Sacrifice

  I can imagine. Jacen was permanently invisible in the Force now, that was for sure. Luke hailed an air taxi, and they headed for Starfighter Command.

  “I’ve spent more time there since I left the military than when I was in uniform,” Jaina said.

  “Can you feel her, Jaina? Can you feel Mara?”

  She looked slightly to one side of Luke, defocused, and shook her head slowly. “Nothing.”

  “I haven’t felt her now for hours.”

  When they reached Starfighter Command, they headed for the chart room. Luke found that he could look at charts and pick up strong correlations in the Force—something Ben had proved to have a talent for, too. He stood in front of the banks of holocharts and tried to relax enough to let the Force steer his attention. He made an effort to put out of his mind where he thought she might have been heading.

  After a while, when the glowing lines and clusters of dots began to blur and lose their perspective, he found himself drawn to one sector in particular.

  “I’m sure she’s in the Hapes Cluster,” he said at last.

  When Luke had first felt Mara drop out of the Force, it was so sudden and uncontrolled that he thought she’d been killed. It woke him in a panic. The three seconds of pure agonized paralysis lasted until she faded back in again, and again, and he worked out that she was doing it deliberately.

  “Ironically, it would have been better if she’d taken a regular X-wing,” Jaina said. “The starfighter techies say it’s almost impossible to locate a StealthX by any of the usual search methods.”

  She was right. Unless someone happened to eyeball Five-Alpha or Mara had left a transponder or comlink active, the starfighter would simply vanish.

  A visual search was all that was left—that, or finding Mara herself. Luke headed for the hangars, and Jaina followed.

  “How do we recover StealthXs that ditch, then?” Luke asked, trying not to vent his frustration on hardworking ground crew.

  The technician stepped back from the starfighter. “Rescue beacon or the Mark One pall of smoke and flame, sir,” he said warily. “The GA asked Incom to make them very hard to detect, and they did.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop harassing people with work to do and go out there myself.” Luke reminded himself that Mara was hunting Lumiya, and so he had to expect her to use every trick in the book. That didn’t stop him from worrying. “After all, I’m the one who shook Lumiya’s hand, and not her throat …”

  Then Mara was suddenly there, not just back in the Force but magnifying her presence, as if she wanted to be found. She was defiant, unafraid, and spoiling for a fight. She’d found Lumiya all right.

  “Why’s she doing that, though?” Jaina had her own hunt—for Alema. Now she was keen to help find Mara. “It’s like she’s taunting her.”

  “Or she’s in trouble and she wants me to find her.”

  “No.” Jaina closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. “Doesn’t feel like a call for help. Feels like … a fight.”

  Luke decided to warn Tenel Ka that he was on his way purely as a precaution. Eighteen-standard-hour transit. Given the number of planets in the Hapes Cluster, it would probably take even the Hapans a lot longer than that to find a StealthX, but the more eyes that were out looking for Mara, the better.

  Luke tried to appear casual as he climbed into his cockpit. Jaina stood looking up at him.

  “I know I’m officially out of the service,” she said, “but if someone authorizes it, I’m happy to join in. Please.”

  Luke gestured to the ground crew. “Thanks.”

  “It’s Lumiya we should be worrying about.” Jaina was trying to reassure him. “I can see Aunt Mara going in for braided scalps like Fett. Red ones. Does Lumiya dye her hair, do you think? Will the stuff have icky gray roots?”

  Luke knew she was trying to make him laugh, and he tried to oblige. But just hearing the name Fett reminded him that pretty well every member of his family, Solos or Skywalkers, was at the top of someone’s must-kill-today list.

  Luke didn’t want or expect to be loved by everyone. He just wanted to wake up one morning and find his loved ones left alone to get on with their lives.

  When Mara came home—scalps or no scalps, war or no war—he was going to book a vacation for the two of them, somewhere soothingly uneventful. He balled the flimsi note she’d left for him and wedged it into a gap in the cockpit fascia. The StealthX’s drives whined into life.

  It wouldn’t be Hesperidium, though.

  KAVAN

  Jacen had expected to have to deal with an angry Mara after he killed Ben, not before.

  He was still looking for meanings and patterns in the events around him, and he now saw in himself a certain desperation to try whatever was placed in his path to see if that did the trick and sealed his Sith status.

  Will I notice? What does it feel like?

  How will I know?

  There had to be something that changed the fabric of the galaxy—a tipping point. Meanwhile, Mara was challenging him, pinpointing herself in the tunnels that ran deep under the Kavan countryside, thinking she was still an A-list assassin and that she could take someone who had complete mastery of the Force.

  She was a superb assassin, but her Force skills were crude compared to his. Once Jacen removed her, it would be easier to deal with Ben. And Luke … he’d cross that bridge when he had to.

  Jacen checked his belt, pockets, and holster, and decided to oblige Mara. Lumiya and Ben seemed to be elsewhere having their own showdown. Now it all fit. Lumiya had to be silenced for what she knew, and Ben would do it. It was tidy. It was a food chain.

  Jacen loaded four poisoned darts into an adapted blaster and slipped the others into slots on his belt, wondering how he could think such things so calmly. He approached the tunnel mouth with slow care. While he could sense the layout, Mara had vanished from the Force again. There was about a meter of headroom as he edged carefully along the central tunnel, and he could see horizontal shafts at about hip height branching off. It had been built to drain storm water; in harsh winters, local Kavani had once made emergency homes down here.

  Jacen stood and listened.

  “Okay,” he said. “I know you can hear me, Mara. You can still back out of this.”

  His voice echoed. There was no response, just as he expected, so he began walking deeper into the maze of drains, lightsaber in his right hand and blaster in the other. The only light around him now was a green haze from the glowing blade of energy.

  “I could,” he said quietly, “go back, block the entrance to this complex with flammable material, and set fire to it.” She could hear him, all right: he could hear water dripping slowly deep in the tunnels. Sound was magnified, even if it was hard to pinpoint the origin. “And the fact that these tunnels have vents means the chimney effect would smoke you out, asphyxiate you, or barbecue you.”

  Silence.

  He held his breath, listening.

  Crack.

  His right knee exploded with blinding pain as Mara cannoned out horizontally, Force-assisted, from a side conduit and caught his leg on the joint with her boots, ripping the tendons. As he lost his footing in the narrow passage, screaming, he found himself wedged for a second and groping for support. He lashed out with his lightsaber, shaving powdery brick from the wall. Mara dropped to the muddy floor to dodge the lightsaber, then sprang up and sprinted away down the tunnel.

  It wasn’t a good start. Jacen swore and made himself run after her, willing endorphins to numb his leg and telling himself that he knew she was setting up a trap. She wanted him confined, pinned down, penned.

  If she thought tunnels would even the odds, she was wrong. He’d bury her here.

  Mara found the perfect trap at the end of one of the culverts. She could hear Jacen’s running footsteps and she had a good fifty meters on him.

  From here, the vaulted ceiling became lower, and even Mara had to run at a crouch. It wasn’t the place to swing a standard lightsaber. The
tunnels were in poor condition, and the brick arches were starting to sag and collapse in places.

  So he wouldn’t oblige her by revealing his physical position in the Force. Fine. She spotted a rusty metal sheet about half a meter wide and laid it carefully across the tunnel floor, propped on stones so he’d tread on it and give her an audible warning when he reached that point. An intense Force shake of the brickwork and arches in front of and behind the metal plate weakened them, and then she stopped them from collapsing by Force pressure.

  Hold ’em up. Wait for him to hit that plate …

  Going after Jacen would never work. He could never be allowed to set the agenda. He could come after her.

  Trap, immobilize, kill.

  It wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t capture the public’s imagination like a lightsaber display at the academy, but her training was in destruction. Jacen’s was in deception.

  She could hear him breathing, and the irregular vzzzm-vzzzm-vzzzm of his lightsaber as he stalked, jumping and turning to be sure she wasn’t behind him. Then she could hear that he wasn’t swinging the blade so much; the short staccato hums and buzzes told her he was running out of room.

  She was trapped too, of course, unless she counted the ventilation shafts every fifty meters. But when she said she was leaving here over his dead body, she meant it.

  She felt the beginning of a compassionate human thought about Leia, but killed it stone-dead. It would weaken her.

  Jacen’s boots crunched over bricks. He was impatient. She was in his way, holding him up when he wanted to get on with something.

  Crunch … crunch … crunch.

  If she’d timed it right, he was close to stepping on that rusty plate.

  Clang …

  The rumbling began. She brought down both sections of tunnel, before and behind, with a massive exertion in the Force that made her breathless. She didn’t hear him call out. Even in the damp conditions, clouds of fine debris filled the air and made her choke.

  Mara waited, one hand over her mouth and nose, shoto drawn, and listened in the Force.

  There was whimpering and the chunk-chunk sound of the last falling bricks. She didn’t expect that weight of debris from a low ceiling to cause impact injury, but to engulf and immobilize him. He wouldn’t be dead—yet.

  She waited in silence, a nonexistent presence herself, until she could hear no more movement.

  Okay. Let’s see what I have to do to end this.

  An arm was all that protruded from the rubble. Through a fist-sized gap, she could see the wet, blinking glint of an eye and bloodstained face. A hand reached out to her, fingers splayed, bloody and shaking. Other people might have felt an urge to take that hand, the most distinctively human of things, but it was an old, tired Sith stunt, and she’d used it herself too many times.

  She took her blaster and leveled it at the eye, one-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. She had the shoto ready in case a coup de grace was called for.

  She felt as detached and steady as she’d ever been as the Emperor’s Hand.

  “Tell my mom I’m sorry I failed her,” Jacen whispered.

  “She knows,” Mara said, and squeezed the trigger.

  chapter twenty-one

  Nu kyr’adyc, shi taab’echaaj’la.

  Not gone, merely marching far away.

  —Mandalorian phrase for the departed

  KAVAN

  They said that the human body was capable of extraordinary feats of strength when in extremis. For a Jedi, it was something else entirely.

  Jacen Solo wasn’t ready to die, not now, not so close to his ascendance, and not in a stinking drain like vermin.

  He deflected the energy bolt with one last surge of the Force and sent the rubble erupting off his crushed and bleeding body like a detonation. Bricks hammered the walls and rained fragments, knocking Mara flat like a bomb blast. She made an animal noise that was more anger than pain and flailed for a moment as she tried to get up.

  The effort froze Jacen for two vital seconds. But he knew if he didn’t get up now and fight back, Mara would come in for the kill, again and again, until he was worn down and too weak to fend her off.

  He scrambled to his feet, staggering more than standing, and suddenly understood.

  It was Mara who had to die to fulfill his destiny.

  Killing her was the test: the words of the prophecy were meaningless, and at a visceral level he knew that her death was the pivotal act. He didn’t know how, and this wasn’t the time to stop and think about it. He surrendered totally to instinct for the first time in ages. Whatever guided a Sith’s hand had to guide him now.

  But he was hurt, and badly.

  Ben … he didn’t know where Ben fitted into this, but now he knew he did, as surely as he knew anything. Jacen didn’t care, because he knew he had to kill Mara now and nothing else would make sense until he did that.

  He fumbled for his lightsaber and thumbed it into life again. Mara was already back on her feet, coming at him with the shoto and vibroblade, brick dust and black-red blood snaking down her forehead from a scalp cut. She leapt at him with the shoto held left-handed, fencing-style, seared the angle of his cheekbone, and caught him under the tip of his chin with the vibroblade as he jerked back.

  She shouldn’t have been able to get near him. He had total mastery, and she was just athletic and fast. He pushed back at her in the Force, sending her crashing against a wall with a loud grunt, but she kept coming at him, one–two, one–two with the shoto and the blade, and he was being driven back, his strength ebbing. He needed space to fight.

  He drew his dart gun and fired one after the other, but Mara scattered all four needles in a blur of blue light. They fell to the ground. He turned and scrambled through the collapsed brick, using the Force to hurl debris up at her from the floor of the passage while she leapt from block to boulder to chunk of masonry, until she Force-leapt onto his back and brought him down.

  They rolled. This wasn’t a duel: it was a brawl. She thrust her vibroblade up under his chin and he jerked his head to one side, feeling the tip skate from his jaw to his hairline as it missed his jugular. He couldn’t draw the weapons he needed. He was losing blood, losing strength, waning, flailing his lightsaber to fend her off. It was almost useless in such a close-quarters struggle. Mara, manic and panting, flicked the shoto to counter every desperate stabbing thrust.

  “Ben … I’ll see you dead first … before … you get … Ben.”

  Jacen was on the knife-edge between dying and killing. They grappled, Force-pushed, Force-crushed: he threw her back again, trying to Force-jolt her spine and paralyze her for a moment, but somehow she deflected it and bricks flew out of the wall as if someone had punched them through from the other side. She almost Force-snatched the lightsaber from his hand, but even with his injuries he hung on to it. He wouldn’t die. He couldn’t, not now.

  “You can’t beat me,” he gasped. “It’s not meant to be.”

  “Really?” Mara snarled. “I say it is.”

  Then she launched herself at him—unthinking, a wild woman, hair flying—and he Force-pushed to send her slamming against a pillar in midleap. But the battering he’d taken and the ferocity of her relentless attack had blinded him to danger from another quarter. As he lurched backward to avoid her, his legs went from under him and he stumbled into a gaping crack opened up by the subsidence. He fell badly: red-hot pain seared from ankle to knee. His lightsaber went flying. Pain could be ignored, but the moment it took him to get to his feet again was enough for Mara to right herself and come back at him with the shoto and plunge it into the soft tissue just under the end of his collarbone.

  Lightsaber wounds hurt a lot more than he ever imagined. Jacen screamed. He summoned his own weapon back to his hand and Mara crashed into him, knocking him flat again and pinning him down. Her vibroblade stopped a hand span from his throat as he managed to grab her hair and drag her face nearer and nearer to his lightsaber. She struggled to pull b
ack, hacking at him with the shoto but blocked by his dwindling Force power each time.

  Her vibroblade grazed his neck. He fumbled in his belt for a dart. She jerked back with a massive effort, leaving him clutching a handful of red hair, and the only thing that crossed his mind as she arched her back and held her arms high to bring both shoto and vibroblade down into his chest was that she would never, ever harm Ben.

  Jacen stared into her eyes and instantly created the illusion of Ben’s face beneath her. She blinked.

  It gave him the edge for that fraction of a moment. It was long enough to ram the poison dart into her leg with its protective plastoid cone still in place.

  It was just a small needle, ten centimeters long. He stabbed her so hard that the sharp end punched through the cone and the fabric of her pants.

  Mara gasped and looked down at her leg as if she was puzzled rather than hurt. The dart quivered as she moved, and then fell to the floor.

  “Oh … it’s done …” Jacen said. The shoto fell from her hand and she made a vague and uncontrolled pawing movement with the vibroblade. It caught him in the bicep, but there was no strength behind the blow, and she dropped the weapon. “I’m sorry, Mara. Had to be you. Thought it was Ben. But it’s over now, it’s over …”

  “What have you done? What the stang have you done to me?” But she was already losing her balance as the poison paralyzed her, and she slumped to one side as he got to his feet, staring up at him more with shock than rage or fear.

  “The prophecy.” It didn’t matter now: the toxin—complex, relatively painless—was circulating through her body. “Don’t fight it. No healing trance. Just let go …”

  Mara tried to get up but sank back to sit on her heels, with an expression as if she’d forgotten something and was trying to remember. She crumpled against the wall. Jacen had never felt such relief. It didn’t have to be Allana, or Tenel Ka, or even Ben. It was over, all over.