Inferno Read online

  “You remember,” she said. “Lumiya invited us to her asteroid.”

  Ship struggled to hold firm, recalling that Lumiya had not actually invited the Broken One to her asteroid. Alema had followed her there.

  “That doesn’t change facts,” Alema insisted. “Lumiya asked for our help.”

  Lumiya hadn’t asked—the Broken One had volunteered.

  “And Lumiya accepted,” Alema pointed out. She was careful to continue her pattern of stressing important action words; that was a key part of technique. “She assigned us to keep watch on Mara.”

  Ship knew what she was doing, but it was not a sentient being, and it did not have the strength to resist the pressure she was bringing to bear. What the Broken One said was true, Ship realized at last. Lumiya had sent her to watch Mara.

  “Because Lumiya trusted us,” Alema said. “Because she was counting on us to continue helping Jacen … like we did at Roqoo Depot.”

  When you reconfigured that freighter crew? Ship asked.

  “So the Jedi would know we were near when Mara died,” Alema clarified. “So they would suspect us instead of Jacen.”

  To ensure his success, Ship added. To ensure that the Sith would rise again.

  “Yes,” Alema agreed. “We promise. The Sith will rule again.”

  In the next instant Alema found herself pressed against the rear bulkhead as Ship accelerated skyward. A sense of frustration flooded the Force as one of her pursuers—Zekk, judging by the labored purity of his presence—alerted his fellows to her escape. Jaina’s reaction was not discernible, but the fact that no one launched a shadow bomb or a proton torpedo at Ship told Alema all she needed to know. For now, her hunters had more pressing matters on their minds.

  The journey to the Kanz sector was as uneventful as it was unnerving. Ship seemed to take a special delight in taxing her composure, flying most of the way with a hull so transparent that Alema felt as though she were traveling across the galaxy in a bubble. For a spacefaring species like the Duros or Gands, the illusion might have produced feelings of exhilaration and awe—but not so for Alema. Twi’leks were cave dwellers by nature, born to the snug comfort of total darkness and tight spaces. By the time Ship entered the unnamed system and a silver nugget of rock appeared in the vacuum ahead, every instinct in her body was screaming for her to close her eyes, to slam shut all perception of the brutal, sickening vastness of the galaxy.

  Alema ignored those instincts, forcing herself to watch calmly as the nugget swelled to a tumbling stone, then to a dust-caked boulder glinting in the light of the distant sun. Ship was testing her, searching for any indication that she was too weak to make good on her promise, and Alema refused to provide one. She knew that Ship could see in her thoughts how terrifying she found the void, but she also knew that it could sense the resolve with which she faced that terror, her utter willingness to sacrifice anything to restore the Balance between her and Leia.

  When the asteroid had grown so large that nothing else could be seen ahead, Ship swung around to its dark side and made a breakneck hangar approach. Sensing that it was still trying to rattle her, Alema resigned herself to the possibility of a fiery death as the price of flying such a fine vessel, then watched in stoic silence as murky crags swelled into looming cliffs. At the last possible moment, a camouflaged blast door slid open, and Ship shot into the hideaway’s cramped hangar, decelerating so hard that Alema had to Force-anchor herself in place to keep from being hurled into the forward bulkhead.

  Ship stopped almost a meter from the far wall and extruded three landing struts, then settled onto the hangar floor, hissing, creaking, and groaning as though it were the Millennium Falcon. Alema allowed herself an enormous smirk of victory.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  Ship let out a final disgruntled rumble, then, once the hangar had repressurized, shaped a door and ramp for her.

  “Wait for us here,” Alema said, rising. “You may as well top off your fuel and tend to your maintenance needs. This may take a few hours.”

  Ship seemed amused by that, and Alema had the distinct impression that it expected her to be here much longer than a few hours—forever, probably.

  “In that case,” Alema said, descending the ramp, “if we fail to return within a hundred years, consider yourself released.”

  If Ship made any reply, it was lost to the dark side aura that began to rise around her as she set foot on the permacrete floor. The energy was so thick it was almost tangible, a cold cloud of gloom that trailed up her thighs like lovers’ fingers. She shuddered with what she thought were pleasant memories—until the shuddering continued and an icy knot of danger sense began to form between her shoulder blades.

  Traps.

  Of course there were traps. This was a Sith hideaway, was it not? Alema opened herself to the Force and felt a sharp sense of peril from the far wall of the hangar, where two dozen coolant drums stood stacked in a triangle seven meters high. The smart thing would have been to climb back aboard Ship and flee before one of those drums exploded. Instead, Alema started across the hangar at a sprint.

  Ship’s surprise was exceeded only by its alarm. It seemed less concerned about Alema than about her orders. If she wanted to get herself killed, that was fine with Ship—but she couldn’t expect it to—

  Stay. Alema put the weight of the Force behind her thought-command. My turn to test your nerve.

  Ship withdrew its presence in a huff, leaving Alema free to concentrate on the problem of the coolant drums. The knot between her shoulder blades was growing colder and tighter by the second, and of course the danger seemed to be emanating from the bottom of the stack. Without breaking stride, she made a clutching motion with her hand, and the middle barrel slid out of line.

  As Alema floated the drum across the hangar to meet her, the rest of the stack crashed down in a cacophony of sloshing liquid and ringing metal. Several barrels burst, pouring hundreds of liters of viscous blue fluid onto the floor and filling the air with the caustic sweetness of hyperdrive coolant.

  Alema already had her lightsaber in hand. Ignoring the burning pain that the fumes brought to her eyes, she ignited the blade and slashed the top off the drum in front of her.

  What she found inside was a barrelful of baradium with a proton grenade detonator—enough explosive power to shatter the asteroid into hundreds of pieces. A thick harness of multicolored wires ran from the detonator to a digital timer currently displaying the number 10 and counting down by seconds. Next to the display was a red disarming switch.

  Rejecting the switch as much too obvious for Lumiya, Alema deactivated her lightsaber and dropped it, then frantically began to sort through the wire harness with her one good hand. By the time she found a single gray disarming wire, the display read 3. She started to pull it—then recalled how Lumiya had nearly killed them aboard the Anakin Solo by mistaking a proximity sensor feed for a safety delay. She released the gray and grabbed the most orange of the three orange wires. When no warning chill raced down her spine, she held her breath and jerked the wire free.

  The timer reached 0. Nothing exploded.

  Alema felt her one lekku uncurl in relief. She recovered her lightsaber and, coughing violently from the hyperdrive fumes, turned to Ship with her brow cocked in triumph.

  Ship seemed unimpressed. There were a hundred ways to die in Lumiya’s sanctuary. Certainly one of the most foolish was standing in a cloud of coolant fumes to gloat.

  The vessel had a point, Alema had to admit. She crossed the hangar to the hatch that led into Lumiya’s chambers, then began to work her way past the gauntlet of traps that had once protected the privacy of the Dark Lady of the Sith. First there was the flechette spray behind the false control pad at the entrance. Then came the air lock with the reversed controls and the poison “decontamination shower,” followed by a clever Force illusion of Lumiya herself that somehow transferred the damage of any attack directed at it back to the assailant. Alema really wanted to learn how
that was done—once the throbbing inside her skull subsided enough for her to concentrate.

  Finally, Alema found herself standing inside the foyer of Lumiya’s suite of chambers, her lekku prickling in anticipation of the wonders she would soon discover. Each of Lumiya’s traps had whetted her appetite for Sith technology, and each time she had defeated one, her expectations had risen. Whatever Lumiya had been trying to guard, it was obviously very important—and valuable. Alema began to have visions of a Sith megaweapon, something that might be able to bring the Galactic Alliance to heel with a single demonstration. Or maybe it was something more subtle, such as an artifact that allowed one to read an enemy’s thoughts from afar. Maybe she would find both—or a whole cache of strange new Sith technology. All those traps had been designed to protect something.

  Alema started by focusing on her Force-awareness, looking for any cold places or disturbances that might suggest a nexus of dark side energy—then quickly gave it up as hopeless. The whole asteroid was suffused with the dark side, so much so that she almost felt as though she were snug in the Dark Nest again, surrounded by the familiar presences of her fellow Gorog. It was a bittersweet sensation, one that threatened to undermine her safety by lulling her into a false sense of security.

  Alema advanced to a careful reconnaissance of the quarters. With a handful of beige sleeping chambers, a keet-paneled study, a vaulted dining room, and a sunken conversation parlor, the suite was comfortable enough. But it was hardly grand or opulent, far from the kind of place that one would expect someone of Lumiya’s power and resources to call home. There was no artwork or memorabilia to make it feel inhabited, though the full-length mirrors on every wall did hint at Lumiya’s vanity.

  Somehow, the mirrors always seemed to reflect Alema at the best possible angle, concealing her disfigurements and accentuating her still-svelte figure. She was enormously pleased—but that did not prevent her from cautiously checking behind each one to make certain it did not conceal a safe or hidden doors.

  Unfortunately, she discovered no secret chambers behind the mirrors, or anywhere else in the suite. The only hint of a secure room was an ancient synthwood door tucked in back of an old-fashioned kitchen. The infrared ovens and particle beam cooktops were too clean to have been used anytime recently, but the door was the only locked portal she had found in the entire suite.

  Alema checked for each kind of trap she had encountered so far, then for all the others she had been trained to identify. Finding none, she opened herself to the Force and ran her hand over the door’s surface, alert for the faintest prickle of danger sense.

  She felt nothing. Whatever trap Lumiya had placed on this door, Alema could not find it. And that could only mean one thing: this was where the Sith treasures were hidden.

  Alema stepped back, taking a moment to calm her pounding heart and consider how to attack the problem. There was no question of leaving the door unopened. To restore the Balance between her and Leia, she had to turn Jacen into what Leia hated most—another Emperor. To turn Jacen into another Emperor, she had to be able to control him, to stop him from doing foolish things like taking the Jedi academy hostage. And to control Jacen, she needed leverage—leverage such as the Sith artifacts hidden behind that door.

  After a few minutes of calming exercises, Alema’s heart finally stopped pounding. She felt confident that she had considered the problem from every angle, and still she could not figure out how the door might be trapped. Her only resource was her knowledge of Lumiya.

  The Dark Lady of the Sith had been a sophisticated and subtle woman, someone who planned in layers and took great pride in reading her prey. She would expect anyone who had made it this deep into her inner sanctum to be as cunning and complex as she was, and her trap would be designed with that type of person in mind. What she would not expect was an intruder who acted like a common thug, who took the easiest, most direct route to what she wanted.

  Alema took a small concussion grenade off her utility belt, then used a dab of synthglue to affix it to the door over the lock. She retreated into the adjacent room and used the Force to activate the trigger. There came a silver flash and an earsplitting bang, and a cloud of black smoke rolled into the dining room.

  Once the smoke had cleared, Alema braved a shower of fire-suppression foam to return to the kitchen. The door in back was hanging twisted and half open. In her excitement, Alema barely remembered to check for more traps, but she still didn’t find any—sprung or otherwise. She activated a glow rod and peered through the charred doorway into an old food storage closet.

  The shelves were lined with cybernetic supplies—tools, fluids, replacement parts—all the equipment Lumiya might need to maintain her mechanical half. As far as Alema could tell, the little room did not contain a single Sith artifact.

  Completely forgetting her own safety now, she slipped past the door. An overhead glow panel activated automatically, filling the chamber with soft white light. Along one wall, she found a huge stockpile of powdered mixes for the protein and vitamin drinks that had served Lumiya’s half-cyborg body as food. On a low shelf on the opposite wall, she found a few power cells and extra strands for the Dark Lady’s lightwhip.

  “Spare parts?” Alema felt herself swelling up with anger, the frustration and fear of the search stoking the fire inside. “Protein drink?”

  She swept half a dozen powdered protein canisters off a shelf, then kicked out in the opposite direction and sent flying a carton of sharpened Kaiburr Crystals. That felt so good that she ignited her lightsaber, then caused a sour-smelling cascade of hydraulic fluid by slashing open an entire row of plastoid jars.

  “We want artifacts!” Alema swung again, cutting the supports from beneath a high shelf. “We want Sith treasure!”

  A cybernetic arm came crashing down on her, battering her about the head and shoulders. She shrugged it off and started to bring her lightsaber around to hack the offending part into so much chaff—then noticed a finger-length datachip holder lying in the hydraulic fluid near the open end of the arm’s hollinium casing.

  “Well … what have we here?” Alema deactivated her lightsaber and retrieved the datachip holder. “Could you be the reason Lumiya kept this door locked?”

  She stared at the fiberplast case as though waiting for an answer—which, in a sense, she was. After a moment, she began to perceive a faint ripple in the Force, the barest hint of the last emotion she had expected to encounter: hope, perhaps even comfort.

  “Interesting,” Alema said. “What are you?”

  This time she did not wait for an answer—despite what Ship believed, she was not that broken. Instead, she looked for more datachips, first searching through the other cybernetic supplies, then the Kaiburr Crystals she had scattered across the floor and the other cartons of lightwhip parts. She ended by emptying every canister of vitamin drink and powdered protein into the growing mess on the floor.

  There were no more datachips to be found, though Alema did discover over a million credits in generic chits hidden inside some of the protein canisters. She left the currency on the floor with everything else she did not want; credits she could get anytime, and stealing them was always so much more fun.

  Convinced there was nothing else to discover in the food closet, Alema returned to Lumiya’s study and inserted the chip into a datapad. She expected to encounter a request for a password or some other form of security; instead, a hooded head appeared on the display and instantly began to speak.

  “Our apologies for the brevity of your journey.” The speaker’s face remained hidden in the shadows beneath his hood, but the voice was male—and full of dark power. “Had we foreseen the speed of the invaders’ advance, we would have sent a more sizable escort. Should you survive and care to reach us on your own, the navigation string attached to this message will guide you … Once.”

  The figure appeared to lean away from the light, and the display went dark. Alema extracted the datachip, then sat back to consider. She ha
d been taught as a young Jedi that only two Sith existed at any one time: the dark side drive for personal power always prevented them from establishing a larger Order. But Lumiya had once hinted—in the missile hold of the Anakin Solo, as she made preparations that might involve sacrificing herself to kill Luke Skywalker—that there were more than two Sith, and that their plan for the galaxy did not necessarily involve Lumiya’s survival. The figure in the message certainly supported this idea; at the least, he seemed to be part of a larger group.

  Alema returned the datachip to its holder and started for the hangar. Clearly, she had set her sights too low. She did not need Sith artifacts to guide Jacen to success.

  What she needed were the Sith themselves.

  six

  To the starboard side of the observation bubble hung a crescent of smog-shrouded world, its planetary defense shields dappled with gold overload circles, its legendary defense platforms reduced to flickering twinkles of flame. Balmorra was lost. Jacen was certain of that. But the Confederation would pay dearly for victory here, provided that the pilots of the Fourth Fleet lived up to their fearless reputation—and provided that he could finally bring his battle meditation into play.

  When Jacen closed his eyes, he could see the Hutt armada—a motley swarm of vessels ranging from heavy marauders to fast corvettes—attacking Balmorra. He could see a flotilla of Commenorian Star Destroyers performing a screening action to keep the Alliance at bay. What Jacen could not see was the readiness of his crews: whether they were eager for a fight, whether their commanders were alert or distracted … whether they were loyal to the new government or considered it an illegal regime.

  Jacen turned his attention to the Fourth’s new flagship, Peacebringer, then pictured Admiral Ratobo’s noseless face, the big eyes and huge bald head. The image darkened to gray-blue, and a pair of pensive creases climbed the Bith’s high brow. For a moment, Jacen sensed Ratobo’s distaste for the battle they would soon be fighting—and his anger at the politicians for allowing it to become necessary.