Fate of the Jedi: Backlash (9 page)

If his senses in the Force had not been tuned to detect any stirring, any remote hint of danger, he would not have felt the tripping of the trap. Far over his head, boulders perched on an overhang leaned out and dropped toward their heads. Luke could feel other, more subtle shiftings take place in the rock wall to his right, but so far the only threat came from that first set of rocks, now gathering speed and building kinetic energy.

Luke leapt up and to the left. His feet came in contact with the rocky slope there, the one on which he had detected no sabotage. He felt rather than heard Ben leap and land beside him.

The slope here was almost vertical, but with a push in the Force Luke sprang up along it, climbing an easy six meters. He dropped back-first onto a ledge. Ben settled in beside him.

They watched several tons of rocks plummet past them, hitting all along the pass and to either side of where they had just been standing. More stones on the facing slope slid free and toppled into the pass, clattering down among the others.

“Three stages of fall,” Ben said, his tone still conversational.

“Very sophisticated. Now let’s find her.”

They opened themselves to the Force, seeking the woman.

Luke made an unhappy face. “Uh-oh.”

“Miscalculated, didn’t you?”

A rancor scrambled into the pass through the entrance Luke and Ben had just used. It carried a gnarled wooden club that must have weighed two hundred kilograms. On its back and neck was a saddle, in which sat a stout blond woman of middle years. She wore glossy black hide garments, and her expression was furious. For the rancor to have appeared there, presumably in response to the triggering of the trap, it must have been concealed very close by. Perhaps it had been cloaked by the Force.

Another rancor appeared down the pass in the opposite direction, thirty meters away. It had no club but carried a metal shield like the first one the Jedi had encountered. Beside it, on the ground, ran the woman Luke had seen the previous day, she of the Lightning Storm, and the rancor’s saddle carried another woman, so like her as to be a sister, though this woman’s garments were tan and her dark hair was streaked with bands of white. The woman on the ground looked dismayed; the rancor rider was smiling as though she relished the scrap to come.

Three more women, dressed in a fashion compatible with the others, appeared at each end of the pass, arriving at a dead run, surefooted. Luke felt a tickle in the Force and looked up. A third rancor was now reaching the summit of the hill where the Jedi sat. This beast was riderless and unarmed, but bigger than the other two.

Luke turned to his son. “When I spotted the woman, she didn’t have these reinforcements.”

“Embarrassing, isn’t it?”

“A bit.”

“What would one of your old Masters tell you at a time like this?”

“Never mind that now.” Luke turned toward the woman they had been following. He called out to her, “A pleasure to meet you at last.”

Looking grave, she opened her mouth to reply. But the woman in the rancor saddle above her gestured, and a sudden wind howled along the pass, plucking Ben from his perch and sending him tumbling down the slope.

With a sigh, Luke released the Force technique that was holding him in place and followed his son.

“Hurry, hurry.” Leia’s tone was urgent.

Han, grim-faced, could not manage any more speed; the airspeeder was at its flat-out maximum. But he could shave off microseconds by taking chances. Veering right and left to avoid the thinning trees, he now came within centimeters of scraping off hull paint against tree bark.

In the seat behind them, Dyon made a strangled noise audible over the engine shriek. Han paid him no mind. The boy clearly needed some excitement in his life. This was it.

They shot past the last of the trees onto rising, rocky ground and topped a low slope. Han’s eye was drawn first to the huge rancor standing atop a nearby hill, roaring down into the gap below. “Oh, stang.”

Leia shook her head. “The rancors aren’t the problem.”

“Rancors?
Plural?”

“There are Witches here.”

Their angle of approach brought them in line with the opening into a rocky pass, and Han could suddenly see what Leia was talking about. Farther down the pass, Luke and Ben, the former in white garments, the latter in black, were leaping side-to-side at the bottom of the pass, dodging head-sized rocks swirling around them. The stones were a cyclone of blunt weapons that could easily crush their skulls. A rancor with a rider stood at either end of the engagement zone, accompanied by three or four Witches of Dathomir. The women gestured, clearly keeping the potentially lethal stones moving with their Force spells.

Han angled so their approach was straight toward the pass entrance. The combatants hadn’t seen them yet. Perhaps the noise and
confusion of the fight would keep them distracted for a few crucial seconds. “We’re outmatched.”

“Why aren’t Luke and Ben using their lightsabers?” Leia held hers at the ready but unlit, her thumb on the ignition button.

The Witches and rancors remained unaware of Han’s speeder as he entered the pass. He killed forward thrust, slewed to port, and kicked the repulsors to full strength, skidding the speeder bottom-first toward the nearest group of enemies.

With any lesser pilot, the maneuver would have caused the speeder to slam nose-first into the pass wall, killing everyone on board. Han couldn’t see but could feel as his bottom-mounted repulsors went from hammering at empty air to hammering at obstacles. There were shrieks as Witches were abruptly propelled out of the way. The wrong-angle deceleration pressed Han deep into his seat.

Then they came to a sudden, spine-compressing stop. The engines kicked off. In the moment he had before gravity took over, Han decided that only a handful of pilots could have pulled off such a maneuver. Himself, Jaina, Luke, Wedge, Tycho. That was it.

Leia and Dyon leapt free. They went to starboard, which was almost straight up into the sky. Each leapt to a different side of the rancor. Then the speeder fell leftward, sliding down the calves of the rancor legs it had fetched up against, falling two or three meters, and crashed onto the rocky floor of the pass.

Han’s breath was jolted from him. But the instincts of a pilot finding himself in a crashed vehicle—
get out, get clear
—took over. Though dazed, he rolled out of and away from the speeder, coming to his feet, off-balance and face-to-face with one of the Witches, a redhead who perhaps looked angrier than any woman Han had seen, Leia excluded.

Someone shot her; a stun bolt took her in the face and she fell out of sight. Who had done it? Oh, that’s right,
Han
had; now he saw the blaster pistol in his hand, saw the charge meter click down by one. Leia had insisted that he switch over to stun bolts. He so seldom did that.

Farther up the pass, Luke and Ben were now moving in concert, gesturing to turn back the reduced wave of flying boulders. Ben launched himself through the air, a perfect flying side kick, and took a dark-haired Witch right in the solar plexus. The woman went down.
Closer at hand, Leia, her lightsaber lit, and Dyon, unarmed, leapt right and left, crossing each other as they did, striking at nearby Witches.

The closest rancor turned, roared down at Han, and raised its club.

“Oh, stang.” Han crouched, gauged which way would be the best to leap.

A blaster bolt—no stun bolt, and bigger, more explosively powerful than any that came from one of Han’s blasters—took the rancor in the center of the chest. The site sizzled and turned black. The rancor, wounded but not impaired, staggered back from the impact and howled again, now looking far past Han.

Han hazarded a look backward. In the distance, just topping the nearest rise, came Yliri’s cargo speeder. Beside her on the front seat, half standing, his rifle braced on the windscreen, was Carrack. Sha and Tarth held on for dear life in the backseat.

Han looked up in time to see the rancor bearing down on him, but it was charging the oncoming speeder. Han leapt out of the way. The rancor’s furious gait, he saw, was jarring the Witch in its saddle, preventing her from aiming whatever spell she was weaving. As the rancor passed, Han aimed a shot up along its back, hitting the Witch at the base of her spine.

Yliri’s speeder headed straight for the oncoming rancor, then sideslipped left and abruptly gained altitude. The rancor swung at it, but the beast’s club missed its bottom by meters. The speeder climbed the slope of the leftward hill, toward the larger rancor standing there.

Carrack’s second blaster bolt hit that rancor, a forehead shot that staggered the beast. Then Yliri’s speeder topped the hill, slewing around in a smuggler’s reverse that brought its relative speed to zero. Its left rear panel hit the stunned rancor in the back of the head, a deliberate maneuver, no accident.

The rancor’s arms flailed and an almost comic expression of dismay crossed its face. Then it fell down the hill slope toward the pass below, carrying a landslide of rock and scrub with it.

Farther down the pass, Luke gestured as if making an upward palm strike against the empty air. Meters away, the farthest rancor stumbled backward and fell, landing full on its rider.

Ben gestured to Leia, saying something Han couldn’t hear. Fresh from having hammered a Witch one–two–three with snap-kicks to the
midriff and leveling her, Leia switched off her lightsaber. She flicked it toward Ben, a toss that should have only carried it a meter or two, but the weapon flew straight into his outstretched hand.

Ben ignited it and placed the tip of the glowing blade mere centimeters from the throat of the woman he’d kicked.

And that was the fight.

T
HE OFFICE, OUTFITTED WITH RICH, TRADITIONAL WOOD PANELING AND
furniture, had a chameleon-like quality Moff Lecersen appreciated. Though it belonged permanently to no Imperial representative and was assigned to any high-ranking official as needed, it was made to be customizable in seconds. The aide of the admiral or general or Moff using it would enter, slide a datacard into the slot on the desk, and the transformation would begin. Holodisplays on the walls would glimmer to life with the VIP’s favorite images; for this meeting, Lecersen had chosen vistas of space docks and orbital vessel construction platforms. The datacard would supply information on preferred ambient temperature, scents, white noise, available entertainments, the array of beverages to be stocked in the small cabinet bar, and more. In extremely expensive hotels, the information would also dictate the hue and apparent texture of color-changeable carpets and walls.

All that information took only moments to impart. Then the aide, if he knew what was good for him, would spend the next hour scanning for listening and recording devices. A pity that this task couldn’t also be relegated to a datacard.

With the air cooled to his favorite temperature, the walls gleaming with demonstrations of military might in the making, Lecersen smiled a sand panther’s smile across his temporary desk at Haydnat Treen, Senator from Kuat. A lean, imposing woman of about eighty standard years, she wore gold-and-brown robes in a very up-to-date Kuati style; her silver-blue hair peeked out from beneath her golden scarf. She held a saucer and cup of very thick, very strong caf with aristocratic grace, and the smile she directed at Lecersen was just like his.

“You’ll imagine my surprise,” he told her, “when I conducted a private investigation into the recent kidnapping attempt on our Head of State and found no evidence implicating any of the usual suspects.”

“The Moffs, you mean?”

“It would be disingenuous of me to say otherwise. Yes, of course. The Moffs.”

“Did you look into your own affairs?” Treen asked. “Perhaps this
was
one of your plans, made while you were sleepwalking.”

“Well, sleepwalking would explain why it was so crude, so thoroughly botched.”

She did not rise to the bait; she merely sipped at her caf.

“So a deeper investigation was warranted.” Lecersen continued. “Fortunately, one of the Borleias banks used for the transactions had a duplicate set of books—the second set being the sort one never shows the government—and that had not been so thoroughly scrubbed. The flow of credits led back to a Coruscanti vehicle importer, which led to a Kuati construction firm, which led … to you.”

“Oh, my. Your accusation positively rends me. I think I’m going to swoon.”

“Please do. I know you’ll make a graceful display of setting the caf safely aside as you collapse. I look forward to seeing it.”

Treen did not swoon, but continued to smile.

“So,” Lecersen said, “I have to ask, why does a Senator from Kuat want to kidnap the Imperial Head of State?”

“Well, he’s handsome, isn’t he?” Treen gave him an admonishing
look. “No, truthfully, it’s because I want you to be Emperor, of course.”

“Ah. I see.” Lecersen blinked. That was not the answer he expected. In truth, he had not expected any sort of confession from her. Now that he was getting one, he had to figure out what to do with it; he had no jurisdiction in Kuat or here, and so might have to hand over evidence to the GA authorities.