Invincible (16 page)

What’s the difference between an AT-AT and a stormtrooper on foot? One is an Imperial Walker and the other is a walking Imperial!

—Jacen Solo, age 14

A
FTER AN AWKWARD SINGLE-THRUSTER LANDING AND A SHORT-BUT-TAXING
hike to her penetration point, Jaina lay on the dropsuit’s belly, reconnoitering the surrounding area. To her left, the crater-pocked surface of Nickel One extended barely a kilometer before plunging away into star-dappled void. To her right, it broadened into a sweeping panorama of boulder ridges and powder lakes that stretched for dozens of kilometers before vanishing beneath the blue-flecked curtain of space. Directly ahead, at the base of a steep slope, sat the bantha-sized cylinder of a FlakBlaster Ten.

The artillery piece was pumping hard with all eight barrels, spitting dashes of white-hot neurodium plasma out over the ridges and powder lakes to Jaina’s right. Its target was a cloud of distant blue specks flittering a few hundred meters above the silver plain, no doubt Jaina’s family and the Mandalorians continuing to attack the command bunker.

On the opposite side of the gun emplacement lay the air lock Jaina needed, a triangular hatch located in a shallow cave-hangar. Unfortunately, the gun crew had positioned their weapon just meters in front of the hangar entrance, so there was no way to reach the air lock without going through them.

This was the part Jaina did not like about being a Jedi. She had grown up knowing stormtroopers only as enemies, had even fought a few of them as an adolescent. But she was old enough now to realize that being stormtroopers didn’t make them evil, or corrupt, or even wrong. It made them a lot like her—just soldiers trying to do their duty, serving a cause they probably believed to be a good one.

And Jaina was going to kill all twelve of them—not because they were shooting at her parents, nor even because she needed to reach the air lock behind them. She was going to do it because if she didn’t, they would report her infiltration and ruin her mission. She was going to kill them for the most dispassionate of all reasons: because it was
necessary.

It made her wonder how different she was from her brother, really. Perhaps she and Caedus were just soldiers in the ancient war between Sith and Jedi. Jaina would have liked to believe that, because then she could pretend this was just something demanded by the war instead of a choice
she
had made out of hatred for what her brother had become.

But Jacen had been a Jedi once. Now he was a Sith. That made him a traitor, and didn’t traitors
deserve
to be hated? They were breakers of vows, betrayers of trusts…corrupters of the innocent and murderers of their beloved. Killing them was more than necessary. It was a duty, an act of deterrence and military preclusion, but also of outrage and reprisal, and
that
made it personal.

A burst of orange flashed at the far edge of the asteroid, and Jaina looked across the dusty plain to find the blue flicker of a blastboat being chased skyward by a funnel-shaped cloud of flame, vapor, and tumbling specks. Having seen similar eruptions more times than she cared to remember, she guessed that the assault on the command bunker had actually overloaded the shields and shattered the observation dome. If
that
did not fix Caedus’s attention on Luke and her parents, nothing would.

Jaina snapped her lightsaber off its magclamp and turned back to the doomed gun crew. She had only about six minutes of good air left—half that if she exerted herself in a fight—so that ruled out any thought of waiting until she could just slip past. She would have to take them all out before they could report what was happening—ideally, before they
realized
what was happening.

Twelve stormtroopers, one Jedi assassin in a damaged dropsuit, three seconds to do the job. No problem.

Jaina primed the mini cannon in the dropsuit’s left arm, then focused her attention on the dust caps dangling from thin cords at the ends of the FlakBlaster’s emitter nozzles. They were probably the simplest technology on the weapon, just shrinlasti socks designed to seal out dirt, moisture, and anything else that might get down the barrels during storage or transport. But they were also electrical nonconductors—to prevent static buildup—which meant the magnetic sleeves that encased the plasma packets as they raced up the barrel would disintegrate on contact.

Confident that Caedus would be too busy worrying about Luke and her parents to sense what she was doing, Jaina used the Force to grab three dust caps—all she could control at once—and slip them over their emitter nozzles.

The gun commander cocked his helmet and just seemed to stare at the barrel ends in disbelief. The gas chief and his tank changer spun away and dived for cover, distracting the master engineer, who turned toward
them
instead of keeping his attention fixed on the output gauges and barrel monitors that might have saved them all.

The master engineer was still turning when the first plasma packets reached the dust caps. The three emitter nozzles vanished in an eye-blistering flash; then the plasma packets already ascending the barrels also began to disintegrate, triggering a chain of ever-growing secondary explosions that engulfed the gun in milliseconds. The entire gun crew disappeared beneath a boiling dome of white fire.

A couple of seconds later the FlakBlaster’s defensive shields finally came down. What looked like a miniature solar flare went arcing out over the asteroid…then liquefied gas began to boil from damaged neurodium canisters, expanding into a thick, emerald fog.

Jaina sprang down into the fog, using the Force to descend the slope in a single leap. She landed a few meters behind the ring of jagged, blue-glowing metal that had once been the FlakBlaster. Knowing that any survivors would be inside the hangar, where the power master and his assistant had positioned their fusion core, she raced into the hangar—and collided headlong with a stormtrooper rushing out to aid his companions.

Being the smaller one, Jaina found herself accelerating backward with the stomach-churning abruptness possible solely in low gravity. Fortunately, she was the only one expecting a fight, so she had time to reach out with the Force and pull the stormtrooper along. He was so surprised and confused that he did not reach for his blaster holster until he was chest-plate-to-chest-plate with Jaina, and by then she had the hilt of her lightsaber jammed against his ribs. She ignited the blade and stirred it around to be certain of a quick kill.

The life left him in a red puff of decompression. Jaina rolled him away from her, then used her still-functional left-side maneuvering jet to bring herself under control. A pair of armored figures emerged from the hangar entrance, looking like armored ghosts as they came rushing through the fog carrying medkits and emergency life-support packs. Jaina raised her arm and ran a line of cannon bolts across their faceplates, reducing their helmets to balls of red mist before they had any hope of reporting her presence.

When no more crew emerged from the hangar, Jaina extended her Force awareness just far enough to confirm that there were no survivors, then quickly shut it down again. She was probably being somewhat overcautious, but after hearing Ben describe some of the things Caedus could do with the Force, she saw no reason to take chances.

Trying not to think about the death she had just wrought, Jaina slipped into the hangar and went straight to the air lock. Of course, there was a security pad in the center of the hatch. Despite her scrubber problem, she resisted the temptation to retrieve the magnetic key from the gun commander. That would create a record of the door opening
after
the explosion had killed him. Instead, she removed an automatic lock slicer from her belt and affixed it to the security pad.

A red flash announced that it had made contact with the security system. Leaving it there to do its work, Jaina returned to the fusion core and reversed the sensor feeds on the cooling valves, then disabled all eight safety shutoffs. The core temperature began to climb slowly. She slid the output switch to three-quarters, which would allow her about five minutes to clear the area before the reactor blew and destroyed all evidence of her attack on the gun emplacement.

By the time Jaina returned to the hatch, the automated slicer was flashing double green to indicate that it had defeated the security system and erased all traces of the breach. She returned the slicer to her equipment belt, then opened the hatch, stepped into the air lock—and felt her spine tingling beneath someone’s gaze. Jaina leapt to one side of the air lock and slapped the
SECURE
pad,
then
spun around.

Through the closing hatch, she glimpsed a line of figures entering the hangar. Armored in colorful Mandalorian
beskar’gam,
they were moving quickly but cautiously, covering one another as they crossed the threshold, then shining their sleeve lamps into every dark corner to ensure there were no stormtroopers hiding in ambush.

The smart thing would have been to let the hatch close and jam the controls, leaving the entire squad to die when the fusion core overheated. That was what Fett would have done, and probably most of the Mandalorians in the squad as well. But Jaina could not let herself become quite
that
ruthless. The Mandalorians were hardly allies, but they weren’t foes yet, either, and that meant she couldn’t go around killing them because their presence happened to be inconvenient.

Besides, the leader was a female in familiar yellow-orange armor with gold sigils. And—assuming Jaina was the lucky one who walked away from the fight with her brother—the last thing she wanted was to have Boba Fett after her for letting his granddaughter die.

An orange beacon flashed on Jaina’s head-up display, warning her that her air scrubbers had failed. Now she was rebreathing her own exhalations. Instantly, she began to feel a little queasy, but she suspected the sensation was more psychological than physical. Even filled with air that she had already breathed once, the dropsuit contained enough oxygen to keep her conscious for two or three more minutes.

Jaina reopened the hatch and waved an admonishing finger at the two commandos who swung their blasters toward her, then used hand signals to explain that the fusion core was rigged to blow. The Mandalorians gave up their search, and the first three crowded into the air lock.

As they waited for the chamber to pressurize, an anger verging on harmful intent began to boil into the Force. Jaina pretended not to notice and simply stared at the commando across from her, a broad-shouldered titan in a red helmet and black armor. Jaina was pretty sure he was Vatok Tawr, a talented fighter as quick as he was strong, with a ready smile and a quiet manner that seemed at odds with his rawboned cheeks and fist-flattened nose. She had trained against him several times.

The green glow of the equal-pressure light finally filled the air lock chamber, not a moment too soon for Jaina. Her head was starting to feel light, and she had to fight her own involuntary reflexes to keep from breathing too fast. She slapped the control pad and stepped through the internal hatch first, presenting her back to the Mandalorians as she opened her faceplate for a moment and gulped down several sweet breaths of dank, musty air.

Beyond the hatchway was a small marshaling vestibule where groups could assemble before and after they had passed through the air lock. Jaina Force-flashed the vidcam monitoring the area, then—knowing that the entire area would be obliterated when the fusion core detonated—simply blasted the security cam apart. As it dribbled to the floor in pieces, she crossed the vestibule and peered down a long, straight tunnel that descended toward the heart of the asteroid. It remained as empty as her inspection tour with Fett had led her to expect.

Jaina turned back to find Mirta and a Mandalorian male she did not know—at least judging by his blue helmet and
beskar’gam
—standing shoulder-to-shoulder behind her. Their G-10 power blasters were not pointed
at
her, but they weren’t really pointed anywhere else, either. Vatok stood behind them, towering over the pair almost like a Wookiee.

“I’m surprised you warned us,” Mirta said. “That’s not too bright, after what your uncle pulled up there.”

“You don’t like the door charge, don’t crash the party,” Jaina said. “We didn’t invite you.”

“But you knew we were coming,” the third Mandalorian said. “And you set us up.”

“And Fett knew
we
were coming,” Jaina said. She spread the bulky arms of her dropsuit in a sort of shrug. “Galaxy’s a cold place, Blue. Get used to it.”

A snicker sounded inside Vatok’s helmet, and Jaina instantly felt an aura of general hostility radiate outward from Blue. She made a mental note to keep him where she could see him, then turned back to Mirta.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “I
know
Fett didn’t send you to help me.”

“How bad you want to die, Jedi?” Blue asked. “Keep asking questions—”