The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  “Right,” he said, and slammed down on the stick.

  Fatman dipped her nose and Coruscant once more came into view, tantalizingly close.

  Smoke wafted into the cockpit from the rear, the smell of seared electronics.

  “Aryn!”

  “I’m on it,” she said, and started to unstrap herself.

  “Chemical extinguishers are in wall mounts in every corridor.”

  On the main screen, Malgus watched the freighter’s engines flare blue. The ship shook loose of the tractor beam’s noose and dived toward the planet like a blaster shot. A murmur went through the bridge crew.

  “Pursue, helm,” Commander Jard said.

  The helmsman engaged the engines and accelerated after the freighter.

  “The tractor has failed, my lord,” Commander Jard said to Malgus, checking the command readout. “We will have it up again in moments.”

  Malgus watched the freighter open some distance between it and the cruiser, and made up his mind. He had crossed a line and started down a road when he had first engaged the tractor beam. But the time was not yet right to walk farther down that road. He could not afford to let the Jedi, Aryn Leneer, get to Coruscant, lest Angral start to perceive motives in Malgus that Malgus would not yet acknowledge in himself.

  “No,” he said. “They’ll be in the atmosphere in a moment. Shoot them down.”

  “Very good, my lord.” Jard looked to the weapons officer. “Weapons free, Lieutenant Makk.” Jard looked to Malgus. “Shall I alert the planetary fighter wing, my lord?”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary, provided Lieutenant Makk does his job.”

  “Very good, my lord.”

  Red lines from Valor’s plasma cannons filled the space between the ship, the fire so thick that the lines seemed to bleed together into a red plane.

  Aryn got halfway out of her seat when an explosion rocked the ship. Fatman lurched and Aryn fell to the floor.

  “Back in your seat,” Zeerid said. “Weapons are hot on that cruiser.”

  Aryn climbed into her seat and got the lap strap on. The moment the buckle clicked into place, Zeerid went evasive. Coruscant spun in the viewscreen as Fatman spun, wheeled, and dived. The red lines of plasma fire lit up the black of space. Zeerid went hard right, down, then left.

  The ship knifed into the atmosphere.

  “Divert everything but the engines and life support to the rear deflectors.”

  Aryn worked the instrument panel, doing as Zeerid ordered.

  Another explosion rocked the ship.

  “The deflectors aren’t going to take another one,” she said.

  Zeerid nodded. The orange flames of atmospheric entry were visible through the canopy. Plasma bolts knifed over them, under, to the left. Zeerid cut Fatman to the right as they descended, risking a bad entry that could burn them up.

  The smoke in the cockpit thickened.

  “Masks?” Aryn asked, coughing.

  “There,” Zeerid responded, nodding at a ship’s locker between their seats. Aryn threw it open, grabbed two masks, tossed one to Zeerid, and pulled the other one on herself.

  “You’ve got the stick,” Zeerid said while he pulled on his mask.

  Aryn grabbed the copilot’s stick and continued Fatman’s spiraling descent toward Coruscant.

  Fire from the cruiser hit the ship on the starboard side and caused the freighter to spin wildly. Aryn felt dizzy, sick.

  “I have the stick,” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He got the spin under control and drove Fatman almost vertically into the atmosphere. The cockpit grew hot. Flames engulfed the ship. They must have looked like a comet cutting through the sky.

  “Too steep,” Aryn said.

  “I know,” Zeerid said. “But we’ve got to get in.”

  The unrelenting fire from the cruiser struck the freighter again, the impact shoving them through the stratosphere. The flames diminished, vanished, and Coruscant was once more visible below them.

  “We’re through,” Aryn said.

  Without warning the engines died and Fatman went limp in the air, spinning, falling, but with no power.

  Zeerid cursed, slammed his hand against the instrument panel, trying frantically to refire them, but to no avail.

  “They can still hit us here,” he said, and unbuckled his belts. “I got nothing but thrusters. Get to the escape pod.”

  “The cargo, Zeerid.”

  He hesitated, finally shook his head and unbuckled her straps. “Forget the cargo. Move.”

  She stood and another bolt hit Fatman. An explosion rocked the rear of the ship. Another. They were going down. Alarms wailed. The ship was burning, falling through the sky. Zeerid hit the control panel to engage the thrusters and keep the ship in the air.

  For the moment, at least.

  “They are dead in the air,” Lieutenant Makk announced. “Drifting on thrusters.”

  Commander Jard looked to Malgus for the kill order. Vrath, too, looked on with interest.

  The freighter hung low over Coruscant’s atmosphere. It limped along on thrusters, trailing flames from its dead ion engines. They could rope them back in with the tractor.

  “Shoot them down,” Malgus ordered.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vrath smile and cross his arms over his chest.

  Explosions in the rear of Fatman started to spread, the secondary explosions working their way forward in a series of dull booms. They would never make it to the escape pod.

  Aryn activated her lightsaber. “Grab hold of something.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting us out.”

  “What?”

  She did not bother to explain. Bracing herself and holding on to her seat strap, she stabbed her blade through the transparisteel of the cockpit canopy and opened a gash. The oxygen rushed out of the cockpit while the pressure equalized. Their masks allowed them to breathe, despite the thin atmosphere. The cold startled Aryn.

  She used her blade to cut a door out of the canopy. The thin air whipped by, whistling.

  “We’re fifty kilometers up, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice rising for the first time. “The velocity alone—”

  She grabbed him by the arm and gave him a shake to shut him up. “Do not let go of me no matter what. Do you understand? No matter what.”

  His eyes were wide behind the lenses of his mask. He nodded.

  She did not hesitate. She sank into the Force, cocooned them both in a protective sheath, and leapt out of the ship and into the open air.

  The wind and velocity tore them backward. They slammed into the ship’s fuselage and whipped through the flames pouring out its sides. At almost the same moment, plasma fire from the cruiser above them hit Fatman dorsally and the ship exploded into an expanding ball of flame. The blast wave sent them careering crazily through the sky and set them to spinning like a pinwheel. For an alarming moment, Aryn’s vision blurred and she feared she would lose consciousness, but she held on to awareness with both hands and fought through it.

  Zeerid was shouting but Aryn could not make it out.

  Her stomach crawled up her throat as they plummeted, spinning wildly, toward the planet below. Her perspective alternated crazily from flaming pieces of Fatman, to Coruscant below, to the sky above and the distant silhouette of the Imperial cruiser, to Fatman again. The motion was pulling the blood from her head. Sparks blinked before her eyes. She had to stop the spinning or she would pass out.

  She made her grip a vise around Zeerid and used the Force first to slow, then to stop the spin. They ended up hand in hand, passing through clouds, falling at terminal velocity toward Coruscant’s surface.

  Malgus watched the freighter disintegrate into flaming debris over Coruscant. He expected the faint touch of the Jedi’s Force signature to disintegrate with it, but he felt it still.

  “Magnify,” he said, leaning forward in the command chair. The image on the viewscreen grew larger.

  Chunks of ja
gged steel and a large portion of the forward section of the ship burned their way toward the surface.

  “Did an escape pod launch before the ship exploded?”

  “No, my lord,” Jard said. “There were no survivors.”

  But there had been. The Jedi, at least, had survived. He could still feel her presence, though it was fading with distance, a splinter in the skin of his perception.

  He considered dispatching fighters, a search party, but decided against it. He was not yet sure what he would do about the Jedi, but whatever it was, he would do it himself.

  “Very good, Commander Jard. Well done, Lieutenant Makk.” He turned to Vrath. “You are done here, Vrath Xizor.”

  Vrath shifted on his feet, swallowed, cleared his throat. “You mentioned the possibility of payment, my lord?”

  Malgus credited him with bravery, if nothing else. Malgus rose and walked over. He stood twenty centimeters taller than Vrath but the smaller man held his ground and kept most of the fear from the slits of his eyes.

  “It is not enough that you’ve killed a rival and destroyed the engspice your employer wished to prevent reaching the surface?”

  “I did not—”

  Malgus held up a gloved hand. “The petty squabbles of criminals hold little interest for me.”

  Vrath licked his lips, drew himself up straight. “I brought you a Jedi, my lord. That was her on the holo.”

  “So you did.”

  “Will I … be paid, then?”

  Malgus regarded him coolly, and the small man seemed to withdraw into himself. The fear in his eyes expanded, the knowledge that he was a lone prey animal surrounded by predators.

  “I am a man of my word,” Malgus said. “You will be paid.”

  Vrath let out a long breath. “Thank you, my lord.”

  “You may take your ship to the planet. The coordinates will be provided to you and I will arrange for payment there.”

  “And then I can leave?”

  Malgus smiled under his respirator. “That is a different question.”

  Vrath took half a step back. He looked as if he had been slapped. “What does that mean? I … will not be allowed to leave?”

  “No unauthorized ships may leave Coruscant at this time. You will remain on the planet until things change.”

  “But, my lord—”

  “Or I can blow your ship from space the moment it leaves my landing bay,” Malgus said.

  Vrath swallowed hard. “Thank you, my lord.”

  Malgus waved him away. Security escorted him from the bridge.

  After the chaos of the cockpit, the quiet of the fall seemed oddly incongruous. Aryn heard only the rush of the wind, the steady thump of her heartbeat in her ears. Zeerid’s fear was a tangible thing to her, and it fell with them.

  She felt free, exhilarated, and the feeling surprised her. To the east Coruscant’s surface curved away from them and the morning sun crept over the horizon line, bathing the planet in gold. The sight took her breath away. She shook Zeerid’s arm and nodded at the rising sun. He did not respond. His eyes stared straight down, iron to the magnet of the planet’s surface. Aryn allowed herself to enjoy the view for a few seconds before trying to save their lives.

  The drag increased as the thin air of the upper atmosphere gave way to the thicker, breathable air of the lower. Below them, Coruscant transformed from a brown-and-black ball crisscrossed with seemingly random whorls of light, to a distinguishable geometry of well-lit cities, roads, skyways, quadrants, and blocks. She could make out tiny black forms moving against the urbanscape, the ants of aircars, speeders, and swoops, but far fewer than ordinary. Plumes of smoke traced twisting black lines into the air. Large areas of Galactic City lay in ruins, dark lesions on the skin of the planet.

  The Empire must have killed tens of thousands. More, perhaps.

  The wind changed pitch, whistled past her ears. She fancied she heard whispers in it, the soul of the planet sharing its pain. Her clothing flapped audibly behind her.

  Below, she could distinguish more and more details of Coruscant’s upper levels: the lines of skyscrapers, the geometry of plazas and parks, the orderly, straight lines of roads.

  She let herself feel the descent and used the feeling to fall into the Force. Nestled in its power, she marshaled her strength. She pulled Zeerid toward her. Unresisting, he felt as limp as a rag doll in her hands. She drew him to her, under her, wrapped her arms and legs around him.

  “Ready yourself,” she shouted in his ear. “Nod if you understand.”

  His head bobbed once, tense and rapid.

  The buildings below grew larger, more defined. They descended toward a large plaza, a flat trapezoid of duracrete with stratoscrapers anchoring each of its corners.

  “I will slow us,” she shouted. “But we will still hit with some force. I will release you before we hit. Try to roll with the impact.”

  He nodded again.

  She lowered her head, angled her body, and tried to use the wind resistance to create some slight motion forward, rather than entirely downward. The ground rushed up to meet them.

  They passed through the ring of skyrises, plummeting past the roofs, windows, balconies. Given the hour, she doubted anyone saw their descent.

  She reached out with the Force, channeled power into a wide column beneath them. She conceptualized the power as somewhat similar to what she would use when augmenting a leap, except that instead of a sudden rush of power to drive her upward, she instead used the power in a gentler, passive fashion. She imagined it as a balloon, soft and yielding at first, but providing ever-increasing resistance as they fell farther into it.

  They slowed and Zeerid shifted in her grasp. Perhaps he did not believe it.

  Pressure built behind Aryn’s eyes, an ache formed in her head.

  The balloon of her power slowed them further. She could see benches in the plaza, a fountain. She could distinguish individual windows in the skyrises around them. They were five hundred meters up and still falling fast.

  The pressure in her brain intensified. Her vision blurred. The ache in her head became a knife stab of pain. She screamed but held on, held on.

  Four hundred meters. Three hundred.

  They slowed still more and Aryn feared she could not bear any more.

  Two hundred.

  A second stretched into an eternity of pain and pressure. She thought she must burst.

  “Hang on, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He was rigid in her arms.

  Fifty meters.

  They were still going too fast.

  Twenty, ten.

  She dug deep, pulled out what power she could, and expended it in a final shout, an expulsion of power that entirely arrested their descent for a moment. They hung in the air for a fraction of a second, suspended only by the invisible power of the Force and Aryn’s ability to use it.

  And then they were falling free.

  She released Zeerid and they both hit the duracrete feetfirst, the shock of impact sending jolts of pain up Aryn’s ankles and calves. She rode the momentum of the fall into a roll that knocked the wind from her and tore a divot of skin from her scalp.

  But she was alive.

  She lifted herself to all fours, every muscle screaming, legs quivering, blood dripping from her scalp. She tore off her mask.

  “Zeerid!”

  “I’m all right,” he answered, his voice as raw as old leather. “I can’t believe it, but I am all right.”

  She sagged back to the duracrete, rolled over onto her back, and stared up at dawn’s light spreading across the sky. The long thin clouds, painted with the light of daybreak, looked like veins of gold. She simply lay there, exhausted.

  Zeerid crawled over to her, cursing with pain throughout. He peeled off his mask and lay on his back next to her. They stared up at the sky together.

  “Is anything broken?” she asked him.

  He turned to look at her, shook his head, looked back at the sky. “If
we get out of this, I’m becoming a farmer on Dantooine. I swear it.”

  She smiled.

  “I’m not joking.”

  She held her smile; he began to chuckle, louder, and the chuckle turned into a laugh.

  She could not help it. A wide smile split her face, followed by a chuckle, and then she joined him in full, both of them giggling hysterically at the dawn sky of a new day.

  Vrath’s hands sweated on Razor’s stick. Despite Malgus purporting to be a man of his word, Vrath felt certain the Imperial cruiser would shoot him from space after he exited the landing bay. For a moment, he considered veering off deeper insystem, accelerating to full to get out of Coruscant’s gravity well, then jumping into hyperspace, but he did not think he would make it.

  More important, he feared that even if he did make it, Malgus would hunt him down on principle. Vrath knew that Malgus would do it because Vrath would have done the same. He’d looked into the Sith Lord’s eyes and seen the same relentlessness he tried to cultivate in his own. He would not cross Malgus.

  He let the ship’s autopilot ride the coordinates provided to him by Valor into Coruscant’s atmosphere. It would put him down in one of Galactic City’s smaller spaceports, probably one commandeered by Imperial soldiers.

  Presently, the spaceport hailed him and sent him landing instructions. He affirmed them and sat back in his chair.

  He resolved that he would not leave Razor once he put down on Coruscant. He wanted no further interaction with conquering Imperials. He wanted only to wait until peace negotiations on Alderaan were concluded, however long that might take, and then get off Coruscant.

  Malgus knew Aryn Leneer had somehow survived the destruction of her ship and he suspected she had survived the descent to Coruscant’s surface. He did not want Angral to learn of her escape. Such knowledge would be … premature.

  He would need to track her down. To do that, he needed to determine why she had returned to Coruscant in the first place.

  “I will be in my quarters,” he said to Commander Jard.

  “If anything requires your attention, I will alert you immediately.”