“I’ve got blips on the horizon,” Corran muttered.
“I see them,” Tahiri said, her heart sinking slightly. Everything had gone fine, up until now. The holes in Yuuzhan’tar’s planetary defenses had been where they were supposed to be. They had come through the upper atmosphere fine. Corran hadn’t even complained about her flying. But now, just when they were almost there, trouble came hunting like a qhal.
“They haven’t seen us yet,” she told him. “They’re atmospheric fliers—they don’t have the legs we do.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Corran said. “The minute they figure out something is bogus, this mission is over. And you’re coming in way too steep.”
“I know,” Tahiri said. She could feel the yorik coral hull of the ship beginning to blister. She straightened out infinitesimally, but that sent them bouncing violently across a thermal boundary.
“I thought you knew how to fly these things,” Corran grunted.
“I do,” she said, feeling her irritation grow. “You want to avoid our blip friends, don’t you? That means coming to ground fast, before they come in range to scent us out.”
“They’re going to see us,” Corran said. “Because we’re going to burn like a meteor if you don’t slow up.”
“All the better,” Tahiri said. “You saw the system chart. There must have been half a billion satellites in orbit around Coruscant. Without anyone to maintain them, they must fall by the dozens every day.”
“Good point,” Corran conceded. “They won’t notice us as we disintegrate.”
“Right.”
“We’re only ten klicks from the ground now.”
Tahiri nodded. “Hang on, and hope the dovin basals in this thing are healthy.”
She nosed up ever so slightly, and now her goal came in sight—Coruscant’s single sea. It didn’t look like the holos she’d seen. There, it had been a sapphire in a silver setting, an artificial bathing pool on a planetary scale. Now it was a vast jade bezeled in a landscape of rust and verdigris.
The fliers were almost in range.
“This is going to be really, really close,” she told Corran.
“Great,” Corran said, teeth gritted.
“From what I’ve heard, you’ve done crazier things than this,” Tahiri said.
“Yes. Me. I’m a highly trained pilot. You’ve flown, what, three times?”
“The controls are yours if you want them.”
The controls, of course, consisted of a cognition hood that fit on Tahiri’s head. She guided the ship by becoming a part of it. A non–Yuuzhan Vong could fly one—Jaina had proven that—but it helped to have the language and the instincts.
And her instincts told her she couldn’t wait any longer or Corran really was going to have cause for complaint. She cut in the dovin basals, pushing them away from the planet, killing their velocity. She nudged the applied force up quickly, so quickly that the living gravitic drives couldn’t also fully compensate for the g’s they were pulling. She felt her weight double, then triple, and the blood in her brain started looking for a way out of her toes.
Hang on, she thought. Hang on.
Blotches of darkness filled her vision, and her chest felt like a bantha was sitting on it. She saw the blips coming into range, entering—
Then the lozenge-shaped craft hit the water and skipped like a stone. Everything went crazy for a moment. She didn’t quite black out, but the ship’s pain jammed through her own thoroughly confused senses. She growled, then howled.
When it all made sense again she saw green.
They were sinking.
“Well,” Corran said. “That was—interesting. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Now let’s see if it was worth it.”
The blips—or, rather, the projected symbols that represented the approaching craft—continued to get closer.
Something in the ship creaked as they continued to sink.
“I wonder how deep it is here,” Corran mused.
“Not too deep, I hope,” Tahiri said. “If I use the drive with them this close, they’ll notice. The hull should be able to take a good bit of pressure.”
The blips were right overhead, now, and they suddenly broke their pattern.
“Not good,” Corran said.
“Khapet,” Tahiri snarled. She’d screwed up. Now they would have to fight, run, and hope to make it to a safe place to jump to hyperspace before they were overwhelmed. Nice going, Tahiri. Prove to Corran you really are the stupid little girl he remembers.
“They’re going,” Corran breathed. “They must have just been investigating the splash. Or the burn trail.” He nodded. “Good call. I don’t want to do it again anytime soon, but …”
“That’s two of us,” Tahiri said, sighing and watching the fliers continue on their patrol.
Somewhere, something cracked. It sounded like ceramic breaking.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s just ease us up a little.”
“Do that,” Corran said, “but don’t surface—wait, how well can this thing work underwater?”
“Well enough. Unless I have to use voids.”
“Yes, let’s not do that,” Corran said. “Can you disable the function?”
“Sure. But why?”
Corran tapped his datapad and pulled up a chart.
“The Western Sea is like any sea—it’s fed by rivers. But because Coruscant is Coruscant, the rivers are artificial. Big pipes, to be exact. If we take this one”—he indicated a spot on the chart—“it will get us pretty close to where we’re going.”
“Assuming the tubes are still there,” Tahiri said. “Yuuzhan’ tar isn’t Coruscant.”
“It’s worth a look,” Corran said. “Anything that will keep us below the level of detection—and between what Jacen and our best intelligence tells us, they don’t have very secure control of a lot of the old underground. That’s why our Prophet is there, presumably.”
“It’s not the way he told us to come.”
“No, it isn’t,” Corran said. “Which gives it another mark, as far as I’m concerned.”
Tahiri nodded and changed her heading. “I hope we don’t bump into anything,” she said. “I can only see ten meters or so.”
“Just go slowly. We’re not in a hurry anymore—the rendezvous is hours away.”
They found the river, a mammoth tube whose diameter the ship’s radar analog suggested was a hundred meters or so. Tahiri kept them centered in it, and worked her way slowly up its length.
“That’s funny,” she said, after a few minutes.
“Funny ha-ha or funny we’re about to die?”
“Odd. What were these tubes made of?”
“Duracrete, mostly. Why?”
“That’s what the sensor signature was like when we started in. But it’s changed, now.”
“Changed how?”
“It’s irregular.”
“Maybe it’s decomposing,” Corran suggested.
“And not metal,” she added.
“Let me guess. It’s alive.”
“Probably.”
Corran scratched his beard. “The Yuuzhan Vong must be replacing the abiotic drainage systems with biotic ones. That would be typical.”
“Yes.”
“How far back was the boundary? How long have we been in this new part?”
“We just passed it. We’re only a few tens of meters in.”
“Right,” Corran said. “Back up. I want to think about this for a moment.”
Tahiri shrugged. “You’re in charge.”
“Yes, I am. I was wondering if you knew that.”
It didn’t quite sound like he was kidding.
Tahiri reversed direction until they were back in the old tunnel.
“What would they be using in place of the old pipe?” Corran asked. “Were we about to swim up the gut of a giant worm?”
Tahiri considered. “I’m not really sure,” she said. “The shaper damuteks have succession pools in their centers. Waste goes into them to be purified, and they have roots that go down into the planet to draw up water and minerals.”
Corran nodded. “I remember hearing that Anakin crawled down through one of those ‘roots’ so he could hide in subterranean caves long enough to build a new lightsaber.”
“And you think the Yuuzhan Vong are converting the Western Sea into a huge succession pool?”
“Maybe. Or it might be more like a ship’s maw luur. It’s the same idea—a combination nutrient bank and sewage treatment plant—but the technology is a little different because a ship’s maw luur is a closed system. Here, I’m not sure which they would use—but in a lot of ways, Coruscant was more like a worldship than a normal planet, right? No natural ecosystem?”
“Yes. In fact, the Western Sea served something of the purpose you describe anyway.”
“Sure. So while they’re still deconstructing the place, maybe their interim design is based more on worldship than planet.”
“Makes sense. So if this is a big maw luur, we’re—” His eyes widened. “Get us out, now.”
Tahiri gave the command, and the dovin basals quivered to life. They began moving back toward the entrance.
“New plan,” Corran said. “I’ve no intention of going up a world-sized digestive tract.”
“I hate to say this,” Tahiri said, “but that revelation—”
Something slammed into the ship, hard.
“—may have come a little late.”
“What is it?” Corran said.
“Something big,” Tahiri said. “We’re inside it.”
“Well get us outside it!”
“I’m trying, but it must have ten times our mass.”
Her skin suddenly began burning. “Uh-oh,” she muttered. “It can digest yorik coral, whatever it is.”
“Part of the maw luur?”
“There are symbiotic organisms in a maw luur that help break down larger things. Nothing this big, though.”
“But this is a really big maw luur,” Corran said. “Digesting really big things.”
“True,” Tahiri replied. “Anyway, if you’ve got any suggestions on what to do here—”
“Fire the plasma cannon.”
“In an enclosed space?” Was Corran crazy? “That could be bad.”
“So could being digested.”
“Right.”
She bit back a shriek as plasma ejected into the water and brought it instantly to boiling, scalding and compressing her hull. The pressure and heat mounted, peaked—and then they were tumbling free. When they finally stabilized, the water in the eyelamps had gone dark blackish red, and nasty chunks of pulverized meat floated all around them.
“Well, that was disgusting,” Corran said.
“Yes,” Tahiri informed him. “And this tube is sucking.”
“I agree. So let’s get out of it.”
“No,” she said, trying to remain calm. “I mean it’s sucking us up it—capillary action, probably, like the roots of a succession pool.”
“Surely not too hard to counteract with the dovin basals?”
“Not at all,” Tahiri replied. “If, that is, the dovin basals were working.”