Apocalypse Page 5

  Jaina cursed beneath her breath, then reluctantly released the hidden trigger that would have sent the heavy door shooting out to crush the pair. Corrupt as he was, Selvi was no Sith—and that made him safe from the Jedi. Jaina glanced across the broad central aisle to her two companions and nodded toward the exit.

  Valin returned her nod and rose instantly, but Jysella—carrying a datapad and wearing her brown hair in a tight bun—scowled.

  “We’re just going to let her GO?” Jysella asked. She was speaking in a Force whisper so soft that her voice was a mere rustle in Jaina’s ears. “A Sith Lord?”

  Jaina shrugged and nodded toward the exit more firmly. Their orders were clear: No attack until the target reaches for a weapon. And no civilian casualties—even if it means letting a Sith Lord escape.

  By the time Vestara and Ben were finally ushered in to meet High Lord Ivaar Workan—better known to the Galactic Alliance as Senator Kameron Suldar—there was no longer enough time to set up the cafasho steamer. Only two minutes remained before the first attacks of the battle were scheduled to begin, and that meant they had drifted completely into the sphere of combat improvisation. That was just fine with Vestara. She had been trained to be unpredictable when she fought, and sometimes the only way to do that was to toss the plan aside.

  Vestara was surprised to see the Senator’s private office furnished sparely but elegantly in blatant Keshiri style, with sculptures of ropy glass resting on display tables throughout the room. The pieces were done in a new style known as flying storm back on Kesh, and they usually depicted a hurricane or cyclone rolling over an alien landscape.

  To the initiated, at least, the conquest symbology was clear, and Vestara found herself shaking her head at its open display. It was the kind of arrogance that would be the Sith’s greatest vulnerability in the coming war. Her people simply did not understand how dangerous the Jedi truly were—or how determined the Masters were to destroy the Lost Tribe of the Sith.

  Workan’s redheaded assistant motioned Vestara and Ben toward a clear spot in the center of the room, then followed close behind as Ben pushed the float pallet forward. When two more red-caped guards stepped out of a corner and fell in behind them, Vestara knew it had been her ploy—the silent I’m Vestara Khai she had secretly mouthed to the guard in the pages’ closet—that had finally won them admittance. She was taking a terrible risk exposing her identity like that, but she wanted to be sure that Luke Skywalker killed Workan, and that meant getting herself and Ben into the High Lord’s office.

  Ben stopped the float pallet at the indicated location, then drew his shoulders square and stood at attention. Workan studied the pallet from behind a large glass desk at the far end of the room. He was a distinguished-looking man with dark hair and darker eyes. Though Vestara had not revealed this to the Jedi’s mission planners, she had met the High Lord once before, back on Kesh when she had been summoned to become Lady Rhea’s apprentice. He had struck her as a cunning and observant man, and the venom in his gaze suggested that he had seen through her disguise and confirmed her identity for himself.

  Finally, Workan gestured toward the tray in Vestara’s hands, using the Force to summon the small envelope she was carrying. Ben let out a gasp of surprise that managed to sound spontaneous enough to be credible. Had Workan and his fellow impostors not already known that they were looking at a pair of spies, the act might have fooled them. As it was, two of the High Lord’s bodyguards were on Ben before his mouth closed, one holding the heavy, curved blade of a glass parang to his throat while the other pressed the emitter nozzle of an unlit lightsaber to his back.

  In the same instant, Vestara felt the sharp tip of a shikkar pricking the flesh over her left kidney. “Not a word, traitor,” the redhead warned. “Don’t even flinch.”

  Vestara obeyed, watching in silence as Workan inspected the envelope for signs of poison. By now, Luke Skywalker would be starting across the visitors’ parlor with the other two members of the assault team. It would take them less than a minute to overpower the sentries in the outer office and reach the security door. Yet even thirty seconds was a long time for Vestara and Ben to survive as unarmed captives, and the safe thing would have been to abort the operation back in the pages’ closet, when it grew apparent they weren’t going to be admitted before the Jedi surprise attack began.

  But aborting the operation would have meant allowing Workan to live, and allowing Workan to live was not an option. Vestara had realized back on the Sith world of Upekzar, when she had sacrificed Jedi Knight Natua Wan to the ancient Dream Singer in order to save Ben, that she would not be able to hide among the Jedi forever. And as a High Lord, Workan was bound by Sith custom to hunt down and slay Vestara for daring to kill High Lord Sarasu Taalon on Pydyr. Therefore, Workan—like all of his fellow High Lords—had to die before Vestara could safely leave the protection of the Jedi Order.

  Finally satisfied that the envelope was not a death trap, Workan read the exterior salutation aloud. “ ‘My dear friend Kameron.’ ”

  At this point, less than a minute remained before the first Jedi assaults began and Workan started to feel Sith dying across all of Coruscant. Vestara and Ben were supposed to be serving cafasho, doing whatever it took to hold the High Lord’s attention while Luke and the rest of the team stormed the outer offices. Well, they might not be serving cafasho now, but Vestara was pretty sure that they had captured Workan’s complete attention.

  Workan removed a folded flimsiplast from inside the envelope and read that aloud, too: “ ‘Did you truly think I wouldn’t know who you are?’ ”

  A ripple of alarm rolled through the Force as Workan’s subordinates grasped the significance of Wuul’s message. The High Lord himself looked almost as though he had been expecting such a note, merely cocking a thin black brow and looking at Ben.

  “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “Not at all.”

  As Ben spoke, muffled voices began to sound in the outer office. Knowing the next few moments would determine whether Ben lived or died, Vestara started to address Workan in an attempt to distract him … and felt a tiny stab of pain as the shikkar broke the surface of her skin.

  If Ben noticed, he showed no sign. “Turn the note over,” he said. “I think that will explain things.”

  Workan did as Ben instructed, then read, “ ‘Surrender or die.’ ” His face grew crimson, and he read the second part. “ ‘Decide now.’ ”

  The High Lord lifted his eyes to glare at Ben, but before he could speak, the muffled voices beyond the security door gave way to cries of alarm. The sizzle of clashing lightsabers began to sound outside the door.

  “If you’re going to surrender, I’d recommend doing it soon,” Ben said, clearly trying to hold Workan’s attention inside the room. “You don’t have much time.”

  Workan’s eyes narrowed. “I am not the one with a parang to his throat.”

  A hint of cockiness came into Ben’s voice. “No, but you are the one who drank two cups of cafasho in Senator Wuul’s office yesterday morning,” he said. “You’re already dead, High Lord Workan.”

  The lie came so smoothly that even Vestara did not sense it in Ben’s Force aura, and she knew it was a fabrication. The cafasho steamer had only been a ruse to get Ben and Vestara inside Workan’s office, but the High Lord wouldn’t realize that—not if he was relying on the Force to tell whether Ben was lying. He glanced again at Wuul’s note, and fear began to blossom across his face.

  The sound of the fighting beyond the door began to subside even sooner than Vestara had expected, but Workan’s attention remained fixed on Ben.

  “I see.” The High Lord rose from behind his desk. “If Wuul has already poisoned me, why go to so much trouble to tell me? Gloating is hardly the Jedi’s style.”

  “Neither is killing in cold blood,” Ben said. “As the note says, you do have the option of surrender. There’s an antidote.”

  Workan glanced back toward the flimsiplast, and—not for
the first time—Vestara found herself in awe of Ben’s quick thinking. He was using the High Lord’s abilities against him, making Workan question his own common sense by hiding an obvious lie in the Force. The trick wouldn’t work for long … but it wouldn’t need to.

  A loud thud sounded from the security door, and a guard said, “Milord, perhaps we should kill the prisoners and—”

  “That door is hatch-steel,” Workan said, waving the man silent. He started around his desk. “This antidote—is it in the cafasho steamer?”

  “Shall I take that as a surrender?” Ben sounded far too cocky for his circumstances—and Vestara had to admit she kind of liked it. “Your people will need to lay down their—”

  “Enough.” Workan pulled a lightsaber from beneath his robes. “We are done playing games, Jedi.”

  And that was when a compression wave blew across the room.

  Vestara did not wonder what had happened or wait to hear the blast. She simply spun away from the shikkar, using one hand to trap the redhead’s wrist and the other to slam a palm-heel into the base of the woman’s jaw. She glimpsed an orange flash and heard the sharp clap of a detonite explosion, then brought her knee up beneath her foe’s arm—and saw the glass dagger float free.

  She continued her attack anyway, snapping the elbow across her thigh. The woman cried out and used the Force to send the dagger flying toward Vestara’s throat.

  Why did Sith always overreach? Vestara pivoted aside, easily dodging an attack she could never have avoided if the woman had settled for a leg attack, then grabbed the redhead by the chin and killed her with a Force punch to the throat.

  “Down now!”

  Recognizing Ben’s voice, Vestara dropped. A crimson blade flashed past a meter overhead. Her gaze followed the blade to the lightsaber, the lightsaber to the arm, and at the other end she found the guard from the pages’ closet. She glanced at the float-pallet hovering behind him and reached for the cafasho machine in the Force.

  The guard pivoted away—straight into Ben, who shoved the shikkar that had almost killed Vestara into the man’s neck.

  The guard collapsed, and Vestara saw a second gold-armored figure stepping toward Ben. She sent the cafasho machine flying in that guard’s direction. He activated a crimson lightsaber and cleaved it apart before it hit him.

  By then she was snatching the lightsaber from beneath the dead redhead’s robes, and Ben was taking another from the impostor he had just killed. Vestara sprang to her feet, then stepped away from Ben so they could flank their new opponent.

  She glanced toward the door and found it standing next to a smoking hole that had once been a wall. Seha and Doran were just rushing through the breach, angling toward the last guard, while Luke and Workan had already joined battle in a whirling tempest of color and smashed office furnishings. With only three Sith left, there was no question of the final outcome—even a High Lord could not overcome those odds, not when Luke and Ben Skywalker were on the other side.

  Vestara sprang to the attack, swinging high to prevent the guard from leaping into a Force tumble. He blocked and spun, bringing his blade around in time to deflect a leg slash from Ben, then glanced toward a display table near the wall. Guessing that a glass sculpture would already be flying toward her head, Vestara dived into a forward roll, then locked her lightsaber into the ON position and tossed it at her attacker’s legs.

  The guard dropped his own blade to deflect the one flying toward his thighs—then simply divided along the spine as Ben’s lightsaber cleaved him from collar to belt. The body did not fall so much as peel apart, and the sculpture crashed to the floor three meters away.

  Vestara called her own weapon back into her hand and then looked up to find Ben stepping across the body toward her.

  “So,” she said, glancing down at the dead Sith. “I guess you do care.”

  “Of course I care.” Ben smiled and reached down to take her hand. “Good teammates are hard to find.”

  “And you two certainly make a good team,” Doran Tainer said, joining them. He studied the three Sith they had killed. “Did you even have weapons when this thing started?”

  “A Jedi is always armed,” Vestara said, quoting a maxim that was a favorite of the Sith as well as the Jedi.

  She held Ben’s hand for a moment, enjoying its strength and warmth—and knowing that one day soon, she would have to turn her back on his touch. Finally, she allowed him to help her to her feet, then turned toward the battle between Luke and Workan. A swath of shattered glass and smoking furniture marked the path their fight had taken to the rear part of the room. It seemed clear from the crooked route that the fight had been both desperate and well matched, but now Workan was finally being forced to retreat past his desk. With Seha Dorvald rushing to join the fight, he would eventually be pushed into a corner and perhaps even taken for interrogation.

  And that, Vestara could not allow—not after the trick she had used to get them into the office in the first place. She thought for a moment, then pulled a blaster pistol from the holster of a dead guard.

  “Something’s wrong!” She started toward the back of the room. “We’ve got to stop him.”

  A large hand caught her by the shoulder. “Stop him from what?” Doran demanded. “Luke wants to take Workan—”

  Vestara shook free. “Look at where he is—he’s trying to get to his desk.” She raised the blaster pistol and began to fire into the combat, not so much trying to kill Workan herself as to force him away from the desk—and onto Luke’s blade. “He must have a detonator switch back there!”

  Doran released her shoulder, and a moment later two more streams of blasterfire joined Vestara’s.

  “Dad, trap!” Ben yelled. “Back off!”

  “Seha—you, too!” Doran added.

  Both Jedi dived away at once, leaving a badly confused Workan struggling to bat aside the storm of blasterfire coming his way. Already exhausted and wounded, with one arm hanging limp and a smoking slash across his chest, he was no match for three attackers trained to coordinate their fire to overwhelm his defenses. It took only six shots for Ben to burn a hole through his head.

  “Quick thinking, Ves.” Ben squeezed her arm, then added, “And thanks. You just might have saved us again.”

  THE PLANET OSSUS HUNG LIMNED IN FIRE, A GIANT GRAY PEARL FLOATING between the orange globes of two suns. It was gray because the entire world was covered in clouds. It was covered in clouds because, twice each year, Ossus passed directly between its two stars. Blasted by radiant energy from opposite sides, it went several weeks without night. Planetary temperatures skyrocketed, changing most of the surface water into atmospheric vapor.

  Allana Solo knew all that because she had read it in the Intelligence Ministry briefing file, along with a warning that conditions were so steamy during this period that pilots departing the surface would be flying blind until they reached space. But to nine-year-old Allana, staring out at the world from the Royal Stateroom aboard the Dragon Queen II, it seemed like Ossus was trying to keep the Jedi young ones home, to prevent the Jedi academy from being evacuated even if it meant the death of every last student.

  “There’s no need to worry.” Allana’s mother came to stand in the observation bubble next to her. “Your grandparents have been doing this sort of thing since before I was born.”

  Allana nodded and glanced at her mother’s reflection in the transparisteel. Wearing a gray flight suit with a rancor-tooth lightsaber hanging from a belt across her hips, she looked more like a Jedi Knight than the Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium. It was a style of attire that Tenel Ka wore only in private—and a rare glimpse, Allana knew, into the life that one of the most powerful women in the galaxy wished she could live.

  When Allana did not reply, her mother took her hand. “They’re going to be fine. If anyone can do this, it’s Han and Leia Solo.”

  “I don’t think you can promise that,” Allana said, continuing to study the cloud-veiled planet in front of them
. “Even Grandpa and Grandma don’t usually fly into the middle of a Sith ambush—at least not on purpose.”

  “No, not usually,” her mother allowed. “But … that’s why we’re here. With a Hapan battle flotilla waiting to pounce, the Sith might decide not to attack at all.”

  Allana rolled her eyes. “Even I understand the Sith better than that, and I’m only nine.”

  Her mother chuckled. “Well, perhaps it was more of a hope than a belief,” she allowed. “But we both know what a mistake it is to underestimate your grandparents.”

  Allana started to agree, but stopped when her pet nexu, Anji, growled a warning. Allana glanced toward the interior of the stateroom and saw her mother’s cousin and confidante, Trista Zel, approaching. Knowing that Trista would not be interrupting unless it was important, Allana silenced Anji with a hand signal, then stepped aside to make room in the little observation bubble.

  Trista flashed an apologetic smile. “Sorry to interrupt, cousin,” she said. Had anyone else addressed the Queen Mother so casually, they would have been banished to the Transitory Mists. “But you wanted to be informed when the Sith make their move.”

  Tenel Ka raised her brow. “Already?”

  Trista nodded. “The scouts have spotted a wing of Skipray twelve-jays entering the atmosphere on the far side of the planet.”

  “Twelve-jays?” Tenel Ka echoed. “Where’d they come up with something that old?”

  Trista shrugged. “We’re still working on that, Majesty,” she said. “What’s important is that TacCon thinks they’ll use the cloud cover to hit the convoy as it leaves the academy. Commander Skela recommends launching two wings of Miy’tils to support Vhork Squadron and protect the convoy.”

  Tenel Ka thought for a moment, then nodded. “Inform the Solos—but send four wings instead.”

  Trista’s eyes widened. “Four wings?”