Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [130]
“It looks like they want to make a ground assault,” Luke observed. He turned to Vestara. “They seem to want to recover you alive, Vestara. They must think you’re a pretty good spy.”
“If you believe that, Master Skywalker, you don’t know Sith as well as you think you do.” Vestara frowned at the tactical display, then began to radiate alarm and fear into the Force, no doubt trying to warn her fellow Sith against approaching the Shadow without a hazard suit. “If they want me alive, it’s so they can punish me for my betrayal.”
“It seems to me that Ben is the one who should be punishing your betrayals,” Luke said. When Vestara’s eyes filled with alarm rather than confusion, he knew he had guessed right about how the Sith had followed them to Pydyr so quickly. “You can keep trying to warn them off if you like, but it does give the lie to your words.”
Vestara’s Force aura abruptly drew in on itself, shrinking to the point where Luke could not sense it without trying. He nodded and waved her into the copilot’s seat.
“Buckle up, fold your hands in your lap, and don’t move.” Luke turned to his son. “Ben, get the ship ready to fly—and do not let Vestara out of your sight. If she so much as fidgets—”
“She’s dead,” Ben said, tapping his lightsaber. “I learned my lesson last time.”
“Let’s hope so,” Luke said, turning toward the back of the flight deck. “We’re in enough trouble already.”
Before he could depart, Ben asked, “Uh, Dad? Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” Luke replied, knowing that Ben was asking to be filled in on a plan that did not yet exist. “Just be ready—and don’t hesitate. Everything depends on that, son—and I do mean everything.”
Luke went to the aft cargo hold, where he paused to remove a combat vest and two different styles of blaster rifle from the weapons locker. Having already examined the equipment once to make certain Abeloth had not sabotaged it while in possession of the ship, he contented himself with a quick functions check, then secured the locker again and debarked through the loading hatch.
Reverberations from events on Coruscant were still coming to him through the Force, and he was beginning to sense that the death was something the Masters regarded as sad but inevitable. He wanted to reach out to them individually, to see if he could learn more, but he resisted. The Sith would feel the attempt as clearly as he had felt Vestara trying to warn them off, and no good would come of alerting them to the trouble on Coruscant. Instead Luke drew his Force presence in tight, then slipped out from beneath the camouflage netting and raced up the slope to an observation post he had scouted earlier, a silt-stone outcropping with a small overhang at the base.
By the time Luke had crawled into his hiding place, the shuttle was resting on its struts at the mouth of the ravine, no more than a hundred meters in front of the Shadow. Its rear ramp was just settling into the golden sand, but there was no sign of the Sith assault team that Luke had expected to see pouring out of the vessel. He quickly pulled a thermal detonator off his combat vest and set the timer to three seconds, but stopped shy of arming it. The Force was still and expectant, like the sea before a storm, and until he had a better idea of what was coming, he did not want to be the one who touched things off.
Instead of an assault team, a pair of Sith appeared on the ramp, descending slowly, their arms extended and in plain view. Both wore combat-black hazard suits, but even from a hundred meters away Luke could tell that the one in front had the slender build and fluid grace of a Keshiri Sith. The one in the rear had one sleeve folded up where his arm had been amputated at the elbow. Unless he missed his guess, he was looking at Sarasu Taalon