Apocalypse (60 page)

“So, Ben, what was
that
supposed to be?” she asked. “The power of the light side?”

“You didn’t do much better,” Ben replied. He pulled his arm free and stopped a few meters outside the steam. “And
you
were drawing on the font.”

“Yeah … because I’d kind of like to survive this,” Vestara replied, reluctantly stopping with him. “What’s your point?”

“That we don’t have to surrender to her,” Ben whispered. He glanced across the courtyard toward the ruined arcade, then used the Force to lift a section of broken pillar and bring it spinning toward the back of the avatar’s head. “We just have to work together.”

There was no time for Vestara to waste with a witty reply. She simply raised her hands and unleashed another fork of Force lightning, this one far less powerful than when she had been drawing on the font’s power. The Keshiri’s hand rose so fast that Ben barely even saw it move, and he realized their ploy could actually work—that even an avatar could fall prey to a tactical diversion.

The Keshiri caught the lightning bolt in the palm of her hand, and its white-hot energy dwindled to a spark. But the pillar kept coming, striking the back of her head with a sickening thud and sending a bloody spray of skull and brain all the way across the courtyard to splatter Ben and Vestara’s legs.

The avatar did not instantly drop dead. She staggered a few steps forward, carried by the momentum of the impact, then raised her smashed head to reveal that one eye had been knocked free of the socket and was now dangling on her cheek.

The other eye fixed its gaze on Ben.

“
Sheeka
, Ben!” Vestara took a step away from him—not because she was abandoning him, Ben felt sure, but because it was the smart tactical move. “I think you really made her mad.”

“Let’s make her even madder,” Ben said, reaching out for another section of pillar. “Hit her agai … rrgh!”

The order came to a strangled end as he felt himself flying back into the arcade. His shoulders hit a pillar dead-center, folding so far backward that both shoulder blades touched stone. Then a tremendous
crack
sounded inside his skull, and his head exploded into dark pain. He felt himself sliding down the pillar toward the cobblestones below, and the last thing he saw was Vestara retreating toward the Font of Power, disappearing into the yellow steam with the avatar close behind.

Abeloth lay tangled in Luke’s arms, a writhing mass of Force energy that had suddenly gone limp a second or a day ago, only to explode an
hour or a nanosecond later into a flailing tempest that had sent them all rolling and bouncing across the Lake of Apparition’s dark waters. The stranger was tumbling with them, his hand still buried in Abeloth’s chest, now wailing in agony as gleaming black Force energy steamed from his wounds.

They bounced so close to the shore, Luke grew worried that Abeloth was trying to carry them away from the lake into some new place beyond shadows. And
then
what? His back hit the water again, and he spun them all around so that his feet were toward the shore. He planted his feet against a moss hummock and kicked off—and sent them all somersaulting back toward the center of the lake. Abeloth stopped struggling and seemed to shrink in his arms, and Luke dared to think that maybe, just
maybe
she had finally lost hope, that they had exhausted her to the point that she was no longer capable of fighting.

Then she was gone, leaving the stranger and Luke with nothing between them but twenty centimeters of space and the stump of the Sith’s hand, now pointed at Luke’s chest and still drawing Force energy, draining it not from Abeloth now, but directly from Luke.

They stayed like that for an eternity, a void of cold nothingness growing inside Luke as the stranger continued to hang in the air above, draining him. It seemed to Luke that the Sith’s betrayal was premature, that they at least ought to make certain Abeloth was truly dead before they turned to fighting each other … but that was not the way Sith did things.

Luke started to bring his hand up, intending to hit the stranger with a Force blast. But before he could loose it, the Sith’s feet dropped to the water’s surface, and he raised his stump and pointed toward the far end of the lake.

“There!”

Luke craned his neck and saw Abeloth’s silhouette backing into the Mists of Forgetfulness—with the stranger’s wrist still protruding from her chest.

“Stop her!” Luke yelled. “If she disappears into that fog …”

Luke left the sentence unfinished as a fountain of oily black Force energy erupted from the protruding wrist. Abeloth’s mouth gaped open, and her piercing shriek broke over the lake, reverberating across the water like a clap of thunder. Luke glanced over and saw the
stranger standing beside him, pointing in her direction, using the Force to draw his missing hand back toward its stump.

Abeloth did not come dancing in to counterattack, did not even try to stand off defensively and weaken them with a blast of Force lightning. She did not have time for such tactics. Luke doubted she would have fled the battle in the first place if she were not
already
dying, and with her Force essence gushing out of her like a geyser, she had to attack
now
.

And she did.

In the next thought Abeloth was simply there in front of the stranger, driving a ball of tentacles deep into
him
. Luke sprang forward to help—and felt a blistering iciness slide deep into his own chest. His entire right side flared into cold anguish, and the tentacles began to dig and grab, tearing him apart inside in a way no lightsaber or blaster ever could.

Luke attacked anyway, driving an elbow strike into the side of her head. As before, there was no crunching, no physical sense of impact, only Force energy plowing through Force energy, sending waves of pain and damage rolling through them both. Luke sensed his elbow come free as it pushed out the other side of Abeloth’s head. Then she simply fell away, her still-balled tentacles tearing free of both Luke and the stranger … each clutching a handful of dripping, pulsing Force essence.

The stranger collapsed with a gaping hole in his chest. Luke felt his own form grow limp and weak, and he sensed his mouth falling open to scream, then his whole body was falling, weak and aching for breath.

Jaina had heard death screams many times before, on battlefields from Anthus to Zelaba, and they had one thing in common: death screams always contained as much surprise as pain, as much anger and disbelief as sorrow. It was as though men meeting a violent end could never quite believe what was happening, that they had finally met a fighter who was better and luckier than they were. Or maybe it was death itself they were cursing, angry at how it preferred to cheat great warriors of their lives rather than take them in a fair fight. Jaina couldn’t be sure
of the feelings behind the scream, but she knew one thing for certain—a death scream was always raw and loud.

And that was the kind of scream she had just heard from the
Rude Awakening
’s medbay, where Luke had strapped in his body before he went beyond shadows.

But with black holes reaching out from both sides and Ship still holding the choke point with a steady assault of boulders and plasma, leaving the pilot’s seat to go check on him was out of the question. The
Awakening
’s shields had long ago failed, and she had so many weak spots in her bow armor that Jaina was seriously considering spinning the ship around to start taking damage in the stern.

She had been fighting back, of course—using a steady onslaught of baradium missiles against Ship. Her goal was to hold on long enough so Luke could return from beyond shadows. By then, she hoped the
Awakening
would be far enough through the choke point to force its way through with one last shot. But Luke’s scream had shown her the folly of her patient approach. She needed to finish this fast and get to Abeloth’s planet.

Jaina checked the missile magazine. Three left.

She launched two, a single second apart, then hit the throttles and accelerated after them. This time, it would be Ship who had to decide how crazy the other pilot was.

By the time Saba reached the air lock at the entrance to the computer core, the shadow-ghouls were barely shadows anymore. Their eyes had paled to white, and they moved so slowly that it was easy to dance past and close the eyes of their corpses. And even when one of them did make contact, there was no life draining or pain, just a sudden cold ache that passed as quickly as the ghoul was destroyed.

Clearly, Master Skywalker had robbed Abeloth of much of her strength. But Saba feared that
he
had also been greatly weakened, for she had not sensed him reaching out to let her know of his success—to warn her that Abeloth would now be desperate and looking to escape. Saba paused in front of the air lock and reached for him in the Force, but there was nothing … no hint of whether he was relieved or in pain, whether he had destroyed Abeloth or not.

Tahiri came up behind her and said, “That was almost
too
easy.” Her voice was trembling with exhaustion, but there was no pain in it, only the joy of returning to the hunt with her true pack. “Are you thinking trap?”

“This one is
alwayz
thinking trap,” Saba said. “It is the best way to hunt.”

“Not what I meant,” Tahiri replied. “I don’t like how that fight suddenly got easier. Abeloth is up to something.”

“So are we,” Olazon said, limping up to join them—and wisely cutting short any discussion of tactics. The pack had planned this part of the attack before drafting Tahiri to join them, and it would not be wise to explain their intentions where Abeloth could be eavesdropping. “And if you call
that
easy, we could use a few Jedi in the Void Jumpers.”

As Olazon spoke, he pulled a bell-shaped explosive from his gear bag and affixed it to the center of the air lock’s outer hatch. Saba could see dozens of dark splotches on his arms and body—areas of dead tissue where the ghouls had touched him and his flesh was no longer emitting normal heat. She knew that if he lived, he would spend the next few weeks inside a bacta tank, trying to replace the flesh the med droids were going to have to cut away.

Once he had set the timer, Olazon asked, “Anyone have a detonator left?”

Saba pulled one off her combat harness and passed it to Tahiri. “Jedi Veila has one.”

“I do
now
.” Tahiri frowned up at Saba, then turned to Olazon. “Set a one-second fuse and float it in?”

Olazon smiled. “Done this before, I see.”

“A few times,” Tahiri said, clearly understating the case.

Olazon nodded, then turned to Stomper Two, who was still carrying the shiny, badly dented orb of the EMP bomb. “You ready?”

“Big Blinder armed, safeties off,” the Void Jumper reported. “I’ll start the detonation timer when Jedi Veila blows the inner hatch.”

“Good.” Olazon flipped the fuse toggle on the first charge, then spun away from the hatch and pressed himself flat against the wall at the end of the corridor. “Fire in the hole!”

Everyone else did the same, Stomper Two going to Olazon’s side of the corridor, and Saba and Tahiri to the opposite side.

“Master Sebatyne,” Tahiri asked, “what’s the rest of our—”

The word
plan
vanished into a deafening bang. A slender cone of blowback flame shot five meters down the corridor, but most of the blast’s power was focused in the opposite direction. The entire hatch buckled inward, filling the interior of the air lock with a cloud of durasteel shrapnel.

The flames had barely died away before Tahiri rolled away from the wall and used the Force to send the thermal detonator floating toward the inner hatch. A second later a white flash flared from inside the air lock.

Saba was around Tahiri and through the hatchway even before the baradium glow had faded. Leaping across a three-meter hole that the detonator had left in the floor, she landed on a transparisteel service balcony inside the computer core. The balcony protruded about a dozen meters into a vast, spherical cavity filled with the faint pink striations of energy-starved circuits. Scattered around the chamber were a handful of drifting, radiant clouds—the tiniest amount of memory that an energy-starved computer needed to keep active to avoid shutting down.

Flying toward Saba from the depths of the chamber was a cloud of white-hot radiance, shaped like a woman’s face, but with a hugely broad mouth and eyes so sunken they looked like wells. As the cloud approached, tendrils of light began to reach out in front of it, stretching toward Saba.

Tahiri alighted at Saba’s side. “Stomper Two!” she yelled. “Big Blinder
now
!”

“Stay here,” Saba ordered, stepping away from Tahiri toward the banks of display screens and interface consoles at the front end of the balcony. “Protect Big Blinder.”

“Master Sebatyne, wait!” Tahiri called. “She’s just energy—you need the pulse bomb to kill her.”

Holding her lightsaber at waist height, inactivated and out of position, Saba ignored the warning and continued forward. What Tahiri
didn’t
know was that Abeloth could see the future, and that meant
they had to use the future to defeat her. That was why Olazon had sacrificed so much to bring the pulse bomb along—so that Abeloth would foresee it destroying the computer core with her inside.

What the prey
hadn’t
seen was how Saba intended to react when Abeloth tried to change the future—or at least Saba
hoped
Abeloth hadn’t seen that. By the time the cloud of radiance reached the front edge of the service balcony, the tendrils of light had solidified into fleshy tentacles, and Abeloth’s face had lost its luminous quality and started to grow opaque.

Still holding her lightsaber down by her waist, Saba Force-sprang into the air. The tentacles immediately stretched toward her, already pulsing with the dark Force essence that Abeloth intended to pump into Saba—that she
needed
to pump into Saba if she was to take a new avatar and escape to recover from the wounds that she had already suffered in the Maw.