Vortex: Star Wars (Fate of the Jedi) (Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi)

by Troy Denning

  “This is the home of the Fallanassi?” Khai asked. Clearly, he was now able to see the island as plainly as Luke was. “It looks like Abeloth’s planet in the Maw!”

  “At least we know we’re in the right place.” Luke continued to decelerate, at the same time trying to decide how he could confirm that his passengers were seeing the same island he was—rather than a slightly different illusion. “What are those mounds at the other end of the island?”

  “Their village, obviously.” Taalon’s voice filled with menace. “If you trick me again, Skywalker, Ben will be the first to die.”

  “Not if you are,” Luke replied. “Tell your warriors to ready themselves.”

  “Sith are always ready,” Khai replied. “You are not going to remind us that the Fallanassi are pacifists?”

  “No,” Luke said. “I’ve given you warning enough.”

  Khai’s brows arched with curiosity, but they were already approaching the village, and Luke used the excuse to break eye contact without elaborating. He landed in a mossy area that appeared to be the village circle, in front of the large hall that was leaking the yellow fumes.

  The Shadow was still settling onto her struts when a soft informational chirp announced that the boarding ramp had been lowered. By the time Luke had popped the release on his crash harness, Sith warriors were already racing out to establish a defensive perimeter. Unlike Jedi warriors, who would have had their blasters in hand and ready to fire under such circumstances, the Sabers acted as though their mere presence was enough to prevent an attack.

  Leaving the Shadow’s systems on READY-STANDBY, Luke rose and followed Taalon and Khai out into the square. Save for a briny hint of sea, the village smelted much the same as had Abeloth’s planet, musty and fetid. And it was not just the air that reeked. The Force was sour with anguish and fear. Luke could feel it swirling past, nettling his body all over as it flowed toward the large gathering hall.

  “Blast!” Ben croaked, joining Luke and the others. “What is that?”

  It was Vestara who answered. “Power.” Like Ben, she still appeared exhausted and sick. “Raw power.”

  Ben looked at her, his brow cocked in doubt. “Power?”

  “Yes, Ben.” A hungry smile came to her cracked lips. “You know how it works. Pain leads to fear. Fear leads to anger.”

  “Anger leads to the dark side,” Luke finished.

  He turned toward the gathering hall, wondering if the fear starting to gnaw at him could possibly have merit. Could Abeloth be feeding on the anguish and fear around her? Could she actually be turning those dark emotions into dark side power?

  Luke’s musings came to an end when the Fallanassi began to emerge from their huts. Dressed in simple shifts belted at the waist, they were all female and mostly human, and in their haggard faces Luke saw the same anguish and fear he felt in the Force. Despite the deliberate menace being projected by the Sith, a gray-haired woman with worried eyes and a long, blade-thin nose set her gaze on Luke. She led forward half a dozen companions who looked to be of a similar age.

  “Do you know her?” Taalon asked.

  “No,” Luke said. “But that’s almost certainly their circle of elders. You should let them approach.”

  Though Taalon issued no orders that Luke could hear, a pair of Sith stepped aside and allowed the Fallanassi inside their perimeter. The gray-haired woman came straight to Luke. Ignoring Taalon and Khai, she fixed him with an angry gaze.

  “Akanah said you would betray us.”

  “I haven’t betrayed you …” Luke paused, waiting for the woman’s name to rise to the top of her mind, then continued, “… Eliya. It’s obvious that your community here was already in trouble. But I doubt you understand the true nature of that danger. I’ve come to help you.”

  “By bringing them into our home?” Eliya waved an angry hand at Taalon. “You expect us to heal Sith?”

  “The danger you face now is far worse than … Sith,” Luke replied. He was so taken aback by the vehemence in her voice that he nearly missed the cue she had fed him—the Fallanassi already had a plan for dealing with the Sith. All he needed to do was keep Taalon from discovering it. “And I need them alive to help you.”

  Eliya studied Luke for a moment, then shook her head in disgust. “Even you don’t believe they’re going to keep their promise.” She sighed heavily, then turned to Taalon. “But the Creed gives us no choice in whom we help. Take off those ridiculous suits, and we’ll see about saving you.”

  “Saving us?” Taalon asked.

  “From the White Plague,” one of Eliya’s companions supplied. She motioned to Ben and Vestara. “You two come with me. We need to get some jigog salve on those sores right away.”

  Taalon’s hand rose. “Hold.”

  He turned and studied Luke for a time, no doubt calling on whatever powers of insight had been bestowed on him by his dip in the Pool of Knowledge. It was a helpless feeling, knowing that an enemy could foretell his plans simply by looking at him—but it was also an important tidbit of information, indicating as it did that Taalon actually had to contemplate the situation to foresee what would happen.

  After a moment, Taalon said to Luke, “You called it the Weeping Pox.”

  It was Eliya who answered. “The White Plague is known by many—”

  Taalon lashed out so quickly that Luke saw nothing but the back of his gloved hand striking Eliya’s face. She went down instantly, landing at his feet with blood pouring from a split cheek.

  “There is no disease,” he announced. “The White Plague is a Fallanassi trick.”

  Eliya’s eyes grew wide with surprise and disbelief, but she shook her head and began, “Believe what you wish, Sith. But it will be your death—”

  “Eliya, don’t,” Luke interrupted. If she continued to lie, Taalon would only make an example of her. “I know this is hard to believe, but the Fallanassi really will be better off if you just cooperate.”

  “We are here to find Abeloth,” Taalon said. He looked toward the gathering hall. “Where is she? In there?”

  Eliya shot an angry scowl at Luke, then shook her head. “No. Not any longer,” she said. “She left—”

  “You will see Abeloth soon enough,” a familiar voice called.

  Luke turned and found Akanah standing in the door of the gathering hall. Her hair was hanging loose and waving about her shoulders, as though caught by a breeze that was not blowing, and there was a darkness in her eyes that seemed to rise from the depths of time itself. Her gaze shifted from Taalon to Luke, and she smiled, revealing a mouthful of small sharp teeth.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “Really, you shouldn’t have.”

  The morning sunlight was bouncing off the duracrete wall, aggravating an already splitting headache and making it even more difficult to see through fogged goggles. Somewhere ahead—more than four hundred meters above the nearest pedway and two full kilometers of traffic-choked skylane above the actual planetary surface—was an expansion joint in need of inspection. To Han, it was just a dusky line running through a blurry gray radiance, a convenient excuse to be floating next to Detention Center 81. He shuffled along the repulsorlift-equipped scaffold—a hoverscaf—to the seam, then ran his gloved fingers up its length. When he felt a ribbon of sticky slime, he selected an electric slug-paddle from his tool belt and ran it up the trail until he hit something soft.

  Instantly the silica slug flattened itself across the expansion joint. Han hit the trigger, electrifying the paddle blade. The slug curled into a ball, and half a second later it was killed and simultaneously captured by a barbed skewer that shot from the handle. Han quickly turned and thrust the body into the incineration vat in the middle of the hoverscaf, but he was not quick enough to prevent its spiracles from releasing a noxious yellow fume that seeped past the respirator mask’s imperfect seal. The stuff smelled like boiling tar poured into a nexu’s litterbox. His eyes watered, making it even more difficult to see, and his stomach threate
ned to empty its contents into his respirator mask.

  Han stumbled to the back of the hoverscaf and pulled down his goggles and respirator, then braced his hands on the safety rail and stared down into the traffic-choked lane below. Why he had ever let Taryn Zel talk him into impersonating an exterminator, he had no idea.

  Except, of course, that it had been the only way to get a rescue team close to the building. Given the short timetable and the facility’s stepped-up security, it had quickly grown apparent that trying to sneak a squad of impostors inside was out of the question. Then R2-D2 had discovered that the schematics on record with the Coruscant Building Authority—and the Planetary Fire Suppression Office—were inconsistent with modern engineering practices, and Zekk had quickly realized that someone in GAS had taken the precaution of filing false plans for the facility. In the end, with no reliable intelligence except the precise spatial coordinates at which the tracking bugs had gone silent, the Solos had settled for the most basic of all plans: blast their way inside, find the Horn kids, and get out.

  A respirator-muffled voice sounded from the other end of the hoverscaf. “Who said it was break time?”

  Han looked over at his scaffold partner. With his identity hidden behind his exterminator’s uniform—yellow hard hat, goggles, respirator, and white jumpsuit bearing the logo RUNKIL REMEDIATION—only the fellow’s two-meter height and the wisps of black hair brushing his collar identified him as Jaina’s old mission partner and ex-sort-of-boyfriend, Zekk.

  “Hey, I’m only human,” Han complained. Unlike Zekk and the rest of the Jedi on the “extermination” team, Han could not call on the Force to keep his goggles clear and his gorge from rising. He had only his stubbornness and a lifetime of hard living to get him through the next few minutes of pretending—and for the first time in a long time, he was worried it might not be enough. “If Runkil doesn’t want us taking breaks, they should spring for droids.”

  “Droids won’t do this work,” Zekk joked. He glanced past Han’s shoulder, then added, “Now you’ve done it. The boss lady is headed our way.”

  Han glanced up to see Taryn Zel zipping toward them on her little boss-floater. Like everyone else on the rescue team, she was dressed in a white jumpsuit bearing the logo RUNKIL REMEDIATION on the breast pocket. Instead of the hard hat and other protective gear, she wore a white supervisor’s cap with a bright red bill that clashed badly with her auburn hair.

  “Sick again, old man?” she called. “Maybe you should stop going out on work nights.”

  Han shot her a watery-eyed glower that was only half acting. Taryn was the only member of the rescue team whose face was unlikely to be in the GAS recognition files, so she had been the natural choice to enter the reception area and present a forged work order to the desk guards. Of course, that also meant she got to play the extermination crew’s boss and take the easy job flitting around barking orders while everyone else scraped silica-eating parasites off the exterior of Detention Center 81.

  “Going out the night before isn’t my problem, boss,” Han replied loudly. “It’s listening to you harp all day that turns my stomach.”

  It was impossible to say whether the flash that came to Taryn’s eyes was one of anger or amusement. But as she swung her boss-floater around next to Han and Zekk’s hoverscaf, she was careful to position it so that her body was between them and the nearest cam bubble.

  “I don’t know why corporate makes me keep you on, you old foghead,” Taryn said loudly. “The foam crew is about to catch you.”

  She pointed ten meters up the wall, where Leia and Jaina were also disguised as Runkil exterminators. They were moving their hoverscaf across the building, coating the duracrete in a thin blanket of foam that, when it evaporated, would leave behind a residual layer of parasite-killing poison. In the meantime, however, the foam was obscuring the cam bubbles that dotted the building and making it impossible for the guards inside to keep tabs on the extermination crew on the exterior.

  “It’s not my fault they’re skipping windowsills,” Han groused.

  He glanced down and saw that Natua Wan and Seff Hellin were already hovering in front of their go-point on level 1910. Their foam crew, consisting of Yaqeel Saav’etu and Kunor Bann, was just coating the last cam bubble between the two levels where the rescue team would enter the building. All four were formerly psychotic Jedi Knights whom Daala had wanted to freeze in carbonite along with the Horn kids, and Han delighted in knowing that Daala would recognize that the Council had chosen the rescue team to send a message: the Jedi were through being pushed around.

  “Your foam crew isn’t skipping anything, old man,” Taryn said. As she spoke, Leia and Jaina descended behind her and coated the last cam bubble in foam. For the next hour, the guards in the detention center control room would be blind to what the extermination crew was doing. Whether the cam bubbles also had audio capabilities was anybody’s guess, so the rescue team had to stay in character—at least until they started blowing things up. “If you can’t keep up—”

  “I can keep up.” Han pointed at the cam bubble behind Taryn and nodded. Once the bubbles were obscured, the plan called for the rescue team to enter in two squads, Squad Saav’etu on level 1910 where Jysella’s tracking bug had gone silent, and Squad Solo on level 1913 where Valin’s had gone silent. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Leia’s foam nozzle began to sputter, and Jaina brought their hoverscaf down behind Taryn.

  “Hey, boss,” Leia said. “I’m out of foam.”

  Taryn smiled and winked at Zekk, then turned to face Leia. “Already? What are you doing with that stuff? Drinking it?”

  “Oh yeah, boss—by the liter,” Leia retorted. “You want it done fast or do you want it done without overspray? I don’t do both.”

  “All right, don’t get snappy,” Taryn replied. “I’ll call the supply van.”

  It was the ready signal. Taryn activated her comlink and ordered Turi Altamik to bring the “supply van” around. As she spoke, Han and the rest of the rescue team were tearing off their goggles and respirators and removing weapons and equipment vests from the hoverscaf tool bins. By the time the Turi arrived, Han was outfitted with his blaster belt, a vestful of assorted grenades, a handsfree comlink, and a T-21 repeating blaster set to STUN. Zekk and the rest of the Jedi were traveling a little lighter, with only their lightsabers, a couple of grenades apiece, handsfree comlinks, blaster pistols—also set to STUN—and the standard assortment of Jedi equipment that always seemed useless until the instant it was needed.

  Taryn waved the “supply van” alongside Han’s hoverscaf. Actually a Cygnus-7 armored transport vehicle, it had been disguised by overlaying a set of artificial body panels bearing the colors and logo of Runkil exterminators. The panels, of course, could be jettisoned at the push of a button, and the power train had been augmented with enough quadfeeds and thrust-boosters to give an Aratech BeamStreak a good race.

  A side panel swished open to reveal C-3PO and R2-D2 standing in the doorway. “Oh, there you are, Cap—”

  R2-D2 interrupted with a sharp tweet.

  “Who are you calling a crossed circuit?” C-3PO retorted. “Of course I know we’re undercover.”

  R2-D2 whistled an angry reply.

  “Come on, you two.” Holding the repeating blaster in one hand, Han lifted the access gate in the rear safety rail. A narrow boarding ramp shot out from the Cygnus-7, bridging the half-meter distance between its side door and the hoverscaf. “We don’t have all day!”

  R2-D2 rolled onto the ramp and was across in a second, but C-3PO took one look at the traffic-choked chasm below and activated his self-preservation routines.

  “Are you quite sure that my presence is required?” he asked. “My gyroservers have been sticking—”

  “Quit stalling,” Han ordered. He pointed at the foam-covered cam bubble, then held a finger to his lips. “You’ve got vibration detectors to calibrate.”

  “Very well.” C-3PO put a tentative
foot onto the ramp, wobbled, and raised both arms for balance. “But if I should happen to slip, please tell Princess—”

  “No one’s slipping.”

  Han leaned over the safety rail and grabbed the droid’s arm, guiding him forward—until the simultaneous crackle of two thermal detonators roared behind him. C-3PO raised his arms to shield his photoreceptors from the flash and nearly pulled Han halfway over the rail. Han raised a knee and managed to catch the rail between his thigh and waist, leaving them both hanging over a kilometer and a half of whirring nothingness. C-3PO’s arms began to wag wildly, threatening to rip free of Han’s grasp or break his hold on the safety rail and send them both plummeting down into the skylane.

  “Threepio, stop that!” Han ordered. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

  “Of course not, sir,” C-3PO replied. He lowered his arms at exactly the wrong moment, and Han found himself struggling to keep the droid from falling toward him. “Droids can’t be killed—only destroyed.”

  Han dropped the blaster onto the hoverscaf and grabbed for the safety rail, but he was already starting to fall backward.

  “Oh, dear!” C-3PO cried, now leaning away. “You seem to be pulling me off the rraaaggh!”

  A fierce pang of agony shot up Han’s arm as the droid’s weight banged it down on the safety rail. The joint started to hyperextend, then Han felt himself rising and starting to flip over the rail after C-3PO.

  “Hold on!” Zekk yelled.

  “Hold on?” Han cried, trying not to think about all the things that were going to tear as soon as the droid’s weight snapped his elbow straight. “Are you crazy?”

  But Han’s arm never reached full extension. Instead he felt himself sinking into the velvet hand of the Force. He looked over to find Zekk gesturing in his direction, floating him and C-3PO over the safety rail back onto the hoverscaf. Their feet had barely touched the deck before C-3PO was in front of Han, arms spread wide.

  “Captain Solo, you just risked your life to prevent my untimely destruction,” he said. “Could you be suffering some manner of cognitive malfunction?”