Apocalypse (40 page)

She returned to the primary tunnel and began to follow the darkness in the Force deeper into the Moon Maiden. The passage was clogged with fungi and corpses, and the walls and ceiling were festooned with hanging moss. Using fire and the Force, they cleared the way as they advanced, leaving the tunnel behind them choked with foul-smelling smoke. Twice, Tahiri stopped Fett from spraying flame over still-living beings. The first was an unconscious human female whose red-pocked face was coated in yellow spores. The next was a screaming Twi’lek with a leg exposed to the bone by flesh-eating mold. Fett remarked that Tahiri wasn’t doing the Twi’lek any favors by stopping him. She had to admit that he had a point, but she still wouldn’t let him burn the poor woman alive.

About eight hundred meters in, they came to a fire bulkhead with a locked hatch. Tahiri felt a large gathering of terrified Force presences on the other side, spread over perhaps a thousand square meters. But
she sensed no one lurking just beyond the hatch, so there was no ambush. She looked into Fett’s visor until a curiosity came to his presence, then pointed at the hatch controls and made a typing motion. He nodded and pulled a lock slicer from his thigh pocket.

As Fett worked, Tahiri did a Force reconnaissance of the area beyond the hatch, trying to get an idea of what they would find on the other side. There was a boiling mass of fear and anguish about half a kilometer directly ahead, tightly packed and stationary—probably a group of beings trapped in a detention area. Scattered to the left were about fifty presences, also frightened, but not in much pain—probably workers of some sort.

Directly ahead, a dozen beings seemed to be moving back and forth across a space about a hundred meters long and twice as wide as the tunnel. Up and to the right, on what felt like a second story, were a trio of shifty presences that Tahiri instantly recognized as Squibs. And a short distance beyond the Squibs was the target.

Tahiri had no doubt that it was Abeloth. It was a seething orb of darkness larger than any she had felt before, as hot in the Force as a fusion core, and it was reaching into her even as she reached for it.

Tahiri tried to shut down quickly, withdrawing from the Force and making her presence small, but it was not easily done. The thing had already started to sink its tentacles into her, and she could feel them writhing about inside, struggling to keep hold, until she finally closed herself off entirely.

For a moment, Tahiri sat, fighting not to tremble, trying not to wonder whether she was really up to this fight. She had confirmed the target’s presence, and, in Fett, she had something likely to hold even Abeloth’s attention until the turbolaser barrage began. Now she just needed to arrange a way to verify the enemy’s destruction—and to do that, she had to get close enough to see her.

Tahiri felt Fett’s gaze on her, then looked over to find his helmet turned in her direction. In his hand, he was holding a tiny black spy droid about the size of her thumb—large by Jedi standards, but small enough for their purposes.

“Ready to take a peek?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I have some intelligence.”

She told Fett about what she had sensed in the Force, laying out for
him as accurately as possible the dimensions of the chamber and the location of the presences she had felt. She paid special attention to Abeloth and the Squibs, describing how the Squibs seemed to be somewhere up high, with Abeloth perhaps thirty meters beyond and at the same level as most of the other beings.

“Impressive,” Fett said. He activated his spy droid and reached for the hatch lever. “I still like a vid feed.”

“Uh, we might not want to take that long,” Tahiri said. “I’m not the only Force-user here, remember? While I was sensing Abeloth in
there
, she was sensing me out
here
.”

“Great,” Fett said, feigning disgust that Tahiri did not feel in his presence. “Now she’s expecting us.”

“So?” Tahiri knew Fett’s effort to make her feel guilty was just an attempt to pull their center of power in his direction, and she wasn’t about to play along. “Did you ever think she
wouldn’t
be expecting us?”

“I guess not,” he admitted. “But we still go after the Squibs first.”

Tahiri checked her chrono and saw that they had about twenty minutes before her projected midday GST bombardment. So time wasn’t the problem—and going after the Squibs would give Abeloth something to think about other than why they weren’t coming after her.

“Okay,” Tahiri said. “Squibs first.”

Fett’s hand remained poised over the hatch lever. “Okay?”

“Sure,” Tahiri said, nodding. “A deal is a deal, and the Squibs aren’t going to be a problem for us. After we finish with Abeloth, that might not be true anymore.”

Suspicion flooded Fett’s presence, and he pulled his hand away from the lever. “That was way too easy, Veila,” he said. “What’s your plan?”

“It’s too late for a plan,” Tahiri replied. Determined to get the fight started before Fett had a chance to break their deal, she used the Force to depress the hatch lever. “We need to move fast if we want to catch those Squibs.”

The hatch opened with a soft hiss. Before Fett had a chance to ask about how she had forced the issue, Tahiri used the Force to push it halfway open.

A gust of hot, dank air rolled through the narrow opening, and Tahiri nearly gagged. The stench seemed equal parts ammonia and unwashed bodies. Fett used his free hand to tap his sleeve controls—activating his helmet’s filter system—then dropped into a fighting crouch and led the way through the hatch.

Through the bulkhead, the tunnel opened into a huge vault. A broad corridor ran from in front of Tahiri and Fett straight ahead to an identical bulkhead more than a hundred meters distant. Along both sides of the chamber ran ten-meter walls of white durasteel, each partitioning off a block of office suites.

The entire space was filled by thickets of knee-high fungi and towering pillars of club moss. Scurrying through this underground forest, Tahiri saw a dozen haggard beings dressed in miner’s overalls. Instead of hauling laserdrills and detonite tubes, however, they appeared to be pushing—and in a couple of cases, abandoning—hoversleds piled with meter-high stacks of poster flimsi and holosign projector pads.

The Force was sour with the slaves’ fear, and now that she was inside the chamber, she could literally see Force energy gathering in oily, iridescent swirls. In fact, it was flowing through a pair of bantha-sized doors into the largest room on the right—just about where she sensed Abeloth’s presence.

No one seemed to notice them, and for a moment Tahiri thought that Abeloth’s captives were just too exhausted or terrified to pay any attention to a guy in Mandalorian armor and a tall blonde wearing an Imperial Security Special Tactics vac suit.

Then a bearded human pulled a stubby E-11 blaster rifle from inside his overalls and threw himself to the floor, firing as he dropped. A single bolt pinged off the bulkhead before Fett’s arm came up and a tongue of crimson flame shot out of a sleeve nozzle to engulf the man.

In the next instant everyone in the chamber was diving for cover and pulling blasters. Tahiri ignited her lightsaber and began to bat bolts toward their sources.

“See? Definitely expected,” she said. “Told you it was too late for a plan!”

“These miners are no trouble.” Fett tipped his head forward and sent an arm-sized rocket screaming into the center of the chamber. “It’s the snarkin’ plants that scare me.”

The rocket detonated with a deafening blast. Tahiri was thrown against the bulkhead behind her by a shock wave hot enough to singe her hair. But the battle fell suddenly quiet, and when the blast-dazzle cleared from her eyes, she saw that the entire chamber had been more or less cleared of flora.

Fett’s gloved hand clamped around her forearm.
“Move.”

He started toward the right side of the chamber, and a tingle of danger sense raced down Tahiri’s spine.

Fett continued to pull her toward the chamber wall. “I want those—”

“No!” Tahiri yelled. “Down!”

She dived in one direction and shoved Fett in the opposite. In the weak gravity, they both traveled a good five meters before hitting the floor. A chain of
plinks
sounded next to her as a line of pellets ricocheted off the floor where she had been standing.

Tahiri rolled onto her back and saw two shatter gun barrels protruding through an observation port in the wall. They were located on the second floor, about fifteen meters to the right of the big doors where Abeloth was hiding. One barrel was swinging toward her, the other toward Fett, and peering over the top of each was a pair of beady Squib eyes.

“There!”

Tahiri pointed and used the Force to shove the nearest weapon into the other one.

Fett’s method was more direct, simply raising his arm and loosing a tongue of flame. It shot through the center of the observation port—but not before both Squibs dropped their weapons and ducked out of sight.

“Go!” Fett yelled, springing up. “Don’t let them hide!”

Tahiri was already on her feet, racing for a small door below the port. It was locked, but these were just sliding doors, not hatches. Her lightsaber required only a few seconds to cut through the thin durasteel.

By then Fett had drawn his blaster pistol and caught up to her. He hit the door at a full sprint, planting a boot solely in the center and kicking the panel down almost before Tahiri had finished cutting it free. She followed him through and found him charging up a pedramp, exchanging
blasterfire with three pack-burdened Squibs and yelling at them to stop shooting before he got serious.

They continued to fire, of course.

Tahiri and Fett caught them at the top of the ramp. Tahiri took the lead, using her lightsaber to deflect their attacks as she advanced, trying to force them to the back of a service corridor so they would have no choice except to surrender. Fett took a more direct approach, using his height to fire over Tahiri’s head. He downed all three Squibs in barely nine shots—which was
very
good shooting, considering that he was in the middle of a firefight and had to time his bolts to get them past a whirling lightsaber.

Tahiri started to chastise the bounty hunter for killing their best means of finding his scientists—then noticed that the three Squibs were lying on the floor twitching, their eyes bulging as they helplessly watched their attackers approach.

“Those didn’t
look
like stun bolts you were firing,” she commented.

“Yeah, I’m full of surprises. You live longer that way.” Fett stepped past her, then jerked a thumb toward the adjacent wall. “You see what we’ve got in there. I’ll handle the interrogation.”

Tahiri did not turn away. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t let you—”

“You have a conscience?” Fett interrupted. “Since when?”

“Prison changed me,” Tahiri replied, knowing it would be a waste of time to explain to Boba Fett that she was trying to make amends for killing Admiral Pellaeon. “And I can’t let you murder helpless captives, Fett. I’m not that person anymore.”

A muffled sigh sounded inside Fett’s helmet, and then he nodded. “Fine. As long as they tell me what we need to know, I’ll let someone else take out the vermin. Good enough?”

One glance at their trembling captives told Tahiri that Fett would have no trouble extracting all the information he wanted from the trio. She nodded and turned toward the door without another word.

The door, of course, had been locked. She used her lightsaber to cut through the durasteel panel, then stepped through the hole.

The room beyond was a basic lab-workroom outfitted with a large table that contained built-in sinks and warming pads at one end. To Tahiri’s left was the observation port through which the Squibs had
opened fire. To her right, in the back of the room, were several computer stations with chairs. Two of the chairs were occupied by humans in white lab coats, one a redheaded male and the other a brunette female. They sat staring at her with looks of absolute terror on their faces. Considering the firefight that had just taken place outside their office, Tahiri found it difficult to understand why they had not fled—until she noticed the shackles securing their legs to their chairs.

“Yu and Tarm?” she asked from the door.

The woman nodded. “I’m Dr. Frela Tarm,” she said. “He’s Dr. Jessal Yu.”

“Good,” Tahiri said. “If there’s anything here you need to stop the nanokiller targeting Boba Fett, I suggest you get it together now.”

The man—Jessal Yu—scowled and yanked at his ankle chain.

“In case you haven’t noticed, we can’t exactly move,” he said. “Besides which, there
isn’t
a way to stop it. You can’t deactivate a nanokiller after you’ve set it loose. You have to design the obsolescence into the original molecules.”

“I wouldn’t admit that to Fett,” Tahiri said. “Because he’s here now, and you’re only going to live for as long as he continues to believe you
can
stop it.”

Tarm’s eyes went wide, and the Force shivered with such fear that Tahiri almost felt sorry for the two scientists—until she reminded herself what the pair had done. They hadn’t just targeted Fett. They were also the masterminds behind a line of illegal weapons that had wiped out the entire Verpine soldier caste on Nickel One—and killed much of Tenel Ka’s family. Whatever punishment Fett meted out to the scientists, it would never be justice enough.

After a moment of wallowing in fear, Yu turned to Tarm and asked, “Perhaps a counteragent, Doctor?”

Tarm considered this for a moment, then nodded. “It sounds believable,” she said. “And who knows? There might even be a way to make it work.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Yu agreed. He turned toward his computer station. “I’ll download the old data. You gather the samples.”

“Agreed, Doctor.” Tarm turned toward Tahiri, then pointed at her shackles. “Could you?”

Tahiri shook her head. “That chair has rollers,” she said, knowing how Fett would react if he came in and discovered she had actually freed one of his scientists. “And you can tell
me
where to find a vidcam and an uplink around here—preferably one I can use without Abeloth noticing.”