[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(136)

To make things more irritating, Han still hadn’t heard from Leia. Admittedly, communication between them was going to be tricky and occasional. He glanced at the comm-equipped datapad that he had carefully glued to the Shriek control board once he’d been sealed into the vehicle-its lit screen remained aggravatingly blank.

Worse still, Wedge seemed to be reading his mind. “Don’t get impatient,” he said, his voice so clear in Han’s ears that he could have been sitting in the now empty copilot’s seat. “We’ll get there soon enough.”

“Impatient?” Han added an edge of disbelief to his voice. “Sonny, I’m just sitting here playing sabacc with the droid brains.”

“Good. Getting skinned will make you mean.”

Han grinned. He put on a little thrust, bringing him up slightly ahead of Wedge’s Shriek. “And getting your hatches blown off will make you mean.”

Wedge’s voice became less cordial, more military. “Forward starfighter edges now encountering enemy units.”

“Lucky them,” Han said.

RELLIDIR, TRALUS

This time, Jaina spoke each word with brilliant, individual clarity, making it impossible to misunderstand her. “I. Said. Drop. The. Shields. Over.”

“Negative on that, negative.” The groundside officer’s voice sounded young and a little panicky. “The enemy is less than three minutes away and descending rapidly.”

“Goodness,” Jaina said. “At two seconds to drop the shields and two to raise them again after we’re outside, that gives you, what? More than two and a half minutes to dither and still be safe? Drop the karking shields and let us out!” She pounded a portion of her control boards, unoccupied by buttons or readouts, with her fist.

Her squadron circled above downtown Rellidir, confined by the energy shields defending that portion of the city. Other starfighters were buzzing beneath her, but none of the other squadrons seemed as anxious to leave the shielded area.

“Orders are for all squadrons to stay close at hand and defend the center,” the anonymous officer said. “So you’re to stay put.”

“This is Hardpoint Squadron, the Jedi unit.” Jaina’s voice was a hiss of anger. “We’re not part of your immediate command structure. Let us out and we’ll do a much better job of defending you.”

“That’s a negative, Hardpoint. My orders are specific, and I’m not going to bother the commander right now with your request. Out.”

“Cringing, whimpering, mewling idiot,” Jaina said. “I’ve seen mouse droids with more guts and thud bugs with more brains.”

“I doubt he can hear you, One.” That was Zekk’s voice.

“I know.” Jaina sighed. “I guess we’re stuck here. Hardpoints, maintain your flight patterns and call out when the opportunities start raining down on us.”

She received a chorus of affirmatives but was too discouraged to pay much attention to them.

STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL

The three Jedi and Brisha rode the turbolift back down to the bottom level of the habitat. “That’s something you could have mentioned from the beginning,” Nelani said. “There’s a Sith in the basement. Any other home in the galaxy, that’d be the first thing out of someone’s mouth.”

“What’s his name?” Ben asked.

Brisha shrugged. “He hasn’t revealed himself to me, and so certainly hasn’t told me his name.” Then she grinned, suddenly playful. “Darth something, I expect.”

“There haven’t been any Sith in the galaxy since-what? The death of the last clone of the Emperor?” Jacen asked.

“True and not true,” Brisha said. “In terms of the classic Master-and-apprentice Sith structure, ‘there can be only two,’ you’re correct. I’m not sure I even count the Emperor’s clones as Sith. After all, they didn’t earn their Sith knowledge, didn’t acquire it through sweat and sacrifice; they inherited it like a package of downloaded computer programming. I think that the last Sith were gone when the Emperor and your grandfather died on the same day.

“But,” she continued, “plenty of Sith legacy survived. Individuals who were candidates to become Sith and failed for some reason to achieve full apprenticeship. They knew enough to survive, knew enough to continue learning. One may have learned enough to become a Master.”

The turbolift thudded to a halt at the habitat’s bottom level, the level by which they’d originally entered the structure. Brisha led them from there through a side door into a hexagonal room dominated by a tube. Tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, it was a cylinder of transparisteel marked by a pair of metal rails. The tube was just under two meters in diameter, and suspended above it on a metal brace was a sort of metal-wheeled cart. The cart had six seats up front, a copious cargo area in the middle, and a backward-facing set of six seats at the very end. Its nose was partly within the cylinder, pointed downward, the front set of wheels on the rails.