Inferno

by Troy Denning

  The flashes of silhouette grew rapidly larger as Jaina and Luke approached, until it became a fixed stain against the stars. Jaina watched in disbelief as it expanded to the size of a bantha, and still the Anakin Solo did not open fire. Unless the visual lookouts were asleep or blind, they had to have noticed the StealthXs streaking toward their vessel by now. Even if the two starfighters were not being silhouetted against the crimson fury behind them, they would still be eclipsing and revealing stars at a furious rate, painting a black smear across the blue-speckled void.

  Luke must have been thinking the same thing, because he suddenly began to juke and jink so furiously that Jaina could hardly stay on his tail. Sneaker filled the cockpit speakers with screeches and whistles, flashing strain readouts and overload warnings across the primary display too fast to read—even had she dared to look. Still, Luke pushed his StealthX harder, accelerating into a wild series of rolls that made her suspect it was the Force instead of bolts and welds holding his craft together.

  Jaina didn’t even try to match his maneuvers, contenting herself to remain generally behind him in a covering position. The Anakin Solo swelled until all she could see was a mountain of black durasteel, and she began to hope—to believe, even—that they had somehow sneaked up on the Star Destroyer. Maybe, just maybe, Luke had been disguising their approach with some Force skill she didn’t even know existed. Maybe they’d be able to swing alongside Jacen’s abomination of a flagship unopposed, then roll up onto its top hull and launch Luke’s shadow bombs without meeting any resistance at all.

  And that was when the lock-alarms broke out screeching. Jaina’s seat slammed into her from behind as a salvo of cannon bolts blew down her rear shields and started chewing through her thin StealthX armor. There was no need to roll out, because she lost control and tumbled toward the Anakin Solo, then ricocheted off its particle shields and began to tumble toward a dark cube that—when she caught glimpses of it—looked perilously like an idle turbolaser turret.

  Jaina slammed one control pedal to the floor and released the other, jerking the stick back to her belly and hitting the thrusters. The StealthX accelerated into something that resembled control, and she was relieved to find herself streaking starward instead of into a black expanse of durasteel.

  “Damage report!” she snapped. The order came by instinct, then—also by instinct—the question. “What happened?”

  She looped into a dive and read Sneaker’s response. REAR SHIELD GENERATORS OVERLOADED AND DESTROYED, NUMBER THREE ION ENGINE DESTROYED, REAR ACCESSORY MOUNT DESTROYED, DAMAGE CAUSED BY MUTIPLLE LASER CANNON STRIKES.

  “I figured that,” Jaina said. “Where’d they …”

  She let the question trail off as the dark plain of the Anakin Solo’s hull drifted back into view and she saw where the attack had come from.

  Luke was attempting to roll onto the top side of the Star Destroyer, still juking and jinking as he tried to position himself for an attack run on the bridge. A few hundred meters behind him and closing fast, a second StealthX was pouring bolts in his direction, angling its fire so Luke could not rise above the Anakin Solo’s midline without crossing into a stream of death.

  “Jacen!”

  INSUFFICIENT DATA TO DETERMINE PILOT IDENTITY, Sneaker informed her.

  “He knew!” Jaina ignored the droid’s message and pointed her nose after the two StealthXs. There hadn’t been enough time since their departure from Kashyyyk for Jacen to suit up and launch. He had to have been waiting for Luke to come after him. “He knew the whole plan!”

  Jaina’s forward canopy erupted into a storm of color as the Anakin Solo’s close-defense gunners caught sight of her. She opened the throttles wide and held her own triggers down, relying on her forward shields far more than anyone in a StealthX sizzled and pinged with cannon hits, Jaina dropped over the hull’s edge and slipped in behind her uncle and brother. The enemy fire faded to a trickle of snap shots—with the three StealthXs flying in such close formation, the Alliance gunners were afraid of hitting their commander.

  Jaina locked her sights on Jacen and fired. He anticipated and slipped in the opposite direction, and one of her bolts lit up Luke’s rear shields.

  Jacen dropped back in and added another three hits for good measure, then dodged aside as Jaina fired again. This time, one of her bolts burned through and disappeared into an engine. There was a flash and a puff of smoke. Luke’s StealthX seemed to skid and bounce off the Anakin Solo’s shields, then—to Jaina’s utter astonishment—it rolled over Jacen’s fire and disappeared onto the upper hull.

  Jaina managed to stitch a line of bolts across Jacen’s upper shields as he pursued, then she followed and found herself struggling to keep up as they streaked past the cloaking cone toward the cratered superstructure of the bridge.

  She pressed her triggers. Again, Jacen slipped her fire, and again the bolts only added to Luke’s problems. Her brother seemed to anticipate every shot before she took it.

  “This’ll never work,” she growled.

  Jaina reached out to Luke, trying to draw him into a combat-meld—and found only Jacen’s presence, powerful and dark and mocking. She had no business flying here against real pilots, he seemed to be saying; she ought to be back at the academy looking after the young ones.

  Jacen’s StealthX dropped back into her sights. She felt her fingers depressing the triggers—then sensed a dark chuckle in the back of her mind and realized he was goading her.

  Then she heard Luke’s voice, clearly, as though it were coming over a comm speaker. Do it! She felt him urging her to fire. Lock ’em down!

  Jaina depressed all four triggers and held them.

  Jacen jinked out of the way, taking a wing hit that sent a laser cannon spinning away, and Jaina found herself looking at the stern of Luke’s StealthX, watching in relief as it veered away from her line of cannon bolts.

  Then Luke’s damaged engine erupted in flames. The StealthX seemed to skid, veering back into Jaina’s line of fire, and a blast of surprise and panic shot through the Force. She released the triggers instantly, but a quartet of bolts was already leaping from the tips of her cannons.

  They caught Luke dead in the stern, chewing through the damaged armor in aflaming eyeblink. The Force boiled with anguish, and then Jaina was flying through a fireball that had once been a starfighter.

  She pulled up more by instinct than because she wanted to avoid crashing. Had there been time to think about it, she might well have flown her battered StealthX straight into the looming mass of the Anakin Solo’s bridge, because this was one mission from which she truly did not want to return.

  Luke Skywalker was dead.

  And Jaina had shot him down.

  eighteen

  Hidden in the smile of an enormous cliff sculpture of a strikingly beautiful Hapan queen, the secret entrance to the Royal Hangar was—like everything associated with the fountain palace—a testament to the wealth and power of the Hapan consortium. It was also designed to accommodate the sleek little skiffs and sport ketches that messengers or secret lovers might fly, not working transports like the Millennium Falcon.

  As they started down the access tunnel, Han eyed the long line of crystal lumeliers hanging from the ceiling and hoped C-3PO had been right about their clearances. It wouldn’t be like Tenel Ka to hold it against him if he hit something—but it wouldn’t make it any easier to convince her that Jacen had to be stopped, either.

  In the copilot’s seat, Leia suddenly gasped, then followed it up with a couple of sharp, short breaths.

  Han’s eves dropped to the maneuvering display. “What’d I hit?” As far as he could tell, he still had at least ten centimeters clearance on all sides. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  When Leia did not answer, C-3PO said, “I don’t believe you’ve hit anything yet, Captain Solo.”

  “You don’t have to sound so disappointed.” Han returned his gaze to the forward viewport and aligned the Falcon’s loading mandibles squarely und
er the last ceiling lumelier. “It’s not like you took the bet.”

  “There would be no purpose in betting against you,” C-3PO replied. “I wouldn’t have anyplace to accumulate my winnings. Droids aren’t permitted to control financial accounts exceeding a million credits.”

  Han might have retorted that C-3PO had nothing to worry about, but he knew the droid could recall every bet he had ever offered, and he really didn’t want to listen to the inevitable tallying of accounts.

  Once the Falcon had finally left the access tunnel and entered the vast opulence of the Queen Mother’s Hangar, he glanced over to see why Leia still hadn’t answered him.

  She was sitting forward in her seat, leaning into her crash webbing, her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were fixed out the forward viewport and focused somewhere, well, beyond, and she had The look. Han’s heart dropped—everything dropped—and as the Falcon swung toward the orange marshaling lights, he was not conscious of moving the yoke in that direction.

  “Oh … oh!” he gasped. “Not again … not Jaina!”

  “No, Jaina’s okay.” Leia was shaking her head, but she had the look of someone who had just watched a star explode. “Well, sort of. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Han demanded.

  He felt like loosing a volley of concussion missiles against the hangar wall, like firing the Sun Crusher into the galaxy core. If something had happened to Jaina, it would be just him and Leia now, because Jacen didn’t count anymore; they had talked it over on the way to Hapes, nice and calm, and it had taken them about two minutes to decide that both their sons were gone now, that Jacen was dead to them. If they were losing Jaina, too, it might be too much for them; Han didn’t know if he could be that strong again, if he had it in him to help Leia through this the way he had when Anakin died.

  Han managed to guide the Falcon into its berth and drop her onto her landing skids, then took a few deep breaths, trying one of those Jedi calming techniques Leia had told him about to keep himself under control.

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you mean, sort of? Either you feel her alive or you don’t.”

  Leia finally seemed to understand the panic she was causing and reached over, clasping his hand. “She’s okay—I mean, she will be. I think she’s upset because she sensed the same thing I just did—maybe she even saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  Leia squeezed his hand. “Luke …”

  That was as far as she made it before she broke down croaking and sobbing, and that was all Han needed her to say. Luke was dead. It did not seem fundamentally possible, as though by some natural law the galaxy had to end before Luke did. But he knew that was what Leia meant.

  “You’re kidding.” Han couldn’t think of anything else to say. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Leia shook her head. “I felt this surprise, then … this anguish. And Luke was just gone.”

  They sat in their seats, Leia letting her tears flow free and Han too stunned to do more than hold her hand, for who knew how long. First Mara, and now Luke. It was more than coincidence. It made him wonder if some dark current in the Force had decided to target the Skywalkers. Or maybe Luke had decided to follow Mara into the Force and tried to take out a Star Destroyer with his lightsaber or something. The one thing Han knew for sure was that Luke could not have gone in the usual way, in a lightsaber duel or a dogfight or just stepping off a pedwalk without looking. It would have taken something big, like a planet exploding … or a sudden change in the laws of physics.

  After a time, a tentative rap echoed through the hull, coming from the still-closed boarding ramp.

  “Perhaps I should answer that,” C-3PO offered. “Hangar security masters can be quite unforgiving about suspicious behavior these days.”

  “Thanks, Threepio,” Han said. “Let them know we’ve just received some bad news. We’ll need awhile to put ourselves together.”

  “No.” Leia began to dab her eyes dry. “Tell them we’ll be out in a moment.”

  “Of course, Princess Leia.” C-3PO started to turn away, then paused. “And my condolences regarding Master Luke. Could you sense whether Artoo was with him?”

  Leia shook her head. “I’m sorry, Threepio. I couldn’t tell.”

  “Yes, well … if Master Luke found it necessary to die, I’m sure Artoo would have wanted to be with him.”

  Another rap echoed through the hull, this one more forceful, and C-3PO started aft. Leia unbuckled her crash webbing and stood, then checked her face in the canopy reflection.

  “I’ll just have to do this with puffy eyes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  “Are you sure you’re up to it?” Han asked. “Tenel Ka’s almost family. She’ll understand if you need a little time—”

  “Thanks, Han, but we don’t have time.” She squeezed his arm. “Not while Kashyyyk burns.”

  She started aft, pulling Han along. Forty years ago, she had burst into his life like a nova, then continued to burn bright that whole time—his guiding star and beckoning light. So he didn’t know why he was so surprised by her strength now, why he hadn’t expected her to meet this loss with the same courage with which she met any hardship. Maybe it was because he was having such a hard time accepting Luke’s death himself. Not being able to actually feel someone die, he still needed to see the body before he could believe it.

  When they reached the hatch, they found a small honor guard of Royal Space Marines waiting down on the hangar floor. The captain, a striking woman with narrow green eyes and dark full lips, stepped to the foot of the boarding ramp and bowed formally.

  “Welcome, Princess. Her Majesty said to bring you up at once.” The captain gestured behind her, where—about twenty meters away—a pair of hammered-aurodium doors guarded an antique mechanical lift. “If you’ll follow me, your escort will join us.”

  Han scowled and joined Leia in not descending the ramp. “Our escort?”

  The captain shot an annoyed glance in his direction, but reacted as any well-trained Hapan officer would when questioned by a foreign diplomat’s male staff. She ignored him. Han clenched his teeth and waited patiently for Leia to take the lead. Bucking four thousand years of Hapan tradition would not convince Tenel Ka of anything.

  Leia must have really been off her game, because it took a couple of seconds before she said, “We came alone, Captain. What escort are you referring to?”

  The captain scowled and was about to answer when a slender figure in a black flight suit stepped into view. After the long flight from Kashyyyk, the circles under her eyes were even deeper, and her curly blond hair was matted flat with helmet sweat.

  “That would be me,” Tahiri said.

  Han frowned, and Leia asked the question, “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see what you were doing,” Tahiri replied. Han noticed that her hand was hovering near the lightsaber hanging from her belt. “And I don’t think I’m going to like the answer.”

  “Then go away and don’t ask.” Han had the sinking feeling he was beginning to understand why Tahiri had followed them—and, just maybe, how Luke had gotten killed. “And I’d do it real fast, before my suspicions start to get the better of me.”

  The Hapan captain frowned at Tahiri. “You told approach control that you were with the Solos.”

  “In a way, I am,” Tahiri said. “I’m here to detain them.”

  Han knew better than to reach for his blaster when a Jedi was practically holding her lightsaber, but he had plenty of time to step behind the bulkhead and reach for the door control. Unfortunately, Leia was already starting down the ramp.

  “Detain us?” Leia demanded. “Don’t tell me you’re with Jacen?”

  “Somebody has to be.” Tahiri remained near a landing strut, about three meters to one side of the boarding ramp. “He’s only doing what’s necessary to save the Alliance.”

  “You’re too smart to buy that.” Han caught up to Leia and took her arm, then continued to address Tahir
i. “What’s he got on you, anyway?”

  “On me?” Tahiri looked away, and even Han could read the guilt in her feelings—all he needed was a good pair of eyes and a lot of sabacc experience. “Nothing,” Tahiri said. “I’m only doing what’s right. Anakin would want me to support Jacen.”

  This was too much for Leia. “Anakin?”

  She jerked free of Han’s grasp, then stepped onto the hangar floor sputtering something about Anakin never approving of torture and coups. Tahiri reached for her lightsaber, and Han realized the young woman was about to learn a very hard lesson about bad timing.

  And so was the honor guard captain, whose eyes widened with alarm as Leia snapped her own lightsaber off her belt. “Put those weapons away now!”

  The captain reached for her blaster pistol and started to step between Leia and Tahiri—until Han jumped down and pulled her back by the collar.

  “Lady, you really don’t want to …”

  Han let the warning trail off as the captain spun on him, holding her blaster pistol under his nose.

  “Okay … maybe you do.” He raised his hands and backed away. “Be my guest.”

  A pair of lightsabers sizzled to life behind the woman, and sparks flew as Leia and Tahiri brought their weapons together. By the time the captain spun back around, the two Jedi were locked in a furious battle of flashing blades and flying feet.

  “Stop!” the captain ordered. She motioned to her squad, who instantly flipped their blaster rifle power settings to stun and leveled the barrels at the combatants. “You will stop, or we’ll open fire.”

  Leia landed a jaw-cracking elbow under Tahiri’s chin, and Tahiri slammed a knee into Leia’s ribs. The captain cursed under her breath, then turned to her marines.

  “Hold on!” Han said. “That’s a really bad—”

  “Fire at will,” the captain ordered.