by Troy Denning
Luke attacked anyway, driving an elbow strike into the side of her head. As before, there was no crunching, no physical sense of impact, only Force energy plowing through Force energy, sending waves of pain and damage rolling through them both. Luke sensed his elbow come free as it pushed out the other side of Abeloth’s head. Then she simply fell away, her still-balled tentacles tearing free of both Luke and the stranger … each clutching a handful of dripping, pulsing Force essence.
The stranger collapsed with a gaping hole in his chest. Luke felt his own form grow limp and weak, and he sensed his mouth falling open to scream, then his whole body was falling, weak and aching for breath.
Jaina had heard death screams many times before, on battlefields from Anthus to Zelaba, and they had one thing in common: death screams always contained as much surprise as pain, as much anger and disbelief as sorrow. It was as though men meeting a violent end could never quite believe what was happening, that they had finally met a fighter who was better and luckier than they were. Or maybe it was death itself they were cursing, angry at how it preferred to cheat great warriors of their lives rather than take them in a fair fight. Jaina couldn’t be sure of the feelings behind the scream, but she knew one thing for certain—a death scream was always raw and loud.
And that was the kind of scream she had just heard from the Rude Awakening’s medbay, where Luke had strapped in his body before he went beyond shadows.
But with black holes reaching out from both sides and Ship still holding the choke point with a steady assault of boulders and plasma, leaving the pilot’s seat to go check on him was out of the question. The Awakening’s shields had long ago failed, and she had so many weak spots in her bow armor that Jaina was seriously considering spinning the ship around to start taking damage in the stern.
She had been fighting back, of course—using a steady onslaught of baradium missiles against Ship. Her goal was to hold on long enough so Luke could return from beyond shadows. By then, she hoped the Awakening would be far enough through the choke point to force its way through with one last shot. But Luke’s scream had shown her the folly of her patient approach. She needed to finish this fast and get to Abeloth’s planet.
Jaina checked the missile magazine. Three left.
She launched two, a single second apart, then hit the throttles and accelerated after them. This time, it would be Ship who had to decide how crazy the other pilot was.
By the time Saba reached the air lock at the entrance to the computer core, the shadow-ghouls were barely shadows anymore. Their eyes had paled to white, and they moved so slowly that it was easy to dance past and close the eyes of their corpses. And even when one of them did make contact, there was no life draining or pain, just a sudden cold ache that passed as quickly as the ghoul was destroyed.
Clearly, Master Skywalker had robbed Abeloth of much of her strength. But Saba feared that he had also been greatly weakened, for she had not sensed him reaching out to let her know of his success—to warn her that Abeloth would now be desperate and looking to escape. Saba paused in front of the air lock and reached for him in the Force, but there was nothing … no hint of whether he was relieved or in pain, whether he had destroyed Abeloth or not.
Tahiri came up behind her and said, “That was almost too easy.” Her voice was trembling with exhaustion, but there was no pain in it, only the joy of returning to the hunt with her true pack. “Are you thinking trap?”
“This one is alwayz thinking trap,” Saba said. “It is the best way to hunt.”
“Not what I meant,” Tahiri replied. “I don’t like how that fight suddenly got easier. Abeloth is up to something.”
“So are we,” Olazon said, limping up to join them—and wisely cutting short any discussion of tactics. The pack had planned this part of the attack before drafting Tahiri to join them, and it would not be wise to explain their intentions where Abeloth could be eavesdropping. “And if you call that easy, we could use a few Jedi in the Void Jumpers.”
As Olazon spoke, he pulled a bell-shaped explosive from his gear bag and affixed it to the center of the air lock’s outer hatch. Saba could see dozens of dark splotches on his arms and body—areas of dead tissue where the ghouls had touched him and his flesh was no longer emitting normal heat. She knew that if he lived, he would spend the next few weeks inside a bacta tank, trying to replace the flesh the med droids were going to have to cut away.
Once he had set the timer, Olazon asked, “Anyone have a detonator left?”
Saba pulled one off her combat harness and passed it to Tahiri. “Jedi Veila has one.”
“I do now.” Tahiri frowned up at Saba, then turned to Olazon. “Set a one-second fuse and float it in?”
Olazon smiled. “Done this before, I see.”
“A few times,” Tahiri said, clearly understating the case.
Olazon nodded, then turned to Stomper Two, who was still carrying the shiny, badly dented orb of the EMP bomb. “You ready?”
“Big Blinder armed, safeties off,” the Void Jumper reported. “I’ll start the detonation timer when Jedi Veila blows the inner hatch.”
“Good.” Olazon flipped the fuse toggle on the first charge, then spun away from the hatch and pressed himself flat against the wall at the end of the corridor. “Fire in the hole!”
Everyone else did the same, Stomper Two going to Olazon’s side of the corridor, and Saba and Tahiri to the opposite side.
“Master Sebatyne,” Tahiri asked, “what’s the rest of our—”
The word plan vanished into a deafening bang. A slender cone of blowback flame shot five meters down the corridor, but most of the blast’s power was focused in the opposite direction. The entire hatch buckled inward, filling the interior of the air lock with a cloud of durasteel shrapnel.
The flames had barely died away before Tahiri rolled away from the wall and used the Force to send the thermal detonator floating toward the inner hatch. A second later a white flash flared from inside the air lock.
Saba was around Tahiri and through the hatchway even before the baradium glow had faded. Leaping across a three-meter hole that the detonator had left in the floor, she landed on a transparisteel service balcony inside the computer core. The balcony protruded about a dozen meters into a vast, spherical cavity filled with the faint pink striations of energy-starved circuits. Scattered around the chamber were a handful of drifting, radiant clouds—the tiniest amount of memory that an energy-starved computer needed to keep active to avoid shutting down.
Flying toward Saba from the depths of the chamber was a cloud of white-hot radiance, shaped like a woman’s face, but with a hugely broad mouth and eyes so sunken they looked like wells. As the cloud approached, tendrils of light began to reach out in front of it, stretching toward Saba.
Tahiri alighted at Saba’s side. “Stomper Two!” she yelled. “Big Blinder now!”
“Stay here,” Saba ordered, stepping away from Tahiri toward the banks of display screens and interface consoles at the front end of the balcony. “Protect Big Blinder.”
“Master Sebatyne, wait!” Tahiri called. “She’s just energy—you need the pulse bomb to kill her.”
Holding her lightsaber at waist height, inactivated and out of position, Saba ignored the warning and continued forward. What Tahiri didn’t know was that Abeloth could see the future, and that meant they had to use the future to defeat her. That was why Olazon had sacrificed so much to bring the pulse bomb along—so that Abeloth would foresee it destroying the computer core with her inside.
What the prey hadn’t seen was how Saba intended to react when Abeloth tried to change the future—or at least Saba hoped Abeloth hadn’t seen that. By the time the cloud of radiance reached the front edge of the service balcony, the tendrils of light had solidified into fleshy tentacles, and Abeloth’s face had lost its luminous quality and started to grow opaque.
Still holding her lightsaber down by her waist, Saba Force-sprang into the air. The tentacles immediately stret
ched toward her, already pulsing with the dark Force essence that Abeloth intended to pump into Saba—that she needed to pump into Saba if she was to take a new avatar and escape to recover from the wounds that she had already suffered in the Maw.
They were still two meters apart when the first tentacle touched Saba’s face, then her entire head was webbed in tentacles. They were trying to push in everywhere, into her nostrils and her eyes and her mouth, tapping against the tympanic membranes that covered her ear canals, even trying to slip up beneath her scales.
Saba ignited her lightsaber and brought it sweeping up, cutting all of the tentacles away at Abeloth’s shoulder. Expecting a geyser of Abeloth’s Force essence to come spraying out of the wounds, she immediately sealed the membranes that protected her eyes and nostrils. But the heat of her blade seemed to cauterize the wounds, and all that happened was that the tentacles flew off in every direction. There was an instant of stunned silence, then Abeloth released an ear-piercing shriek of pain and rage.
In the next millisecond they both slammed down atop an interface console. Saba felt metal buckling and clearplas shattering, then they tumbled off on opposite sides, Saba hitting the deck near Tahiri and Abeloth landing on her feet by the balcony’s edge. Fearing that her prey would attempt to retreat into the computer core, Saba grabbed at Abeloth in the Force, at the same time slashing her lightsaber through the console that separated them.
The blade suddenly died. For an instant Saba thought the pulse bomb had detonated early. She cursed her pack’s lack of faith in her skill, but then Abeloth was racing toward her, coming in faster than she was being pulled, and Saba realized that her prey had extinguished the blade.
Even with no arms left to fight with, Abeloth remained determined to take Saba’s body. Her huge mouth gaped open, revealing two rows of fangs—fangs sharp enough to shred blast armor, set in jaws wide enough to bite through a rancor neck.
That was no way to fight a Barabel.
Saba brought both fists up together, jamming them into Abeloth’s mouth in a Force-enhanced double punch. The blow knocked a ten-centimeter hole through both sets of fangs, and when Abeloth bit down there was nothing but toothless gum clamping Saba’s scaly forearms.
Still, the pain was excruciating, and Saba came close to stopping before she felt her forearms snapping. Hissing in pain, she balled her fists anyway, locking her talons deep into the back of Abeloth’s throat. In one smooth jerk, she pulled her prey’s head down sideways and exposed the neck.
Then Saba sank her fangs in deep. They sliced through skin and gristle and just kept sinking, cutting through muscle and bone and spinal cord. Abeloth’s body went limp with shock. Saba used her broken arms to jerk the head down farther, exposing even more neck. She ripped flesh. She gnashed sinew. She crushed vertebrae. She whipped her muzzle back and forth, and she felt the prey’s head pop loose.
Only then did Abeloth’s jaws open and release Saba’s broken arms. She let her hands open, and her claws slipped free. The head went flying across the balcony and landed at the feet of Tahiri and the two Void Jumpers. All three stared at the gruesome thing in open shock, until Tahiri finally seemed to recover her wits and look toward Saba.
“Master Sebatyne?” she gasped. “Is she … did you get her?”
“Yes, Jedi Veila,” Saba said, struggling to her feet. “Now we have both killed an Abeloth.”
Ben’s brain was so muddled—and his vision so blurry—that at first he took the flickering blue ball to be a sun about to go nova. Next, he thought it might be the efflux nozzle of a departing starship. Then he noticed the arch of a stone arcade before him, and the cobblestone courtyard all around him, and he recalled that he was on a planet somewhere in the Maw. He had been taken there by a Sith meditation sphere named Ship, at the command of a being called …
Abeloth.
His eyes went back to the column of yellow fog at the heart of the courtyard. That was the source of the flashing. There was a ball of blue energy dancing inside it, crackling and drifting back and forth. And there was a voice, too, a familiar female voice … calling his name.
“Ben?”
Vestara Khai’s voice.
“Ben!”
His girlfriend’s voice.
“Ben, where are you?”
She sounded terrified.
“BEN! I need you!”
Her voice began to quaver …
“Ben, don’t give … up … on … me.”
She was panting for breath.
“Please, not … don’t let this …”
Ben sprang to his feet. His head began to throb so hard he thought it would split, and he felt warm blood cascading down the back of his neck. He staggered forward anyway—and nearly vomited when he entered the yellow cloud and took his first breath of acrid steam.
The blue ball was dancing toward him now. As it drew closer, he could see that the glow was being caused by a crackling cage of Force lightning. Inside the cage, two figures were locked in hand-to-tentacle combat, one a beautiful young woman with brown eyes, the other a hideously battered thing with a mass of smashed skull and spilled brains. It looked as though a Keshiri had grown tentacles and stepped into a threshing machine.
The beautiful young woman—Vestara—was blasting away with a constant stream of Force lightning, trying to use it to hold her attacker at bay. The Keshiri mess was grasping at her with two sets of arm-tentacles, using one set to keep them bound together while the other set probed at her mouth and nostrils. Protruding from a small scabbard on the Keshiri’s belt was the handle of a glass dagger. Ben recognized it as one of the favorite weapons of the Lost Tribe of Sith, a thin glass stiletto known as a shikkar.
Ben did not even hesitate. He used the Force to pluck the shikkar from its scabbard, then drove the tip up through the center of the Keshiri’s back, angling the blade so that it passed through her spinal cord, straight into her heart.
A spray of dark blood erupted around the shikkar’s handle, and the Keshiri collapsed to her knees, then threw her smashed head back and let loose with an eerie wail. Her tentacles slid free of Vestara and started to swing around toward her back.
Ben used the Force to snap off the shikkar’s handle.
Vestara hit the Keshiri in the face with a blast of Force lightning.
The Keshiri toppled over backward and lay writhing, apparently helpless, but somehow still alive. Ben used the Force to drag her out of the yellow fog, away from the Font of Power and out into the light of the planet’s bright blue sun.
The Keshiri stopped struggling, and her eyes grew vacant and glassy. Her tentacles fused back into arms, then her entire body went slack. Ben used the Force to summon the pillar fragment that he had used to smash her skull earlier and dropped it across her chest. He heard bones snapping and air fluttering from her lungs, but no screams or groans or half-heard wails to suggest the woman was anything but dead.
Then Vestara stepped out of the yellow fog. Her face was wild, and the font’s dark power was swirling around her legs so thickly that it looked as though she were floating on a black cloud. She raised her hands and pointed them at the corpse. Clearly, she intended to hit it with another blast of Force lightning—to burn it to a crisp and destroy every last trace of the thing that had tried to take them.
“No, Vestara.” Ben quickly stepped to her side and placed a hand across her wrists, then gently forced her arms down. “There’s no need for that. We’re done with her now.”
Ship hung in the exit to the choke point, a small dark spot silhouetted against a blue giant sun. Jaina knew her opponent had to be as battered as the Rude Awakening. It had stopped returning fire after she had hit it with the double baradium strike and driven it out of the narrows. But it had refused to give up entirely, always remaining just close enough to remain a threat, to make one last suicide run and take them both out.
Unfortunately, the shock waves had taken a toll on the Awakening herself. She had at least three hull breaches, and Jaina had b
een forced to close her helmet and seal the medbay cabin where Luke lay strapped into a bunk. Now she truly had only one way to save him—assuming that was still possible. She had to set down on a planet with an atmosphere—and this deep in the Maw, that meant Abeloth’s own world.
Jaina fired the last baradium missile. Then, praying that the Awakening could take one more battering, she accelerated after it … and watched in disbelief as the distant dot suddenly began to shrink and vanished into nothingness.
Finally, Ship had turned and run.
THE LAKE OF APPARITIONS WAS NEITHER WARM NOR COLD, STILL NOR roiling. It simply was, beyond time and sensation, beyond fear or desire or duty. It embodied surrender and attainment, death and immortality, and Luke had never felt more ready to slip below its dark surface and join his beloved Mara, to wrap himself in her liquid embrace and let the Depths of Eternity wash away the anguish of his wounds, the ache of his lonely despair.
But something would not let him sink.
He lay on the water for a year or a minute, hurt and exhausted, watching Abeloth’s pale form vanish. Her eyes were empty and dark, her tentacles curled into loose balls. Her golden hair was fanned about her head in a floating halo, and she did not seem to be sinking so much as merely shrinking. Luke continued to watch as she dwindled to the size of a thigh, a foot, a finger, then a mere sliver that seemed to hang below him, wavering and flickering, before it finally slipped from sight.
And still Luke did not sink. He was too weak to rise, and he could feel nothing of himself except the aching void Abeloth had torn in his chest. It occurred to him that he might well be dying, and it was not a thought that brought him any fear. Even if his life had not been as long as Yoda’s, it had been a good one filled with close friends and much-loved family. He had been of some small service, at least, to his fellow sentient beings. And in the new Jedi Order, he had rekindled a light that had once gone out in the galaxy. He had few regrets for anything he had done, and if the time had come to let another Jedi carry the torch, he was ready.