by Troy Denning
Several meters from where the grenades had originated, Mirta and Roegr came over the seats firing and leaping across rows. Three Imperials went down with scorch holes in their armor before they could react, and two more fell to the floor, still spinning when they turned to fire—and were rewarded with bolts through the faceplates.
Then, when the remaining guards turned toward the two bounding commandos, Vatok and the last Mandalorian popped up from where the grenades had originated. They began to lay covering fire, catching half a dozen Imperials square in the back, bringing the odds close enough to even that Mirta and Roegr were almost assured of reaching the Moffs in one piece.
But Jaina was far more interested in the grenades. Instead of detonating in the midst of the Moffs, they seemed to catch a nonexistent wind and drift through the deteriorating hologram toward her projection booth. She could think of only one explanation for such an odd flight.
Caedus. He was coming to the Moff’s defense. Did that mean he was using the Moffs to draw the Mandalorians out—or the Mandalorians to draw her out?
The battle sounds out in the forum seemed to fade as Jaina’s pulse began to pound in her ears. The grenades were coming in her direction, under her brother’s control. Convinced she knew what that meant—terrified she knew—she lowered her QuietSnipe and reached out to the grenades in the Force … then felt them drop away.
They detonated outside the booth, somewhere a few meters below. The floor shook beneath her feet, and a blinding curtain of light and flame shot up in front of the image aperture. The sound of Jaina’s pulse pounding in her ears changed to sharp banging, and the acrid smell of detonite and smoke scorched her nostrils.
Then a lightsaber snap-hissed to life out in the forum and began to whine and whir through a deflection pattern. Still, Jaina did not quite grasp that she had been mistaken—that the approaching grenades had not been a sign of her brother’s omniscience, merely a coincidence of timing and location—until she began to hear the cheee-chew of blaster bolts being deflected by Caedus’s blade.
Jaina quickly shut herself off from the Force and returned to the aperture, the QuietSnipe raised to her shoulder and her finger on the trigger. Her brother was just dancing out of the yellow ball of the holographic sun, a dark-cloaked figure with no helmet and yellow eyes, weaving baskets of crimson light as he spun through the holographic asteroids, batting bolts of blaster energy back toward alarmed Mandalorians and confused bodyguards alike.
Jaina braced the barrel of the QuietSnipe on the edge of the image aperture. But Caedus—she could not bear to think of him as her brother, not at that moment—was moving too wildly and quickly to give her a clean shot. She would have to wait until he engaged someone and slowed down.
Mirta Gev was the first of the original combatants to recover from the shock of his arrival. A bouncing figure in yellow-orange armor only a few rows from her targets, she turned her G-10 power blaster on a round-faced Moff with a ruddy complexion and three chins, and a smoke hole the size of Jaina’s fist erupted from the man’s back.
Caedus came out of a spin looking in Mirta’s direction. She sailed meters into the air, flipping upside down and crashing into a ceiling corner on the far side of the chamber, then dropping four meters to the floor. She landed on the crown of her helmet in a metallic crash audible even above the battle and folded in two, and she did not move again.
Jaina forced herself not to feel the sentiments rising inside her, the rage and shock and sorrow. Emotion is a weakness. It would not save the living, she reminded herself, and it could not bring the dead back to life. She returned her attention to Caedus and saw the Moffs cowering in the seats behind him, returning the Mandalorians’ fire with underpowered hold-out blasters and T-21s taken from their fallen bodyguards.
Caedus himself was driving a boot into Roegr’s blue breastplate, sending him tumbling backward over a row of seats. Jaina set the QuietSnipe’s sight on the back of the Sith’s head and squeezed the trigger—then saw a gray helmet spurt blood when a bodyguard stepped between her and her target. He fell toward Caedus, smashing him in the small of his back and nearly knocking him over the seats after Roegr.
Caedus righted himself with the Force and came around with his lightsaber sweeping low, his yellow eyes blazing with anger as he sliced through the bodyguard’s helmet. Jaina adjusted her aim—then barely prevented herself from squeezing the trigger when a streak of blue armor came leaping over the seats to block her shot, the curved blade of a beskad flashing at Caedus’s neck.
Roegr never had a chance. Caedus simply spun inside the attack, staggering his assailant with a Force-driven elbow to the helmet. Knowing the folly of trying to track a whirling target—especially without the Force to aid her—Jaina kept her eye on her sniper sight and waited for him to move into the shot.
But Caedus slipped in the opposite direction, dragging his blade across the Mandalorian’s faceplate, then pulling it back across the breastplate. The slashes would have cut through normal armor like a plasma torch through plastoid, but all they did to Roegr’s blue beskar’gam was burn a couple of deep furrows.
Still, good armor was hardly a match for the speed and power of a Sith Lord. By the time Roegr recovered from the elbow strike and tried to bring his beskad up again, Caedus was already trapping the Mandalorian’s sword arm in an elbow lock. Continuing to spin—and denying Jaina a viable target—he deactivated his lightsaber and cocked his arm back for a pommel strike.
Then Caedus did a peculiar thing. He paused for an instant, glowering at the Mandalorian’s blue armor as though offended by its color. Jaina saw the chance for a difficult oblique shot past Roegr’s helmet and swung the QuietSnipe over.
Caedus brought the pommel of his lightsaber down, striking the breastplate not all that hard, not quite in the center … and shattering it. The beskar didn’t burst apart or send shards flying, or do anything remotely explosive. It just crumbled away from the vacproof under-liner, leaving Roegr faceplate-to-chin with his soon-to-be killer.
Jaina was too disciplined to let her shock distract her, but she was shocked. Beskar’gam was some of the toughest armor in the galaxy, able to deflect blaster bolts and lightsaber strikes with little more than a scorch mark, and her brother had just destroyed a piece with a tap. Had he mastered the shatterpoint?
The academy Archives claimed that it was a lost and rare art, the ability to perceive points of weakness where a small amount of precisely applied force would unlock the unseen structures that bound together even the most indestructible materials and situations. The great Jedi Master Mace Windu, who had died in the Clone Wars, had been known to possess the gift. He had been the last.
Until Caedus.
Growing more frightened than ever by the magnitude of her brother’s powers—and therefore even more resolved to stop him—Jaina set her front sight on Caedus’s ear and fired a burst of three pellets … just as Caedus flipped his lightsaber around and thumbed the activation switch.
The blade ignited inside Roegr’s chest, splitting him open at the sternum. The tip extended up through his neck and hit the back of his helmet, failing to penetrate the tough beskar and snapping his head back into the path of Jaina’s first mag-pellet. The third pellet whispered past, barely a centimeter behind Caedus’s unprotected head, and punched a hole through a seat.
But the second pellet, the one that didn’t miss, caught Caedus in the shoulder and sent him spinning. With Roegr’s sword arm still trapped in an elbow lock, he pulled the Mandalorian around with him, and Jaina’s next burst of mag-pellets slammed into the blue plate still affixed to the dead man’s back. The impact tipped the balance, driving Caedus over a row of seats and out of sight down on the floor.
Jaina continued to fire, her mag-pellets tearing seats apart as she swept the barrel back and forth. Either the Moffs and their bodyguards did not know where the attack on Caedus was coming from or they did not care—which was hardly a surprise. Half a dozen Moffs lay strewn over seats with gapi
ng scorch holes where their medals or eyes or ears used to be, and the four bodyguards left to protect the survivors were clearly not up to the job. Vatok and the other surviving Mandalorian were working their way down toward the lower seats, taking turns moving and covering—and reducing the number of Moffs and bodyguards by one each as Jaina watched.
The QuietSnipe finally ran out of mag-pellets. Jaina ducked out of the image aperture and rolled to one side, ejecting the empty magazine and wondering whether she could possibly have taken Caedus out so easily.
She had her answer an instant later when a fork of Force lightning danced through the aperture and shattered the lens of the holoprojector. Jaina slipped a fresh magazine into her QuietSnipe and continued to roll until she reached the control board where the projectionist had been standing.
The Force lightning ceased, but Jaina did not make the mistake of returning to the aperture through which she had fired the first time. Instead, she poked her head up above the control board and looked through the viewing panel out into the forum seats.
Caedus was on his feet again, dancing back and forth, his wounded arm hanging limp at his side, wielding his lightsaber one-handed and still deflecting everything that Vatok and the other Mandalorian were pouring down toward the Moffs.
Jaina started to step back to her original firing position—then noticed a trio of blaster barrels scattered across the lower seats, pointing up toward the aperture. Clearly, someone had taken control of the situation down there—and she had the sinking feeling that it was her brother.
She pulled her lightsaber off her belt and jammed the emitter nozzle against the one-way viewing panel above the control board. Out in the forum, she saw Caedus look toward the second Mandalorian. The man suddenly stopped firing and grabbed for his throat, scratching at the bottom rim of his helmet as though he believed that was what had crushed his larynx.
Jaina thumbed her lightsaber’s activation switch, and the blade snapped to life, burning a thumb-sized hole through the one-way transparisteel in front of her. The three blaster barrels she had spotted a moment earlier swung toward the blade’s glow and began to pour sizzling bolts of energy into the viewing panel. Jaina ignored the attacks and worked her blade in a circle, enlarging the hole into a suitable firing port.
By the time she had finished, Vatok was the last Mandalorian remaining, only a few paces from Caedus and the Moffs, and his attacks were being deflected without going anywhere near their targets. Jaina wanted to yell at him to stop, to turn and run, but even had there been time to pull her comlink and open a channel, she knew her words would have been futile. Vatok would never flee while his companions lay dead on the field of battle; nor would Caedus allow him that option.
Jaina was looking at a dead man. She knew that, knew that even if she killed her brother, she would not save her friend. She pushed the barrel of her QuietSnipe through the hole she had made and pulled the trigger. But this time, Caedus was not surprised. He spun away even as she opened fire, leaping in close to engage Vatok hand-to-hand, deftly placing the big Mandalorian between Jaina and himself.
Jaina did what Fett would have done—what Vatok himself would have done—and continued to fire, doing her best to direct her pellets past his shoulders into Caedus … and failing. Even without the bodyguards’ blaster bolts streaming up to blind her as they ricocheted off the exterior of her viewing panel, half her pellets were driving dents into Vatok’s back plate, and the rest were sailing harmlessly past to destroy seats.
Though Vatok still had two good arms and Caedus had only one, it was all he could do to defend himself—and Jaina suspected that was only because her brother needed to keep using Vatok as a shield. The Mandalorian tried to slam the butt of his blaster into Caedus’s head—only to have the lightsaber slice it in half. He drove a knee into the ribs on Caedus’s vulnerable side—only to meet a Force block that sent him stumbling back into a burst of mag-pellets from Jaina. He caught a lightsaber strike on his beskar vambrace, then tried to drop an iron-gloved fist across the bridge of Caedus’s nose—only to find himself striking at empty air when his foe was already ducking away and driving him back with a shoulder to the midsection.
Nor could Jaina do anything to help. Her brother seemed to anticipate every adjustment she made, swinging Vatok around to block her line of sight when she tried to slide a burst of pellets past the Mandalorian’s flank, dancing aside when she streamed fire straight into his back in an effort to push him forward and bowl Caedus over.
Then, three seconds and a hundred pellets later, Jaina ran out of ammunition again.
Before she had even pulled the barrel out of her makeshift firing port, Caedus had Force-hurled Vatok down between the seats and was driving his lightsaber down toward the Mandalorian’s head. Even without the scream, Jaina would have known her friend was dead.
Which side of an Ewok has the most fur?
The outside!
—Jacen Solo, age 14
It looked like the stars just kept exploding. There would be a few moments of tranquillity when the blue-flecked curtain of space hung outside the blastboat canopy, as still and stunning as the first time Han had sat in a pilot’s seat. His chest would go hollow with awe at the vast beauty before him, and he would be struck by what a gift his life had been, by how much his famous Solo luck had brought him—the freedom to wander an entire galaxy at will, a real live Princess for a wife, and children who had made him proud … almost all the time.
Then the swirling ion trail of a starfighter would come corkscrewing out of the dark, or the luminous halo of an approaching frigate would drift into view. Boiling balls of fire would erupt ahead, like stars going nova. The blastboat would chug when Leia and Saba returned fire, and a bright, shrinking disk might flare away as Luke launched a concussion missile. R2-D2 would scroll a tactical update across the pilot’s display, C-3PO would declare their imminent doom, and Han would slam the yoke to one side, diving away into the shelter of the star-dappled void.
But this time, the proximity alarm broke out squawking, and crooked snakes of color began to jump across space in front of the cockpit canopy. Blue rings of ion glow formed in the dancing iridescence ahead and swelled into the backlit forms of an arriving war fleet. Almost instantly, columns of turbolaser fire began to streak back and forth between the newcomers and the disorganized Remnant flotilla that had been trying for hours to chase off the Jedi raiding force.
Han pointed their nose straight at the heart of the arriving fleet, trying to run parallel to the fiery torrent rather than ducking out before he had some sense of the newcomers’ gunnery patterns. Despite his efforts, one bolt flashed past close enough to rock the blastboat sideways and darken the canopy blast-tinting. The shield generator sizzled with strain, and the cabin filled with the caustic scent of melting circuitry.
Han cursed, then checked his tactical display and saw that not just one, but two fleets were arriving: a mixed bag of Galactic Alliance defectors clustered around Cha Niathal’s Ocean, and a flotilla of old Empire-era Star Destroyers and Scimitar-class frigates led by Daala’s renowned Chimaera.
“The Conniver Sisters One and Two,” Han commented. “Who invited them?”
“I wasn’t aware that battles required invitations,” C-3PO said, reaching for the blastboat’s comm controls. “But we should certainly extend a gracious welcome.”
“You’re asking me to lie?” Han asked. “No way.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Captain Solo,” C-3PO replied. “We are in desperate need of relief, and they clearly appear to be taking our side.”
“The only side those two take is their own,” Han said. “They’re just here because they smell blood and want to see what they can pick off for themselves.”
“Nevertheless, they are shooting at our enemies instead of us, which is the very definition of ally in nearly six thousand galactic cultures,” C-3PO noted. “Might I suggest that now would be an excellent time to broaden your horizons?”
&nbs
p; “No.”
The intensifying brilliance of an oncoming turbolaser strike flared before Han’s eyes. He pushed the yoke forward, then slammed into his shoulder restraints as the bolt skipped off their shields and bounced the blastboat downward. The generators failed with an earsplitting thraaawkk, and acrid yellow fumes began to pour out of the recirculation vents.
R2-D2 let out a long stream of beeps and tweedles, and damage reports began to scroll across the pilot’s display. Their shields were only down until Luke could bring the backups online, but a coolant line had sprung a leak—that explained the acrid fumes—and their fusion core was about to start overheating.
“You see?” C-3PO asked. “Even Artoo is frightened, and that never happens. We should definitely request an escape vector and let them take over the fight.”
“Not going to happen, Goldenrod.” Han spotted a flight of XJs and antique TIEs streaming away from the two fleets and dropped into their transit lane, then swung back toward Nickel One. “Not while my daughter is still down there in that rock.”
The frigate that had been pursuing them most recently hung in the distance, a little above their plane of orientation, a knobby-ended cylinder trailing a long, curving tail of ions as it turned away from the oncoming fleets. Beyond it floated Nickel One itself, an inky-black nugget visible only in the sense that its dark mass blotted out the stars beyond. Swarming around the asteroid were the flickering pinpoints of perhaps a hundred vessels: the Remnant’s scattered flotilla rushing to regroup and defend their conquest.
Two-thirds of those flickering pinpoints were probably Star-hunters or other small combat craft, which meant that the Remnant would be slightly outnumbered—at least until the Alliance’s Fourth Fleet returned from its escort duty to support them. Unlike the Third Fleet, which had lost nearly a quarter of its strength to Niathal’s call for desertion at Fondor, the Fighting Fourth remained at nearly full strength. It would be more than a match for Niathal and Daala—especially under the capable command of Gavin Darklighter.