[Legacy Of The Force] - 07(76)

Alema’s lip curled and she lunged again.



Alema stared at Jaina as though the rage she felt could somehow burn holes in the Jedi. She drew a deep breath, signal of a tirade to come, and then stopped, looking upward.

Jaina felt it, too, a sudden sense of satisfaction in the dark energy of this place. It was growing, swelling, absorbing, eating…

Eating Zekk…

Jaina gasped. She reached out through the Force to

Zekk, but he was suddenly no longer there, not in any form she could recognize.

Alema laughed. “There, your first loss of the day. With more to come.”

Jaina ignored her, continued looking up. Zekk was out there. He had to be.

Though he might now be so much a part of this place that his presence in the Force was indistinguishable from the energy here. Inside, Jaina withered at the thought.

As the mynock banked to pass before Jaina again, Alema turned toward the Jedi, smiling. “No answer for us? We…” Then she froze, her eyes going wide.

Jaina felt a sudden sense of freedom.

Something was leaving this place, something dark and wicked, and Alema Rar paled to a lighter shade of blue.

The Twi’lek shook her head. “Ship …”

Jaina looked at her. “Problem? Anything I can help with?”

“Ship? Ship?” Alema opened her mouth wide, as though to scream-and then vanished from sight, along with the mynock.

The scream did reach Jaina’s ears-tiny and distant, from far below.



Leia kept her guard up and her wits about her, but it was clear-Alema was slowing. Tiring. In their last exchange, the Twi’lek’s sledgehammerlike blows had grown weaker.

Now Alema disengaged, took a step back, opened her mouth for another jibe-and her eyes snapped open wide as though she’d been stabbed from behind. Her next breath was a gasp. Then she disappeared, fading instantly from sight.

Wary, Leia looked for her opponent within the Force.

But she felt no one else aboard the Falcon, just herself and Han.

She glanced back over her shoulder. “How goes the war?”

Han’s voice was a growl. “It’d be better if you were up in a laser turret.”

“Not until I get the word that Alema’s in chains or in a box.”

He growled again.



The flight of mynocks, Jag in tow, entered another narrow passage. Jag’s captor swung him toward the side, allowing him to scrape along the rocky tunnel.

A protruding stone caught him in the back, not hurting him, but bouncing him up away from the wall. He oriented his sensors forward, trying to anticipate the next bJow, to avoid it with the use of his thruster pack. They had dragged him through what seemed like kilometers of tunnels, bouncing him off every available surface, and he had not managed to avoid every impact-his left elbow throbbed as though it were damaged or even broken, and his head rang from repeated impact.

They entered a new chamber. Jag’s sensors picked up a wall in the near distance, perhaps thirty meters away. The mynocks angled toward an aperture…

And then they were gone, leaving him hurtling toward the vertical stone surface ahead.

He kicked in his thruster pack, slowing himself, but the mynocks had been moving fast. Despite his braking maneuver, he hit the wall hard. He heard and felt a crack from his left leg … and vision failed as if his sensors had all suddenly been switched off.



Alema stood, legs shaking, from where she had fallen. Her senses, back in her own body after too many minutes divided among several phantoms, cast out in the Force, looking for Ship.

Ship was. … distant. Ship was fleeing. Ship was happy.

“Come back!” She poured her strength of will into her command, but her effort was too late, too distant. Ship sped onward, uncaring.

This was bad. Now, instead of having an escape method close at hand, she would have to ascend to the asteroid’s surface, past the Jedi and the idiot soldier who led them, to steal whatever vehicle had brought them. Or lure the Falcon in close, kill Han and Leia, and steal it. This would not be easy.

She was already tired. More than tired.

As she clambered into the railcar, she tried to make herself small in the Force, so that it would be more difficult to find her. The railcar, at least, had no droid brain to malfunction, no Sith sympathies to lead it astray. It had a lever with labels that read up and down.

She pushed it toward up and the car began gliding up the rails.



ABOARD THE POISON MOON

“New contact, Captain.” Ithila sent her sensor board display to Dician’s monitor. Its image, now far less pixilated but wavering because of the Poison Moon’s maneuvers, showed the asteroid habitat. A starfighter-sized craft, emerging from beneath the structure, headed starward.

Dician sat forward. Tiny as it was on the monitor, this was clearly a Sith meditation sphere-the vehicle that had brought Alema Rar to Korriban. Just as clearly, the Twi’lek was making her escape in it. “All weapons, bear on the meditation sphere. At my command…”