Dician cleared her throat. “Perhaps some more information would be in order.”
Ithila glanced at her captain, evidently trying to gauge whether Dician was being polite or sarcastic. “Two targets. Too far away for a visual reading. Neither one has a transponder active. Fuel emission sensor readings suggest one is a starfighter, and the other is in the class of a yacht or light freighter. The starfighter is approaching our target asteroid. The other vehicle is staying on station a hundred kilometers or so from our target.”
Dician considered, drumming her fingers on the armrest of her captain’s chair. Sneaking up on a rogue Jedi in an antiquated frigate was tricky enough without the complication of additional observers. Still, it had to be done. “Continue as ordered. However, we may have to make a fast run from the final asteroid to our target. I want all crews and asteroid-buster bombs standing by at the shuttles. I want all weapons primed and ready.”
Wayniss nodded, unperturbed. “Yes, Captain.”
Jag took the lead in his X-wing—it was only fitting, because of the three starfighters, his was the only one not equipped for stealth. Jaina and Zekk hung back in their StealthXs as Jag approached the habitat. Squat and dome-topped, set atop plascrete columns holding it meters above the asteroid surface, archaic of design, and pitted with meteorite strikes sustained across centuries, it exactly matched the habitat described in Ben Skywalker’s report of the Brisha Syo encounter.
Jag brought his vehicle in quickly enough that he could accelerate away at a good clip if weapons turrets suddenly sprouted on the habitat’s surface, but the habitat remained inert, and he felt a moment of doubt. Was Alema even there? Leia’s last tight-beam transmission, minutes earlier, had indicated that she had felt some movement in the Force, something distinct from the pool of dark energy waiting at the asteroid’s center, but that didn’t mean their quarry was home.
Well, if she wasn’t, her hunters could take up residence and wait for her.
His X-wing comm board reported a signal—an automated query from a hangar facility, offering landing instructions. He ignored it.
He decelerated as he neared the habitat. In the dim light from the distant sun, it was revealed to be an unlovely mass of reinforced duracrete, its viewports dark, perhaps covered by durasteel meteorite shutters. He sent his X-wing into a shallow dive, activating repulsorlifts as he came within meters of the stony asteroid surface, and glided in underneath the habitat, between its support pillars.
A column of light emerged from the center of the habitat’s underside, illuminating a section of railed track. The track led down to the asteroid surface—and into it, through a broad gash in the stone.
Jag nodded. The light had to come from the chamber described in Ben Skywalker’s report, a room that housed the railcar access to the mines below. The hatch into the chamber was open, with the chamber’s air probably being contained by atmosphere shielding.
Not that the presence or lack of atmosphere mattered to him, not now.
He set his X-wing down almost directly beneath the chamber opening and powered down. Then, bypassing warning indicators and programming implemented to prevent accidents, he raised his canopy, venting his cockpit atmosphere into space. He pulled his crushgaunts from the webbing that kept them secure at his feet, donned them, then unstrapped and activated his low-grav thruster pack.
This would be a tricky maneuver. He had to fly up into the lit chamber, which was simple enough…but if the habitat’s artificial gravity was active, and he calculated his angle and rate of travel wrong, he would immediately be dragged back through the hole again, or would hit the chamber ceiling and carom to an inglorious crash somewhere on the chamber floor.
As he reached the circular opening and emerged into light, he cut his thruster and drew his oversized blaster. His momentum carried him a couple of meters into the air.
—curved wall ahead of him, no targets visible—
He came down on his feet on solid flooring and spun, assessing possible threats, possible targets.
—track protruding nearly up to the high ceiling, a control stand, no railcar, doors, no Alema Rar—
Breathing hard, he took another turn around, confirming that there were no threats at hand.
Excellent. He was in. On the other hand, there had been no one there to see his flashy arrival.
He shrugged and holstered his blaster. He’d just have to do it again sometime when he had an audience.
Jaina and Zekk, their StealthXs side by side and mere meters apart, saw the hangar’s blast doors begin to slide open, revealing a large, lit chamber beyond—and Jag Fel standing at one door edge, waving them in.
Jaina goosed her thruster and glided forward, Zekk pacing her. As they approached, Jag waved downward, indicating a litter of items on the floor just inside the door. Jaina saw barrels, wires, electronic components.
Jag held up his hands together, then spread them, miming the effects of an explosion. Jaina nodded. So Alema had left them a trap, a bomb—what looked like an improvised bomb. If it was improvised, the odds were improved that Alema Rar was still here, or had only recently fled.
The Jedi set their vehicles down in the center of the hangar, slowly spinning them on repulsorlifts so they faced the doors, and came to a full landing.
Jag shut the outer doors and approached as they raised their canopies. His visor was up. “Two bombs so far.” He gestured toward the litter on the floor, and toward the edge of the door where it rested on its guiding rail. There Jaina saw more electronic components. “Simple ones, thrown together. But no Sith ship.”
Jaina rolled out of her cockpit and dropped to the floor. There was something malevolent about this hangar, something different from the energy that suffused this place—a different flavor. She searched for it in the Force and found it nearby, a loathing mixed with patience, anger mixed with servility.
Whatever its source was, it had recently rested against a nearby wall and had left only minutes before.
Disappointment weighed down on her. “She’s fled.”
Zekk moved up to join them. He shook his head. “No, she hasn’t. Can’t you feel it?” With a pointing finger, he traced a path from the corner where that patient loathing had waited, out through the hangar doors, and then down—straight down, into the asteroid.
Now Jaina could feel it, could follow that trail. The vehicle, for it had to be Alema’s Sith craft, had been here until recently, then had been flown down through the rift in the asteroid surface. Alema and her craft waited far below.
Jag shrugged. “She knows we’re here. Scratch off the element of surprise. We’ll just have to show her some other surprises. Problem is, though the habitat is pressurized, and the caverns are, there’s about a fifteen-meter gap of hard vacuum between the two.”
“Not a problem.” Jaina drew her Jedi cloak around her. “We have the equivalent of flight suits on under our robes. With flight helmets, or with our emergency masks, we can survive several minutes’ worth of hard vacuum.”
Jag flipped his visor shut. His next words, through the helmet’s speaker, were amplified rather than muffled. “Let’s go, then. Let’s end this.”
ABOARD THE POISON MOON
“It’s a Corellian light freighter. The disk shape is distinctive.”
Dician, jolted by Ithila’s words, looked at her sensor officer. The Poison Moon had crept closer by several asteroids to the habitat location, and now the sensors could pick up the habitat building itself, and details of the other vehicle that waited nearby.
Dician’s mouth went dry. “Compare the vehicle’s distinctive markings and modifications with known records of the Millennium Falcon.” Yes, there were hundreds or thousands of Corellian YT-1300 light freighters still in service around the galaxy…but one, and only one, had a vastly increased likelihood, a greater statistical probability, of showing up wherever trouble was brewing.
With growing impatience, she waited while Ithila tapped her way through a series of screens. T
hen Ithila looked up, her expression startled. “It’s a match, Captain. Certainty exceeds ninety-eight percent.”
Dician took a deep breath. The Falcon, especially if it was captained by Han Solo, would be quite a prize, captured or destroyed. The bragging rights alone for having killed Solo, for ridding the galaxy of his interference, would keep Dician warm for decades. And the pleasure would be doubled if Leia Organa Solo, Jedi and traitor to the noble Sith name of Skywalker, was aboard.
Dician struggled to keep her tone normal. “No mistakes now. We have double the Falcon’s firepower and the element of surprise, but none of that means anything if we make a mistake. So we will continue our approach, and we will be perfect. We will make our run on the Falcon, and we will be perfect. We will launch our crews to raid the habitat and situate the bombs on the asteroid, and we will be—what will we be?”
The bridge crew members offered their answer in unison: “Perfect.”
“That’s right. Perfect.”
“Perfect.” Leia rubbed the back of her neck.
Han glanced her way. “What?”
“What what?”
“You said perfect. As in, something’s really perfect, or something’s very messed up, I-don’t-really-mean-it’s-perfect?”
Leia shook her head. “I don’t know. The second one, I guess.” She returned her attention to the sensor board. Nothing had changed since she’d seen the habitat’s hangar door close, nothing would change until her daughter, Zekk, and Jag emerged, but a nagging thought told her she really needed to keep her attention there.
Then she felt it, a pulse in the Force, a distant query from the direction of the asteroid. Flavored with the darkness that inhabited that place, but distinctly the presence of Alema Rar, it reached out for her, brushed over her, went elsewhere.
Leia stiffened. “Alema’s found us.” She unstrapped and rose from the copilot’s seat, taking her lightsaber in hand. “And if we’ve guessed right about the way she operates now…”
Han nodded glumly. “She’ll conjure up a Force phantom and send it against us.”
Leia turned to face the cockpit entrance, ready.
chapter twenty-four
Jag leapt up, high above the opening in the floor, and dropped through into hard vacuum.
Passing through the area of the habitat’s artificial gravity, he slowed in his descent but continued downward, the metal track close by, into the deeper darkness of the large gash in the asteroid surface below. He thought he could feel his feet hit the atmosphere containment field there—whether he could or not, he felt his rate of descent slow further as he encountered the friction of atmosphere. “I’m in.”
He cycled through his helmet sensors. The basic sensors showed cavern walls all around, at distances of thirty to a hundred meters. There were a few faint gleams from glow rods on the metal rails; other than that, all was dark. “You’re going to need some lights.”
A moment later his sensors showed Jaina and Zekk dropping feetfirst after him. They held lit glow rods, so he could see them with his naked eyes, as well. The glow rod light reflected from the irregular surfaces of the transparisteel foil masks they wore for their brief exposure to hard vacuum.
Jaina’s voice crackled in his ear. “We just felt her reaching out for us.”
Jaina and Zekk vectored in their slow free fall—an act that would be impossible for normal people, but Jag assumed they simply used the Force to shove themselves laterally. The maneuver allowed them to drift to within reach of the metal track. They did not grab it, but occasionally reached out a hand or foot to brush against it, directing them smoothly down its length. Jag touched his thruster pack to slow himself to their descent rate.
There was something on his sensors, something big but indistinct, on the far side of the widest part of this cavern. Jag rotated and pointed in that direction, alerting the others.
It rushed toward them, streaming through the air, growing more distinct as it came.
A flock of mynocks—
ABOARD THE MILLENNIUM FALCON
A thump against the Falcon’s cockpit viewport prompted Leia to turn forward again.
There was someething outside the viewport, resting against it, a gray, fleshy mass with an enormous gaping mouth full of sharp teeth. Han stared back at the thing, unruffled. “Mynocks, sweetheart. Give me a minute, I’ll burn ’em off.” He began typing in the commands Leia knew would send electric currents through the Falcon’s outer hull.
“Wait!” Leia reached out through the Force toward the mynock. As she did so, it looked away from Han, straight at her.
In the Force, it was her husband.
Leia gulped. “Burn that and you burn yourself. That mynock is a Force phantom. And it’s you.”
Han looked outraged. “A mynock? Kill me, sure, but does she have to insult me?”
“Han…”
“Hang on, Princess. If I can’t burn it off, I’ll shake it off.” As Leia grabbed for the back of her chair, Han hit the thrusters. The sudden acceleration nearly took Leia off her feet—then ended abruptly as Han hit the retros, slamming Leia forward into the back of her chair.
The mynock hurtled forward as if catapulted from the Falcon’s cockpit. A few dozen meters away it spread its leather arm-wings and banked as if flying in atmosphere, wheeling around back toward them.
ABOARD THE POISON MOON
“The Falcon is maneuvering.”
Dician gave Ithila a nod and returned her attention to the forward monitor. It showed the Corellian freighter whirling in place, then accelerating away from the asteroid—and then, just as abruptly, vectoring to starboard.
Dician cocked her head. It looked as though the Falcon were engaged in a dogfight. But no opponent appeared on the sensor board.
This was the second inexplicable event in just a few moments. Less than a minute earlier, Dician had felt something brush against her in the Force. That presence had moved on, seeming to settle elsewhere on the Poison Moon—settling everywhere at once, as far as she could tell, but not doing anything. And now this.
Wayniss seemed unperturbed. “Orders, Captain?”
They were now mostly shielded behind the last large asteroid positioned between them and the habitat. It wasn’t all that large; if the Millennium Falcon’s curious acrobatics took her farther and farther in random directions, she would inevitably detect the frigate.
“Wait until the Falcon is oriented away from us on one of her maneuvers. Then begin your run. The instant I determine that the Falcon has detected us, I’ll issue the command Go. This means all weapons open fire on the Falcon, all shuttles launch. Instantly.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“What are we?”
“Perfect, Captain.”
“That’s right.”
The stream of mynocks, twenty at least, flew straight at Jaina and her companions. She reached out in the Force to find them—and felt incongruously complex presences instead.
One of them, the lead mynock, was unmistakably Jag—or at least bore his unique signature in the Force. The rest were unfamiliar to her, but definitely more complex, more alive in the Force than mynocks. “They’re all phantoms. One of them is you, Jag.”
She got a grunt of confirmation.
The lead mynock flew straight at Jag. He hit his thruster and twisted aside. The digits at the end of its right wing-arm, grasping at him, missed him by a meter. Its lashing tail missed him by centimeters. Jag maintained his lateral thruster burn, carrying him away from the mynocks and the Jedi.
Most of the mynocks followed him. Four veered toward the Jedi, a fly-by attack made with lashing tails. Jaina and Zekk got their hands on the metal track and had no difficulty twisting out of harm’s way as the mynocks attacked and passed.
Jag’s voice was calm, unrattled. “Keep going. I’ll lead these away. We’ll divide Alema’s concentration, see if we can overload her.”
“Be careful.” With an exertion in the Force, Jaina pushed herself downward, causing
her to slide much faster down the track. Zekk followed. The last four mynocks didn’t—they wheeled for a moment, then took off after Jag.
The light from their glow rods showed the track passing through a hole in the cavern floor, leading into another, deeper chamber.
ABOARD THE MILLENNIUM FALCON
Han spun the Falcon, a barrel roll that would have made it next to impossible for a real mynock to reattach itself to her hull. But he lost sight of the creature by eye and by sensor and wondered if it had managed to clamp onto the hull despite his maneuvers.
Leia gripped the back of her chair in a ferocious Wookieehug and glared at him. “Remind me why I ever unstrap myself while I’m aboard this crate?”
“Because you’re still looking for thrills. That’s why you’re still with me. Where’s the mynock, sweetheart?”
Leia’s face cleared as she searched in the Force. Then her expression began to change to one of alarm. “Incoming fi—”
Han put the Falcon into another gymnastic tumble even as he saw Leia’s expression alter. Lances of light glared by outside as linked turbolasers fired on them.
“Where’d she come from?” On Han’s sensor board, closing fast, was a small capital ship—an Interceptor-class frigate, to judge from her elongated spar of a body, broadened chisel-shaped bow, and blocky stern. As Han watched, thruster flares lit from the flanks and top hull of the frigate, and shuttles of several different vehicle classes launched, angling away from the frigate—away from the Falcon, toward the asteroid.
Interceptors weren’t much by capital ship standards, but they carried more turbolasers than the Falcon, proton torpedoes instead of concussion missiles, heavier armor, heavier shields…The Falcon was outclassed. But Han was not going to leave, not with his daughter still prowling around the depths of the asteroid, away from her StealthX.
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Fury Page 19