by Troy Denning
But these were not normal circumstances. If Saba retreated, if she let up for even a second, Hamner would lock his lightsaber blade on and Force-hurl it into the relay box. She had to keep the pressure on, to keep him so busy defending himself he had no chance to attack the blast doors’ control mechanism. And so she continued to fight at a disadvantage, expending most of her energy defending herself, but launching a kick or a Force shove or even a threatening slash any time Hamner gave her the chance.
The warning strobe began to flash more rapidly, and Hamner’s gaze slid toward the blast doors. Thirty seconds. Saba took advantage of the distraction to launch an all-out power assault, pummeling her quarry with Force shoves and two-handed slashes, kicking at his legs and … finally … rocking him back on his heels.
Hamner gave ground, struggling to regain the initiative, letting Saba in so close that soon the only weapon he had left was his head.
So he used that, slamming his brow into her armored throat.
Saba stumbled back, sissing not because the strange lump in her throat made it difficult to breathe—though it did—but because she could not believe what Hamner had just done.
“A head butt?” she gasped, grinning despite herself. “Are you joking?”
Apparently, Hamner was not. As Saba stumbled back, he pushed after her, following so close she could barely bring her elbows to bear. After two steps, she gave up and tried another tactic, bringing a knee up into her attacker’s groin so hard it lifted him off his feet.
And that was when Saba smelled something acrid and familiar. She glanced down to find the emitter nozzle of Hamner’s lightsaber pressed to her abdomen just below her rib cage, his thumb still on the activation switch and a gray column of vaporized keratin rising between their bodies.
“Stang,” Saba gasped. She tumbled backward, her insides exploding in fiery pain, her vision already starting to narrow. “Good one.”
When Hamner deactivated his lightsaber and tried to step free, Saba realized he still had time to sabotage the relay box. She tried to pull him down with her, but her strength was gone, and he pulled free effortlessly. So she took the only option available and helped him along, giving him the strongest Force shove she could manage.
Hamner went flying into the safety rail, both arms flailing and badly off-balance. Still, it looked like he would catch himself and recover—until his lightsaber touched the top rail and burned through in a bright flash. The durasteel did not bend far beneath his weight, only a few centimeters at most.
But it was enough.
Hamner lost his battle against momentum and gravity and tumbled over the rail, arms wheeling and mouth gaping in surprise. Saba was already rolling toward the edge of the catwalk, her insides burning like lava as she reached out with her hand and with the Force.
It was with the Force that she caught him, of course.
She could feel him about twenty meters below, his fear and surprise hanging in the Force like an ice fog, still and white and tranquil as the morning after the storm. Saba peered over the edge and saw him about twenty meters below, upside down and—like any good Jedi—still holding his lightsaber. She reached out to him in the Force, assuring him she would not let him drop, that whatever their differences they were still Jedi Masters and would one day soon return to being friends.
Hamner twisted around until he could look up and meet her gaze. There was no longer anger in his steely eyes, only sadness and forgiveness … and unyielding resolve. Saba’s heart started to climb toward her throat. With no hope of making herself heard above the roaring of the impatient StealthXs, she reached out in the Force, begging her lost friend to see that he was beaten, to surrender to the will of the other Masters and not make her choose between him and the Skywalkers—between his life and her duty.
But Jedi do not surrender, and they never give up. Hamner locked his lightsaber blade on, then looked away from Saba and sent it spinning up toward the relay box.
“No, Kenth!” Even Saba could not hear the pain—the anguish—in her voice. “No!”
Saba watched the lightsaber spin upward long enough to be certain it was being directed through the Force, then reluctantly reached for it in the Force—and found herself fighting for control. The struggle continued for a span of perhaps three heartbeats, then Hamner smashed into the deck below, and the lightsaber was hers. She sent it tumbling down into a turadium blast door, and finally the strobe light stopped blinking.
Launch.
With its drooping wings and S-shaped landing struts, the craft hanging above the rolling waters looked more like a seabird than a troop shuttle. It was coming in low and slow, swinging past the Fallanassi’s hidden island so tightly that it might have been a clargull returning to its nest on the distant white cliffs. But Luke knew better than to doubt what he was seeing. He could sense the Balance tipping toward darkness, he could feel the Force shuddering with uncertainty and despair.
Something terrible had just happened on Coruscant. Luke had felt it through the Force, a wave of sorrow so sharp and feral it had sent a physical jolt through his entire body. The aftershocks were still coming as others learned of the event—ripples of grief and disbelief and guilt that left Luke feeling worried and forlorn. There had been a death on Coruscant, a loss so profound it had rocked the entire Jedi Order. Exactly who was gone or how, it was impossible to know … but it did seem clear that Luke could no longer count on reinforcements.
Not that it mattered. The Sith were coming now, and Luke had only a single Jedi Knight—Ben—to stand at his side. With the fate of the Jedi and their own lives hanging by a thread, the Skywalkers had run out of time, and whether they stood or ran, the outcome looked the same. Abeloth was free, the Lost Tribe was on the loose, and all that stood between them and the rest of the galaxy were a Jedi Master and his son.
This time, Luke did not know if it would be enough.
Turning his back to the sea and the white-cliffed island, Luke crossed the beach to the tree-filled ravine where he had hidden the Jade Shadow beneath a camouflage net. The precaution had kept any Pydyrians from coming to investigate, but he knew better than to think it could hide them from the Fallanassi or the Sith. Akanah would know where he was by the disturbance his presence caused in the White Current, and the Sith had only to reach out to Vestara to locate them.
Luke ducked under the netting—which he covered with fresh boughs every day—and ascended the boarding ramp into the Shadow. He found Ben slumped in the salon, his glazed eyes fixed on an old episode of Starjaxx playing on the holovid. His pale face was covered in blue blisters and weeping sores, and his unkempt hair had not been washed in a week. Luke felt guilty for not showing Ben how to see through the Fallanassi illusion, but Vestara had proven much easier to control after she discovered the rips in their hazard suits and started to believe that she and Ben were infected, and Luke doubted that she would have continued to believe in the illusion if she was the only one who seemed to be getting ill. She had already asked several times why he didn’t seem sick, and “I’m a Jedi Master” was starting to wear thin as a convincing reply.
“Where’s Vestara?” Luke asked.
Ben raised a lethargic arm and pointed aft. “In her cabin. I don’t know how long she has left, Dad. She’s pretty sick.”
“Good,” Luke said, starting toward forward. “Come with me.”
“Okay.” Ben braced his hands on the edge of the couch and pushed himself more or less upright. “But, I mean, she’s dying. Aren’t you being kind of harsh?”
“Not what I meant.” Luke jerked his thumb toward the flight deck. “Come on. I’ll explain as we fire up.”
If Ben did not exactly leap up, he at least made it to his feet. “Fire up? Dad, we can’t break quarantine. If we take this disease off Pydyr—”
“We won’t, son, I promise you that.” Luke’s voice had softened, for he could not help feeling proud of Ben’s selflessness in the face of his own death. “But we’ve got trouble coming, and I wan
t us ready—”
“Trouble?” The question came from the back of the salon, where Vestara had appeared still belting her robe. Like Ben, she was covered in blisters and sores, and she looked as though it had taken all her strength simply to rise and dress herself. “I thought I felt something.”
“I think we both know what you felt,” Luke said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “Come with us.”
Vestara remained where she was. “Master Skywalker, I have no idea—”
“I said come,” Luke interrupted, dropping his hand to his blaster. “If I need to ask again, I’m going to do it with a stun bolt.”
Vestara’s eyes widened. “No problem.”
Luke led the way to the flight deck. Through the camouflage netting, he could make out a large shape low on the horizon, but no more. He motioned Ben to the pilot’s chair, then activated the copilot’s tactical display. Immediately the designator code for a CSA Kondo-class assault shuttle appeared ahead of the Jade Shadow, crossing in front of it and descending to land.
“It looks like they want to make a ground assault,” Luke observed. He turned to Vestara. “They seem to want to recover you alive, Vestara. They must think you’re a pretty good spy.”
“If you believe that, Master Skywalker, you don’t know Sith as well as you think you do.” Vestara frowned at the tactical display, then began to radiate alarm and fear into the Force, no doubt trying to warn her fellow Sith against approaching the Shadow without a hazard suit. “If they want me alive, it’s so they can punish me for my betrayal.”
“It seems to me that Ben is the one who should be punishing your betrayals,” Luke said. When Vestara’s eyes filled with alarm rather than confusion, he knew he had guessed right about how the Sith had followed them to Pydyr so quickly. “You can keep trying to warn them off if you like, but it does give the lie to your words.”
Vestara’s Force aura abruptly drew in on itself, shrinking to the point where Luke could not sense it without trying. He nodded and waved her into the copilot’s seat.
“Buckle up, fold your hands in your lap, and don’t move.” Luke turned to his son. “Ben, get the ship ready to fly—and do not let Vestara out of your sight. If she so much as fidgets—”
“She’s dead,” Ben said, tapping his lightsaber. “I learned my lesson last time.”
“Let’s hope so,” Luke said, turning toward the back of the flight deck. “We’re in enough trouble already.”
Before he could depart, Ben asked, “Uh, Dad? Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” Luke replied, knowing that Ben was asking to be filled in on a plan that did not yet exist. “Just be ready—and don’t hesitate. Everything depends on that, son—and I do mean everything.”
Luke went to the aft cargo hold, where he paused to remove a combat vest and two different styles of blaster rifle from the weapons locker. Having already examined the equipment once to make certain Abeloth had not sabotaged it while in possession of the ship, he contented himself with a quick functions check, then secured the locker again and debarked through the loading hatch.
Reverberations from events on Coruscant were still coming to him through the Force, and he was beginning to sense that the death was something the Masters regarded as sad but inevitable. He wanted to reach out to them individually, to see if he could learn more, but he resisted. The Sith would feel the attempt as clearly as he had felt Vestara trying to warn them off, and no good would come of alerting them to the trouble on Coruscant. Instead Luke drew his Force presence in tight, then slipped out from beneath the camouflage netting and raced up the slope to an observation post he had scouted earlier, a silt-stone outcropping with a small overhang at the base.
By the time Luke had crawled into his hiding place, the shuttle was resting on its struts at the mouth of the ravine, no more than a hundred meters in front of the Shadow. Its rear ramp was just settling into the golden sand, but there was no sign of the Sith assault team that Luke had expected to see pouring out of the vessel. He quickly pulled a thermal detonator off his combat vest and set the timer to three seconds, but stopped shy of arming it. The Force was still and expectant, like the sea before a storm, and until he had a better idea of what was coming, he did not want to be the one who touched things off.
Instead of an assault team, a pair of Sith appeared on the ramp, descending slowly, their arms extended and in plain view. Both wore combat-black hazard suits, but even from a hundred meters away Luke could tell that the one in front had the slender build and fluid grace of a Keshiri Sith. The one in the rear had one sleeve folded up where his arm had been amputated at the elbow. Unless he missed his guess, he was looking at Sarasu Taalon and Gavar Khai.
Luke set the thermal detonator aside and aimed his longblaster at the lead figure, then peered through the sniperscope at the purple visage that probably belonged Sarasu Taalon. He could not be certain because the slender face had grown gaunt and twisted, with brows that hooked sharply upward at the outer ends and cheekbones that protruded so prominently they looked like knuckles. The lips had grown bloated and cracked, and the mouth seemed twisted into a permanent grimace of pain.
But it was the eyes that troubled Luke most. They had turned as dark as wells, and shining up from the bottom were a pair of tiny light points, as bright and silver as stars.
Luke’s stomach grew cold and heavy. He pulled away from the sniperscope and gazed down at the two beings with his naked eye, trying to decide whether they might not be a Fallanassi illusion after all. Living beings simply did not change into other kinds of beings. True, there were any number of medical conditions that might cause someone’s bones to grow knobby, or his lips to swell. A wasting disease or prolonged bout of hunger might cause a face to grow gaunt and eyebrows to take a different shape. There were even conditions and parasites that could turn hair into something that looked more like worms.
But those eyes … eyes simply did not turn into pinpoints of silver light.
Luke peered into the sniperscope again and found himself looking into a slightly less grotesque version of the face he had glimpsed a moment before. The cheeks were no longer quite so knobby, the lips merely swollen and cracked. And the eyes, he saw now, had merely changed color. The irises and sclera had turned as black as the pupils, creating the appearance of emptiness where there was simply darkness.
But the silver pinpoints remained.
Had they flickered or shifted as Taalon moved his head, they might have been no more than reflections of the Pydyrian sun. But they remained steady, shining out from the darkness of the High Lord’s soul, and Luke knew why the Force was so full of portent that morning, why he could feel the Balance shifting toward shadow.
Taalon had been in the Pool of Knowledge, and that changed everything.
As Luke was contemplating this, Taalon reached the bottom of the ramp and stopped. He stared out to sea for a long time, and Luke began to worry that the Sith was actually seeing the white cliffs of the distant temple island—that despite the hazard suits the High Lord and his followers were wearing, Taalon had somehow learned the secret of seeing through Fallanassi illusions. Finally, the Sith turned back to the beach and studied the sand, either gathering his courage or biting back his pain. Then, after a moment, he raised his head and looked directly into the sniper scope.
Come now, Master Skywalker. Taalon’s voice reached Luke more inside his mind than in his ears—a simple enough Force trick, but nonetheless one that sent a chill down Luke’s back. There will be time enough for that after we talk.
Luke replied in a normal speaking voice. “You expect me to come down?”
Well, you haven’t blasted me yet, Taalon countered.
Luke pressed the trigger and held it down—then felt his jaw drop as bolts began to ricochet off the High Lord’s palm. It wasn’t the deflection of blasterfire with a bare hand that shocked him—he had fought plenty of Sith capable of that trick. What amazed Luke wa
s the speed with which Taalon had moved. In the nanosecond it had taken the first bolt to cross the distance between them, the High Lord’s hand had risen to deflect it, traveling so fast that the appendage had literally seemed to disappear from one place and reappear in another.
After tolerating the volley for a couple of seconds, Taalon grew weary of defending himself and crooked a finger. Luke tightened his grasp on the longblaster, expecting to feel it being ripped from his hands through the Force. Instead he found himself sliding out of his hiding place and tumbling through the air as he dropped toward the beach.
Luke tossed the longblaster aside and snatched his lightsaber, then quickly used the Force to right himself before he reached the beach. But Taalon did not hurl him into the sand, or even attempt to send him flying into Gavar Khai’s scarlet blade. He merely dropped Luke to the ground at a distance of five meters, then motioned for Khai to put his weapon away.
“For now, Master Skywalker, we have no need to kill each other.” Taalon waved a suited arm at the shuttle behind him, where a large company of Sith warriors stood waiting in full hazard suits. “You can’t succeed, and I’m willing to postpone your death until you are no longer of use.”
“Very generous,” Luke replied. “But what makes you think I would want to be of use to you?”
“Your son’s life, of course.” The hazard-suit vocabulator gave Taalon’s voice a droning quality. “If you do what I ask, he will leave Pydyr alive.”
“Provided Vestara is released in exchange,” Khai added.
Luke didn’t believe them for a moment, of course. But at least the negotiations would allow him to stall and learn something more about what was happening to Taalon … and how powerful the High Lord had actually become.
Luke glanced over at Khai. “Vestara has recovered from her beating, but I’m afraid she and Ben have both fallen ill with the plague.” He looked back to Taalon, then said, “Assuming Ben survives, I might be interested in your offer.”