Star Wars_ Darksaber - Kevin J. Anderson [133]
“I will go to the top of this temple and be the focal point for all of your energies. We will join together, some thirty of us bound by the Force.”
Dorsk 81 raised his voice. Inner power grew in him as he spoke. He had never before desired leadership of any kind, but now he no longer felt like a follower. He felt strong and driven.
“Pool your resources, and I will draw from you, channel it through myself, and push out just as I did with that scout walker. I’ll shove them away, tumble them end over end, knock the Star Destroyers far from here.”
He trembled as he said this, and Kyp stood beside him, clasping the cloned alien’s thin shoulder. “And after we get the battlecruisers away,” Kyp said, “then we can mop up the remnants of the attackers down here.” He smiled. “It might be all finished by the time the New Republic gets here.”
“We must not wait,” Dorsk 81 said. “We are all together now, but the attack is intensifying. Even this Great Temple won’t be stable for long, unless we do something.”
At the apex of the pyramid, Dorsk 81 stood barefoot on the sun-warmed flagstones that had been locked together to form an observation deck. The Jedi trainees frequently came up here to watch the rainbow-filled sunrise at the limb of the gas giant overhead.
Tall fires in the jungles surrounding the temple complex crackled and rose into the sky. Below, squadrons of mechanical scout walkers and ground-chewing siege machinery worked their way toward the Jedi stronghold.
The Imperials had figured out that the Jedi Knights were no longer at the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster; now that the trainees had gathered in the tallest temple, Pellaeon’s attackers would soon direct their strike at the ziggurat.
Dorsk 81 tilted his smooth face up to the sky and held his hands at his sides, fingers spread. The stone felt strong beneath the soles of his feet, and he calmed himself, reaching within him for threads that he could spin together with the others.
Kyp and Kirana Ti, Kam Solusar, and all the other Jedi trainees—some he knew well, others he had barely met—also focused their abilities. Dorsk 81 recalled how they had banded together to fight Exar Kun, and now he felt the same invisible whirlwind surrounding him.
The new Jedi Knights joined together with invisible cords of light. The bonds were strong, reinforcing their skills from person to person. Dorsk 81 stood in the middle, the eye of the storm, where he could draw upon the Force, magnify it with a strength greater than he had ever conceived.
In his mind an evil shadow of doubt flickered. He suddenly wondered if it wasn’t indeed impossible to move such a huge fleet. His doubt began to grow and he recalled again the face of his elder clone, Dorsk 80, scowling at him—You’ll never accomplish anything more important than what you could have done on Khomm.
Why don’t you stay with us? the younger Dorsk 82 had pleaded. Everything will be fine, just the way it always was.
But Dorsk 81 wanted more. His life had a greater purpose. He had sensed that from early on, but had ignored it for so long. Now he was a Jedi Knight. A Jedi Knight.
His determination formed a crushing vise in his mind that obliterated the doubt—and before he could be distracted by other thoughts, Dorsk 81 reached out and grasped the threads of Force the other trainees offered to him. He felt as if he had tapped into a huge power source, an overload of energy that he channeled through himself without hesitation.
He reached upward with his hands, picturing the Star Destroyers in orbit: seventeen wedge-shaped engines of death bristling with weapons, loaded with more TIE fighters and assault troops. His thoughts soared outward, leaving the emerald jungle moon behind, and trailing behind his presence came a battering ram