[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(143)
“I knew you’d find time for me,” he commed.
Had she heard him?
His comm crackled. Lumiya’s voice had never aged. He hadn’t noticed that before. “I saw no point in running, Luke. Let’s finish this.”
The ship was exactly as he’d imagined: rough-skinned, red-orange, so organic in appearance that it might have suited the Yuuzhan Vong. The angular masts and webbed vanes at its cardinal points lent it an edge of predatory grace.
“I had to make sure she died,” said Lumiya. “But you’ll understand that, sooner or later.”
She didn’t open fire, and the sphere didn’t move. Luke considered taking one kill shot, but he’d done that before, and a pilot called Shira Brie had survived the appalling injuries he inflicted to be become the cyborg facing him now. No, she had to die for good.
The sphere rotated to face Terephon and began to pick up speed, on a straight course for the planet. Luke set off in pursuit and the two ships accelerated, pushing their sublight limits in what Luke started to feel was a crash dive.
Oh no, Lumiya, you don’t get away with a. suicide run. You’re mine.
He stayed within his thoughts: he had next to nothing to say to her now. The sphere was streaking ahead of him, pulling away. He hung on it, closing the gap, calculating how long he had to intercept before it hit the upper atmosphere and plummeted to the surface, robbing him of every closure he needed.
And justice. Don’t forget that. It’s about paying the price for Mara’s life.
The StealthX edged nearer its manual’s recommended safe velocity. Luke brought the fighter alongside the sphere, dipping one set of wings in warning to make it clear he’d intercept her. Maybe she didn’t realize that he had tractor capability: she would now. Luke dropped back behind her and applied enough traction to slow her and get her attention. He could have sworn something protested. It was the ship, complaining deep in his mind about the rough handling.
Lumiya seemed to get the idea and decelerated. Luke broke contact before they hit atmosphere, and followed her down, buzzing her to force her to land on a flat-topped mesa overlooking a typically spacious Hapan-style city nestling among trees and vast gardens.
He jumped out of the cockpit and waited for her to leave the safety of her vessel, standing with his lightsaber in both hands. Eventually an opening formed in the side of the sphere, and she emerged. Would the ship attack him as it had Mara? It made no move. He couldn’t even feel it now.
“Come on, Luke, try to finish the job. Mara would have wanted that, yes?” Lumiya reached up to her face and tore away the veil that covered everything but her eyes. Then she reached behind her back and slowly drew out her lightwhip. “And this isn’t to make you feel shame for the extent of my injuries. I just want you to see who you’re fighting.”
“I’m seeing.” Luke drew his lightsaber and temporary comfort flooded him. “And this ends here.”
He knew the lightwhip by now. He’d relied on the shoto as an extra weapon in the past to counter the whip’s twin elements of matter and energy, but he was flooded with a new confidence that he could take her with just the lightsaber that had always stood between him and darkness. Holding it two-handed over his head, he rotated it slowly, stalking around her.
Lumiya raised her arm to flick the whip and get the momentum for the forward stroke. And then she cracked it, sending forks of dark energy crackling into the ground at his feet, making him jump back before he sprang forward again and brought the lightsaber around in a right-to-left arc that she parried with the whip’s handle. He leapt out of range of the whirling tails again and again, then she paused and he edged closer again.
“You hate me that much?” he asked.
“I don’t hate you at all.”
“You killed her. You killed my Mara.”
“Nothing personal.” She looked as if she was smiling, but the movement was around her eyes rather than her cybernetic mouth. “Just doing what I swore an oath to the Emperor to do. To serve the dark side. Oaths matter, Luke. They’re all you’re left with in the end.”
She drew back her arm and brought the lightwhip crackling through the air, missing Luke by centimeters. He lunged at her again and again, driven back each time. She’d slow sooner or later.
But so would he.
Then, as she began to raise her arm again, he ran at her, so close in that she couldn’t get the whip traveling at its maximum lethal speed. He forced her back, step by step, as she tried to maintain the distance she needed.
Onetwothreefour; she blocked him, handle held this way, then that, using the whip like a short lightsaber to deflect him, but Luke didn’t pause or shift direction to wrong-foot her. He drove her like a battering ram toward the edge of the mesa, pushing her within meters, then a step, of the edge.