Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [183]
Syal kept her attention on the skies beyond her viewport. She ached all over and could taste blood in her mouth. “How’s it look?” she asked.
Zueb, kneeling in his chair, facing backward, pulled his hands and face out of the mess of dislodged circuits and wiring he’d been working with. He gave her a noncommittal look. “Not good.”
“Will we make orbit?”
“Orbit, yes.” The Sullustan shrugged. “But no hull integrity. Blow up a balloon and let it go to fly around, venting air? That’s us.”
“Plug our suits in for direct atmosphere and power for heating. We’ll put up with a few minutes of cold.”
“Yes, boss.” Zueb fiddled around behind their seats, plugging both their flights into power and air suppliers, then turned around and settled into his chair. He uttered a bark of pain. “Oww. Think I have no spine left.”
“You had one to begin with?”
“Not nice.” Zueb strapped in.
Syal brought the engines up. They whined, unnaturally loud, the noise strained and wrong, but the diagnostics board indicated that they were supplying power to the thrusters. Gently, slowly, Syal lifted off, pointed the Aleph’s battered nose away from the portions of the sky where combat was still thick, and accelerated.
“We lost this one,” she said.
“You did great.”
“I’m a great loser.”
“I fly with great loser any day. Also, Lieutenant Baradis thinks you’re really good looking.”
“What?”
“Said so in mess yesterday.”
“You’re trying to take my mind off all this.”
“Yes. Am doing a good job?”
“No.” She frowned. “Baradis, huh?”
“Don’t see it myself. Human heads too tiny to be good looking.”
She grinned. “Shut up.”
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Nelani ran with the speed of a trained athlete, but as soon as she passed beyond the cavern where Darth Vectivus’s house stood and where the artificial gravity generator operated, her gait became inefficient, her leaps too long—she didn’t have Jacen’s experience with low gravity.
He began to catch up to her.
She bounded up along the rails, toward the surface habitat, her lightsaber giving her enough light to see the cross-rungs where she needed to place her feet.
Jacen saw spots of blood on some of those rungs, evidence of the injury Lumiya’s whip had inflicted on her.
The rails rose through a gap in the cavern ceiling, and beyond that point Jacen could no longer see Nelani. He left his own lightsaber on but closed his eyes, seeking her with his Force-senses—
And there she was, hurtling toward him in the leg-forward posture of a vicious side kick.
Not looking in her direction, he twisted aside and swatted at her with his lightsaber. He put no strength behind his blow; he didn’t need to. The blade caught her on the inner thigh, slicing through cloth and skin and muscle. She shrieked, flew past him, hit the stony surface of this cavern floor, and rolled, in the curious way that low gravity mandated, to a halt.
He bounced toward her, slow, sure, and predatory.
When he reached her, she was sitting, unable to stand, her now lit lightsaber in her right hand, her right leg, now useless, beneath her. He could see part of the wound, black with cauterized flesh and blood. She looked up, the pain on her face made more stark by the glaring brightness of both their blades.
“Jacen, don’t do this,” she said.
“You don’t understand what’s at stake.”
“I’m not concerned with living or dying,” she told him. “I surrendered my fate to the Force when I joined the order. It’s you. If you do this, you’ll become something bad. Something destructive.”
“A Sith.”
“No. Call it whatever you want to. What do you call someone who kills without needing to? Someone who joins sides with evil because of a well-reasoned argument?”
He stood there and looked at her, and was battered by emotions—his, hers, lingering dark side energies from thousands of years before. Her health and beauty, which had been marred and which he would mar further. Her despair and disillusionment, which were almost