[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(72)

She tucked her blowgun under her bad arm and fumbled for her darts. Just a few more seconds and she would spit poison toward Mara.

But the disturbance she’d sensed had obviously upset Jacen, and it had to have made Luke and Mara alert; Mara was pulling out a comlink, but Luke was vigilant, looking after Jacen and then around the casino. An assassination attempt now was likely to be detected. But when would she have a better chance?

She got her dart in hand, placed it into the mouthpiece of her blowgun, and was just raising the weapon to her lips when Luke stood and looked straight at her.

She froze. He couldn’t possibly see her, not in these conditions. But if she attacked now, when his senses were obviously at their keenest, he couldn’t possibly fail to detect the attack.

Comlinks all over the casino began to beep and chime. Military personnel stood up from their tables, from their drinks, many of them now in the direct line of fire between Alema and Mara. She hissed, vexed.

She needed to be closer. She moved forward, still cloaked by the chamber’s natural shadows.

Then Mara rose, saying something, and she and Luke ran toward the exit. Uniformed personnel also began crowding that way, most of them listening to or speaking into their comlinks.

Alema picked up the pace, but she was slowed by the crowd, by the fact that one of her feet, little more than a stump, caused her to limp. She shoved gamblers out of her way, using the Force to add a little strength to her efforts.

But still, it was long, frustrating seconds before she got through the exit, in the middle of a pack of military men and women. Not a tall person, she hopped up and down, looking along the access corridor in both directions for her target.

There she was, Luke beside her, at a full run in the direct ion of the bow, almost at the limits of the blowgun’s range. Alema put the weapon to her lips, paused half a second to calm herself, elevated the weapon’s tip to give her dart a trajectory that would carry it near the corridor ceiling, and blew.

The dart was lost to her sight the moment it left the blowgun. She hopped up twice more to maintain a line of sight on Mara’s retreating back. The dart should bit just about—

Luke and Mara passed the entrance to a cross-corridor and turned left into it. An Ortolan - blue-furred, big-boned, arid squat, with drooping oversized ears and a nasal trunk that reached to midchest - came trotting out of that corridor, turning toward the Maw Casino. Then the Ortolan stumbled and fell face-first onto the corridor floor.

Alema snarled. Her dart had found the wrong target.

The moving crowd had grown so thick that without exerting herself fully, and very obviously, through the Force, she could make little headway through the mass of military personnel heading toward the Errant Venture’s vehicle hays. By the time she got to the cross-corridor, there was no sign of the Jedi.

A human male emerging from the side corridor bumped into her. He was darkskinned, good-looking, with thick white hair and a trim white beard and mustache; he carried a silver-tipped cane, and his flaring silken cloak slid across the bodies of everyone he passed, Alema included.

Alema was twenty meters down the side corridor before she realized who he was.

Lando Calrissian.

She all but screamed where she stood. If Lando was here, there could be no question about Han and Leia. She turned back and forth, trying to decide whether to follow Lando or the Skywalkers, and finally turned back to pursue Lando.

BRIDGE OF THE DODONNA

“Recall all scouts,” shouted Admiral Tarla Limpan. The gray-green skin and red eyes of her Duros ancestry made her a striking figure on the Star Destroyer’s bridge-a benefit to her now, in the thick of battle. “Launch squadrons as they come ready. Threat assessment! What are we looking at?”

Finally, a hologrammic schematic of space directly around the planet Corellia sprang into existence above the bridge walkway. Admiral Limpan was actually within the hologram; she took two steps backward to be clear of it. On the schematic, the sphere of Corellia was a blue wire grid; Alliance ships were small green symbols, Corellian craft on the planet’s surface or within her atmosphere were yellow, and unknowns were red. There were lots of unknowns, some of them already streaking down into the atmosphere on the far side of the planet from the Dodonna. Far too many were approaching Dodonna along orbital vectors.

Though Colonel Moyan, her starfighter coordinator, was not on the bridge-he remained in the starfighter control salon, a nearby compartment-his growling voice echoed over the bridge’s speaker system: “We have two cruisers, a frigate, and a minimum of twelve starfighter squadrons headed our way. That’s only the newcomers. There are at least as many starfighter units rising up from Corellia’s surface. This is an all-out push. Our deployments around Centerpoint Station and the other four worlds are reporting similar mismatches.”