Chapter

26

Zak felt the explosions before he heard it. He heard it before the concussion knocked him off his feet and sent him and Jaina slamming into the cold, wet durasteel platform. Luke somehow managed to keep his footing, stumbling forward only a single step and maintaining a defensive posture in case the imposter took advantage of the distraction.

He did, but not in the way Zak expected. Instead, he turned and ran down the long stretch toward the city dome.

As Zak was getting to his feet, he watched as Luke sprinted, faster, and cut off the darksider, slashing with his blade on the way past and after he had secured his new position in order to halt the intended retreat.

The darksider responded with his own blade, trying to sidestep around the seasoned Jedi Master, and failing to gain any ground.

"Zak!" Jaina called to him. She too, he saw, was back on her feet. The rain had soaked her through, and clumps of wet hair were sticking to her face stubbornly, refusing to budge for long when she brushed them aside.

"What?"

"The dome!"

Those two words alone startled Zak into realisation. The explosions had come from somewhere. Instinct had told him to watch his prey, rather than determine what had been destroyed.

The platform they were on wasn't shifting, wasn't falling into the ocean, so at least they were safe for the meantime. Zak looked around at the domes and platforms visible from where he stood. The platforms with Luke Skywalker's X-wing and the Silent Hunter were fine, he saw. So were the domes in the immediate vicinity.

Then he saw it. A thick cloud of dark smoke was billowing copiously from a dome on the eastern side of the central structure. The platform that had been attached to it was no more now than the broken remnants of the bridge leading to it, and the dome was tilting more and more each second towards the surface of the turbulent ocean.

"Go!" he heard Luke call over to them. The darksider had been pushed back to the platform proper now, fending off vicious strikes from the Jedi Master as he tried, no doubt desperately, to find a way to strike back.

"Come on!" Jaina urged on the tail of her uncle's words. Her fingers wrapped firmly around Zak's wrist and she tugged as she started on her way.

"It'll take too long to get there through the city!" Zak called over her shoulder as they ran past the duelling pair towards the dome. He chanced a look back just in time to see Luke kick the darksider in the face, sending him stumbling away in recovery. The sight brought a grin to his face, despite the rage boiling beneath the surface.

He would never forgive the imposter for what he had done, and tried to do, to Jaina. Never! And, if he was honest with himself, he wanted to kill the man. But his duty was as a Jedi first; he had to see to the safety of others.

"We're not going through the city," he heard Jaina shout back at him.

He grinned, knowing exactly what she intended seconds before he saw her leap up over the entrance to the dome. He followed suit a second later, his feet coming down to a slippery, but somewhat secure, purchase on the wet durasteel. He pushed off, sprinting over the curving metal after Jaina as she made her way straight over it in the direction of the explosions.

Zak reached out with his senses towards the dome. He had to be sure that they weren't just wasting their time. Reaching out, he felt the presence of many hundreds of minds; complex minds with complex thought patterns. The dome was full of Kaminoans, it seemed; as full as it could possibly have been without any of them being pressed against the walls. And it felt to Zak like there was an uneven mix. Most of them were of the intellectual class—at least more than half. Administrative staff made up the second highest grouping, with labourers making up the remainder.

Were there laboratories and research offices in this particular dome that had lead to so many intellectual-classed Kaminoans being imprisoned there, as he sensed they were?

"Think about it, Zak," Jaina said to him, sensing the direction of his thoughts. He noticed then that she had slowed for him to catch up.

"Huh?"

"Their society is one built on scientific accomplishment and business. If he takes out this many of their research and administration staff, it'll set back whatever any of them had been working on while replacements are being brought up to speed to continue the work. Labourers are easily replaced, because it takes no special knowledge to clean, and maintenance and construction work can be learned quickly, if not directly programmed into their genetic makeup. But a lot of the researchers will have notes in their minds or on personal datapads and flimsi. Negotiators and client consultants will have built a rapport with their clients and may know preferences of frequent clients."

"I never considered that," Zak admitted as they ran. They were cresting the top of the dome now, dashing past groupings of communication towers and sensor arrays attached to the top. What looked to be a ray shield generator dome sat in the centre of the array cluster.

"I figured that." She clasped his hand again and gave it a squeeze.

"He's had this whole thing planned to the last detail," Zak said absently as they started dashing down the slope that was the other side of the dome.

"How do you mean?" Jaina asked him, sparing only a quick glance before jumping over a piece of shrapnel that had made the distance and embedded into the surface of the dome they were atop.

"He must have known we were coming. He had a good number of Kaminoans from the city locked up in that one dome, which we were then surreptitiously steered clear of—I only now realised that when Loru Fa showed me around the city, we went nowhere near that dome." He chided himself for having missed that. "A dome he apparently had rigged with explosives, either because he always intended to kill his hostages, or because he would foresee that he would need to distract whoever tried to stop him from escaping.

"He had the foresight to keep me locked away while he went about pretending to be me to get close to you and Luke. No doubt, he intended to kill you both." He didn't need to put into words what else the imposter had planned for Jaina. Just the thought brought the rage back to the surface of his thoughts.

Through the link, he felt Jaina's attempts to calm him, and he was grateful for that.

"Perhaps he's exceptionally good at improvising," Jaina offered, though it sounded like she wasn't entirely convinced of the suggestion herself.

They leapt from the dome they were on when they were halfway down the sloping side, touching down on the next dome and continuing on without even half a second delay.

"My guess is distraction," Jaina said.

"Hmm?"

"The explosions," she reminded him, bringing him back to one of his suppositions. "I would put credits down that it was intended as a distraction in case he was prevented from escaping. Since it stands to reason he'd assume only Jedi could stop him, he would know that we would abandon such an attempt in the face of saving the lives of our hosts."

Zak snorted as he sidestepped, mid-stride, around another piece of shrapnel. "Maybe it's a little more than slightly arrogant to assume only a Jedi could stop him," he said softly. Jaina heard him and nodded with a grim smile. "Nevertheless …"

Then they reached the other side of the dome they were on, they saw the destruction in its entirety. The supports holding the damaged dome to the main structure had been blown apart, as had the thick struts that had come up from the surface of the ocean to support the smaller structure from below. Those struts were now skewering the dome from below as it tilted more and more towards the ocean, its descent driving the support struts in deeper, possibly taking lives.

Zak almost turned away. He could feel some panic from the Kaminoans. Mostly, there was just a sense of determination. There seemed to be a coordinated effort within the dome to try and escape.

But escape to where? The dome was essentially cut off from the rest of the city now. It had tilted away from the main structure enough that all connecting walkways had snapped away, corridors split and disjoint.

"We're close enough," Jaina said, coming to a stop at the top of the dome they were on.

Zak stopped as well, standing beside her as they looked out at the damage. The smoke continued to pour through a large split in the supper north facing of the damaged dome, but that was all that issued from it. No one tried to climb out.

"How do you want to go about it?" he asked Jaina.

"We need to reconnect the dome to the main structure," she told him, reaching out with her right hand. Zak felt the Force swell around her, around the dome, as she used it to do as she wished. "Then we can evacuate them into the main structure. The supports aren't going to be able to hold that thing up for much longer, so it's a lost cause."

"I'll do it," he said. "Get over there when it's stable and see to the evacuation."

"Are you sure? There's quite a bit of weight behind it. It's going to tax you."

"Get!" he said with a playful slap on the arm.

He planted his feet firmly on the durasteel beneath him and reached out with both arms. He drew on the power of the Force, letting it fill him, channelling it down his arms towards his target. He felt the power encircle the structure, encasing it.

Jaina was right, it was heavy. He funnelled more of his will into the task at hand, using naught but his mind to hold the structure up, to push it back into place, back to where they needed it.

It took a little time—minutes, maybe–before he had it more or less exactly where it was supposed to be. By then, he was starting to feel the effects of the task. His muscles hurt as if he were holding up the weight of the dome with his arms, rather than his mind. His whole body was tensed with the pain. His thoughts were racing, his will threatening to buckle. Sweat dotted his forehead, but went unnoticed due to the rain.

"Go!" he gasped. And Jaina took off at once.

Luke ducked under the wide swing of the imposter's ruby blade before kicking out at him. He felt his foot connect with flesh again.

No matter how many times he felt his feet or his fists connecting with his opponent, he couldn't help but be surprised by it. When the imposter had fought all three of them together, he seemed untouchable. Now that he fought Luke alone, he seemed unable to dodge a single blow.

And yet, somehow, he was able to steer clear of Luke's lightsaber. Was he toying with the Jedi Master; letting him get in those hits in order to lull him into a false sense of superiority that would ultimately doom him? Or was it that he was starting to wear down after the effort of duelling for such a length of time?

Luke doubted that it could be the latter. At most, only half an hour had passed since he, Zak and Jaina had begun trading blows with the dark imposter. He sensed that there was more in him that he was showing, that he could continue to fight against them all for much longer than he had.

And yet, Luke noticed that no matter how well he was able to fend off the three incoming blades during the encounter, the imposter had been unable to gain ground on them. The only time he had gained ground was in those minutes when he had fought the Jedi Master alone. Other than that, all he seemed capable of was tactical repositioning, deflecting, and dodging.

Whoever had trained this young man had undoubtedly been a genius.

Alitha Palpatine came unbidden to his mind. Was it possible that the young man he fought now was the newest acquisition of hers? Allina had told them all of his existence two years ago at Navii Lya. She had said that her mother had been after both this man and Zak and hoped to be able to manipulate them both into serving her and ensuring her dominance over the galaxy.

Had she succeeded in the first half of her goal already? Had she stumbled across this man, or he upon her, and a partnership of convenience been born? Or had she actually subdued him, forced her will upon him and set him loose on the task of acquiring Zak for her?

The thought was staggering. If this man was to match Zak in power, and he had so far proved that he could, and served the Empress of the Second Imperium, it would increase her power twenty fold. Together, she and this imposter could overpower even Luke Skywalker, and the rest of the High Council. Together, they could bring about the end of the Jedi Order that her father had attempted more than forty years ago.

"What's wrong, Skywalker?" the young man said with a sneer that made Luke frown. He looked so much like Darth Malonic that it disturbed Luke to look upon him. And yet, knowing that he wasn't Zak in any sense, this time, the Jedi Master was aware that he would not hold back from killing him, if his hand were forced.

"You seem quite sure of your victory, Randall," Luke said, using the name Koa Ne had provided him when he had told the Jedi about the imposter.

A flash of irritation crossed the young man's features, and his free hand lashed out, gathering the Force and flinging it toward Luke in the form of high-energy plasma.

Luke caught the electrical stream on the tip of his lightsaber, allowing the magnetic field around the plasma blade absorb and dissipate the attack while he applied slight Force pressures to direct stray streams of lightning to where he wanted it to go.

Apparently, he had touched upon a nerve.

"How is it that you com by that name?" he demanded of the Jedi Master. Then, "Ah; I see. The Prime Minister has been flapping his gums. I'm sorry, but I think I ought to silence him once I'm through with you."

"I can't allow that, Randall," Luke insisted, sidestepping to put him fully in the way of the bridge back to the city. "As I'm sure you're well aware."

Randall growled and charged forward, lightsaber flashing side-to-side. Luke easily deflected the incoming slashes as if they were no more than incessant bugs coming at him. Angered as the young man was by Luke's knowledge of his name, he wasn't thinking clearly enough to plan his attacks through as he had been previously.

Luke would use that.

He took advantage of a wide opening in the young man's attack and slashed right-to-left at chest height. The Randall backpedalled just enough to avoid the blow before resuming his attack. Luke reversed the direction of his lightsaber, bringing the pommel around and clubbing the darksider in the side of the head.

He let loose an enraged roar as he went down, spinning back to his feet.

"What has she promised you?" he asked Randall. "You should know that the word of a Sith cannot be trusted."

"What has who promised me?" Randall spat as he charged forward again. Luke gave ground, battering the incoming blade back and back again before they could become a serious danger to him.

"Alitha. No doubt"—he grunted with the effort of outright blocking a particularly heavy slam from Randall's lightsaber—"she put you up to this."

"I answer to no one!" Randall roared. "And I have no idea who you're talking about!"

Luke realised his mistake an instant after Randall did. He felt the hot blade of his opponent's lightsaber brush against his leg. It wasn't deep enough to be crippling, but it was painful.

He looked up at Randall, into his eyes. He saw the self-satisfied smirk. Then he was flung backwards across the platform and over the edge.