Apocalypse (42 page)

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, because 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.