THIRTY-FIVE

A pillar of orange rocket exhaust arced out of Kr’s frozen tangle of ethmane crystals, emerging from an ice-lined shaft more than a kilometer across. This column was far larger than any others Luke and Mara had seen, its heat raising a wall of steam as it bent toward the Skywalkers and streaked low over the moon’s frozen surface.

Confident they had finally found what they were looking for, Luke and Mara banked away and began to accelerate, drawing the orange column after them. Luke would have liked to make a reconnaissance pass to be certain the huge shaft was the hangar opening he believed it to be, but Kr’s tortured terrain and icy blue light neutralized the speed and camouflage of their StealthXs, and both of their starfighters had already taken too much of a beating to risk another confrontation.

Two seconds later, Luke’s R9 astromech unit—sitting in for an operationally challenged R2-D2—sounded an attack alarm. Luke felt a start from Mara as an explosion rocked her StealthX; then his own starfighter gave a sharp double buck. The R9 pointedly informed Luke they were being ambushed by Gorog dartships, and the tactical display showed half a dozen of the little craft behind them, rising from the sensor-blocking depths of the frozen ethmane jungle.

Luke continued toward the Falcon, flying low over Kr’s feathery jungle of ethmane crystals. Ideally, he would have climbed for open space where their StealthXs would have full advantage, but the tactical display showed a second swarm of dartships flying top cover, in perfect position to stop them.

The Skywalkers had traveled barely a kilometer when another column of dartships rose out of the ethmane jungle ahead.

Luke sensed Mara’s alarm almost before his own. They had stayed a little too long, and now Gorog was boxing them in. The swarm spread out before them, creating an orange wall of rocket exhaust. The Skywalkers began to pour cannon fire into the swirling mass, trying to clear a lane for their StealthXs.

It was like trying to blast a tunnel through a cloud. Every time they created a hole, it filled instantly.

As the Skywalkers drew closer, the orange wall resolved itself into a pattern of fiery whirling disks, each with the black dot of a dartship at its heart. Mara continued to fire, and Luke followed her lead. The tactic clearly had no chance of success, but Mara had a plan. Luke was almost sure of it.

Finally, when the swarm was so close that the dartships had grown into tiny cylinders, glowing streaks of missile propellant began to reach out toward the Skywalkers. Mara took the lead and pulled up, a loose wing stabilizer shuddering under the strain. The two nearest swarms—the one blocking their escape and the one pursuing from behind—nosed up to give chase.

Stick close, she warned.

Suddenly Mara dropped the nose of her StealthX. Luke followed so quickly that he almost beat her, but the Dark Nest was not fooled. The dartships simply leveled off and continued to close on the Skywalkers.

Luke expected Mara to pull up again and outclimb their pursuers, gambling that the StealthXs could withstand a barrage of Killik chemical explosives long enough to fight through the top-cover swarm. Instead, she continued to dive. The ice jungle’s feathery canopy came up rapidly. Luke began to wonder when she intended to pull up.

She did not.

A flurry of cannon bolts lanced out from Mara’s StealthX, instantly superheating the ice crystals in front of her and filling Luke’s forward view with brown steam. He switched to instrument flying and followed her through the cloud into the snarled depths of the ice jungle. Flash-frozen spires of ethmane stood at all angles, glowing translucent blue with Gyuel’s distant light, reaching out to embrace each other with delicate arms of hoarfrost.

Mara flipped her StealthX up on edge and slipped between two ethmane pillars, then crashed through a curtain of frost and sent up a glittering cloud of ice particles. Luke ducked under a frozen arch, then shot ahead of Mara into the lead.

He offered his apologies through their Force-bond, along with an image of the loose stabilizer he had seen on her wing.

Whatever, she answered.

Luke felt a sudden compulsion to swing back toward the nest and wondered if his wife had gone crazy.

Mara urged him to think. Gorog expected them to run for the Falcon.

Luke quickly brought them around. It would be safer to go in the opposite direction…and sneak a look at the nest. He focused all his attention on the frozen jungle ahead and began a Jedi breathing exercise, allowing his mind to race forward through the ethmane spires, to find its own route down the twining passages and rolling channels. Time seemed to slow. He surrendered his steering arm to the Force, and his hand began to move of its own accord, guiding the StealthX into one shimmering gap after another, bobbing over blue curtains, ducking beneath long fronds of frost, blasting holes through impassable walls of ice.

Mara stayed close on his tail, almost joining her hand to his through their Force-bond, and thirty seconds later they shot through a small icy portal into an irregular blue shaft barely broad enough for Luke to bank the StealthX into a tight inside spiral.

Stang!

Luke felt Mara’s fear through the Force, and his heart jumped into his throat. Then, as he continued his own spiral around the small shaft, he saw the jagged hole where her StealthX had bounced off the icy wall. His tactical display showed her still on his tail, but weaving badly.

Mara?

Fine! she answered.

Luke continued to bank, setting the StealthX up on one wing so that he could look up out one side of the cockpit and down out the other. He estimated they were about two kilometers deep, though that was impossible to confirm with instruments. This far down inside the frozen moon, the StealthX’s sensor range extended only as far as the walls of frozen ethmane.

Below, the shaft continued to narrow and curved back under itself, concealing the nest entrance—assuming it was down there—behind a wall of blue ice. Aside from the walls, which had been polished smooth by the heat-and-freeze cycle of countless rocket launches, there was no sign of dartships.

Mara seemed worried by how quiet it was.

Luke didn’t like it, either. Gorog would have left something to defend the nest. The hair on his neck began to rise, and he decided they had seen enough.

Mara, now directly opposite him on the other side of the shaft, agreed and started to climb. Her shields were flickering, and that loose stabilizer was flapping around beneath her wing.

Luke fell in behind her; then an attack alarm sounded and a laser cannon began to fire blue bolts up the shaft. He felt another jolt of emotion from Mara, this time anger, as her StealthX took a trio of hits. Her shields went down with the second, and the ends of both starboard wings vanished with the third.

Luke did not waste time looking at his tactical display. He simply dropped the StealthX into a dive and started firing and then saw the nose of Alema’s stolen skiff, just slipping back out of sight. He continued to fire for a second longer, pouring his rage and disbelief at her through the Force, until the bend in the shaft vanished behind a curtain of ethmane steam. He sensed no shame or sorrow in the Twi’lek, only the enormous, murky presence of the Dark Nest.

When no more cannon bolts rose out of the fog, Luke pulled up into a tight banking turn that would allow him to keep an eye on the shaft in both directions. Mara was still above him, her StealthX crawling around the shaft in a wobbling circle, both starboard engines shut down and the stumps of her starboard wings vibrating badly.

Mara?

Everything good, she reported.

It didn’t look good. Luke was about to tell her to try climbing when the mouth of the shaft—two kilometers above—began to brighten with the orange glow of dartship rockets.

Mara brought her StealthX out of its circle and fired at the icy wall, trying to punch through into the ethmane jungle beyond.

The stumps of her starboard wings tumbled away in a cascade of sparks and mini-explosions. Then she slipped into a spin and flashed past Luke, vanishing into the ethmane steam below.

Luke felt her stretching out to him, clinging to their Force-bond as she fought to bring the StealthX under control. He poured reassurance into their bond, trying to let her know that he would not abandon her, that he was coming right behind her. Then he reached for Leia in the Force, pouring out his alarm and picturing a crashing starfighter, and dived after Mara.

He caught up to Mara on the other side of the fog. She was using a combination of the Force and power manipulations to keep the StealthX under control, corkscrewing down the shaft in an ever-tightening spiral, pushing the damaged craft to its limits and a little beyond to stay ahead of the approaching dart-fighters.

The shaft twined its way another seven kilometers into the ice moon, growing ever smaller and more twisted. Finally the squarish, cave-like opening of a launching bay appeared at the bottom of the shaft, perhaps a kilometer away.

Luke armed a pair of proton torpedoes, then urged Mara to do the same. They would need to give the Falcon something to look for.

With pleasure!

Mara stabilized her spin just long enough to send a pair of proton torpedoes streaking toward the cavern mouth. Under other circumstances, Luke might have felt a pang of concern knowing that Alema’s skiff had entered the hangar only a short time before. But under these conditions—even understanding that she was under the control of the Dark Nest—he felt nothing. Whatever happened, the Twi’lek had brought it on herself.

A brilliant flash filled the cavern mouth as Mara’s torpedoes detonated inside, and suddenly the last five hundred meters of shaft were filled with glittering ice shards. Luke activated his targeting computer, but between Mara’s wildly gyrating StealthX and interference from the ethmane ice, he was unable to get a lock.

Mara. Luke moved his finger to the torpedo trigger. Stay left.

The first barrage of turbolaser fire fanned down from the Hapan batteries, and Kr was suddenly veiled behind a curtain of crimson energy. The Chiss answered with a volley of missiles, and a thousand propellant trails rose to bar the way forward. Han pulled up short and rolled the Falcon away from the sudden fury.

“No!” Leia’s eyes were fixed on her display, where a navigation lock had been guiding them toward the detonation site of the Skywalkers’ proton torpedoes. “Luke and Mara need help.”

“And they won’t get it if we fly into that mess,” Han said. In fifty years of flying, he had never seen a battle this compact before. There had to be a hundred capital ships fighting over a moon only eighty kilometers long. “Even I’m not that good.”

“Yes, Han, you are.”

“Look, I’m not leaving,” Han said. “We just have to find another way in.”

Leia’s voice grew sober. “Han, I think they’re down.”

“Down?” A leaden ball formed in Han’s stomach. “What do you mean, down?”

“Crashed,” Leia said. “They may need—”

Han swung the Falcon around and started back toward Kr.

“—extraction,” Leia finished.

“How did that happen?” Han demanded. Space ahead had become a flashing sheet of turbolaser fire, striped at irregular intervals by growing lines of missile flame. “They’re Jedi, blast it! In StealthXs! They were just supposed to find the nest and call us.”

“Things go wrong even for Jedi.” Leia’s eyes were fixed out the viewport. “Threepio, break out the EV suits.”

“EV suits?” C-3PO squealed. “If we go EV out there, we’re doomed! The odds of surviving are…why, they’re entirely incalculable!”

“Still better than with no suit,” Han said. “Do as she says. We may need suits to recover Luke and Mara.”

“As you wish, Captain Solo,” C-3PO said. “But I really don’t think we’re going to survive long enough to reach them.”

The sheet of flashing energy ahead brightened rapidly as the Falcon drew closer, and the canopy tinting darkened. Han looked to his instruments and found nothing but electromagnetic static, its density increasing as space ahead grew more brilliant.

“Sweetheart,” Han asked as casually as he could manage, “do you think you can do that Jedi thing—”

“Quiet.” Leia was already staring out the forward viewport with a faraway expression in her eyes. “I’m concentrating.”

Han waited for instructions. Leia continued to concentrate.

A web of tiny efflux trails—all that was visible of the Chiss and Hapan starfighters vying for control of the attack routes—began to lace the darkened canopy. Even that faded when the Falcon entered the battle zone.

A shudder ran through the decks as Meewalh opened up with the belly turret against some hazard Han could not see. Then the attack alarms shrieked as cannon fire pounded their lower shields.

“Who was that?” Han demanded over the intercom.

Meewalh informed him it was a starfighter, but she had no idea whose. All she had been able to see was a blurry tail of ion exhaust.

“Uh, sweetheart?”

“Concentrating!”

The invisible fist of a turbolaser blast glanced off the Falcon’s port side, instantly overwhelming the shields and sending her spinning out of control. The cockpit erupted with damage alarms, and Leia began to scream.

It took Han a moment to realize she was finally giving him instructions. “Port! Go port!”

He steadied the Falcon—relieved to see that he still could—then swung hard to port.

“Threepio, give me a damage report.”

The droid dropped an EV suit on the deck. “We’velostour- auxiliaryaccelerationcompensator!” he babbled. “Andourportdockingringiscompromised. We’llnevergetoutofthisinonepiece!”

“The damage is minor,” Saba said over the intercom. “This one will see to it.”

Han frowned. Saba still had a piece of skull missing under that thick hide of hers. She had talked Luke into bringing her along only by threatening to come anyway, but he knew better than to protest. It just wasn’t smart to question a Barabel’s ability to do anything.

Leia ordered, “Climb!”

Han pulled back on the yoke and felt the Falcon buck as something exploded under her.

“Dive!”

Han pushed the yoke forward and was nearly thrown out of his seat as a turbolaser blast blossomed just to their stern.

“Starboard, gentle.”

Han swung to starboard, and the red streak of a missile shot past the Falcon’s blackened canopy.

“Dead ahead, fast.”

Han pushed the throttles into overdrive. The canopy grew suddenly transparent again, and still he could not see anything. There was only a thick brown fog, blossoming here and there with cannon fire and laced with the blue trails of starfighter ion drives.

“They melted it!” Han gasped. “They melted an entire—”

“Instruments, Han!”

Han glanced down and found the reassuring sight of a space battle on his tactical display. What looked to be about ten dozen squadrons of starfighters were whirling around Kr, maneuvering for position and pouring laserfire at each other. A single Chiss cruiser was sliding quietly around the moon’s bulk, playing a game of moog-and-rancor with a pair of Hapan Novas.

Kr’s surface, a sensor-blocking layer of frozen ethmane, was literally disappearing before their eyes. Every time a stray cannon blast struck ground, a thumb-sized area of ice vanished from Han’s display.

Leia found the fading rad signature of the Skywalkers’ proton torpedoes and reestablished their navigation lock. Han slipped the Falcon under the moon, streaking toward their destination only a hundred meters below Kr’s jagged belly. Their goal lay about ten kilometers ahead of the Chiss cruiser, so he chose a slow, direct route that would take them past its weapons turrets at a respectable distance. In a battle like this, the only way not to get shot at was to make clear you were no kind of threat.

As the Falcon neared the cruiser, a flight of clawcraft dropped out of the fog to look her over.

C-3PO opened an emergency channel. “This is the Millennium Falcon hailing all combatants. We are neutral in this conflict. Please direct your fire away from us! I repeat: we are neutral!”

The clawcraft dropped back into the kill zone behind the Falcon and hung there. The navigation lock slowly drifted toward the center of the screen.

The stolen skiff was floating amid the rest of the wreckage, a pile of flattened durasteel flickering in the light of Mara’s two functioning spotlights. There was no way to tell whether Alema and Ben’s Killik “friend” had been aboard when the proton torpedoes eviscerated the launching bay, but Mara was betting the pair had escaped. So far, she had seen no signs of the Twi’lek’s body among the scorched pieces of chitin tumbling past her canopy, and Alema was a Jedi. She would have sensed what was about to happen and raced for shelter.

Mara guided her ailing starfighter through a jagged breach in the launching bay’s rear wall. Her spotlights stabbed through a dusty cloud of floating rubble, illuminating a maintenance hangar with a bank of shattered dartship berths on the far wall. She sealed her EV suit and dropped her StealthX to the deck, skidding to a lopsided landing between the broken remnants of two egg-shaped storage tanks.

Knowing that Luke would be covering her from his own craft, Mara sprang out of the cockpit and tumbled all the way to the ceiling, coming to a rest beside a spitcrete ridge that would have served the Gorog as a sort of upside-down catwalk. When no attacks came, she exchanged her lightsaber for her blaster and covered Luke while he landed.

A large part of her—the part that was Ben’s mother—would have preferred him to rejoin the Falcon and come back with the Solos and the heavy artillery. But she had known from the moment her R9 died that would never happen; Luke would no more have left her alone than she would have him. Besides, this wasn’t so bad. It had been her and Luke against a world more times than she could count, and they always won.

Luke took cover inside the shattered base of a storage tank, then Mara pushed off the ceiling and joined him. They were taking care to stay out of their StealthXs’ spotlights, but there was enough ambient light to see his lips pressed tight together through his faceplate.

“What do you think?” Mara spoke over their suit comm. She wanted to keep her Force-senses clear for alerting her to danger. “Try to squeeze into your Stealth and sneak out?”

Luke shook his helmet. “There won’t be any slipping past that dartship swarm out there. As a matter of fact…” He turned toward his StealthX and commed his R9. “Arnie, go find a dark corner and—”

The command came to a sudden end as the orange glow of rocket exhaust lit the launching bay entrance. Mara grabbed Luke’s arm and kicked off the floor, using the Force to pull them toward a ruptured door membrane in the back of the maintenance hangar. Arnie started to tweedle a question, but the comm channel abruptly dissolved into static as a trio of bright flashes lit the chamber.

There was no boom, of course, but Mara suddenly grew uncomfortably warm inside her vac suit, and the shock wave hurled her and Luke headlong through the door membrane into the darkened utility passage beyond.

With no gravity or friction to slow them down, they did not stop until they slammed into a wall two seconds later. Mara hit back-first, driving the air from her lungs but not breaking anything she could feel. A sharp crack over the comm suggested that Luke had impacted on his helmet. She started to ask if he was okay, then sensed him wondering the same thing about her and knew he was.

“Check air and suit,” Luke said, righting himself.

The reminder was unnecessary. The heads-up status display inside Mara’s faceplate was already glowing, though she did not remember activating it.

“I’m good,” she said. “You?”

“Have a hisser,” he reported, indicating a small air leak. “But we’d better look for it later.”

He pointed back toward the maintenance hangar. Thirty meters away, the orange glow of rocket exhaust was flickering against a section of curved tunnel, dimming and brightening as dartships landed and shut down their engines and more poured into the hangar behind them.

“I don’t recall seeing any EV suits in the Taat hangars,” Mara said hopefully.

“No—but a carapace is a good start on a pressure suit.”

“Killjoy.” Mara turned her wrist over and entered a four-digit code on her forearm command pad. The StealthX’s self-destruct alarm began to gong inside her helmet, and the heads-up display on her faceplate began a twenty-second countdown. “Come on, Skywalker. Let’s stay on the move until we hear from the Falcon.”

Mara turned away from the hangar and started into the frozen darkness ahead.