The Last Command (55 page)

She saw it coming, or maybe Skywalker’s training had taught her how to use the Force to anticipate danger. As the heavy metal swung down on her, she slashed upward with her lightsaber, cutting through the catwalk far enough to the side that the main part missed her and Solo as it swung past to crash into the floor in front of Karrde and the vornskrs. But there was no time for her to get out from under the end she had cut off. It caught her across her head and shoulder, knocking the lightsaber from her hand and hammering her to the floor beside Solo.

“Leia!” Skywalker shouted, throwing an anguished glance at his sister. Suddenly the debilitating buzzing in his mind seemed to be forgotten as his fighting abruptly shifted from groggy defense to furious attack. The clone fell back before the onslaught, barely managing to block Skywalker’s blows. He jumped up onto the stairway, hastily backed two steps further up toward C’baoth as Skywalker charged after him, then leaped over onto the remaining guard platform. For a second Mara thought Skywalker was going to pursue him up there, or else cut through the platform base and bring him down.

He didn’t do either. Standing halfway up the stairs, a sheen of sweat glistening on his face, he gazed up at C’baoth with an expression that sent a shiver down Mara’s back.

“Do you also seek to destroy me, Jedi Skywalker?” C’baoth said, his voice quietly deadly. “For such thoughts are foolish. I could crush you like a small insect beneath my heel.”

“Perhaps,” Skywalker said, breathing heavily. “But if you do, you’ll never have the chance to control my mind.”

C’baoth studied him. “What do you want?”

Skywalker jerked his head back toward his sister and Solo. “Let them leave. All of them. Now.” His eyes flicked to Mara. “Mara, too.”

“And if I do?”

A muscle in Skywalker’s cheek twitched. His finger moved, and with a sputtering hiss his lightsaber blade disappeared. “Let them go,” he said quietly, “and I’ll stay.”

From somewhere nearby a dull thudding noise began, adding an irregular pulsebeat to the eerie breathing sounds whispering through the cloning cavern. A blaster rifle pounding against heavy metal, Lando decided, giving the doors around the walkway a quick look. So far they all seemed secure, but he knew that wouldn’t last. The stormtroopers out there weren’t firing at the doors just for target practice, and there was bound to be a bag of shaped explosives on their way.

From the other side of the equipment column, Chewbacca rumbled a warning. “I
am
keeping my head down,” Lando assured him, peering into the gap between two large ducts at the maze of multicolored wiring and piping beyond. Now, where was that repulsor pump connection again…?

He had located the spot and was reaching in with the charge when the callbeep from his comlink unexpectedly went off, echoed a fraction of a second later from Chewbacca’s comlink. Frowning, half expecting it to be some hotshot Imperial tech who’d found his channel, he pulled it out. “Calrissian,” he said.

“Ah—General Calrissian,” Threepio’s precise voice came back. “I see Artoo has been successful in eliminating the jamming. Surprising, actually, given all the trouble which we’ve been required to—”

“Tell him good job,” Lando cut him off. Now was decidedly not the time for a pleasant little chat with Threepio. “Was there anything else?”

“Ah, yes, sir, there is,” the droid said. “The Noghri instructed me to ask whether you wish us to return to assist you.”

There was another thud, a louder one this time. “I wish you could,” Lando sighed. “But you’d never make it back in time.” The thud came again, and this time he distinctly saw the door opposite their bridge shake with the impact. “We’ll just have to get out of here by ourselves.”

From the other side of the work platform, Chewbacca rumbled his less-than-enthusiastic opinion of that. “But if Chewbacca wishes us to return—”

“You won’t get here in time,” Lando told him firmly. “Tell the Noghri if they want to be useful they should head up to the throne room and give Han a hand.”

“It’s too late for that,” a new voice put in, almost too quiet to hear.

Lando frowned at the comlink. “Han?”

“No, it’s Talon Karrde,” the other identified himself. “I came in with Councilor Organa Solo. We’re up in the throne room—”

“
Leia’s
here?” Lando asked. “What in—?”

“Shut up and listen,” Karrde cut him off. “That Jedi Master of Luke’s—Joruus C’baoth—is up here, too. He’s taken out Solo and Organa Solo both, and has Skywalker fighting what looks to be a clone of himself. He’s not paying any attention to me at the moment—there’s some kind of face-off going on up there. But he would the minute I tried anything.”

“I thought Luke said the Force was being blocked.”

“It was. Somehow, C’baoth got it back. Are you down with the cloning tanks?”

“We’re above them, yes. Why?”

“Organa Solo suggested earlier that there should be a large number of ysalamiri scattered around that area,” Karrde said. “If you can pull a few of them off their nutrient frames and get them up here, we might have a chance of stopping him.”

Chewbacca growled mournfully, and Lando felt his lip twist as he nodded agreement. So that was what all those blasting disk explosions had been about. “It’s too late for that, too,” he told Karrde. “C’baoth’s already had them all killed.”

For a long moment the comlink was silent. “I see,” Karrde said at last. “Well, that explains that. Any suggestions?”

Lando hesitated. “Not really,” he said. “If we come up with anything, we’ll let you know.”

“Thank you,” Karrde said, a little too dryly. “I’ll be waiting.”

There was a click as he left the channel. “Threepio, you still there?” Lando asked.

“Yes, sir,” the droid answered.

“Get Artoo back on the computer,” Lando told him. “Have him do whatever he can to shift troops away from that air intake we came in through. Then you and the Noghri start heading that way.”

“We’re leaving, sir?” Threepio asked, sounding astonished.

“That’s right,” Lando told him. “And Chewie and I will be right behind you, so you’d better move fast if you don’t want to get stepped on. Better alert the two Noghri that Luke sent with that Myneyrshi bunch, too. Got all that?”

“Yes, sir,” Threepio said hesitantly. “What about Master Luke and the others?”

“Leave that to me,” Lando told him. “Get busy.”

“Yes, sir,” Threepio said again. Another click, and he was gone.

There was a moment of silence. Chewbacca, broke it with the obvious question. “I don’t think we’ve got a choice anymore,” Lando told him grimly. “The way Luke and Mara talk about him, C’baoth’s at least as dangerous as the Emperor was. Maybe even more so. We’ve got to try to take out the whole storehouse and hope we get him along with it.”

Chewbacca growled an objection. “We can’t,” Lando shook his head. “At least not until it’s set and running. We warn anyone up there now and C’baoth will know all about it. Might have time to get it stopped.”

There was another muffled blast from the door. “Come on, let’s get this done,” Lando said, picking up the last of his explosives. With luck, they would have time to rig Chewbacca’s arrhythmic resonance gimmick before the stormtroopers got in. With a little more luck, the two of them might make it out of the cavern alive.

And with still more, they might be able to find a way to alert Han and the others before the whole storehouse blew up beneath them.

For a long moment the throne room was silent. Mara stared at Skywalker, wondering if he understood what he was saying. To offer to voluntarily stay here with C’baoth…

His gaze flicked sideways again to meet hers, and even through the buzzing in his mind she could feel his private dread. He knew what he was saying, all right. And he meant it. If C’baoth accepted his offer, he would go willingly with the insane Jedi. Sacrificing himself to save his friends.

Including the woman who’d once promised to kill him.

She turned away, suddenly unable to watch. Her eyes found Karrde, half hidden behind the wreckage of the catwalk as he knelt between his two vornskrs. Stroking them, talking quietly to them—probably calming them down after that Force-driven tantrum of C’baoth’s. She peered at the animals, but they didn’t seem to be hurt.

Her head movement must have caught Karrde’s eye. He looked up at her, his face expressionless. Still patting the vornskrs, he tilted his head fractionally toward Solo and Organa Solo. Frowning, Mara followed his gaze—

And froze. Beside the section of catwalk wreckage still half covering his wife, Solo was moving. Slowly, a couple of centimeters at a time, he was creeping across the floor.

Toward the blaster Organa Solo had dropped.

“You ask too much, Skywalker,” C’baoth warned softly. “Mara Jade will be mine. Must be mine. It is the destiny demanded of her by the Force. Not even you may trifle with that.”

“Right,” Mara put in, looking back at C’baoth and putting all the sarcasm into her voice as she could manage. Whatever the risks to herself, she had to draw as much of C’baoth’s attention away from the other end of the throne room as she could. “I still have to kneel at his feet, remember?”

“You insult me, Mara Jade,” C’baoth said, turning an evil smile on her. “Do you really believe me so easy to mislead?” Still watching her, he crooked a finger—

And as Solo’s hand stretched out toward it, the blaster twitched another half meter out of his reach.

From the guard platform came a subtle change in hum. “Skywalker—look out!” Mara snapped.

Skywalker spun around, lightsaber igniting again and swinging up into defense. The clone, his wind or his courage back, was already halfway through his leap, his lightsaber slicing downward. The two blades met with a crash and an impact that drove Skywalker backward to the edge of the stairway. He took one step more, fought for balance, then dropped off to the floor below.

Mara threw a quick look at Solo as the clone charged over the edge in pursuit. If the clone really was an extension of C’baoth’s mind…

But no. Even as Solo tried again for the blaster it again slid away from him. Whatever effort C’baoth was expending on the lightsaber duel, he clearly still had enough concentration left to toy with his prisoners.

“You see, Mara Jade?” C’baoth asked quietly. His fury had passed, the brief flicker of fun as he toyed with his prisoners had passed, and now it was time to return to the important business of building his Empire. “It is inevitable. I will rule… and along with Skywalker and his sister, you will serve at my side. And we shall be great together.”

Abruptly, he took a long step back from the guardrail on the other side of the stairway. Just in time; an instant later Skywalker was back, backflipping up from the lower throne room floor. He landed with his back to Mara, floundering a moment as he fought to recover his balance. There was another flash of light, blue-white this time, as the clone leaped up over the guardrail in pursuit, swinging his lightsaber in vicious horizontal arcs to guard against attack. Skywalker moved backward out of his way; glancing past him, Mara saw C’baoth take a hasty backward step of his own. The clone hit the floor and charged, lightsaber still slashing toward Skywalker in wide horizontal arcs. Skywalker continued to give way, apparently unaware that he was backing toward the solid rock wall.

Against which he would be trapped.

They passed by… and Mara looked over to find C’baoth once again gazing at her. “As I said, Mara Jade,” he said. “Inevitable. And with you and Skywalker beside me, the lesser peoples of the galaxy will flock to us like leaves in the wind. Their hearts and their souls will be ours.”

He looked across the room and beckoned. Still crouching behind the catwalk wreckage, Karrde jerked in surprise as his blaster rose from his holster and shot through the air toward C’baoth. Halfway there it was joined by Organa Solo’s dropped lightsaber and the blaster Solo was still doggedly trying to chase down. “As will their insignificant weapons,” C’baoth added. Holding a negligent hand out to receive them, he turned his eyes back to the duel about to play itself to its conclusion.

It was the chance Mara had been waiting for. Possibly the last chance she would ever have. Reaching through the chaos surrounding her mind, she stretched out to the Force, focusing her eyes and mind on the weapons flying across the room toward C’baoth’s hand. She felt his inattentive control snap—

And Organa Solo’s lightsaber arced away from the blasters to land firmly in her hand.

C’baoth spun back to face her, the blasters falling with a clatter onto the stairway. “No!” he screamed, his face twisted horribly with fear, confusion, and dread. Mara felt his sudden frantic tug fumbling at the lightsaber; but it, too, was twisted with confusion and dread, and this time he didn’t have surprise on his side. Given time, he would recover from the shock, but Mara had no intention of giving him that time. Igniting the lightsaber, she charged!

The clone must have heard her coming, of course; the distinctive sound of her lightsaber made that inevitable. But with Skywalker backed up against the wall, the temptation to finish off one opponent first was too great to resist. He swung one last time, his lightsaber slashing into the wall as Skywalker ducked low beneath the blade—

And with a brilliant flash of shattered electronics, the wall exploded outward, over Skywalker’s head and directly into the clone’s face.

Skywalker hadn’t been backing into a wall after all. He’d been backing into one of the throne room’s viewscreens.

The clone shrieked—the first sound Mara could remember hearing him make—as he staggered backward. He spun toward the sound of her lightsaber, his face twisted with anger and fear, his eyes still dazzled. He raised his lightsaber to attack—

YOU
WILL
KILL
LUKE
SKYWALKER
.

She ducked beneath the slashing blade, gazing into his face. Skywalker’s face. The face that had haunted her nightmares for nearly six years. The face the Emperor had ordered her to destroy.

YOU
WILL
KILL
LUKE
SKYWALKER
.