Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 07_ Fury - Aaron Allston [81]
Dician struggled to keep her tone normal. “No mistakes now. We have double the Falcon’s firepower and the element of surprise, but none of that means anything if we make a mistake. So we will continue our approach, and we will be perfect. We will make our run on the Falcon, and we will be perfect. We will launch our crews to raid the habitat and situate the bombs on the asteroid, and we will be—what will we be?”
The bridge crew members offered their answer in unison: “Perfect.”
“That’s right. Perfect.”
“Perfect.” Leia rubbed the back of her neck.
Han glanced her way. “What?”
“What what?”
“You said perfect. As in, something’s really perfect, or something’s very messed up, I-don’t-really-mean-it’s-perfect?”
Leia shook her head. “I don’t know. The second one, I guess.” She returned her attention to the sensor board. Nothing had changed since she’d seen the habitat’s hangar door close, nothing would change until her daughter, Zekk, and Jag emerged, but a nagging thought told her she really needed to keep her attention there.
Then she felt it, a pulse in the Force, a distant query from the direction of the asteroid. Flavored with the darkness that inhabited that place, but distinctly the presence of Alema Rar, it reached out for her, brushed over her, went elsewhere.
Leia stiffened. “Alema’s found us.” She unstrapped and rose from the copilot’s seat, taking her lightsaber in hand. “And if we’ve guessed right about the way she operates now…”
Han nodded glumly. “She’ll conjure up a Force phantom and send it against us.”
Leia turned to face the cockpit entrance, ready.
chapter twenty-four
Jag leapt up, high above the opening in the floor, and dropped through into hard vacuum.
Passing through the area of the habitat’s artificial gravity, he slowed in his descent but continued downward, the metal track close by, into the deeper darkness of the large gash in the asteroid surface below. He thought he could feel his feet hit the atmosphere containment field there—whether he could or not, he felt his rate of descent slow further as he encountered the friction of atmosphere. “I’m in.”
He cycled through his helmet sensors. The basic sensors showed cavern walls all around, at distances of thirty to a hundred meters. There were a few faint gleams from glow rods on the metal rails; other than that, all was dark. “You’re going to need some lights.”
A moment later his sensors showed Jaina and Zekk dropping feetfirst after him. They held lit glow rods, so he could see them with his naked eyes, as well. The glow rod light reflected from the irregular surfaces of the transparisteel foil masks they wore for their brief exposure to hard vacuum.
Jaina’s voice crackled in his ear. “We just felt her reaching out for us.”
Jaina and Zekk vectored in their slow free fall—an act that would be impossible for normal people, but Jag assumed they simply used the Force to shove themselves laterally. The maneuver allowed them to drift to within reach of the metal track. They did not grab it, but occasionally reached out a hand or foot to brush against it, directing them smoothly down its length. Jag touched his thruster pack to slow himself to their descent rate.
There was something on his sensors, something big but indistinct, on the far side of the widest part of this cavern. Jag rotated and pointed in that direction, alerting the others.
It rushed toward them, streaming through the air, growing more distinct as it came.
A flock of mynocks—
ABOARD THE MILLENNIUM FALCON
A thump against the Falcon’s cockpit viewport prompted Leia to turn forward again.
There was someething outside the viewport, resting against it, a gray, fleshy mass with an enormous gaping mouth full of sharp teeth. Han stared back at the thing, unruffled.