The Joiner King (51 page)

“They melted it!” Han gasped. “They melted an entire—”

“Instruments, Han!”

Han glanced down and found the reassuring sight of a space battle on his tactical display. What looked to be about ten dozen squadrons of starfighters were whirling around Kr, maneuvering for position and pouring laserfire at each other. A single Chiss cruiser was sliding quietly around the moon’s bulk, playing a game of moog-and-rancor with a pair of Hapan Novas.

Kr’s surface, a sensor-blocking layer of frozen ethmane, was literally disappearing before their eyes. Every time a stray cannon blast struck ground, a thumb-sized area of ice vanished from Han’s display.

Leia found the fading rad signature of the Skywalkers’ proton torpedoes and reestablished their navigation lock. Han slipped
the
Falcon
under the moon, streaking toward their destination only a hundred meters below Kr’s jagged belly. Their goal lay about ten kilometers ahead of the Chiss cruiser, so he chose a slow, direct route that would take them past its weapons turrets at a respectable distance. In a battle like this, the only way
not
to get shot at was to make clear you were no kind of threat.

As the
Falcon
neared the cruiser, a flight of clawcraft dropped out of the fog to look her over.

C-3PO opened an emergency channel. “This is the
Millennium Falcon
hailing all combatants. We are neutral in this conflict. Please direct your fire away from us! I repeat: we are neutral!”

The clawcraft dropped back into the kill zone behind the
Falcon
and hung there. The navigation lock slowly drifted toward the center of the screen.

The stolen skiff was floating amid the rest of the wreckage, a pile of flattened durasteel flickering in the light of Mara’s two functioning spotlights. There was no way to tell whether Alema and Ben’s Killik “friend” had been aboard when the proton torpedoes eviscerated the launching bay, but Mara was betting the pair had escaped. So far, she had seen no signs of the Twi’lek’s body among the scorched pieces of chitin tumbling past her canopy, and Alema was a
Jedi
. She would have sensed what was about to happen and raced for shelter.

Mara guided her ailing starfighter through a jagged breach in the launching bay’s rear wall. Her spotlights stabbed through a dusty cloud of floating rubble, illuminating a maintenance hangar with a bank of shattered dartship berths on the far wall. She sealed her EV suit and dropped her StealthX to the deck, skidding to a lopsided landing between the broken remnants of two egg-shaped storage tanks.

Knowing that Luke would be covering her from his own craft, Mara sprang out of the cockpit and tumbled all the way to the ceiling, coming to a rest beside a spitcrete ridge that would have served the Gorog as a sort of upside-down catwalk. When no attacks came, she exchanged her lightsaber for her blaster and covered Luke while he landed.

A large part of her—the part that was Ben’s mother—would
have preferred him to rejoin the
Falcon
and come back with the Solos and the heavy artillery. But she had known from the moment her R9 died that would never happen; Luke would no more have left her alone than she would have him. Besides, this wasn’t so bad. It had been her and Luke against a world more times than she could count, and they always won.

Luke took cover inside the shattered base of a storage tank, then Mara pushed off the ceiling and joined him. They were taking care to stay out of their StealthXs’ spotlights, but there was enough ambient light to see his lips pressed tight together through his faceplate.

“What do you think?” Mara spoke over their suit comm. She wanted to keep her Force-senses clear for alerting her to danger. “Try to squeeze into your Stealth and sneak out?”

Luke shook his helmet. “There won’t be any slipping past that dartship swarm out there. As a matter of fact …” He turned toward his StealthX and commed his R9. “Arnie, go find a dark corner and—”

The command came to a sudden end as the orange glow of rocket exhaust lit the launching bay entrance. Mara grabbed Luke’s arm and kicked off the floor, using the Force to pull them toward a ruptured door membrane in the back of the maintenance hangar. Arnie started to tweedle a question, but the comm channel abruptly dissolved into static as a trio of bright flashes lit the chamber.

There was no boom, of course, but Mara suddenly grew uncomfortably warm inside her vac suit, and the shock wave hurled her and Luke headlong through the door membrane into the darkened utility passage beyond.

With no gravity or friction to slow them down, they did not stop until they slammed into a wall two seconds later. Mara hit back-first, driving the air from her lungs but not breaking anything she could feel. A sharp crack over the comm suggested that Luke had impacted on his helmet. She started to ask if he was okay, then sensed him wondering the same thing about her and knew he was.

“Check air and suit,” Luke said, righting himself.

The reminder was unnecessary. The heads-up status display
inside Mara’s faceplate was already glowing, though she did not remember activating it.

“I’m good,” she said. “You?”

“Have a hisser,” he reported, indicating a small air leak. “But we’d better look for it later.”

He pointed back toward the maintenance hangar. Thirty meters away, the orange glow of rocket exhaust was flickering against a section of curved tunnel, dimming and brightening as dartships landed and shut down their engines and more poured into the hangar behind them.

“I don’t recall seeing any EV suits in the Taat hangars,” Mara said hopefully.

“No—but a carapace is a good start on a pressure suit.”

“Killjoy.” Mara turned her wrist over and entered a four-digit code on her forearm command pad. The StealthX’s self-destruct alarm began to gong inside her helmet, and the heads-up display on her faceplate began a twenty-second countdown. “Come on, Skywalker. Let’s stay on the move until we hear from the
Falcon.”

Mara turned away from the hangar and started into the frozen darkness ahead.

The walls and floor were coated in a frozen black wax that absorbed the light from Luke’s helmet lamp and made the passage seem even darker and murkier than it was. Every few meters, a fissure caused by the tunnel’s sudden decompression ran all the way to the moon ice, sometimes exposing a short length of spitcrete piping or power conduit. There were none of the shine-balls that illuminated other Killik nests, nor any sense of order to its convoluted plan. The passages seemed to meander at random, twining around each other like vines, branching off at arbitrary intervals and rejoining the main passage without crossing any obvious destination between.

At the speed he and Mara were sailing through the darkness, using the Force to pull themselves along through the zero-g, Luke was growing badly disoriented. He no longer had any sense of whether they were traveling deeper into the moon or back toward the surface; whether ten meters of ethmane ice separated them from the hangar or a thousand. Were it not for the frozen beads of vapor that his leaky vac suit was leaving behind, he wasn’t even sure he could have found his way back down the same passage.

Mara suddenly grabbed a crack in the wall and brought herself to a stop. Luke did the same and found himself looking at one of the bulging hatch membranes that Killiks used instead of air locks. A pull chain hung to one side of the hatch, attached to a set of valves positioned to spray sealing gel over the membrane before anyone tried to push through.

Mara didn’t reach for the pull chain, and neither did Luke. Both
their spines were prickling with danger sense, and they were all too aware of how difficult it was to sense Gorog in the Force.

“Ambush,” Mara concluded. “They’re starting to come after us.”

“Starting?”

Luke looked around, and his helmet lamp illuminated a torrent of dartship pilots pouring around the bend, at most thirty meters away. Wearing their dartship canopies like carapaces, they were scurrying along every available tunnel surface, with their legs and arms sheathed in a shimmering fabric that bunched and gathered at the joints. They had no weapons other than their six limbs—but that would be enough if the swarm ever caught up.

There was no question of using the Force to hide. Whenever the Gorog lost sight of their, quarry, they simply spread out, scrambling over every surface in every direction, literally hunting their quarry down by feel.

Luke began to pour blasterfire into the front ranks. Most bolts ricocheted off the canopies, while those that hit a limb simply activated a safety seal at the nearest joint. The insects just kept coming.

“Trouble,” Luke said over the suit comm. Lightsabers would be more effective, but he
really
didn’t want to go hand-to-hand with who-knew-how-many bugs. “Big trouble, in fact.”

“Maybe not that big,” Mara said.

“No?”

“They can’t
all
be dartship pilots,” Mara said. He felt rather than saw her nod at the bulging hatch membrane. “So they won’t
all
be wearing pressure suits.”

“You’re right,” Luke said. The first pilots were less than ten meters away now, but he holstered his blaster and grabbed his lightsaber. “Not that big.”

They ignited their lightsabers, then pressed themselves against the tunnel wall and slashed a large X across the center of the hatch. The membrane blew apart, and their would-be ambushers went tumbling past on a tide of explosive decompression, crashing into the pilot swarm and bringing its advance to a tumbling, confused halt.

Once the torrent slowed, Mara floated through the tattered
membrane into a corridor filled with flash-frozen Killiks. Luke followed a few meters behind, using the Force to pull himself along, shouldering aside Gorog warriors with heads painted in the dark spray pattern of decompression death.

“How’s that hisser?” Mara asked.

Luke checked the heads-up display inside his faceplate. He was down to just fifteen minutes of air, and the loss rate was increasing.

“Fine for now.”

He turned his helmet lamp back through the burst hatch and was relieved to illuminate only a small portion of the throng that had been pursuing them so far. About fifty of the insects were still coming, pushing their way up the body-choked passage toward him and Mara. The last dozen or so were scurrying in the opposite direction, vanishing into the darkness behind the hundreds of pilots that had already started back toward their dartships.

“But the next time we come to a pressure hatch, let’s try to leave it intact,” Luke said. “I think our rescue party is about to be delayed.”

The navigation lock finally reached the center of the display. Relieved to note their Chiss escorts were still behind them—the cruiser was less likely to blast the
Falcon
to atoms that way—Han began a slow, spiraling descent into Kr’s thickening fog. He would have liked to drop into a power dive and go screaming down to find Luke and Mara, but that would have looked suspicious. And when Chiss grew suspicious, they killed things.

“Let’s see what it looks like inside that fog,” Han said. “Activate the terrain scanners.”

Leia brought the scanners online. Unlike ethmane ice, ethmane fog was almost as transparent to sensors as air, and a moment later the mouth of a broad funnel-like pit appeared on Han’s display. The hole appeared to be a deep one, descending more than two kilometers before finally curving out of sight.

“Any sign of rescue beacons?” Han asked.

Leia shook her head. “None.” She closed her eyes. “They’re too deep.”

“Deep?”

“Inside Kr,” she said. “I think they’re in the nest.”

“
In
the nest?” Han felt like he was going to choke on his heart. “That’s not tunny, Leia.”

“It gets less funny,” she said. “Luke seems to think we’ll meet a reception committee.”

“You don’t say.” Han smiled. “Good.”

“Good?” C-3PO demanded. “I don’t see anything good about this situation at all. There’s every chance that both Master Skywalkers will be killed by our baradium missiles!”

“Not really.” Han pushed the
Falcon
’s nose down and dropped into a steepening dive. “For that to happen, we’d have to actually
fire
the baradium missiles.”

“You don’t intend to fire them?” C-3PO asked, growing even more alarmed. “Not even one?”

“No.” Leia’s tone was relieved. It had been her idea to bring the baradium missiles along, but she had spent most of the trip worried about how they were going to keep Alema clear when they fired the weapons at the nest. Han had not been quite so worried. “Not with Luke and Mara inside.”

“But you won’t be able to clear the nest!” C-3PO objected. “Without those missiles, the odds will be—”

“Easy, Threepio.” The last thing Han wanted to hear was how bad the odds were. He was already having to hold the yoke tight to prevent his hands from shaking. “I wasn’t counting on the missiles anyway.”

“You weren’t?”

“Of course not,” he said. “They’re baradium. You
never
get to shoot the baradium missiles.”

“Oh.” C-3PO grew calmer. “That’s true. I have no record of one ever actually being launched.”

They descended a thousand meters into the fog, then a Chiss voice crackled over the comm.

“
Millennium Falcon
, be advised that if you attempt to evade us, we
will
open fire.”

“We’re not evading,” Han answered. “We’re going in … and you’re welcome to follow.”

“Going in?” The ethmane ice was already beginning to make the comm signal scratchy. “Clarify.”

“We have two Jedi pilots down inside the nest,” Leia explained. “We’re going to extract them.”

The clawcraft reappeared on the
Falcon
’s tail. “We’ve detected no other craft—”

“Do you ever?” Han interrupted. “She said they were
Jedi
pilots—Luke and Mara Skywalker, to be exact. You coming or not?”

There was a moment’s silence, then the two clawcraft began to drop back. “Your request lies outside our mission profile, but we have been authorized to wish you good luck.”