The Last Command (54 page)

And then the
TIE
interceptors were on them, and there was no time left to wonder why their carefully planned surprise attack had failed before it had even begun. For the moment the only question was that of survival, one ship and one engagement at a time.

The stealthy footsteps came around the corner ten meters away and continued toward him; and Han, pressed painfully back into the slightly recessed doorway that was the only cover for those same ten meters, abandoned the faint hope that his pursuers would miss him and prepared for the inevitable firefight.

They
should
have turned off. In fact, by all rights they shouldn’t have been up here at all. From the snatches of status reports he’d been able to catch while passing by deserted checkpoints, it sounded like everyone who could carry a blaster was supposed to be twenty levels down fighting the natives who were running loose through the garrison. These upper levels didn’t seem to even be occupied, and there sure wasn’t anything up here except maybe C’baoth that needed any protection.

The footsteps were getting closer. It would be just his luck, Han thought sourly, to run into a couple of deserters looking for a place to hide.

And then, maybe five meters away, the footsteps abruptly stopped… and in the sudden silence he heard a stifled gasp.

He’d been spotted.

Han didn’t hesitate. Pushing hard off the door behind him, he leaped across the corridor, trying to duplicate that trick down at the defense station, or at least do the best he could without Chewbacca here to back him up. There were fewer of them out there than he’d expected, and further to the side than he expected, and he lost a vital half-second as his blaster tracked toward them—

“Han!” Leia shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

The sheer surprise of it caught Han’s timing straight across the knees, and he slammed rather ingloriously into the wall on the opposite side of the corridor. It was Leia, all right. Even more surprising, Talon Karrde was with her, along with those two vornskr pets of his. “What in blazes are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Luke’s in trouble,” Leia said breathlessly, rushing forward and giving him a quick, tense hug. “He’s ahead somewhere—”

“Whoa, sweetheart,” Han assured her, hanging on to her arm as she tried to pull away. “It’s okay—we knew the ysalamiri were here going in.”

Leia shook her head. “That’s just it: they’re not. The Force is back. Just before you jumped out of cover.”

Han swore under his breath. “C’baoth,” he muttered. “Has to be him.”

“Yes,” Leia said, shivering. “It is.”

Han threw a look at Karrde. “I was hired to destroy the Emperor’s storehouse,” the smuggler said evenly. “I brought Sturm and Drang along to help us find Mara.”

Han glanced at the vornskrs. “You have anyone else with you?” he asked Leia.

She shook her head. “We ran into a squad of troops three levels down moving this way. Our two Noghri stayed behind to hold them off.”

He looked at Karrde. “How about your people?”

“They’re all in the
Wild Karrde
,” he said. “Guarding our exit, should we have the chance to use it.”

Han grunted. “Then I guess it’s just us,” he said, shifting his grip on Leia’s arm and heading down the corridor. “Come on. They’re up in the throne room—I know the way.”

And as they ran, he tried not to think about the last time he’d faced a Dark Jedi. In Lando’s Cloud City on Bespin, when Vader had tortured him and then had him frozen in carbonite.

Somehow, from what Luke had told him, he didn’t expect C’baoth to be even that civilized.

The lightsabers flashed, blue-white blade against green-white blade, sizzling where they struck each other, slashing through metal and cable where they hit anything else. Gripping the guardrail with both hands, fighting against the turmoil roiling through her own mind, Mara watched in helpless fascination as the battle raged across the throne room floor. It was like a twisted inversion of that last horrifying vision the Emperor had given her at the instant of his destruction nearly six years ago.

Except that this time it wasn’t the Emperor who was facing death. It was Skywalker.

And it was no vision. It was real.

“Watch them closely, Mara Jade,” C’baoth said from where he stood at the top of the steps, his voice hard yet strangely wistful. “Unless you bow willingly to my authority, you will someday face this same battle.”

Mara threw a sideways look at him. C’baoth was watching this duel he’d orchestrated with a fascination that bordered on the grisly. She’d called it, all right, back when she’d first met him on Jomark. The work he’d done for Thrawn had given him a taste of power; and like the Emperor before him, that taste had not been enough.

But unlike the Emperor, he was not going to be content merely with the control of worlds and armies. His would be a more personal form of empire: minds re-formed and rebuilt into his own conception of what a mind should be.

Which meant that Mara had been right on the other count, too. C’baoth was thoroughly insane.

“It is not insanity to offer the richness of my glory to others,” C’baoth murmured. “It is a gift which many would die for.”

“You’re giving Skywalker a good shot at that part, anyway,” Mara bit out, shaking her head to try and clear it. Between her own memories, an echo of the strange buzzing pressure she was picking up from Skywalker’s mind, and C’baoth’s overbearing presence two meters away, trying to hang on to a line of thought was like trying to fly an airspeeder in a winter windstorm.

But there was a mental pattern the Emperor had taught her long ago, a pattern for those times when he’d wanted his instructions hidden even from Vader. If she could just clear her mind enough to get it in place—

Through the turmoil came a sudden jolt of pain. “Do not attempt to hide your thoughts from me, Mara Jade,” C’baoth admonished her sharply. “You are mine now. It is not right for an apprentice to hide her thoughts from her master.”

“So I’m already your apprentice, huh?” Mara growled, gritting her teeth against the pain and making another try at the pattern. This time, she made it. “I thought I had at least until I’d knelt at your feet.”

“You mock my vision,” C’baoth said, his voice darkly petulant. “But you
shall
kneel before me.”

“Just like Skywalker will, right? Assuming he lives through this?”

“He will be mine,” C’baoth agreed, quietly confident. “As will his sister and her children.”

“And then together you’ll heal the galaxy,” Mara said, watching his face and listening to the turmoil in her mind. Yes; the barrier seemed to be keeping C’baoth back. Now if she could just hold on to that privacy a little longer…

“You disappoint me, Mara Jade,” C’baoth said, shaking his head. “Do you truly believe I need to hear your thoughts in order to read your heart? Like the lesser peoples of the galaxy, you seek my destruction. A foolish notion. Did the Emperor teach you nothing about our destiny?”

“He didn’t do a good job of reading his own, I know that much,” Mara retorted, listening to her heart thudding as she watched C’baoth. If that erratic mind of his decided she was a genuine threat and launched another of those lightning bolt attacks…

C’baoth smiled, holding his arms out to the sides. “Do you feel the need to measure your strength against mine, Mara Jade? Come, then, and do so.”

For a pair of heartbeats she eyed him, almost tempted to try. He looked so old and helpless; and she had her mental barrier and some of the best unarmed combat training the Empire at its height could provide. It would take just a few seconds….

She took a deep breath and lowered her eyes. No; not now. Not like this. Not with these pressures and distractions spinning through her mind. She’d never make it. “You kill me now and I won’t be able to kneel for you,” she muttered, letting her shoulders slump in an attitude of defeat.

“Very good,” C’baoth purred. “You have wisdom of a sort, after all. Watch, then, and learn.”

Mara turned back to the guardrail. But not to watch the lightsaber duel. Somewhere down there was the blaster C’baoth had torn from her grip when he did whatever it was he’d done to the mountain’s ysalamiri and gotten to the Force again. If she could find it before C’baoth realized that she hadn’t really given up…

Across the floor, Skywalker leaped up again to the catwalk. The clone was ready for the move, hurling his lightsaber upward right behind him. The blue-white blade missed Skywalker by a hair, slicing instead most of the way through the catwalk floor and one of the support struts holding it to the ceiling. With a tooth-jarring shriek, the strained metal twisted under Skywalker’s weight, dumping him back off.

He hit the floor more or less on his feet, dropping down to land on one knee. His hand reached out, and the lightsaber that had been falling toward the clone suddenly changed direction. It arced toward Skywalker’s hand—

And stopped dead in midair. Skywalker strained, the muscles of his hand tightening visibly as his mind stretched out. “Not that way, Jedi Skywalker,” C’baoth said reprovingly; and Mara glanced over to see that his hand, too, was stretched out toward the errant lightsaber. The clone, for his part, was just standing there in his brown robe, as if he knew that C’baoth would be on his side in this battle.

Maybe he did. Maybe there was nothing left in that body but an extension of C’baoth’s own mind.

“This duel must be to the death,” C’baoth continued. “It must be weapon against weapon, mind against mind, soul against soul. Anything less will not bring you to the knowledge you must have if you are to properly serve me.”

Skywalker was good, all right. With the strange buzzing pressure in his mind he must have known he couldn’t match C’baoth strength for strength. Mara felt the subtle change in his concentration; and suddenly he swung his own lightsaber over his shoulder, the green-white blade scything toward a point midway along the other lightsaber handle.

But if C’baoth wouldn’t let Skywalker disarm his opponent, he wouldn’t let him destroy the weapon, either. Even as the blade sliced downward, a small object shot out of the shadows to Skywalker’s right, slamming into his shoulder and deflecting his arm just far enough for his blade to sweep through empty air. An instant later the old Jedi had torn the clone’s lightsaber from Skywalker’s mental grip, sending it back across the room to its owner. The clone raised it to en guard position; wearily, Skywalker got to his feet and prepared to continue the battle.

But for the moment Mara wasn’t interested in the lightsabers. Lying on the floor, maybe two meters back from Skywalker’s feet, was the object C’baoth had thrown at him.

Mara’s blaster.

She looked sideways at C’baoth, wondering if he was watching her. He wasn’t. In fact, he wasn’t looking at much of anything. His eyes were unfocused, staring across the throne room, a strangely childlike smile on his face. “She has come,” he said, his voice almost inaudible over the clash of the lightsabers below. “Just as I knew she would.” Abruptly, he looked at Mara. “She is here, Mara Jade,” he said, pointing dramatically toward the turbolift she and Skywalker had come up.

Frowning, not sure she should take her eyes off him, Mara turned her head to look. The turbolift door slid open and Solo stepped out, his blaster ready. And right behind him—

Mara caught her breath, her whole body going tense. It was Leia Organa Solo, holding a blaster in one hand and her lightsaber in the other. And behind her, his pet vornskrs in front of him on leashes—

It was Karrde.

Organa Solo? And
Karrde
?

“Leia—Han—go back,” Skywalker called to them over the clash of the lightsabers as the newcomers moved along the walkway past the galaxy hologram and on into the main part of the throne room. “It’s too danger—”

“Welcome, my new apprentice!” C’baoth shouted joyfully, his voice drowning out Skywalker’s as it echoed grandly in the open space. “Come to me, Leia Organa Solo. I will teach you the true ways of the Force.”

Solo had a different sort of lesson in mind. He reached the end of the walkway, sighted along the barrel of his blaster, and fired.

But even wallowing in self-delusion, a Jedi of C’baoth’s power couldn’t be taken out that easily. In a blur of motion, Mara’s blaster leaped upward from the floor into the path of the shot, its grip shattering into a shower of sparks as Solo’s shot expended its energy there. The second shot was likewise blocked; the third caught the blaster’s power pack, turning the weapon into a spectacular fireball. The blaster was torn from Solo’s grip before he could fire a fourth.

And C’baoth went berserk.

He screamed, a horrible shriek of rage and betrayal that seemed like it would set the air on fire. Mara jerked back as the piercing sound cut through her ears—

And an instant later nearly fell over the guardrail as the Force equivalent of the scream slammed into her.

It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before; not from Vader, not from the Emperor himself. The utter, animal ferocity—the total loss of every shred of self-control—it was like standing alone in the middle of a sudden violent storm. Wave after wave of fury swept over her, ripping through the mental barrier she’d created and battering her mind with a numbing combination of hatred and pain. Dimly, she saw Skywalker and Organa Solo staggering under the assault; heard Karrde’s vornskrs’ howling in pain of their own.

And from C’baoth’s outstretched hands erupted a blaze of lightning.

Mara winced in sympathetic pain as Solo was thrown backwards into the guardrail at the front of the hologram pit. Through the crackle of the lightning she heard Organa Solo shout her husband’s name and jump to his side, dropping her blaster and igniting her lightsaber just in time to catch the third blast of lightning on the green-white blade. Abruptly, C’baoth shifted his aim upward to the damaged catwalk hanging precariously over their heads. The lightning flashed again—

And with a
crack
of exploding metal the center of the catwalk split apart. Pivoting on its last remaining support strut, it toppled ponderously downward toward Organa Solo.