The Joiner King (50 page)

Two seconds later, Luke’s R9 astromech unit—sitting in for an operationally challenged R2-D2—sounded an attack alarm. Luke felt a start from Mara as an explosion rocked her StealthX; then his own starfighter gave a sharp double buck. The R9 pointedly informed Luke they were being ambushed by Gorog dartships, and the tactical display showed half a dozen of the little craft behind them, rising from the sensor-blocking depths of the frozen ethmane jungle.

Luke continued toward the
Falcon
, flying low over Kr’s feathery jungle of ethmane crystals. Ideally, he would have climbed for open space where their StealthXs would have full advantage, but the tactical display showed a second swarm of dart-ships flying top cover, in perfect position to stop them.

The Skywalkers had traveled barely a kilometer when another column of dartships rose out of the ethmane jungle ahead.

Luke sensed Mara’s alarm almost before his own. They had stayed a little too long, and now Gorog was boxing them in. The swarm spread out before them, creating an orange wall of rocket exhaust. The Skywalkers began to pour cannon fire into the swirling mass, trying to clear a lane for their StealthXs.

It was like trying to blast a tunnel through a cloud. Every time they created a hole, it filled instantly.

As the Skywalkers drew closer, the orange wall resolved itself into a pattern of fiery whirling disks, each with the black dot of a dartship at its heart. Mara continued to fire, and Luke followed her lead. The tactic clearly had no chance of success, but Mara had a plan. Luke was almost sure of it.

Finally, when the swarm was so close that the dartships had grown into tiny cylinders, glowing streaks of missile propellant began to reach out toward the Skywalkers. Mara took the lead and pulled up, a loose wing stabilizer shuddering under the strain. The two nearest swarms—the one blocking their escape and the one pursuing from behind—nosed up to give chase.

Stick close
, she warned.

Suddenly Mara dropped the nose of her StealthX. Luke followed so quickly that he almost beat her, but the Dark Nest was not fooled. The dartships simply leveled off and continued to close on the Skywalkers.

Luke expected Mara to pull up again and outclimb their pursuers, gambling that the StealthXs could withstand a barrage of Killik chemical explosives long enough to fight through the top-cover swarm. Instead, she continued to dive. The ice jungle’s feathery canopy came up rapidly. Luke began to wonder when she intended to pull up.

She did not.

A flurry of cannon bolts lanced out from Mara’s StealthX, instantly superheating the ice crystals in front of her and filling Luke’s forward view with brown steam. He switched to instrument flying and followed her through the cloud into the snarled depths of the ice jungle. Flash-frozen spires of ethmane stood at all angles, glowing translucent blue with Gyuel’s distant light,
reaching out to embrace each other with delicate arms of hoarfrost.

Mara flipped her StealthX up on edge and slipped between two ethmane pillars, then crashed through a curtain of frost and sent up a glittering cloud of ice particles. Luke ducked under a frozen arch, then shot ahead of Mara into the lead.

He offered his apologies through their Force-bond, along with an image of the loose stabilizer he had seen on her wing.

Whatever
, she answered.

Luke felt a sudden compulsion to swing back toward the nest and wondered if his wife had gone crazy.

Mara urged him to think. Gorog expected them to run for the
Falcon.

Luke quickly brought them around. It would be safer to go in the opposite direction … and sneak a look at the nest. He focused all his attention on the frozen jungle ahead and began a Jedi breathing exercise, allowing his mind to race forward through the ethmane spires, to find its own route down the twining passages and rolling channels. Time seemed to slow. He surrendered his steering arm to the Force, and his hand began to move of its own accord, guiding the StealthX into one shimmering gap after another, bobbing over blue curtains, ducking beneath long fronds of frost, blasting holes through impassable walls of ice.

Mara stayed close on his tail, almost joining her hand to his through their Force-bond, and thirty seconds later they shot through a small icy portal into an irregular blue shaft barely broad enough for Luke to bank the StealthX into a tight inside spiral.

Stang!

Luke felt Mara’s fear through the Force, and his heart jumped into his throat. Then, as he continued his own spiral around the small shaft, he saw the jagged hole where her StealthX had bounced off the icy wall. His tactical display showed her still on his tail, but weaving badly.

Mara?

Fine!
she answered.

Luke continued to bank, setting the StealthX up on one wing
so that he could look up out one side of the cockpit and down out the other. He estimated they were about two kilometers deep, though that was impossible to confirm with instruments. This far down inside the frozen moon, the StealthX’s sensor range extended only as far as the walls of frozen ethmane.

Below, the shaft continued to narrow and curved back under itself, concealing the nest entrance—assuming it was down there—behind a wall of blue ice. Aside from the walls, which had been polished smooth by the heat-and-freeze cycle of countless rocket launches, there was no sign of dartships.

Mara seemed worried by how quiet it was.

Luke didn’t like it, either Gorog would have left
something
to defend the nest. The hair on his neck began to rise, and he decided they had seen enough.

Mara, now directly opposite him on the other side of the shaft, agreed and started to climb. Her shields were flickering, and that loose stabilizer was flapping around beneath her wing.

Luke fell in behind her; then an attack alarm sounded and a laser cannon began to fire blue bolts up the shaft. He felt another jolt of emotion from Mara, this time anger, as her StealthX took a trio of hits. Her shields went down with the second, and the ends of both starboard wings vanished with the third.

Luke did not waste time looking at his tactical display. He simply dropped the StealthX into a dive and started firing and
then
saw the nose of Alema’s stolen skiff, just slipping back out of sight. He continued to fire for a second longer, pouring his rage and disbelief at her through the Force, until the bend in the shaft vanished behind a curtain of ethmane steam. He sensed no shame or sorrow in the Twi’lek, only the enormous, murky presence of the Dark Nest.

When no more cannon bolts rose out of the fog, Luke pulled up into a tight banking turn that would allow him to keep an eye on the shaft in both directions. Mara was still above him, her StealthX crawling around the shaft in a wobbling circle, both starboard engines shut down and the stumps of her starboard wings vibrating badly.

Mara?

Everything good
, she reported.

It didn’t look good. Luke was about to tell her to try climbing when the mouth of the shaft—two kilometers above—began to brighten with the orange glow of dartship rockets.

Mara brought her StealthX out of its circle and fired at the icy wall, trying to punch through into the ethmane jungle beyond.

The stumps of her starboard wings tumbled away in a cascade of sparks and mini-explosions. Then she slipped into a spin and flashed past Luke, vanishing into the ethmane steam below.

Luke felt her stretching out to him, clinging to their Force-bond as she fought to bring the StealthX under control. He poured reassurance into their bond, trying to let her know that he would not abandon her, that he was coming right behind her. Then he reached for Leia in the Force, pouring out his alarm and picturing a crashing starfighter, and dived after Mara.

He caught up to Mara on the other side of the fog. She was using a combination of the Force and power manipulations to keep the StealthX under control, corkscrewing down the shaft in an ever-tightening spiral, pushing the damaged craft to its limits and a little beyond to stay ahead of the approaching dart-fighters.

The shaft twined its way another seven kilometers into the ice moon, growing ever smaller and more twisted. Finally the squarish, cave-like opening of a launching bay appeared at the bottom of the shaft, perhaps a kilometer away.

Luke armed a pair of proton torpedoes, then urged Mara to do the same. They would need to give the
Falcon
something to look for.

With pleasure!

Mara stabilized her spin just long enough to send a pair of proton torpedoes streaking toward the cavern mouth. Under other circumstances, Luke might have felt a pang of concern knowing that Alema’s skiff had entered the hangar only a short time before. But under these conditions—even understanding that she was under the control of the Dark Nest—he felt nothing. Whatever happened, the Twi’lek had brought it on herself.

A brilliant flash filled the cavern mouth as Mara’s torpedoes
detonated inside, and suddenly the last five hundred meters of shaft were filled with glittering ice shards. Luke activated his targeting computer, but between Mara’s wildly gyrating StealthX and interference from the ethmane ice, he was unable to get a lock.

Mara.
Luke moved his finger to the torpedo trigger.
Stay left

The first barrage of turbolaser fire fanned down from the Hapan batteries, and Kr was suddenly veiled behind a curtain of crimson energy. The Chiss answered with a volley of missiles, and a thousand propellant trails rose to bar the way forward. Han pulled up short and rolled the
Falcon
away from the sudden fury.

“No!” Leia’s eyes were fixed on her display, where a navigation lock had been guiding them toward the detonation site of the Skywalkers’ proton torpedoes. “Luke and Mara need help.”

“And they won’t get it if we fly into that mess,” Han said. In fifty years of flying, he had never seen a battle this compact before. There had to be a hundred capital ships fighting over a moon only eighty kilometers long. “Even I’m not that good.”

“Yes, Han, you are.”

“Look, I’m not leaving,” Han said. “We just have to find another way in.”

Leia’s voice grew sober. “Han, I think they’re down.”

“Down?” A leaden ball formed in Han’s stomach. “What do you mean,
down?”

“Crashed,” Leia said. “They may need—”

Han swung the
Falcon
around and started back toward Kr.

“—extraction,” Leia finished.

“How did that happen?” Han demanded. Space ahead had become a flashing sheet of turbolaser fire, striped at irregular intervals by growing lines of missile flame. “They’re
Jedi
, blast it! In
StealthXs
! They were just supposed to find the nest and call
us
.”

“Things go wrong even for Jedi.” Leia’s eyes were fixed out the viewport. “Threepio, break out the EV suits.”

“EV suits?” C-3PO squealed. “If we go EV out
there
, we’re
doomed! The odds of surviving are … why, they’re entirely incalculable!”

“Still better than with no suit,” Han said. “Do as she says. We may need suits to recover Luke and Mara.”

“As you wish, Captain Solo,” C-3PO said. “But I really don’t think we’re going to survive long enough to reach them.”

The sheet of flashing energy ahead brightened rapidly as the
Falcon
drew closer, and the canopy tinting darkened. Han looked to his instruments and found nothing but electromagnetic static, its density increasing as space ahead grew more brilliant.

“Sweetheart,” Han asked as casually as he could manage, “do you think you can do that Jedi thing—”

“Quiet.” Leia was already staring out the forward viewport with a faraway expression in her eyes. “I’m concentrating.”

Han waited for instructions. Leia continued to concentrate.

A web of tiny efflux trails—all that was visible of the Chiss and Hapan starfighters vying for control of the attack routes—began to lace the darkened canopy. Even that faded when the
Falcon
entered the battle zone.

A shudder ran through the decks as Meewalh opened up with the belly turret against some hazard Han could not see. Then the attack alarms shrieked as cannon fire pounded their lower shields.

“Who was that?” Han demanded over the intercom.

Meewalh informed him it was a starfighter, but she had no idea whose. All she had been able to see was a blurry tail of ion exhaust.

“Uh, sweetheart?”

“
Concentrating!
”

The invisible fist of a turbolaser blast glanced off the
Falcon
’s port side, instantly overwhelming the shields and sending her spinning out of control. The cockpit erupted with damage alarms, and Leia began to scream.

It took Han a moment to realize she was finally giving him instructions. “Port! Go port!”

He steadied the
Falcon
—relieved to see that he still could—then swung hard to port.

“Threepio, give me a damage report.”

The droid dropped an EV suit on the deck. “We’velostourauxiliaryaccelerationcompensator!”
he babbled. “Andourportdockingringiscompromised. We’llnevergetoutofthisinonepiece!”

“The damage is minor,” Saba said over the intercom. “This one will see to it.”

Han frowned. Saba still had a piece of skull missing under that thick hide of hers. She had talked Luke into bringing her along only by threatening to come anyway, but he knew better than to protest. It just wasn’t smart to question a Barabel’s ability to do
anything.

Leia ordered, “Climb!”

Han pulled back on the yoke and felt the
Falcon
buck as something exploded under her.

“Dive!”

Han pushed the yoke forward and was nearly thrown out of his seat as a turbolaser blast blossomed just to their stern.

“Starboard, gentle.”

Han swung to starboard, and the red streak of a missile shot past the
Falcon
’s blackened canopy.

“Dead ahead, fast.”

Han pushed the throttles into overdrive. The canopy grew suddenly transparent again, and still he could not see anything. There was only a thick brown fog, blossoming here and there with cannon fire and laced with the blue trails of starfighter ion drives.