THE NUMBERS ON LUKE’S CHRONO READ 11:52 GST. AT PRECISELY 12:00 GST, a brigade of Void Jumpers would hit the exhaust port. That meant Luke and his team had eight minutes—eight minutes for three Jedi to do the impossible or die.
The Jedi, obviously, were hoping for the impossible.
Their objective was a small deflector shield generator that protected the main exhaust port in this corner of the Temple. It lay 150 meters ahead, at the end of a long run of ventilation ducting. Between Luke’s team and the objective were two vertical airshafts, which joined the main duct from below. Technically, the shafts were called stack-heads, but in his exhaustion Luke could no longer remember why the engineers used such an odd term. He knew only that the shafts were a pair of broad, windy chasms spaced roughly fifty meters apart, and that the grit they carried was going to make advancing down the cramped duct feel even more like being caught in a Tatooine dust storm.
But at least the duct’s maintenance lighting had been activated, so it was possible to see the biggest problem that Luke and his team faced. At the far end of the run, beyond the second stack-head, four Sith were kneeling behind a tripod-mounted heavy blaster. The deflector shield generator, of course, was behind the Sith, floating on a tethered hoversled in the middle of the exhaust port.
If Luke and his team succeeded in destroying the shield generator, several thousand elite Void Jumpers would come crashing through the exhaust port. Along with their Jedi liaisons, they would disperse throughout the Temple and open other breaches in the Sith defenses, and the rest of Bwua’tu’s space marine volunteers would flood in to finish the job.
This new assault plan would cost many more Galactic Alliance lives than the admiral’s original plan. But the Sith would quickly find themselves cornered and outnumbered, and the Jedi and their allies would, sooner or later, liberate the Jedi Temple.
Liberating the Temple would not win the war against the Sith, or even end the battle for Coruscant. But Luke and his allies were counting on it to be the turning point, when the Sith went from entrenched defenders to hunted quarry, and momentum swung back toward the Jedi.
All Luke’s team had to do was take out that shield generator.
On most days, that would have been an easy job for two Jedi Masters and Jaina Solo, who, as the Sword of the Jedi, had proven time and again that she was the combat equal of anyone in the Order.
But Luke and his two companions were not at their “normal” best. They had been fighting and retreating—mostly retreating—for far too long. At this point, they were all suffering from serious wounds. Jaina had a broken arm and probably several broken ribs. Corran had lost two fingers to a stray blaster bolt, and he was limping around on a knee swollen to the size of a hubba gourd. Luke had taken a blow to the head that still had him seeing stars, and he had a painful lightsaber burn along his left side. They were all drawing on the Force so heavily that they were virtually glowing with cell overload. Jaina had already entered a stage of Force euphoria, and it would not be long before she experienced a crash every bit as severe as a spicehead coming down from an overdose.
Corran Horn tapped Luke with a three-fingered hand, then tipped his head and croaked, “Company.”
Luke looked in the direction Corran was indicating, down the duct behind them. A lavender-skinned Keshiri woman was rounding a corner about two hundred meters away. The distance was too great to see her features plainly, but Luke had no need. He knew she had dark hair, oval eyes, and a wide, cruel smile. Her name was Korelei, and she was the reason Luke and his companions were on the verge of collapse.
The three Jedi had first encountered Korelei in the corridor outside the computer core, when they had lured the Sith away so Ben and the Horn siblings could get Rowdy inside. Noticing how the other Sith deferred to her, Luke had intentionally waited until she was on top of the first detonite mine before triggering it. Instead of shredding her and every other Sith within three meters, the blast had simply dissipated into some sort of Force shield that she had flung down.
And the situation had deteriorated from there. Korelei and her troops had continued to hound the three Jedi since, never giving them a moment’s rest, always finding them when they hid, continually herding them away from the computer core. It was hard to understand how she could be so cunning and powerful and not be the Grand Lord of the Lost Tribe, but so far she had kept her quarry too busy for such speculation. She had made it impossible for Luke’s team to reunite with Ben and the Horn siblings—or even to discover what had happened to them. Luke and Corran knew only two things about the fate of Ben, Valin, and Jysella. First, they had not succeeded in getting the blast doors open, or the primary shields down. Second, neither he nor Corran had felt anything in the Force to suggest that any of their children had died. Beyond that, the two fathers were left to fear the worst and hope for the best.
Luke drew his blaster pistol. “Time to go.”
“No-we-have-to-wait!” Jaina’s voice was rapid and full of excitement, a symptom of the Force euphoria that was the only thing preventing her collapse. “It’s still five minutes before midday.”
“I know,” Luke said. “But we can’t wait.”
“But if we blow the generator early,” Jaina insisted, “every gunner on this side of the Temple will be taking aim up the assault corridor!”
“Jaina, they are now.” Corran’s voice was gruff and impatient, a sign that he was in such bad shape himself that he didn’t seem to recognize what was happening to Jaina. “When have we done anything to surprise that she-voork chasing us?”
“We haven’t.” Luke watched Korelei pause in the duct. Perhaps sensing the blaster in his hand, she waved several of her followers ahead of her. “She’s the first Sith who actually worries me.”
“Thanks,” Jaina said. “Didn’t need to hear that.”
“Sorry.” Luke winced at his slip; obviously, he was not in top form, either. “I thought you would have noticed. But we can’t wait, not with her behind us.”
“Better to blow the shields early than not at all,” Corran agreed. “I’ll take out the generator.”
“Good,” Luke agreed. “Take Jaina with you. I’ll handle rear guard.”
“Alone?” Jaina sounded confused. “How can you stop them alone?”
“I only need to slow them, Jaina,” Luke said patiently. “Taking out the shield generator is the important thing here—the only important thing.”
Jaina started to nod—then seemed to realize what he was saying and shook her head vigorously. “No way,” she said. “I’m not leaving you to die. Not—”
“Jaina!” Corran grabbed her by the arm. “We’re all going to die, most likely. Let’s just get this done first, okay?”
Jaina’s eyes brightened with alarm. Then a sudden calmness came to her face, and Luke knew her Force euphoria was passing. She had only minutes before her body collapsed, literally burned out by the constant flood of Force energy she had been drawing through it. She gently pulled her arm from Corran’s grasp and nodded.
“Right.” She looked down at her splinted arm, then tried to make a fist and failed. “Looks like I should take the lead.”
Corran studied her in silence, no doubt taking the same meaning from her suggestion that Luke did. Jaina was offering to serve as a human shield for Corran, who at least had the use of both hands, and thus would be in the best possible shape to finish the job when he reached the Sith protecting the generator. It was a sound tactic, considering the circumstances, and it broke Luke’s heart to nod in agreement.
There could be little doubt that he was sending his own niece to her death—just as he had sent her brother Anakin to his. But what else could he do? The Jedi attack plan had failed miserably, and the price of that failure was death—his and Jaina’s and Corran’s, almost certainly. But if they could take out the shield generator and open a route into the Temple for the Void Jumpers, then at least they would be putting the Sith on the defensive.
And they would be giving Ben and Valin and Jysella a chance to make it out of the Temple alive.
As Jaina unclipped her lightsaber and turned to leave, Luke flooded his presence with feelings of respect and gratitude. He reached out to her in the Force, then said, “Master Solo?”
Jaina stopped, but didn’t turn, and for a moment Luke thought he had made a mistake of timing. But after a couple of breaths, he felt her calming and growing stronger in the Force, and she asked, “Yes, Grand Master Skywalker?”
“I just wanted you to hear me say it,” Luke said. “May the Force be with you.”
Jaina nodded without turning around. “Thanks,” she said. “That means a lot right now.”
“Glad you feel ready, Master Solo,” Corran added. “The Order needs you like it never has before.”
Jaina was quiet for a moment. Luke could tell by the sorrow in her Force aura that she was thinking of her loved ones—her parents, Han and Leia; her lost brothers, Anakin and Jacen; her niece, Allana. And most of all Jagged Fel, the man she was probably not going to live to marry. Luke almost told her to wait—that he and Corran could do this alone.
But that was not who Jaina Solo was. She was a warrior, and broken or not, she would have cut off her own arm before she allowed him and Corran to attack the Sith without her.
A moment later, Jaina nodded to Corran and said, “You’re just saying that because I’m going first.”
Without awaiting a reply, she rose into a crouch and took off down the main duct at a sprint, her footfalls booming off the metal like thunder. Corran limped after her, moving surprisingly quick for a man with a damaged knee. A few breaths later the enemy gunner’s heavy blaster opened fire, filling the run with a screeching storm of light and heat. It went silent again almost instantly as Jaina raised her broken arm and gestured, using the Force to shove the weapon and its tripod back into the main exhaust port behind it.
The Sith leapt free. For just an instant, the blaster and its tripod hung suspended in the shaft, caught between gravity and the fierce updrafts created by the huge turbocharged circulation jets that drew air through the Temple’s ventilation system. Finally, gravity won, and the weapon plummeted out of sight.
By then, Jaina was at the first stack-head, leaping the two-meter pit where it opened into the floor. The Sith unleashed a combined volley of Force lightning and blasterfire. The range was still nearly a hundred meters, so the pistol bolts ricocheted off the duct’s metal lining and lost all their energy long before reaching Jaina. But both Force lightning attacks found their target—just as she was in midair over the stack-head.
Jaina caught the first fork on her lightsaber blade. The second seemed to hit her square in the chest. Luke saw her shoulders rock back; then her momentum vanished, and she started to drop.
Corran was in the air half a step behind her, somehow keeping pace despite his swollen knee. He reached down and caught a handful of robe. They both crashed onto the floor just centimeters beyond the stack-head, then went tumbling along the duct until they rolled free of the Force lightning. At the far end of the duct, the Sith started forward toward the second stack-head to stop Jaina and Corran from leaping across.
Unfortunately, Luke couldn’t afford to watch what happened next. The time had come for him to leave Corran and Jaina to their objectives and tend to his own. He turned to find Korelei’s troop a little more than a hundred meters away, with two more stack-heads between him and them. They were charging down the main duct three abreast, their crackling lightsabers creating a moving bubble of crimson light. Korelei herself was not visible, though somewhere in the second or third rank Luke could feel a menacing presence that could only be her.
Deciding to make the same use of terrain as the Sith defending the shield generator, he stepped to the edge of the nearest stack-head and opened fire across the pit. The three Sith in the front rank began to bat his attacks back toward him, so he dropped to his belly and continued to aim at their chests—until they reached the first stack-head and jumped into the air, when he shifted his pattern and began to switch between leg and head shots.
As he had hoped, the sudden change took the Sith by surprise. One Saber took a leg hit and collapsed into a tumbling heap when he landed on Luke’s side of the pit. A second grew careless when trying to block a face shot and ended up removing the head of the woman next to him. A third Sith perished when the tumbling head struck him in the face and he fell short of the edge, then toppled into the shaft.
But the rest made it across, half a dozen of them, now only fifty meters away, with Korelei in the second rank urging them on. Luke continued to fire, switching between their legs and heads and barely slowing them down. Behind him, the screech and crackle of the battle between Jaina and Corran and the four Sith they faced was rising to a crescendo—a sure sign that Jaina and Corran were approaching the last stack-head. The impossible mission was beginning to seem more impossible every moment.
Then Jaina yelled at Corran. “Go now!”
With Korelei’s band still forty meters away, Luke glanced back in time to see Jaina pulling up short on the near side of the stack-head and using the Force to throw her lightsaber. It went spinning across the pit horizontally. Corran was about a step behind her, his own blade whirling madly as he batted blaster bolts aside.
Jaina’s lightsaber reached the far side of the pit and was quickly batted aside by one of the Sith. By then Corran was already leaping across, his blade rising into a high guard and his boot coming up for a thrust kick—which seemed almost certain to cost him a leg, until Jaina extended her hands. She hit the Sith with a Force blast that Luke had not thought she still had the strength to deliver, and all four enemies went tumbling backward.
A heartbeat later Corran was on the far side of the stack-head. Nothing remained between him and the shield generator but four still-tumbling Sith and fifty meters of duct. Luke saw him twist the hilt of his dual-phase lightsaber, then the silver blade turned purple and was suddenly a third longer as the second focusing crystal took over. The first Sith screamed, and Luke began to feel a lot better about their chances.
But on the near side of the stack-head, Jaina was done. She was on her knees, swaying in exhaustion and dangerously close to falling unconscious. Luke used the Force to pull her a safe distance away from the pit’s edge, then turned to find his own trouble almost on him. With the first rank of Sith only two steps from the other side of the stack-head, he tossed his blaster behind him and extended a hand, grabbing four Sith ankles in a crushing Force grasp. He pulled them toward the pit.
Three of the Sith found themselves suddenly falling into the stack-head. They screamed and twisted, desperately searching for something they could grab—then plummeted out of sight. The fourth Sith managed to Force hurl himself backward and land on his side of the pit. Before Luke could drag him forward, a glass parang left the scabbard hanging from the man’s belt and came flying.
Luke redirected the parang with little more than a thought, but by then Korelei and another Keshiri were in the air over the stack-head, their lightsabers ignited and their eyes fixed on Luke. He lit his own weapon and sprang to his feet, at the same time hitting them both with a Force blast that sent the male Keshiri tumbling back across the pit.
Korelei did not even feel it. She merely swung her lightsaber down to block Luke’s slash, then planted a stomp kick square in his chest and sent him sailing down the duct backward.
Luke came down five meters away, a crushing pain in his chest. He struggled to draw breath. Korelei was barely two paces away, her fingers already glowing blue with the Force lightning she was about to hurl. With neither the time nor the strength to leap up, Luke merely reached for her in the Force, then turned his lightsaber toward her midsection and pulled.
They came together in a collision that left Luke’s head spinning and his bones aching. He knew his lightsaber had struck home because he smelled scorched flesh. The hilt was wobbling against his hand as Korelei struggled to free herself of the searing blade. He felt a palm press itself to his chest, so he brought his free hand up and grabbed her arm … too late. His entire body sizzled into the joint-crushing grip of a Force lightning strike.
The agony seemed to last forever. Luke could feel his own flesh charring beneath the palm pressed to his chest; he was paralyzed by the lightning, unable to fight free or attack with a head-butt, or even flick his lightsaber blade and finish Korelei. He simply hung paralyzed, one hand clutching her arm, the other pressing the hilt to her chest, wondering how long it would take her to die.
A lot longer than Luke, apparently. Her free arm rose between them, pushing off to create some space. Then she twisted away, hurling him into the duct wall … and sliding off his lightsaber sideways. The act opened a gaping chasm in her torso.
The wound did not even slow her down. Leaving Luke to drop unharassed, she raced down the duct after Corran, who had taken out three of the shield generator’s defenders and was using a flashing onslaught of lightsaber attacks to drive the fourth Sith back toward the exhaust port. By the time Luke hit the floor, she was halfway to the next stack-head, her shoulders pivoting awkwardly atop a wound that should have left her lying in a lifeless heap ten steps earlier.
Luke had no time to contemplate the source of her toughness. He could already hear boots pounding on the duct floor as her last two followers rushed to catch up. Still trembling with the aftereffects of her Force lightning, he spun himself around to look the way she had come and saw the pair approaching the nearest stack-head. Because of the duct’s low height, their heads and shoulders were hunched over, so they looked more like a pair of baby rancors than Sith.
They must have believed Luke was still incapacitated, becaused they did not even cover each other as they leapt. Such arrogance. He waited until they were over the center of the pit, then waved a hand at the one on the left, using the Force to shove him into the one on the right. Both Sith slammed into the wall of the duct and dropped like stones, their arms flying forward as they tried to snag the edge. Luke flicked his hand in their direction, hitting them with a Force shove that rocked both men backward. They cried out in surprise—or perhaps it was anger—and vanished down the stack.
Relieved that at least some Sith died the way they were supposed to, Luke summoned his discarded blaster and turned back toward Jaina—and began to understand why Korelei was so hard to kill. From the back, the Sith she-voork appeared to be floating more than running, and the gruesome wound that Luke had opened did not seem to be bleeding so much as venting a dark, greasy fume that rose into the air and spread along the ceiling of the duct.
Korelei was no more a “normal” Keshiri female than was Luke. She was some other kind of creature.
And she was halfway to Jaina, who was kneeling in the middle of the duct, slumped over and so motionless that Luke thought she might be dead.
A cry of anguish echoed down the duct as Corran cut down the last Sith between him and the shield generator.
Korelei—or whoever, whatever she was—raised an arm, and a powerful bolt of Force lightning crackled down the run. Taken by surprise, Corran screamed and went down, then lay on the duct floor convulsing and shaking, swaddled in dancing forks of blue energy and unable to free himself.
Luke opened fire with his blaster, managing to burn several bolts into the Korelei-thing even at a distance of over thirty meters. Of course, they barely slowed her down.
Luke had to stop the Korelei-thing—he could not bring himself to even think her true name—or the Jedi’s last hope of breaching the Temple would be lost. He opened himself to the Force completely, and the energy came flooding in so fast it seemed to lift him, to carry him down the duct on a raging river of power. When he began to gain on his quarry, he fired again, this time pouring so many bolts into her legs that one actually erupted in flame.
And it made no difference.
This thing—this entity—had powers almost beyond comprehension. But he was beginning to comprehend.
“Jaina!” Luke reached out to her and was relieved to feel life in her aura. He put the power of the Force into his voice and focused his words on her. “Master Solo! The Jedi need you … now!”
Jaina did not stir.
Luke switched to fire at his quarry’s head. A bolt caught the Korelei-thing just behind the ear and went blasting out the other side, carrying with it a spray of bone and brain.
The Korelei-thing stumbled.
He fired again, but now the creature was pivoting around, throwing her free hand up to deflect the bolt and send it ricocheting back down the duct. He didn’t care, because at the other end of the run Corran was free, scrambling on his hands and knees toward the shield generator.
Luke grabbed Jaina in the Force. “Jedi Solo! Stand and fight!”
She remained motionless. Luke fired again.
The entity caught the bolt and held it, still burning, in her hand. There was a gaping scorch hole in her cheek where the earlier bolt had exited. Her lavender skin had faded to a blue-tinted alabaster, and when she locked gazes with Luke, her pupils had contracted to mere points of silver light. She smiled, her mouth stretching so wide that it reached from ear to ear, then her arm whipped forward and sent the blaster bolt sizzling straight at Luke’s eyes, and he could deny the truth no longer.
Abeloth was here.
Down in the smoky genetics lab on Hagamoor 3, Tahiri had no time to call for help. Not that Fett could have offered much. A tentacle lashed up toward the workroom where Tahiri stood, and the head floating at the end—the one that looked like flabby Moff Quillan—came flying into the transparisteel viewing panel that separated the two rooms.
Instead of bursting against the panel as Tahiri had expected, the head exploded in a purple flash of Force energy. Tahiri brought her arm up, using the Force to push against the blast wave, and barely managed to keep from being shredded by the spray of metal shards that came flying her way.
Then Tahiri was flying, being drawn out through the shattered viewing panel into the searing heat of the genetics laboratory. How much time had passed since she had checked her chrono, she could not say. Two minutes, no more than three—and she needed to keep Abeloth occupied for at least eight. Not good.
Tahiri jammed a hand into one of her vac suit thigh pockets and felt the reassuring smoothness of a thermal detonator—and then she was in Abeloth’s grasp, wrapped in a tentacle so tightly she could hardly breathe. A second tentacle wrapped itself around Tahiri’s wrist and pulled her hand out of the pocket, still holding the not-yet-armed detonator.
Abeloth spun Tahiri around, and she found herself looking into a monstrous face—a face so consumed by Force energy it barely looked human. What little flesh remained had turned as gray as ash, and it was peeling away in flakes the size of thumbnails. The nose had collapsed into open cavities, and the lips had withered into brown strips that looked like they might fall off any moment.
But the eyes were familiar—and shocking. They were the same icy blue irises that had stared at Tahiri from the witness stand as Pagorski testified—as she lied about the death of Admiral Pellaeon. But the pupils weren’t Pagorski’s. They were huge, and they seemed dark and bottomless, with no light except a pair of tiny silver points that seemed to be receding even as Tahiri looked into them, to be drawing her down into a cold and soulless Void from which there could be no escape.
Inside Tahiri’s mind, Abeloth’s wispy voice said, There is no need for explosives, child.
The tentacle squeezed Tahiri’s wrist until her hand opened and the thermal detonator dropped to the floor—still unarmed.
We are going to be together a long time, you and I.
Tahiri jammed the emitter nozzle of her lightsaber into the pit of Abeloth’s stomach. “Not if I can help it.”
She thumbed the switch and saw the tip of her sapphire lightsaber shoot out through Abeloth’s back. Guessing it would take more than a single penetrating wound to kill a Force entity, Tahiri immediately whipped her hand down, dragging the blade down through her captor’s body at an angle … or so she had intended.
When the blade failed to move, Tahiri looked down and saw that this hand, too, was wrapped in a tentacle. She tried to pull free and found that not only was she unable to move the hand, she could no longer even feel it.
That is the thing, my child, Abeloth said. You can’t help it.
A tentacle rose between them, then bent forward and began to slither up Tahiri’s chin.
“What?” Tahiri gasped. A cold terror was rising inside her, and she had to fight to avoid panicking. “What are you doing?”
Did I not say? Abeloth replied. We are going to be together. The lieutenant’s body is weak. Yours will be strong. Yours has felt the Force—
The explanation was cut short by the sharp crackle of a mini rocket, its roar rising in pitch as it approached. Tahiri glanced toward the shattered viewing panel and saw Fett standing there, the arm with the launcher still pointed down into the lab.
Then Abeloth twisted away, ripping herself open on Tahiri’s lightsaber blade, and was gone. The mini rocket arrived an eyeblink later, striking the floor in front of Tahiri … and failing to explode. Fett dipped his helmet—as though to say you’re welcome—then spun away and disappeared about two breaths ahead of Abeloth. She sprang through the hole after him, an oily dark fume pouring from the wound in her side.
It took a couple of heartbeats for Tahiri to believe she hadn’t lost her mind. It seemed impossible, but Fett had just risked his life to save hers. And he was using himself as bait, when he could have just taken his scientists and fled. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all—or maybe he just valued his word more than his life.
Either way, Tahiri was not going to waste the time he had just bought her—quite possibly with his life. She pulled two more thermal detonators from her vac suit pockets and armed them both, then set one fuse for twenty seconds and secured this detonator inside a thigh pocket. The other detonator she kept in her hand, setting the fuse for ten seconds.
By the time Tahiri finished her preparations, brilliant bursts of orange and blue were flashing in the workroom as Fett unloaded his full arsenal into Abeloth. Keeping a silent count in her head, Tahiri Force-leapt through the shattered viewing panel and turned toward the far end of the room, where the two nanotech scientists—Tarm and Yu—were still shackled and cowering in their chairs.
Fett was in front of the two scientists, crouching behind the large lab table that filled the middle of the room, firing everything he had at Abeloth. The blasterfire she simply took, her wounded body barely flinching as bolt after bolt burned through. The flames she stopped with a shield of Force energy that sent tongues of crimson fire licking in every direction but toward her. And the mini rockets she simply Force-nudged off-course, sending them streaking past to explode harmlessly against the wall.
Tahiri’s count reached five. Abeloth was facing away from her. She had leapt up on the table and was walking across it toward Fett.
Tahiri raised the thermal detonator so Fett would have at least some chance of grasping her plan, then opened her hand and used the Force to float it gently toward Abeloth.
The detonator had traveled barely half the distance when Abeloth pivoted sideways so that she could see both of her enemies, and extended a tentacle. The orb tore free of Tahiri’s Force grasp and went sailing toward Fett.
With only a few seconds left before the first detonator exploded, Tahiri went straight to Plan B, activating her lightsaber and Force-leaping to the attack. She was on Abeloth by the count of eight, hacking through a trio of tentacles—which dropped to the tabletop and promptly slithered around her ankles.
A tremendous roar filled the room as Fett activated his jetpack and came streaking toward them, one hand grasping the detonator Abeloth had sent flying toward him—which he had nabbed from the air. He jammed the detonator into the fume-oozing wound in the same instant Tahiri’s count reached nine.
She turned to leap away—then something strong clamped her biceps, and her arm nearly came out of its socket as she was jerked into the air. By the time she realized Fett had politely snagged her on the way past, they were crashing into the front corner of the workroom. Everything went white and loud, and Tahiri feared they had failed to escape the detonator’s blast radius.
That fear vanished an instant later as she hit the floor in an aching heap. Fett came down on top of her, all hard metal and sharp edges, and Tahiri realized that she had actually survived.
Had Abeloth?
Tahiri looked back toward the lab table. There was no lab table, only a five-meter hole in the floor. Drs. Frela Tarm and Jessal Yu, both utterly blast-shocked, sat staring into the hole.
Tahiri tried to move, but Fett was still lying atop her, silent and limp.
When he didn’t answer, she checked him in the Force and was actually a bit relieved to sense that he was still alive.
“Fett!”
Tahiri started to roll him off gently—until a little voice in her head reached the number fifteen, and she recalled Plan B.
“Fett!” She shoved him hard, bolstering her own strength with the Force. In Hagamoor 3’s weak gravity, the effort sent him flying. “Get off!”
Fett clanged into the ceiling and seemed to awaken. He pushed off hard and dropped back toward the floor, growling in a groggy voice, “Don’t move!”
Tahiri ignored him and opened the utility pocket where she had secured the second detonator.
“I’ve got you, scum!” Fett shouted.
Tahiri looked over to find him standing on wobbly legs—and pointing his flamethrower at her. She used the Force to point his arm in another direction, then held the thermal detonator up for him to see.
“Two seconds,” she said.
Fett’s grogginess seemed to vanish all at once. He pointed toward the shattered viewing panel that overlooked the main genetics lab.
“Get rid of—”
Tahiri whipped the detonator toward the viewing panel, using the Force to guide it and push it along. Even then, the orb had barely passed through the opening before it activated. There came a tremendous crack and a blinding white flash that seemed to eat away much of the wall and the floor in front of them … and then there came another crack, this one deep and sonorous.
The entire facility shook as though it had been hit by an asteroid, and a tremendous clatter echoed through the room as untold tons of stone rained down on the upper side of the ceiling.
Fett’s helmet turned so that the visor was fixed on Tahiri’s face. “Those are some pretty nice detonators. Where’d you get them?”
Another boom shook the workroom, and this time a two-meter circle of ceiling simply vanished into smoke. The shrill whistle of escaping atmosphere wailed through the room, and everything that was not secured to a wall or a floor—shards of metal, pieces of flimsi, datachips—began to fly toward the hole.
Tahiri grabbed the helmet off the carrying clip on her shoulder and—praying that her vac suit had not been compromised during the battle—pulled it over her head and seated it with a quick twist. Fett, whose armor included a built-in vac suit, simply started tapping keys on his forearm control pad.
“Veila!” he yelled over their suit comm. “Is there something you forgot to tell me?”
Another blast shook the facility, this time striking somewhere farther away from the main lab. Tahiri checked her chrono and saw that the barrage had started two minutes early. She hoped that Vangur had noticed the frigate moving into attack position and retreated to a safe distance.
Tahiri toggled her chin-mike. “I didn’t think it would matter,” she said. “I thought we’d be dead by now.”
“You might be,” Fett warned.
“They’re two minutes early, if it’s any consolation,” Tahiri said. “Jag must really have lit a fire under his staff.”
“Now the Imperial Navy moves fast.” Fett’s helmet turned toward the back of the workroom, where Frela Tarm and Jessal Yu were already in the last stages of decompression sickness, with blue skin and blood oozing out around the rims of their bulging eyes. “Of course.”
Fett turned toward the viewport through which the Squibs had attacked earlier, then used a mini rocket to blow the transparisteel out of its frame.
“Ladies first,” he said. “And no, I’m not going to blast you in the back. I know what happens when you try that on a Jedi.”
“I’m no Jedi.”
“Yeah, you are,” he said. Another turbolaser strike hit the facility, and a second, larger hole appeared in the workroom ceiling. He waved Tahiri toward the frame. “I’m about done being forgiving.”
Tahiri looked back toward the two nanotech scientists, who were both convulsing in their final death throes. “What about your counteragent?”
Fett shrugged, and she could feel his disappointment in the Force. “What about it?” he asked. “The sleemos who invented it are as good as dead. There’s no use joining them.”
“I suppose not,” Tahiri agreed. “But Fett, I’ve got to ask—”
“I’m not your chat-buddy,” he interrupted. “It’s time to go.”
“I know that.” Half expecting a tentacle to appear, Tahiri took one last glance toward the main genetics lab. “So why did you save me back there? You could have taken the scientists and been gone.”
“Maybe I should have, but a deal’s a deal,” Fett said. “Besides, you saved me first. I hate owing someone like you.”
“Like me?”
“A Jedi,” Fett growled. “Can we go now?”
“Sure,” Tahiri said, “but why did you risk your life to save me a second time.”
“I like being owed.” Fett stepped toward the opening. “I’m going now, Veila.”
“Hold on.” Tahiri caught his arm and turned toward the computer stations at the back of the lab. “There’s a datachip in there—and I’d like you to have it.”
Another strike landed, this time sending tons of stone tumbling down into the central cavern beyond the empty viewport.
Fett cast a meaningful glance upward, then said, “It better be some datachip.”
“Probably not, but it’s the only shot you have,” Tahiri said. “I told Yu to copy all his nanokiller files so you’d have the research when you took him and Tarm.”
Fett cocked his helmet to one side. “Why would you do that?”
Tahiri shrugged. “Because I like being owed, too,” she said. “And because I was Caedus’s apprentice at the time.”
“I haven’t forgotten.” Fett turned and started toward the back of the lab to retrieve the chip. “But that’s done between us. Okay?”
“Okay,” Tahiri said. And then they were both hurrying toward the exit, Fett ahead and Tahiri following close behind. “And thanks.”
“That still doesn’t make us buddies, Veila,” Fett said. “To me, you’re just another stinking Jedi.”
From where Jaina was kneeling in the center of the ventilation ducting, facing the side wall, she could see many things. She could see that the Keshiri woman, with her torso cut half apart and a blaster bolt exit wound where her left cheek used to be, was no ordinary Sith. She could see that Luke was driving the woman-thing straight into her. And at the far end of the run, she could see Corran Horn limping toward the edge of a giant exhaust port, mere meters from lobbing the team’s last thermal detonator into the shield generator. She could see that any second now, the Keshiri would have to turn and attempt to stop him, and Jaina could see that her chrono said it was two and a half minutes before midday, GST.
Two and a half minutes was a very long time for an emplacement gunner to adjust his aim. Too long. Jaina knew that as soon as the shield generator went down, the Sith gunnery commander would realize there was a fresh attack coming—and where. He would order all of his gunners to break off their battles with the blastboats and assault cars that had been trying to breach the Temple’s impregnable defenses for days now. He would order them to turn their attention to the exhaust port. And he would order them to fill the sky above the port with cannon bolts and missiles. Then, in two and a half minutes, the Void Jumpers would find themselves dropping into hell.
And that was why Jaina continued to ignore Luke’s order to stand and fight. Instead, she remained motionless, willing Corran to slow down, touching him through the Force and urging him to hang back. But she could feel his concern, his fear that if he delayed, he would be wasting Luke’s sacrifice by allowing the indestructible Keshiri woman to catch up. The instant the woman got past Jaina and had a clear lane to Corran, he would launch himself at the shield generator.
But Jaina also knew she could never last two and a half minutes against the Keshiri woman—not anymore. Her entire body felt like it was burning from the inside out, and she was not at all sure her muscles would obey even when the time came—as Luke kept ordering—to stand and fight. She thought she might last thirty seconds, maybe even a minute if the Force was with her. But two and a half minutes? In two and a half minutes she would be dead.
Jaina’s chrono advanced to two minutes before midday, and then a strange thing happened. The Keshiri woman wailed in pain. It was not merely the kind of scream that anyone might let out as a blaster bolt tore through a lung. This was something supernatural, a scream that seemed to echo through the Force and roll around inside Jaina’s head without ever actually passing through her ears.
The woman staggered, and when Luke blasted her again, she gathered herself to spring after Corran. Time up. Jaina stretched a hand toward her lightsaber and, summoning it into her grasp, used the Force to lift herself to her feet.
The woman surprised Jaina by stopping between her and Luke, and Jaina found herself looking into the face of death. The mouth, where it had not been blown away by Luke’s blaster bolt, was a hideous wide thing that stretched from ear to ear, and the eyes were sunken wells of darkness, at the bottom of which burned two tiny points of light.
Abeloth.
Jaina recalled the description well enough to realize whom she was facing, and she knew that her chances of surviving to see Jag again had just dropped to zero. She ignited her lightsaber and leapt into battle with a powerful mid-body strike that she hoped would drive her foe back onto Luke’s blade.
Abeloth’s hand flicked, and Jaina found herself tumbling down the duct backward. She saw the dark rectangle of a stack-head flash past beneath her; she slammed down and rolled twice before she could finally use the Force to bring herself to a stop. She came up on her knees, facing back the way she had come, and saw Abeloth leaping across the pit toward her.
Jaina brought her lightsaber across in a high guard—only to see her attacker drop down the stack and vanish from sight.
Too exhausted and confused to rise, Jaina remained kneeling where she was, half expecting a hand to come punching up through the sheet metal to grab her by the ankle and drag her to her death. Instead she saw Luke approaching, his lightsaber in one hand and his blaster in the other. When he reached the edge of the stack-head, he extended his arm and blind-fired a flurry of bolts after Abeloth. Then he peered cautiously over the side … and looked confused.
He looked back toward Jaina. “What happened?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” Jaina said. “I thought you—”
“Not me,” Luke said, shaking his head. “It was something else—something we don’t understand yet, I think.”
“Something else we don’t understand about her?” Jaina replied. “Great.”
Then she remembered Corran—and that she had not yet heard the crackle of a thermal detonator. Jaina checked her chronometer. It was still a minute and a half before midday. She spun around and was relieved to see Corran standing at the edge of the exhaust port, looking back toward them—and still holding the detonator in his hand.
“Now?” he called. “My chrono is acting up.”
Jaina checked her own chrono again, then shook her head. “Not yet.” Guessing that it would take her just about a minute to cover those last fifty meters, she motioned for Luke to join her, then rose and began to hobble down the duct toward the shield generator.
“Let’s do it together.”
“Good thinking,” Luke called. “The med-evac team will be faster if we all collapse in one place.”