The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “I saw her at the Liston Spaceport. She was there.”

  Aryn’s fingernails sank into his skin, but she seemed not to notice. He welcomed the pain. She stared off through the windscreen. He fancied he could see her weighing options in the scale of her mind. He held out hope she would choose the right one.

  “I want to see her,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  That was not the answer Zeerid had been hoping to hear.

  Malgus sat among the ruins, the fallen statues of his ancient foes, and pondered. The night breeze blew cool over his face. He replayed his confrontation with Aryn Leneer. Her power had surprised him. So, too, the anger that underlay it.

  The anger he understood, even respected, but he didn’t understand how she’d come by it. She had known that he’d killed Master Zallow when they had fought on the ruins. But she had not known when they had first seen each other on the ship-to-ship holo over Coruscant, when Valor had shot down the freighter. He was certain of that. He would have felt the knife point of her rage if she had known then.

  So she must have learned in the interim that he had killed Master Zallow.

  Either she’d seen it somehow—a surveillance recording pulled from the rubble, maybe—or she’d interrogated a witness, a survivor who had escaped, or maybe a droid who had crawled out of the destruction.

  Either way, she now knew the details of the attack.

  It pleased him that she knew. The destruction of the Jedi Temple was the greatest achievement of his life. He wanted the Jedi—wanted Aryn Leneer—to know it was he who had done it, he who had left the corpses of so many Jedi buried in the rubbled tomb of their onetime Temple.

  But something worried at the edge of his mind. She had not fled on the speeder out of fear. He would have felt that, too.

  I am going to hurt you, she’d said.

  How could she hurt him?

  And all at once he knew. She knew the details of his attack on the Temple, so she knew Eleena had accompanied him. She might even have seen in Malgus’s behavior what Lord Adraas had seen—his feelings for Eleena. She would hurt him the same way Adraas and Angral would try to manipulate him.

  The realization sent a rush of emotion through him, a rush it took him a moment to recognize as fear. He activated his comlink and tried to raise his lover on their normal frequency.

  No response.

  A flutter formed in his stomach. He raised Jard.

  “Jard, has Eleena returned to Valor?”

  “She has not, my lord,” returned Jard. “One of her shuttles has returned, but she was not aboard.”

  A fishhook of fear lodged in Malgus’s gut and pulled him to his feet.

  “When is the last time she checked in?” he asked.

  “She has not checked in, my lord. Is there cause for concern? Should I send a team to retrieve her?”

  “No,” Malgus said. “I will find her myself.”

  There could be any number of reasons for Eleena to be out of contact. She could have simply turned off her comm.

  But Malgus could not shake the unease he felt. He hailed his personal pilot and summoned the shuttle back to the Temple. He knew where Eleena and her team had set down—the Liston Spaceport. He would look for her there first.

  The sky lightened to the east. Zeerid checked his chrono. Almost dawn. The night had disappeared on him. He was too wired to feel fatigue. He worked up the nerve to ask his question of Aryn.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She did not look at him, and he took that as a bad sign. “I’m going to get you into the spaceport and you’re going to fly back to your daughter.”

  Assuming he could dodge Imperial cruisers on the way out, which would be no mean feat.

  “That isn’t what I mean, Aryn, and you know it. What are you going to do with her?”

  Aryn did not answer, but the set of her jaw told Zeerid all he needed to know. He regretted mentioning the Twi’lek to Aryn. His honesty would cost Aryn her soul. Hunting the Sith who had murdered her Master was one thing. Killing the Twi’lek simply to hurt Malgus was something else. As he drove, he found himself hoping that the Twi’lek had left the spaceport.

  Ahead, the port came into view. He scanned the sky, saw nothing. The control tower was still dark. The Empire had done a poor job of securing the port—they had far too few men guarding a location with many potential entry points—but Zeerid supposed they had limited troops and an entire planet to police. He was glad of it. Otherwise, his plan would have had no chance to succeed.

  “I’ll circle wide and we’ll go up top. The key to this is speed.”

  “Won’t they spot us on scanners?”

  “The tower’s dark and I don’t see any hardware around. If they have orbiting surveillance on the port, well …”

  He shrugged. If the Empire had orbiting surveillance or high-altitude surveillance droids watching the spaceport, he and Aryn would have problems.

  “Speed is still the key,” he said. “Even if they see us, if we can get in and out fast enough, we can still pull it off.”

  Aryn brushed her hair from her face. “Where did you see her? The Twi’lek?”

  “There,” he said, pointing at the large transparisteel windows that opened onto the small-craft landing pad where he had spotted the shuttles, the drop ship, and the Twi’lek. Without bringing his macrobinoculars to bear, all he could see through the windows were indiscriminate gray shapes, presumably the shuttles. Aryn stared at the windows for a moment, then nodded to herself.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  He killed the running lights on the speeder and took it up to five hundred meters, just above the top of the main center structure in the spaceport. Pushing the thrusters as hard as he could, he accelerated toward it.

  His heart raced, not out of fear that they would be caught, but out of concern that Aryn would find the Twi’lek.

  He swerved around one of the large-craft landing arms that reached up and over them. He hunched behind the controls, anticipating fire at any moment. But none came.

  Below them perhaps a hundred meters, he could see the roof doors of the various small-craft landing pads. Aryn unstrapped herself, turned, and unlatched T7. The droid beeped.

  Zeerid slowed the speeder but did not stop. If anyone had seen them approach, he wanted them to think that the speeder just kept on going.

  “Ready?” he asked, and set the speeder’s unsophisticated autopilot to fly on another ten klicks before setting down.

  “Ready.”

  He released the stick, and he and Aryn quickly maneuvered onto the back of the speeder near T7. The wind pulled at them. He had trouble balancing but Aryn took him by the arm and steadied him. They sandwiched the droid between them, shared a look.

  “Go,” he said.

  She nodded and they stepped off the back of the speeder.

  T7 whooped as they fell. The droid’s bulk did not allow them to control their descent; they were flipping end over end immediately. Zeerid’s field of vision veered rapidly, wildly, between the starry sky and the top of the spaceport below. His stomach crawled up his throat and he gritted his teeth to keep down the protein bar he’d eaten.

  End over end they spun, T7 whistling with alarm, until Aryn seized them in her power, ended the spinning, and slowed their descent. The metal and duracrete of the spaceport’s roof rushed up to meet them. They had only a second, two. Aryn grunted, slowed them still further, further, until they touched down gently on the roof.

  “Much better than last time,” Zeerid said, grinning, heart racing. “I could go my whole life without another fall and feel I’d missed nothing.”

  Aryn did not so much as smile.

  Zeerid gathered himself, took a blaster in each hand, and scanned the rooftop. He spotted a conduit access panel. “There.”

  They ran over to it and he shot off the metal cover with his blaster, exposing a viper’s nest of wires. Ordinarily, a breached cover would have set off an alarm in the contro
l tower, but the control tower was dark, unoccupied.

  “Do it, Tee-seven.”

  A panel in the droid’s abdomen opened and several thin, mechanical arms reached out. All ended in one kind of tool or another. T7 stuck the arms into the wires and began to work. Zeerid, still concerned that they may have been spotted, scanned the sky. He saw nothing.

  T7 hummed while he worked.

  “Come on, come on,” Zeerid said to the droid. To Aryn, he said, “You all right?”

  She seemed oddly calm, or preoccupied.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  The droid gave an excited series of whistles and whoops.

  “He’s into the safety and fire suppression system,” Aryn said.

  “Trigger it with a ten-second delay,” Zeerid said to the droid.

  The droid beeped acquiescence.

  Malgus bounded into the shuttle as it set down near the Temple.

  “The Liston Spaceport,” he said to the pilot. “Quickly.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  He tried again to raise Eleena on the comm but got no response. With each moment that passed his concern grew. He recognized that his emotions were driving him, controlling him, knew too the weakness it evidenced, but he could not let her come to harm, not by a Jedi.

  Angral’s admonition bounced around his brain: Passions can lead to mistakes.

  The pilot’s voice over the comm disrupted his train of thought.

  “Have you heard the news from Alderaan, my lord?”

  “What news?” Malgus said. His muscles bunched, as if in anticipation of a blow, or combat.

  The blow came and hit him hard.

  “There are rumors that an accord has been reached and that a peace treaty will be signed later today. In exchange for the turnover of certain outlying systems to Imperial control, Coruscant will be returned to the Republic.”

  The pilot’s words pushed Angral’s words out of Malgus’s brain and ricocheted around in his head like blaster shots.

  Outlying systems.

  Coruscant returned to the Republic.

  Peace.

  The words applied heat to Malgus’s already bubbling emotions. He thought of Angral and Adraas sitting somewhere together, drinking wine and thinking that they had accomplished something by forcing the Republic to surrender some insignificant systems, when in fact they had poisoned the body of the Empire with the venom of peace.

  “Peace!”

  He paced the compartment, fists clenched, a wild animal tiring of its cage. His thoughts veered between Eleena on the one hand, Angral and Adraas on the other.

  “Peace!”

  He slammed his fist into the bulkhead, welcomed the pain.

  They thought they could tame him, Angral and Adraas, thought they could use Eleena to domesticate him. And wasn’t that what she wanted, too? She, who sought to be his conscience. She, who asked him to put love before his duty to the Empire.

  Malgus’s brewing anger boiled over into rage. He slammed his fists down on the worktable, denting it. He picked up a chair and threw it against the bulkhead, drove his fist through the small vidscreen built into the wall.

  “Is everything all right, Darth Malgus?” the pilot called over the comm.

  “Everything is fine,” Malgus said, though nothing was.

  “Coming up on the spaceport now, my lord,” said the pilot.

  Zeerid watched T7 work, anxious. His internal clock was running. They needed to keep moving.

  Having jacked into the spaceport safety and fire suppression system, T7 was to send a false signal into the network, tricking the sensors into detecting a fuel gas leak in the landing bay where the Imperial shuttles had landed. An alarm indicating the leak of highly explosive fuel gas should trigger evacuation and venting procedures.

  Or so Zeerid hoped.

  The droid’s metal arms worked their magic. T7 cut a wire here, soldered there, reattached several cables here, then plugged into the interface he had rewired. His low whistles and chirps told Zeerid he was communicating with the spaceport’s network. After a short time, the droid retracted his metal arms into the cylinder of his body.

  “Done?” Zeerid asked.

  T7 beeped an affirmative.

  Zeerid slapped him on the head and the droid protested with a low beep.

  “Then let’s go,” Zeerid said.

  He and Aryn sprinted across the roof toward the launch doors, with T7 wheeling after them. Zeerid counted down from ten in his head. Just as they reached the launch doors, just as he finished his countdown, sirens began to wail, audible even from the roof. A mechanical voice spoke over the facility’s speakers.

  “A hazardous substance spill has occurred in landing bay sixteen-B. There is significant danger. Please move rapidly toward the nearest exit. A hazardous substance spill has occurred in landing bay sixteen-B …”

  “If Tee-seven did his job,” Zeerid said, and the droid beeped indignantly, “the system will detect the fuel gas leak in the pad right below us. When it does, it should open the launch doors automatically to vent the gas—”

  The roof vibrated as the launch doors unsealed and started slowly to slide open.

  “Nicely done,” Zeerid said to the droid.

  Ahead, Malgus saw the small spaceport the Empire had commandeered. It looked somewhat like an upside-down spider with a few too many legs, with large-craft landing arms sticking out from the bloated body and raised skyward. Launch doors over the various small-craft landing pads dotted the spider’s body. All were closed save one. Light spilled out into the sky through the open doors.

  “There is a crowd near the port’s entrance,” the pilot said.

  Malgus looked away from the open launch doors to see dozens of people pouring out of one of the entrances to the spaceport and milling about. Most were port workers in dungarees, citizens of Coruscant whom the Empire had pressed into service to do menial labor at the port, but he counted perhaps twenty Imperial soldiers, a dozen navy sailors, and a handful of other soldiers in half armor.

  He pressed his face to the window to look more closely at the soldiers. He saw Captain Kerse, one of those he had picked to accompany Eleena.

  But he did not see Eleena.

  “Set down near the doors,” he said. “Quickly.”

  The shuttle touched down with a heavy thud and Malgus hurried out. Upon seeing him, the Imperial soldiers snapped to attention and offered a salute. The workers backed away, fear in their eyes. Perhaps they’d heard of what he’d done at the hospital.

  Malgus walked up to Captain Kerse, a powerfully built man whose bald head sat like a boulder upon his thick neck. Malgus towered over him.

  “Darth Malgus, there is a fuel gas leak in the small-craft landing area. We evacuated while the safety system—”

  “Where is Eleena?” Malgus asked.

  “She is …” Kerse looked around the crowd. His skin turned blotchy. To one of his men, he said, “Where is the Twi’lek?”

  “I saw her near the other shuttle, sir,” replied another of the soldiers. “I assumed she followed.”

  Malgus grabbed Kerse by his plasteel breastplate and pulled him nose-to-nose.

  “She was with you before the gas leak?”

  Kerse’s head bobbed on his neck. “Yes. She—”

  “Take me.”

  “The fuel gas, my lord.”

  “There is no fuel gas! It is a ruse to get to Eleena.”

  To get to him.

  “What?” Kerse said.

  Malgus threw Kerse to the ground and strode past him for the port’s doors. Behind him, he heard Kerse call out for the other soldiers to follow. By the time the doors slid open before Malgus, he had six elite soldiers with blaster rifles in orbit around him.

  “This way, my lord,” said Kerse, taking position beside him.

  “Speed and precision,” Zeerid said, as much a reminder to himself as to Aryn. “Speed and precision.”

  They watched the launch doors pull back to vent no
nexistent fuel gas. The open doors revealed the landing pad below. Zeerid saw the two Imperial shuttles, the Dragonfly-class drop ship. The sirens continued to scream. The automated voice on the speakers continued to drone on.

  Zeerid would hijack the drop ship. He’d have to dodge Imperial fighters and cruisers on his way out of Coruscant’s space. The shuttles would fly like the square heaps they were, and he’d get shot down as soon as he cleared the atmosphere. The dropship, at least, would give him a decent chance of getting clear.

  He took Aryn by the bicep. “You can still come with me, Aryn.”

  She looked him in the face and he saw once more, for the first time since seeing her again, the deep understanding that lived in her eyes.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can,” he insisted. “You’ve honored your Master’s memory.”

  “Time to go,” she said. “Speed and precision, you said.”

  He bit back his reply and once more they wrapped T7 in their shared grasp and leapt into the void. Again Aryn’s power slowed their descent and cushioned their landing.

  They hit the pad’s metal-and-duracrete floor, assaulted on all sides by the wail of the sirens and the relentless voice on the loudspeakers. Zeerid took quick stock of the situation.

  He saw no one in the landing area and the only way out—a pair of double doors leading into a long corridor beyond—were open. Everyone must have evacuated.

  Both of the Imperial shuttles had their landing ramps down. The drop ship did not and the canopy of its cockpit was dimmed, as opaque as dirty water.

  “Tee-seven, I need you to crack open that Dragonfly. Right now.”

  The droid beeped agreement and wheeled toward the drop ship’s rear door. Zeerid looked to Aryn and gave it another try.

  “Reconsider, Aryn.” He stood directly before her, forcing her to see him, to hear him. “Come with me. Please.” He smiled, trying to make light. “We’ll start a farm on Dantooine, just like I said.”

  She smiled, seemingly amused by the thought, and he was pleased to see it. “I can’t, Zeerid. You’ll make a good farmer, though. I’m going to find the Twi’lek and—”