Jaina Solo banked her X-wing starfighter into as tight a turn as she could endure. The g-forces of her maneuver crushed her into her seat, but she called upon the Force to protect her, to keep her centimeters away from the edge of blackout.
She came out of the maneuver pointed back the way she’d come, directly toward the Star Destroyer Rebel Dream and the partial squadron of Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers beyond the ship, and spared a glance to her sensor board. The other members of her shield trio, Kyp Durron and Jag Fel, were right alongside—no problem for Jag and his Chiss clawcraft, far nimbler than the X-wings, but the turn had to have been as taxing for Kyp as it was for Jaina. On the other hand, Kyp was a Jedi Master, not just a Jedi Knight, not yet twenty years of age.
Jaina and her shieldmates passed beneath Rebel Dream, her tremendous length flashing overhead in an instant. “All right, here’s the plan,” she said. “We go in looking like we’re going to punch into the center of their formation, but instead we turn to starboard and skirt along its edge. As each target comes up, we concentrate fire on it, just like those drills we did. Ready?”
Kyp’s voice was smooth, controlled: “Always ready, Goddess.”
Jag merely clicked his comlink once for affirmative.
“Fire and break.”
As the foremost of the oncoming coralskippers came within firing range, it began unloading a stream of tiny red glows in their direction. Each glow was a couple of kilograms of superheated molten rock, plasma. In the coldness of space, these projectiles would rapidly cool, but during the seconds they remained heated they were deadly weapons capable of burning through starfighter armor as though it were sheet ice.
Jaina set her lasers to dual fire and waited. A brief instant later, she felt Kyp reach out to her through the Force, taking momentary control of her hand on the pilot’s yoke. She felt herself aim and fire on the distant coralskipper. Kyp’s lasers flashed at the same instant, Jag’s a fraction of a second later.
In the distance, Jaina’s shot disappeared as a tiny black singularity, a miniature black hole called a void, appeared at the bow of the coralskipper. Kyp’s vanished into an identical void a meter or so back. But Jag’s shot, one too many for the skip’s voids to intercept, punched into the vehicle’s canopy. There was a brief flash from within and the coralskipper’s flight became ballistic instead of controlled.
Jaina, back in full control of her motions, banked and turned to starboard, her wingmates keeping in tight, controlled formation; ahead of her was a second coralskipper, then a third. She reached out for Kyp, let him fire, regained control, reoriented, reached for Kyp, let him fire—
In seconds two more coralskippers were flaming wrecks in space. She knew, without consulting the sensor board, that the skips from the other side of that formation had to be angling in toward her from her port side; she stood her X-wing on its tail, relative to its previous course, and rose away from the conflict zone, forcing those coralskippers to give chase—away from Mon Mothma and that ship’s mission.
In the distance, Mon Mothma entered the zone of dovin basal mines. Her own complement of fighters—E-wings, X-wings, and TIE interceptors—boiled out of her fighter bays and streaked off into the darkness, toward the ship they had come to escort, to protect.
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, walked point, meters ahead of the rest of his party.
He knew he’d never be recognized as Luke Skywalker, despite his fame. He wore vonduun crab armor, the preferred defensive dress of Yuuzhan Vong warriors. His was artificial, made of lightweight materials carefully textured and colored to resemble the living arthropod plates of the Yuuzhan Vong, but he actually preferred that; some of his companions, wearing the real thing, had to deal with the occasional twitches and contractions made by living armor. Beneath the armor, he wore a body stocking in pale gray with blue highlights that was a close match for some Yuuzhan Vong skin tones. Except for his height, handspans shorter than that of the average Yuuzhan Vong warrior, he was a visual match for the enemy.
Not that he’d be easy to see in his current surroundings. He was in a pedestrian traffic corridor, the sort that continued from building to building via enclosed, elevated walkways, at about the hundred-story level. This had once been a well-to-do residential building, with only a few well-appointed suites per floor. Every door into the corridor had been smashed in, but the state of the chambers beyond—stripped of valuables, but with common machinery left intact—suggested that it had been looters rather than Yuuzhan Vong at work here.
And the smell of decay was everywhere. They’d stumbled across numerous remains of Coruscant residents—some the obvious victims of violence, some whose deaths had no clear cause, most in advanced stages of decomposition.
How much food had there been in these people’s kitchens at the time of Coruscant’s fall and the utter demolition of its infrastructure? How much water would they have been able to find? On a world with no wilderness, no farmlands, no means of obtaining food other than now impossible import and machinery that was vulnerable to destruction by the enemy, it was very possible that a simple majority of the population of Coruscant was already dead, with the proportion growing every day.
In some places the stench of rot was greater, in some places lesser, but it was everywhere. Luke and most of his companions now had patches of cloth saturated with a mild perfume stuffed into their nostrils. Face had supplied them. Luke didn’t want to know what experiences Face had gone through to give him the foreknowledge to bring a large supply of that perfume.
As Luke neared the edge of this building and the start of one of the connecting walkways, he shut off his glow rod, which itself was engineered to resemble a Yuuzhan Vong illumination creature. Dim sunlight spilled in from the opening to the walkway, indicating that the walkway was the sort with transparisteel panels providing what had once been a breathtaking view of this part of the world-city.
He felt, as well as heard, Mara catch up to him. “You did the last one, farmboy,” she said.
He gave her a look. She, too, was dressed in Yuuzhan Vong combat armor and an appropriately colored body stocking. But for the shape of her chin and mouth beneath the edge of her helmet, she was unrecognizable as his wife. “You did the one before that.”
“My turn.” That was Garik “Face” Loran, onetime actor, longtime team leader in New Republic Intelligence. About half his usual team, designated the Wraiths, were along on this mission. He was totally unrecognizable; in addition to the vonduun crab armor, he wore an ooglith masquer, a type of living mask employed by the Yuuzhan Vong, that had been engineered by Wraith member Baljos Arnjak to resemble the branded, mutilated face of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He stopped beside Mara. “Kiss for luck?” He puckered the alien face’s slitted, mangled lips.
She shook her head. “I don’t know whether to mark that down as ‘exceptionally daring’ or ‘unusually stupid.’ ”
Face chuckled. He shucked his pack free and extracted a coil of cord from it, then continued forward, tying one end of the coil around his waist. He handed the other end and the coil itself to Luke. “Kiss for luck?”
“Get out of here.”
They reached the large aperture providing access to the walkway. Like the corridor itself, it was wide enough for four large humans easily to walk abreast, but it was lined on either side and above with transparisteel panels reinforced by metal supports. Through the transparisteel, Luke could see surrounding buildings, most of them coated by green algaelike scum or patches of alien grasses. Many of the buildings seemed to be in an advanced condition of decay, with crumbled roofs and rounded edges.
Face moved ahead on the walkway, each step tentative. Luke couldn’t see the far end of the walkway; it was bowed in the middle, higher there than at either end, the better to support great weights, and was at least fifty meters in length, crossing over what had once been a broad boulevard.
When Face was ten meters away, Luke’s helmet comlink popped, then came alive with Face’s whispered words: “No excess creaking. This one seems pretty solid.”
The other members of Luke’s group moved up to the near end of the walkway. All were in Yuuzhan Vong armor, either real like Face’s or fake like Luke’s.
The largest “warrior,” with distinctive black-and-silver tracery on his mask and torso armor, was Kell Tainer, a Wraith, fond of machinery and high explosives, a skilled hand-to-hand combatant.
Then there were the two “Domain Kraal” sets of armor, colored in swirled silver and coral-pink hues, taken from warriors who’d occupied the world of Borleias before the splintering New Republic had regained it. The one with the more pointed helmet was worn by Baljos Arnjak, the Wraiths’ expert on Yuuzhan Vong society and organic technology; the other, whose broader helmet had larger eyeholes, was worn by Bhindi Drayson, a woman with a broad range of intelligence skills, including military tactics, computers, and robotics. Bhindi’s face was marred by hard-wearing makeup that, short of close inspection, made it look like her lips were cut to tatters and the remainder of her face was tattooed. Baljos wore another of the ooglith masquers, his with a pair of tusks jutting from the lowest portion of the chin.
Next was Elassar Targon, a Devaronian, the Wraiths’ medic. He wore a gray-and-green set of artificial armor; the thought of wearing living armor had apparently filled him with supernatural dread. Even now, as he kept his attention fixed on Face’s progress, his right hand was engaged in making a series of gestures. Were they to keep the Yuuzhan Vong at bay, or to keep Face safe? Luke didn’t know, and Elassar did this sort of thing so habitually that he probably didn’t realize he was doing it.
Beside him was Danni Quee, the New Republic scientist who had been responsible for so many technological developments in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong. She wore the all-black armor, a living set that had originally been slated for Elassar; it was a touch too large for Danni and she was awkward moving in it. With a moment of rest available to her, she dug a small electromagnetic radiation sensor out of her bag and began sampling the local environment. Danni and Elassar also wore makeup, though it was more effective on his typically diabolical, red-skinned Devaronian face than on her even features.
Tahiri Veila stayed meters to the rear of the party, guarding the approach from that direction. She was the third Jedi in the group. Still a teenager, she was officially a Jedi apprentice; in all but official recognition, however, she was a Jedi Knight because of the skills and experience she’d accumulated since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion began. Things changed so fast in these war years that testing hadn’t kept up with the advancement of her generation of Jedi. Hers was a rust-colored set of armor, and the no-skid soles of her body-stockinged feet were doubtless better, to her mind, than wearing shoes or boots, but not as good as going barefoot, her habitual preference. She wore the last of the three ooglith masquers, hers showing four sharp nail-like spikes protruding from each cheek and deep, red crisscross scar patterns on her jaws and neck.
Luke looked at her. He hardly needed the Force to sense the pain that seemed to be her constant companion these days. Her best friend, Luke’s nephew Anakin Solo, had died not long ago—died during a successful but costly mission to destroy the source of the voxyn creatures that had proven so adept at hunting and killing Jedi. Since then, Tahiri had, except for occasional moments, worn silence and distance like a set of Jedi robes.
Luke had authorized that mission of the young Jedi, and many of them had died. It was hard at times to look Han and Leia, Anakin’s parents, in the eye. And now he was leading yet another mission in which a young Jedi would be in peril. He wondered sometimes if he would ever be allowed to quit sending the young off to suffer pain and death.
Probably not, he thought. I’m not that lucky.
“I’m at the midpoint,” Face whispered. “Still no creaking. I’ll jump up and down at the far end to make sure the attachment there is still secure, and—wait a second. I see some movement …”
Then there was a new voice, a shout in the Yuuzhan Vong language from well beyond Face. The tizowyrm—a Yuuzhan Vong organic translator—installed in Luke’s ear gave him the words in Basic: “Stop where you are! Tell me your name, domain, and mission!”
Luke tossed the coil to Baljos. “Leave the packs here.” He moved forward, Mara and Kell with him, and heard the running feet of Tahiri coming up from behind. The four of them were the only ones with much of a chance in direct battle with fully trained Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Both normally and through his helmet comlink, Luke heard Face’s reply, shouted in the Yuuzhan Vong language, with to what Luke sounded like proper aggression and inflection: “I am Faka Rann. My mission is the destruction of abominations and the training of my warriors. Do not hinder me.”
As Luke, Mara, Kell, and Tahiri came closer to Face, they could see down the incline on the other side, where a party of Yuuzhan Vong warriors approached. Luke saw seven of them, most already holding amphistaffs in their hands. The serpentlike amphistaffs were currently stiff, in staff/spear configuration. Face was fiddling with the fake amphistaff wrapped around his waist, but Luke could see that he was actually freeing the cord.
Luke came up beside Face and stood there, arms crossed, a stance of defiance and arrogance. Mara came to a stop beside him, Tahiri and Kell on the other side of Face. Kell unwrapped the false amphistaff from around his own waist and triggered it, snapping it into rigidity, an artful imitation of the use of the genuine weapons, though his would never stand up to the rigors of combat.
The oncoming unit of warriors halted ten meters away and their leader looked at Luke and the others. “This is our designated zone,” he said. “Who has commanded you to hunt here?”
“No one has commanded us!” Face’s tone was sharp and mocking, even through the tizowyrm’s translation. “We are not on duty. We seek personal glory.”
“If you are not on duty, your mission is subordinate to ours. Make way.”
Luke knew that no true Yuuzhan Vong warrior would respond well to such a command, and he sighed inwardly. There was going to be a fight. He moved his knee until he could feel his lightsaber where it dangled from his belt under the armor’s skirt plates.
“If you are on duty,” Face said, “then your mission is less important than ours, for you hunt only at your superiors’ orders, while we hunt because it makes us great. You make way.”
The enemy leader stared at Face. Then the brief stalemate ended as it had to; the leader charged, his warriors with him in two lines.
Face dropped back, allowing the more skilled combatants to close the gap where he’d been. The enemy leader hurtled toward him as if to shoot between Luke and Kell to reach him anyway, whirling his amphistaff to slam Luke out of the way, but Luke went up and over the charge in a somersault made only slightly clumsy by his false alien armor.
While he was inverted, he saw Kell catch the leader and spin him back and around, slamming him powerfully into one of the transparisteel panels on the side of the walkway. The panel held, but the metal restraints holding it failed; warrior and panel punched free of the walkway. The warrior screamed, flailing, as he dropped from view.
Luke landed and brought his lightsaber out from beneath the skirt plates even as he heard the snap-hiss of Mara’s and Tahiri’s blades igniting. His lit just in time to catch the thrust from an amphistaff. He shoved the deadly pointed tip of the weapon out of alignment, let it slide past him, and riposted. The warrior he faced caught the lightsaber blade on the amphistaff’s upper end and the blade bounced away, leaving only the faintest of burn marks on the amphistaff neck.
His opponent screamed, “Jeedai!” The cry was picked up and repeated by the other five warriors facing them—and then by other voices, farther back.
Luke parried a thud bug hurled his way by one of the warriors in the second rank, then made a wild swing at the warrior in front of him. That fighter ducked, but he was not the true target; Luke’s blow continued onto the arm of Tahiri’s opponent to his right, hitting it at the unprotected elbow, severing it. That warrior roared, more, it seemed, in anger than in pain, as his arm and amphistaff dropped to the walkway floor. Tahiri took advantage of the moment to kick him, propelling the warrior back into the second rank. Meanwhile, in Luke’s peripheral vision, Mara deftly incinerated a razor bug hurled at her, then parried a hard swing from a front-rank amphistaff and a thrust from another in the second row.
Then Luke could see them, more warriors running toward them from the building opposite. He couldn’t count them; he thought there were at least twenty, and more were emerging from that walkway opening every second. Most were screaming, “Jeedai!”
Kell Tainer turned and ran. Luke caught a glimpse of Tahiri’s eyes, startled and betrayed, through her helmet faceplate before she ducked beneath the swing of her next opponent. Before she could straighten, a burst of blasterfire filled the air above her. Most of it was absorbed or deflected by her opponent’s vonduun crab armor, but one shot caught the warrior in the throat. He fell back, his throat smoking, and Luke could see Face standing directly behind Tahiri, blaster rifle in hand. Even as Tahiri rose, Face let off the trigger and took a half step left, out of Luke’s peripheral vision, waiting for another target.
Luke kicked the severed arm and its amphistaff up into the face of his opponent, then followed with a simple thrust to the head. That warrior was too canny or experienced for such a ploy; unflinching, he let the arm bounce from his helmet and deflected the thrust with his amphistaff.
Then the next wave of warriors reached them, and suddenly there were too many amphistaffs, thud bugs, razor bugs, and knifelike coufees to stand firm against. Luke found himself forced backward step after step even as he parried a blow, incinerated a razor bug, plunged his lightsaber blade into a warrior’s throat. “Fighting retreat!” he shouted.
Something arced between Luke and Mara from behind. It looked like a flat black box, about the size of human hand, with glowing letters or numbers on one side. And Kell was once again in Luke’s peripheral vision, this time with a blaster, holding it high over the head of the Jedi, pouring fire down into the Yuuzhan Vong. “Suggest we retreat fast,” he shouted. “Ten.”
“What was that?” Luke asked. Instead of blocking the next amphistaff blow to come his way, he leaned forward before the blow began and whipped his lightsaber across his new opponent’s wrist, severing the holding hand.
“You know what it was. Seven. Six.”
Luke began to back away fast. Mara and Tahiri kept pace with him, and Face and Kell kept up the blasterfire, joined by an occasional single-shot blast from their allies behind.
They’d almost backed into the opening to the building when Kell’s explosive charge detonated. Suddenly the walkway in the midst of the Yuuzhan Vong force was a wall of fire rushing toward them.
Luke exerted himself, hurling himself backward with use of the Force, yanking Mara and Tahiri with him. They landed several meters back in the building corridor, still deflecting thrown thud bugs and razor bugs. Then the fiery flash from the explosion roared across the intervening Yuuzhan Vong and past the Jedi, momentarily blinding Luke, hammering him backward. Sure in his sense of where the other Jedi and Wraiths were, he whirled his lightsaber in a defensive motion he seldom used outside of practice, felt it hit something hard and unyielding.
Then the heat and brightness were past. He found he was locked, lightsaber against amphistaff, with a warrior whose back was smoking. Three other warriors stood among him and his allies, though two were now dancing in concentrated fire from the Wraiths and Danni Quee. The last, in the middle of a quite elegant snap-kick against Mara, was receiving her lightsaber thrust up and under his skirt plates.
Luke kicked out, catching his opponent in the center of the torso, sending him hurtling. The warrior staggered back to the walkway aperture … then dropped out of sight with a shout of surprise.
The walkway was gone. Only smoke and the jagged edges where it had once joined the building suggested it had ever been there. Even with his ears ringing from the explosion, Luke could hear the smashing, grinding noise as its wreckage descended three or four hundred meters to the boulevard below.
They stood panting for a moment, Jedi, Wraiths, and scientist, staring at one another. Finally Luke said, “Anyone hurt?”
“I got grazed by a thud bug,” Danni said. “But it hit the armor. It only knocked me down.”
“Something of a disastrous encounter,” Luke decided. “But at least we don’t have any injuries.”
“It was a very successful encounter,” Face said. “Very promising.”
Luke frowned. “How so? Now they know we’re here. That Jedi are here.”
“No. First, I think they were all on the walkway. So no one alive knows that Jedi are here.”
“Until they find the bodies,” Mara pointed out. “With distinctive lightsaber burns on them.”
Face shrugged. “You have me on that one. But second, more important, until those lightsabers came out, they believed we were Vong. The disguises, and my extraordinary diligence in learning some conversational Yuuzan Vong during the last couple of years, are working. We can expect them to work again.”
“Good point.”
Face’s tone became professionally worried. “So, does that count as my turn, or do I have to check out the next walkway?”
Luke grinned. “It counts as your turn.”
“The next one,” Kell said, “will be twenty or thirty flights down. We’d better get to it.”
Bhindi slapped the back of Kell’s helmet. “That one is going to have been hit by debris from this one, Explosion Boy. We go up.”
His tone subdued, Kell said, “I knew that.”
Han Solo, upside down and up to his waist in machinery beneath the deck plating of the Millennium Falcon, heard and felt footsteps approaching. They were light, precise—Leia. That meant there would be a second set, the footsteps of Meewalh, Leia’s Noghri bodyguard, but Han had never actually heard them.
A desire to finish patching the coupling he was working on kept him inverted and incurious—that, and the fact that he knew that if Leia had a problem, her walking pace wouldn’t be normal. “Artoo, you want to hand me the electrical flow meter?” He extended a hand up into the air.
R2-D2, Luke’s astromech droid, responded with a series of cheerful whistles and bleats. Han heard the whine of a manipulator arm being extended, felt the meter being pressed into his hand. Then he heard his wife’s voice: “Do you think if I poked him, he’d bang his head into the flooring?”
R2-D2’s blatted response sounded definitely affirmative.
“You better hope she doesn’t, Artoo,” Han said. “I can’t take revenge on my wife, so I’ll have to take it on the nearest droid at hand.”
R2-D2 replied with a distinctly sour set of notes, then Han heard the droid whir away. “What did he say?” Han asked.
Leia laughed. “I don’t know. But if I were him, it would be, I’ll go fetch See-Threepio, then.”
“Good point.” Han clipped the flow meter to the wires he’d just installed. “You want to power up the holocomm for me?”
“Are you down there with your head in the holocomm power cables?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I can’t tell if the power flow is right if you don’t.”
“Come on up out of there and leave the meter where you can see the readout.”
Han growled. He knew, deep in his heart, that nothing could go wrong, that the Falcon would never hurt him while he was working on her. He knew this in spite of innumerable minor abrasions, contusions, and electrocutions he’d suffered over the years. But Leia remained stubbornly unconvinced.
He also knew, from long experience, that Leia was not going to leave until she was sure he wasn’t going to do something she considered foolish. He could either wait here upside down forever, or do it her way.
So he situated the meter where he could see the readout from above. He shoved his way up and out of the access and turned an artificially cheerful smile on Leia. “Happy?”
“Happy. You’re very red.”
“That’s what happens when you stay upside down for too long. Could I get you some caf? Something to read? For while you’re here managing this repair operation, that is.” Ignoring sudden dizziness brought on by the flow of blood back out of his head, he stood.
Leia smiled, not at all put off by his snide comments. “Actually, I just came here to remind you that we need to see Tarc before we take off.”
“Yeah, I know. I just hate good-byes. Never could figure out how to make them happy.”
Leia lowered her voice to a whisper. “Speaking of which, do you have any advice on how we’re going to tell Meewalh she can’t come along on this mission? That hovering around me to do bodyguard duties will compromise any disguises that we try to use?”
Han matched her whisper for whisper. “How about persuading her to take a vacation?”
“Han.”
“How about, just before takeoff, we send her out to pick up a bottle of brandy, and then leave while she’s running the errand?”
“You’re not helping.”
He smiled and pulled her to him. “You’re not fooling anybody. You know exactly what you’re going to tell her. You just want me to be there when you do it. To back you up. Right?”
She offered him an expression of mock outrage. “No fair peeking into my mind like that.”
“Right?”
Leia sighed and settled against him. “Right.”
But her expression, though merry, wasn’t entirely without worry, and he knew why. She couldn’t be entirely free from concern with one of their sons recently lost to war, the other missing and presumed by most to be dead, and their only daughter elsewhere in the Pyria solar system on a mission with her squadron. Han wondered if there would ever be a time when Leia’s expression was completely at peace.
Well within the dovin basal minefield, Jaina and her Twin Suns Squadron caught up with Mon Mothma, which was executing a turn back toward Borleias while, in the distance, a Gallofree cargo ship, as pudgy and unlovely as a Hutt in the middle of diving into a pool, edged toward them. Tiny lights winking around the freighter hinted at the battle that still went on, but they were few in number—and ever fewer, as the sensor blips representing coralskippers gradually disappeared from the screen.
“Twin Suns, this is Rebel Dream. Sensors show more skip squadrons incoming, but we think our payload will be out of the minefield and through with its last microjump before they arrive. It’s going to be close, though, so please stand by.”
Jaina grinned at the please. Because of the game she was playing with the Yuuzhan Vong, the deception in which she increasingly identified herself with their Trickster goddess, Yun-Harla, she was a step or two outside Borleias’s command structure, and all commanders had been privately instructed to treat her with the deference due a foreign dignitary. She sometimes wondered which of them were amused at playing along and which were irritated. This controller’s voice held no evidence of annoyance. “Twin Suns Leader to Rebel Dream, copy.”
Jaina brought her squadron around to cruise alongside Rebel Dream and waited. As the cargo vessel’s lines finally came into sharp focus with the naked eye, her name finally blipped onto her sensor board, Reckless Abandon, and she could see the nature of the starfighters protecting her—they were now organized into escort wings, all the fighting done. Most wore the white-and-dark-gray color scheme of Rebel Dream support craft, but one squadron, mixed A-wings and E-wings, was painted in glaring yellow with menacingly angular black stripes.
“What the Sith spawn are those?” Jaina asked.
“Twin Suns One, you have the Taanab Yellow Aces, Ace-One speaking.” The voice was male, amused. “We’re here to show the defenders of Borleias what flying is all about.”
Jaina winced. She’d forgotten that she had switched over to the general New Republic military frequency to respond to Rebel Dream. But despite the fact that the mistake was hers, she couldn’t let a jibe like that go by. “So you’re the masters at flying out of an engagement zone?”
“Ooh,” Ace-One said. “Don’t say engagement. Unless you’re volunteering, that is.”
“Ace-One, Reckless Abandon. Do you suppose you could confine your courtship rituals to groundside?”
“Copy, Reckless. Twins Leader, look me up when we’re on the ground. Ace-One out.”
Jaina switched back to send out only over squadron frequency. “Arrogant little monkey-lizard.”
“I agree.” That was the mechanical voice of Piggy, Jaina’s Gamorrean pilot and tactics expert. “I know him.”
Creatures moved within Tam Elgrin’s field of vision. He couldn’t seem to hold his eyes open enough for visual clarity, so most of the time they were mere blobs of white or orange, walking back and forth before him, speaking in muted tones.
He was content with that for a while, even content to understand that he wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t remembering, but eventually curiosity got the better of him and he forced his eyes open wider, forced himself to focus.
He could see now that the traffic was beyond the bed he lay on. A clean sheet in a soothing blue covered his large, ungainly frame. Beyond his feet was the metal footboard of a bed, and beyond that was some sort of pedestrian traffic lane; the blobs of color he had seen were people, humans and the occasional Twi’lek or Rodian or Devaronian, most in medical whites, some in pilot jumpsuit orange, moving past his field of vision, paying him no mind.
To either side of his bed were hung opaque curtains of that same offensively inoffensive blue, so patently obvious a measure to provide him with privacy from two directions and suggest calm that he finally understood that he was in a hospital.
That realization was enough for now. He didn’t need to know why he was here. The fact that his brain worked well enough to process information again was sufficient.
But a moment later, a figure left the traffic lane and moved into his curtained cubicle. It was a Mon Calamari; Tam’s long experience with nonhumans suggested that it was a female. She wore medical whites, and her skin was a deep, appealing pink. “You are awake,” she said, her tone suggesting that it was a minor achievement, something for which everyone should be at least slightly pleased.
“Um,” he said. It was supposed to have been yes, but it came out um.
“Do you know what has happened? Where you are, and why?”
He shook his head. “Um.”
“You’ve been rather badly used by the Yuuzhan Vong, conditioned by them to do their bidding. But you resisted your conditioning and probably prevented a tragedy. Resisting it did you a certain amount of physical harm, which is why you’re here now.”
It was as though he had been facing a dam between him and his memories … then the dam crumbled and memories washed down over him, hammering him, sweeping him away. He remembered being on the world of Coruscant as it fell to the Yuuzhan Vong, remembered hiding and running from them afterward, remembered being captured by them. Then there were days—how many? Only two, though it seemed like a lifetime—of lying on a table that twitched, of listening while one of the Yuuzhan Vong told him to do things, of feeling agonizing pain whenever he worked up the nerve to refute their words, refuse their orders. The pain came even when his refusal was deep in his heart, even when it was made without him speaking or glaring or shaking his head to let them know of his rebellion. The table always knew, the table always hurt him, until the words of the Yuuzhan Vong came and he could no longer resist them, no longer offer even the most secret of refusals.
Then he had been allowed to “escape,” reunite with his employer, historian Wolam Tser, and escape Coruscant to Borleias, a temporary stronghold of the reeling New Republic military. There he had spied upon the New Republic operations, the scientist Danni Quee and the pilot Jaina Solo.
Only when he knew that he would have to kidnap one of them and kill the other had he found the strength to withstand the pain that came whenever he did not leap to the bidding of the Yuuzhan Vong. And he’d fallen, certain that the pain would kill him.
“Are you still with us, Master Elgrin?”
“Um,” he said. “Yes.” He opened his eyes; the Mon Cal female was bending over him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes moving independently as she looked him over. He knew from experience that her expression suggested slight distress, though it would not have been obvious to someone who knew only human expressions. “It’s not ‘Master’ Elgrin. Just … Elgrin. Or Tam.”
“Tam, I am Cilghal. I will be working with you to overcome the lingering effects of what was done to you.” She cocked her head, a human mannerism, perhaps one she had learned from being among humans. “I am sad to have to tell you that your courage in resisting your conditioning was not a cure for you. You still suffer the effects of that conditioning. We will work together to erode those effects, to return you to normal.”
“If I’m still—why isn’t my head killing me right now?”
Cilghal took one of his hands in hers—a smooth, webbed hand much larger than his, but not cold, as he’d expected—and moved his hand up to his brow. There, he felt the device, helmetlike, covering the top of his head. “This apparatus,” she said, “senses the onset of your headaches. It interferes electronically with your pain receptors, reducing or eliminating the pain. Later, we can fit you with an implant to do the same thing without being noticeable. The implant will also allow you to reward yourself by initiating the release of endorphins whenever you do something you know to be in defiance of the will of the Yuuzhan Vong. It will, we think, gradually counter the conditioning you have received.”
“But what’s the point? I’m going to be tried. And executed. For treason.”
“I think not. This base is under military law, and General Wedge Antilles has said that you are to be commended, not punished. There will be no trial for you.”
Tam felt his eyes burn, then tears came. Whether they were tears of relief or shame for the forgiveness he’d received but had not earned, he could not say. He turned away from Cilghal so she would not see them.
“I will go now,” she said. “We will talk later. And you will get better.”