “But I’ll have Artoo raise the temperature so you don’t freeze.”
Joram’s voice turned sarcastic. “Thanks. You’re a real sweet smooka.” He did as instructed, leaving two piles of armor on the floor, then rose and dragged his sister into the storeroom. “You do know we’ll be coming after you. No Mandalorian can let someone steal his beskar’gam. It’s an honor thing.”
“Funny,” Leia replied. “I didn’t know hired killers had honor.”
That actually drew a smile from Joram. “Now that you mention it, maybe it’s more of a pride thing,” he said. “But we will be coming.”
“How polite—a warning.” Leia jabbed the second hypo into his neck and activated the injector. “I can hardly believe you’re Mandalorian.”
She waited until he had collapsed next to his sister, then grabbed her tray of supplies and returned to the corridor. Luke was surprised to see that her lips were taut and her eyes brimming with unshed tears.
“You can’t possibly be worried about that kid’s threat,” Luke said. “If he and his sister were anything to be nervous about, he would have known better than to give us a warning.”
“Joram doesn’t worry me.” Leia looked around, obviously searching for a good place to tend their wounds. “But we’re not winning this thing, and I’m starting to wonder if I’m going to see Han again.”
“You will,” Luke said. “We just need to patch ourselves up and find someplace to hide while we figure out where they took him.”
“It’s that last part that troubles me,” Leia said. “The Qrephs are always two steps ahead of us, and we keep trying to beat them
at their own game. We need to change the dynamic.”
“We will,” Luke promised. “The Qrephs may not realize it yet, but they’ve already made one very bad mistake.”
Leia cocked her brow. “They took Han?”
“That’s right,” Luke said, smiling. “Nobody is harder to figure out than Han Solo. I know it’s hard to hear, but if they wanted him dead, he would have been dead before they left the Ormni. So, whatever those two want with him, he’s going to make them crazy trying to get it.”
Leia studied Luke for a moment, then finally nodded. “Maybe so,” she said. “He’s certainly driven me crazy enough times.”
R2-D2 appeared a few meters down the corridor and whistled impatiently, then disappeared into the adjacent room—where he continued to whistle.
Luke gave Leia’s shoulder a squeeze. “Either Artoo found us a medical droid or we have company on the way,” he said. “You check on that, and I’ll jam the doors.”
Leia nodded and disappeared down the corridor with her tray of supplies. Luke used his lightsaber to cut the legs off a durasteel bench, then returned to the infirmary entrance and slipped them into the tracks of the sliding door. When he finished, he still saw no sign of anyone coming down the corridor beyond, but he took the precaution of disabling the control panel, as well. His precautions probably wouldn’t delay Vestara and her Mandalorians for long, but at least they would have to make a lot of noise trying to get through.
The floor, of course, was spattered with blood from his wound. Deciding that cleaning up wouldn’t delay their hunters much anyway, Luke simply left it and returned to the room R2-D2 had sought out.
Instead of the surgical droid he had expected, Luke found Leia with a female patient with auburn hair and a bandaged torso. Her face was so pale, and her eyes so sunken, that it took him a moment to recognize her as Lando’s treacherous operations manager, Dena Yus.
When Yus heard him enter the room, she looked up and smiled. “Luke Skywalker.” She raised her free arm, motioning for him to take her other side. “Hurry. We don’t have much time if you want to save Captain Solo.”
Fifteen
The object in the holograph was unlike anything Ben had ever seen, natural or artificial. Shaped like two pyramids stuck base-to-base, it had black granular facets that occasionally flashed white. There was nothing else in the image for comparison, so its size was impossible to determine. As it spun on its long axis, it threw off wisps of blue haze, and Ben could just make out three silver specks drifting across its mid-line.
“What is that thing?” he asked, leaning closer to the image. “Could it be a chromite crystal?”
He was in the Falcon’s main hold, kneeling among the scattered remnants of the R9 astromech droid he had salvaged from Ohali Soroc’s wrecked StealthX. Lando and Omad Kaeg were with him, while Tahiri was at the helm, headed for his father and Aunt Leia’s last known position. Ben had not been able to find either his father or aunt in the Force since the last blast of emotion he had felt, but that probably only meant that they were hiding their presences for some reason. At least, that’s what he kept telling himself.
“It could also be magnetite,” Omad Kaeg suggested. “It does look like a mineral crystal of some sort.”
Ben turned to C-3PO, who was standing behind the astromech’s half-melted casing. “See if you can get him to enlarge the image.”
“I can try,” C-3PO said. “But, as you can see, Nineball is no more than an operating system now. With all of his memory cards and datachips removed, it’s remarkable that he recalls his own identifier.”
“Just ask,” Ben said.
Before using Nineball to bait their trap, the Mandalorians had stripped the droid to his barest components. Fortunately, Jedi R9s were designed to protect mission data at all costs. While trying to retrace Ohali’s journey through the Rift, Ben had come across several holovid fragments buried in a string of corrupted operating code.
C-3PO shot a blurp of static toward Nineball’s new comm receiver, which they had borrowed from Ben and Tahiri’s own astromech.
Nineball squawked a reply that was more death rattle than chirp, but the holograph’s perspective slowly began to draw tighter. After a moment, the crystal became a pair of immense black facets sloping away from each other at a ninety-degree angle, and the silver flecks became two starfighters and a medium transport.
“That’s some crystal,” Ben said, awed by what he was seeing. “Do they grow that big in the Rift?”
“I’ve seen a few durelium and cardovyte crystals the size of an asteroid tug,” Omad replied. “But that thing must be as big as a Star Destroyer.”
“Or a moon,” Lando said. He scowled down at the wrecked R9 unit, which Ben had reduced to a warped motherboard surrounded by cables and borrowed parts—then asked, “Are you sure you don’t have some data-merging issues?”
Ben looked up with an expression that suggested Lando’s circuits were as scrambled as the droid’s. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked. “We probably have a hundred issues—none of which we have time to address right now. His processor could go at any second.”
“Forget I asked,” Lando said. “But if that’s an asteroid, why hasn’t someone hauled it in? The prospector’s cut alone would be enough to buy a world.”
“Because that’s not an asteroid.” Ben’s thoughts were beginning to race. Though he was reluctant to say so before he had evidence to support his suspicions, he was starting to believe they might be looking at something very special—something that he had secretly feared might not even exist. “Whatever that thing is, Nineball thought it was important to protect an image of it when things went bad—and Ohali wasn’t hunting asteroids.”
Lando’s brow shot up. “Are you saying that’s—”
“I’m not saying anything yet,” Ben said. “I don’t want to leap to any conclusions, especially not before we’ve learned everything we can from Nineball.”
Ben looked to C-3PO, who shot another burst of static at the borrowed comm receiver.
The R9 gave a barely audible rasp, then the holograph flickered and switched to a tactical display. The asteroid was designated UNKNOWN SPACE STATION, and the orbiting vessels were identified as two Mandalorian Bes’uliiks and the Marcadian luxury cruiser Aurel Moon.
Omad’s jaw dropped. “That’s the Qrephs’ yacht!”
“Which probably means that, uh, thing is their secret base.” Lando’s voice dropped. “I think we know who’s behind Ohali’s disappearance.”
“Maybe,” Ben said. “Or maybe not. Think about it—Ohali was in a long-range StealthX, so she had a lot of fuel and no real firepower. After recording this, her first move should have been to bug out and send a report to the Jedi Council.”
“Maybe she tried,” Lando said. He turned to C-3PO. “Ask him how Jedi Soroc came to find this Unknown Space Station.”
When C-3PO relayed the question, the tactical display flickered out and the R9 fell silent. It remained that way for almost a full minute, and Ben began to fear the astromech had finally suffered a catastrophic failure. He stuck a finger inside the warped chassis and began to push cables and wires aside, looking for broken solder or an overheated relay—anything that he might be able to repair.
Finally the droid began to creak and sputter, so softly that it was nearly imperceptible. Then his motherboard cooling fans began to whir, a sign that he was engaged in some heavy-duty processing. Ben froze, afraid that if he withdrew his finger again, he would disrupt the circuit.
“Oh, dear,” C-3PO said. “All this effort is straining his processing unit. Perhaps we should withdraw and let his circuits cool.”
Ben shook his head. “Whatever just happened, there’s no guarantee I can make it happen again,” he said. “And I can still hear him drawing power. Let’s give him a chance to work it out.”
“It’s our best shot,” Lando agreed.
They fell silent, listening to the hum of the cooling fans—and trying not to wince at e
very little pop and hiss.
After a moment, Lando said, “Ben, we both know that Ohali Soroc was looking for the Mortis Monolith, and that thing certainly qualifies as a monolith.”
Ben nodded. “So you’re wondering if the Qrephs could have found the Mortis Monolith? I’ve been wondering the same thing.” He paused, then—a bit reluctantly—asked, “But if Ohali thought she had found the Mortis Monolith, why does Nineball call it a space station?”
“I see your point,” Lando said. “Ohali must have thought she was looking at a space station.”
“Exactly,” Ben said. “Until we know better, we have to assume that’s what she found.”
“Could the Qrephs have built such a thing themselves?” Omad asked.
“Absolutely,” Lando said. “They’re on the cutting edge of all kinds of technology, and they have more money than most galactic empires.”
“Then maybe we’re focusing on the wrong problem,” Omad suggested. “Instead of asking ourselves what this thing is, maybe we should be asking why they have brought their work to the Chiloon Rift.”
“Because they really want to keep it a secret, of course,” Ben said. A frightening thought occurred to him, and he turned to Lando. “They couldn’t be building some sort of Death Star, could they?”
Lando’s eyes grew wide, but he shook his head. “They’re certainly capable, but even something like the Death Star is not much good without a sizable navy to support it. And if they had a navy that large, they wouldn’t be hiring Mandalorians to do their dirty work out here.”
Nineball emitted a rasp, and their attention returned instantly to him.
“Threepio, what’s he saying?” Lando asked.
“It may not be reliable,” C-3PO said. “But he claims that when Jedi Soroc found the space station, she was following a Sith meditation sphere.”
“A meditation sphere?” Ben repeated. His stomach began to churn, for the only meditation sphere he knew of was the one flown by Vestara Khai, and betrayed did not begin to describe what she had done to him. She had played him for a fool, claiming his heart and stomping it into a bruised mass, and there was no Sith in the galaxy whom he wanted to hunt down more. “Ship?”