"Okay," he said. "I know you can hear me, Mara. You can still back out of this."

His voice echoed. There was no response, just as he expected, so he began walking deeper into the maze of drains, lightsaber in his right hand and blaster in the other. The only light around him now was a green haze from the glowing blade of energy.

"I could," he said quietly, "go back, block the entrance to this complex with flammable material, and set fire to it." She could hear him, all right: he could hear water dripping slowly deep in the tunnels. Sound was magnified, even if it was hard to pinpoint the origin. "And the fact that these tunnels have vents means the chimney effect would smoke you out, asphyxiate you, or barbecue you."

Silence.

He held his breath, listening.

Crack.

His right knee exploded with blinding pain as Mara cannoned out horizontally, Force-a.s.sisted, from a side conduit and caught his leg on the joint with her boots, ripping the tendons. As he lost his footing in the narrow pa.s.sage, screaming, he found himself wedged for a second and groping for support. He lashed out with his lightsaber, shaving powdery brick from the wall. Mara dropped to the muddy floor to dodge the lightsaber, then sprang up and sprinted away down the tunnel.

It wasn't a good start. Jacen swore and made himself run after her, willing endorphins to numb his leg and telling himself that he knew she was setting up a trap. She wanted him confined, pinned down, penned.

If she thought tunnels would even the odds, she was wrong. He'd bury her here.

Mara found the perfect trap at the end of one of the culverts. She could hear Jacen's running footsteps and she had a good fifty meters on him.

From here, the vaulted ceiling became lower, and even Mara had to run at a crouch. It wasn't the place to swing a standard lightsaber. The tunnels were in poor condition, and the brick arches were starting to sag and collapse in places.

So he wouldn't oblige her by revealing his physical position in the Force. Fine. She spotted a rusty metal sheet about half a meter wide and laid it carefully across the tunnel floor, propped on stones so he'd tread on it and give her an audible warning when he reached that point.

An intense Force shake of the brickwork and arches in front of and behind the metal plate weakened them, and then she stopped them from collapsing by Force pressure.

Hold 'em up. Wait for him to hit that plate . . .

Going after Jacen would never work. He could never be allowed to set the agenda. He could come after her.

Trap, immobilize, kill.

It wasn't pretty, and it wouldn't capture the public's imagination like a lightsaber display at the academy, but her training was in destruction. Jacen's was in deception.

She could hear him breathing, and the irregular vzzzm-vzzzm-vzzzm of his lightsaber as he stalked, jumping and turning to be sure she wasn't behind him. Then she could hear that he wasn't swinging the blade so much; the short staccato hums and buzzes told her he was running out of room.

She was trapped too, of course, unless she counted the ventilation shafts every fifty meters. But when she said she was leaving here over his dead body, she meant it.

She felt the beginning of a compa.s.sionate human thought about Leia, but killed it stone-dead. It would weaken her.

Jacen's boots crunched over bricks. He was impatient. She was in his way, holding him up when he wanted to get on with something.

Crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch.

If she'd timed it right, he was close to stepping on that rusty plate.

Clang. . .

The rumbling began. She brought down both sections of tunnel, before and behind, with a ma.s.sive exertion in the Force that made her breathless. She didn't hear him call out. Even in the damp conditions, clouds of fine debris filled the air and made her choke.

Mara waited, one hand over her mouth and nose, shoto drawn, and listened in the Force.

There was whimpering and the chunk-chunk sound of the last falling bricks. She didn't expect that weight of debris from a low ceiling to cause impact injury, but to engulf and immobilize him. He wouldn't be dead-yet.

She waited in silence, a nonexistent presence herself, until she could hear no more movement.

Okay. Let's see what I have to do to end this.

An arm was all that protruded from the rubble. Through a fist-sized gap, she could see the wet, blinking glint of an eye and bloodstained face. A hand reached out to her, fingers splayed, b.l.o.o.d.y and shaking.

Other people might have felt an urge to take that hand, the most distinctively human of things, but it was an old, tired Sith stunt, and she'd used it herself too many times.

She took her blaster and leveled it at the eye, one-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. She had the shoto ready in case a coup de grace was called for.

She felt as detached and steady as she'd ever been as the Emperor's Hand.

"Tell my mom I'm sorry I failed her," Jacen whispered.

"She knows," Mara said, and squeezed the trigger.

chapter twenty-one.

Nu kyr'adyc, shi taab'echaaj'la.

Not gone, merely marching far away.

-Mandalorian phrase for the departed KAVAN.

They said that the human body was capable of extraordinary feats of strength when in extremis. For a Jedi, it was something else entirely.

Jacen Solo wasn't ready to die, not now, not so close to his ascendance, and not in a stinking drain like vermin.

He deflected the energy bolt with one last surge of the Force and sent the rubble erupting off his crushed and bleeding body like a detonation. Bricks hammered the walls and rained fragments, knocking Mara flat like a bomb blast. She made an animal noise that was more anger than pain and flailed for a moment as she tried to get up.

The effort froze Jacen for two vital seconds. But he knew if he didn't get up now and fight back, Mara would come in for the kill, again and again, until he was worn down and too weak to fend her off.

He scrambled to his feet, staggering more than standing, and suddenly understood.

It was Mara who had to die to fulfill his destiny.

Killing her was the test: the words of the prophecy were meaningless, and at a visceral level he knew that her death was the pivotal act. He didn't know how, and this wasn't the time to stop and think about it. He surrendered totally to instinct for the first time in ages. Whatever guided a Sith's hand had to guide him now.

But he was hurt, and badly.

Ben ... he didn't know where Ben fitted into this, but now he knew he did, as surely as he knew anything. Jacen didn't care, because he knew he had to kill Mara now and nothing else would make sense until he did that.

He fumbled for his lightsaber and thumbed it into life again. Mara was already back on her feet, coming at him with the shoto and vibroblade, brick dust and black-red blood snaking down her forehead from a scalp cut. She leapt at him with the shoto held left-handed, fencing-style, seared the angle of his cheekbone, and caught him under the tip of chin with the vibroblade as he jerked back.

She shouldn't have been able to get near him. He had total mastery, and she was just athletic and fast. He pushed back at her in the Force, sending her crashing against a wall with a loud grunt, but she kept coming at him, one-two, one-two with the shoto and the blade, and he was being driven back, his strength ebbing. He needed s.p.a.ce to fight.

He drew his dart gun and fired one after the other, but Mara scattered all four needles in a blur of blue light. They fell to the ground. He turned and scrambled through the collapsed brick, using the Force to hurl debris up at her from the floor of the pa.s.sage while she leapt from block to boulder to chunk of masonry, until she Force-leapt onto his back and brought him down.

They rolled. This wasn't a duel: it was a brawl. She thrust her vibroblade up under his chin and he jerked his head to one side, feeling the tip skate from his jaw to his hairline as it missed his jugular. He couldn't draw the weapons he needed. He was losing blood, losing strength, waning, flailing his lightsaber to fend her off. It was almost useless in such a close-quarters struggle. Mara, manic and panting, flicked the shoto to counter every desperate stabbing thrust.

"Ben . . . I'll see you dead first. . . before . . . you get . . .

Ben."

Jacen was on the knife-edge between dying and killing. They grappled, Force-pushed, Force-crushed: he threw her back again, trying to Force-jolt her spine and paralyze her for a moment, but somehow she deflected it and bricks flew out of the wall as if someone had punched them through from the other side. She almost Force-s.n.a.t.c.hed the lightsaber from his hand, but even with his injuries he hung on to it. He wouldn't die. He couldn't, not now.

"You can't beat me," he gasped. "It's not meant to be."

"Really?" Mara snarled. "I say it is."

Then she launched herself at him-unthinking, a wild woman, hair flying-and he Force-pushed to send her slamming against a pillar in midleap. But the battering he'd taken and the ferocity of her relentless attack had blinded him to danger from another quarter. As he lurched backward to avoid her, his legs went from under him and he stumbled into a gaping crack opened up by the subsidence. He fell badly: red-hot pain seared from ankle to knee. His lightsaber went flying. Pain could be ignored, but the moment it took him to get to his feet again was enough for Mara to right herself and come back at him with the shoto and plunge it into the soft tissue just under the end of his collarbone.

Lightsaber wounds hurt a lot more than he ever imagined. Jacen screamed. He summoned his own weapon back to his hand and Mara crashed into him, knocking him flat again and pinning him down. Her vibroblade stopped a hand span from his throat as he managed to grab her hair and drag her face nearer and nearer to his lightsaber. She struggled to pull back, hacking at him with the shoto but blocked by his dwindling Force power each time.

Her vibroblade grazed his neck. He fumbled in his belt for a dart.

She jerked back with a ma.s.sive effort, leaving him clutching a handful of red hair, and the only thing that crossed his mind as she arched her back and held her arms high to bring both shoto and vibroblade down into his chest was that she would never, ever harm Ben.

Jacen stared into her eyes and instantly created the illusion of Ben's face beneath her. She blinked.

It gave him the edge for that fraction of a moment. It was long enough to ram the poison dart into her leg with its protective plastoid cone still in place.

It was just a small needle, ten centimeters long. He stabbed her so hard that the sharp end punched through the cone and the fabric of her pants.

Mara gasped and looked down at her leg as if she was puzzled rather than hurt. The dart quivered as she moved, and then fell to the floor.

"Oh . . . it's done . . ." Jacen said. The shoto fell from her hand and she made a vague and uncontrolled pawing movement with the vibroblade. It caught him in the bicep, but there was no strength behind the blow, and she dropped the weapon. "I'm sorry, Mara. Had to be you.

Thought it was Ben. But it's over now, it's over . . ."

"What have you done? What the stang have you done to me?" But she was already losing her balance as the poison paralyzed her, and she slumped to one side as he got to his feet, staring up at him more with shock than rage or fear.

"The prophecy." It didn't matter now: the toxin-complex, relatively painless-was circulating through her body. "Don't fight it. No healing trance. Just let go . . ."

Mara tried to get up but sank back to sit on her heels, with an expression as if she'd forgotten something and was trying to remember.

She crumpled against the wall. Jacen had never felt such relief. It didn't have to be Allana, or Tenel Ka, or even Ben. It was over, all over.

"What?" Mara said. She tried to put her fingers to her lips, shaking, but her hand fell back to her lap. She looked at them as if expecting to see blood.

Jacen suppressed his instinct to help her. "It's my destiny, Mara- to be a Sith Lord, and bring order and justice. I had to kill you to do it. You're going to save so many people, Mara. You've saved Ben. You've saved Allana, too. It's not a waste, believe me."

"You're ... as vile as he was."

Jacen could hardly understand what she was saying. "Who?"

"Palpatine."

"It's not like that," he said. He had to make her see what was happening. It was important. He owed her that revelation. She'd made the sacrifice, although he was now starting to wonder what that meant for whatever love he had to give up. "It's not about ambition. It's about the galaxy, about peace. It's about building a different world."

She stared back at him, and now he could see-and feel-her disgust.

He wasn't sure if it was aimed at him or at herself.

Jacen hurt. He was starting to feel the full extent of his injuries, and he needed to heal himself. He also needed to get out of this tunnel.

Mara was breathing heavily now, one hand slack in her lap but the other still clenching and unclenching as if trying to form a fist to give him one final punch. Her vivid green eyes were still bright with relentless purpose. He knew he would try to forget them every day of his life.

"You think . . . you've won," she said, slurred, but utterly lucid and unafraid. "But Luke will crush you . . . and I refuse ... to let you . . . destroy the future . . . for my Ben."

Jacen sat and waited, almost expecting a prophecy from her to help him make sense of what he'd done. But after a few moments, he felt the final discharge of elemental energy that every Force-user would notice and comprehend.

Ben was the last word she ever spoke.

KAVAN.

Lumiya felt the Force shift subtly like tectonic plates in motion.

She hadn't realized that the decisive moment would feel quite like that.

"Ship," she said, "The new Dark Lord needs me. Follow him." Then she left to prepare for death, intending to die well.

KAVAN.

Ben suddenly couldn't hear the voice of the Sith sphere. His own name-Ben, Ben, Ben-drowned out every other sound, even though deep in his head, it was quieter than a whisper, a summons and a farewell for him alone. He forgot about Lumiya, and stumbled toward the source of the voice, blinded by tears. "Mom!" he yelled. "Mom!"

PERLEMIAN TRADE ROUTE.

In the c.o.c.kpit of his StealthX heading for Hapes, Luke Skywalker felt a hand brush his hair, and as he reached out involuntarily to touch it, he knew his world had ended.

chapter twenty-two.

I don't know what's happening, Mand'alor, but the amount of secure GA comm traffic flying around the Hapan Cl.u.s.ter now has to be seen to be believed. Major panic ongoing. Stand by.