Face shouted that information into his comlink.
“Did she hear you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell her it’s moving.”
Far below, the treads spun into action. The construction droid’s machinery whined as the gigantic machine lurched into action … and then crashed into the duracrete wall before it.
Unable to hear, Mara bit off a curse. She tucked her comlink away and jumped back into the fight, deflected a pair of thudbugs, took a swipe at Lord Nyax’s hand; its arm rotated and it caught the attack on its lightsaber blade.
Luke flipped over the pale thing, striking as he went; his blow was blocked.
Tahiri, in front, lunged forward … and stumbled, right into the path of a knee blade. Mara reached out, an effort to shove with the Force, knowing that she was too late, knowing that the knee-blade would emerge in a fraction of a second from the back of Tahiri’s skull—but Tahiri whipped to the side, still in control, still in balance, even as Luke crashed feetfirst into Lord Nyax’s neck, forcing its head down toward its own knee-blade.
The blade turned itself off. Lord Nyax’s head passed through empty space. Luke, backflipping to his feet, offered up an expression of bafflement and frustration.
Mara sighed. It had been a feint, an effort to trick the thing into spearing itself with its own weapons. But its designers had been too thorough. There were fail-safes.
The floor rocked under their feet. Mara felt the crash from below as much as she heard it.
Lord Nyax leapt upward a half-dozen meters and then, impossibly, just hung there in space, smiling down at the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong.
Mara realized, a fraction of a second too late, that it had merely grabbed the same cord by which she and Luke had descended. Then the floor went out from under her.
The construction droid plowed into the wall before it, smashing steel and duracrete out, allowing blue-white sunlight to spill in. It lurched and wobbled as it continued, internal balance compensators having a hard time keeping up with the irregularity of the surface it moved across.
The catwalk under Face’s feet rippled. “C’mon!” He turned back toward the stairs they’d descended, but the catwalk mounting on the corner nearest the droid’s exit hole snapped and dropped, snapping the next mounting toward him and the next mounting after that. The catwalk fell all along one wall, except for the mounting behind Face and Kell, turning their footing into a steep ramp.
Face managed to get his hands on the catwalk railing. As his feet went out from under him, he held on. He looked up, could see Kell holding on above him, could see the ceiling of this chamber split and collapse as one of its supporting walls gave way under the droid’s destructive exit.
Bodies began spilling through the split in the ceiling. Some were bodies of workers. Others were Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Then there were the bodies of his Jedi friends.
As he felt his footing give way, Luke sprang, with the last bit of traction the flooring gave him, toward Mara and Tahiri. He hit them like an overly aggressive ballplayer, catching one in each arm.
The patch of floor they were heading toward opened, giving him nothing to land on. With the Force, he shoved at his own back, propelling him through the rent, toward the metal wall he saw before him, the wall and the catwalk there …
He saw that their arc was going to miss the catwalk. They would hit the wall and plummet. But in that instant, the left end of the catwalk broke free of its moorings and dropped, bringing it beneath their ballistic arc. A moment later, they hit the swaying thing, bending it down still farther, but Mara and Tahiri grabbed its trailing end and held on with their considerable strength.
Gasping for breath, Luke looked around. He and both of the others had switched off their lightsabers midleap. “Good instincts,” he said.
“Good teacher,” Tahiri said. She looked up, past Luke. “Hey, Face, is that you?”
“Hold on, hold on, I’ll get a line down to you.”
Face tied off the cord he’d once used to safeguard his passage across an elevated walkway. He dropped the other end down the swaying catwalk toward the Jedi. In moments, Luke, Mara, and Tahiri swarmed up to join them. The construction droid was only just pulling out onto the avenue beyond the building.
“Did you see Viqi Shesh?” Mara asked.
Kell jerked a thumb up toward the stairwell behind them. “She was still at the bottom of the steps when the big boom hit. She took off.”
Mara clambered up to the base of the stairs. “I’m going after her.”
“Mara, no.” Luke’s voice did not carry a plea; his tone conveyed simple truth. “Lord Nyax is more important. I can feel him moving up there. Moving away. We have to go after him, bring him down.”
Mara sighed, shut her eyes. After a moment, she nodded.
“I lost her, I’ll go after her,” Kell said.
Face pressed the locator into his hand. “No. You go after this, Mechanic Boy. It could be our ticket out of here.”
“You go after her, then.”
Face gestured toward the construction droid, which leaned at an alarming angle toward the next building over as it turned rightward onto the avenue. “I’m going after that. Nyax sent it off for a purpose. We need to know what that purpose is.”
Mara pounded her fist on the bottom step, then stood. “Let’s go,” she said.
Up on the half-collapsed floor above, Denua Ku hung, unable to climb, unable to descend.
A three-meter length of rebar emerged from his gut. It was slick with his blood. He knew that his lung had been punctured.
The pain was extraordinary. He did not mind pain, did not fear it, but it was beginning to fade in a way that suggested imminent death rather than recovery.
In the silence left by the infidel machine’s departure, he heard feet padding softly across the remaining floor. He looked up. Viqi Shesh, most of the way around the chamber toward the hole by which the pale monster had entered, her hands tied behind her back, paused and looked at him.
“Tell them I died well,” Denua Ku said.
“I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell them you died whining, that you died begging for infidel medicines, anything to alleviate the pain.”
Denua Ku snarled. He reached for his pouch, for his last remaining razorbugs.
Viqi laughed at him. Before he could bring out the weapons, she reached the corner and ducked through the hole there.
Lord Nyax led the three Jedi on a high-speed run through the ruins of Coruscant. He could travel faster than they could, because from time to time he’d simply leap from one building to the next one over, usually a leap too great for them to match. Yet they could always feel him in the distance, sense his movements, sense a feeling of expectation and even anxiety from him.
Once they caught up very close. The bodies of five lightly scarred Yuuzhan Vong warriors, young ones, lay in a brightly lit corridor, their wounds still smoking. In the distance, the Jedi could hear the footsteps of Lord Nyax fleeing.
“Where’s he going?” Mara asked.
Luke thought about where they started this fight, where they’d been since then. “It’s a big arc. Maybe part of a big circle.”
“Why?” Tahiri asked. She breathed more easily than Luke or Mara, the energy and resilience of youth standing her in good stead.
“He’s not fleeing,” Luke said. “He could have left us behind some time ago. So he wants us to follow him. Into a trap?” He shook his head. “He would have gone straight. No, he’s just leading us on a chase. A diversion.”
“So where does he want us not to go?” Tahiri asked.
Mara turned abruptly, headed back the way they’d come. “To wherever it sent that construction droid.” She pulled out her comlink. “Mara to Face. Come in, Face.”
Face ducked behind a pillar between two smashed-in panels of transparisteel. He got out of sight just in time. Outside, a wingpair of coralskippers flew by at his exact altitude—the same al
titude as the top level of the combat droid. “Face here. I hear you.”
“Are you still with the construction droid?”
“Well, yes and no.” He leaned out of the shattered viewport next to him. In the distance, he could see the coralskippers hovering outside the mound of rubble the construction droid made when it plowed into the side of a giant ziggurat of buildings. “It’s ahead of me. It’s digging through construction. Moving a lot faster than those things are rated to move, I’ll bet. I’m cut off from it for the moment. I’m going to have to track it from floors above and hope they don’t fall out from under me.”
“Leave a tracking signal open. We need to find you.”
“Done. Face out.” He sat there for a few more moments, gasping in the warm, moist, cloying air of Coruscant, then rose again. “I hate this job.”
The Jedi circled around the growing accumulation of coralskippers hovering outside the collapsed hole the construction droid had bored into the ziggurat’s side. On an upper floor half a kilometer from the gathering, they met up with Face and peered at the ziggurat. “Interesting,” Luke said.
“What?” said Tahiri.
“This is one of the monolithic blocks that served the Old Republic as a government center,” Luke said. “A lot of it belonged to secondary bureaus, to embassies and legations from non-Republic worlds, and to businesses and organizations more or less allied with the Old Republic.”
Tahiri gave him a skeptical look. “How do you know that?”
“Because, youngster, the few surviving databases and filemaps that mentioned the old Jedi Temple indicated that it was—” Luke pointed. “—somewhere there. I’ve been all through it, kilometers and kilometers of it. By the time I got to look at it, of course, Emperor Palpatine had long destroyed every remaining trace of the Jedi.”
“Maybe not every trace,” Mara said. “Why do you suppose Lord Nyax is digging there?”
“Because …” Luke considered. “Because he has some kind of implanted memories or instincts? Perhaps he wants to destroy any remnant of the Temple because of lingering emotions. Or maybe he knows about some portion of it that was never on the public databases.”
“Either way,” Mara said, “we have to find out.”
Luke smiled. “One of the advantages about having been all through that region is that I know quite a few ways in and out. C’mon, let’s bypass these skips.”
Deep in the guts of the ziggurat, the construction droid leaned against the sloping black wall, driving its plasma cutters into the smooth surface, hammering the glossy wall with its mechanical limbs. Chunks of dense stone fell away from the impact points, but the wall yielded only very slowly.
Luke and his companions peered at the action through a crack in a duracrete wall a couple of stories up. Much of the construction that should have been beneath them had collapsed as soon as the construction droid had plowed its way to this point, meaning that the creaking and sagging of the floor beneath them heralded a further collapse that was probably imminent.
“What’s beyond that wall, farmboy?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t know this area was here. I’m not sure there were any visible accesses into it before. Hey, we have Yuuzhan Vong coming.”
Despite the danger that her extra weight might present, Mara leaned in over her husband’s shoulder to look. Yuuzhan Vong warriors were scrambling over the rubble and rushing toward the construction droid.
Coruscant survivors rushed out of the construction droid’s base to meet them. Unarmed, ill-fed, they still had a tremendous edge in numbers over the warriors, and Luke saw several of the Yuuzhan Vong go down under struggling masses of bodies. The stronger survivors picked up chunks of stone and brained the troops.
More Yuuzhan Vong entered. More survivors swarmed in, now coming from surrounding areas of rubble instead of just from the droid’s base.
Luke looked back at the others. “He’s near. He’s calling to them. Calling for help.”
Face pulled his helmet off, touched his forehead. He looked troubled. “I know. I can feel him. In my head. I want to go down there.” He looked up into their worried expressions, offered them a wan smile. “Well, mostly I don’t. But I can feel the draw.”
“You’re strong,” Tahiri said. “Well fed. You have hope still. He’d have to exert himself more to control you. But I suspect he can. I’m not sure he can’t control us.”
“Kell to Face.” The voice, small and tinny, floated up from Face’s helmet.
The Wraith leader pulled his helmet up beside his features. “Face here.”
“I’ve found the source of the locator signal. We’re in luck. It’s a spaceworthy transport. It’s our passage back to Borleias.”
“What kind of condition is it in?”
“It’s ready to go. Oh, it’s blocked in by several tons of rubble.”
“Can you handle that?”
“What’s my bag full of?”
“That’s what I thought.”
Luke looked again at the battle raging below, a battle where his only opponent of consequence was the creature they called Lord Nyax. “Face, our mission is over. I want you to round up the others, get to that transport, and prepare to leave Coruscant.”
Face grinned at him as though he were waiting for a punch line. “And what about you silly Jedi types?”
“We’re going down there.” Luke closed his eyes, just for a moment, as the weight of that decision pressed upon him. He was about to lead his wife and a teenager into a situation he wasn’t sure he could handle, a situation that was likely to get them all killed. He looked at Face again. “If we die here, the other Jedi need to know about Lord Nyax. You’re going to tell them.”
Face thought about it, his smile disappearing. “I normally try to argue against suicide missions.”
“But you know what Lord Nyax can do.”
“Yes. So all I can do is wish you luck.”
Face left.
Luke took a couple of deep breaths, turned to the others. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Tahiri said.
Mara just nodded.
Luke ignited his lightsaber and sliced into the gap he’d been peering through, widening it.
Lord Nyax watched as his workers swarmed toward the warriors he could not sense. He did not like the fact that he could not feel them, but he did enjoy seeing his workers kill them—though it was usually at a cost of twenty or thirty workers per warrior.
But he was summoning more workers from all around. No matter how well they hid in the ruined undercity, his call reached them and forced many, most, to climb free of their hiding holes, to stumble and then walk and then race toward the scene of this conflict.
And he could feel the wall weakening. Soon it would give way completely. The woman who had told him of this wonderful machine—he thought she was up at its summit, making it move—had been right.
Then he sensed something and looked up. A bar of energy flashed, and three people fell out of a hole in the ceiling.
They drifted laterally to the top of the slope of the black wall, riding it down, using their power to slow their descent, keep their balance, increasing the friction between the clothes on their feet and the wall’s surface.
Lord Nyax moved to be beneath them. He ignited his blades, all of them. He knew they’d be here, knew it from the moment they stopped chasing him. He wished they’d go away instead of tiring him.
The foremost of them, the male, slid down until he was not far above Lord Nyax’s reach, then leapt free, somersaulting to land somewhere behind him. Lord Nyax reached out as the male came down; he slid a sharp-edged piece of stone toward the male’s landing area, timing it so that the stone would shear through the male’s legs. But the male slowed his descent and rotation, landing atop the stone instead of in front of it, and bounded off, toward Lord Nyax. Meanwhile, the women leapt clear of the stone, spinning down toward him, igniting their weapons as they came.
Lord Nyax leapt fr
ee of the center of their formation, bounding up over the head of the red-haired female. He hit the stone wall feetfirst, shoved off, and rotated to a landing many steps away from the three pests.
Then he made a thought and drove it into their heads.
It hit Luke like a razorbug fired straight through his forehead. Luke staggered under the pain. His back hit the irregular floor. He waved his lightsaber up and in front of him, a defensive form, but there was no follow-up blow for him to counter.
There was, however, a new priority. He was to switch off his lightsaber and then go attack the Yuuzhan Vong. He leapt to his feet and turned his weapon off. He could see Mara and Tahiri doing the same.
But that would mean dying—and, worse, failing.
No, it’s what he had to do.
No, he couldn’t do that.
He stood, frozen by the dilemma, straining against the thought that filled his mind, the thought that was slowly driving out every other consideration.
So he did what he had to whenever he was confused. He reached out, touching Mara in the Force. He didn’t have to open his mind to her; his mind was as open as it could be, held open by Lord Nyax’s thought. He just had to reach for her, and she was there, locked in as much confusion and pain as he.
She had no answer for him. He reached for Tahiri and found her to be identically immobile.
He felt Lord Nyax grow impatient, then angry, and Lord Nyax expressed his anger through pain. Luke felt his fingers and toes, hands and feet, shins and forearms explode. He fell, writhing, then stared in amazement as he realized that his limbs were still attached—the pain was real, but no injury had caused it. He could feel Mara’s pain, feel Tahiri’s.
There was something different about Tahiri’s. He looked over to where she lay.
She was rolling to her stomach, forcing her way to her feet. Off-balance, weaving as she stood, she nevertheless managed to pick up her lightsaber and ignite it. She looked at Nyax, anger blazing in her eyes. “I know something about pain you don’t,” she said. “Pain drowns other people. I just swim in it.” She took a step toward her tormenter.
Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 22