Conquest: Edge of Victory I (6 page)

“That’s not so bad,” he murmured. “One Corellian light transport. Maybe it
is
one of Karrde’s bunch.” Or maybe not. And maybe there were a hundred Yuuzhan Vong ships on the other side of the gas giant or Yavin 4, invisible to his Jedi senses and hidden from his sensors. Whatever the case, waiting around wasn’t going to improve matters. He powered up, corrected his tumble, and engaged the ion engines.

He activated his comm system and hailed the stranger. “Transport, acknowledge.”

For a few moments, he got nothing, then the audio crackled. “Who is this?”

“My name is Anakin Solo. What are you doing in the Yavin system?”

“We’re Corusca gem miners.”

“Really. Where’s your trawler?”

Another pause, then words underlined with a bit of anger.

“We can see the moon now. We knew it was here all along. Your Jedi sorcery has failed you.”

THE TRANSPORT IS ARMING WEAPONS SYSTEMS
, Fiver
noticed. Anakin nodded grimly as the other vessel swung toward him.

“I’m only warning you once,” Anakin said. “Stand down.”

For an answer, he got a blast from a laser cannon, which at that distance he managed to avoid as easily as he might deflect a blaster shot with his lightsaber.

“Gee,” Anakin muttered. “I suppose that says it all.” He opened his S-foils. “Fiver, give me evasive approach six, but I still want the stick just in case.”

ACKNOWLEDGED
.

He dropped toward Yavin 4 and the transport at full thrust, spinning and dancing as he went, and when he felt his target firmly enough in the Force, he sliced the night of vacuum with ruby red. The transport returned fire and began its own evasive maneuvers, but that was like a bantha trying to dodge a mace fly.

They had good shields, though. As Anakin completed his first pass, his opponent was still essentially untouched. To make matters more interesting, four winks of blue flame and his instruments agreed that the transport had just fired proton torpedoes at him. Anakin had been preparing to turn for another pass; instead he continued his noseward plunge toward the moon.

“Four proton torpedoes. These guys really don’t like us, Fiver.”

THE TRANSPORT SEEMS HOSTILE
, Fiver acknowledged. Anakin sighed. Fiver was a more advanced astromech than R2-D2, but he missed his uncle’s droid’s personality at times. Maybe he ought to do something about that.

Two laser blasts hit his shields in quick succession, but they did their job. On his tracker, the proton torpedoes continued to close as Anakin met resistance from the atmosphere. He plunged on, and the ship began to vibrate faintly. His nose and wings were starting to heat up from the upper atmosphere. If he didn’t time this exactly right, he would scatter all over the jungle kilometers below.

When the lead torp was almost on him, he cut his engines and yanked the nose up. The atmosphere, still thin, was nevertheless able to give the XJ X-wing a good strong slap, hurling him away from the moon. Servos whined and something somewhere made a startling
ping
. Using the momentum from the atmospheric skip, Anakin turned further spaceward, blood rushing from his head as the g’s mounted, then he kicked in the engines again.

Behind him, the proton torpedoes didn’t fare as well. They tried to turn after him, of course. Two didn’t make it, and continued plunging moonward. The other two skipped along wildly different courses than Anakin and would never find him again before running out of fuel.

“Nice try,” Anakin said grimly. Now he was climbing uphill, out of the gravity well, his lasers pumping a steady rhythm. He took another hit from the enemy’s more powerful gun, and for an instant the lights dimmed in the cockpit. Then they flared back to life as Fiver rerouted, and Anakin took a hammer to the transport. Their shields faltered, and he slagged their primary generator. Looping around them nose to tail, he drilled laser turrets, torpedo ports, and engines.

Then he tried the comm again. “Ready to talk now?” he asked.

“Why not?” the voice from the other end replied. “You can still surrender if you want.”

“That’s—” Anakin began, but Fiver interrupted.

HYPERSPACE JUMP DETECTED
. 12
VESSELS HAVE ARRIVED, DISTANCE
100,000
KILOMETERS
.

“Sith spit!” Anakin muttered, bringing his sensors to bear.

They weren’t Yuuzhan Vong ships, he saw that immediately, just a motley collection of E-wings, transports, and corvettes.

They were hailing him. He opened the link.

“Unidentified vessel, this is the Peace Brigade,” a voice
crackled. “Stand down and surrender, and you won’t be harmed.”

They were too far away to hit him. Soon they wouldn’t be. Anakin closed his S-foils, rolled, opened the throttle, and raced toward the distant viridian of Yavin 4.

   Anakin vaulted from the cockpit of the X-wing into silent near darkness. A twilight line of illumination in the distance was the entrance he had flown through into what had once been a part of an ancient Massassi temple complex, much later the central hangar for the Rebel fleet, and which now saw little use at all, since most ships landing at the academy set down outside.

Anakin’s flight boots scuffed the ancient stone surface, and the sound grew around him into the hushed beating of enormous wings. He smelled stone and lubricant and more faintly the musky jungle outside.

Someone was watching Anakin from the darkness.

“Who is that?” a voice asked, each word stretching to fill the abyss.

“It’s me, Kam. Anakin.”

A faint glow appeared, and then a bank of light panels came on. Some ten meters away Kam Solusar stood, hooking his lightsaber back into his belt.

“I thought it felt like you,” Kam said. “But there’s been an unknown ship in orbit for several standard days now. We’ve been trying to keep them confused.”

“Peace Brigade,” Anakin explained. “And the one ship has friends now, about twelve of them. And they aren’t confused anymore.”

He’d been walking toward Kam while he spoke, and suddenly his old teacher swept forward, clasping his arm. “It’s good to see you, Anakin. And you? You’re alone?”

Anakin nodded. “Talon Karrde is on the way with a flotilla. He’s supposed to evacuate you and the students. Uncle Luke wasn’t expecting the Peace Brigade to show up so soon, I guess.”

Kam’s eyes narrowed. “But you were, weren’t you? You came here without permission.”

“I came against orders, actually,” Anakin corrected. “That’s not important now. Getting the students to safety, that is.”

“Of course,” Kam agreed. “How long before the Peace Brigade can land?”

“An hour? Not long.”

“And Karrde?”

“He could be days.”

Kam grimaced. “We can’t hold out here that long.”

“We might. We’re all Jedi.”

Kam snorted. “You need a sense of your limitations. I have a sense of mine. We might do very well, but we’ll lose kids. I have to think of them first.”

They were approaching the turbolift when the door hissed open and ejected a blond-and-orange blur. The blur smacked Anakin at chest height, and he suddenly found surprisingly strong arms wrapped around him in a fierce embrace. Bright green eyes danced centimeters from his own.

He felt his face go warm.

“Hi, Tahiri,” he said.

She pushed back from him. “Hi, yourself, great hero-from-the-stars who’s too good to keep in touch with his best friend.”

“I’ve—”

“Been busy. Right. I know all about it—well, not
all
about it because we get the news so late here, but I heard about Duro, and Centerpoint, and—”

She stopped suddenly, either because she saw it in his face or felt it in the Force. Centerpoint Station was a sensitive subject.

“Anyway,” she went on, “you won’t believe how boring it’s been without you. All the apprentices have gone off, and that just leaves these
kids—
” She stepped away, and for the first time, he really saw her.

Whatever she detected in his eyes cut her off in midsentence. “What?” she asked instead. “What are you looking at?”

“I—” Now his face felt like it had been grazed by blasterfire. “You look … different.”

“Older maybe? I’m fourteen now. Last week.”

“Happy birthday.”

“You should have thought of it then, but thanks anyway. Dummy.”

Anakin found himself suddenly unable to meet her eyes. He dropped his gaze. “You’re, uh, still barefoot, I see.”

“What did you expect? I
hate
shoes. I only wear them when I have to. Shoes were invented by the Sith to keep our delicate toes in anguish and misery, I’m sure of it. Did you think just because I grew a centimeter or two I’d start torturing my feet?”

She looked up at Kam suspiciously. “What’s he doing here, anyway? I know he didn’t come to see
me
.”

Anakin flinched at the hurt he heard in that.

“Anakin’s come to warn us of trouble,” Kam replied. “In fact, you’ll need to do your catching up later.”

“Really? Trouble?”

“Yes,” Anakin said.

Tahiri put her hands on her hips. “Well, why didn’t you say so? What’s going on?”

“We need to talk to Tionne and Ikrit,” Kam told her, continuing forward into the turbolift.

“
Now
,” Anakin added, following him.

“But what’s going
on?
” Tahiri shouted at their suddenly retreating backs.

“I’ll explain on the way,” Anakin promised.

“Fine.” She ducked into the lift just as the door was closing.

“The Yuuzhan Vong warmaster basically put a price on our heads,” Anakin said. “On
all
our heads, all the Jedi. He announced that if what’s left of the New Republic
will turn over all of its Jedi to him—and Jacen especially—he won’t take any more planets.”

“Boy,
that
sounds like a lie,” Tahiri said.

“Doesn’t matter. People believe him. Like the people in the ships approaching right now.”

“They want to turn
us
over to the Yuuzhan Vong? Let them try!”

“Don’t worry, they will.”

The door opened and they emerged onto the second level. Kam started down the main corridor and then through a series of passages that were utterly familiar to Anakin, though they all seemed somehow narrower than when he had last seen them. The Massassi temple that housed the academy had once seemed impossibly huge. Now it seemed merely large.

They reached the central area, and twenty-odd faces turned toward them. Human, Bothan, Twi’lek, Wookiee—more than a dozen species were represented. All were quite young except one—Tionne, Kam’s wife, a graceful silver-haired woman with pearl-white eyes. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise and her lips in pleasure.

“Anakin!” she said.

“Tionne,” Kam said gently but urgently, “we need to talk.”

“Anakin!” Sannah, a girl of thirteen with brown hair and yellow eyes, waved at him. Even younger Valin Horn was waving, though he wasn’t shouting.

“He’s busy!” Tahiri told them. But when Anakin went to talk with Kam and Tionne, Tahiri came along.

“Tahiri—” Kam began.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You aren’t leaving me out of this.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Kam said gently. “I was going to ask you to find Master Ikrit and meet us in the conference room.”

“Oh. Okay.”

She whirled off down the corridor on bare feet.

* * *

Tahiri was back with Ikrit only moments later. The old Jedi Master padded into the room on all fours, his long floppy ears dragging the ground. His normally bright eyes seemed a little dull to Anakin, and he felt an inexplicable pang.

“Master Ikrit.”

“Young Anakin. It is good to see you,” Ikrit replied. “Though you bring troubling news.”

“Yes.” He raced through the details once again, for Ikrit and Tionne.

“They would take our children?” Tionne murmured, more darkly than was her wont.

“The Peace Brigade? Absolutely. Tionne, it’s
bad
for Jedi out there right now.”

“I understand,” she said, then clenched her fist. “No, I
don’t
understand. Has the galaxy gone mad?”

“Yes,” Kam said softly. “It’s an old madness, war.”

“You don’t have any ships, do you?”

“No. Streen went with Peckhum in the supply ship.”

“Where to?”

“Corellia. He should be back soon. Though I suppose they won’t, now.”

“We’ll have to hide them here, then,” Anakin said. “Where?”

“Down the river! The cave beneath the Palace of the Woolamander,” Tahiri offered. “Master Ikrit’s cave.”

Anakin raised his eyebrows. “That’s a good idea. They’d be really hard to find there, especially if the Peace Brigade doesn’t start looking right away.”

“What do you mean by that?” Kam said, his voice suddenly cautious. “Why would they delay the search?”

“I’ll stay behind,” Anakin said. “I’ll make it look as if we’re still in the temple trying to make a stand. They’ll waste time shooting their way through while you and Tionne get the kids to safety.”

“You’re leaving out one little detail,” Tahiri said. “What about
you?
What keeps
you
safe?”

“I’ll hide the X-wing. I know a good place. I can slip through them. Then I’ll play hide-and-seek until Talon Karrde shows up. Once he’s mopped up the Peace Brigade, I’ll lead him to you.”

“You’ve been thinking about this,” Tionne said.

“All the way down,” Anakin admitted. “It’s the best way.”

“He’s right,” Kam said.

“Kam—” Tionne began.

“He’s right,” Kam went on, “except that he’s not the one staying behind—I am.”

“I’m the better pilot,” Anakin said bluntly. “I’m the only one who can pull it off.”

“Anakin is correct,” Ikrit said in his scratchy voice. “It is part of his destiny. And mine.”

“Master Ikrit—”

“You will say I am no warrior. That may be true—it has been long since I wielded a lightsaber, and it was not what I preferred even then. But it is not lightsabers that will prevail here today, not weapons. Not all uses of the Force are aggressive.”

Anakin pursed his lips, but he couldn’t bring himself to contradict the ancient Master.