Dark Force Rising (Star Wars) swtt-2

by Timothy Zahn

  "It's not a whim, Luke insisted. "Together, Leia and I can do it."

  "If you try, you will risk losing them to the dark side," C'baoth said flatly. He sighed, his eyes drilling away from Luke as he looked around the room. "We can't take that chance, Luke," he said quietly. "There are so few of us as it is. The endless war for power still rages-the galaxy is in turmoil. We who remain must stand together against those who would destroy everything." He turned his eyes suddenly back on Luke. "No; we can't risk being divided and destroyed again. You must bring your sister and her children to me."

  "I can't do that," Luke said. C'baoth's expression changed-"Not now, at least," Luke amended hastily. "It wouldn't be safe for Leia to travel right now. The Imperials have been hunting her for months, and Jomark isn't all that far from the edge of their territory."

  "Do you doubt that I can protect her?"

  "I...no, I don't doubt you," Luke said, choosing his words carefully.

  "It's just that-"

  He paused. C'baoth had gone abruptly stiff, his eyes gazing outward at nothing. "Master C'baoth?" he asked. "Are you all right?" There was no reply. Luke stepped to his side, reaching out with the Force and wondering uneasily if the other was ill. But as always the Jedi Master's mind was closed to him. "Come, Master C'baoth," he said, taking the other's arm. "I'll help you to your chambers."

  C'baoth blinked twice, and with what seemed to be an effort, brought his gaze back to Luke's face. He took a shuddering breath; and suddenly he was back to normal again. "You're tired, Luke," he said. "Leave me and return to your chambers for sleep."

  Luke was tired, he had to admit. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine," C'baoth assured him, a strangely grim tone to his voice.

  "Because if you need my help-"

  "I said leave me!" C'baoth snapped. "I am a Jedi Master. I need help from no one.

  Luke found himself two paces back from C'baoth without any recollection of having taken the steps. "I'm sorry, Master C'baoth," he said.

  "I didn't mean any disrespect.

  The other's face softened a bit. "I know you didn't," he said. He took another deep breath, exhaled it quietly. "Bring your sister to me, Jedi Skywalker. I will protect her from the Empire; and will teach her such power as you can't imagine."

  Far in the back of Luke's mind, a small warning bell went off. Something about those words ... or perhaps the way C'baoth had said them ...

  "Now return to your chambers," C'baoth ordered. Once again his eyes seemed to be drifting away toward nothing. "Sleep, and we will talk further in the morning."

  He stood before her, his face half hidden by the cowl of his robe, his yellow eyes piercingly bright as they gazed across the infinite distance between them. His lips moved, but his words were drowned out by the throaty hooting of alarms all around them, filling Mara with an urgency that was rapidly edging into panic. Between her and the Emperor two figures appeared: the dark, imposing image of Darth Vader, and the smaller blackclad figure of Luke Skywalker. They stood before the Emperor, facing each other, and ignited their lightsabers. The blades crossed, brilliant red-white against brilliant green-white, and they prepared for battle.

  And then, without warning, the blades disengaged ... and with twin roars of hatred audible even over the alarms, both turned and strode toward the Emperor.

  Mara heard herself cry out as she struggled to rush to her master's aid. But the distance was too great, her body too sluggish. She screamed a challenge, trying to at least distract them. But neither Vader nor Skywalker seemed to hear her. They moved outward to flank the Emperor ... and as they lifted their lightsabers high, she saw that the Emperor was gazing at her. She looked back at him, wanting desperately to turn away from the coming disaster but unable to move. A thousand thoughts and emotions flooded in through that gaze, a glittering kaleidoscope of pain and fear and rage that spun far too fast for her to really absorb. The Emperor raised his hands, sending cascades of jagged blue-white lightning at his enemies. Both men staggered under the counterattack, and Mara watched with the sudden agonized hope that this time it might end differently. But no. Vader and Skywalker straightened; and with another roar of rage, they lifted their lightsabers high YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER!

  And with a jerk that threw her against her restraints, Mara snapped out of the dream.

  For a minute she just sat there, gasping for breath and struggling against the fading vision of lightsabers poised to strike. The small cockpit of the Skipray pressed tightly around her, triggering a momentary surge of claustrophobia. The back and neck of her flight suit were wet with perspiration, clammy against her skin. From what seemed to be a great distance, a proximity alert was pinging.

  The dream again. The same dream that had followed her around the galaxy for five years now. The same situation; the same horrifying ending; the same final, desperate plea.

  But this time, things were going to be different. This time, she had the power to kill Luke Skywalker.

  She looked out at the mottling of hyperspace spinning around the Skipray's canopy, some last bit of her mind coming fully awake. No, that was wrong. She wasn't going to kill Skywalker at all. She was She was going to ask him for help. The sour taste of bile rose into her throat; with an effort, she forced it down. No argument, she told herself sternly. If she wanted to rescue Karrde, she was going to have to go through with it.

  Skywalker owed Karrde this much. Later, after he'd repaid the debt, there would be time enough to kill him.

  The proximity alert changed tone, indicating thirty seconds to go. Cupping the hyperdrive levers in her hand, Mara watched the indicator go to zero and gently pushed the levers back. Mottling became starlines became the black of space. Space, and the dark sphere of a planet directly ahead. She had arrived at Jomark.

  Mentally crossing her fingers, she tapped the comm, keying the code she'd programmed in during the trip. Luck was with her: here, at least, Thrawn's people were still using standard Imperial guidance transponders. The Skipray's displays flashed the location, an island forming the center of a ring-shaped lake just past the sunset line. She triggered the transponder once more to be sure, then keyed in the sublight drive and started down. Trying to ignore that last image of the Emperor's face ...

  The wailing of the ship's alarm jerked her awake. "What?" she barked aloud to the empty cockpit, sleep sticky eyes flicking across the displays for the source of the trouble. It wasn't hard to find: the Skipray had rolled half over onto its side, its control surfaces screaming with stress as the computer fought to keep her from spinning out of the sky. Inexplicably, she was already deep inside the lower atmosphere, well past the point where she should have switched over to repulsorlifts.

  Clenching her teeth, she made the switchover and then gave the scan map a quick look. She'd only been out of it for a minute or two, but at the speed the Skipray was doing even a few seconds of inattention could be fatal. She dug her knuckles hard into her eyes, fighting against the fatigue pulling at her and feeling sweat breaking out again on her forehead. Flying while half asleep, her old instructor had often warned her, was the quickest if messiest way to end your life. And if she had gone down there would have been no one to blame but herself.

  Or would there?

  She leveled the ship off confirmed that there were no mountains in her path, and keyed in the autopilot. The ysalamir and portable nutrient framework that Aves had given her were back near the aft hatchway, secured to the engine access panel. Unstrapping from her seat, Mara made her way back toward it It was as if someone had snapped on a light switch. One second she felt as if she had just finished a four-day battle; half a step later, a meter or so from the ysalamir, the fatigue abruptly vanished.

  She smiled grimly to herself. So her suspicion had been correct: Thrawn's mad Jedi Master didn't want any company. "Nice try"' she called into the air. Unfastening the ysalamir frame from the access panel, she lugged it back to the cockpit and wedged it beside her seat.

  The rim of m
ountains surrounding the lake was visible now on the electropulse scanner, and the infrared had picked up an inhabited structure on the far side. Probably where Skywalker and this mad Jedi Master were, she decided, a guess that was confirmed a moment later as the sensors picked up a small mass of spaceship-grade metal just outside the building. There were no weapons emplacements or defense shields anywhere that she could detect, either on the rim or on the island beneath her. Maybe C'baoth didn't think he needed anything so primitive as turbolasers to protect him.

  Maybe he was right. Hunching herself over the control board, hair-trigger alert for any danger, Mara headed in.

  She was nearly to the midpoint of the crater when the attack came, a sudden impact on the Skipray's underside that kicked the entire craft a few centimeters upward. The second impact came on the heels of the first, this one centered on the ventral fin and yawing the ship hard to starboard. The ship jolted a third time before Mara finally identified the weapon: not missiles or laser blasts, but small, fast-moving rocks, undetectable by most of the Skipray's sophisticated sensors.

  The fourth impact knocked out the repulsorlifts, sending the Skipray falling out of the sky.

  CHAPTER

  21

  Mara swore under her breath, throwing the Skipray's control surfaces into glide mode and keying for a contour scan of the cliff face beneath the rim building. A landing up on the rim was out of the question now; putting down on the limited area up there without her repulsorlifts might be possible, but not with a Jedi Master fighting her the whole way. alternately, she could go for the dark island beneath her, which would give her more room to operate but leave her with the problem of getting back up to the rim. Ditto if she tried to find a big enough landing area somewhere else down the mountains. Or she could admit defeat, fire up the main drive and pull for space, and go after Karrde alone.

  Gritting her teeth, she studied the contour scan. The rock storm had stopped after the fourth hit-the Jedi Master, no doubt, waiting to see if she'd crash without further encouragement on his part. With a little luck, maybe she could convince him that she was done for without actually wrecking the ship in the process. If she could just find the proper formation in that cliff face ...

  There it was, perhaps a third of the way down: a roughly hemispherical concavity where erosion had eaten away a layer of softer rock from the harder material surrounding it. The ledge that had been left beneath the indentation was relatively flat, and the whole thing was large enough to hold the Skipray comfortably.

  Now all she had to do was get the ship there. Mentally crossing her fingers, she flipped the ship nose up and eased in the main sublight drive. The glare of the drive trail lit up the near side of the rim mountains, throwing them into a dancing mosaic of light and shadow. The Skipray jerked up and forward, stabilized a little as Mara brought the nose a bit farther back off vertical. It threatened to overbalance, eased back as she tapped the control surfaces, twitched almost too far in the other direction, then steadied. Balancing on the drive like this was an inherently unstable operation, and Mara could feel the sweat breaking out on her forehead as she fought to keep the suddenly unwieldy craft under control. If C'baoth suspected what she was trying, it wouldn't take much effort on his part to finish her off.

  Setting her teeth together, splitting her attention between the approach scope, the airspeed indicator, and the throttle, she brought the ship in.

  She nearly didn't make it. The Skipray was still ten meters short of the ledge when its drive trail hit the cliff face below it with enough heat to ignite the rock, and an instant later the ship was sheathed in brilliantly colored fire. Mara held her course, trying to ignore the warbling of the hull warning sirens as she strained to see through the flames between her and her target. There was no time to waste with second thoughts-if she hesitated even a few seconds, the drive could easily burn away too much of the ledge for her to safely put down. Five meters away now, and the temperature inside the cabin was beginning to rise. Then three, then one There was a horrible screech of metal on rock as the Skipray's ventral fin scraped against the edge of the ledge. Mara cut the drive and braced herself, and with a stomach-churning drop, the ship dropped a meter to land tailfirst on the ledge. For a second it almost seemed it would remain balanced there. Then, with ponderous grace, it toppled slowly forward and slammed down hard onto its landing skids.

  Wiping the sweat out of her eyes, Mara keyed for a status readout. The airs tilting maneuver had been taught to her as an absolute last-ditch alternative to crashing. Now, she knew why.

  But she'd been lucky. The landing skids and ventral fin were a mess, but the engines, hyperdrive, life-support, and hull integrity were still all right. Shutting the systems back to standby, she hoisted the ysalamir frame up onto her shoulders and headed aft.

  The main portside hatchway was unusable, opening as it did out over empty space. There was, however, a secondary hatch set behind the dorsal laser cannon turret. Getting up the access ladder and through it with the ysalamir on her back was something of a trick, but after a couple of false starts she made it. The metal of the upper hull was uncomfortably hot to her touch as she climbed out onto it, but the cold winds coming off the lake below were a welcome relief after the superheated air inside. She propped the hatchway open to help cool the ship and looked upward.

  And to her chagrin discovered that she'd miscalculated. Instead of being ten to fifteen meters beneath the top of the crater, as she'd estimated, she was in fact nearly fifty meters down. The vast scale of the crater, combined with the mad rush of the landing itself, had skewed her perception.

  "Nothing like a little exercise after a long trip," she muttered to herself, pulling the glow rod from her beltpack and playing it across her line of ascent. The climb wasn't going to be fun, especially with the top-heavy weight of the ysalamir frame, but it looked possible. Attaching the glow rod to the shoulder of her jumpsuit, she picked out her first set of handholds and started up.

  She'd made maybe two meters when, without warning, the rock in front of her suddenly blazed with light.

  The shock of it sent her sliding back down the cliff face to a bumpy landing atop the Skipray; but she landed in a crouch with her blaster ready in her hand. Squinting against the twin lights glaring down on her, she snapped off a quick shot that took out the leftmost of them. The other promptly shut off; and then, even as she tried to blink away the purple blobs obscuring her vision, she heard a faint but unmistakable sound.

  The warbling of an R2 droid.

  "Hey!" she called softly. "You-droid. Are are you Skywalker's astromech unit? If you are you know who I am. We met on Myrkr-remember?" The droid remembered, all ,right. But from the indignant tone of the reply, it wasn't a memory the R2 was especially fond of. "Yes, well, skip all that," she told it tartly. "Your master is in trouble. I came to warn him." Another electronic warble, this one fairly dripping with sarcasm.

  "It's true," Mara insisted. Her dazzled vision was starting to recover now, and she could make out the dark shape of the X-wing hovering on its repulsorlifts about five meters away, its two starboard laser cannons pointed directly at her face. "I need to talk to him right away," Mara went on.

  "Before that Jedi Master up there figures out I'm still alive and tries to rectify the situation."

  She'd expected more sarcasm, or even out-and-out approval for such a goal. But the droid didn't say anything. Perhaps it had witnessed the brief battle between the Skipray and C'baoth's flying boulders. "Yes, that was him trying to kill me," she confirmed. "Nice and quiet, so that your master wouldn't notice anything and ask awkward questions." The droid beeped what sounded like a question of its own. "I came here because I need Skywalker's help," Mara said, taking a guess as to the content. "Karrde's been captured by the Imperials, and I can't get him out by myself. Karrde, in case you've forgotten, was the one who helped your friends set up an ambush against those stormtroopers that got both of you off Myrkr. You owe him."

  The droid snor
ted. "All right, then," Mara snapped. "Don't do it for Karrde, and don't do it for me. Take me up there because otherwise your precious master won't know until it's too late that his new teacher, C'baoth, is working for the Empire."

  The droid thought it over. Then, slowly, the X-wing rotated to point its lasers away from her and sidled over to the damaged Skipray. Mara holstered her blaster and got ready, wondering how she was going to squeeze into the cockpit with the ysalamir framework strapped to her shoulders. She needn't have worried. Instead of maneuvering to give her access to the cockpit, the droid instead presented her with one of the landing skids.

  "You must be joking," Mara protested, eyeing the skid hovering at waist height in front of her and thinking about the long drop to the lake below. But it was clear that the droid was serious; and after a moment, she reluctantly climbed aboard. "Okay," she said when she was as secure as she could arrange. "Let's go. And watch out for flying rocks." The X-wing eased away and began moving upward. Mara braced herself, waiting for C'baoth to pick up the attack where he'd left off. But they reached the top without incident; and as the droid settled the X-wing safely to the ground, Mara saw the shadowy figure of a cloaked man standing silently beside the fence surrounding the house.

  "You must be C'baoth," Mara said to him as she slid off the landing skid and got a grip on her blaster. "You always greet your visitors this way?" For a moment the figure didn't speak. Mara took a step toward him, feeling an eerie sense of dévà vu as she tried to peer into the hood at the face not quite visible there. The Emperor had looked much the same way that night when he'd first chosen her from her home ... "I have no visitors except lackeys from Grand Admiral Thrawn," the figure said at last. "All others are, by definition, intruders."

  "What makes you think I'm not with the Empire?" Mara countered. "In case it escaped your notice, I was following the Imperial beacon on that island down there when you knocked me out of the sky." In the dim starlight she had the impression that C'baoth was smiling inside the hood. "And what precisely does that prove?" he asked. "Merely that others can play with the Grand Admiral's little toys."