Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 07_ Fury - Aaron Allston [61]
Then he knew the answer. She was Force-sensitive. Pilots were dying, and she was feeling the diminishment in the Force that accompanied each death. Inured as he was to death in combat, he paid no more attention to it than he would to a breeze stirring his hair. But Allana was experiencing each event as a little stab of pain.
He hesitated, caught off guard. What could he tell her to make the pain go away? No soothing words would keep her from feeling each distant loss, and he was suddenly helpless.
ABOARD THE LOVE COMMANDER
Jaina’s commed signal activated the receiver and chip Han and Jag had planted in the outer door machinery. Rows of warning lights flashed around the outer doors, indicating that the atmosphere shield was being activated. Moments later the doors slid aside, revealing a number of capital ships looming in the starfield.
Han eased the yoke forward. The Love Commander glided to the entryway, and her prow emerged through the atmosphere shield.
But Han did not increase thrust for a run into space. As the yacht’s nose entered vacuum, Han meticulously turned to port, toward Anakin Solo’s stern. Leaving the hangar, the yacht maintained a distance of less than two meters from the Star Destroyer’s hull—too close for the ship’s guns to target him. They could not depress that far, and even if they could, a clean hit would hull the yacht and damage the Anakin Solo itself.
Jaina nodded. “Nice. Slow as a teenager taking her first speeder parking test…but nice.”
Han shot her a dirty look. “Now we just have to find the perfect time to make our run for it.”
chapter eighteen
Jag and Zekk were just strapping themselves into couches in the yacht’s den—plush, embarrassingly comfortable couches—when Alema Rar emerged from the hatch to the stern refresher. Her smile was all innocence. “Hello, boys. Does Han Solo have a moment for us?”
Zekk was up in an instant, his lightsaber igniting with a snap-hiss. Alema raised her own from beneath her black robes and ignited it.
Unbuckling and rising, Jag turned toward the cockpit. “Trouble! Alema!” Facing Alema again, he did not bother drawing his blaster. He knew the futility of that, at least while she had him in sight. Instead he reached for the large travel bag at his feet, rummaged through it, and brought out a helmet. It had a large visored slit over the eyes rather than a full faceplate, and was an undecorated, burnished gray in color.
Swathed as Alema was in her robes, it was hard to tell whether this was the maimed Twi’lek he had followed for years or the miraculously cured one Han, Leia, and Waroo had faced on Kashyyyk, but her face—unblemished, no sign of muscle damage or old breaks to the cheekbone—suggested that it was the latter.
He caught Zekk’s eye and shook his head. Then Jag slipped on his helmet, powering up its internal system with a flick of the switch under its collar.
Alema attacked, lunging at Zekk with speed surpassing that which her Jedi training should have allowed her. The tall Jedi parried, trying to bind Alema’s blade with his own.
But her attack was not in earnest. Alema’s movement carried her past him in a rolling dive that would have sent her over his most likely counterstrike had he thrown one. She hit the compartment’s carpeted floor past him, rolled to her feet, and, speed undiminished, charged into the narrow passageway leading to the cockpit.
Jag heard the buzz and crackle of lightsaber striking lightsaber. Alema immediately backed into the compartment again, Leia following her, the two of them exchanging lighting-fast blows with their weapons.
But where Alema was genuinely striking at Leia’s neck, waist, and limbs, Leia looked like a stage performer—her blows designed to connect with her opponent’s blade and nothing else. Even Jag, no swordsman, could see Leia pass up an opportunity to cut the Twi’lek down.
Jag cycled through the helmet’s suite of sensors,