Apocalypse (57 page)

The message was only three short lines, but it had done more to incapacitate Luke than any of the wounds he had suffered fighting Abeloth. He had
trusted
Vestara—had even been the one to persuade the other Masters she would be a valuable asset inside the Temple during the battle against the Sith.

He could not have been more wrong.

His mistake had cost Bazel Warv his life and—assuming he was correctly interpreting Corran’s conspicuous use of the word “target”—nearly gotten Allana killed. Now, after three days of meditation, he continued to find himself mired in doubt, wondering what else he might be wrong about, and reluctant to trust his own judgment.

And he was running out of time.

The
Rude Awakening
, a sleek little pinnace infiltrator manufactured for the space marines’ elite Void Jumper units, was already approaching the choke point where Sinkhole Station had once hung suspended in a binary black-hole system. Luke could see the accretion whorls of the two black holes with his naked eye, a pair of fire-rimmed disks centered in the forward viewport, and he could feel Ben ahead, on Abeloth’s hidden planet, reaching out to him in the Force, urging him to hurry.

And
still
Luke didn’t know what to do, whether he was following the will of the Force by following Ben—or defying it.

The Histories of Thuruht had convinced him and the rest of the Jedi Council that the galaxy went through a regular cycle of destruction and renewal, and that Abeloth—as mad and deadly as she was—played a crucial role in that cycle. But the cycle had been disrupted by the death of the Ones, and without the Son and the Daughter, there was no one capable of ending Abeloth’s chaos and supervising Thuruht’s construction of a new prison. Unless the Jedi could stop her themselves—and that seemed to Luke a very big
if
indeed—she would go on sowing disorder and chaos until civilization itself vanished from the galaxy.

“A little advice from the junior Master on the Council?” Jaina asked
from the other side of the cockpit. Even smaller than her mother, she looked almost child-like sitting in a pilot’s seat designed for a two-meter Void Jumper in full combat armor. “Not that I want to rush your planning or anything, but a mind divided against itself cannot win.”

Luke cocked a brow. “You interrupted my meditations to quote a training aphorism that the Banthas learn in their second week?”

“Yes,” Jaina said. “That, and we’re about to get jumped.”

“You’ve sensed Ship?”

“Not yet,” Jaina replied. “But we’re entering a choke point, and it’s where
I
would mount an ambush.”

Luke nodded. “And Abeloth is trying to draw us in,” he said. “Ben has been reaching out to me, trying to let me know their situation is desperate.”

Jaina shoved the throttles to their overload stops. “And you didn’t tell the pilot?”

“You’re not the only one expecting an ambush.”

Luke started to tell her to pull the throttles back. Then he decided Jaina was as aware of Ship as he was and that it was better to let her fly her own vessel, and then he almost decided to tell her to slow down anyway, so they could develop a plan. That was the trouble with being so emotionally involved in a mission. It made you indecisive, clouded your thinking. He wanted nothing more than to rush to Ben’s side and rescue him. It was killing him not to do it—but he knew just how foolish that course of action would be. Abeloth was baiting him, trying to
make
him race in unprepared, because that was the surest way to a kill.

Then, too, there was the other thing—the thing that had been consuming Luke’s thoughts since departing Coruscant. “And, I’m still trying to decide whether we’re doing the right thing.”

Jaina’s astonishment quivered through the Force, and she took her eyes off the fiery whorls ahead long enough to look over in open shock. “You mean by going after the Sith Abeloth?”

“Sort of,” Luke said. “I mean by going after Ben and Vestara.”

“It’s all part of the same problem.” Jaina’s reply came a little too quickly. She was arguing for what she wanted to believe, not for what she knew to be true. “To recover Ben and capture Vestara, we have to take out Abeloth. Take out Abeloth, and we recover Ben and capture Vestara.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Luke said. “But I went back and checked the Archives for anything on the Mortis monolith.”

“And?”

“I found confirmation in a report from Obi-Wan,” Luke said. “It was just as Yoda told me. Obi-Wan seemed to think that he and Anakin had been drawn to Mortis because the Father was dying and wanted Anakin Skywalker to take his place as the Keeper of the Balance.”

Jaina’s jaw dropped. “
Chosen One
indeed,” she said. “What happened?”

“Obviously Anakin didn’t accept,” Luke said. “The Son ended up murdering the Daughter with a special Force-imbued dagger, and the Father tricked the Son by sacrificing himself with the same dagger—so that Anakin could kill the Son.”

Jaina nodded. “I see what you’re thinking. It was your father’s refusal that resulted in the death of the Ones. So maybe it’s your
son
’s destiny to become the new Keeper of the Balance?”

“Close,” Luke said. “I’m wondering if it’s Ben’s destiny to take the Daughter’s place and become the embodiment of the light side.”

“And Vestara’s to become the embodiment of the dark side?”

“After the way she played us, you have to admit she fits that role,” Luke said. “And since the two of them are in love …”

“You think it has the will of the Force written all over it,” Jaina said. “The two lovers, opposites bound together.”

“Something like that,” Luke admitted. “And you know it’s not just the Archives. I have other reasons for thinking this might be the will of the Force—all the Masters do.”

Jaina sighed. “The dream,” she said. “Ben and Vestara fighting for the Balance in the courtyard of the Font of Power.”

“That would be the reason,” Luke said. “If I had been the only one to see that, maybe it could be dismissed as a dream. But when all of the Masters have the same dream …”

“Okay, that’s hard to ignore,” Jaina agreed. “But the will of the Force? It’s pretty arrogant to claim the Force is telling you what it wants. That’s the kind of thinking that led Jacen to … to do what
he
did.”

As Jaina spoke, the fire-rimmed orbs of the two black holes ahead began to swell and rapidly drift apart. The two Masters were approaching
the point of no return, and Luke still didn’t know whether going after Ben was the right thing. Perhaps Luke was being just as selfish as his own father had been when he refused to become the Keeper of the Balance. Perhaps all that had followed—his own birth and Leia’s, then Ben’s birth and Mara’s death and Ben’s short journey into darkness—had been destiny. Maybe it was simply a way for a new trio to restore Balance to the Force.

Luke shook his head. “Jaina, I want to agree with you, to say that we have to do the obvious thing and rescue Ben. But—”

“But that’s the trouble,” Jaina finished. “You
want
to agree, and that’s why you can’t be certain it’s the right choice.”

“There is no emotion, there is peace,” Luke agreed. “But I’m
filled
with emotion. I’m terrified for Ben, and it’s clouding my judgment.”

“Of course it is,” Jaina said. “You’re Ben’s father—and that’s part of the Force, too.”

Luke frowned. “I’m not sure how that fact helps.”

“I’m saying that you can’t ignore who
you
are in this,” she said. “If the hand of the Force is at play in Ben’s fate, then it’s at play in yours, too. You can’t hold yourself above the will of the Force, or you make the same mistake Jacen did.”

“So I should just do what I want to?” Luke shook his head. “Sorry, life is never—”

“No—I’m saying you should do what you know is right,” Jaina corrected. “And you
do
know what is right. It’s simple—it’s
always
simple.”

“So, act on principle,” Luke said, boiling her argument down to three words. “Don’t worry about the results.”

“Mortals can’t always
know
the results,” Jaina replied. “Not for certain. We can only act according to our true natures, and leave the rest to the Force.”

“And we just ignore the visions the Force sends us?”

“Of course not,” Jaina said. “But we don’t take them literally, either. The Force doesn’t send comm messages, right?”

Luke half smiled. “I suppose not,” he said. “When dreams speak, they do it in symbols.”

“Exactly,” Jaina said. “So, who’s Ben? The ideal Jedi, right?”

“And Vestara is pure Sith,” Luke agreed. “It’s the Jedi and the Sith
who must take the place of the Son and the Daughter … and deal with Abeloth.”

“That’s
my
guess,” Jaina said. “The only thing I don’t see is, if the Father is dead, who keeps the Balance?”

Luke thought for a moment, then said, “Us, I think—the Jedi and the Sith. Thuruht said the galaxy enters a new age whenever Abeloth is freed—and the dream means that in this age, it’s the Jedi and Sith—each following our own natures—who will keep the Balance.”

“So, Jedi and Sith, at war forever?” Jaina asked.

“Not forever,” Luke said. “Just until the next time Abeloth is freed.”

“
If
we can stop her this time,” Jaina said. “And that’s a very big—” Jaina’s voice was suddenly drowned out by the screeching of proximity alarms and target-lock alerts. She started to put the
Rude Awakening
into an evasive spiral, then glanced at the gravity readings and seemed to realize that they were already too deep into the choke point to risk maneuvering. She simply activated the automatic laser cannons and brought up the shields, then watched wide-eyed as lines of color began to fly back and forth between the little pinnace and a dust-sized propulsion halo hanging dead center between the two black holes, blocking their only approach to Abeloth’s hidden world. “Ship?” Luke asked.

“Could it be anything else?” Jaina replied, the tension already thick in her voice.

“Not really.” Luke clicked out of his crash harness, then rose and turned to go aft. “Don’t get vaped, but try to get past him. Make it look good.”

“Wait,
look
good?” Jaina glanced over at his departing form. “Where are you going?”

“To strap into a medbay bunk,” Luke replied. “I don’t know how long this is going to take, so I should probably make sure my body is lying down when I leave it.”

A
S THE
R
UDE
A
WAKENING
SPED ONWARD, THE FIRE-RIMMED ORBS
ahead rapidly began to swell and drift apart, leaving the area between them webbed with blazing whorls of accretion gas. Against this brilliant backdrop, Ship also began to swell, growing from a propulsion halo the size of a dust mote to a dark sphere as large as Jaina’s thumb.

A constant stream of fire streaked back and forth between the two vessels, cannon bolts from the
Awakening
and plasma bulbs from Ship. Both vessels were taking the attacks dead center in the forward shields, making no attempt to evade. With the grasping hand of a black hole reaching from both sides of an ever-narrowing safe corridor, there was no room to maneuver, or even to flee. Flying skill did not matter, nor even combat training. Pilots had one choice and one choice only: punch it out head-on.

And in that kind of fight, it was usually the pilot who attacked quickest and hardest who survived. Jaina checked the range and, seeing that the two vessels were closing in even faster than she thought, armed the
Rude Awakening
’s first missile.

Jaina had chosen the
Rude Awakening
for good reason: it was a Void Jumper assault pinnace. That meant it could get in fast, evade detection, take a beating, and deliver a devastating attack. In fact, it was one of the most fearsome tactical combat vessels in the galaxy, designed to go head-to-head with a Mandalorian
Bes’uliik
and be the craft that emerged from the fireball. Jaina could not imagine any better combat transport to fly head-on against Ship—especially not after she had fitted the entire missile magazine with baradium warheads. Talk about a
rude awakening
.

The targeting computer chimed once, announcing that the two crafts had closed to effective missile range. Jaina did not bother to try for a target-lock—Ship would defeat it anyway, and in this fight a quick attack was everything. She simply launched, then pulled the throttles back so the
Awakening
would not be inside the lethal radius when the baradium detonated. The blazing white disk of a thrust ring appeared in front of the cockpit then, as the missile streaked away, quickly shrank to a white dot.

In the next instant a tiny gray dot appeared in front of the
Awakening
. In an eyeblink, it expanded into the gray, oblong lump of one of Ship’s Force-hurled stones. Fighting the urge to dodge—a mistake that might well have carried them across a nearby event horizon—Jaina held the pinnace steady and thumbed the intercom pad on her control yoke.