TWENTY-FIVE

The interior of Stomper One filled with soft whirrings and electronic chirpings as the assault shuttle’s passengers began their final systems checks. Each soldier worked his servomotors and confirmed the calibration of his targeting systems with two adjacent units, then executed a quick comm scan to be certain he was receiving on all channels. Because this platoon was assigned directly to the assault commander—Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker—they all performed a vocabulator check as well. The phrase “check sound, check Basic” reverberated through the passenger cabin thirty-two times—always in the ultradeep, ultramale version of Lando Calrissian’s voice, which remained the standard for the entire line of YVH combat droids.

Sitting behind the controls of the assault shuttle, Luke found the mechanical symphony strangely isolating. As the sole biological unit in the assault brigade, he had already felt a bit out of place, and the stark efficiency of his YVH 5-S Bugcrunchers left him feeling more alone than he cared to admit. The droids would perform as well as—if not better than—living beings, but there was nothing like a little laughter to calm a soldier’s nerves before combat.

As soon as the YVHs had finished their vocabulator checks, they began to spray vacuum-resistant lubricant into one another’s joints. The whole assault shuttle was quickly filled with an oily-sweet odor that gave Luke watery eyes and a queasy stomach. He had never expected to miss the smell of another soldier’s sweat quite so much.

The gravelly voice of the Megador’s Tactical Control officer came over the flight-deck speaker. “Task Force Stomper cleared for assault. Be advised: Colony capital ships and dartship swarms attempting to return to support Ackbar. Time of breakthrough uncertain.”

“Acknowledged.”

Luke did not bother to check his tactical display for a tally of the enemy vessels—the number was going to be high, and it did not matter. In fifteen minutes, he would either be aboard the Ackbar fighting Raynar, or the eternal war that Jacen had foreseen would be erupting into full blossom.

Luke sealed his vacuum suit, then transmitted the attack order to the other fifty assault shuttles in his all-droid brigade and pushed his own throttles forward.

“Stomper in,” he reported to the Megador.

“Good hunting, my friend.” This voice belonged to Pellaeon. “And may the Force be with you.”

Luke thanked the admiral for the good wishes and promised that his faith in the Jedi plan was not misplaced, then turned his attention to the assault.

The Admiral Ackbar lay only ten kilometers ahead, her bump-nosed silhouette surrounded by a swirling shell of Killik dartships that were rapidly being vaporized by Alliance turbolaser strikes. Her main engines lit space as she struggled to retreat toward Tenupe, but she was ensnared by the heavy-duty tractor-beams of half a dozen “pirate-nabber” Star Destroyers identical to herself.

Raynar would have been much wiser to send his fighter screen out to counterattack his captors, but he appeared to be holding the dartships back to deal with Task Force Stomper. That was what Admiral Bwua’tu had predicted he would do, and so far the Bothan seemed correct.

Beyond the Ackbar, dozens of what Luke thought of as Shard-class capital ships were abandoning the battle on Tenupe to rush to Raynar’s aid. Somewhat chunky and conical, they ranged in length from a kilometer and a half to nearly ten, but each had one broad, rounded end and several jagged sides. It almost appeared that the strange flotilla had been constructed by shattering an asteroid or a small moon. Judging by the halo of dispersion flashes and fiery streaks around the vessels, each was also very well shielded and heavily armed.

The Battle of Tenupe itself continued to rage, a flashing red stain that now spread across a quarter of the planet. Most of the Chiss fleet was down in the clouds and hidden from sight, but some of the Colony’s larger ships were silhouetted against the flickering brilliance below. The four nest ships that had escaped the Jedi at the Murgo Choke were clustered near the heart of the battle, pouring a terrible rain of fire down upon the planet from one side of their hulls while the other hurled turbolaser potshots at the Alliance.

What impressed Luke most was the Killiks’ inventiveness in completing their fleet. Arrayed around the edges of the battle were dozens of ancient megafreighters, their distinctive ring shapes surrounded by dark, swirling clouds that suggested the freighters were serving as staging areas for dartship swarms. Meanwhile hundreds of smaller vessels, visible to the naked eyed as triangular specks, were flitting around the center of the fight in erratic flight patterns, each pouring fire down from a single turbolaser. Chiss megamasers were blasting the gnat-like targets out of orbit whenever their gunnery crews could get a target-lock, but it would clearly take a while to exterminate them completely.

The Ackbar’s shields began to flicker with overload discharge, then collapsed in a string of bright, colorful flashes.

Control’s voice came over the speaker in Luke’s helmet. “Target is shields down. All main batteries switch to formation defense, all squadrons released for strafing runs.”

The order had little to do with Task Force Stomper, but Luke was glad Control had included his channel in the transmission array. The sound of a nonelectronic voice reminded him that he was not attacking the Ackbar alone, that he and his bugcrunchers were merely the tip of a spear being driven by an entire attack fleet.

The Alliance batteries quickly obeyed Control’s order and switched fire to the approaching Shard flotilla. The fighter squadrons left the safe stations where they had been waiting out the turboblaster exchange and streaked in to attack, painting whole swaths of space blue with their engine efflux. The Ackbar’s close-range cannons weaved a web of laser bolts in their paths, and the Colony’s dartships drew back, creating an even tighter shell around the beleaguered Star Destroyer.

Bad mistake.

Bwua’tu had predicted the tactic. The Alliance fighter squadrons blew through the shell behind a flurry of proton torpedoes, then fell on the Ackbar like a thousand hawk-bats, strafing her weapons turrets and clearing the way for Task Force Stomper.

A squadron and a half of starfighters—the eighteen craft that had been in the maintenance bays when the Killiks captured the Ackbar—dropped out of the hangar bay and turned to meet Luke’s assault shuttles. Bwua’tu had predicted that, too. Rogue Squadron slashed in from its escort station and eliminated the interceptors in three fiery passes.

By then, Task Force Stomper had closed to within three kilometers of the Ackbar, with only the dartships to prevent them from reaching their target. The swarm peeled away from its combat with the starfighter squadrons and came after the assault shuttles.

Exactly as Bwua’tu had expected.

One of the Alliance’s pirate-nabber Star Destroyers slid its tractor beam over and simply pulled the dartships away in a tumbling mass. Nothing remained between Task Force Stomper and its target but a thousand meters of laser-laced space. Every second or so, a blossom of color would flare somewhere in the task force as an Ackbar cannon bolt dissipated against a shuttle’s shields or a stray dartship was destroyed by a YVH gunner. But for the most part, the starfighter squadrons and the pirate-nabber tractor beam did a remarkable job of deflecting the Killik attacks.

Luke activated his task force command channel. “We’re on our own now. Fan out and get in fast.”

Instead of acknowledgments, he was greeted by a static-filled pause precisely 1.2 seconds long—the standard delay a YVH droid allowed for a biological unit to finish an incomplete thought.

Then an ultradeep Lando Calrissian voice said, “Sir, ‘fan out and get in fast’ is not a clear order.”

“Sorry.” Luke sighed, wishing there had been room to add basic soft-logic interpretation to the YVH processing unit. “Disperse to assigned zones and penetrate target hull.”

“Stomper Two acknowledging,” the platoon’s droid leader responded.

“Stomper Three acknowledging.”

A long series of deep-voiced acknowledgments began to sound inside Luke’s helmet—forty-nine other platoons in all. He passed the time by reminding himself that the bugcruncher brigade would prove well worth the irritation once Task Force Stomper entered the Ackbar. They were better armored and far more deadly than living commandos, and they would be immune to the Force-based influence attacks of Raynar Thul and Lomi Plo.

The assault shuttles were just beginning to fan out when one of them suddenly flew apart. There was no flash or fireball. The passenger cabin simply came apart at the seams, spilling its cargo of bugcrunchers out into the void.

As Luke was checking his tactical display to find the shuttle’s number, another one came apart.

He frowned and opened a channel to the pilots. “Stomper Twelve, what happened to your shuttle?”

The reply came in the electronic tones of a voice synthesizer, since Stomper Twelve’s pilot was currently floating through a vacuum and unable to produce any sounds with his own vocabulator. “It disintegrated.”

“I can see that!” Luke said. “What caused…”

Luke let the question trail off when he suddenly felt the Force drawing in around him, as though gathering itself for a powerful, violent release. He had just enough time to create a bubble of counterpressure around himself before every damage alarm on his control panel came to life. The cockpit simply came apart around him, and he found himself tumbling through space in the midst of a flotsam cloud.

Raynar Thul.

An electronic voice sounded inside Luke’s helmet. “Sir, if you were asking a question—”

“Disregard,” Luke ordered.

Another assault shuttle came apart, spilling another platoon of thirty-two bugcrunchers into space. This was not an attack Bwua’tu had expected—but that hardly mattered, because the Bothan always planned for what he could not foresee. He had been the one who had insisted that the Alliance specify space-assault YVHs as the platform when it purchased its new Bugcruncher Brigade.

Luke opened a brigadewide channel. “All dismounted Stomper units continue toward original target zones under individual propulsion.”

Again came the long string of acknowledgments. Luke used the Force to hitch a ride on a passing droid as his own platoon fired their thrusters and weaved through a blinding tangle of laser bolts, zipping starfighters, and rocket exhaust toward their target zone. They lost two units to lucky cannon strikes and three more to ramming dartships, but the Alliance starfighters were doing a good job of suppressing the enemy defenses, and Stomper One reached the Ackbar’s bridge in good order and with more than enough strength to perform their mission.

By then, much of the rest of the brigade had also reached the Star Destroyer and were dutifully reporting their successes as they breached the hull. The entire vessel had been declared a free-fire zone, so Luke really did not need to know more. He released the platoons to their own initiative and told them to report when they had taken their objectives.

Luke reached out in the Force and found Raynar reaching back, descending rapidly from the command deck atop the bridge structure. Raynar’s presence was as murky and heavy as always, and as soon as Luke felt it, it began to press down inside, urging him to turn back.

Luke did not resist. He was going to leave, he wanted to leave…with Raynar. Luke began to exert his own will, pulling Raynar toward him, using Raynar’s own power against him by binding their presences together with memories from their past: of how Luke had once helped protect Raynar’s family from the Diversity Alliance, and how he had later helped Raynar’s father destroy a terrible virus that could have caused a galaxywide plague. They were going to leave together. UnuThul wished Luke to go, Luke wished UnuThul to go with him, and so they would go together. UnuThul wished it.

The weight inside suddenly diminished as Raynar started to retreat. Luke tried to stop him, to find some part of his former student that he could hold on to. But UnuThul still had the power of the Colony behind him, and he called on that power to break the bonds of remembrance the Jedi Master had so quickly woven. His murky presence wrenched free, and the heaviness vanished from inside Luke’s chest.

Stomper One and his assistant had already finished placing the breaching charges. The rest of the platoon was arrayed around Luke on the Ackbar’s hull, shielding him with their hulking bodies and firing their forearm-mounted blaster cannons at a flight of incoming dartships. Luke could see tiny divots forming in the droids’ laminanium body armor as the enemy’s weapons silently made their mark.

“What are you waiting for?” Luke commed Stomper One. “Detonate!”

But when it came to procedure, even war droids could not be hurried. “Stay clear!” Stomper One commed. “Fire in the hole!”

Then he detonated the charge.

Luke’s faceplate darkened against the brilliance of the blast, but not so completely that he missed the flash of Stomper One’s blaster cannons firing into the breached hull.

Then Stomper One pronounced, “Clear!” and began ordering, “Go…go…go…” at one-second intervals, sending a bugcruncher through the hole with each command.

By the fourth go, Luke’s faceplate had returned to its normal tint, and he could see a steady stream of captured food containers, membrosia waxes, and chunks of spitcrete gushing out the breach into space.

“Grand Master Commander?” the lead droid asked.

“Thanks.”

Luke ducked through the hole into the interior of what had once been the junior officers’ mess. The lights remained on, so he could see that the chairs that had once been bolted into place along the tables had been removed by the Killiks. The far half of the room had been converted to a nursery, and the larvae were lying half out of their cells, writhing in pain from the decompression blow. Membrosia waxes and Alliance foodstuffs were still tumbling out of their lockers—or rising out of spitcrete bins—and flying out the breach with the cabin’s air.

Raynar’s heavy presence returned, this time summoning Luke.

The Jedi Master started toward the interior exit, where the first bugcrunchers were already trying to override the decompression safety and open the hatch. He was happy to go to Raynar. Again, Luke exerted his own will through the Force, incorporating UnuThul’s wishes, but turning them toward his own ends. He recalled his dinner with Aryn Thul, when she and Tyko had asked Luke to spare her son’s life. It was time to stop the killing, to end this war, and the Jedi Master would gladly go to Raynar to accept his surrender. UnuThul wished Luke to come, and Luke wished to end the war, and so Luke would come and accept the Colony’s surrender.

Again, Raynar withdrew, this time so violently that Luke had no chance to prevent it. UnuThul was coming—not to Luke, but after him. The Master would have to fight. He had known it would come to this, but knowing did not make his heart any less heavy.

The interior hatch finally irised open, and the decompression blow brought half a dozen Killiks tumbling out. The bugcrunchers opened fire with their blaster cannons, shattering the tough pressure carapaces before the bugs could react, then pushed through the doorway with weapons still blazing. By the time the fourth droid had gone through, a synthesized voice was already sounding the all-clear inside Luke’s helmet.

Luke stepped through the hatchway and found himself in a narrow corridor littered with dead Killiks and pieces of shattered carapace. A closed hatchway sealed either end of the short passage. Two confused boxy little mouse droids were trying to make their way through the debris, determined to complete some errand that no longer mattered. A row of sealed hatches lined the opposite wall, which—if Luke recalled the Ackbar’s bridge schematic correctly—concealed storage lockers, officers’ lounges, and exercise facilities. Each was a dead end, as well as a potential hiding place for ambushers.

The corridor was hardly the ideal place for a lightsaber duel, but it would have to do. Luke could already sense a furious Raynar Thul at the far end of the passage, using his brute Force-strength to wrest open the safety-sealed hatch.

As soon as the last of his platoon had entered the corridor, Luke pointed to the hatch through which they’d come. “Make that hatch airtight.”

“Airtight, sir?” Stomper One asked. “Are you certain? As S-series droids, we enjoy a significant tactical advantage in a nonpressurized environment.”

“But I don’t.” Luke plucked at the sleeve of his vac suit. “And I don’t want to worry about ripping this. The fight is about to get rough.”

“Rough?” Stomper One looked up and down the corridor, appraising their position and apparently reaching the same conclusion that Luke had: the corridor was a bad place for a firefight. “As you wish, sir.”

The droids quickly went to work, sealing the hatch to the officers’ mess and using their blaster cannons to spot-weld the others closed so the platoon could not be ambushed. When Luke noticed they were leaving the hatch directly behind them open, he pointed to it.

“Fix that hatch, too.” He started up the corridor toward the hatch at the far end. “We won’t be retreating.”

Stomper One’s synthesized voice assumed a note of approval. “Very good, sir.”

Luke felt the Force stir as Raynar made a final exertion. “They’re coming. Prepare for—”

The far hatch suddenly ruptured inward, bringing with it a short-lived decompression squall that rocked Luke back on his heels and hazed the corridor with airborne dust. He glimpsed a tall figure in a black pressure suit.

Then the figure flicked one of his hands, and Luke found himself flying backward, bouncing off YVH droids and tumbling out of control. He reached out in the Force, grabbing at passing hatches, the ceiling, even Raynar himself, but he was whirling too fast to catch hold of anything.

He hit the end of the corridor with a tremendous clung, unsure whether he was upside down or sideways, then crashed to the floor struggling to remain conscious.

By the time his eyes came back into focus, the corridor had erupted into a crashing storm of cannon bolts and shatter gun pellets. The lower two-thirds of the corridor was blocked by a wall of laminanium bugcruncher armor, but the upper third of the passage belonged to Raynar’s Killiks. Still in their pressure carapaces, they were scurrying through the smoke along the walls and ceiling, pouring shatter gun pellets down on the droids’ heads, trying to get past so they could launch an attack from the rear.

Luke rolled to his feet…and watched in astonishment as his helmet dropped to the floor in two pieces. He glanced at the wall behind him and saw a fist-deep depression where its impact had dented the durasteel.

“Can’t let him do that again,” Luke groaned. He opened the seals on his vac suit gloves, shook them to the floor, and snatched the lightsaber off his belt. Then he averted his eyes and spoke into his throat mike. “Dazers!”

The corridor erupted in rainbow iridescence; then a piercing squeal came over Luke’s earpiece and the smell of ripe hubba gourds filled his nostrils. Stunned by the Dazers’ aura-deadening properties, several Killiks dropped off the ceiling into the midst of the bugcrunchers. The rest of the insects were soon spread overhead in yellow smears.

Luke had already rushed forward, only to find himself trapped behind his own bugcrunchers and unable to see the rest of the battle. “Make a hole!” he ordered. “Coming through.”

Three bugcrunchers blocking his way obediently stepped aside, and Luke found himself staring up ten meters of corridor packed chest-high with Killik corpses and twisted YVH frames. At the other end, with his black helmet lying in a melted gob before him and the fingers of his vac suit gloves burned off by all the Force energy he had been throwing around, stood Luke’s melt-faced opponent. Raynar Thul.

Luke jumped onto the pile of chitin and metal in front of him. Two of Raynar’s Unu bodyguards immediately popped up and sent a burst of shatter gun pellets zipping down the corridor toward him.

Luke flicked his hand and Force-batted the projectiles into a wall, then the bugcrunchers at his back sent a stream of cannon fire down the hall. Raynar ignited a gold lightsaber and deflected most of the volley, but a few of the bolts made it through and splattered his bodyguards across the walls.

“It’s not too late to surrender.” Luke started forward at a walk. “I’m not eager to do this.”

Raynar’s burn-scarred lips twitched in a faint hint of a smile. “We are.”

Raynar raised his lightsaber and jumped onto the carnage heap.

Luke ignited his own blade and raced forward, using the Force to keep himself from stumbling over debris. A loud crunching erupted behind him as his surviving droids raced after him, then half a dozen of Raynar’s bodyguards leapt up from the other end of the pile and started forward, firing shatter guns with their lower set of arms and carrying flame tridents with their upper pair.

A flurry of cannon bolts zipped past Luke from behind and took out three insects. Raynar pointed at the attacking droids. A muffled thump erupted inside one of them, and it went down in a sizzling, popping crash of laminanium. Luke killed the last of Raynar’s bodyguards by Force-slamming them into the wall so hard their thoraxes burst, then the two Jedi were on one another, their lightsabers flashing toward each other’s heads with all the speed and might they could summon.

That was the trouble with powerful men—especially younger ones. Awed by their own strength, they so often believed strength was the answer to every problem. Luke was older and wiser. While Raynar swung, he pivoted.

As Raynar’s gold blade sliced the air where Luke’s head had been, Luke’s boot was kicking him behind the ankles, knocking his legs out from under him and stretching him out flat.

But Raynar was a Jedi, and all Jedi were quick. He caught himself in the Force, levitating himself just long enough to bring his golden blade sweeping in at Luke’s shoulder.

Luke had no choice but to block with his blade, and no place to block but the forearm. Raynar’s lightsaber went spinning off, still securely in the grasp of his three-fingered hand, and caught one of Luke’s bugcrunchers squarely in the back. The weapon sliced through six centimeters of laminanium armor before the severed forearm flew free. The blade deactivated, and the hilt disappeared into the tangle of death and destruction at the droid’s feet.

The pain of losing an arm might have forced a common Jedi to stop fighting, but Raynar was no common Jedi. He had the Force potential of the Colony to draw on, and he did that now, swinging his remaining hand up to hurl Luke down the corridor as he had done before.

But this time, Luke was ready. He placed his own hand in front of Raynar’s and rooted himself in the heart of the Force, and when he did that, he became the very essence of the immovable object. Nothing could dislodge him—not one of Lando’s asteroid tuggers, not the Megador’s sixteen ion engines, not the black hole at the center of the galaxy itself.

Luke stood that way, waiting, dimly aware that his surviving bugcrunchers were moving into defensive positions, one at his back and the other just inside the burst hatch. Raynar continued to struggle, trying to hurl Luke down the corridor, trying to move him a single centimeter.

Luke did not budge, and finally Raynar stopped struggling and met his eyes with a stunned and anguished gaze.

The Master sighed and shook his head. “What am I going to do with you, Raynar Thul?” he asked. “You learn nothing from your mistakes.”

Luke deactivated his lightsaber and picked Raynar up by the collar and slammed him against the wall. He used the Force to pin him there, waiting for an answer to his question, watching as the expression in his captive’s pained eyes turned from astonishment to anger to calculation.

But when Raynar’s free hand rose, it was not to summon the Force lightning that Luke had expected. It was to call his lightsaber back, to attempt to continue the battle that he obviously could no longer win.

It was in that moment that Luke finally decided that the life of Raynar Thul would be spared. He intercepted the weapon and used the Force to pin Raynar’s remaining arm against the wall along with the rest of his body. Then he opened the hilt of the captured lightsaber and removed the focusing crystal. He held it up in front of Raynar.

“Someday I may return this—but for now, it’s staying with me.” He zipped the gem into a pocket of his vac suit, then reached out to Raynar in the Force and spoke in a softer voice. “Your days as UnuThul are done, Raynar. It’s time to surrender and come home.”

The eyes beneath Raynar’s lumpy brow flashed with alarm. “The Colony is our home.”

Luke shook his head. “That can’t be anymore, Raynar,” he said. “The Colony can’t be anymore. If you stay with the Killiks, the entire species will die.”

Raynar curled his scarred lip. “Lies.”

“No.” Luke touched Raynar through the Force. “You’re still a Jedi. You can sense when a person is telling the truth. You can sense it in me, now.”

Hoping to force his Will on his captor, Raynar accepted the contact—as Luke had known he would—then gasped in astonishment as he sensed the truth in what Luke was saying. “How?”

“Because as long as you are the Prime Unu, Lomi Plo will be the queen of the Gorog.” Luke began to press, as though he were trying to force his will on Raynar. “And as long as there is a Gorog, the Colony will be a threat to the Chiss.”

Raynar began to pull, learning from Luke’s earlier tactics and trying to use Luke’s own attack against him. “The Chiss are a threat to the Colony.”

Luke went along with Raynar—in fact, he pushed even harder.

“That’s right. The Chiss are a threat to the Colony,” Luke said. “They have developed a weapon that can wipe out the entire Colony. They tried to use it here. Jaina and Zekk stopped them…but we both know they have more.”

Backed by Luke’s strength, the truth was too much for Raynar. His Will broke, and his resolve turned to panic. “We know,” he admitted.

Luke continued to push. “And they’ll use it—if you stay with the Colony.”

Raynar shook his head. “We can’t let them.”

“Then you have to leave,” Luke said. “It’s the only way to save the Killiks.”

A terrible sadness came to Raynar’s melted face. He lowered his burned eyelids and reluctantly began to nod—then suddenly stopped and glanced toward the hatch through which he had burst earlier.

“Not the only way.” Raynar’s voice assumed a dark tone, and Luke knew his true target was finally preparing to show herself. “Maybe there is a weapon to kill the Chiss?”

Luke resisted the temptation to look toward the hatch. Lomi Plo would not show herself if she knew she was expected.

“Even if there was such a weapon, it wouldn’t be right to use it,” Luke said. “The Jedi won’t permit speciecide against the Chiss—any more than we would against the Killiks.”

“But you could…if it was self-defense.” Raynar bared his jagged teeth in a try at a grin. “Destroying the Chiss would be self-defense, so you would have to permit it.”

Raynar began to push back now, filling Luke’s chest with the dark weight of UnuThul’s Will.

“If it were self-defense, we might have to permit it,” Luke said, playing along—and again using Raynar’s own attack against him. “But even that wouldn’t save the Colony. It cannot survive as it is. We know that.”

“How do we know that?” Raynar demanded angrily. “We know no such thing.”

“We might,” Luke insisted, exerting his own will through the Force again, reeling Raynar in. “If the Colony grew too large, it would devour its own worlds and destroy itself.”

“There are always more worlds,” Raynar countered.

“Not always,” Luke said. “Sometimes all of the other worlds are taken. That could have been what happened when the Killiks disappeared from Alderaan.” He paused, then used the Force to pull as hard as he could, trying to draw Raynar into his own view of reality. “In fact, I’m sure that’s what happened on Alderaan. The Killiks devoured their own world and tried to take someone else’s. That’s the reason the Celestials drove the Killiks into the Unknown Regions.”

The fight finally went out of Raynar. “You’re sure?” He folded his cauterized forearm stump across his stomach and cradled it with his other arm, his lips quivering in pain and tears welling in his eyes. “You know—”

The question was drowned out by the roar of a blaster cannon, and Luke glanced down the corridor to see the bugcruncher stationed there suddenly powering down. The droid fell out of the opening backward and crashed to the deck, then Lomi Plo scuttled through the hatchway on her mismatched set of legs—one human, the other insectile. She turned her bulbous eyes and noseless face down the corridor, then extended her crooked upper arms toward the lightsaber in Luke’s hands.

The last remaining bugcruncher opened fire, forcing Lomi Plo to ignite the lightsaber in her lower set of hands. Her blocks and parries came so slowly that she was barely able to deflect the cannon bolts and she was forced to swing her upper arms toward the droid and drain its power. Raynar, thankfully, continued to stand dazed—and seemingly impotent.

Determined to reach Lomi Plo before she drained his lightsaber’s power cell, Luke sprang down the corridor and leapt off the carnage heap to attack. Lomi blocked his first pass with her white lightsaber. Then, in place of the purple lightsaber she had left in Jacen at the end of their last meeting, she ignited a familiar-looking green blade—the lightsaber Raynar had confiscated on Woteba. Luke’s lightsaber.

“Now you’re just ticking me off,” Luke said.

Lomi clacked her mandibles and hissed, then launched a deadly low–high–low combination with her flashing blades. Luke parried, ducked, and jumped, then brought an elbow up under her mandibles and sent her staggering back, all four arms flailing as she struggled to catch her balance on her mismatched legs.

Luke whipped his blade around, cocking it for a death slash across her middle—then had a prickle of danger sense between his shoulder blades and tried to spin away. He almost made it.

Something heavy and huge slammed into his shoulder—a shatter gun pellet?—and sent him tumbling across the floor past Lomi Plo’s feet. He tried a reactionary slash as he rolled by, only to discover that was he was no longer holding his lightsaber, and he could not move his prosthetic hand—nor the rest of his arm.

Lomi Plo’s two blades began to chop the floor behind him, so he used the Force to accelerate himself and continued to roll, then came to his feet two meters on the other side of her and called his lightsaber back to his good hand.

The weapon arrived just ahead of Lomi Plo, and suddenly Luke found himself on the defensive, being driven into a corner while Raynar Thul—not so impotent after all—used his other hand to fire more shatter gun pellets.

In lightsaber combat, Luke favored two-handed styles, but he could still fight single-handed—even with his weak hand—just as well as anyone in the academy. What he could not do, however, was fight wounded and weak-handed against twin blades while a second party fired a steady stream of hard-to-deflect shatter gun pellets at him.

In short, Luke was desperate.

So he dropped to his side and caught Lomi Plo’s human leg in a scissoring motion between his feet. The knee bent backward and popped with a sickening crunch.

She fell, squealing in pain and clacking her mandibles—and redoubled her attacks, slashing so ferociously with her twin blades that Luke’s lone hand barely had the strength to block.

Of course, Control picked that moment for an important announcement from the Megador. “Be advised that three Killik swarms are diverting to attack Healing Star.”

Lomi Plo’s attacks slackened for a moment, and Luke realized that she was gently probing him through the Force, searching for any hint of fear or doubt. He put the Healing Star—the fleet’s main hospital ship—out of his mind and remained focused on the fight. Lomi Plo had almost certainly used the Dark Nest to divert those swarms, to try to create an opening that would give her power over his mind.

Still dodging shatter gun pellets, rolling back and forth on the floor and parrying madly, Luke glanced up the corridor and used the Force to reach into the carnage heap beneath Raynar’s feet. He grabbed the largest, heaviest thing he could find—a disabled bugcruncher droid—and jerked it free.

The pile shifted and Raynar crashed down on his back, but Luke barely noticed. He was pulling the droid down the corridor straight at Lomi Plo.

She deflected it easily, of course—but she had to spin away from Luke and wave a hand, and that gave him the chance he needed to Force-spring up the corridor toward Raynar, who was just returning to his feet.

“As I was saying,” Luke said, pointing his lightsaber down at Raynar’s chest. “You never learn.”

Raynar’s eyes flashed with alarm and he rolled away—presenting the side of his head for a perfect knockout blow. Luke brought his lightsaber down, but deactivated the blade and flipped it around at the last second to strike at the base of the ear.

The blow landed with a sharp crack that suggested a breaking skull, but Luke had no time to worry about Raynar. Lomi Plo was dragging herself out the hatchway, trying to escape into the general confusion of the Ackbar’s recapture. He sprang after her, using the Force to drag her back into the corridor.

Lomi Plo whirled around, her lightsabers rising into a guard position but not attacking. Trapped on the floor with a broken knee, she knew as well as Luke did that she could not defend herself; that he could kill her any time he wished.

So Luke was half expecting it when Control’s voice sounded in his earpiece again. “Be advised, Killik swarms are opening fire on Healing Star.”

Lomi Plo’s mandibles opened wide, and a long, gurgling hiss erupted from her throat. Luke did not need to speak Killik to understand what she was saying—or even to probe her meaning through the Force. She could call off the attack on the hospital ship.

All Luke had to do was let her go.

Luke snorted. “That’s the trouble with you ruthless types—you’re all so predictable.”

Lomi Plo grabbed hold of the sides of the hatchway with two of her hands, then pulled herself up on her insect leg and cocked her head so that only one of her bulbous eyes was turned toward Luke.

“Mara and Jacen are in a hospital back on Coruscant,” Luke explained. “There’s nobody aboard Healing Star but a few mouse droids. Admiral Bwua’tu said you were going to attack it. And by the way, I have no doubts about Mara. She says hello, in fact.”

Lomi Plo’s reaction came so suddenly that Luke doubted even she was expecting it. She just came flying at him with both blades flashing, striking high and low from opposite sides in a desperate attempt to finish him off.

Luke, of course, had anticipated this, too. Lomi Plo had no power over him. He simply stepped inside her attack and flicked his wrist twice, first sweeping his blade upward, then whipping it around in a backslash, and she landed at his feet in four parts.

Luke stood looking down at the pieces for a moment, half expecting them to turn to smoke and vanish, or to dissolve like a bad HoloNet signal. It was hard to believe that a woman of mere flesh and blood and chitin had caused so much trouble—had brought the galaxy to the edge of eternal war—but of course, beings of flesh and blood were always starting wars. That’s why the galaxy needed her Jedi.

Luke reached down and retrieved the two lightsabers Lomi Plo had been wielding. He tucked the white one inside his flight utilities and hung the green one in its proper place on his belt, then returned to the side of his former student.

Raynar was still unconscious, but his vital signs were stable, and he did not seem to be in any great danger.

Luke broke out a medkit and started to work. “Let’s get you patched up, son,” he said. “We’re going home.”