Dark Force Rising (Star Wars) swtt-2

by Timothy Zahn

  "And can others get hold of the Grand Admiral's ysalamiri, too?" she demanded, gesturing toward the frame on her back. "Enough of this. The Grand Admiral-"

  "The Grand Admiral is your enemy," C'baoth snapped suddenly. "Don't insult me with childish denials, Mara Jade. I saw it all in your mind as you approached. Did you really believe you could take my Jedi away from me?" Mara swallowed, shivering from the cold night wind and the colder feeling within her. Thrawn had said that C'baoth was insane, and she could indeed hear the unstable edge of madness in his voice. But there was far more to the man than just that. There was a hard steel behind the voice, ruthless and calculating, with a sense of both supreme power and supreme confidence underlying it all.

  It was like hearing the Emperor speak again.

  "I need Skywalker's help," she said, forcing her own voice to remain calm. "All I need to do is borrow him for a little while."

  "And then you'll return him?" C'baoth said sardonically. Mara clenched her teeth. "I'll have his help, C'baoth. Whether you like it or not."

  There was no doubt this time that the Jedi Master had smiled. A thin, ghostly smile. "Oh, no, Mara Jade," he murmured. "You are mistaken. Do you truly believe that simply because you stand in the middle of an empty space in the Force that I am powerless against you?"

  "There's also this," Mara said, pulling her blaster from its holster and aiming it at his chest.

  C'baoth didn't move; but suddenly Mara could feel a surge of tension in the air around her. "No one points a weapon at me with impunity," the Jedi Master said with quiet menace. "You will pay dearly for this one day."

  "I'll take my chances," Mara said, retreating a step to put her back against the X-wing's soard S-foils. Above and to her left she could hear the R2 droid chirping thoughtfully to itself. "You want to stand aside and let me pass? Or do we do this the hard way?"

  C'baoth seemed to study her. "I could destroy you, you know," he said. The menace had vanished from his voice now, leaving something almost conversational in its place. "Right there where you stand, before you even knew the attack was coming. But I won't. Not now. I've felt your presence over the years, Mara Jade; the rising and falling of your power after the Emperor's death took most of your strength away. And now I've seen you in my meditations. Someday you will come to me, of your own free will."

  "I'll take my chances on that one, too, Mara said.

  "You don't believe me," C'baoth said with another of his ghostly smiles. "But you shall. The future is fixed, my young would-be Jedi, as is your destiny. Someday you will kneel before me. I have foreseen it."

  "I wouldn't trust Jedi foreseeing all that much if I were you," Mara retorted, risking a glance past him at the darkened building and wondering what C'baoth would do if she tried shouting Skywalker's name. "The Emperor did a lot of that, too. It didn't help him much in the end."

  "Perhaps I am wiser than the Emperor was," C'baoth said. His head turned slightly. "I told you to go to your chambers," he said in a louder voice.

  "Yes, you did," a familiar voice acknowledged; and from the shadows at the front of the house a new figure moved across the courtyard. Skywalker.

  "Then why are you here?" C'baoth asked.

  "I felt a disturbance in the Force," the younger man said as he passed through the gate and came more fully into the dim starlight. Above his black tunic his face was expressionless, his eyes fixed on Mara. "As if a battle were taking place nearby. Hello, Mara."

  "Skywalker," she managed between dry lips. With all that had happened to her since her arrival in the Jomark system, it was only now just dawning on her the enormity of the task she'd set for herself. She, who'd openly told Skywalker that she would someday kill him, was now going to have to convince him that she was more trustworthy than a Jedi Master. "Look-Skywalker-"

  "Aren't you aiming that at the wrong person?" he asked mildly. "I thought I was the one you were gunning for."

  Mara had almost forgotten the blaster she had pointed at C'baoth. "I didn't come here to kill you," she said. Even to her own ears the words sounded thin and deceitful. "Karrde's in trouble with the Empire. I need your help to get him out."

  "I see." Skywalker looked at C'baoth. "What happened here, Master C'baoth?"

  "What does it matter?" the other countered. "Despite her words just now, she did indeed come here to destroy you. Would you rather I had not stopped her?"

  "Skywalker-" Mara began.

  He stopped her with an upraised hand, his eyes still on C'baoth. "Did she attack you?" he asked. "Or threaten you in any way?" Mara looked at C'baoth ... and felt the breath freeze in her lungs. The earlier confidence had vanished from the Jedi Master's face. In its place was something cold and deadly. Directed not at her, but at Skywalker. And suddenly Mara understood. Skywalker wouldn't need convincing of C'baoth's treachery after all. Somehow, he already knew.

  "What does it matter what her precise actions were?" C'baoth demanded, his voice colder even than his face. "What matters is that she is a living example of the danger I have been warning you of since your arrival. The danger all Jedi face from a galaxy that hates and fears us."

  "No, Master C'baoth," Skywalker said, his voice almost gentle.

  "Surely you must understand that the means are no less important than the ends. A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack." C'baoth snorted. "A platitude for the simpleminded. Or for those with insufficient wisdom to make their own decisions. I am beyond such things, Jedi Skywalker. As you will be someday. If you choose to remain. Skywalker shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can't." He turned away and walked toward Mara "Then you turn your back on the galaxy," C'baoth said, his voice now earnest and sincere. "Only with our guidance and strength can they ever hope to achieve real maturity. You know that as well as I do." Skywalker stopped. "But you just said they hate us," he pointed out.

  "How can we teach people who don't want our guidance?"

  "We can heal the galaxy, Luke," C'baoth said quietly. "Together, you and I can do it. Without us, there is no hope. None at all."

  "Maybe he can do it without you," Mara put in loudly, trying to break up the verbal spell C'baoth was weaving. She'd seen the same sort of thing work for the Emperor, and Skywalker's eyelids were heavy enough as it was. Too heavy, in fact. Like hers had been on the approach to Jomark ... Stepping away from the X-wing, she walked over to Skywalker. C'baoth made a small movement, as if he were going to stop her; she hefted her blaster, and he seemed to abandon the idea.

  Even without looking at him, she could tell when the Force-empty zone around her ysalamir touched Skywalker. He inhaled sharply, shoulders straightening from a slump he probably hadn't even noticed they had, and nodded as if he finally understood a hitherto unexplained piece of a puzzle.

  "Is this how you would heal the galaxy, Master C'baoth?" he asked. "By coercion and deceit?"

  Abruptly, C'baoth threw back his head and laughed. It was about the last reaction Mara would have expected from him, and the sheer surprise of it momentarily froze her muscles.

  And in that split second, the Jedi Master struck. It was only a small rock, as rocks went, but it came in out of nowhere to strike her gun hand with paralyzing force. The blaster went spinning off into the darkness as her hand flared with pain and then went numb. "Watch out!" she snapped to Skywalker, dropping down into a crouch and scrabbling around for her weapon as a second stone whistled past her ear. There was a snap-hiss from beside her, and suddenly the terrain was bathed in the green-white glow of Skywalker's lightsaber. "Get behind the ship," he ordered her. "I'll hold him off." The memory of Myrkr flashed through Mara's mind; but even as she opened her mouth to remind him of how useless he was without the Force, he took a long step forward to put himself outside the ysalamir's influence. The lightsaber flashed sideways, and she heard the double crunch as its silent blade intercepted two more incoming rocks.

  Still laughing, C'baoth raised his hand and sent a flash of blue lightning toward them.

&n
bsp; Skywalker caught the bolt on his lightsaber, and for an instant the green of the blade was surrounded by a blue-white coronal discharge. A second bolt shot past him to vanish at the edge of the empty zone around Mara; a third again wrapped itself around the lightsaber blade.

  Mara's fumbling hand brushed something metallic: her blaster. Scooping it up, she swung it toward C'baoth And with a brilliant flash of laser fire, the whole scene seemed to blow up in front of her.

  She had forgotten about the droid sitting up there in the X-wing. Apparently, C'baoth had forgotten about it, too.

  "Skywalker?" she called, blinking at the purple haze floating in front of her eyes and wrinkling her nose at the tingling smell of ozone.

  "Where are you?"

  "Over here by C'baoth," Skywalker's voice said. "He's still alive."

  "We can fix that," Mara growled. Carefully picking her way across the steaming ruts the X-wing's laser cannon had gouged in the ground, she headed over.

  C'baoth was lying on his back, unconscious but breathing evenly, with Skywalker kneeling over him. "Not even singed," she murmured. "Impressive."

  "Artoo wasn't shooting to kill," Skywalker said, his fingertips moving gently across the old man's face. "It was probably the sonic shock that got him."

  "That, or getting knocked off his feet by the shock wave," Mara agreed, lining her blaster up on the still figure. "Get out of the way. I'll finish it."

  Skywalker looked up at her. "We're not going to kill him," he said.

  "Not like this."

  "Would you rather wait until he's conscious again and can fight back?" she retorted.

  "There's no need to kill him at all," Skywalker insisted. "We can be off Jomark long before he wakes up."

  "You don't leave an enemy at your back," she told him stiffly. "Not if you like living.

  "He doesn't have to be an enemy, Mara," Skywalker said with that irritating earnestness of his. "He's ill. Maybe he can be cured." Mara felt her lip twist. "You didn't hear the way he was talking before you showed up," she said. "He's insane, all right; but that's not all he is anymore. He's a lot stronger, and a whole lot more dangerous." She hesitated. "He sounded just like the Emperor and Vader used to." A muscle in Skywalker's cheek twitched. "Vader was deep in the dark side, too," he told her. "He was able to break that hold and come back. Maybe C'baoth can do the same.

  "I wouldn't bet on it," Mara said. But she holstered her blaster. They didn't have time to debate the issue; and as long as she needed Skywalker's help, he had effective veto on decisions like this. "Just remember, it's your back that'll get the knife if you're wrong."

  "I know." He looked down at C'baoth once more, then back up at her.

  "You said Karrde was in trouble."

  "Yes," Mara nodded, glad to change the subject. Skywalker's mention of the Emperor and Vader had reminded her all too clearly of that recurring dream. "The Grand Admiral's taken him. I need your help to get him out."

  She braced herself for the inevitable argument and bargaining; but to her surprise, he simply nodded and stood up. "Okay," he said. "Let's go." With one last mournful electronic wail Artoo signed off and with the usual flicker of pseudomotion, the X-wing was gone. "Well, he's not happy about it," Luke said, shutting down the Skipray's transmitter. "But I think I've persuaded him to go straight home."

  "You'd better be more than just thinking you've persuaded him," Mara warned from the pilot's chair, her eyes on the nav computer display. "Sneaking into an Imperial supply depot is going to be hard enough without a New Republic X-wing in tow.

  "Right," Luke said, throwing a sideways look at her and wondering if getting into the Skipray with her had been one of the smarter things he'd done lately. Mara had put the ysalamir away in the rear of the ship, and he could feel her hatred of him simmering beneath her consciousness like a half-burned fire. It evoked unpleasant memories of the Emperor, the man who'd been Mara's teacher and Luke briefly wondered if this could be some sort of overly elaborate trick to lure him to his death.

  But her hatred seemed to be under control, and there was no deceit in her that he could detect.

  But then, he hadn't seen C'baoth's deceit either, until it was almost too late.

  Luke shifted in his chair, his face warming with embarrassment at how easily he'd been taken in by C'baoth's act. But it hadn't all been an act, he reminded himself. The Jedi Master's emotional instabilities were genuine-that much he was convinced of. And even if those instabilities didn't extend as far as the insanity that Mara had alluded to, they certainly extended far enough for C'baoth to qualas ill.

  And if what she'd said about C'baoth working with the Empire was also true ...

  Luke shivered. I will teach her such power as you can't imagine, C'baoth had said about Leia. The words had been different from those Vader had spoken to Luke on Endor, but the dark sense behind them had been identical. Whatever C'baoth had once been, there was no doubt in Luke's mind that he was now moving along the path of the dark side.

  And yet, Luke had been able to help Vader win his way back from that same path. Was it conceit to think he could do the same for C'baoth?

  He shook the thought away. However C'baoth's destiny might yet be entwined with his, such encounters were too far in the future to begin planning for them. For now, he needed to concentrate on the immediate task at hand, and to leave the future to the guidance of the Force. "How did the Grand Admiral find Karrde?" he asked Mara.

  Her lips compressed momentarily, and Luke caught a flash of self-reproach. "They put a homing beacon aboard my ship," she said. "I led them right to his hideout."

  Luke nodded, thinking back to the rescue of Leia and that harrowing escape from the first Death Star aboard the Falcon. "They pulled that same trick on us, too," he said. "That's how they found the Yavin base."

  "Considering what it cost them, I don't think you've got any complaints coming," Mara said sarcastically.

  "I don't imagine the Emperor was pleased," Luke murmured.

  "No, he wasn't," Mara said, her voice dark with memories of her own.

  "Vader nearly died for that blunder." Deliberately, she looked over at Luke's hands. "That was when he lost his right hand, in fact." Luke flexed the fingers of his artificial right hand, feeling a ghostly echo of the searing pain that had lanced through it as Vader's lightsaber had sliced through skin and muscle and bone. A fragment of an old Tatooine aphortsm flickered through his mind: something about the passing of evil from one generation to the next "What's the plan?" he asked. Mara took a deep breath, and Luke could sense the emotional effort as she put the past aside. "Karrde's being held aboard the Grand Admiral's flagship, the Chimaera," she told him. "According to their flight schedule, they're going to be taking on supplies in the Wistril system four days from now. If we push it, we should be able to get there a few hours ahead of them. We'll ditch the Skipray, take charge of one of the supply shuttles, and just go on up with the rest of the flight pattern."

  Luke thought it over. It sounded tricky, but not ridiculously so.

  "What happens after we're aboard?"

  "Standard Imperial procedure is to keep all the shuttle crews locked aboard their ships while the Chimaera's crewers handle the unloading," Mara said. "Or at least that was standard procedure five years ago. Means we'll need some kind of diversion to get out of the shuttle."

  "Sounds risky," Luke shook his head. "We don't want to draw attention to ourselves."

  "You got any better ideas?"

  Luke shrugged. "Not yet," he said. "But we've got four days to think about it. We'll come up with something."

  CHAPTER

  22

  Mara eased the repulsorlifts off; and with a faint metallic clank the cargo shuttle touched down on the main deck of the Chimaera's aft hangar bay.

  "Shuttle 37 down," Luke announced into the comm. "Awaiting further orders."

  "Shuttle 37, acknowledged," the voice of the controller came over the speaker. "Shut down all systems and prepare for unloadi
ng."

  "Got it."

  Luke reached over to shut off the comm, but Mara stopped him.

  "Control, this is my first cargo run," she said, her voice carrying just the right touch of idle curiosity. "About how long until we'll be able to leave?"

  "I suggest you make yourselves comfortable," Control said dryly. "We unload all the shuttles before any of you leave. Figure a couple of hours, at the least."

  "Oh," Mara said, sounding taken aback. "Well ... thanks. Maybe I'll take a nap."

  She signed off. "Good," she said, unstrapping and standing up. "That ought to give us enough time to get to the detention center and back."

  "Let's just hope they haven't transferred Karrde off the ship," Luke said, following her to the rear of the command deck and the spiral stairway leading down to the storage area below.

  "They haven't," Mara said, heading down the stairs. "The only danger is that they might have started the full treatment already." Luke frowned down at her. "The full treatment?"

  "Their interrogation." Mara reached the center of the storage room and looked appraisingly around. "All right. Just about ... there should do it." She pointed to a section of the deck in front of her. "Out of the way of prying eyes, and you shouldn't hit anything vital."

  "Right." Luke ignited his lightsaber, and began carefully cutting a hole in the floor. He was most of the way through when there was a brilliant spark from the hole and the lights in the storage room abruptly went out.

  "It's okay," Luke told Mara as she muttered something vicious under her breath. "The lightsaber gives off enough light to see by."

  "I'm more worried that the cable might have arced to the hangar deck," she countered. "They couldn't help but notice that." Luke paused, stretching out with Jedi senses. "Nobody nearby seems to have seen anything," he told Mara.

  "We'll hope." She gestured to the half-finished cut. "Get on with it."