[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(148)

Jacen considered that. This combat was not just pointless, being carried out at someone else’s wish for someone else’s ends, but also dangerous—the false Luke was potentially good enough to kill Jacen.

Still, the false Luke reeked of the dark side of the Force. There could be no enduring benefit in cooperating with him. Could there? For a moment Jacen was confused, weighing the preponderance of Jedi history and claims about dark-siders against his own limited experience.

But he decided in favor of history and tradition. “I try not to negotiate with phantoms, with things that don’t exist. Better to just cut them in half and watch them disappear.” Jacen kicked off from the wall and flew forward again.

He knew that this solidly planted, gravitationally advantaged Luke had adapted to Jacen’s low-gravity tactics, so he altered them-the instant he touched down before the false Luke, he planted his feet and used the Force to brace him there, then threw a flurry of hard blows.

It was no use. The false Luke adapted instantly to his change in tactics, reverting to a softer, defensive style, turning away each of Jacen’s all-out attacks. And he did so grinning, silently mocking.

The false Luke, instead of countering Jacen’s fifth blow in sequence, sidestepped it, luring Jacen forward and offbalance. Luke’s counterstrike whipped around and down toward Jacen’s unprotected back

“Enough,” Brisha said, and the false Luke vanished. Jacen, straightening, still felt a tremor of pain from the area where the blow would have landed, and looked down to see a portion of his robe, a long black mark, on fire. He patted it out and looked up at Brisha. “Who was that, really?”

She shrugged. “A combination of the real Luke Skywalker and the dark side energy of this place. A combination that would have beaten you, since you weren’t utilizing the same energy, the resources available to you.” She still held on to one of the rails-sagged against it, actually. She was perspiring.

“You’ve been using a lot of energy yourself,” Jacen said. He switched his lightsaber off.

She nodded. “Coordinating the actions of several Force phantoms at once? Very tiring. Try it sometime.”

“So you admit that you’re behind this assault on me.”

“Oh, it was no assault. Just a test. If it had been an assault, I would have let the Luke phantom kill you. Don’t you think?”

Jacen frowned. Her words had the ring of truth to them. “I think it’s time for you to tell me your whole story.”

“Of course.” She pushed off from the rail and floated toward the stone outcropping where the false Luke had originally arrived. She bounced lightly past Jacen and beckoned for him to follow. “All the answers are this way.”

He followed.

RELLIDIR, TRALUS

Han grinned as he completed his circuit around the shield-protected Center for the Performing Arts. His spotter droids were raining down on the ground, sustaining but ignoring small-arms fire from GA ground crews and infantry, and already his board was lighting up with the data the droids were feeding to the Corellian operations HQ. On the wire-frame representation of the local area, the top of the shield was a hot spot where numerous droids had their laser sighting rifles trained. Above, many of the starfighters trapped within the outer range of shields were also being targeted.

Han’s and Wedge’s Shrieks were on the spotter droids’ matrix, as well-as nontargets. Missiles that detected and turned toward the Shrieks were supposed to move away to find new targets. Missiles that came in too fast to divert their flight paths were supposed to detonate prematurely. In theory, the Shrieks were safe from the missile barrage.

In theory.

Han didn’t rely much on theory. He’d prefer to have some buildings between him and the incoming missiles

There was something wrong. Ahead, as he completed his circuit, was an Aleph where no Aleph should be. This one was battle-scarred, its fuselage scraped, its forward viewports scratched and dented.

Han’s eyebrows shot up. This had to be the Aleph that had pursued them on the approach boulevard, Syal Antilles’s craft. Inexplicably, it had managed to follow them in. And now it was slowing, turning toward the Terkury building.

Alarm bells went off in Han’s head. If he were in Syal’s position, he would know that missiles were roaring up behind. He would be figuring out how to stop them before they got here. And that meant dropping a rackful of missiles into the Terkury building, collapsing it so the missiles would hit the falling debris, never making it past the outer shield zone.

That’s what Syal was doing, and he had to stop her. He switched his weapons board over to missile fire and dropped his targeting brackets over the Aleph.