Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [88]
Then, as Mara swung around on the rope during her descent, she saw the woman.
The woman was dark-haired, attractive, standing at the top of the staircase by which the Yuuzhan Vong had arrived. Unlike the workers, she was alert, watching the fight with an expression of detached interest.
She was Viqi Shesh.
Mara felt coldness sweep over her. The woman who had helped betray Coruscant to the Yuuzhan Vong, the woman who had stolen Mara’s son, Ben, was here, palling around with her Yuuzhan Vong masters while the world crumbled around them.
She opened herself to Luke through the Force, something she preferred not to do while cold thoughts of murder were strong in her, and let him see Viqi through her eyes. “Viqi first,” she said.
“Lord Nyax first,” he answered. At ten meters above the floor, he detached the cord spool from his belt and let go with his hand, dropping the remaining distance. He landed in a tuck and roll and came up in a full-speed run straight at Lord Nyax.
Mara spared one last look at Viqi, a glance that, had it become a physical manifestation of her anger, would have sliced through the woman as cleanly as an amphistaff point, and dropped. She came up in a roll and followed her husband.
Ahead, the first pair of Yuuzhan Vong warriors had reached Lord Nyax.
Viqi watched the huge pale man slaughter Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
The first two warriors stopped a dozen steps from the thing and hurled thudbugs. The pale man twitched and the lightsaber blades from one forearm and one knee rose, incinerating the living weapons.
Two more warriors raced up and, under cover of more thrown thudbugs, charged, whipping their amphistaffs around, one lashing out with the tail and the other with fangs.
The pale man stepped in close to the second warrior. The first warrior’s fang attack missed by a meter. The pale man’s left forearm blade lashed out at the second warrior, who blocked the attack by catching the blade in an amphistaff coil. Then the pale man’s left elbow blade raked across the warrior’s throat, separating it from his body. Meanwhile, the pale man’s right-arm, right-elbow, right-knee blades rose, darted, swayed, and wherever they went, incandescences flared—sign of thudbugs being vaporized.
The pale man flipped the dead warrior’s amphistaff toward the first warrior. The warrior contemptuously swept it out of the way, overcorrected as his own staff came back to block a lightsaber thrust—and could not block the other lightsaber blade as it simultaneously thrust into his helmet’s eye socket. He fell, smoke pouring from the mask as he died.
More warriors arrived—two still threw thudbugs, four more skidded to a stop beside them and waited for a bare second to calculate their strategy.
A piece of ceiling steel whirled down like a spinning sawblade from above. It flashed across the warriors’ position at knee height, and just for a fraction of a second Viqi thought that it had missed. Then those six warriors collapsed, legs severed at the knees, blood gouting from the stumps and limbs.
Seconds had passed. Eight Yuuzhan Vong warriors and their voxyn were dead. Seventeen more remained.
These warriors approached more cautiously. Directed by Denua Ku, they circled around the smiling, confident pale man who towered over them.
The whirling steel panel came around for another pass, but this time, a chunk of machinery, an air-cooling unit a meter on a side, fired off from the floor as though it were a guided missile and hurtled into the sheet’s path. The sheet wrapped around it with a ferocious, almost feral shriek of metal bending, and both fell to the floor.
The pale man looked off to Viqi’s left. She followed its gaze. There, advancing on the pale man, lightsabers lit, were Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade.
Viqi’s eyes grew wide. What were they doing here?
The Yuuzhan Vong, too, seemed caught off-guard. Denua Ku had no more love of the Jeedai than any warrior,