Jaina felt it, too, a sudden sense of satisfaction in the dark energy of this place. It was growing, swelling, absorbing, eating…
Eating Zekk…
Jaina gasped. She reached out through the Force to Zekk, but he was suddenly no longer there, not in any form she could recognize.
Alema laughed. “There, your first loss of the day. With more to come.”
Jaina ignored her, continued looking up. Zekk was out there. He had to be.
Though he might now be so much a part of this place that his presence in the Force was indistinguishable from the energy here. Inside, Jaina withered at the thought.
As the mynock banked to pass before Jaina again, Alema turned toward the Jedi, smiling. “No answer for us? We—” Then she froze, her eyes going wide.
Jaina felt a sudden sense of freedom.
Something was leaving this place, something dark and wicked, and Alema Rar paled to a lighter shade of blue.
The Twi’lek shook her head. “Ship…”
Jaina looked at her. “Problem? Anything I can help with?”
“Ship? Ship?” Alema opened her mouth wide, as though to scream—and then vanished from sight, along with the mynock.
The scream did reach Jaina’s ears—tiny and distant, from far below.
Leia kept her guard up and her wits about her, but it was clear—Alema was slowing. Tiring. In their last exchange, the Twi’lek’s sledgehammerlike blows had grown weaker.
Now Alema disengaged, took a step back, opened her mouth for another jibe—and her eyes snapped open wide as though she’d been stabbed from behind. Her next breath was a gasp. Then she disappeared, fading instantly from sight.
Wary, Leia looked for her opponent within the Force. But she felt no one else aboard the Falcon, just herself and Han.
She glanced back over her shoulder. “How goes the war?”
Han’s voice was a growl. “It’d be better if you were up in a laser turret.”
“Not until I get the word that Alema’s in chains or in a box.”
He growled again.
The flight of mynocks, Jag in tow, entered another narrow passage. Jag’s captor swung him toward the side, allowing him to scrape along the rocky tunnel.
A protruding stone caught him in the back, not hurting him, but bouncing him up away from the wall. He oriented his sensors forward, trying to anticipate the next blow, to avoid it with the use of his thruster pack. They had dragged him through what seemed like kilometers of tunnels, bouncing him off every available surface, and he had not managed to avoid every impact—his left elbow throbbed as though it were damaged or even broken, and his head rang from repeated impact.
They entered a new chamber. Jag’s sensors picked up a wall in the near distance, perhaps thirty meters away. The mynocks angled toward an aperture…
And then they were gone, leaving him hurtling toward the vertical stone surface ahead.
He kicked in his thruster pack, slowing himself, but the mynocks had been moving fast. Despite his braking maneuver, he hit the wall hard. He heard and felt a crack from his left leg…and vision failed as if his sensors had all suddenly been switched off.
Alema stood, legs shaking, from where she had fallen. Her senses, back in her own body after too many minutes divided among several phantoms, cast out in the Force, looking for Ship.
Ship was…distant. Ship was fleeing. Ship was happy.
“Come back!” She poured her strength of will into her command, but her effort was too late, too distant. Ship sped onward, uncaring.
This was bad. Now, instead of having an escape method close at hand, she would have to ascend to the asteroid’s surface, past the Jedi and the idiot soldier who led them, to steal whatever vehicle had brought them. Or lure the Falcon in close, kill Han and Leia, and steal it. This would not be easy.
She was already tired. More than tired.
As she clambered into the railcar, she tried to make herself small in the Force, so that it would be more difficult to find her. The railcar, at least, had no droid brain to malfunction, no Sith sympathies to lead it astray. It had a lever with labels that read UP and DOWN.
She pushed it toward UP and the car began gliding up the rails.
ABOARD THE POISON MOON
“New contact, Captain.” Ithila sent her sensor board display to Dician’s monitor. Its image, now far less pixilated but wavering because of the Poison Moon’s maneuvers, showed the asteroid habitat. A starfighter-sized craft, emerging from beneath the structure, headed starward.
Dician sat forward. Tiny as it was on the monitor, this was clearly a Sith meditation sphere—the vehicle that had brought Alema Rar to Korriban. Just as clearly, the Twi’lek was making her escape in it. “All weapons, bear on the meditation sphere. At my command—”
“Captain, the vehicle is empty.”
Dician blinked. She reached out toward the sphere through the Force and sensed its mind, its desire…but no occupant.
So Alema Rar was still on the asteroid. Interesting.
She was having no luck destroying the Millennium Falcon. The freighter’s pilot was just too good—evidence that Han Solo was indeed at the controls. His death would be a great prize, but worth only bragging rights.
The meditation sphere, on the other hand, was something tangible, something Dician could have, could keep. It would be the envy of every member of her Order.
She looked at Wayniss. “Have the shuttle crews reported in? Are all the explosives charges in place?”
“Yes, Captain. The big one was just activated and delivered. You can begin detonating them anytime you like.”
“Follow the new contact.” As the Poison Moon heeled over on its new course, she added, “Tell the shuttle crews to assemble on—What’s our designation for the largest asteroid in this belt?”
“Omega Three Seven Nine.”
“On Omega Three Seven Nine. We’ll be back for them. Probably.” She reached out for the meditation sphere and was gratified to still feel it, a pulse of dark energy precisely attuned to the ways and wishes of her Order. “Where are you going, charming one?”
She expected no answer, but got one, the clear image of a distant world—arctic, forested, a menacing blue-white eye in a sea of darkness.
Ziost, original homeworld of the Sith.
She flicked a finger at Wayniss. “Lay in a course for Ziost. All speed. We’ll see if we can beat the little fellow there and scoop him up as he arrives.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And just before we enter hyperspace, begin the bomb triggering sequence.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Dician smiled. “Congratulations, everyone. On the perfect resolution to a perfect mission.”
chapter twenty-seven
ABOARD THE MILLENNIUM FALCON
“They’re running.”
Leia, once again in her rear-facing seat position, turned to stare through the forward viewports. “What?”
“They’re running.” Han leaned back and stretched, nonchalant. “I chased ’em off.”
“Sure you did.” But on the sensor board, the frigate was indeed outbound. “I wonder what they wanted in the first place?”
“Me, of course. Us, I mean. You know the mentality.”
Leia glared. “Oh, I know the mentality, all right.”
“By the way, thanks for not letting our passenger come visit the captain.”
“That’s better.”
On the asteroid, far away from the habitat, light flared, a brilliant, piercing white glow. As it faded, Han and Leia could see damage remaining where it had been—a black-and-red hole, tiny at this distance, through which atmosphere began venting in a column that rapidly grew to be kilometers tall.
Even at the distance of half a kilometer, Jaina saw the railcar ascending toward her; it had running lights, making it easy to spot in the darkness. A quick touch with the Force confirmed that neither Jag nor Zekk was in control of the vehicle.
With her ligh
tsaber, she cut through both rails of the track, then hauled herself up a few meters and cut through again, slicing away a span of track. Then she hauled herself back up, coming to a stop twenty meters above the gap she’d created.
The railcar hit the gap. It could have come clean off the rails, floating into the void of the cavern, but it instead angled the other way, and its nose hit the far section of track dead-on. It came to a sudden stop, the cars behind it accordioning, piling up like a freight-hauler disaster.
A small figure was ejected from the lead car. Alema rose, hurtling past the gap, and grabbed at a cross-tie, coming to an abrupt stop a handful of meters below Jaina.
Jaina smiled down at her. “Hello again.”
Alema’s mouth twisted. “This is no longer a game. Get out of our way.”
“For me, it was never a game. Say, how are you going to climb the track and swing a lightsaber with only one working arm?”
“We will find a way.” Alema ascended another few cross-ties. Now she was only three meters beneath Jaina’s feet.
“You could surrender. Throw away your lightsaber. And your blowgun and darts and other toys. Pretty much everything on your person. And I’ll take you to safety, and you’ll live.”
Alema shook her head. Her half-length brain-tail came free of her hood. “With the universe still out of balance? With the wicked not punished? We think not.”
Then it came, a low, rumbling roar from some great distance to Jaina’s left. She peered off into the darkness, remaining mindful of Alema’s position through her sense of the Force. “Some new trap?”
“We were about to ask you the same thing.”
A speaker box aboard the mangled railcar began talking, its voice speaking Basic with a light, lilting accent Jaina had never heard before. “Attention, all workers of Jonex Mine Eight Eleven B. Our sensors indicate a catastrophe-level event. Seek the nearest omega-designated shelter immediately. Activate all emergency beacon comm posts at once. Attention, all workers of Jonex Mine Eight Eleven B…” Faintly, she could hear the same message being echoed off distant stone walls.
She glanced down at Alema again. “Sounds bad. Guess we’d better stay here until we find out what’s gone wrong.”
Alema released her grip on the cross-tie but did not drift away from the track. She climbed a step toward Jaina, manipulation of the Force keeping her steady on the cross-ties, and drew forth her lightsaber, igniting it with a snap-hiss. “Get out of our way.”
There was another distant rumble, this time from the right. Jaina’s ears popped from a change in pressure. She worked her jaw, equalizing the pressure, and her hearing returned to normal. “Sorry. What was that again?” She lit her own lightsaber.
“Idiot.” Alema waved, a sweeping gesture, as if slicing with a vibroblade.
Energy—invisible, reeking of the dark side—slammed into Jaina, forcing her back. The track she held on to bent several meters above her head, moving her out of the way. The blow drove the wind from her lungs and sent a wave of pain through her chest.
In her moment of discomfiture, Alema leapt up past her. She landed on a cross-tie twenty meters above Jaina. She began climbing as though the vertical track were a staircase, using only her feet and the Force.
A blaster bolt from above caught her nearly by surprise. Alema got her blade up in time to absorb some of it, but the impact knocked her back and away from the track. She fell fifty meters or more, and was almost swallowed by darkness before she recovered sufficiently to vector back toward the lower section of track.
Grimacing with pain, Jaina looked up. Descending toward her was Jag, in a free fall allayed by infrequent pulses of his backpack thruster.
Jaina moved hand over hand along the track, reaching the point where Alema’s Force attack had bent it, and began climbing from there. If she got high enough fast enough, she could cut free another section, perhaps making the gap too great for Alema to leap past, even in this low gravity.
The track wavered as something hit the angled section she had just left. She glanced back.
Jag was there, standing on one leg. Through his visor, Jaina could see that he was sweating, probably from pain. He glanced down toward Alema. “Did you give her the chance to surrender?”
Jaina nodded. “She said no. Rudely.”
“That’s it, then.” He jerked a thumb upward, signaling for her to climb. “Go.”
“I’ll stay. We have to deal with Alema.”
“I’ll deal with Alema. Someone’s using explosives, city-busters at least, and they’ve cracked the shell of this asteroid. The atmosphere’s venting. And Zekk—he’s one chamber up and he’s a mess. I can’t get him to leave. He’ll die here if you don’t help him.”
Jaina looked down at the climbing Alema, up at the distant gap into the next chamber, and finally at Jag. “You’re going to die.”
“Maybe. But my suit can handle hard vacuum for an hour or more. Yours, with your mask, five minutes. Who dies first? Go on. When you get to the next cavern, cut the track free.”
Jaina looked at him. The Jaina of a few weeks ago would have seethed, argued. It was her right to stay here until the bitter end—her right.
Jag’s, too.
“Good luck.” Her words emerged as a whisper. She leapt up and began climbing as fast as her strength and boosts from the Force would allow her.
Jag pulled a pouch free of his utility belt and jammed it onto the metal of the track he stood on. Then he fired off his thruster and ascended. He didn’t have to worry about overtaking Jaina; she was climbing fast.
Below, Alema leapt across the gap separating the lower track from the upper. She landed exactly where Jag had stood moments ago.
Jag made sure his comlink was active. “Boom One.”
He wasn’t fast enough. He’d uttered the first word when Alema gestured. The explosives package he’d affixed to the rail sailed free of the track. It exploded a moment later, far enough away that it did no more to Alema than cause the track she stood on to sway.
She stared up at him, murder in her eyes, and began climbing again, almost as fast as Jaina—faster than Jag’s poor low-gravity thrusters could carry him.
As she climbed, the bent section of track beneath her twisted back the other way, and then again toward her, and finally came free entirely, a broken section four meters long. Rapidly, borne by invisible powers of the Force, it rose past Alema, flying straight toward Jag.
He grimaced. “This is going to hurt.”
The track came level with Jag, a few meters away—then swung toward him like a club, one end remaining in place, the other end hammering at his midsection.
The beskar plate took the force of the blow, but that merely meant it distributed the impact across his entire chest. Jag hurtled to one side like a ball kicked by a rancor, his head and limbs jerking in the opposite direction. His left leg, probably already broken at the thigh, was suddenly engulfed in greater pain, as though his bone marrow had been replaced by a lit lightsaber blade.
He flew perhaps thirty meters. But the flying section of track got ahead of him and swung again, batting him back toward Alema.
Still, the breastplate held. Still he could breathe, could think—barely.
His body a jangled mass of fiery nerve endings, he crashed into the remaining section of vertical track a couple of meters beneath Alema. He managed to clamp his left crushgaunt onto it.
“We are sure you flew your X-wing.” Alema’s face was now covered by a transparisteel mask—probably the same one she wore when escaping her own trap at Gilatter VIII, Jag guessed. Her voice came across his helmet speakers. “Your companions will not have sabotaged it. They want you to escape. So we will leave in it. Small compensation for Ship. Clearly, we need to punish you more.”
It took an effort to make the words emerge in recognizable fashion. “Alema…you’re never going to leave this asteroid. Your insanity, and the last traces of the Dark Nest, end here and now.”
The shock on Al
ema’s features suggested that she had just witnessed an insect reciting poetry. Profane poetry.
Jag felt his stomach lurch just a little. The track they both held had given way and was beginning to fall.
Alema, distracted by the sudden sensation of free fall, glanced upward.
Fast as a striking sand panther, Jag drew his oversized blaster and aimed it at Alema.
He wasn’t fast enough. She did not even look down at him. While he was in mid-draw, Alema released her lightsaber and crooked a finger at his blaster. It flew from Jag’s grasp into her hand. Her lightsaber floated beside her.
Alema looked down at him and shook her head. “You die because you oppose us, because you insult the nest. But most of all, you die because you refuse to learn.”
Oh, but I do learn. The sensor inside that blaster is now informing its processor that it’s gone beyond a certain distance from me. Five…
“Droids firing lasers—now, that would have been intelligent and dangerous to us.”
Four.
“We cannot feel droid intent, and lasers travel faster than the eye can follow.”
Three.
“Such an attack, executed from secrecy, might well have hurt or killed us.”
Two.
“But now we will simply cut you to pieces.” Alema gestured, and her lightsaber began floating its way toward Jag. She watched, her expression cool and detached beneath her faceplate.
One.
And in that last moment, though Jag had tried to concentrate solely on his pain, on his sense of desperation and failure, something of his growing anticipation must have leaked through his emotional barriers. Alema’s eyes widened. She looked back and forth for the new danger she was just beginning to sense.
The blaster in her hand exploded.
The detonation was brilliant and noiseless, sure sign of how near vacuum the atmosphere was. Jag’s faceplate polarized almost instantly, leaving him dazzled but not quite blind. He ignited his thrusters, hurtling upward—
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Fury Page 21