Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  “You’re blaming the Yuuzhan Vong invasion on the Jedi?” Anakin asked incredulously.

  “Jedi have provoked this war at every stage, hoping to use it as a way to embellish their own power. Your plans for the domination of this galaxy have long been known. This time, your tactics have reverse-throttled on you.”

  “That’s the biggest trough of bantha fodder I’ve ever heard anyone spit up in my life,” Anakin said. “You are cowards and traitors. You want us? Come and get us.”

  He fired his blaster through the narrow window and ducked as return fire heat-spalled the ancient stone. Particle shields like the one he had erected did nothing to stop energy blasts. The thick jungle air filled with the hiss and whine of blasters as the fire expanded to other parts of the temple complex.

  “What are they shooting at up there?” Anakin wondered aloud.

  “Ghosts of mist and madness,” Ikrit told him.

  “They don’t notice no one is shooting back?”

  “Not yet. They believe they see the bolts of energy weapons.”

  “How long can you keep that up?”

  “Longer if the occasional bolt is real.”

  “Got you,” Anakin said, leaning around the door frame. Aiming carefully, using the Force, he blew a blaster rifle out of a hooded man’s hands. He continued that way for about twenty minutes, picking his shots carefully. Each second felt like a burden lifted from his shoulders; each movement of the chrono took Tahiri and the rest farther from danger.

  “They’ve found the generator,” Ikrit murmured. “Your shield will be down soon.”

  “It’s okay,” Anakin said. “We’re almost done here. Even after it’s down they’ll come in cautiously. We’ll have plenty of time to get to the hangar and get my X-wing out. Then all we have to do is run their little blockade.” He’d noticed three of the five ships had landed facing the closed hangar doors. No surprise there, but what they didn’t know was that one of the ion cannons that guarded the hangars was still operational—and had a self-contained power supply good for at least a blast or two.

  He leaned out for a parting shot.

  A blaster bolt seared by over his shoulder, lanced down into the Peace Brigaders. Anakin jerked his head around.

  “That shot came from above us!”

  “Yes,” Ikrit said. “Didn’t you notice? Didn’t you know she would come?”

  “Notice who?” But in a flash he knew. Tahiri was up there, Tahiri and two other people. All Jedi.

  “Hutt slime!” he swore. “Just what I need!” He turned to Master Ikrit. “There won’t be room for all of us in the X-wing. Meet me in the deep grotto. I’ll think of something on the way.”

  With that he raced down the corridor, blaster in one hand and lightsaber in the other.

  He found them in the refectory—Tahiri, Valin Horn, and Sannah. They had barricaded the outer door with tables and had two blasters between them, no telling where they had gotten them. When Anakin entered, Tahiri waved the gun at him.

  “What are you doing?” Anakin exploded.

  “Helping you,” Tahiri said with a grin.

  “How did you—”

  “Kam thought we were on Tionne’s boat, Tionne thought we were on his. Simple, with a little planning.”

  “But Valin? Valin’s only eleven!”

  “Twelve!” Valin said very seriously. “I can help.”

  “This is insane.”

  “Fine one you are to talk, Anakin,” Tahiri snapped. “You’re the one who left Coruscant without permission, aren’t you? You get to do everything while we just run away and do nothing? I don’t think so, best friend.”

  “Yeah? Well, my plan was to get away in the X-wing. Now we have too many people for that. What does the brilliant Tahiri propose we do, exactly?”

  “Oh.” Her green eyes went round. “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  “No, I guess you didn’t.”

  The floor suddenly vibrated like the shell of a Hapan lute.

  “What’s that?” Sannah asked.

  Valin, peeking out the window, answered. “The shield is down. Now they’re shooting at the doors. Some men are coming up the stairs, too.”

  “No more time,” Anakin said. “We’ll have to think as we go. I told Ikrit to meet us in the grotto.”

  “Then we’ll be stuck underground.”

  “I didn’t have much time to put this together, Tahiri.”

  “You mean there’s more to your plan than hiding in the grotto?”

  Anakin blew out a deep breath. “Sure. We’ll take a Peace Brigade ship.”

  Tahiri smiled. “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  They reached the turbolift just as a clump of Peace Brigaders appeared at the end of the corridor facing onto the outside stairs.

  “Hey! Stop!” one of them shouted.

  Two blaster shots pinged against the doors as they closed. Anakin let out a breath as the lift started to descend, then sucked it back in.

  “It’s going to stop,” Anakin said. “At the second level.”

  “Override it.”

  “I can’t,” he said, activating his lightsaber with a snap-hiss. “The door will stay open for a few seconds. If they’re out there …”

  The door opened on the muzzles of six blasters. Anakin didn’t think. He’d already slapped the “down” button—now he leapt into the midst of his enemies, blocking the first two blaster bolts with his weapon and sending them burning back through the press. He cut a blaster rifle in half and spun. Shouting in alarm, his attackers gave ground, trying to find a range where they could use their weapons. Two came at him with stun batons. He leapt and whirled, disarming one with a cut that took several fingers and another that sheared the baton in half. He felt another blow coming, one he wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid.

  When he landed, he was facing another lightsaber, its blade a vibrant blue.

  Behind it—gripping it and grinning fiercely—was Tahiri. She’d just slashed the force pike in half that had almost impaled him.

  He didn’t let his astonishment faze him. The turbolift with Sannah and Valin was long gone. Find Master Ikrit, he sent after the young candidates, hoping that if they could not make out actual words, they would at least get the sense.

  Then he squared his shoulders and faced the Peace Brigaders who were warily regrouping about two meters away. “You don’t stand a chance,” Anakin told them. “I’ve been trying not to hurt you. That ends with the next person who fires a weapon at me.”

  “They can’t get all of us,” a woman in front said. She had a seamed brown face and dark eyes.

  “Of course we can,” Anakin said.

  “All of us?” She smirked. From behind her came the sound of what could only be reinforcements.

  Anakin hit the woman, hard, with a telekinetic shove that took all of her companions down, too. Then he whirled and made four quick slashes that opened a gaping hole into the turbolift shaft.

  “Go,” he told Tahiri. “You say you’re ready for all this? Jump.”

  Tahiri nodded and without the slightest hesitation leapt down the shaft. Anakin followed her, bolts flashing above him. Together, they hurled through darkness.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Anakin reached to Tahiri through the Force, and for an instant met a wall as hard as the stone of the temple. Then she reached back, and they clicked as if they had never been apart, so intensely that it actually frightened him. They fell in a sort of acrobatic dance, Anakin using the Force to slow Tahiri’s fall and she slowing his as they spun around a common fulcrum somewhere between them, like two children clasping hands and leaning back, turning around on their feet. If either let go, the other would go whirling off, out of control

  An old game, one they had invented long ago.

  He noticed something was falling with them—a pair of glop grenades. He sent them humming back up the shaft and out the hole he had cut.

  The two young Jedi touched down, feather light, on top of
the turbolift.

  “Wow!” Tahiri said. “It’s been a long time since we did that. That was terrific. And the way you got the grenades, too—that was art!”

  “I—”

  The car of the lift suddenly started again.

  Desperately Anakin cut into the power couplings and superconductor casings in the walls. The lift jarred to a stop. Meanwhile, Tahiri sliced into the roof of the car itself and jumped back, in case there was blasterfire.

  But there was none.

  “I don’t feel anyone on the lift,” Tahiri said.

  “No. I sent it down to the third hangar level below the temple. I think Valin and Sannah got off, and then someone called it back up—probably someone on the ground level. Judging by our drop, we’re probably somewhere between—”

  An explosion six meters above him cut him off as one of the outer lift doors blew in.

  “There’s the ground floor, right there,” Anakin said. “Come on!”

  He jumped down into the car. With his lightsaber, he cut through the car and the wall beyond, revealing an underground hangar that hadn’t been used since the battle against the first Death Star.

  “You block their shots,” Anakin told Tahiri.

  As bolts rained down and Tahiri deflected them, Anakin cut the fail-safe magnetic bolts that had locked the turbolift in place. He flicked off his lightsaber.

  “Cut your lightsaber, now!”

  “But—”

  “Quick!”

  She did, flattening against the lift walls as blasterfire poured through the hole above them. Another grenade plinked against the lift floor.

  “There. Throw that back at them,” Anakin said.

  The grenade whizzed back up the hole. “Why didn’t you do it?” Tahiri asked.

  “Because I’m holding the lift car up.”

  Above them, the glop grenade went off, and Anakin let gravity have the car.

  It dropped like a stone.

  “Remember to jump up just before we hit bottom,” Anakin gritted, as the lift hurled down through the layers of hangars and Massassi caverns below the temple.

  “Somebody wasn’t paying attention in physics lectures,” Tahiri said.

  “Nope. Mind the roof.” And then they did jump, pushing away from the lift floor with the Force, up through the jagged hole, into the turbolift shaft. Below them, the car hit bottom with a terrific din. Once again they drifted each other down upon it, but this time the car wasn’t exactly level. It had wrenched the lowest doors from their hinges, and they were able to step through.

  The Rebel Alliance had converted square kilometers of Massassi caverns into hangars, but below that there were chambers and caverns more or less untouched. The turbolift went down only as far as the Alliance had used the caverns. After that it was stairs, winding corridors, and secret panels.

  “They’ll look up there first,” Anakin said. “They’ll think we went through into the hangar where I cut the wall. By the time they think to look down here—in fact, hang on.” He activated his wrist comm.

  “Fiver.”

  AFFIRMATIVE. Fiver’s response scrolled across the small display.

  “I need you to fly the X-wing out of the hangar. Avoid all pursuit until I call you again. Got that?”

  AFFIRMATIVE.

  “Good luck, Fiver,” Anakin whispered.

  After a long descent, Anakin stopped in front of a blank wall. “Remember this?”

  “Is Dagobah up to its neck in mud?” Tahiri pushed a patch in the wall and it swung open. The two stepped through and closed it behind them. Anakin felt around in the rocks and came up with one of the two glow lamps that were usually secreted there.

  “Master Ikrit has already been here,” he murmured. “With Valin and Sannah.”

  “Yeah. I can feel them.”

  “That was, umm, good back there,” Anakin admitted. “Where did you get the lightsaber?”

  “Anakin Solo. You don’t think I can build a lightsaber?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just didn’t think—”

  “Right. You didn’t think, and you’re still not thinking, and you’d better fix that before you say anything else. Now, let’s find Master Ikrit.”

  The pungent, rotten-egg scent of sulfur would have led them to their destination if their memories had not. Ikrit, Valin, and Sannah sat on the edges of an underground hot spring, just outside of a shaft of light that fell from a hundred meters or more above, where some long-ago force, natural or artificial, had cut through the soft stone.

  “I’ve never seen it in daylight,” Tahiri murmured.

  When they were younger they had come here with Kam and Tionne to drift in the warm water and turn from inward to outward in the Force, to contemplate the stars above and the person within. It was a place all the students knew, but which was never spoken of to anyone else.

  “Good that you have come,” Ikrit sighed.

  “You knew I would,” Anakin said.

  “Yes. Still, it is good.”

  “What will we do now?” Valin asked. He was trying to look brave, but Anakin could feel his fear.

  “Now? You guys will keep waiting here. It should be safe enough. I’m going to climb up there—” Tahiri elbowed Anakin in the side. “I mean,” he corrected, “Tahiri and I will climb up there while we have light to see by. Then we’ll hide until dark and stea—er, commandeer one of their ships, one big enough for all of us.”

  “And small enough to bring down here,” Tahiri added.

  “Right. There’s a light transport I think might fit the bill.”

  “Do you remember the way up?” Tahiri asked.

  “You two did this before?” Ikrit asked. “Climbed up to the surface from here?”

  “Um, yes,” Anakin replied. “When we were bored, once.”

  “I thought I always had my eye on you,” Ikrit said. “I must be getting old.”

  Somehow, the Jedi Master looked old, older than Anakin had ever seen him. He sounded old, too.

  “Are you ill, Master Ikrit?”

  “Ill? No. Sad.”

  “Sad at what?”

  Ikrit ruffled his fur. “It is inappropriate, my sadness. It is nothing. Go, succeed as you always do. Remember—” Ikrit paused, then began more strongly in a voice that made Anakin feel, suddenly, that he was eleven again. “Remember. You two are better than the sum of your parts. Together, you two could—” He paused again. “No. Enough. I’ve said enough. Together, that’s the important thing. Now go.”

  They reached the top by nightfall and took shelter in a small cavern just under the lip of the pit. It was a tight fit, but impossible to see unless you were hovering right in front of it. They sat shoulder to shoulder, breathing deeply and working the cramps from their muscles.

  “You thought I was going to mess things up,” Tahiri said suddenly.

  “What brought that up?”

  “There hasn’t been time to talk about it until now.”

  “Well, keep your voice down. It’s not exactly the brightest thing for us to be talking.”

  “We’ll feel them in the Force long before they hear us.”

  “Unless they have Yuuzhan Vong with ’em. You can’t feel them in the Force.”

  “Really? Is that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  Tahiri punched his shoulder lightly. “So you thought I was going to mess things up. Get us all caught.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, of course not. Wouldn’t want to upset baby Tahiri.”

  “Tahiri, now you’re acting like a kid.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m acting like someone whose best friend has completely forgotten she exists.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? When you left the academy with Mara, did you even bother to say good-bye? And since then, have you sent me a single message, or even reached out in the Force? And just a while ago, when we did our old falling dance—y
ou didn’t like it. I almost had to catch myself!”

  “You’re the one who resisted,” Anakin said. “We were falling like rocks, and you resisted me.”

  “That was you, you big dumb gundark.”

  “That’s crazy. You—” But the whole scene flashed suddenly though his mind again. Maybe it had been him. When he and Tahiri worked together it was sometimes hard to tell who was feeling what.

  “See?” she said frostily.

  Anakin was silent for a moment, and so, miraculously, was Tahiri.

  “I did miss you,” Anakin finally said. “No one knows me the way—” He broke off.

  “Right,” Tahiri said. “No one knows you like I do, and you don’t want anyone to. You want to keep all of that stuff in you, where no one can touch it. Chewbacca—even last time you were here you wouldn’t talk about him. Now you pretend you’re past it. And the thing at Centerpoint—”

  “You’re right,” Anakin said. “I don’t want to talk about that. Not right now.”

  Tahiri’s shoulders began to shake, just a little, and Anakin realized she was crying.

  “Come on, Tahiri,” he said.

  “What are we, Anakin? A year ago you were my best friend in the world.”

  “We’re still best friends,” he assured her.

  “Then the way you treat your other friends must really stink.”

  “Yeah,” Anakin admitted. Almost without thinking, he reached for her hand. For a few seconds, she didn’t respond. Her fingers were cold and motionless in his, and he suddenly believed he had made some kind of mistake. Then she gripped back, and warmth rushed around him like a whirlwind. She nodded her head over onto his shoulder, still weeping, and silence folded around them again. But this time it was an easier silence. Not happy or even quite content, but easier.

  After a while her breathing became regular, and Anakin realized she was asleep. By the faint orange light of the gas giant outside, he could make out traces of her features, so familiar and yet somehow different. It was as if, below the girl’s face he had always known, something else was pushing up, like mountains rising, driven by the internal heat of a planet. Something you couldn’t stop, even if you wanted to.