Invincible (41 page)

“None taken,” Ben said. “Zekk’s got a better chance of keeping up with you, anyway.”

Taryn gave him a sly grin, then cocked her brow. “How good a chance?”

“Uh, pretty good,” Ben said. “I guess. I can’t believe you’re thinking about that right now.”

“I can think about a
lot
of things at the same time,” Taryn purred. “It’s the sign of a healthy mind.”

Ben felt the heat rising to his cheeks and started to turn away—until he felt a sudden jolt of shock and despair in Trista’s Force aura. He looked over and found her pressing her finger to her comlink earpiece, quietly murmuring into her throat-mike, asking questions like, “Do we know if she survived?” and “Who’s heard about this? Anyone moving yet?”

Ben glanced back to Taryn and found her also holding a finger to her comlink earpiece, listening intently but not speaking. She saw him studying her and motioned him close.

“There’s been an attack aboard the
Dragon Queen,
” she whispered. “Almost everyone with royal blood is dead.”

Ben’s heart dropped so far he’d have to pick it off the ground. “Tenel Ka?”

Taryn shook her head. “Don’t know yet.”

“Allana?”

Taryn shook her head again and did not answer.

The two sisters listened for another moment, then Trista clicked off. She pulled her blaster rifle from its holster and checked its power charge.

“We’re going to hold out,”
she said, quoting him. “You had to say it, didn’t you?”

Ben frowned, struggling to make the connection between what had just happened on the
Dragon Queen
and the battle on Shedu Maad. “You’re saying I
jinxed
us?”

“It’s not your fault. This is a Hapan thing.” Taryn checked her own blaster rifle, then pointed at the lightsaber still hanging from his belt. “You
do
know how to use that, right?”

“Uh, sure.” Ben snapped the lightsaber off his belt. “If I have a good…”

He did not bother finishing the sentence, since both sisters had already retreated from the maboo thicket and were heading toward an old mine adit that entered the hillside at the back of the terrace. The two guards stationed at the mouth of the tunnel took one glance at the blasters in the sisters’ hands and looked away, obviously taking pains not to see the pair.

Once they had entered the cool mustiness of the adit, Ben asked, “What was
that
all about?”

“The
Megador
still has most of the Home Fleet bottled up at Uroro Station.” Trista removed her night-vision goggles and led the way down the passage, following a line of hastily strung ceiling lights toward the Hapans’ command center. “So it’s just the
Dragon Queen
and a few of Ducha Requud’s Battle Dragons up there. Since the attack on the Queen Mother, SigTel has been picking up a lot of comm traffic between the
Anakin Solo
and the
Deserving Gem.
”

“I guess that explains things…sort of,” Ben said. SigTel was the Hapans’ Signals Intelligence unit. Apparently, they suspected the Moffs were trying to strike a deal with Ducha Requud to take Tenel Ka’s place. “But I was actually asking why the guards pretended not to see us.”

“Oh,
that.
” Taryn’s voice turned teasing, and Ben knew he was not going to get a straight answer. “We sort of turn invisible sometimes. Don’t Jedi?”

“It’s different for us,” Ben answered. “We actually have to sneak.”

The lights ended a thousand meters later, next to an old repair chamber cut into one side of the adit. Once again, the guards stationed at the door looked aside as Trista and Taryn approached, and Ben followed the sisters into General Livette’s makeshift command center.

About a dozen senior officers—all women, of course—were gathered around a large holotable that displayed Shedu Maad’s strange topography. In the center lay the main mining pit, a vine-draped abyss more than ten kilometers wide, with a gray-green lake filling the bottom. It was surrounded by uniformly terraced hillsides cloaked in maboo cane, and enormous flats covered with kolg forest—old strip mines and tailings ponds slowly being reclaimed by nature. The display also showed a patchy web of red lines beneath the surface terrain; these represented what little the mapping crews had learned about the network of underground tunnels and shafts that honeycombed the area.

As the officers noticed Ben and the sisters, the urgent drone that had filled the chamber quickly faded, and they turned to face the trio with expressions ranging from irritation to fear. Trista went left and Taryn went right, leaving Ben to wonder what they wanted
him
to do. Deciding it would be safer to stay where he could block the door, Ben stopped at the base of the table and held the hilt of his lightsaber in plain sight.

Taryn stopped about halfway down the table, positioning herself behind the officers and shaking a warning finger when one of them started to turn around. Trista marched straight to General Livette, a stern-jawed woman who did not bother with the usual Hapan vanities, leaving her hair gray and the old blaster burn across her cheek unaltered.

Livette scowled at Trista. “You had better have a good reason for interrupting us
now
—especially with blasters in your hands.”

“Don’t pretend you haven’t heard,” Trista said, pointing the blaster at Livette’s head. “It makes you look complicit.”

Livette’s expression went from haughty to resigned, and feelings of guilt tainted her Force aura. “Of course, I’ve heard of the unfortunate attacks aboard the
Dragon Queen,
” she said. “The news is all over the fleet.”

Trista used her free hand to point at Livette’s comlink. “Open a channel to
Deserving Gem,
” she ordered. “Have the comm officer put you through to Ducha Requud and tell us what you hear.”

Livette obeyed, then suddenly looked a little ill and held the comlink out so everyone could hear. It was a woman’s voice, screaming in terror and begging for her life.

“There
aren’t
going to be any deals with the Moffs,” Trista said. “I hope that’s clear.”

“Ab—absolutely.” Livette fell silent as she contemplated something, then she smiled to herself and said, “As a matter of fact, I was just about to ask for you. We’ve had reports of a female Jedi penetrating our perimeter with a squad of Elite Guard stormtroopers.”

“A
Jedi
?” Trista asked. “With the Imperials?”

“That’s not a Jedi,” Ben said, stepping to the edge of the table. He was pretty certain that General Livette had actually
authorized
the penetration, but he wasn’t going to argue the point if Trista and Taryn didn’t. “Where are they?”

Before answering, Livette looked to Trista. “I hope you realize that nobody in this chamber was aware of Ducha Requud’s betrayal.” She was hardly smooth; Ben didn’t even need the Force to tell that she was lying. “Our loyalties lie strictly with the
legitimate
successor to Her Majesty Tenel Ka…assuming there
is
a need for a successor, of course.”

“Did we
say
something to make you believe we doubted you, General?” Taryn asked coolly. “As long as we win the battle, there won’t be any reason to suspect the loyalty of anyone in this room.”

“I’m glad we all agree.” Livette turned to one of her officers, then said, “Show them.”

The officer tapped the keys of a data remote. A blue star appeared in the holo, about a kilometer down the terrace from the headquarters—but only a few hundred meters from the underground hangar that the Jedi starfighters were using to refuel and rearm.

“We believe this may be their target,” the officer said, pointing at the hangar. “There are reports of a hidden shaft here”—She pointed at the blue star,—“that provides access to the hangar.”

Trista looked to Taryn. “Take Ben. I’ll stay here to protect General Livette in case you run into problems.” She turned to the general again. “But I certainly hope that doesn’t happen. We wouldn’t want a repeat of Ducha Requud’s unfortunate accident, would we?”

Livette finally paled. “It might be wise to take a squad of Her Majesty’s Commandos along,” she said. “They’ll be waiting for you outside.”

Ben allowed Taryn to lead the way out into the adit, then stepped to her side and asked, “What happened on the
Dragon Queen
?”

“It sounds like a nanokiller,” Taryn answered. “The
Queen
took some prisoners aboard. Half an hour later, puffs of silver mist started coming out of the ventilation system and taking down anyone with royal blood.”

“But everyone else is okay?” Ben asked.

Taryn looked over. “There was a
lot
of royal blood on the
Queen,
Ben.”

“I know,” Ben answered. “But
someone’s
got to be alive—not everyone aboard had royal blood. So how come no one’s telling us what happened to Tenel Ka? If she’s dead, they ought to know it for sure.”

“You think Her Majesty survived,” Taryn surmised. “Allana, too.”

“I think they could have,” Ben said hopefully. “Tenel Ka would have sensed trouble coming, and she’s been keeping Allana very close to her.”

The mouth of the tunnel appeared ahead, a black arch where the ceiling lights simply ended, and Taryn looked away.

“It’s the way we do things,” Taryn said. “When a Queen Mother dies, we like to keep things uncertain for a while. It gives us a chance to tighten up security around potential successors—and to see which one seems a little
too
prepared to take her place.”

“Like Ducha Requud,” Ben said. He could reach out in the Force to see if Tenel Ka was alive, but it would serve nothing except his curiosity—and it might be a distraction Tenel Ka did not need, if she
was
alive. “I guess that makes sense. But who’s
we,
exactly?”

Taryn did not look over. “Who do you think, Ben?”

“I have no idea.”

“Good,” Taryn said, putting her night-vision goggles back on. “It would have been a shame to kill you.”

For once, she did not sound like she was joking. Ben put on his own goggles and followed her out into the night, where they met a dozen male commandos and started down the terrace toward their intercept point. It was a difficult trip through thick stands of maboo, especially since they had to travel quietly over broken ground. Taryn surprised Ben by setting a brutal pace in near silence, and he had to draw on the Force to match her.

The commandos were quiet but not quite silent, and when they drew within two hundred meters of the objective, Taryn signaled them to slow down and move more carefully. She took Ben and continued forward, then crept into a cane thicket at the edge of the terrace and peered down into the forest.

Even with the night-vision goggles, it was difficult to see much through the billowing crowns of the kolg trees. About seventy meters from the base of their terrace, a troop of mangy-furred rat-monkeys were huddled together on a high branch, their infrared silhouettes cowering in fear at the constant roar of Jedi starfighters entering and departing the nearby hangar.

Something about the monkeys struck Ben as odd. If they were so frightened of the noise and light of the starfighters, why were they cowering in the
top
of the kolg tree? He began a systematic search of the nearby forest canopy, and soon spotted another troop of rat-monkeys climbing into the treetops.

“There,” he whispered, pointing. “Coming toward us.”

Taryn ran her gaze down his arm toward the trees, then said, “Ben, we’re not looking for…”

She let her sentence trail off as she realized the significance of what he was pointing out, then glanced back into the maboo thicket. The commandos were not yet in sight.

“What’s taking them so long?” she hissed.

An unpleasant thought occurred to Ben. “You don’t think they were loyal to—”

“No, they’re just
men.
” She swung her goggles in Ben’s direction. “No offense, handsome.”

Taryn slipped out of the thicket and angled down toward the point where they expected to intercept the enemy, which Ben guessed would be about where the forest met the slope. The ground was still muddy enough that he and Taryn were leaving an easy trail to follow. But the maboo cane wasn’t as thick on the embankment as it was on the flat part of the terrace, so there was a risk of being spotted on the way down.

By the time Ben and Taryn reached the bottom of the slope, he could hear the soft whisper of leaves and branches rubbing against plastoid armor. He dropped behind a fallen kolg tree next to Taryn and peered out through the underbrush, hiding his presence in the Force. It was only a matter of time before Tahiri felt Taryn and the commandos, but at least she would not realize that they were accompanied by a Jedi.

Fortunately, Tahiri seemed to be concentrating on other things for the moment. She emerged from the forest at the head of the column, an infrared silhouette with one hand outstretched, her palm turned downward as though feeling something rising from the ground. Behind her came a line of about a dozen stormtroopers, the four in the middle carrying a litter with a metal cone resting in the center.

Ben thought the cone might be a canister full of Remnant nanokiller—until he saw a set of colored lights blinking in a three-red-two-yellow-one-green pattern that he had been trained to recognize early in his days as a GAG antiterrorist operative: a baradium warhead.

Ben touched Taryn’s forearm and directed her attention to the warhead…and felt her muscles tense beneath his grasp. Even a small baradium warhead would be powerful enough to blow the top off the entire ridge—and a warhead that required four men to carry it
wasn’t
small.

Tahiri stopped about fifteen meters away, in the center of a treeless circle of underbrush, and motioned the stormtrooper behind her to stop.

“I think this is it,” she said. “Bring up the penetration charges. But keep that warhead back. We don’t want to detonate it just
trying
to get into the tunnels.”