Invincible (4 page)

“Fierfek!” Jaina felt herself growing angry; she had not spent the last five standard weeks trading bruises with the most notorious killer in the galaxy to have it end here. She had to survive long enough to go after her brother. “Any idea what it is?”

“What difference does it make?” Fett asked. “It’s probably going to kill us—I already feel it starting to burn.”

“Acid, then.” Jaina pulled a canister of neutralizer from her equipment belt and popped off the cap, then felt her own hand begin to tingle—not burn. She looked over to see Fett holding a green stim-shot hypo, but doing nothing except looking at his feet. “You said
burn
!”

“Maybe it should have been sting.” Fett continued to look at his feet. “What’s the difference?”

Jaina started to tell him the difference was whether to use a neutralizer or a countertoxin—and that a stim-shot was the wrong thing to use no matter what—but realized that Fett’s retort had been based on something else entirely. The silver film on his greaves and boots was dissolving and falling away.

Then the tingling on Jaina’s hand and wrist faded. The silver stain decayed into a dingy powder, leaving her flesh slightly reddened but otherwise undamaged. She used the Force to concentrate her awareness on the area, searching for any hidden damage, and felt nothing worse than a mild sunburn.

The Verpine were not faring so well. They had only made it a few meters down the tunnel before being overtaken by the film, and now the passage was filled with staccato clattering and the fading squeals of dying insects.

Jaina looked to Fett. “How are
you
feeling?”

He shined his sleeve lamp down the passage. Ss’ess and the rest of the Verpine lay on the floor beneath powdery coatings of gray. Most were writhing in the final throes of a death seizure, but some already lay motionless, with dark blood seeping from their eyes and thorax spiracles.

“Lucky,” Fett said. “That happens sometimes.”

He turned away from Ss’ess and the others, then brushed past and started down the passage at a run again. Ignoring the implied order to follow, Jaina pulled her medpac from her belt and went to squat beside Ss’ess, where she began to burn detailed Force impressions of his symptoms into her memory. It took another ten steps before Fett finally decided to stop and turn around.

“You’re not trying to save him?” Fett asked. “Tell me we’ve done better than that with—”

“Just trying to find out if your message got through to Moburi.” As Jaina said this, she experienced a faint sense of guilt and failure beneath Ss’ess’s pain. “It didn’t.”

Fett shrugged. “He’ll be there.”

“If you say so.” Jaina didn’t bother to hide her doubt. It was going to be difficult enough for her and Fett to reach the hangar ahead of the Imperials, and
they
didn’t have orders telling them to put up a stiff resistance. “But if it’s all the same, I’m not counting on it.”

She used a swab to collect some dust and blood from Ss’ess’s body, then—using a Force suggestion to put him to sleep—gave him a single pat on the shoulder and stood.

“I can tell you what that stuff is,” Fett said, waiting as she sealed the swab inside a sample tube. “Nano.”

“It won’t hurt to run some tests,” Jaina said, joining him. “Better to be sure.”

“I
am
sure.” Fett started to run again. “It’s the Imperial style—they probably got the idea from the stuff your dad found on Woteba back when you were kissing bugs.”

“They weren’t bugs,” Jaina said, restraining the urge to Force-slap him upside the head. “Killiks are—”

“So you
were
kissing ’em?” Fett asked. “I always thought that part was just—”

Jaina Force-shoved him into the wall—hard—then pushed him down the tunnel at a run. “You shouldn’t waste your breath, old man,” she said. “You’ve got a contract to keep.”

Fett laughed and picked up the pace. “Anger is weakness, Jedi,” he said. “And try to keep up. We’ve still got five kilometers to go.”

In the course of the next thirty minutes, they passed at least two hundred dead Verpine. Some lay near crashed capsules, badly mangled but curled into peaceful little balls by the companions who had left them there. Most of the others were sprawled where they had fallen, twisted into painful-looking shapes and coated in the same gray powder that had been left on Ss’ess and the others after the silver film overtook them.

But a few scattered corpses—all from either the technician or labor caste—appeared to have died of more typical wounds, mostly blaster burns and grenade detonations. None of them had any sign of the gray powder that had coated the dead soldiers. Jaina didn’t bother pointing out the ramifications to Fett; she was certain that he could see them as clearly as she did—and would find them just as unnerving.

If the Remnant had engineered a weapon to kill only the Verpine soldier caste, they clearly intended to get the munitions plants running again soon. Within a matter of days, the entire military industry of the Roche system would be supplying the Remnant—and therefore Jacen—with some of the finest weaponry in the galaxy.

Jaina was still trying to digest this unpleasant realization when the fear and anger of a battle began to ripple through the Force from somewhere not too far ahead. All the presences felt human to her, and one or two of them were even vaguely familiar. They had found Fett’s Mandalorians—in the middle of a battle. With the Force, she pulled Fett to a stop, then used hand signals to communicate what she sensed.

Fett nodded and took a couple of seconds to arm his entire weapons array. Then they shut off their lights and began to creep up opposite sides of the tunnel, Fett using his helmet’s infrared sensors to navigate in the darkness, Jaina relying on the Force. They hadn’t gone far when the battle began to assault their nostrils. This was not the typical smell of blaster-scorched flesh and spilled entrails, but the kind of odor that came out when a repair crew tore the patches off a combat vessel that had survived a nasty turbolaser barrage—the acrid reek of flash-melted metal and incinerated bodies.

After moving just twenty meters in two careful minutes, Jaina sensed the tunnel opening up ahead, no doubt at the Client Hangar Two loading platform. She could feel a dozen angry Mandalorians about thirty meters ahead, crouching in the transport tube at the opposite end of the platform. Scattered around one side, arrayed in a large crescent across a vast space that had to be the entry to the hangar—if not the hangar itself—she sensed about two dozen disciplined presences. Stormtroopers, she assumed.

Fett began to murmur into his helmet mike…then ducked as a colored flash came crackling out of the darkness and blasted a head-sized crater from the tunnel wall. Instantly he began to return fire, pouring blaster bolts toward his unseen attacker, and the loading platform grew bright with crisscrossing lines of color. In the strobing light, Jaina glimpsed half a dozen Mandalorian bodies ahead, lying below the loading platform at the bottom of the transportation tube. Their
beskar’gam
appeared to be more or less intact—but so badly discolored and deformed that it looked like they’d taken laser cannon blasts square to their chest plates.

Fett yelled something she couldn’t make out over the wail of so many blaster rifles, then crouched and charged into the transportation tube, sticking his weapon arm up over the loading platform to return fire. A blaster bolt caught his T-21 in the cooling module, blowing the weapon apart and sending it flying in three different directions. A second bolt ricocheted off the inside of Fett’s vambrace, flinging his arm straight up above the edge of the platform, where a third bolt burned through his palm and blew out the back of his gauntlet, spinning him around and dropping him flat to the dead repulsor rail.

These were not her mother’s stormtroopers, Jaina realized. These guys could
shoot.
She ignited her lightsaber and charged after Fett, simultaneously batting blaster bolts back toward her attackers and using the Force to push Fett along the rail so he wouldn’t become a stationary target.

Then the hair rose on the back of her neck, and she had the sense that someone very dangerous was focusing on her. She thought for a second it might be her brother—but realized she would have been dead by the time she sensed
him
watching. She dived for the repulsor rail, catching Fett square in the back as he came up holding a BlasTech S330 he had taken from one of his dead mercenaries.

They slammed down flat, Fett cursing inside his helmet and trying to throw her off, Jaina using the Force to keep them pinned until whatever she had sensed…

…crashed against the back wall, lighting up the transportation tube like a nova burst to life. The blast seared the left side of her face and filled her nose with the sulfurous smell of melted stone, scorched cloth, and singed hair. Jaina glanced over and saw a half-meter ball of crackling, boiling
white
still burrowing into the tunnel wall, stone pouring from the hole in a bright liquid stream.

Fett finally squirmed out from beneath her and spun around on his knee, still cursing and oblivious to the thumb-sized hole that had been burned through his hand. If he noticed that he was now kneeling on the warped chest plate of a helmetless mercenary, or that the man’s face was as red and puffy as that of someone who had been steamed alive, he showed no sign.

“Not what I had in mind, Jedi.” He nearly had to shout to make himself heard above the scream and crackle of the battle. “When I said cover me, I meant with a
blaster.
”

“My mistake,” Jaina replied wryly.

She was about to add that it wouldn’t happen again when a dozen Mandalorians came running up from the other end of the loading platform. The leader, a tall broad-shouldered fellow armored in red and black, was crouching low and keeping a careful watch on a chrono he carried in his hand. Everyone else was returning Imperial fire, only half crouching behind the platform’s cover and relying on their
beskar’gam
to deflect enemy fire while they picked off stormtroopers.

The leader dropped to a knee beside Fett. “Good to see you, boss.” He displayed the chrono, which was counting down by seconds. “We’ve got nine seconds till they hit us again.”

“Good to see you, too, Moburi.” Fett’s helmet swung in Jaina’s direction, shooting her a glance she was fairly sure would have been smug had she been able to see beneath his viewplate, then looked back to Moburi. “Plasma cannon?”

“Just a gun,” Moburi corrected. “That’s why—”

“Where?” Jaina poked her head up, but she was so blinded by the flurry of blaster bolts that she could not pinpoint anyone’s location—much less the plasma gun’s. “Just one?”

“One’s enough,” Moburi said.

Jaina glanced at the chrono in his hand and saw that it was down to six seconds. She didn’t have time to explain—not if she was going to take out that gun before it fired again.

“Where?”

Moburi glanced at Fett, who looked at Jaina and shook his head. “No way. I’m not going to—”

“
You’re
not.” Jaina knew what Fett was going to say, that he wasn’t going to risk the tool of his vengeance against her brother—and she understood why. Assassins didn’t make it to Fett’s age by taking chances they could avoid. But Jaina also knew that she was going to have to take a lot of chances to bring Jacen down—that from the moment she began her hunt, she would be assuming far greater risks than facing down a few dozen crackshot stormtroopers. “Cover!”

Jaina reignited her lightsaber, then Force-sprang out of the tube and into an evasive somersault.

Behind her Fett yelled, “Fierfek!” then, “Go, go, go!”

By the time she came down again she was halfway across the loading platform, a dozen Mandalorians charging out of the darkness behind her. She landed in a near trance, her pulse racing with battle exhilaration, her lightsaber whirling by instinct, her mind focused on discovering the location of the plasma gunner. It was impossible to see anything in the darkness behind the strobing crescent of color that marked the stormtroopers’ skirmish line. But Jaina knew that was where her target would be, defended by the rest of his squad, tucked behind hard cover with nothing visible but his muzzle and sniper sight.

And he would be up high. The plasma ball had been at face level while she was in the bottom of the transportation tube, which meant the sniper had been shooting down at them.

Behind her, a Mando grunted in anguish as a lucky blaster bolt found a seam in his armor; a concussion grenade detonated off to her right and sent chunks of white armor spraying everywhere. Jaina felt her lightsaber catch a trio of powerful bolts, then saw the fiery dashes return to send a stormtrooper and his G-8 power blaster flying in opposite directions. She spun through the resulting gap in the enemy line, dancing left, then right to slice through a white-armored shoulder and send a boxy helmet and its contents tumbling away.

And that was when she sensed the plasma gunner’s focus returning. It wasn’t as strong this time, probably because it was centered on someone else, and she wouldn’t have noticed it at all if she hadn’t been searching for it. But she could feel the sniper preparing to fire again, somewhere ahead, above…and
right.

Jaina smiled, more in satisfaction than bloodlust, and rushed into the darkness. Extending her Force awareness high along the wall and ceiling of the loading vault, she sensed a human presence. Two presences—sniper and spotter, hiding on an observation balcony high above the battle. She did not reach for a blaster or a glow rod or try to leap up to their hiding place. She just
grabbed
and pulled, using the Force to jerk them both forward.

The sniper and his partner almost certainly yelled or cried out as they flew from their firing post, but the sound was inaudible beneath the booming crackle of a plasma discharge. An orb of silver brilliance came arcing down from the balcony, followed by two dark-armored figures and their gun. Then the energy ball crashed into an overturned service cart, creating a cannon-sized detonation that illuminated the entire vault for a full two seconds.