• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This might work. This attack might just work.

Then Jaina felt a pulse of malevolence, followed by something approaching her—something too massive for her to deflect, moving too fast for her to dodge.

The stream of mynocks flitted by Jag, passing within meters, their angry eyes fixed on him. Several flicked their tails at him. Two swooped close enough to be real threats. He raised his left arm, caught a tail end across his crushgaunt. The blow did not scar the metal. With his right hand he missed the other tail. It lashed across his chest, cutting a razor-thin gash in his flight suit but doing no harm to the beskar breastplate beneath.

The blows sent him tumbling through the air in the mynocks’ wake. As much as he could, he bent toward the gash in his flight suit, clamping an arm across it, as though he were injured. If anyone was watching, he needed to conceal the presence of his armor as much as possible.

The mynocks wheeled in unison. His blaster hand twitched, every instinct telling him to draw and fire…but they flew past too quickly.

When they swept by again, he blocked three tail lashes before they were past—and then felt a jerk as a fourth tail, grappling rather than lashing, wrapped around his left ankle and towed him along in the mynock’s wake.

The flock dived, heading toward a narrow gap in the cavern floor far away from the rail track.

Jag gritted his teeth. He was doing his job. He was keeping these mynocks off Jaina and Zekk.

If only he didn’t hate this task quite so much.

At the lowest level of the cavern complex, Alema Rar sat on the chamber’s stone floor. A few meters ahead of her sat the railcar that provided access between this chamber, the habitat, and all caverns in between; it rested at the bottom of the track, angled upward. A few meters to her left was the entrance into Darth Vectivus’s private cavern, the one in which he had built his ridiculous mansion so long ago. The stone door that could seal the chamber was open. The artificial gravity in the chamber was active, and even here, outside its main area of effect, Alema could feel it, providing her with what seemed to be about half Coruscant’s gravity.

She was already panting, tired by the effort of maintaining so many phantoms at once. She didn’t think she could handle much more gravity than that—unless she drew continually on the power of this place, which would have other consequences. How had Lumiya accomplished what she had with the phantoms? With years of practice and tremendous will, Alema decided.

She felt a little better. It was time to return to the war—to begin finishing off her intruders.

chapter twenty-five

Descending in Jaina’s wake, Zekk felt the attack the instant Jaina did, felt its power and speed.

And its intent. It was aimed at Jaina. Reflexively, Zekk lashed out with the Force, pushing. Jaina shot downward as if fired from an ancient artillery piece.

Something flashed by a meter over her head, something silver. It severed the track there, leaving a clean break in the metal rails. A fraction of a second later it hit the far wall of the cavern with a dull flash of light and a resounding boom.

Zekk turned his attention toward the source of the attack. It was outside the range of his vision, but he could feel it now that it was on the offensive, no longer lying in wait. It had to be a hundred meters or more away, though exact distances were difficult to predict through the Force.

It reeked of dark side energy and intent, a Force presence that was at once unliving but not inert. It had purpose. Zekk could almost see it, reading its self-image: a large ball, webbed wings projecting from it, a weapon spike protruding from the top, a landing spike from its bottom…

And hatred for him, for Jaina, in what served it as a heart.

Zekk read its movements and intentions as it acted. Its top spike was aimed toward Jaina. Now it canted upward, aiming at Zekk, and prepared to fire again—

Zekk grabbed the track with his free hand and pushed off, adding energy from the