Apocalypse (49 page)

“So, what happened in the escape tunnel?” Ben demanded.

“I led an ambush.” There was a hard edge in her voice that did not match the apology in her watery eyes. “On the
Millennium Falcon
.”

“You
what
?” Ben had no need to fake the shock, anger, or confusion in his voice. Her story made no sense, yet he could see in her face—and feel in the Force—that it was true. “What was the
Falcon
doing down there?”

“Dropping off Bazel Warv. He’s dead.” Vestara paused, doing a fairly good job of pretending to be cruel by making Ben wait for the news that she knew would be closest to his heart. “The Solos managed to escape into the Temple, but they’ll be dead soon enough … if they aren’t already.”

Noticing that she hadn’t said anything about Allana or more casualties, Ben breathed a silent sigh of relief and said, “You’re a lying she-voork. There’s no reason the
Falcon
would be down there.”

“Your confusion is understandable.” Vestara was managing to sound like she was actually enjoying this—and, perhaps, on some level she was. After all, tapping into one’s secret emotions was the key to good acting. “The
Falcon
is supposed to be with the academy students, I know. We don’t know why it wasn’t—only that our signal people intercepted some chatter about infiltrators entering through the evacuation route. Since I was the only one who knew how to find the tunnel, I led the ambush. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be the
Millennium Falcon
.”

Vestara was telling the truth about being surprised—but she was lying about everything else. Ben could see it in her eyes and feel it in the Force, and she was a good enough liar that it shouldn’t have been
that easy for him. There wasn’t any more she could tell him, and she was letting him know it.

Ben nodded to show he understood, then asked, “So you were just playing me all along? You were never serious about becoming a Jedi?”

“Does it
look
like I was serious?” Vestara’s voice held so much contempt that she sounded sincere, and something dark began to burn inside Ben. “Yes, Ben, I was playing you. That’s what Sith do.”

Ben glowered at Vestara, thinking of all the times she had betrayed and deceived him in the past, deliberately allowing the dark ember inside to build into full-blown anger. With Ship able to touch the surface of their minds almost at will, it was important to
feel
the emotions appropriate to their words, or Ship would sense the disparity and realize whose side Vestara was really on.

Ben was still glowering when a faint rumble began to reverberate through Ship’s landing struts. It was so dull and muffled that he thought he might be imagining it—until Vestara frowned and glanced down at her feet.

“What’s that?” she demanded.

Ben shrugged. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

He looked through the viewport that Ship had created earlier and saw that Abeloth had stepped fully out onto Pinnacle Platform. She was standing at the balustrade, leaning slightly over the rail. And once again, her gaze was fixed on the Galactic Justice Center. One set of tentacles seemed to be pointing toward the base of the distant structure, while the other was hanging down toward the plaza, pulsing and shimmering as she drew on the dark side energy of the frightened crowd below.

“Ah—Abeloth is angry,” Vestara said, following Ben’s gaze. As she studied the scene, the rumble deepened and grew more audible, and Ship began to sway on its struts. She did not speak again for a second or two, then the entire reception hall started to shake and the wrecked entry began to drop rubble. “The people of Coruscant have disappointed the Beloved Queen. Now they will feel her wrath.”

Ben began to have a very bad feeling about what was happening. “A groundquake?”

Vestara turned back to him, her mouth twisted into a smile that
seemed more frightened than cruel. “The groundquakes are just the beginning, you fool,” she said. “The volcano will be the true punishment.”

Ben recalled the giant volcano at Abeloth’s home in the Maw, and the pool of magma on Pydyr, and quickly understood the truth of what Vestara was saying. Whether the volcanoes somehow fed Abeloth’s power or were a mere side effect, it seemed clear that they were associated with her presence. And on Coruscant, even a small flow of magma would kill millions. With footings and foundations melting by the square kilometer, skytowers would fall by the thousands, tumbling into their neighbors or dissolving into the same pools of molten stone that had eaten away their bases. The fumes, superheated and filled with noxious gases, would kill
hundreds
of millions—and if a pyroclastic flow developed, the death toll would rise to the billions.

And the whole time, Abeloth would be feeding off the fear and anguish of the victims. She would grow into a being beyond mortal comprehension. With the dark side hers to command, she could literally reshape the galaxy in any manner she wished.

Ben shook his head, not quite able to grasp the enormity of what was happening before him. He was watching a deity being born—and she was not a benevolent one. It felt like he was caught in one of those terrible nightmares from which it was impossible to awaken, except that if this
was
a nightmare, it had been going on so long that it had become his life.

Ben looked back to Vestara and found her studying him, watching him come to the same conclusion she had no doubt reached days before, when she had made the decision to infiltrate the Sith. Abeloth had to be stopped at any cost, even if it meant sacrificing themselves—or each other.

After a moment, Ben asked, “The people of Coruscant have disappointed Abeloth how, exactly? There’s nothing they could have done that would justify that kind of punishment.”

Vestara’s smile turned passably cruel. “Who said the Beloved Queen needs justification for anything she does? And anyway, it’s what the kreetles
didn’t
do that has angered her.”

“Which is?”

“They didn’t defend her,” Vestara replied. “When the Jedi and their space marine galoomps invaded our Beloved Queen’s palace
three days ago, only a few brave spirits tried to protect her. Most Coruscanti just went home and hid like the cowards they are—and
that
is why they will suffer.”

“Our forces are inside the Temple?” Ben gasped, uncertain whether to be relieved or alarmed. If they had
already
been inside for three days, then clearly the battle was not going well. “How?”

“They came in like flitnats, through an exhaust portal,” Vestara answered. “The fools have been trying to clear the palace of Sith ever since—and they have no idea what they are truly facing. When they finally
do
discover the Beloved Queen, they will wish they had died on a Sith shikkar instead.”

Ben glared at Vestara with an expression of pure hatred that he hoped would conceal the gratitude he felt for the information she was so subtly relaying. In telling him the location of the initial breach—an exhaust portal—she had also explained why it was taking so long to clear the Temple. The Jedi and their space marine allies were being forced to fight for every meter, and that was going to take time. But even more important was what Vestara had told him about the attackers having no idea who they were truly facing. If the Jedi didn’t know that Abeloth was in the Temple, then they wouldn’t be pushing to kill her. They would be taken completely by surprise when the magma began to flow—and by then it wouldn’t matter what they knew. Abeloth would be too strong to defeat.

Ben locked gazes with Vestara, then looked quickly toward the still-lowered boarding ramp. “And you’re just going to let that happen?” He looked back toward Vestara. “You’re just going to let Abeloth annihilate the jewel of the galaxy?”

“As long as it destroys the Jedi, yes.” Vestara kept her gaze on Ben. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“You’re right. I don’t know why you wouldn’t.” Ben looked back toward the boarding ramp, then back to Vestara, then back to the boarding ramp. “It just seems like an awful waste, destroying that much wealth.”

He looked back to Vestara and tipped his head toward the boarding ramp. She held his gaze for a moment, then her eyes went soft and she gave a brief nod. She understood. She had to find the Jedi and bring them back to Abeloth.

“Coruscant’s wealth is nothing to me.” Vestara reached down and unclipped the safety clip on her lightsaber hook. “It belongs to the Beloved Queen, and it is hers to do with as she pleases.”

“The Beloved Queen is a sick sack of tentacles.” As Ben spoke, he was rising to his feet and spinning around to present his back to her. “I’ve seen starving Hutts who aren’t as crazy as she is.”

“Sweat-licking skarg!” A hissing crackle sounded behind Ben as Vestara ignited her lightsaber. “For that, you lose your hand!”

Ben spread his arms as far as he was able, trying to stretch his stun cuffs wide. A searing heat warmed the heels of both palms as the blade sizzled through the armored cable, and his hands came free.

A familiar hiss sounded from the ventilation duct as anesthetic gas began to pour into the cabin, and Ship sank on one side of its struts as it started to raise the boarding ramp to prevent their escape. Ben spun around and grabbed the blaster pistol from Vestara’s holster.

“Gas!” He shoved her toward the ramp. “Go! I’ll take care of Ship.”

Vestara did not need to be told twice. She simply nodded and leapt for the exit. Ben took the blaster off safety and spun away from her, aiming toward a small control nodule in Ship’s rear wall. Then Vestara cried out in surprise behind him, and the sizzle of her lightsaber faded into silence.

Resisting the temptation to look, Ben raised the blaster and pulled the trigger—and sent a single bolt burning into the floor as the weapon was Force-jerked from his hand.

In the same instant, Vestara came flying in at his flank, hitting so hard it felt like she had been launched from a missile tube. They flew across the cabin together and slammed into an interior wall, then dropped onto the floor in a tangled heap.

The anesthetic gas was already filling Ben’s head with fog, and he could feel a knot rising on his brow where he and Vestara had banged skulls. Still, he managed to fight off the rising tide of darkness long enough to look back toward the exit, where the lavender-skinned Lord was standing on the half-raised ramp, watching Ben and sneering.

“Jedi fool!” the Keshiri said. “If she will betray
us
, she will betray you, too.”

I
N HER DREAM
, J
AINA LONGED TO REDIRECT THE
K
HAI GIRL
’
S SHIKKAR
before it lodged in Ben’s eye, but those were not the rules. The fate of the galaxy hung on this fight, and if Jaina wanted the galaxy of the future to be a fair one, then she could not interfere—not even if it meant Ben losing an eye, or his life.

Whose
rules, Jaina could not recall. She knew only that she had arrived at the rim of the gorge to find the pair locked in battle, their lightsabers sparking and popping as they drove each other back and forth across the stone courtyard. She had snatched her own lightsaber from her belt and sprang down into the yellow fog that was rising from the Font of Power—and immediately found herself back where she had started, with her lightsaber hanging back on her belt.

A voice that was neither male nor female had said
“No!”
and Jaina had understood that she could not help her young cousin. The Balance itself hung on the fight between Ben and his Sith girlfriend—not on its outcome, but on the combat itself.

At the last second, Ben leaned away from the flying shikkar, but the
blade passed so close to his head that Jaina saw a spray of blood and the tumbling crescent of an ear tip.

Then the yellow fog lifted again, and Jaina felt herself rising through the viscous warmth of a bactabath. How long it had been since the med-evac team had extracted her—and Luke and Corran—from the Jedi Temple, she had no idea. Her injuries no longer ached, but she could tell she was being pulled from the cylinder early. Her arm felt a bit weak in the area of the break, and when she tried to expand her lungs, she experienced a momentary hesitation that suggested her body still expected it to hurt.

Once her head had cleared the top of the tank, Jaina found herself looking out on the utilitarian interior of the Galactic Justice Center infirmary. Like most prison infirmaries, it was little more than a long hall, with a row of opaque bath cylinders along one side and a row of security stalls along the other. Gavin Darklighter—the admiral in command of the Galactic Alliance Space Marines—had commandereed it for use as a field hospital, and groaning space marines lay everywhere—strapped onto hovergurneys parked in the central aisle, stretched out on exam tables in security stalls, even lying on the floor curled into fetal positions. At least a dozen Emdee droids were performing surgery out in the open, and there were probably thirty sentient nurses performing triage or emergency life support. Clearly, the battle for the Jedi Temple was still raging—and it was not going well.