Abyss (43 page)

“Ben,” his father asked, “who the black empty void is
that
?”

The tips of four scarlet lightsabers were chasing one another around the perimeter of the hatch, so bright that Ben could look at them only through the blast-tinting of his helmet’s faceplate. The blades were cutting through the thick alien metal as though it were plasteel, and Ben could feel dark presences—a lot of dark presences—standing in the corridor outside.

His father was down in the front of the control room, trying to cut a meter-wide escape hole into the viewport. The metal was only a fraction the thickness of the hatch, but his lightsaber was cutting much more slowly than the blades of the mysterious intruders. It seemed strange that thin transparent material should be so much tougher than a heavy metal hatch, but that was certainly the way it looked.

“Dad, you’re cutting really slow,” Ben said, speaking into his helmet microphone. After Rhondi’s death, the first thing both Skywalkers had done was put on their vac suits with the idea of fleeing back to the
Shadow
as swiftly as possible. “Could your power cell be low?”

Luke’s reply came over the helmet receiver, calm and patient. “Son, I’m a Jedi Master. Do you really think I’d forget to check my own lightsaber’s power-cell levels?”

“Just asking. Strange things happen around here.” Ben checked the hatch again and saw that the four scarlet blades were almost to the corners. “Such as … they’re cutting through that hatch about twice as fast as you’re cutting through the viewport.”

“That
is
interesting.” Luke sounded less nervous about this news than intrigued by it. “And you’re
sure
you have no idea who they are?”

“Dad, I told you no. But they
had
to hear Rhondi pounding on that hatch.” Ben wasn’t worried about electronic eavesdropping; even if the intruders had a receiver set to the correct channel, the Skywalkers’ communications were encrypted using the latest Jedi technology. “And they still pushed a lightsaber through it at
head height
. Does that sound like Mind Walker style to you?”

“Not really.” Luke deactivated his lightsaber and stepped away from the circle he had been cutting, leaving about ten centimeters at the top still attached. “But they didn’t manifest out of the void. They’re a part of this somehow.”

“Yeah, but we really don’t have time to stop to talk …”

Ben let the sentence trail off as his father raised a hand and used the Force to push the smoking circle of semi-attached viewport outward, opening a hole large enough to serve as an escape route. Instead of leading the way through it, Luke started toward the back of the room, angling toward the corner opposite Ben’s.

“We need to take one alive,” Luke said.

“Alive?”
Ben echoed. “Check your vitals readout. You’re barely strong enough to make a run for the
Shadow
—much less take
prisoners
.”

“True—and feeling better every second.” Luke pointed at the hatch. “Ben, we need to find out who those people are—and who sent them. That’s the key to figuring this place out.”

Ben knew there was no point in arguing. His father’s voice had assumed that
I’m the Master
tone. Besides, the logic was sound, at least until it came to the part about them making it back to the
Shadow
alive.

“Can we at least be careful about it?” Ben asked. “Right now, all we know about them is that they don’t mind killing people, and they have a thing for red lightsabers. Whoever they are, they seem to have all the advantages.”

“Not
all
of them,” Luke said, slipping behind an equipment cabinet on the opposite side of the room. He was on the upper tier, about five meters past the hatch. “Are you ready with that gas cylinder?”

Ben checked the hand torch he had used to weld himself and Rhondi into the chamber. The feed valve was wide open, and the safety shutoff was disabled.

“Affirmative.”

“Then hide your Force presence and wait for my signal,” Luke ordered. “We might learn something just by watching them.”

Ben slipped into his own hiding place—the foot well of an equipment console, on the upper tier directly across from his father. He quickly drew his Force presence inward, shrinking it down until even he could not sense it, then felt the floor reverberate as the heavy hatch fell into the room.

Two seconds later the door charge detonated, but there were no muffled screams to suggest that anyone had been near the entrance when the fuse activated. Whoever they were, Rhondi’s killers had obviously learned their lesson when they opened Rolund’s cell and tripped the first mine.

The blast of the door charge was still vibrating through the floor when Ben felt the lighter pounding of running feet. He guessed that maybe seven or eight intruders had entered, but there was no way to be certain. He waited five long breaths for them to pass his hiding place, then peered out toward the hatchway. The metal was still smoking and glowing white. Even so, he could see a pair of vac suit boots on the floor outside the hatchway.

A double comm click sounded inside Ben’s helmet. The signal meant his father was preparing to move, but it would be impossible to see the rear guard from his side of the room. He hit a chin toggle inside his helmet, intending to warn his dad about the ambusher, then saw the intruder’s boots charging into the control room and realized his father was already moving.

Holding the gas canister in one hand and his lightsaber in the other, Ben rolled from his hiding place. A line of eight intruders was descending toward the diversionary hole in the viewport, all of them in a hurry. Like the Skywalkers, they were wearing full combat-rated vac suits and carrying lightsabers. Some also carried blasters, and most wore equipment belts with two sheaths, one for a slender glass-handled dagger and one for a curved, heavy-bladed parang.

Ben’s father was already sliding onto the top of an equipment console, so intent on capturing a prisoner that he did not sense the rear guard coming through the hatch behind him. The intruder’s faceplate was raised, revealing a lavender face with fine features and a long nose, slightly more slender than a human’s. In her gloved hand, she was holding one of the dark parangs. Instead of leaping into a melee attack as Ben had expected, she stopped and raised the parang.

“Dad!” Ben commed. “Roll,
now
!”

The parang flew, and Luke rolled, disappearing over a row of equipment cabinets just as the weapon spun past centimeters above his helmet. Unable to hear the commed message, the woman grimaced and extended her hand, using the Force to call the weapon back—and presenting her back to Ben as she moved to put the row of equipment cabinets between herself and Luke.

Ben did not give her a chance to catch the parang. He simply Force-leapt across the last three meters between them, pointing his lightsaber at her heart and thumbing the activation switch. To his relief, both his weapon and his body felt fully powered—though, in the latter case, it was impossible to say whether the fuel was the hydrade he had quaffed earlier or his desperation to save his father.

The woman must have had her own danger sense. Even before Ben’s blade extended, she was spinning away, still reaching for her parang with one hand, igniting her own lightsaber with her other, and snapping a vicious heel kick at Ben’s groin with her near foot.

It was too fancy, too much. Ben merely stepped back and gave her empty hand a Force tug. Instead of returning to her grasp ready to throw again, the parang sliced her hand off at the wrist. The woman cried out, and her heel kick glanced off the canister he was holding.

She attempted a trailing lightsaber slash at Ben’s neck. He leaned away, then used the Force to pull her, center mass, onto his own blade.

In the next instant, Ben’s entire body was tingling with danger sense, and he was spinning and slashing, his blade weaving a basket of protection as the woman’s companions came charging toward him behind a wall of blasterfire.

He retreated toward the hatch, at the same time comming his father. “Hey, Dad, about that prisoner—”

“Go!” Luke came rolling over the bank of equipment cabinets, pouring blasterfire into the intruder he had been attempting to capture, then hit the floor and began to scramble toward the hatchway. “And cover me!”

“Sure thing,” Ben said.

As he slipped through the hatch, Ben deliberately slammed the neck of the hand torch on the jamb. The head flew away on a jet of pressurized gas, and a rime of frost formed instantly on the cooling canister. He tossed it back into the control room. It began to fly about in the weightless environment, spewing explosive azetal fumes and bouncing off smoking equipment consoles.

Ben took cover behind the jamb and drew his blaster. He began to fire around the corner, fully opening himself to the Force so he could sense his father’s location. He felt a wave of terror as the anonymous enemy realized what would happen when the concentration of azetal grew high enough to ignite, and then his father came flying through the hatchway feetfirst, low to the floor and pouring bolts back into the control room.

Two heartbeats later, the enemy fire trailed off to nothing. Ben grabbed his father’s ankle and sprinted down the corridor, dragging him along while he continued to cover the hatchway behind them. As Ben moved, he had to be careful to keep one foot on the floor so that he would continue to be affected by the station’s primitive form of artificial gravity.

Twenty steps later they were at the other end of the corridor, and no one was following. Ben stopped and released the ankle.

“That was some shooting!” Ben cried. “Did you get them
all
?”

Luke shook his head. “Just three. The others were Force-leaping through that bolt-hole I cut.” He righted himself, then extended a hand toward the far end of the corridor and used the Force to lift the fallen hatch back into its place. “Whoever those guys are, they’re no idiots. They know what’s going to happen when the azetal gas gets dense enough.”

Vestara’s orders were simple: she was to wait in hiding at the bowl-shaped junction chamber that connected the station’s central sphere to its cylindrical wing. If the Skywalkers entered this area alive, she would arm the grenades she had been given and toss them into the chamber. With a little luck, she would be able to pull her hatch closed before the Skywalkers sent the grenades flying back into her corridor. With a lot of luck, there would be enough left of the pair to present to Lord Vol when they returned to Kesh without Ship.

But, as with any Sith plan, there were layers of treachery and intrigue to consider, and so Vestara had a second assignment. After leaving the air lock through which Ship had inserted them onto the station, the first thing Lady Rhea had done was to free the surviving members of her crew from Abeloth’s thrall—just as Vestara had freed
her
.

The second thing Lady Rhea had done was to change the team’s
mission from capturing the Skywalkers to killing them. That had been the strike force’s original purpose, and that was what Lady Rhea ordered them to do. Even had she not still been their commander, it would have taken little effort to win the small group over. Returning Ship to Kesh was clearly beyond their capabilities, but Lady Rhea felt confident that the death of the Skywalkers and the news of Abeloth’s strange power would be enough to win the Circle’s forgiveness. And even if she was wrong, the entire crew had agreed—returning to Abeloth and her strange planet was out of the question.

To the surprise of everyone except Lady Rhea, even Yuvar Xal had readily embraced this plan. In fact, he had proclaimed that
all
of the survivors would be bathed in glory when the Circle learned of Abeloth’s power. His enthusiasm had aroused suspicions, of course—due in large part to the fact that earlier, when the crew had stopped at the
Eternal Crusader
to retrieve vac suits and weapons, Ship had allowed only Xal and Ahri to board the frigate.

So, along with Baad Walusari, Vestara had been assigned to keep watch over Xal and Ahri. If the pair attempted to depart their assigned station, they were to be murdered. If they attempted to capture the Skywalkers themselves, they were to be murdered. If they attempted to contact Ship, or even
looked
like they were thinking about disobeying Lady Rhea, they were to be murdered.