Star Wars: Knight Errant (44 page)

Join the club
, Narsk thought.
She’s not paying me enough for this!

Kerra pulled her lightsaber from one body only to embed it in another. Arkadia was letting her guards have their chance at her. Reflection Prospect had gone in a couple of minutes from a place of peace to a killing zone.

She struggled to find somewhere to stand. New attackers replaced every one that fell. And deflecting blaster shots into them wasn’t effective, she’d discovered. The
fancy sash wasn’t the only thing Arkadia issued her Citizen Guards; the electromesh tunics under their clothes took the punch out of blasterfire.

The Jedi leapt, winging another attacker. The accursed tunics were no match for her lightsaber, but they made it more difficult for her to withdraw it. She couldn’t do this with body shots. This was messy enough work already.

The floor shook. There was no mistaking it now: there were explosions coming from the north, in the direction of Patriot Hall. Shooting a look up to the upper floor, Kerra saw that Arkadia was noticing it, too.

“That’s enough,” the Sith Lord said, directing her snipers back to the ledge. “No blasters. Thermal detonators!”

A Citizen Guard looked up at her. “But our people are down with her—”

“And doing their job!
Now do yours!
”

From his perch on the track of the parked icecrawler, Rusher could see
Diligence
climbing into the thin Synedian air toward Patriot Hall. Red lights glimmered on the great conical tower to the north, one of the two tractor beam emitters he’d seen on landing.

“That’s it,” Rusher whispered.
Make them think you’re coming for us
.

The warship had covered half the length of the ice sheet outside when the lights on the north tower suddenly went green.
Diligence
seemed to struggle against an unseen force, urging the transport and its attached cargo pod clusters toward the parking area, already littered with ships. The ship wobbled, straining to rise higher over the tractor beam emitter.

Rusher tapped his space helmet to activate the comlink. “That’s it! Cut it loose!”

Diligence
dipped and yawed—and suddenly the entire starboard cargo assembly separated from the ship, plummeting like a colossal bomb toward the emitter and Arkadia’s parked fleet.

KRAKKA-BOOOM!

Syned shook!

Narsk grabbed the landing gear and held on. He looked out through the magnetic field to the inferno beyond. The mercenary had signed on all right. With a vengeance. The northern tractor beam emitter was a memory. And even as the deadly blossom of exploding ordnance rose and expanded, it fell in on itself, creating another caldera in the ice where the landing field had been.

As the surface ice beneath it distributed the kinetic energy, Embarkation Station 7 rode up and down as if on an uncoiling spring. Above, massive chunks of ice fell from the ceiling, narrowly missing the stumbling Wookiee. Around the quaking shuttle, technicians staggered toward the walls, away from Quillan in his deadly burgundy chair.

Narsk leapt from behind the landing gear and lunged for the teenager. Half visible in the shower of ice, the Bothan forced his arm underneath the heedless boy’s shoulder and heaved.

“Hang on, kid. This is for your own good!”

Farther south through the tunnels, the explosion rocked Reflection Prospect, knocking Arkadia and her snipers to the ground. From beneath the balcony, Kerra saw it: reverberating through Calimondretta’s glacial
skeleton, the shock wave ripped the icy pillars suspending the second floor to pieces.

She dived for the only shelter she could see—the threshold of the hallway she’d entered through, littered with bodies. At once, up ahead of her, the entire second floor of the grotto heaved and gave way, shaken by subsidiary blasts as it went down.

Kerra shielded her face against the rush of chilly debris.
Those were the thermal detonators
, she thought. But no thermal detonator could shake an entire city!

“Boy, that was pretty,” Rusher said gleefully.

“I don’t know,” Dackett responded over the comlink. “Novallo’s gonna take my other arm for this.”

Rusher had told the Bothan right: it had been an insane idea. All
Diligence
’s armaments were deployed on the floor of Patriot Hall around him; not nearly enough weapons to consume all the munitions socked away in the ship’s clawed, four-chambered cargo clusters. Neither Rusher’s ground team nor the ship had any way to fire those.

But
Vichary Telk
had once been a ship to itself, before being welded to the cargo pods. Severing one of the two cargo compartments that served as
Diligence
’s feet had been a simple matter of sealing the accesses and setting off the explosive bolts holding the hydraulic system in place. The engineer had, indeed, invented some new words on hearing Rusher’s plan in the secure comlink exchange. But the plan had worked, making an astounding impact.

“You’re beautiful, Bothan—whoever you are!”

Now
Diligence
looked stunted, half its footing amputated. The ship would never land again in this condition. “Losing lateral control, Brig!” Dackett called over the comlink.

“Hang on,” Rusher said. Opening a pack on his belt, he looked at the homing sensor. Nothing. “Dack, you got anything on our wanderers up there?”

“Negative. The tags aren’t strong enough to penetrate the ice!”

There goes that gambit
, Rusher thought. Beadle had delivered more than just the stealth suit and the lightsaber. They’d welded a comm-frequency tag just like the one all his troopers wore to the base of the Jedi’s weapon. But neither Beadle nor the lightsaber were showing up on his register. “We’re going to have to do this the hard way. Let me make my call!”

Switching from the secure channel to the one he’d used to contact Calimondretta Control, Rusher slid down off the icecrawler and placed his call. “Lord Arkadia, this is your deliveryman,” he said. “Give me the Jedi—or I’m gonna crack your city open and let you all die!”

In the rapidly disintegrating hangar, Arkadia’s technicians listened as the brigadier repeated his message. Or tried to listen—as the blasts kept coming from the south. The intruders in Patriot Hall were shooting again, doing their best impressions of the miners who had originally hollowed out Calimondretta’s tunnels.

Abruptly, a muscular human mechanic turned to see a surprising sight in the frigid haze: a bipedal snowman, pushing Quillan and his hoverchair up the ramp to the shuttle. “Hey!”

So much for this
, Narsk thought, slapping a wrist control and deactivating the stealth suit. Suddenly appearing in the shower of ice crystals, Narsk yelled back through his mask to the mechanic. “Saboteurs!” he implored, pushing the chair higher. “Hurry, we’ve got to complete the mission!”

“I don’t think we should do anything without asking—”

Narsk faced the mechanic, the suit and mask serving to make him look menacing and mysterious. “Look around!
Don’t you know your job?” He jabbed his gloved claw toward the shuttle. “Now help me load him up!”

Befuddled, the mechanic dashed to the top of the ramp, pushing Quillan and his conveyance inside the hatch. Seeing the worker secure the passenger section, Narsk dashed down the ramp, headed for the hidden compartment he’d tried so hard to escape from just moments earlier.

The stepladder gone, Narsk leapt, grabbing hold of the tail section and pulling himself up. Straining, he reoriented himself and backed his body, serpent-like, into the chamber. Reaching for the compartment’s tube-like oxygen feed, he routed it under his mask. The vehicle shook around him, beginning to taxi toward the exit. The droid pilot had been given the go signal.

Reaching for the control to cycle the compartment shut, Narsk saw chaos on the receding floor of Embarkation Station 7. The Wookiee guard and two of the techs were there, screaming at the seemingly paralyzed mechanic. After a second the man realized his mistake and began yelling at Narsk.

“Wait a minute! You’ve got the
wrong hoverchair
!” The mechanic dashed past the booby-trapped chair, still parked on the hangar floor, its rich color obscured by frost. “Quick! Raise the magnetic field! Order the droid to stop the ship!”

Feeling the sluggish shuttle lift from the ground, Narsk found the remote control Arkadia had given him and pressed the button.

The last thing he saw before his hidden compartment cycled shut was the burgundy chair spiraling into the air, riding a volcano of blue gas. And the bone-chilling screams were the last thing he heard, before the sound of the accelerating engines on either side of him claimed his hearing forever.

* * *

Kerra puffed, sprinting the long meters up the hallway. Arkadia’s guide had led her this way earlier, on their way to the museum. It was the only path out of the grotto now; the collapse of the second level had ruined the route up to Patriot Hall. And while she’d seen Arkadia on the terrace before, she hadn’t seen her fall. Kerra was taking no chances. No more than she already had, anyway.

Although the pumps no longer worked, the algae still lit the way, fluorescing in their tubes. Even back in the ruins of Reflection Prospect, the giant pipes had held, although several now tilted at dangerous angles. Arkadia’s society really was formidable in its accomplishments. She represented a great threat to everyone around her—and the Jedi and the Republic didn’t even know she existed. Kerra had to change that, had to stop Arkadia.

But she already had a job. She had to get the refugees out.

Reaching the anteroom, Kerra dove toward the opulent museum door. Cracking it open, she found what she expected inside: Arkadia’s museum, in all its vast circular majesty. Several of her prized artifacts had fallen to the floor, shaken by the tremors in the ice.

Kerra searched for exits. The stars shone through the skylight twenty meters above—far too high to reach, even jumping from the pylon at the room’s center. But there were six other entrances. One of them had to have—

Arkadia
.

The Sith Lord stood in the doorway to the left, her ornamented staff in both hands, her face smudged with smoke, her once-proud armor scratched and singed.

“I don’t know what you’ve done or how you’ve done it,” Arkadia said, activating the control transforming her staff into a double-bladed lightsaber. “But it stops here.”

* * *

Rusher swore. Minutes had passed, with no response. He’d held his fire on the city, but the city had nothing to say to him. Only Team Zhaboka was still firing; Rusher had sent them and their more portable weapons out onto the tundra to target land vehicles approaching over what was left of the ice sheet.

Certainly someone could hear him; he heard the panicked chatter on the comlink channel. But none of it seemed directed at him. If Arkadia was out there, she was probably busy.

And if Kerra was out there, that’s where Arkadia was, too.

“Stop shooting! Stop shooting!”

Rusher looked to the north, where the tunnel leading into the glacier had collapsed between their fire and their impromptu bomb. A space-suited figure clambered awkwardly through a tight gap between the crushed gate and several ice boulders.

“Lubboon!” Rusher dashed across the crunchy depot floor. Two of his troopers pulled chunks away, helping the recruit past.

“I gave the Bothan the lightsaber like you said, sir,” Beadle said, breathlessly.

“The Jedi, trooper! Did you see her?”

“No, sir. But the Bothan gentleman did go after her,” Beadle said, pointing ahead of him. “North.”

“That’s south.”

Rusher stalked the debris-strewn floor, trying to remember. The big grotto was directly south, at the juncture of passageways leading east, to Arkadia’s museum, and farther south, down a series of escalators. The Citizen Guards had taken Kerra that way, deeper into the bowels of the glacier. With the damage they’d done to the passageways, there was no reaching the grotto, much less anything leading down from there.

No, if Narsk had reached Kerra, the Jedi would have tried to go up. That meant either Patriot Hall—or up the long, climbing hallway to Arkadia’s museum. Was there some exit at that end? More important, could they ever find it? There wasn’t any time for picking through the rubble. If Arkadia had any other ships in the system, they’d be on their way by now.

A call on the secure channel interrupted him. “The other tractor beam’s got us, Brigadier!”

“Give ’em the other barrel,
Diligence
,” Rusher said, waving to his crew to stop firing. Looking south, he clicked the comlink again. “You can’t land, anyway, until you do. We’ll assemble outside.”

“You don’t sound happy. No Jedi?”

“No,” Rusher said, “and no route to the Republic.”

“Let’s use the coordinates the Sith lady gave us,” Dackett said. “We’ve got ’em punched up and ready to go as soon as we recover everyone. I don’t think we’re going to be very popular here after this.”