Invincible (31 page)

By the time Jaina had cleared her mind, her four sparring partners stood around her in a semicircle. Each was holding a small panel in front of him, his legs braced and his elbows locked so the panel would not move when it was struck.

Jaina did not take any time to study her targets or be certain of her strike. She simply looked at the panel in Jag’s hands—a homogoni slab five centimeters thick. She actually
saw
how the Force bound its cells together, how they were organized into long lines that gave the wood its grain, and exactly where that grain could be split. Then she simply let her hand slide out and do it, let her fingertips touch the place she had seen. At once, she felt the Force shooting through her hand as it rushed into that weak spot, shattering the bonds that had held the slab together.

The homogoni did not just split, it shattered, and Jag was left holding two tiny fragments with a pile of slivers at his feet.

“Nice job,” he said.

Jaina had already turned to the panel in Zekk’s hands, a plastoid breastplate that had been taken from a captured stormtrooper. She saw the plastoid as she had seen the homogoni, but now there was no true grain, just layer after layer of polymers crossing in every conceivable direction, with one spot where the layers were particularly thin. She let her hand slide out again. The breastplate fragmented into a dozen pieces and clattered to the grass at Zekk’s feet. Next, Jaina turned to Tesar and let her hand slide out to touch the small square of hfredium hull plate he was holding. The square parted into triangles and fluttered out of the Barabel’s hands.

Finally, she turned to Lowbacca, who was holding a disk of raw
beskar.
Luke had arranged to buy the disk from one of the arms dealers that the Mandalorians were now quite freely supplying with the stuff. She almost hesitated, but forced herself
not
to think, to just see and do, and before she knew it her hand was shooting out toward the heart of a spiral of carefully worked metal crystals.

And the disk crumbled, just as Roegr’s breastplate had when Caedus had tapped it with the pommel of his lightsaber.

Behind her, Jaina’s father let out a loud, embarrassing whoop. “Who needs a lightsaber?” Han exclaimed. “I haven’t seen anything that impressive since your mother wrapped a chain around Jabba’s throat.”

“Han, you didn’t see that,” her mother said. “Freeze-blind, remember?”

Jaina turned to find her mother tapping her temple near her eyes, and her father still pumping his fist into the air. But it was the doorway a dozen meters behind them that caught her interest. Emerging from it was a handsome young man with reddish hair and his father’s blue eyes, with a pair of well-dressed Hapan women following close behind.

“Ben?”
Jaina spread her arms and rushed across the grass to greet him. “You’re back!”

She wrapped him in a tight embrace and whirled him back and forth, ignoring for the moment whether he wished to speak himself—or even needed to breathe.

“Don’t you
ever
do that again!” she ordered.

Ben managed to disengage himself. “Do
what
?”

“Move away from your backup!” Jaina said. “What were you thinking?”

She finally began to notice the women accompanying Ben—and grew so distracted she did not hear Ben’s reply. They were definitely identical twins and definitely Hapan nobility, with the fine clothes and haughty bearing typical of women of that class. But they were more than that. With their long straight noses, thin arcing eyebrows, and silky red hair, they were obviously relatives of Tenel Ka—and fairly close relatives, at that.

“…not to get
you
and Aunt Leia captured, too,” Ben was saying. “That’s the protocol for a situation like the one we were in at Monument Plaza, and it was the right thing to do.”

“Yes, it was,” Leia agreed, joining them. “Welcome back. And please forgive Jaina. She was just worried about you. We all were.”

“Thanks, Aunt Leia.” Ben smiled at her briefly, then looked back to Jaina and frowned. “I’m a
Jedi,
Jaina, with a job to do, just like you. If we’re going to keep working together, you’re going to have to remember that—okay?”

Jaina lifted her brow. “Yeah, sure, Ben. Sorry.” She looked to the two women accompanying him. “What have you two been feeding him?”

The two women looked at each other, then the one on the right said, “Don’t blame
us
if you can’t handle your men. All we did was deliver him to Her Majesty, as ordered.”

Ben just shook his head, then turned to his father, who was standing quietly beside Leia.

“Good to see you, Dad,” he said. “At least
you’re
not treating me like a kid anymore. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, Ben,” Luke said. “But there’s no need to thank me. All I did was give you a mission, and you performed brilliantly. Without you, we wouldn’t have known where to look for Caedus—and we wouldn’t have known what he was up to in the Roche system.”

Ben beamed for a second, then hugged his father. Jaina was surprised to see that he had already grown almost as tall as Luke. In a year, he might even be taller.

“I guess I had a good teacher, Dad.” After a moment, Ben freed himself and stepped back, his expression growing serious again. “But there was a problem with my escape—a big one.”

“There always is, kid,” Han said. “What’s this one?”

Ben hesitated. “Maybe I’d better let Tenel Ka explain it. She has the intelligence reports.”

“Tenel Ka is
here
?” Zekk gasped.

Ben looked at Zekk as though he had just asked a very foolish question. “Of course she’s here,” he said. “You didn’t think the
Dragon Queen
came all this way just to deliver
me,
did you?”

Jaina frowned and looked to her mother, who did not seem surprised at all. “What did I miss?”

“Sorry,” Luke said. “I didn’t want to interrupt your sparring. The
Dragon Queen
arrived an hour ago with most of the Hapan Home Fleet.”

Now Jaina was
really
confused—as were Jag, Zekk, and the others. Moving an entire fleet to a secret base wasn’t a very good way to keep it secret.

“What’s the Home Fleet doing
here
?” Zekk asked.

“Her Majesty will explain all that shortly,” said one of the women with Ben. She stepped to Zekk’s side and looped a hand through his arm. “In the meantime, why don’t you show me around, handsome? My name’s Taryn.”

Zekk looked somewhere between confused and shocked; then his expression softened.

“Maybe we can do that later…Taryn.” He nodded toward the door, where a large Hapan security detail was escorting Tenel Ka and Allana into the courtyard. “Right now, I’d like to hear what Her Majesty has to say.”

Taryn looked annoyed—but only for a moment. “Later is good, too,” she said. “But don’t disappoint me. We have a date.”

“Uh, sure.” Zekk was clearly reeling from the straightforward manner of Hapan women; he flushed and glanced over at Jaina. “I mean, if
you
don’t mind.”

Taryn turned to Jaina, her expression more appraising than apologetic. “He’s yours?”

“Well, n-no,” Jaina said. Zekk looked even more uncomfortable, and through the Force, she could feel Jag smirking at her dilemma. “Of course he’s not
mine.
We don’t—”

“Well, then,” Taryn interrupted. She smiled and squeezed Zekk’s biceps. “Lucky me.”

Taryn’s twin sister rolled her eyes. “We’re supposed to be on duty, Taryn.”

“Don’t be such a Dug, Trista,” Taryn replied. “I can have fun
and
do my duty.”

Trista stifled her reply as Tenel Ka emerged from the building, holding the hand of a beautiful little girl with her mother’s red hair and a cute button nose. Jaina’s heart broke. It was the first time she had ever seen her niece, and Allana’s resemblance to Jacen at that age was striking. She could not understand how her brother could have introduced so much evil into the galaxy when he had such innocence to protect. Nearly everything else Caedus had done
might
have been forgivable, but how could he have taken his own daughter hostage?

As Tenel Ka and Allana arrived, the group made a place for them to stand, but there were no big Solo hugs for Allana. Her paternity was known by only a few, and for Allana’s sake, Tenel Ka and the Solos wanted to keep it that way.

“Your Majesty,” Luke said. “Thank you for visiting us here on Shedu Maad. We’re honored.”

Tenel Ka smiled and impatiently motioned for everyone to stop bowing. “There is no need for formalities when we are alone, my friends,” she said. “Nor do we have the time. I’m afraid I’ve come with some alarming news.”

Luke nodded. “We suspected as much when you arrived with your fleet. What is it?”

“As Ben may have told you,” she said, “my father was captured and taken aboard the
Anakin Solo.
”

Ben
hadn’t
told them, of course, which certainly explained the dead silence that greeted her announcement.

After a moment of quiet, Ben said, “It was my fault. I thought I was clean, but—”

“It wasn’t your fault, Jedi Skywalker,” said Trista. “You
told
us we were being watched.”

Leia stepped over and took Tenel Ka’s hand. “I’m so sorry, Your Majesty. If there’s anything we can do—”

“Perhaps later, Princess Leia,” Tenel Ka interrupted. “But Prince Isolder knew the location of this base. Apparently, Darth Caedus forced him to reveal it, because the
Anakin Solo
has broken out of the Roche system with the Remnant assault fleet. They were last seen entering the Transitory Mists near Roqoo Station.”

“Caedus is coming to
us
?” asked Saba Sebatyne, looking entirely too happy about it. “You are certain?”

Tenel Ka nodded. “And there may not be time to evacuate. The Mist Patrol informs me that with the right charts, Caedus could be assaulting the Maad system within twelve hours.”

“What are the chances he has the right charts?” Han asked.

“Even if he doesn’t, the Force will guide him,” Luke said. He turned to Tenel Ka. “But I doubt your father revealed our location. I think Caedus may have found us another way.”

“What other way?” Tenel Ka asked. “Only a handful of people know the location of this base.”

Luke motioned Jaina forward, then pointed at the stains that Jaina still had not been able to scrub off her face and neck. “Do you recognize this?”

Tenel Ka’s jaw dropped. “Those are not burns?” Before Luke or anyone else could answer, she leaned in closer to Jaina. “That’s Caedus’s blood?”

“I
knew
it,” Jaina said, growing uneasy. “It’s from his arm, and it won’t come off—”

“Because it’s a blood trail,” Tenel Ka explained. “Some of the Nightsisters used the technique to mark their slaves—so they could always track them down.”

Jaina’s heart sank. “So
I
led him here.” She turned to Luke. “And you knew? Why did you let me stay?”

“I knew Caedus would be coming,” Luke corrected. “For
me.
”

Jaina frowned. “But he
saw
me cut off his arm,” she said. “He must know that I’m the one hunting him.”

“He knowz you are the Sword,” Saba corrected. “Does one win a battle by breaking the Sword, or the warrior who wieldz it?”

Luke turned to Tenel Ka. “Thank you for the warning. I don’t mean to be an ungracious host, but we have to prepare, and we may not have long. Perhaps you and Allana should leave while there’s still time.”

“We are staying, as is my fleet,” Tenel Ka said. “If the Jedi fall, so does my throne. Better to defend it here among friends than on Hapes, with more enemies at my back than in front of me.”

“It will be an honor, Jedi Majesty,” Saba said. “This one will be proud to hunt at your side.”

As Luke and the others began to make plans for the coming onslaught, Jaina was still struggling to grasp how her brother had taken advantage of her. She did not understand exactly how Nightsister blood trails worked, but she assumed the Force-user somehow maintained a connection to the blood he had shed, and employed that to keep track of his living property.

If Jaina’d had any lingering doubts about whether there might be any trace of Jacen left inside Darth Caedus, they were gone now. Caedus had known
exactly
what he was doing when he ordered those stormtroopers to redirect their fire. And his cold calculation in the face of such an injury scared her even more than seeing him stand up after losing his arm. He hadn’t wanted Jaina killed
then,
because he needed her to lead him to the Jedi
now.

When Jaina returned her attention to the others, it was to find her father studying her with sad, sympathetic eyes.

“It finally happened, didn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Jaina said. “I think it did.”

Ben frowned. “
What
happened?”

“Her last hope died,” Leia said. “She realized that Jacen is totally gone. There’s nothing left to bring back into the light.”

Jaina nodded. “That’s pretty much it,” she said. “I started to wonder again when he ordered those stormtroopers to redirect their fire. But whatever I thought I saw—it was in
my
eyes, not his.”

Ben contemplated this for a moment, then asked, “But how
do
you know when someone can be brought back toward the light?”

“First, they must
want
to be redeemed,” Tenel Ka said. “All Caedus wants is to control everything he sees. There is no use wishing otherwise, Ben.”

“
I
did some pretty terrible things,” Ben pointed out. “And no one gave up on
me.
”

“
You
got a little confused, kid,” Han said. “That happens. But you didn’t go around killing family members and burning planets.”

Jaina glanced over at Luke. He was studying Ben not with shock or disbelief over his son’s naïveté, but with pride. Luke understood his son much better than they did, she realized. Whatever Ben was working through, it had nothing to do with Jacen…
or
Caedus.