Invincible (10 page)

As Ben’s head snapped back, he caught a glimpse of scarred brow and blond hair, then felt his teeth biting through his tongue and his feet flying out from beneath him and realized Tahiri had caught him beneath the chin with a fist or an elbow or a hydraulic hammer, and it hardly mattered which because all he could feel was the inescapable darkness of a black hole drawing him down into the singularity of unconsciousness, into helplessness, defeat, and death.

Ben refused to go. He lashed out in the Force, grabbing at the last place he had seen Tahiri, pulling with all his might and feeling…feeling
something
give, feeling something like legs or ankles or feet come flying toward him, then hearing Tahiri scream in anger or pain or maybe just surprise.

A sharp clang echoed through the plaza decking as her armor hit, and the darkness started to retreat from Ben’s head. He sensed Tahiri lying at his feet, just as flat on the deck as he was. She swore, profaning Ben’s dead mother and promising to make him pay for
making this so hard,
then he saw his lightsaber lying on the durasteel not far from his hand—surrounded by a dozen pairs of black boots, but still within his Force grasp.

Ben reached out in the Force. Half a dozen troopers cried out in astonishment as the weapon banged off their boots, spinning and tumbling through the thicket of shins and ankles to arrive in his hand
upside down,
with the emitter nozzle pointed straight into his eye.

Tahiri’s voice sounded from a meter beyond his feet. “I’ve had it with this kreetle!”

Ben flipped the lightsaber around and sat up. Tahiri was sitting up now, too, looking straight toward him. Her face was slimmer and more lined than he remembered it, but still as beautiful as ever, framed by a halo of flowing golden hair and marred only by the three diagonal scars on her brow and the fury in her eyes.

“Put him out,” Tahiri ordered.
“Now!”

Ben ignited his lightsaber, and
that
was when he saw—finally—the black wall of GAG troopers arrayed around him in a ring, all pointing blaster rifles in his direction. He gave himself over to the Force and felt himself springing to his feet, his blade moving to block, then heard it bat
onetwothree
blaster bolts aside before a flurry of hot punches caught him square in the back. His body exploded into paralyzing pain, and the electric darkness rose up to swallow him again.

How many stormtroopers does it take to change a glow panel? Two: one to change it, and one to blast him, then take credit for the work.

—Jacen Solo, age 14

B
Y THE TIME
J
AINA PUSHED THROUGH TO THE FRONT OF THE
crowd, Tahiri and her troopers were clamping Ben into the GAG Doomsled, fitting his wrists and ankles with electromagnetic bands that would keep his limbs firmly affixed to his durasteel seat. His head had already been enclosed inside a full-faced “blinder” helmet—basically a durasteel bucket with no viewplate, secured to the ceiling by a short chain.

Ben had fled
away
from his backup. Jaina knew her young cousin had only been trying to preserve mission security, that he had followed textbook procedure when facing overwhelming odds—but that was GAG thinking.
Jedi
stuck together. They trusted one another to do the impossible, and when they found themselves in trouble, they did
not
make it harder for their partners to extract them by running in the opposite direction.

Across the compartment from Ben, Shevu lay stretched over several seats, his wrists and ankles already magclamped to the durasteel. He wasn’t wearing a blinder helmet—the chain was too short to reach someone lying prone—and he was cursing and screaming as an MD droid tended to a blaster wound he had suffered, abrasion-cleaning it without the benefit of a numbing agent.

All this was being done with the Doomsled’s detention compartment open to full view, so the public could see the stern efficiency with which GAG dispatched traitors to the Alliance. Good government was transparent, after all.

But there was also another reason, Jaina knew. Ben remained in full view so his backup team would feel encouraged to attempt an ill-advised rescue. There was simply no other reason a Sith apprentice and a full GAG security detail would take ten minutes to secure a pair of semiconscious prisoners—or wait for a Doomsled to arrive in the first place. Standard procedure was to whisk prisoners away instantly, both to maximize their confusion and to minimize any chance that they would be rescued—or silenced—by unconstrained colleagues.

Jaina realized all that, recognized an obvious setup when she saw one, and it meant nothing to her…because she
wasn’t
losing Ben. She wasn’t putting her uncle through that kind of anguish, and she wasn’t giving her brother another shot at their cousin. Ben had stepped too far into the light to fall again, and Jaina knew that he would let himself be tortured to death before turning dark—and knowing Caedus, that might be exactly what happened.

Jaina saw the black streak of a vidlog droid zipping down the line of bystanders toward her, creating a record of onlookers that would be analyzed frame by frame back at headquarters. She was disguised as an Elomin office girl, but her mask-flattened nose and fake skull-horns would not fool a GAG facial-recognition servobrain. She used a Force flash to disrupt the vidlogger’s optics, then slipped back into the crowd. Of course, the Force flash itself would confirm that Ben had had a Jedi backup—but Tahiri certainly knew that much already. At least now she wouldn’t know exactly
which
Jedi it had been.

Once Jaina was sufficiently hidden in the crowd, she made her way to within a few meters of a sultry Codru-Ji female who had males of all species stealing furtive glances. The woman’s outfit—a daring mini-vest-and-clingpant combo—was part of a hide-in-plain-sight strategy, the kind of thing that anyone who knew the stately Leia Organa Solo would be shocked to see her wearing. Even more shocking, at least to Jaina, was the throng of admirers that her mother could still attract…and she felt fairly certain that the prosthetics and makeup did not have all that much to do with it.

Jaina caught her mother’s eye, then flicked her gaze toward one of the medwagons that had arrived to gather the GAG casualties Ben and Shevu had left scattered across the plaza. Leia nodded and shot a flirty smile at a red-skinned Devaronian who had been dipping his brow horns in her direction, then sent a teasing brow flash toward a blue-faced Duros whose red eyes had remained fixed on her for a good five seconds. She put on a sad little pout and waved good-bye to both, then started to work her way through the crowd toward the medwagon Jaina had indicated.

They met at the circle of gawkers surrounding the vehicle. Jaina kept her eyes on the two Rodians being loaded into the patient compartment by MD droids, but her attention was on her mother.

“You’ve got half the males in the plaza standing on their tongues,” she whispered. “I hope Dad doesn’t know how you act when you’re dressed like that.”

“Of course he knows,” Leia replied. “He
loves
it when I dress like this.”

Jaina tried not to imagine her father leering at her mother in that outfit and failed miserably. “Thanks for that picture. I knew there was a reason I don’t travel with you guys much.”

Leia chuckled. “You ought to—maybe you’d learn to dial down the gravity setting a little,” she said. “You need to give your alter ego room to play in these situations. That’s the best way to make it work for you.”

“Really?”
Jaina wondered why her mother would think her “alter ego” was an uptight secretary from an emotionally restrained species. “I look forward to hearing more about your theory later. In the meantime…”

Jaina gestured at the medwagon, where the second Rodian’s gurney was being magclamped to the floor, opposite his companion. From what she could sense through the Force, both agents were in pain, but completely stable and far from death.

“Shall we?”

Leia eyed the medwagon, then said, “You know we don’t stand a chance, right?”

“I know that it’s
Ben.
”

Leia let out a huge sigh of relief. “I was
hoping
you’d say that.”

She stepped across the intangible line of control that a pair of Coruscant Security officers had created by the simple fact of their presence. Ignoring them, she started toward the medwagon’s patient compartment, wailing and whimpering and in general doing a pretty credible job of looking like a vac-brain glitter girl on the verge of hysterics.

“Webbbbi!”
she screamed. “
What
happened?”

The two security officers sprang after her, both raising stun sticks and yelling dire warnings to stop.

“It’s okay,” Jaina said, also crossing the line of control and coming up behind the two officers. “She’s with
me.
”

Force commands only worked on weak-minded individuals, which Jaina felt sure had to include most of the beings serving her brother. These two were no exception. They stopped almost in their tracks and turned around, their shoulders already sagging in an unconscious gesture of subservience.

Still, an Elomin secretary in a high-necked sheath was far from the uniformed superior they had been expecting. They frowned and glanced at each other, then the older of the two—an anvil-headed Arcona with deep cracks in the flesh around his green eyes—extended a long-taloned hand.

“Credentials, please.”

“I’m undercover.” Jaina gestured with her hand, giving the Arcona something to focus on other than the mesmerizing tone of her voice. “I have no credentials.”

The Arcona’s gray brow knitted into a deep furrow. “She’s undercover,” he said. “She has no credentials.”

“So?” asked his companion, a handsome human with bright white teeth and what looked like a two-day growth of beard stubble. “That just means she’s GAG. Leave her alone.”

“Good thinking,” Jaina said to the human. “And you don’t need to file a report about this. We’re undercover.”

Now the human frowned, and she realized that she might have overplayed her hand. “No report? Sergeant Qade will have our heads.”

“No, he won’t.” Jaina leaned in close, then lowered her voice so that the two officers had to lean down to hear her. “Who do you think we’re investigating?”

The cracks around the Arcona’s eyes suddenly widened into red stripes of raw flesh, and the human’s white teeth vanished behind his pale lips.

“Qade?”
he gasped. “I don’t believe it!”

Jaina leaned in even closer. “Does that mean you’re unwilling to cooperate, Officer…” She paused until she sensed the man’s name rising to the top of his mind, then finished, “Tobyl?”

Tobyl’s eyes widened, and he stood up straight. “Not me!” he said. “Er, I mean, we never saw you.” He turned to the Arcona. “Right, Jat’ho?”

The Arcona simply looked away and stepped back toward the line of control, threatening to arrest a hapless Falleen couple who had done nothing wrong.

“Good,” Jaina said. “A note of commendation will be placed in your file.”

Tobyl smiled. “Thanks. After my last review, I could use—”

“Not
those
files,” Jaina said.
“Ours.”

Tobyl’s smile turned to an expression of dismay. “GAG has a file on me?”

Jaina frowned. “Come now, Officer,” she said. “You
know
I can’t tell you that.”

She stepped past Tobyl and continued toward the medwagon, where her mother had already deactivated both MD droids and was closing the doors of the patient compartment. Jaina went directly to the front of the blocky medwagon and used the Force to deactivate the security circuit on the pilot’s hatch, then stood back as the door swung up to reveal an operator’s compartment nearly as packed with controls and gauges as a starfighter’s cockpit—though with nearly a meter of empty space separating two thickly padded safety seats, it was far roomier.

A surprised Bith looked out from the pilot’s seat, his lidless eyes bulging in alarm. “What are you doing?” He reached up to pull the hatch closed. “Get back! You’re not author—”

“Officer Tobyl will explain.” Jaina caught his arm, then slapped the quick-release latch on his crash webbing and pulled him out of the seat. “These patients are my responsibility now.”

“What?” The Bith tried to return to the pilot’s seat, only to find Jaina’s hand in the middle of his chest, sending him stumbling back toward the control line. “Who do you think you—”

“Officer Tobyl will explain.”

Jaina hopped into the pilot’s seat, pulling the hatch closed in the same motion, and engaged the repulsorlifts. The medwagon lurched into the air with a shrill whine and sent dozens of bystanders scrambling out of its path. She held back on the throttle under the pretense of giving them time to clear a lane, but she was also peering over their heads in the direction of Ben’s Doomsled, watching as it streaked across the plaza toward the rectangular maw of the Arakyd Towers ThroughPass.