Invincible (18 page)

Jaina laughed. “I liked fighting you, too, Vatok,” she said. “You were my favorite.”

Vatok turned back. “You mean that?”

“Sure,” Jaina said. She hadn’t realized he was growing so fond of her; it seemed a lifetime ago—since before Mara’s death—that she had paid any attention to that sort of thing. “Even better than Fett.”

“You better not be making fun of me.” Vatok’s tone was only about half joking. “I’m the sensitive type, you know.”

“A sensitive Mandalorian? No such thing,” Jaina retorted. “But I’m telling the truth. Fett’s an old man. It’s like bruising your father.”

Vatok laughed and started toward the door. “I’m going to tell him you said that, you know.”

“I hope you do,” Jaina said. Silently, she added,
Because it means you came back alive.
“Shoot straight and run fast.”

This stopped the big Mandalorian in his tracks. His helmet turned back toward her, and she could sense that his mood had swung toward the serious.

“What is it?” she asked. “Don’t tell me that’s something Mandalorians only say to women?”

“Only to
assassins,
” Vatok corrected. “To commandos, you say,
Die proud.
”

“Sorry—
jetiise
ignorance,” Jaina said. “But please—
don’t.
”

Vatok chuckled. “Okay, since you asked so nicely.” He started toward the door again. “May the Force be with you, Jedi.”

This time Vatok didn’t look back, leaving Jaina alone with her fears, wondering not only whether he and Mirta and the rest of the Mandalorians were headed to their deaths, but whether she might be, as well. Even Luke did not know the full of extent of Caedus’s powers, and Jaina had no illusions about being her brother’s equal in terms of Force strength. If it came down to a straight Force battle, she would die. It was that simple.

But her fears ran deeper than just dying. She knew her parents too well to think her death would destroy them or ravage their marriage—but it
would
crush them, and she could not bear to imagine the craziness they might undertake in a grief-fueled quest for vengeance. And the risks of actually succeeding were even greater. Jaina’s best chance of success lay in ambush, but she did not imagine for a moment that she could kill her own brother in cold blood and remain untainted by the dark side.

All that assumed, of course, that when Jaina looked into her brother’s yellow eyes, she
could
pull the trigger—that she did not lose her resolve. She extended the barrel of her QuietSnipe and slipped a magazine of pellets into the feeder, then summoned one of the cyberbrain technicians over to the projection booth. The Verpine resistance network—consisting of roughly the entire insectoid population of the Roche system—had already explained to Jaina and the Mandalorians that this booth housed only part of the projection equipment. Similar booths were located on the two flanking walls, and there was one in the floor below the hologram. Inside each booth were two Imperials—a member of the stormtrooper Elite Guard, and a holoprojectionist.

“Call the guard out for me,” Jaina whispered.

The Verpine lowered his long snout. “Why?”

“So I can take him down quietly,” Jaina said. “We don’t want to alarm the Moffs, do we?”

“I mean why should the resistance help
you
?” the insectoid asked. “The Verpine do not have a mutual-aid treaty with the Jedi.”

Jaina grated her teeth, recalling how exacting insectoid minds tended to be—and wondering if she had been this annoying as a Killik Joiner.

“The Jedi don’t require treaties,” she explained. “We help where help is needed. But if the Verpine don’t
need
help…”

She began to break down the QuietSnipe.

“Wait.” The Verpine punched a code into the security pad on the triangular hatch, then called inside, “Trooper Aitch-Four-Forty-nine-Dash-Bee-Seven, there may a security breach you should check.”

“Again?” came the electronic-voiced reply.

Potential security breaches were the standard excuses that the Verpine technician and labor castes had been using—under the pretense of full cooperation—to lure stormtroopers aside as Jaina and the Mandalorians penetrated the depths of the asteroid.

“What is it this time?” the trooper asked, coming toward the door. “Strange pheromones? An open hatch? Someone’s pet mynock on the loose?”

The technician waited until the stormtrooper was coming through the hatchway before answering.

“I’m not sure.” He looked toward Jaina. “It might be a Jedi.”

“A
what
?”

The trooper turned to look, leaving Jaina with no choice but to push the barrel of her QuietSnipe up under his jawline and pull the trigger. There was a barely audible
krafuut
as the mag-pellet accelerated up the barrel and into his brain. A red spray shot from beneath the stormtrooper’s helmet, and he stumbled back toward the nearest VerpiTron, dying even before his feet had stopped moving.

The technician cried out and leapt after the trooper, pulling him away from the delicate cyberbrain and to the floor in a loud, plastoid clatter.

Jaina frowned down at the Verpine. “That wasn’t much of a diversion.”

The technician blinked up at her. “You wanted him to look the other way?” he asked. “Why didn’t you say so?”

Before Jaina could reply, a female voice called from inside the booth. “Aitch? What’s going on out there?”

Jaina stepped through the hatchway into a large durasteel booth packed with softly humming holoprojection equipment. At the front of the cramped little chamber, a projectionist in a brown Imperial uniform was standing in front of a chest-high control board, peering through a panel of one-way transparisteel. Her small hands were splayed wide over an array of knobs and glide switches designed for long-fingered Verpine technicians, flying back and forth as she struggled to maintain the crispness of the holoimages out in the Strategic Planning Forum.

When her stormtrooper companion did not answer, she turned away from the transparisteel panel, at the same time calling,
“Aitch?”

Jaina was already leaping.

Unfortunately, she could not use the Force for fear of alerting her brother to her presence, so it took a couple of bounds to reach the front of the booth. The projectionist’s eyes grew wide, and her hand darted toward the blaster pistol hanging from her belt—which was what saved her life.

Jaina reached the woman just as the blaster pistol cleared its holster and quickly pushed it down. A single bolt
ping
ed off the floor and began to bounce around inside the projection equipment, triggering a succession of hisses, clinks, and pops that left no doubt about the damage being done.

Jaina cursed under her breath, then slammed a side hammerfist into her attacker’s jaw hinge, catching the nerve bundle just under the ear. The projectionist fell instantly unconscious and dropped to the floor in a heap. Jaina used plasticuffs to bind her at the wrists and ankles, then smashed the emitter nozzle of the woman’s blaster pistol against the floor and tossed it aside.

By the time she had finished, acrid smoke filled the air, and the sounds coming from the holoprojectors had grown even more loud and exotic—long descending whistles, low raspings, sharp bangs. Jaina peered through the one-way panel and saw many of the images in the hologram starting to break up. Down in the forum’s front seats, a cluster of twenty men dressed in medal-heavy Imperial uniforms were scowling up at the display. They did not appear to have any aides with them, but a detail of stormtroopers in the gray armor of the Remnant’s Elite Guard were stationed a dozen meters away, on the small apron area between the forum’s uppermost seats and the exit doors.

There was, of course, no sign of Darth Caedus.

The projectionist’s comlink began to chirp for attention. Jaina checked the name tag on the woman’s uniform, then pulled the comlink from her breast pocket and opened the channel.

“Sangi here,” she said, deliberately putting a little shrillness into her response in an attempt to divert attention from any obvious differences in their voices. “Just having a little problem.”

“What
kind
of problem?” demanded a tinny male voice. “And give me a proper report, Ensign. We have good reasons for these protocols, you know.”

“Of course, uh, Lieutenant,” Jaina replied, taking an educated guess. “It’s nothing serious, just blew a couple of—”

“Lieutenant?”
the man interrupted.

“Sorry—Lieutenant Commander,” Jaina said, taking another guess. “We just blew a couple of capacitors. Everything should be back online in a minute.”

“Very well,” the voice said, and Jaina knew she had guessed wrong. Had she been right, there would have been another lecture about completeness, perhaps even a request for an authentication code. “Carry on.”

“You bet.”

Jaina dropped the comlink on the floor and crushed it beneath her boot heel. Sangi’s commander already knew where she was, but at least this way the communications team would not be able to activate the comlink remotely and eavesdrop on what she was doing. She closed the hatch at the back of the booth, locking it from the inside so any Remnant security personnel coming after her would have to cut their way into the booth…then heard a muffled chain of thuds as the Mandalorians began their assault on the Moffs.

Jaina extended the barrel of her QuietSnipe and went to the projection aperture in the center of the booth’s front wall. Unlike the transparisteel panel through which the projectionist had been watching the holograms, the aperture was just an empty hole through which the holoprojector beam could pass without suffering any image degradation.

Or through which a mag-pellet could pass without being deflected.

By the time Jaina had reached the projection aperture, most of the Elite Guard lay more or less helpless on the floor. Many were obviously dead, their bodies torn apart by the detonite explosions with which the Mandalorians had opened their initial assault. Others were too wounded or too blast-shocked to fight, some holding their arms over gaping holes in their stomach armor, others banging charred limb-stumps on the floor. A few were sitting upright with their arms hanging at their sides or resting in their laps, their faceplates fixed on the ruptured doors at the back of the room, as though they could not see or hear or weren’t even aware of the seven maniacs in brightly colored
beskar’gam
charging out of the smoke.

At least two dozen guards had escaped the carnage of the initial assault, and now they were retreating toward the front seats. As soon as they saw the Mandalorians, they began to fire up toward the apron with their repeating blasters, slowing the onslaught but hardly stopping it. Their hits merely knocked the Mandalorians off their feet without penetrating their
beskar’gam,
and a second later the Mandos would be up and coming again.

Unfortunately, time was something the attackers did not have. Even
beskar’gam
was no match for sheer numbers, and it would be only a minute—perhaps a matter of
seconds
—before stormtroopers began to pour through the doors behind them. Jaina was in a perfect position to tip the balance by opening fire and clearing a lane down to where the Moffs had taken cover in the forum’s lower seats.

The trouble was, helping the Mandalorians meant revealing her presence to Caedus, and
that
meant reducing her own chances of success to almost nothing. She knew what Fett would do in her place…and in this case he was right. The Mandalorians had their mission and Jaina had hers.

The only thing that caused Jaina doubt was the lack of her brother’s actual presence. She could think of a hundred reasons he might be hiding from Nickel One’s security cams, but the only ones that made sense right now had to do with the Mandalorians. Either he intended to ambush them, or Vatok had been right about him setting up the Moffs for assassination.

Jaina watched with strained patience as a string of bolts finally slipped beneath the bottom edge of a Mandalorian helmet and sent it tumbling away, the head inside trailing curls of smoke and blood. The fellow’s companions were too disciplined to look or even acknowledge the reminder of their own mortality, but the assault did stall for just an instant.

No strangers to battle themselves, the troopers of the Elite Guard sensed the minuscule shift in momentum and immediately changed tactics, concentrating their fire on the most exposed Mandos. A torrent of fiery beams drove a brown-armored Mandalorian to the stairs, where he lay thrashing and cooking inside his armor until a lucky bolt finally found a seam and put him out of his misery.

With only five enemies remaining, the Elite Guard started to advance back toward the upper rows of seats, literally pushing their foes ahead of them with blaster bolts. Another Mandalorian went down, a melt hole opening in his breastplate when he made the mistake of presenting the same side of his armor to the Imperials for too long.

The Mandalorians finally gave up their charge and dived for cover between the seats. Eager to press their advantage, the Elite Guard began to race upward, stepping from seat-top to seat-top and blowing apart whole rows in their attempts to get at their enemies. Jaina saw Mirta glance up toward her hiding place and began to wonder if there was any sense in remaining concealed. At this rate, the Mandalorians were going to be killed without any help from her brother.

Down in the lower seats, the Moffs had apparently reached a similar conclusion. They began to show their heads, shouting encouragement and orders—usually conflicting—to their bodyguards. And that was what Mirta had been waiting for. Four grenades flew up from behind the seats.

Explosives weren’t necessarily the most accurate or certain way to kill someone, but they
were
alarming. About half the Elite Guard turned to dive for cover before it grew apparent that the grenades were arcing over their heads down toward the Moffs. Some actually turned to watch, while others let their fire stray as they instinctively ducked or dodged.