The Gallofree personnel transport Jeolocas dropped out of hyperspace exactly where she was supposed to, so far from any star system and from any widely known hyperspace route that the only thing her occupants should have seen was the surrounding expanse of stars and nebulae in all their color and purity.
Instead, as the whirling lines of hyperspace travel straightened and then foreshortened and Jeolocas dropped into realspace, clearly visible from the bridge was a Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog, an oblong mass of glistening red-and-black yorik coral, less than twenty kilometers away, easy firing distance.
Jeolocas’s captain, a young man from Corellia who had grown up on the exploits of famed Corellian pilots like Han Solo and Wedge Antilles, suddenly felt the kinship he’d always known with those heroes fade away to a cold recognition of his own mortality. For the first time in his life, he felt no ambition to see an enemy spacecraft in his targeting reticle, to dogfight with enemy pilots in the thick of battle. In fact, the merchant corps he served suddenly seemed more dangerous than he could endure. “We’re dead,” he said, his voice a croak.
The officer next to him, a Twi’lek female with pale blue skin, merely smiled. “Not unless you want to be.”
“What?” He stared at her, looking for any sign that she was distressed, confused, surprised in the least. He saw none. He didn’t know her well—hadn’t known her prior to a day ago, when she’d been assigned to this mission on the direct recommendation of the Talon Karrde organization—and now he understood that everything he had known about her, her name, her service record, all had to be a lie. He looked around the interior of the command pod and realized that she’d sent the other five ship’s officers off on various duties just prior to arrival, leaving the two of them alone here. “You knew they’d be here.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re Peace Brigade, you sold us out—”
“It doesn’t matter who I am. It only matters that you do as you’re told.”
He drew his service blaster. He’d practiced his draw for years until it was as smooth as shimmersilk and faster than the eye could follow. He’d practiced it until Han Solo himself, had he ever met the man, would have been impressed with his speed and deadliness.
As he brought the weapon up, he felt a sharp pain in his wrist.
He looked down. His hand was empty, bent back at a bad angle. His blaster was in the Twi’lek woman’s hand and tucked barrel-first under his chin. She looked slightly more serious now, as if deciding whether to forgive him for the minor transgression of trying to kill her. The pain from his wrist jolted up to his elbow, then made more leisurely progress up to his shoulder while he stared, uncomprehending. He cradled his injured hand.
“Do you want to live?” the woman asked.
He nodded.
She smiled again. She reached up with her free hand and took the captain’s cap from him, settling it down on her own head. “Then go hide. Don’t come out until I call for you.”
He turned and marched, his legs stiff, from the bridge. From the corner of his eye, he could see, through the viewport, the Yuuzhan Vong frigate launching a shuttle of some sort.
Suddenly, the thought of being less dashing than Han Solo didn’t bother him as much as it used to. He could happily be less dashing than Han Solo for the rest of his life … so long as the rest of his life was measured in years rather than minutes.
The air lock opened and the armored warrior led his unit of Yuuzhan Vong into the hateful metal corridors of the transport.
Waiting for him was a single ship’s officer, a female of a species he had seen before, a species whose name he could not recall; her skin was a pleasing blue two shades lighter than the bags under his eyes, and her hairless head separated in back into two fleshy tails. She wore a blue uniform jumpsuit and cap, both decorated in gold trim. A blaster pistol lay at her feet.
“I am Bastori Rak,” he said. “Who is captain here?”
“I am.” The female offered him a respectful nod but did not meet his eyes. Nor did she exhibit fear.
Bastori Rak hesitated for a moment. His usual tactic during such boardings was to instill pain and fear into the ship’s officers to eliminate any possibility of defiance, but no defiance was being offered. It was obvious that the female already knew she was a subject of the Yuuzhan Vong. He briefly considered striking her anyway, but decided to test the extent of her willing obedience instead.
He drove the pointed end of his amphistaff into the blaster pistol’s grip, shearing through it and into the deck plating beyond, then shook the blaster’s remains free from his weapon. “What is your destination, and what do you carry?” he asked.
“We are bound for the Hapes Cluster with a cargo made up mostly of refugees,” she said. “We carry seven crew, three hundred twenty-six refugees—three hundred forty if you count the ones who are in hidden compartments—as well as food, personal effects, trade items, and Jedi training materials. Shall I give you the codes to our computer security now?”
“Yes, and then you will follow—Jeedai training materials?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of materials?”
“I’m not sure. I saw only the contents of one barrel. They include holos of training regimens, holos of Jedi history and philosophy, infectious agents that transform normal beings into Jedi, a lot of lightsabers from their new manufacturing plant, that sort of thing.”
For a moment, Bastori Rak could only gape at her. Visions of his future passed briefly before his eyes. A find of this significance would result in his advancement, in his name accumulating long-deserved fame. Finally, he managed, “Are there Jeedai here?”
The woman considered. “I don’t think so. Though if there are, I expect they’ll be back with the training materials, destroying them.”
“Take us there at once.”
She shrugged and turned down the long corridor leading into the transport’s depths.
Two levels down, in one of the forward holds, Bastori Rak and his warriors looked with distaste at the tall stacks of nearly identical cargo containers, obviously the result of mechanical manufacture, as the female led them between aisles of the things. “There,” she said, and pointed.
Set out in an open area between two stacks were barrel-shaped metal containers, a bit over a meter tall and nearly a meter wide at their thickest point, arrayed in four rows of four. Each was labeled JEDI ACADEMY PROPERTY. DANGER. DO NOT OPEN.
Bastori Rak felt light-headed. “Can we move them without harm?”
“I don’t think so,” the woman said. She held her hand up, palm toward the ceiling, a gesture that suggested she was begging for something. “Here, let me show you.”
Bastori Rak looked at her. She now met his eyes, her expression one of mocking humor.
In his peripheral vision, Bastori Rak saw something silver moving from above. It smacked down into the woman’s palm.
The hilt of a lightsaber.
She said, “Embrace the pain, scarhead,” and ignited the weapon; a bright silver blade of energy shimmered into existence.
The weapon’s distinctive snap-hiss noise jolted Bastori Rak into action. He swung up his amphistaff in a blocking motion.
Her strike, a lateral slice, danced around his parry. It sliced the miniature villip from his shoulder and seared into his neck between the vonduun crab armor on his torso and his helmet. He felt blinding pain, pain too great for him to accept or ignore, and the amphistaff flew from his nerveless fingers as he collapsed.
But he was not dead, and could still see. He saw his second-in-command strike at the woman, saw her graceful parry, heard her laugh. He saw the tops of the Jeedai barrels bulge as their contents stood up within them and smashed through the thin metal sheets sealing them.
Their contents were droids, war droids, weapons at the ready. Their blasters opened up, chewing through his warriors.
There was blinding whiteness to his vision now. He struggled to stay focused but could not. He died watching his warriors jittering in the concentrated fire coming from the hated war droids.
Colonel Gavin Darklighter, sitting in darkness relieved only by the glows from his instruments, hit his comlink. “That’s the signal,” he said. “Launch.”
The darkness above his head parted as his X-wing’s camouflage—a cargo container bolted to the transport’s top hull, immediately before the command pod—parted and folded down to either side. All around, the other eleven snubfighters of Rogue Squadron were also being released, also hitting thrusters as they hurtled toward the Yuuzhan Vong frigate.
The Yuuzhan Vong were quick on the uptake—Gavin could allow them that. Almost as soon as Rogue Squadron cleared the transport, the frigate’s plasma cannons were opening up, directing streams of superheated material at his X-wings. “S-foils to attack position,” he said, “and fire at will.”
The wings of the twelve snubfighters opened into their characteristic X shape. Before Gavin’s were even locked into place, Nevil and two other Rogues had fired proton torpedoes.
Gavin and the rest waited for a handful of seconds, slewing their snubfighters around in an effort to keep the plasma cannon trails off them, then opened up with their lasers. Twelve sets of quad-linked lasers flashed, sending their destructive energy across twenty klicks of space in an instant, bypassing the proton torpedoes, hurtling against the frigate—
Hurtling into the voids projected before the frigate. The vessel’s dovin basals, responding to the threat of the first attacks to arrive, created their gravitic singularities in front of the laser attacks and swallowed the majority of their energy.
They were still swallowing, in fact, when the late-arriving proton torpedoes flashed between them and struck the frigate’s hull. They detonated, one, two, three brilliant explosions, and as the last of them began to fade Gavin could see the mighty frigate cracked in two, each half spitting forth flaming debris. The plasma cannons no longer aimed their energies at Rogue Squadron; two of them still fired, sending burning blobs randomly into space.
“Confirmed kill,” Gavin said, “no friendly losses. Do you read, Gambler?”
Lando Calrissian’s smooth tones were preserved across the comlink. “We read, Rogue Leader. Likewise, no friendly casualties here. A beautiful execution all around.”
“We’ll see you back at base, then. Rogue Leader out.” Gavin led the Rogues in an easy loop around until they were oriented toward Borleias. A few moments later, his squadron made the jump into hyperspace.
Lando looked over the battlefield that had been a cargo hold. Twenty Yuuzhan Vong warriors lay dead, some of them no longer recognizable as bipedal humanoids, all over the deck plating. Lando’s fifteen war droids and Alema Rar, the Twi’lek Jedi, moved among them, dispatching wriggling amphistaffs and the occasional thud bug and razor bug set free by the blaster damage that had killed their owners. Alema whistled to herself as she worked.
Lando consulted his datapad. He sent a signal to query a device elsewhere in the vessel. “Not good. Danni’s device isn’t indicating any weird gravitic fluctuations. Meaning that there probably isn’t a tracking creature on this vessel.”
Alema nodded and switched her lightsaber off. “Refugees have to be turning one another in. I’m not sure for what. Violence threatened against their loved ones, maybe. Maybe some sort of bribe.” She shrugged. “We’ll figure out what they’re doing.”
Lando turned his attention to his droid aide. “One-One-A, let’s get this cleaned up. Get rid of the biological remains only, don’t worry about the blaster scorches. Load representative weapons and gear into a barrel and seal it tight, then load it onto the shuttle.”
One-One-A saluted. “Acknowledged.”
“Would you like to celebrate?” That was Alema. She wore a curious smile, artificially demure.
Lando turned back to her. “What did you have in mind?”
She just continued smiling.
“Oh.” He gave her his best smile in return, modulated his voice to its smoothest register. “I find myself flattered. But I am a married man.”
She cocked her head as though the answer were incomplete.
“So I have to decline,” he concluded.
She shrugged as though it were of no concern. “I’ll prep the shuttle, then.”
When she was gone, Lando turned back to 1-1A. “Remind me again of the rewards of being virtuous?”
“I have never reminded you of this before.”
“That was a rhetorical question.”
“Nor have I ever told you of such rewards prior to not reminding you.”
“It was still rhetorical. I really need to give you an upgraded conversation module if you’re going to be talking all the time.”
In the distance, they heard Alema calling, “Captain, captain, wherever you are! You can come out now!”
Han came awake with Leia shaking him. Their chamber was dark, and he could feel that only a few hours had passed since they’d gone to sleep. Grogginess lay over him like a second blanket. It occurred to him that perhaps Borleias had never become a true colony world because everyone who lived there was continually sleep-deprived. “What, what?”
“The control center just reached me on the comlink,” Leia said. There was a breathless excitement to her voice, a happiness Han hadn’t heard in a long time. “Jaina’s insystem and headed this way. Get—”
Han was suddenly on his feet, the grogginess evaporated like a snubfighter shield hit by a laser cannon. He lurched toward the footlocker that held his clothes.
“—dressed.”
Luke watched them spiral down from the sky, a battered-looking X-wing and a disk-shaped Hapan freighter, landing in the same portion of the field that had briefly served the Advisory Council’s vehicles.
Jaina Solo—heir to some measure of her father Han’s lankiness, with features as deceptively delicate as her mother’s, her brown hair clinging to her scalp after hours in a helmet—descended the freighter’s boarding ramp and was immediately enfolded in the embrace of her parents. Behind her was Lowbacca, nose lifted as if trying to scent friends among the crowd; he offered a rumbling Wookiee growl of welcome as Tahiri, Zekk, and other academy friends bolted from the fringe of onlookers to embrace him.
Kyp Durron descended from the X-wing cockpit. Slender and dark-haired, with sharp features that seemed sculpted to convey anger and discontent but currently were calm, he was, for once, not dressed in stylish civilian clothes, but instead wore an anonymous pilot’s jumpsuit.
Luke moved up to join Kyp. Mara didn’t keep pace with him; Luke knew she was waiting for an opening to talk to Jaina. Luke gave the problematic Jedi a nod he hoped looked friendly. “Kyp.”
“Master Skywalker.” Oddly, there was neither irony nor anger in Kyp’s voice.
“You seem tired.”
“No, I don’t,” Kyp said. “Just different.”
They brought out a dark-hours meal for the latecomers and heard their story—a free-form recounting, to be sure, made somewhat random by the way Jaina, Kyp, and Lowbacca tended to interrupt one another with corrections and elaborations—of the days the three had spent on Hapes after the departure of Han and Leia. Wedge, acting more or less as master of ceremonies for the meal, brought in one more participant; Luke was startled to see Jag Fel enter the chamber.
Fel was a tall, wiry young man with close-cropped black hair, a scar running from his right eyebrow upward and then being echoed in a white lock of hair. He was Wedge’s nephew and, not surprisingly, a brilliant pilot, having inherited reflexes from both the Antilles and Fel families and having been raised among the militaristic, blue-skinned Chiss, among whom his parents had chosen to live. Fel’s black uniform harked back to those of old-time Imperial TIE fighter pilots, but was cut along different lines, with red piping along tunic and pants. Luke had been aware that Jag had been on Hapes with Jaina, but thought he’d departed from there for distant regions of space.
Han tried to find seats near Jaina, but, curiously, Leia chose places far enough away to give her a little distance, a little perspective on their daughter.
“So the Yuuzhan Vong are clustering around Hapes, but Tenel Ka is in charge there as Queen Mother,” Luke summarized. “Some good, some bad. Even with her fleets so badly reduced and her danger so close, Hapes could be a strong ally for us. We’ll need to offer her whatever support we can manage to keep the Vong from making any further inroads there.”
Kyp made a sour face. “I don’t think Hapes can ever be sorted out.” Then he looked thoughtful and added, “On the other hand, I’m the last one who ought to be offering that kind of opinion.”
“We’re lucky things turned out as well as they did there,” Luke said. “Ta’a Chume could still be in charge, could still be making things harder for all of us.” He turned to Jaina. “Seriously, you understand that I wasn’t questioning your decision. I wasn’t hinting that you should throw yourself on the thermal detonator that a marriage to Isolder would represent.”
Jaina offered him an unperturbed smile. “I know what you meant, Uncle Luke. I made the right choice.”
Han leaned rightward so he could whisper to Leia. “She’s changed. Just in the days since we left Hapes.”
Leia nodded, imperceptible to all but him. “She’s settled something in her mind. I think she’s come through one of the conflicts that was eating at her.” She sagged just a little. “But whatever she settled, it wasn’t about me. She didn’t quite relax when I was holding her out there.”
“She’ll find the right course through what she’s dealing with. Give her time.”
Wedge, focused on Jaina, asked, “So, what are your plans now? You’re still on Rogue Squadron’s reserve roster, but your situation is unique, so I’m not going to call you up for duty if you and Luke feel you’ll be more useful elsewhere. I can put you in touch with one of the fleet groups if that’s what you want … but we could really use your piloting skills on Borleias.”
Jaina looked around. Han saw her gaze click to a stop, ever so briefly, on him, Leia, and, curiously, Kyp and Jag. “I’d like to stay,” she said. “But I want to do something. I want to form a new starfighter squadron, if I can put together enough pilots and matériel, and practice some tactics involving the Force. Force-based coordination.”
Luke’s eyebrows rose. “Sort of like what Joruus C’baoth did for Thrawn.”
Jaina shrugged. “I’m not talking about ancient history, I’m talking about now.” She glanced around at the winces and dark looks she received from everyone present who was over the age of thirty. She offered up a calm smile. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, I’m not talking about something on the scale that C’baoth used. Just within a fighter squadron. The Yuuzhan Vong think that I’m associated somehow with Yun-Harla, their goddess of trickery. I’d like to play on that … and this means coming up with methods of trickery. Or what seems like trickery to them. That means the Force to me. The Force, and maybe the best advice from the best pilots, like Uncle Luke and General Antilles.”
Wedge considered. “I’ve heard a little about this Trickster goddess thing. I think it has real potential for psychological warfare. So I’m inclined to move on this idea. But, Jaina, if we’re going to have the Yuuzhan Vong believe you’re tied to this Yun-Harla, we’re going to have to treat you like a goddess.”
Jaina turned her smile on him. “That sounds terrible.”
“I’m not joking. I suspect it means special treatment to the point of isolation. You’d have to be seen getting benefits and considerations that you haven’t earned, which will cause bad feelings among pilots who have earned them. You’d only be able to talk freely with people who were in on the secret, and only in areas that Intelligence has certified are free of listeners. It’s going to distance you from people.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Luke leaned forward. “I also think this is something that ought to be done. Anything new we can do to keep the Yuuzhan Vong off balance is worth exploring. And since I have another mission priority now, why don’t I just hand command of Twin Suns Squadron over to her? With your approval, Wedge.”
Jaina’s head turned as though it had been snapped around by a Wookiee wrestler. “You mean that?”
“I do. And I don’t think the symbolism will be lost on the Yuuzhan Vong. Luke Skywalker gives up his personal squadron—”
“A squadron with the word twin in the name,” Jag said, his tone low.
“Good point,” Luke said. “It was actually named in memory of Tatooine, but they don’t know that.”
Wedge nodded. “Jaina could use some command experience, and I know something she doesn’t—which is that Corran Horn has rejoined Rogue Squadron. Meaning that we’d have two starfighter squadrons with Jedi in them. That might allow us some even more extravagant experiments in tactics.”
“I brought in a fighter squadron from Hapes,” Jag said. “But the notion of learning tactics involving Force coordination—and playing with the minds of our enemies—is an intriguing one. I think I’d like to join your Twin Suns Squadron.”
“I would, too.” That was Kyp Durron. Han saw a momentary flash of surprise in Luke’s eyes.
Wedge didn’t bother to conceal his own surprise. “You’re both sure? About taking orders from a squadron leader with a lot less command experience than you have?”
“Yes,” Jag said. “I know how to take orders as well as give them. And my second-in-command, Shawnkyr Nuruodo, is certainly qualified to lead the squadron I brought.”
Kyp nodded. “I suspect I’d benefit from analyzing and advising for a while instead of leading. If I start to chafe, I can always transfer out.”
Han felt Leia’s breath on his ear, heard her whisper, “It looks like Jaina’s not the only one who went through changes.”
“Obviously a fake Kyp,” he whispered back. “You distract him. I’ll shoot him under the table.”
Wedge turned a smile, tinged just slightly with amused malice, on Jaina. “There you go. An instant squadron for you to reconfigure as the honor guard of the manifestation of a Yuuzhan Vong goddess. This means that the very first thing you get is bureaucratic personnel matters to deal with. I’ll see if I can round up an Ewok pilot candidate to throw your way just to make things more difficult. You’ll be my age in no time.”
Nen Yim stood over the warmaster as he lay on the table. She was uneasy, for her life hung in the balance, and everything, including the simple fact that she stood while Tsavong Lah lay before her, was wrong.
She was a woman of the Yuuzhan Vong. A member of the shaper caste, she wore the living headdress of the shapers, and among her living decorations and mutilations was her right hand, not the one she was born with. It was an eight-fingered shaper’s hand, each of the digits acting as a tool useful to her profession. Her teacher, Mezhan Kwaad, had been a heretic, disobedient to the rulers of the Yuuzhan Vong, contemptuous of the gods, but Nen Yim had learned many secrets of the shapers’ craft. She was soon called by Supreme Overlord Shimrra himself, as his personal shaper, who had temporarily released her to the warlord.
Under a curved lens—a living creature that adjusted its shape and therefore magnification at its operator’s touch—was Tsavong Lah’s left arm. Nen Yim carefully studied it, noting the appearance of the flesh at the join of Yuuzhan Vong arm and radank claw, observing the behavior of the carrion-eaters upon it. They were huge in this view, the size of a thumbnail, possessed of spiky hairs, sharp angular legs, and pincers adept at digging through flesh.
“Well?” the warmaster said.
Nen Yim considered her reply, but she had little to lose by presenting him with the naked truth, so her delay was not long. “There is little I can tell you after one brief examination. But I can give you these facts.
“First, what is happening here is not like any implant rejection I have ever seen.”
“Why?”
“These creatures are bred to consume dead flesh. They are useful for cleansing wounds. They are attacking the necrotic flesh of your join. But there should be little or no necrotic flesh there, because both your natural arm and the radank claw are regenerating. In a normal rejection, such as we see with the Shamed Ones, one part or the other begins to fail to regenerate, and carrion-eaters spread through that portion of the unfortunate’s body until the connection between original flesh and new flesh is gone.”
The warmaster did not interrupt, so Nen Yim felt safe in continuing. “Second, because your Yuuzhan Vong flesh is regenerating at a slower rate than the radank flesh, and because only your Yuuzhan Vong flesh is becoming necrotic at the join, the effect is that the radank claw is increasing in size, occupying a greater portion of your arm as your original flesh diminishes.”
“I can see that.”
“But it is unnatural. It is especially unnatural because, third, the radank claw, as it grows, appears to be developing characteristics of a radank as it would appear farther up the leg, as if someone were slowly re-creating the entire creature through the absorption of your body. It is an odd pathology.”
“If it were deliberate on the part of a shaper, why would it be done this way?”
Nen Yim lifted the optical device away from Tsavong Lah and positioned it over a surface littered with tissue samples she had taken from him. “If I were to guess, I would say that the presence of the carrion-eaters is required to convince casual onlookers and those who are not expert in shaper techniques that rejection is imminent; this requires the sacrifice of flesh to the parasites. But your arm is essentially sound, meaning that if the process can be stopped, it will be as functional as if it were transplanted without difficulty.”
“In other words, it promises rejection without harming me extensively.”
“Could you do this? Could you cause an implant to act this way?”
“I believe so. I’ve never turned my mind to such a task … but out of different techniques, techniques designed to accomplish other ends, I believe I could find a way to do this.”
“What would you have to do to your victim?” Tsavong Lah sat up, wrapping his cloak about himself, and once again towered over the lowly shaper.
“I would have to engineer the attachment point of the implant to react to certain substances. Then, after the implant was successfully attached, I would have to maintain a supply of those substances into the join.”
Tsavong Lah shook his head. “There is no way I could be fed such poisons. The measures I take to keep my food pure are too extreme.”
“Does he touch you?” The words left her before she could contain them, before she could remind herself that one at her lowly level did not put a direct question to the warmaster without first performing a complex series of ritual statements. She swallowed against sudden fear, but persisted. “I apologize for my lack of manners. But it occurs to me that if I were to examine such an injury routinely, I could introduce these substances through direct handling. Or perhaps through use of specialized creatures resembling the carrion-eaters, bred to carry these substances and die rather than consume dead flesh.”
The warmaster ignored her breach of protocol. “He does touch my flesh and that of the implant in his examinations. Can you counteract his efforts?”
“I do not know. I do not even know for certain that these are the actions of a shaper. This could be the signs of a god’s displeasure.” Nen Yim sensed the warmaster’s impatience with her answer, and pressed on. “But assuming that this is the work of a shaper, I would first need to examine your arm immediately after the shaper’s next visit, so that I might detect any new substances or parasites that he might have introduced.”
“It will be done as you say.” Tsavong Lah gestured for her to take up the voluminous cloak she had hidden her features within when being brought to this chamber. “You will be taken to quarters. Assemble a list of what you will need. If anyone asks why you are here, tell them that you will be preparing my infidel servant, Viqi Shesh, for certain experiments.” As if divining Nen Yim’s thoughts, the warmaster added, “No, you will not be experimenting with her. But this deception should placate the curious.”
“As you wish it, Warmaster.” She bowed and retrieved her cloak.
“What am I supposed to be seeing?” Iella asked. She was in Danni’s office, and a little annoyed because Danni was taking up time she needed for Intelligence matters.
Danni tapped a key on Iella’s datapad. The image began again—a view of Yuuzhan Vong warriors in a dimly lit corridor. They charged toward whoever was carrying the holocam, their war cries terrifying, their movements just slightly alien. “This is Tam Elgrin’s recording. He was with a group of people in a Coruscant building when a Yuuzhan Vong patrol saw and pursued them. He was at the rear of his group when he recorded this. Then he switched off the holocam so he could concentrate on running, and he got away. Most of the other people didn’t.”
“There’s something wrong with the recording, and with Tam himself. Tam behaves kind of oddly, more than is normal for someone who is just socially maladjusted, I think, so I’ve been trying to figure him out. I’ve played this recording over and over again, first looking for little bits of information about Yuuzhan Vong hunting tactics, then about Tam … and I finally realized that this feeling of wrongness I had didn’t have anything to do with the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I kind of went behind your back and asked the Wraiths to look into it for me. To do analysis on the recording in their spare time.”
“They have spare time? I don’t remember issuing them any spare time. So what did they find out?”
“There are nine sets of footsteps echoing in that hallway. You can count eight Yuuzhan Vong visible in the recording, so the other one has to be Tam.”
“Eight Yuuzhan Vong and one human.” Iella looked at the recording again. It played on continuous loop. “Meaning that Tam wasn’t with a group.”
“Right.”
“Why would he lie?” The answer was in place before Iella finished the question. “Because if he admitted he was alone, he’d have to have a really good explanation of how he got away from those warriors.”
“Right again.”
“Meaning he didn’t get away.”
Danni shrugged. “That’s my guess. But I’m not in Intelligence.”
“You want to transfer?”
Danni smiled. “I don’t think they’d let me.”
Iella extracted the data card from her datapad. “Mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead. I’ve copied the recording. Multiply.”
“That’s good work, Danni.” Iella rose and moved to the door. “You let me know if you ever want to get into the Intelligence analysis business.”
“Twin Suns Leader ready,” Jaina said. “Four lit and in the green.” The vibration from her X-wing’s engines, the whine of engines from all over the special operations docking bay, cut into her, a familiar and welcome sensation.
“Twins Two, ready.” That was Kyp. “Going to shield me a goddess.”
“Twins Three, ready.” That was Jag, and, as Jaina predicted, he omitted any quip or irrelevant remark.
“Record Time, ready to lift.”
Moments later, they lifted off, two X-wings and Jag’s clawcraft comprising a shield trio, with the Record Time, the troop transport damaged during the taking of Borleias and subsequently patched back together, lumbering after them. They moved easily out of the docking bay and lifted toward the starry sky, just starting to blur with dawn, above them.
Jaina spared a look out the starboard side of her canopy at Jag’s clawcraft. This variant form of TIE starfighter had the basic cockpit sphere and twin ion engine pods of classic TIE fighters and interceptors, but from the point the engines met the cockpit emerged four forward-sweeping, talon-shaped solar array wings. Jaina didn’t know whether to be pleased or irritated at the artistic incongruity of that style of vehicle being included in her mostly X-wing squadron, and tried to think as a Yuuzhan Vong goddess would.
After a few minutes, long after they’d cleared Borleias’s atmosphere and were headed to a patch of Pyrian space well away from any naval activities, she keyed her comlink. “Kyp, remind me to issue an order that all starfighters in this squadron are to be individually decorated by their pilots. No uniformity. Their astromechs, too.”
“Will do, Goddess.”
Jag said, “Coming up on practice zone in ten, nine, eight …”
Moments later the starfighters slowed to a stop, relative to distant Borleias, and hung drifting in space as Record Time caught up to them.
Jaina asked, “How are you going to decorate your fighter, Jag?”
“Black ball,” he answered immediately. “The claws the color of silver metal, with bloodred splashes on them. As though the whole thing were some sort of claw weapon. The metal, of course, is to annoy the Vong; otherwise I might use a more naturalistic claw color.”
“You came up with that just in the time since I decided everyone should decorate their starfighter?”
“No. I decided on this design days ago, when I calculated that you’d be issuing that directive.”
Days ago? Jaina felt a flash of surprise and irritation. How dare he attempt to predict her this way?
How dare he do it successfully?
But she tamped down on the feeling. Jedi Knights needed to be serene. Squadron leaders shouldn’t let their pilots get to them. She needed not to be caught off guard, even when caught off guard. She just smiled. “Well, it’s a good design. I approve.”
“Thank you.” There was the slightest touch of mockery to his reply, and Jaina felt her mood sour slightly. It wasn’t true, as some of the New Republic pilots thought, that Jag Fel always acted as though he were superior. What was true was that he always seemed to see through deceptions, always seemed to know the truth behind what was being said to him. No one liked to have their falsehoods ignored, their images pierced.
On the other hand, this meant Jag would have a harder time behaving as though he were serving a goddess made flesh. Jaina smiled to herself. She’d be able to find some way to make him uncomfortable, to penetrate his unflappable manner.
“Record Time coming on-station.” The announcement blaring through her comlink jolted Jaina out of her reverie.
“Deploy targets,” Jaina said. “All right, Kyp, let’s show Jag how Force-users do it.”
From one of Record Time’s bays streamed a series of cargo containers. They were the most-damaged of the containers that had been used to bring garrison supplies into the Pyria system, too badly crushed or corroded to stand up to further use. Now each had two red target zones painted on each long side; sensors were attached to the targets. They tumbled through space at Record Time’s arrival velocity.
Jaina led her flight in a loop that would bring them up at a ninety-degree course to the containers’ path.
“I’m open, Goddess.”
Jaina suppressed a grimace. She should have known that Kyp would be ready for the Force link they were trying. She should have felt it.
But she had been keeping herself a little closed off. It was better that way. She didn’t want to be so closely tied to Kyp that he would feel it through the Force, be tortured by it, when and if she followed her brothers into death.
When, not if.
So, though she let him help her back from the dark side path she had recently followed, though she even acknowledged him as a second Jedi Master—though no one would ever replace Mara as her true Master—it was best to keep him at a certain distance.
But she couldn’t do so all the time, so, feeling a touch of unease, she extended her Force perceptions toward Kyp, found him, merged with him in a sense.
It was neither as close nor as effective a bond as the one between Luke and Mara. But then, she didn’t want it to be. That sort of closeness led to no good.
She frowned at that thought, wondering where it had come from, wondering if Kyp had picked it up. But there had been no flicker of emotion from him. Doubtless he hadn’t. “All right, Jag. Kyp and I are going to pick and hit a target. The sensors will tell us how close together our strikes are, how well we’re coordinating through the Force. For fun, I want you to see how long it takes you to punch a hole in the target directly between our two strikes.”
“Consider it done.”
They angled in toward one target, Jaina and Kyp moving together with a precision possible only through the Force. Jag stayed with them, tucked between and slightly behind them, his maneuvers as fast and precise as it was possible for them to be without Force coordination.
Jaina picked her target—a container both tumbling and spinning on its long axis, two containers starboard of the one they were heading toward—and fired. Her quad-linked lasers and Kyp’s burned off at what looked like exactly the same instant, hitting the red target zones of the container simultaneously, reducing the container’s two ends to molten slag. A fraction of a second later, Jag’s blast hit the center of the spinning mess, cleaving it in two.
“Not bad.” Jaina consulted her comm board. “Four one-hundredths of a second between our shots, Kyp; yours hit second. We need to get those numbers down. Jag, you were twenty-six one-hundredths of a second behind Kyp. Pretty good, considering you didn’t know which container was going to be our target.”
“Actually, I did. I knew it wasn’t going to be the one our course was aimed at. Given a fifty-fifty directional choice, you go starboard more than half the time. I figured you wouldn’t choose the first target of opportunity in that direction, so I centered on the second. Of course, if I’d been wrong, it would have taken me a much bigger fraction of a second to hit the target you’d chosen.”
Jaina heaved a sigh. Jag was determined to annoy her with his efforts to predict her. But she schooled her emotions once more into something like serenity and merely clicked her comlink in acknowledgment. “Let’s go around again,” she said.
The second run was much like the first. Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots remained separated by a few hundredths of a second. Jag’s follow-up shot was, if anything, faster than it had been on the first target.
“You guessed I’d go left of our course, one target out,” Jaina said.
“Yes.”
“Let’s do it again.”
As Luke finished packing his bag for the day’s activities, Mara entered their quarters. Ben was awake in her arms, grasping at her hair, pulling it into his mouth, but all of Mara’s attention was on Luke. “I’m going to Coruscant with you.”
That stopped Luke cold. “What changed your mind?”
“Time. Time to calm down, time to figure things out. Understanding that there’s nobody more suited than you are to stopping the enemy that menaces Ben, and there’s nobody better than me at watching your back.” She shrugged, then looked down into the face of their son.
“Ultimately, it was figuring out that if I wait until Ben’s enemies are right in front of me before I kill them, I’ve already failed him.”
Mara’s expression was so melancholy that Luke felt his throat constrict. “Listen, I’m about to go out into the jungle with Tahiri to plant a few gravitic sensors. Care to come along?”
Mara nodded. “Do you think Leia would baby-sit for us?”
“I suspect she’d be very happy to.”
Luke, Mara, and Tahiri moved through the jungle a few hundred meters from the start of the kill zone. They’d entered the jungle, had gone through a series of steps to shake off any likely Yuuzhan Vong observers, and now reached the first of their target zones.
Luke set down his backpack. From within it he drew a short-hafted heavy hammer. “Behold,” he told Tahiri, “the favorite weapon of Jedi before the invention of the lightsaber.”
She frowned at him, green eyes confused beneath her bangs. “You’re kidding.”
“Of course I’m kidding. C’mon. The Jedi sledgehammer?” Grinning, he turned to his wife. “Mara?”
From her own backpack she drew a stake, two-thirds of a meter long, made of metal, very broad at the top. She obligingly set it point-first into the ground. “Go ahead. I’ve always thought that menial labor involving hitting heavy metal things with other heavy metal things was man’s work.”
With quick, hard blows, Luke pounded the thing until its head was flush with the ground. Then he spread dirt and leaves over it.
“And that’s going to transmit gravitic fluctuations?” Tahiri sounded dubious.
“Uh-huh.” Luke replaced the hammer in his backpack, then picked the backpack up. It weighed less, several kilograms less, than it had when he set it down. He pretended not to notice, or to recognize that the ground beneath the pack was stirred up, when it had been smooth when he’d set the pack down. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Tahiri announced. Mara just nodded.
As they moved from the site, Luke whispered, “Well?”
“I think we were being watched,” Tahiri whispered back. “I mean, it felt right. From the Yuuzhan Vong perspective. But I’m not sure.”
“I’m sure,” Luke said. “Couldn’t you feel the insect life go quiet just east, ahead of us?”
“I …” Tahiri looked embarrassed. “I could have been able to if I’d thought about it. But I didn’t.”
“Don’t feel bad. You were thinking Vong—”
“Yuuzhan Vong.”
“—Yuuzhan Vong instead of Jedi. I suspect it’s not easy to think both ways at once. Is it?”
Tahiri shook her head. “They’re ahead of us, then. That won’t be the same group that was watching us, I expect. That group hasn’t had time to get into position ahead of us.”
“Good work,” Mara said. “When do we expect it?”
“They’ll wait until we can’t hear what the first group is doing back at the site we just left,” Tahiri said. “But they’ll be impatient. It’ll be pretty soon after that. Such as … now.” Tahiri thumbed her lightsaber on; its snap-hiss heralded the lengthening of its glowing blade just in time for that blade to intercept a thud bug. The thud bug flared into incandescence and disappeared with a crackling sound.
Luke brought his lightsaber up but turned away from Tahiri. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Mara doing the same, turning the other way. The three of them stood back to back as the Yuuzhan Vong warriors came spilling out of the jungle.
There were five of them, and the first, coming in at Luke, was moving too fast, committed to the charge, depending on the first thud bug to distract the Jedi. Luke spun his lightsaber to intercept his cracking amphistaff, then rolled over backward, propelling the Yuuzhan Vong warrior past him in an uncontrolled tumble. Yours, he thought.
Barely looking, Mara brought her own lightsaber blade around, plunging it into the hurtling warrior’s face as he tumbled past.
The next one in came at Tahiri, amphistaff rigid in a two-handed grip. She parried his first strike, his second, and kicked him in the knee, but the impact of her bare foot on his vonduun crab armor slowed him not at all.
Two, timing it as a single attack, leapt out from a screen of dangling fronds at Mara. She reversed her lightsaber so that the butt of the hilt was next to her thumb, the blade oriented down, and directed it back and forth against their low amphistaff attacks, using the lightsaber as a defensive umbrella. As one went high to bring his weapon up and over her defense, she kicked out, a beauty of a full-extension kick that caught him under the jaw and tumbled him backward into the fronds.
The last one came in at Luke. He was slower, more patient than his comrades. Luke struck, a feint, then began a reverse strike as he saw his opponent raise the amphistaff to parry … then something about the warrior’s pose and motion set off an alarm in Luke’s mind. Luke dropped to one knee and the poison spat by his foe’s amphistaff went harmlessly over his head.
It wasn’t entirely harmless. Luke saw it arc toward Tahiri’s side. She withdrew a step, drawing her enemy forward, and the poison splattered against that warrior’s mask, dribbling through the eyehole. The warrior gurgled, clamping down on a shout of pain or dread.
Luke rose to a crouching position and then continued the motion, leaping up and over his opponent, inverting as he went, swinging his lightsaber with blurring speed at his foe’s head. His enemy caught the blow on his amphistaff and was shoving the staff’s pointed tail at Luke even as the Jedi Master landed. Luke caught the thrust on his lightsaber blade, deflected it mere centimeters, and kept the energy blade scraping up the amphistaff’s length. His opponent jumped away before the lightsaber could sever his fingers.
Tahiri’s enemy was down now, poison flowing from one eye socket and smoke rising from the other, and she moved into position just in time to intercept Mara’s second foe as he returned from the verge of fronds. Caught off guard by her flurry of attacks, the Yuuzhan Vong warrior allowed himself to be forced into retreat; both of them disappeared into the fronds.
Luke’s foe flicked the serpent head of his amphistaff forward. Luke sidestepped and the poisoned thing snapped to full extension a hairsbreadth from his side. Then Mara’s hand closed around it, over the head, and yanked. Luke’s foe stumbled forward, off balance for one deadly moment, and Luke swung his lightsaber into the vulnerable gap beneath the warrior’s helmet. Flesh boiled and severed. The warrior fell.
Luke spun. Mara was flinging the captured amphistaff into the face of her foe; the warrior contemptuously brushed it aside and raised his weapon.
Luke flung his own lightsaber spinning toward the warrior, then added a deft touch with the Force to make its flight eccentric, unpredictable. The warrior batted it aside as well, but the distraction was too long; Mara drove in with her lightsaber, punching through the warrior’s right arm socket, shearing his arm completely off. As he fell, she followed through with a thrust to the face.
Luke beckoned and his lightsaber, depowered, flew back into his hand. He snapped it on again. “Tahiri?”
“Here.” She emerged from the screen of fronds, unhurt. “Look what mine was carrying.” In her hand was a metal stake.
Luke frowned. “Is that the one we just planted?”
“No, a different one.” Mara smiled. “Success.”
“Let’s go,” Luke said. “Before any more decide to visit.”
They headed on to their next planting spot. There, they’d hammer another stake in—a stake that did contain sensor equipment, but which was designed to be found and removed by the Yuuzhan Vong.
For the real sensors were in Luke’s bag. Each was a little droid, the size of the ubiquitous little utility droids found all over capital ships. These contained the same gravitic sensors as the spikes, but also burrowing motivators that allowed them to exit the slit at the bottom of Luke’s backpack and dig their way into soft soil. The Yuuzhan Vong might see every spike planted, might remove every one … but odds were good they wouldn’t detect a single burrowing droid.
Luke had fought against many sneaky people, but was usually happy to have sneaky people on his side.
As they executed kills on target after target, Jaina became more proficient at choosing targets Jag couldn’t anticipate; the time between Kyp’s shot and Jag’s grew until it averaged nearly half a standard second. Jaina felt she’d achieved a slight measure of victory. At least Jag couldn’t remain confident in his ability to anticipate her thinking. But the gap between Jaina’s firing time and Kyp’s remained about the same.
“I have an idea on that,” Jag said. “About your Force coordination.”
Jaina almost laughed. “Jag, you don’t know anything about the Force. You’re as Force-blind as your uncle.”
“Yes, and my uncle would figure this out, too. I’m looking at your Force link as though it were some sort of neural interface between you and Kyp. Assuming it allows speed-of-light communication of impulses, we have your impulse to fire essentially triggering both your firing reflex and Kyp’s. Correct?”
“Maybe.”
“So perhaps the difference in your times is roughly the difference in your physical reaction times. You’re years younger than Kyp. Perhaps you should either hesitate—for as short a time as you can manage—once you’ve made the decision to fire, or you should let Kyp choose the targets and follow his lead.”
Jaina looked over her shoulder, through the canopy, to where Jag’s clawcraft floated beside and behind hers, and gave Jag a dubious look. “All right, sure. Let’s give it a try.”
On their next run, the difference between Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots was one one-hundredth of a second, still in Jaina’s favor.
Kyp whistled. “Good thinking, Fel. Let’s do this a few more times …” His voice trailed off.
Jaina felt it, too. She stared off into space, in the direction of the star Pyria.
“What is it?” Jag said.
“Something …” Jaina switched her comlink to fleet frequency and brought up her navigation program. She oriented her X-wing toward the source of her disquiet to give her a close reading on the course toward that distant point. “Twin Suns Leader to Control.”
“Control here.” It was a man’s voice, decorated with a disinterested drawl.
“Do you have anything going on in the spinward side of the system, say on an approximate course toward Arkania?”
There was a delay of a few seconds. “Negative on that.”
“Something’s up … my flight is going to head that way. Keep your ears open for us.” She switched back to her squadron frequency. “Come on, mortals.”
“As you wish, Goddess.”
Jag responded with a comlink click.