The holographic representation of Luke demonstrated his utter shock at the events that Corran had described to him. Once the latter had finished, Luke immediately said, "Commander Fel, are you listening in on this conversation? I'll give you ten seconds to respond or I will cut this communication off."
Five seconds later, the voice of Jagged Fel said over the speaker of Corran's holoterminal, "I'm here, Master Skywalker. What is it that you wish to say to me?"
"If I agree to keep out anymore Jedi involvement in your hunt for Gorog," Luke said, "will you call off your troops' manhunt for my niece and allow Master Horn and my nephew to look for her?"
"Master Skywalker, what are you doing?" Corran asked in shock.
As Luke looked at Corran with a silent glare, Fel's voice said, "I don't see how that would benefit the Ascendancy, Master Skywalker. While we admittedly don't much care for your kind being out here as it is, they would still be useful to us in hunting down the AWOL Jedi who are still part of the Dark Nest; well, except for your niece, of course."
"Then what if I sent you some other Jedi?" Luke asked. "Ones who have no connection to the Dark Nest Knights? I can guarantee you won't have another situation akin to Master Sebatyne or Jaina again."
"No connection, you say?" Fel asked. "Well, wasn't your niece, nephew, and Lowbacca's connection to Jedi Rar, Veila, and Sebatyne part of why they would be so useful in the hunt for the latter three?"
"Yes, but as you can see," Luke said, "that connection has become more of a liability than an asset."
"Not necessarily," Fel countered evenly. "It was only because of Master Sebatyne's involvement that everything went wrong. Or, rather, how you handled her. Quite frankly, if you hadn't assigned your Jedi team to try to apprehend her, she might have been an asset in locating the missing Knights; maybe even the rest of the Dark Nest."
"Commander Fel," Luke intoned, "if you or any of your troops are responsible for harming my niece-"
"Jedi Lowbacca will be instantly executed if you try to have Master Horn and Jacen go against anyone aboard my ship, Master Skywalker," Fel said.
It was then that a holographic representation of the Chiss-raised human appeared next to Luke's representation; his stoic visage was a counter to the desperation that appeared on Luke's face.
"Are you willing to have Lowbacca sacrificed to avenge Jaina, Master Skywalker?" Fel asked. "And let's not forget; I know you Jedi aren't all-powerful. Tell me, how many of my troops do you think Horn and Jacen can kill before they are gunned down by my surviving soldiers' charrics? Think through this first, Master Skywalker; you have no upper hand here."
A moment of tense silence passed before Fel said, "That's right; you realize it now. Your Jedi, Master Skywalker, are mine. There is nothing you can do to save Jaina; all you can do is minimize the tragedy of her impending doom, as well as Master Sebatyne's passing, by tempering Master Horn and Jacen from doing anything rash. So, until Rar, Veila, and Tesar Sebatyne are all neutralized, one way or another, the Jedi who are aboard my Star Destroyer are as much hostages as they are assets. Do you understand that?"
As silence passed over again, Corran looked over his shoulder and found two Chiss troops standing there with their charrics across their chests. They looked intently down upon him; he looked back at the holographic representations of Luke and Fel.
"I understand everything that you have said, Commander Fel," Luke said temperately.
"Good," Fel said with an amicable tone. "I will make sure that my troops will bring Jaina's corpse back to Master Horn with as few charric bolts in her body as possible. I'm sure she will be presentable for her funeral; unlike Master Sebatyne, of course." He then signed off from his end.
Luke then asked, "Corran?"
"Yes, Master Skywalker?"
"Do what you think is right."
"Yes, Luke."
From his end, Luke shut off the transmission, leaving Corran alone with the two guards behind him.
When he stood up and turned to face them, he used his ability to implant the image of Jaina suddenly appearing before them with her lightsaber out and active.
The guards, naturally, fired upon the illusion that only they could see; but just as Jaina's image dissipated, Corran had also disappeared from his spot, leaving the charric bolts that were fired to destroy the holoterminal that the Jedi Master had vacated.
When next he appeared, Corran was behind them, and less than a second after he activated his lightsaber, both of the guards' heads came clean off their bodies.
And even before their headless corpses collapsed to the deck, Corran called out to Jacen through the Force and conveyed, Get Lowie. We have to leave.
. . .
When Jacen received Corran's message through the Force, his eyes flashed open and he leaped up from his meditative seat on the floor. He then expanded his awareness outward to detect any particular electromagnetic currents; he then felt the vidcams along this corridor and used the Force to scramble the feed. Then, after sensing the two Chiss guards outside his door; he hurried over and used the Force to knock their heads together, rendering them unconscious.
He then tried opening his door; unsurprisingly, he found it locked. So he used the Force to blast it outward and hurried out to the nearest turbolift that would take him to the medbay where Lowie was. Along the way, he found three troops who had been casually heading in his direction taking notice of the guards and the broken-down door; with a current of Electric Judgment on his part, he reduced all of them to unconsciousness, too.
From there, he had no problem reaching the turbolift; he slashed open the doors with his lightsaber and, after looking up and down to find no elevator heading in his direction, he jumped down toward the level where the medbay was. He slashed open the doors leading into the corridor; there, after landing in a tuck-and-roll, he got up in a crouch and took stock of his surroundings.
There was a Chiss troop on both his left and right as well as two ahead of him; the path ahead led to the medbay. So he burst up from his crouch and used a Fallanassi illusion to distract the guards in front of him; they saw a small swarm of Killiks heading in their direction.
They immediately began shooting at the illusory insects, none of which dissipated, even as Jacen leaped over them and used the Force to knock their heads together as he had before. When he landed, he turned back and deflected the charric bolts that were fired at him from the other two troops that he had spotted earlier. However, once their attention turned to shooting at the false insects along the deck, Jacen used the Force to throw the troops back to the bulkhead behind him, where they fell unconscious.
Jacen turned back just as he allowed the illusory Killiks to dissipate away. He rushed ahead a few more meters to Force-blast the door into the medbay that held Lowie just as a shipwide red alert went out.
Damn! Jacen thought. I forgot to scramble the vid feeds on this level. Hopefully, I'm not too late.
By then, he had run into the medbay and found a bedded Lowie, restrained by fiberchord where he lay, surrounded by two guards and a doctor. Jacen knocked all three Chiss back with the Force so that when their heads hit the bulkhead behind them, they fell to the floor unconscious. He then rushed to Lowie's side, cut off the straps holding him down, and placed one of his large arms across his shoulder as he tried helping him up.
"You still got one good leg, my friend," Jacen said. "I won't let you fall on the other."
"What's going on, Jacen?" Lowie asked in a low tone. Jacen could tell he was still drugged so he couldn't feel the pain of his lost leg; the stump there had a suture on it that may have had a Chiss variant of bacta, if it was bacta, placed there.
"I'll explain later," Jacen said as he helped Lowie take short, simple steps toward the medbay exit.
Once they were halfway there, a squad of Chiss came in and levelled their weapons at the two Jedi. But all it took from Jacen was to have more illusory Killiks suddenly manifest in the medbay, and then the Chiss all began firing upon each other as they tried to shoot down the insects that suddenly crawled all over them.
It was only seconds before they were all dead, and Jacen and Lowie were able to hobble out of the medbay around the fried bodies.
Jacen only hoped that he could keep up this Fallanassi trick all the way until they escaped the Guardian.
. . .
While Fel may have been correct that Jedi weren't all-powerful, just as Jacen told Corran that even a Jedi Knight as powerful as Jaina wasn't invincible, the Jedi Master felt that he was probably making Fel think the opposite by now. Because as he casually walked down the corridor ahead of him that would take him directly into the Guardian's port hangar bay, Corran's Force-shield was able to absorb and dissipate the charric bolts from the troops ahead seemingly without effort.
Of course, it took a great deal of effort on Corran's part to do so; but even as he kept the shield up, he allowed some of the energy from the bolts to come to him so that he could absorb that energy through the Force. And as he allowed this energy to build up from within him, he allowed a meter-wide opening in his shield just long enough to have a great ball of white light fry the troops who were there.
When Corran opened his eyes and dropped his Force-shield, he saw the crispy corpses of the dozen Chiss before him collapse to the deck. But when he heard the clamor of boots along the deck coming from the intersection of corridors behind him, Corran rushed ahead toward the hangar bay entrance, slashed open the doors, and hurried inside.
Around him, there appeared to have been over two dozen troops and a little more than a dozen technicians around some clawcraft in their racks above and in the six troop shuttles here. Their attention became directed at Corran, and while the techs dropped to the deck, the troops got their firearms out and began firing at the Jedi Master.
Of course, he became a blur as he induced Force-speed within himself; as he did, he managed to cut down about seven troops before they even knew that he was upon them. When he made it to one of the shuttles, he cut down two more troops before using the Force to pry open the ship's landing ramp. After he hurried up, he had the ramp closed before he went to the cockpit.
He initiated a cold-start ignition sequence, allowing the shuttle to get itself into the air immediately. He then began firing upon the troops that fired their charrics at him; his confiscated ship's shields held, naturally, and he took great care not to fire upon the technicians who now made their way toward the various exits.
Even before the last of the technicians left, streams of troops began pouring in from the egresses and peppered the shuttle's hull with their vain shots. However, Corran could see that they were mere distractions as he spotted some squads setting up large gun emplacements; they no doubt carried armament that was capable of taking the shuttle down.
It was a no-brainer for Corran as he began blasting away the emplacements in between shooting at the other troops; he even had time to lay waste to the other shuttles so that none of the troops could use them to their advantage.
Hurriedly, he swung the shuttle's nose upward and fired upon the racks of clawcraft that were only now being boarded by their pilots. But even as Corran managed to destroy most of them, two pilots managed to enter their fighters and launched to begin throwing volleys of lasers down toward the shuttle.
Corran dodged the shuttle out of the way of the raining lasers and headed out through the bay's exit for space with the two clawcraft chasing him. He did his best to maneuver around, but this was a shuttle, not a starfighter, so more often than not, he found his rear getting smacked by the clawcraft's projectiles.
Naturally, Corran spun the shuttle around and began firing at both starfighters head-on. Now, as he prepared for the dogfight, he hoped that Jacen and Lowie could find their own way off the Guardian.
. . .
On the Guardian's bridge, Fel watched the live footage over at the security station in anger as Jacen, who still had Lowbacca leaning upon him, carefully made his way down a set of emergency stairs toward the starboard hangar. Along the way, the Chiss troops who tried to intercept the two Jedi from both above and below were seemingly ravaged by Killiks who manifested out of nowhere, inevitably leading the troops to kill either themselves or their comrades as they tried to shoot down the swarms of insects.
It took Fel a while as he watched the Killiks not even receive a scratch, but finally, he went to the comm station, activated the shipwide broadcast system himself (much to the comm officer's mild chagrin), and said, "Attention, all soldiers! Ignore the Killiks! They're not really there! They're some Jedi illusion; focus on the Jedi instead!"
He went back to the security station to watch the footage; in spite of his warning, it didn't seem as if any of his troops were listening. They still ended up killing each other, and Jacen and the Wookiee were making their way to the hangar unimpeded.
Fel pounded the console in front of him in frustration. "Damn it!" After he sighed, he looked to the footage provided by the Guardian's external cams that showed that, although Corran Horn managed to destroy the two clawcraft who pursued him out of the port hangar, a squad from the starboard hangar had launched and was gunning for the stolen shuttle.
Fel couldn't help but give a bittersweet grin at seeing Horn pilot the shuttle away as fast as he could toward Hlest. Unfortunately, all it took to ruin even that moment of triumph was to look back and see that Jacen and Lowbacca had made it to the level where the starboard hangar bay was; with a quick slash of his lightsaber, Jacen got him and his hairy friend inside where a few squads of troops were waiting for them.
But instead of using more of the illusion—as if he had simply grown bored of it—Jacen unleashed a massive Force-wave, no doubt aided by Lowbacca (drugged though the Wookiee might have been), that knocked all of the soldiers off their feet. Then, as the two Jedi slowly proceeded toward one of the shuttles, Jacen used the Force to have the charrics of the nearest downed troops flung away from them. For others, their weapons seemed to suddenly disappear, only to manifest in space nearby the Guardian. And for others still, Jacen dispatched them with green currents of lightning from the fingertips of the hand that wasn't supporting Lowbacca.
Fel never felt so utterly embarrassed in his life once the two Jedi managed to board one of the shuttles; mentally, he kicked himself for not having any of those ships grounded or had any critical components removed beforehand.
He had truly underestimated the Jedi today; they were far from the hostages that he claimed that they were to Luke Skywalker.
"When they get clear," Fel ordered to the gunnery crew, "blow them out of the sky!"
Moments later, the other stolen shuttle lifted off and blasted away at the other shuttles for good measure, and then rocketed out into space; no doubt the only reason Jacen didn't stick around to reduce the clawcraft above to slag was because he didn't want to waste anymore time in saving Horn's life.
But once Jacen's stolen shuttle was in the Guardian's turbolasers sights, none of them fired upon it.
"What's happening?!" Fel exclaimed. "Why aren't you firing!"
"Something's wrong, sir!" one of the gunnery crew reported without looking away from his computer. "We can't seem to get a lock!"
Damn Jedi! Fel cursed inwardly.
He turned to the comm officer and said, "Break off half the squadron chasing Horn and have them blow up that shuttle!"
"Yes, sir!" the officer reported before she tended to her duty.
Not long after, the clawcraft squadron that was still chasing Horn's juking-and-jinking shuttle was halved as six of them turned their attention to the ship containing Jacen and Lowbacca.
. . .
Just after six of the clawcraft chasing him broke off, Corran finally turned away from Hlest and began spewing some lasers toward the half-dozen that remained. They broke off, but one of them was blown away while another had its right wing clipped off before it went spinning toward the planet.
The other four broke off and began to circle away to initiate an attack run at the shuttle. Corran picked one of the clawcraft and blew it away before it could fully turn to meet him. But by then, the other three were ready, and he had to dive hard to avoid their incoming lasers.
When he broke out of his dive and levelled out, he found that the three clawcraft who were still after him were sticking right on his tail, nailing him with hit after hit in spite of his piloting.
Then something critical was finally hit and Corran suddenly lost control as he went spinning away, thankfully, from Hlest, so he at least had no fear of burning away from an uncontrolled descent through the planet's atmosphere. Unfortunately, that was no help to him as the clawcraft soared past him and began circling back to begin a run that would surely blow him away.
And to think it would all end like this, Corran thought bitterly. After failing so many Jedi lately, he would die so ignobly in the Unknown Regions, not even fighting a war this time. If only he could say goodbye to Mirax, Valin, Jysella, even Booster, for that matter...
Suddenly, just as the trio of clawcraft faced him, they broke off again when a flurry of Killik dartships suddenly manifested in their midst; within moments, as the three clawcraft fired upon the dartships, the projectiles fired by the Chiss fighters phased right through the insectoid vessels. And, because of the formation of the clawcraft, all three of them were destroyed simultaneously right before the Killik dartships disappeared as if they had never been there at all.
Corran! Jacen's voice echoed in the Jedi Master's mind. I can only hold back the Star Destroyer's guns off for so long with my powers! Quickly! Get ready to board my shuttle!
Putting the disappearing dartships out of his mind for the moment, Corran hurried out of his seat and headed for the landing ramp; soon, as two more squads of clawcraft launched from the Guardian, he felt a slight bump when the two ships were connected and sealed together. He then opened the landing ramp and hurried into the next shuttle.
He closed the ramp behind him, which prompted another buckling feeling as the two shuttles unsealed from each other, before he dashed past a drugged Lowie, who was seated in one of the passenger seats. He made it to the cockpit where Jacen was piloting and asked, "What did you just do to get them to kill each other?"
"Fallanassi illusion!" Jacen explained without taking his eyes away. "Did the same to the other clawcraft that chased me! Even knowing they're illusions won't help them! Now take the helm and make our way to Hlest to save Jaina! I'll try to get rid of those other clawcraft!"
"Hlest, it is!" Corran agreed as Jacen quickly stood up from the pilot seat. The Jedi Master took his position and reoriented toward the planet while Jacen sat down in the copilot seat and concentrated on getting the Chiss behind them to kill each other with more illusions of Killik dartships.