Han swooped back to the north, accelerating, and brought the Falcon in at a straight run to the docking bay. A crowd swarmed about the gates as the ship arrived—people suddenly realizing the fact of their impending doom and desperate to find an escape.
Han looked to Chewie. “You load the ship,” he instructed. “Pack them in as tight as you can.”
“We’ve got to mobilize all the other ships,” Anakin said. “We can’t let any take off unless they’re full.”
Han nodded. “Still not enough,” he reminded. “We’ve got to find that source and take it out.”
“I can find it,” Anakin volunteered.
Han froze and looked at him hard.
“I can,” Anakin insisted. “Then you and Chewie come in with the Falcon and blast it.”
Han spent a long moment studying his younger son. He understood that he’d be better suited than Anakin to do the necessary evacuation work here at the docks—it would take someone of Han’s age and experience, someone who could maintain respect, and, in the absence of that, control the crowd with cunning. Anakin would be able to do much, particularly with any use of the Force, but this situation might become politically charged soon enough, especially if Sernpidal’s authorities—and where were they, anyway?—showed up to investigate, bringing with them all those layers of intrigue that always accompanied such situations. Given that, Han’s experience would prove invaluable.
Still, the thought of sending Anakin to find this unknown source, this instrument powerful enough to bring down a moon, terrified him.
But he had to trust in his son.
“We’ll get you a landspeeder,” he said. “You get out there and find the source, and call in the coordinates right away. Don’t play around with it, just call it in.”
Anakin nodded and moved to the weapons locker, strapping a blaster onto his belt opposite the lightsaber.
“Don’t you try to do it yourself,” Han demanded. “You find it, and call it in, and get the hell out of the way.”
Anakin stared long and hard at Han, the two locking gazes, and a moment of trust passed between them.
Sernpidal City was even more chaotic than Han could imagine. Many locals were out in the streets, on their knees, crying and praying for Tosi-karu to make her arrival.
The irony of those prayers was not lost on Han.
Many more people swarmed the docking gates, and every now and then the sound of a blaster echoed through the buzzing air. Han had figured that if they loaded every available ship to capacity, they might be able to get the bulk of the city’s residents out of there, but when he came down the landing ramp and saw the magnitude of the chaos and panic, he doubted they would ever come close to accomplishing that.
From a bay not far away, a small shuttle blasted off, and watching it streak into the sky, the three were horrified to see people hanging on to its landing legs. One after another, they fell, shrieking, plummeting to their deaths.
Another quake ripple rocked the city, buckling one of the walls right into the Falcon, though the tough old ship appeared to sustain no damage.
“Clear that!” Han yelled to Chewie. The Wookiee rushed back inside, and a moment later, the forward laser cannons fired, three short bursts, and the rubble was blasted to pieces.
“You’ll never get there,” Han said to Anakin.
“I’ve got to try.”
Han looked at his son. He didn’t want to send the boy out into this maelstrom, with quakes and riots and general panic, but neither could he deny the necessity. If they didn’t find the source, and soon, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, would die.
He grabbed Anakin by the arm and ran down the ramp with him, drawing his blaster and waving it about to keep the scrambling mob at bay. Outside, they did indeed find a landspeeder, with a familiar old man, the mayor, sitting calmly on a bench beside it.
“Hey, that’s mine!” another man protested, seeing Han help Anakin over the side and into the cockpit.
“Go with him, then, if you want,” Han shot back. “Or help me get some of these people onto my ship.”
After a split second’s thought, the choice seemed more than obvious, and the man ran past Han and back toward the waiting Falcon.
“What are you doing?” Han asked the mayor, who had come waddling over, a large pack on his back.
He shrugged. “Waiting for the goddess to arrive, I guess,” he answered with a chuckle. “I knew you’d come back.”
Han looked at him curiously.
“Hero type,” the old man said calmly. “Can you stop the moon from falling?”
“I haven’t got that kind of weaponry,” Han answered.
“Is it being pulled down here by something?” the surprising old man asked. “By a gravity well, an Interdictor cruiser, perhaps?”
Han’s look became even more skeptical.
“I haven’t always lived here,” the old man explained. “And I’m no stranger to the more advanced ships.” He gave another, self-deprecating chuckle. “Maybe that’s why the Sernpidalians elected me mayor.”
Han motioned for him to come on. “Go with my son,” he instructed.
“Where shall we run?”
“Just go,” Han growled. “He’ll explain the plan on the way.”
The old man climbed in, and Anakin handed him the charts, then put the landspeeder into full throttle, zooming down the street.
A roar from Chewie told Han that there was trouble brewing back inside the Falcon. He reminded himself to thank Lando profusely when he got back, then ran for his ship.
SIXTEEN
Worthy Opponent
They didn’t, couldn’t, say a word as the Jade Sabre approached the now-yellow-and-green planet known as Belkadan. Luke and Mara had done their homework on the way to the planet, and they held no doubts, with visual inspection looming before them, that something on the planet had gone terribly, terribly wrong.
It wasn’t the lack of response, other than the incredible amounts of static, whenever they tried to hail the scientific outpost, ExGal-4. In truth, any response would have surprised them, for merely in observing the planet, they knew.
Belkadan was, to their way of looking at things, dead.
“What were they doing at that station?” Mara asked.
“Observations,” Luke replied. “Just staring out at the galactic rim.”
“That’s what ExGal tells the public,” Mara said skeptically.
Luke turned to regard her. “You think this is an experiment gone wrong?”
“Can you think of anything else that might have done this?” Mara asked. “You’ve read the reports on Belkadan—full of huge trees and small seas, and with clear air and blue skies. The only thing that kept the place from being more appealing was the rather difficult animals that called it home.”
“The reports from the station indicated that they lived behind protected walls,” Luke agreed.
“So if animals had found their way in and destroyed the station, it wouldn’t be so surprising,” Mara reasoned. “Do you know any animals that could cause this?” She waved her hand at the viewport and the curving line of Belkadan’s horizon, and the roiling, noxious-looking clouds.
“The reports from their headquarters on Coruscant and from this particular station give no hints that anything more than observation was going on here,” Luke said, but his tone wasn’t so firm. How could it be, with such devastating evidence as the view before them? Something had gone very wrong down there, something brutal, and Luke understood that such catastrophes were usually the work of reasoning beings.
Mara glanced down at her console’s smaller viewscreen, scrolling the information of the composition of the clouds. “Carbon dioxide and methane, mostly,” she explained, and that came as no surprise to either her or Luke. “In tremendous concentrations. Even if there is a layer of breathable air below, it would be too hot down there to support much life.”
Luke nodded. “We’ve got to go down and see.”
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Mara didn’t disagree, but her concerned look was not lost on Luke. Neither was her color; Luke had noted that Mara’s complexion had paled as they had approached Belkadan, and he could sense a bit of her internal weakening. The flight from Dubrillion had been easy enough, but Luke now feared that all of this, the trip to the Outer Rim, the tour of Lando’s incredible city, and now the journey out here to Belkadan, might be proving too taxing for his wife.
“We can call back and do a few more readings,” Luke offered instead. “ExGal will muster the right ships to come out and see what happened here.”
“We’re here now,” Mara pointedly reminded.
Luke shook his head. “We haven’t got the right equipment,” he explained. “We can do the preliminary scan, and relay that information, but the Jade Sabre isn’t really built for flying into that mess.”
Mara’s expression shifted from surprised to angry as she came to the obvious conclusion that Luke was trying to protect her. “The Jade Sabre can fly through a firestorm,” she replied. “She can blow a starfighter out of the sky and run circles around Star Destroyers. She’s as good a shuttle as anyone will find, and better than anything ExGal will put together.”
“Neither of us are trained in—” Luke started to say.
“There might be people still down there,” Mara harshly interrupted. “They might even be hearing our call, but unable to respond. So we should just fly away? Back to the safety of Lando’s planet?”
“Nothing with Lando is ever safe,” Luke replied with a halfhearted smile, a feeble attempt to lighten the mood.
“But he does have doctors, right?” Mara said sarcastically. “Because we need doctors.”
“Doctors?” Luke echoed, but the word died on his lips, for he knew Mara had seen right through him and his attempts to protect her, and that this, above anything else in all the galaxy, brought up the fires in the independent woman. Luke could yell at her, even insult her, during their occasional arguments, and she’d give it back to him tenfold, but never, ever, would Mara Jade Skywalker accept condescension. She was ill, true, but she would not be treated as if she was incapacitated. Their course now seemed obvious; their duty compelled them down to the planet, to the outpost to rescue survivors or, perhaps, to retrieve bodies, and to retrieve, as well, any information that might tell them what had happened to Belkadan.
Luke buckled his harness tight about him. “It’ll be a rough ride down,” he remarked. But he understood that, for him, the ride down to Belkadan wouldn’t be half as bad as the ride back to Lando’s might have been had he insisted on it.
As soon as the Jade Sabre broke the rim of Belkadan’s atmosphere, Luke understood just how much his last words had been an understatement. Violent winds buffeted the shuttle, and some unforeseen electromagnetic imbalance sent the sensors and other instruments screaming out error messages and alarm bells. Systems failed and then came back on-line; at one point, there was a sudden drop to the right, and both Luke and Mara thought their harness belts would cut right through them. Behind them, secured in a pod much like his seat on Luke’s X-wing, R2-D2 screeched and chattered.
A few seconds—which seemed like hours—later, they broke through the roiling clouds and hit an air pocket that put them into a straight drop for nearly a thousand meters before they slammed back to a stable ride.
Then they saw the devastation, the reddish brown forest streaming lines of noxious vapors skyward. Mara hit Luke with a succession of questions concerning air quality and wind speed and altitude, but her copilot could only shake his head, having no answers, for none of the instruments were giving him plausible readings. He looked back to R2-D2 and asked the droid to try to make sense of it, and R2-D2’s answer scrolled across the screen, a jumble of incoherent letters and symbols.
“Are you all right?” Luke asked the droid pointedly.
R2-D2 whistled like a drunken pirate.
“Do you see that?” Mara interrupted, indicating the data screens.
Luke moved in close and read carefully. “Sulfur,” he said, and looked up. “A volcano?”
“If we’re going out, we’re going to need breath masks,” Mara remarked.
They were flying manually now, by sight and by gut. Mara shut off all heads-up displays, leaving the screen open for normal viewing, and brought them lower, the swift shuttle skimming the treetops. “Any idea of where we’ll find that station?” she asked.
Luke, his eyes closed as he delved into emanations from the Force, replied, “We have coordinates, but that won’t do us much good without instruments.”
“Are you feeling anything?”
“Belkadan’s not dead,” Luke replied. “It’s just . . . different.”
That much seemed evident to Mara as she stared out the window at the living trees emanating the fumes. She thought for a moment to fall into the insight of the Force, as well, but seeing the perplexed look on her husband’s face, changed her mind and concentrated on her flying instead.
She turned the shuttle north and brought it up, just under the cloud level, accelerating to a swift flight.
“We won’t spot anything from here,” Luke reasoned. “Not even a distress signal.” He stopped his complaining a moment later, though, when he came to understand Mara’s thinking, when the thick air gradually began to thin as they approached Belkadan’s northern pole, an ice cap that seemed far less substantial than the documents about Belkadan had indicated it would be. It seemed as if the increased heat on the planet was already making a difference.
“Oh, smart woman,” Luke said with a smile.
The ride smoothed out and the cloud cover thinned even more, and the instruments came back on-line, a little bit, and enough for the two to get some fix on the exact polar coordinates. Using these as their base, they turned in-line for the coordinates of the ExGal station, eyeing landmarks along their way, even downloading an image of the mountains along that general line. Off they went, up high again and straight toward target. R2-D2 kept the calculations going, measuring speed and, thus, distance, and within minutes, the droid could calculate their coordinates closely enough to know that they were in the vicinity of the ExGal station.
Mara executed a few long-banking turns, trying to spot the station amidst the jungle canopy, while Luke alternated between looking and feeling. It was in one of those Force-sensitive transitions that the Jedi found their answer. “Left,” he told Mara. “About thirty degrees.”
She didn’t ask, just turned.
“Hold it steady,” Luke told her, feeling the sensation growing. Warmer, warmer. “Over that rise,” he announced, opening his eyes, and sure enough, as soon as the Jade Sabre crested the ridge, a thin tower came into sight, and a walled compound behind it.
“ExGal-4,” Mara announced.
Patiently awaiting his retrieval to a position of more immediate value, Yomin Carr heard the whine of the Jade Sabre’s powerful drives as the shuttle made its first pass overhead. He got to a window in time to see the ship’s second pass, and though he, like his people, was no supporter of anything purely technological, he had to admit that this ship, with its sleek fish-head design and swept-back tail fin and its flared side pods protecting the twin ion drives, was among the most beautiful he had seen. It cut the vapor trails with hardly a wake and with movements swift and sure.
Smiling with satisfaction, the previously bored warrior strapped on his vonduun crab shell–plated armor and his bandolier of flying thud bugs, did a quick check of his pouch of sentient and binding blorash jelly, and took up his amphistaff, another living creature, a vicious serpent that could harden all or part of its body to the consistency of stone, including narrowing its neck and tail so that they would cut like a razor, or could become supple and whiplike for its Yuuzhan Vong master. In the hands of a true warrior like Yomin Carr, the amphistaff could become a deadly missile weapon, as well, a spear to hurl, or it could spit forth a stream of venom twenty meters with stunning accuracy, blinding opponents instantly and killin
g them slowly, over many agonizing hours, as the poison seeped in through pores and wounds.
Back at the window, Yomin Carr watched the sleek shuttle put down just outside the compound walls.
The Yuuzhan Vong warrior’s smile was genuine; he was going to enjoy this.
They came out of the security of the Jade Sabre tentatively, and none more so than R2-D2, who was so concerned with the eerie and dangerous surroundings that he failed to pay enough attention to his companions and kept bumping into Luke. They couldn’t stay on planet for long, they knew, even with their breath masks, for it was too hot, and every step would literally suck the moisture right out of them.
Mara started for the compound door, but Luke noted something off to the side by the tower, and pulled her by the arm that way. As they approached, they noticed that all the ground in the area was covered by strange-looking little reddish brown beetles.
“They’re all dead,” Luke noted, stepping gingerly over the crunchy insects, and R2-D2 blew whistles of protest and flat out refused to follow—until, of course, something hidden deep in the jungle canopy roared and then the little droid zoomed through the beetle cluster, crunching them up with his wheels, spraying the tiny carcasses up into the air in his wake.
“But it’s not the air, apparently,” Mara noted, turning a glance toward the jungle canopy. “Some of the creatures have survived.”
“Well, if some of the creatures have survived, then so should the people inside the station, some of them, at least.”
“Unless what we’re hearing are new creatures, adapted to the atmosphere,” Mara noted, and she checked a gauge at the side of her collar and shook her head. She and Luke might be able to breathe without help from their equipment, but the air was certainly of terrible quality.
The three moved to the wall, toward the gate showing on this side of the compound, a stained metal door.
“Blood,” Mara noted.
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