For the first time in years, Luke found himself facing an opponent whose very nature made him waver in courage and resolve: bureaucracy.
Meetings were among the most ferocious weapons of his opponent. He would spend one hour, two, three discussing anti–Yuuzhan Vong starfighter tactics with Colonel Celchu and a board of military advisers, then rush to a similarly lengthy, tedious, and tiring gathering with scientists pondering yet again the reason the Yuuzhan Vong and their creatures were invisible to the Force. Luke learned to alleviate his frustration by taking charge of the meetings and conducting them along with other activities—exercise, inventories of supplies, training sessions for the Jedi students aboard Errant Venture.
And yet plans progressed as the Inner Circle formulated the structure of a Resistance that could settle deep into hiding as the Yuuzhan Vong came and could then spring up to gut the invaders when the time arrived.
Similar in structure to the Jedi underground that Leia and Han had been organizing, the Resistance would be broader in nature and greater in numbers. The Inner Circle would land one or more trusted members on every world it could. Those members would set up Resistance cells of personnel. Each cell would set up more cells. No member of a cell would know the identities of more than two Resistance members outside his or her own cell, the better to contain damage if a cell were to be compromised. Each cell would try to establish a base that the Yuuzhan Vong could not find, a place to store vehicles, weapons, tools, droids, anything that the Resistance would need when the time came to return the fight to the Yuuzhan Vong.
The existence of the Inner Circle was known throughout Wedge’s fleet group and nicknamed the Insiders, but it was commonly believed that it was a board of military advisers. Its true purpose remained a secret.
Luke offered what knowledge and tactics he could, and it turned out to be more than he’d expected.
In the years since he’d become a Jedi Master—and for years he’d been the only Jedi Master known to the galaxy—he’d searched tirelessly for knowledge about the Jedi as they had been before the rise of Emperor Palpatine to power. Palpatine and his right-hand servant, Darth Vader, Luke’s own father, had systematically destroyed the Jedi and tried to eradicate all knowledge of their existence. Luke had sought to recover that knowledge. He’d searched out the remaining traces of the Jedi, finding scraps here and rumors there, and had learned to run those trails to ground. Most had led nowhere—as the Jedi he’d sought had either successfully vanished or had disappeared temporarily, only to be found, at last, by Palpatine’s minions and expunged.
In learning how Jedi who had survived the initial sweeps of the Emperor’s Purges had done so—how they’d gone to ground, erased their official identities, concealed their Force powers, smuggled their lightsabers, and eluded their hunters—Luke had, without knowing it, accumulated a tremendous, if only theoretical, knowledge of those techniques. Now, in meetings and recording sessions, that information poured from him and was added to the Intelligence training of Mara and others, becoming part of the handbook of establishing Resistance cells, as it had when he and his allies had begun setting up the Jedi underground across the galaxy.
Eventually, realizing what good they might do for the Resistance’s cause, Luke became resigned to, even comfortable with, the meetings. And they kept his mind away from the worry and ache he could feel growing within him.
More than twenty-five years ago, when Luke’s Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru had died on faraway, insignificant Tatooine, Luke had found himself alone—surrounded by new friends, but possessing no family. Then, over time, he’d gathered a family about him. His father had not been among those gathered; Anakin Skywalker had died months after the revelation of his true identity. But in Leia, Luke had found his true sister; then his friend Han Solo had become his brother-in-law. Their children, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo, had followed. Then Luke’s relationship with Mara, which had evolved from a murderous hatred on her part to love on both their parts—love, and a bond, expressed through the Force, that blurred the edges between them, between their thoughts and hopes—had culminated in their marriage. Finally there had been Ben, born mere months ago, and Luke’s family numbered eight, all calling Coruscant home.
Now “home” was a conquered battlefield. His family, gathered after so much sacrifice and effort over so many years, was scattered. Young Anakin Solo was dead, and all the hopes Luke had invested in him were gone. Jacen was missing; most were convinced he was dead as well. Jaina had not come to Borleias; she was off on a personal quest of vengeance, and such quests often led to ruin, the dark side of the Force, or death … or all three. Han now recuperated from an injury at a secret Jedi base, and Leia waited with him. The only ones Luke could hold to him each day were Mara and Ben, and the three of them lived surrounded by enemies.
Each time this realization hit Luke, he gently moved it away from his conscious thoughts and meditated, focusing himself on his purpose, his tasks, those he loved. But these Jedi techniques merely put off his worries for a while longer. The worries endured, waiting patiently to claim his attention and erode his confidence. They were the Yuuzhan Vong of his own mind.
Luke found himself surrounded by foliage and thought for an instant that he was on foot patrol in Borleias’s jungles. But he realized within an instant that the air here was even danker than was customary on Borleias, and the precise nature of the plants and trees around him was wrong for that world. Here, the trees were darker, larger, their limbs drooping, while opaque pools of ground-water concealed furtive movements of their occupants.
Dagobah. It was the world where he had trained with Yoda, a lifetime ago.
So this was a dream. He shook his head. No, in dreams he was not usually so lucid. It was a vision, then, a vision through the Force.
He turned and faced the opening into the cave. It was there that he had confronted a vision of Darth Vader—of himself in Vader’s distinctive dress. Now, there was no Yoda to warn him against taking weapons into this place of evil and confrontation, and Luke felt sad that this vision would not give him even the momentary pleasure of seeing his old Master again in the one context where his presence was appropriate.
Luke found he was dressed in black. His lightsaber hung at his waist. He removed it, depositing it in the crook of a tree branch, and entered the cave.
Within, he found only darkness and silence. But he knew something was there, a few steps from him, a deeper darkness. He could neither see nor hear it, but could feel it within the Force. He stepped toward it and felt it move to the side, circling him.
Then it brushed past him, a contact that sickened him, reawakened in him every great hatred of his life—for Darth Vader, for the Emperor, for himself when he had stumbled too far down the path of the dark side—and left the cave. Luke followed.
He emerged into brighter light than he’d seen outside a moment ago, and now he was surrounded by soaring buildings, construction so high that the sky was visible only as a faint sliver of light. All around him, duracrete surfaces, crashed landspeeders, and giant blocks of unrecognizable debris were coated with green algae and waving grasses in a more pallid green hue. At his feet, a human body was covered with the same stuff.
The darkness he’d pursued was ahead of him, farther down the narrow aperture between skyscrapers, still invisible to the naked eye, still nauseatingly tangible within the Force.
It roiled and spun like a tornado. It increased in size until it brushed against the buildings to either side. The algae and grasses there changed when it touched them, suddenly bearing large, malformed fruits as black and slick as old oil. Then every surface in sight was covered with the fruits, and as he watched they began to drop from their stems. They struck the ground and then struggled to newly developed feet, walking in every direction with the awkwardness of babies.
And each of them was filled with misery and dark side longing for ruin.
One opened its mouth and let out a piercing wail. Then another did, and a third. Suddenly the air was full of their cries.
A hand gripped Luke’s shoulder. He opened his eyes. Mara was shaking him; her face was pale. The air was still filled with cries, but they were Ben’s, and Mara held the baby away, as if to protect him from Luke. “What is it?” she asked.
“A vision.” Luke brought his breathing under control and found that one part of his vision still lingered; dark side energy and malice still surrounded him. Ben, as sensitive to the Force as only the child of two eminent Jedi could be, wailed in protest. “There’s evil on Coruscant. Tremendous dark side evil.”
The hologram showed a familiar sight: the daytime skyline of some portion of Coruscant. The enormous, soaring buildings and the mottled orange clouds in the sky were distinctive to that world, though there were so countless many different planetary vistas like this that no one present could precisely identify the portion of Coruscant being displayed.
Things were different, though. The more distant skyscrapers seemed to be a uniform shade of green, and the reason why was evident on the nearer buildings: they were coated in a material that looked like algae. From the algae protruded things that looked like grasses, tree branches, umbrella-topped fungi. Up close, their colors were different; only in the distance did they blur together into a single hue.
Luke found the hologram unsettling. The algae and grasses were identical to those of his vision.
In the darkened conference chamber, a man stepped up next to the holoprojection. In the light cast by the projection of Coruscant, his face was luminous, the green from the algae lending color to his pale skin, white hair, mustache, and beard, giving him a nonhuman aspect. He was lean with age, though not to the point of emaciation. His garments were black, covering all but his head and hands, leaving viewers with the impression that those body parts were floating free in the chamber.
But this wasn’t an eerie image. Many of those present had known his face for years. Wolam Tser was a political historian whose holodocumentaries had cataloged every stage of the New Republic’s development from when it was nothing but a poorly funded, chaotically disorganized Rebel Alliance.
“I’ve stopped the image here for a moment,” Wolam said, his rolling voice and upper-class accent instantly familiar to those in the chamber, “so you can see what is happening on Coruscant’s surface. Some sort of planet shaping has begun. Those growths cover much of the planet’s surface. They spread incredibly swiftly; everything you see in this image was bare duracrete the day before this was recorded. The darkest green material, some sort of pastelike scum, secretes acids that break down the chemical composition of duracrete. The fungi, I suspect, are related to the exploding fungi of Yavin Four; when struck, they detonate. The hardier-looking growths send deep taproots into the surfaces beneath them. In short, they are rapidly destroying the construction on Coruscant’s surface—and, of course, construction covers almost every square centimeter of the planet’s surface. The air, though this image doesn’t suggest it, is increasingly noxious, and the remaining population is staying in ever-lower city levels, huddling near air scrubbers that provide them with adequate atmosphere.”
Luke asked, “What about Yuuzhan Vong intrusions?”
Wolam peered in his direction, squinting in a futile effort to see deeper into the shadows. “That is the distinctive voice of Master Skywalker, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“The Yuuzhan Vong are indeed performing raids into the lower levels. Some seem to have objectives, such as the destruction of air scrubbers, while others seem to be nothing but hunting expeditions. But the most fearsome of their assaults are not raids; they occur when the Yuuzhan Vong remove themselves from an area. They evacuate to a distance of many kilometers. And then this happens.” Wolam brought up a small handheld device and depressed one of its buttons.
The frozen image suddenly flickered back into life, though nothing changed other than the motion of nearby planet-shaping growths in the wind and a brief flash of lightning in one of the clouds.
Then something did change. A patch of that cloud became brighter. Something erupted from it, a small flaming dot with a trail, descending at an angle toward the planet’s surface.
The dot disappeared behind the buildings in the distance. There was a moment in which nothing occurred other than the dissipation of the dot’s smoke trail high in the atmosphere.
A flash of light from that point in the distance briefly overloaded the holocam’s ability to record; the image burned away to brightness. Then it returned.
The buildings still stood in the foreground and the distance, but now there was something behind them: a tall column of smoke spreading out toward the top into a shape reminiscent of many forms of fungus.
And something was racing toward the holocam, a shock wave. Nearest the smoke column, the buildings blurred and vanished. The wave of destruction, a distinct semicircle, flashed across the intervening kilometers faster than a starfighter could fly, eradicating every structure in its way. As the leading edge came close to the holocam’s viewpoint, Luke could hear members of the audience drawing breath and leaning back as though to put more distance between them and the wave.
The vision of Coruscant shook and faded to blackness.
Someone brought up the lights in the chamber, and once again it was a cozy meeting room rather than a vision of doom.
Wolam stood near the head of the table, to Wedge’s left; he was the only one standing. “That event nearly cost the life of my holocam operator, Tam.” He gestured to a man at the rear of the chamber; the fellow, young and bulky enough to look awkward in a normal-sized chair, gave him an indifferent wave. “Tam lay unconscious for two days before finding his way back to me, and was sick for days after because he’d breathed in so much of the toxic atmosphere. He’s still feeling the effects.”
Wedge asked, “What sort of weapon did they use to achieve that result?”
Wolam gave him a thin smile. “Our own. That was a Golan Defense Platform. A few days ago, it defended Coruscant against the Yuuzhan Vong. Then, after it was destroyed, it was nudged from orbit to come down upon the planet’s surface. I can’t estimate …” He stopped, and there was no indication on his face of what had caused him to hesitate, but Luke felt a sudden flash of pain from the man. “I can’t estimate how many died when it hit. Millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions. That impact zone was a couple hundred kilometres southwest of the Imperial Palace. They’re pushing more satellites and skyhooks down, one after another. And since only a few million of Coruscant’s citizens have found passage offworld, the vast majority are in mortal peril—in the short term, from the falling satellites, and in the long term from the planet shaping.”
“We appreciate the information you’ve brought us,” Wedge said, “and the samples you’ve given us have been forwarded to our team of scientists specializing in Yuuzhan Vong techniques.” He consulted the datapad before him. “Your shuttle’s damage—that was sustained during your departure from Coruscant?”
Wolam nodded. “One reason it took me a few days to depart was that several of us clubbed together to make a mass departure. The idea was that, since their starfighter analogs would inevitably come after us, some of us might survive where one ship wouldn’t.” He looked apologetic. “Mine was one of the few that made it out.”
“Your damage is being repaired. Your shuttle should be ready in a day or two. We can send you out with the next batch of refugee departures; you’ll have starfighter cover for your trip.”
Wolam glanced around. Luke saw his attention freeze, for the barest of moments, on several of the faces present at the meeting, including Luke’s own. Then Wolam returned his attention to Wedge. “If I may, I’d like to stay instead. I’m a historian. Here is where history is being made. We won’t be much of a draw on your resources. We have quarters aboard my shuttle.”
“Very well.” Wedge stood. “Now, it’s back to work. I’m sorry it’s all bad news today, but we need to be kept updated.”
On his way out the door, Tam accepted congratulations from many of those who’d been present—congratulations on bringing valuable information, congratulations on surviving. He nodded and gulped, uncomfortable at being among so many people—at being among so many famous people—and moved as quickly as he could. His size, for he was tall enough to brush his hair against the top of the doorjamb and bulky enough to bring a smile to the face of a smashball team owner, acted against him, as it usually did; he managed to catch chair legs with his feet and inadvertently brushed some smaller people out of the way as he staggered for the door. Then he was out in the hall, where at least the traffic was moving in the direction he wanted to go, and a few moments later was outside, gratefully gulping in Borleias’s moist, warm air.
“Not much for crowds, are you?” The speaker—female, young—had moved up beside him as he’d recovered.
He took a look at her and his stomach lurched again. She was right. Crowds were bad. But attractive females didn’t help either. They, too, made words stick in his throat and made his heart hammer. This one was slender, her hair a cascade of blond curls now tied back in a tail. Her eyes were a lively blue, her features the sort that brightened any chamber they entered.
Tam took a moment to remember what it was she’d said. He managed a smile that, he hoped, suggested he was at ease. “That’s right. I’m a field holocam operator, not a city boy. How I ever let Wolam persuade me to come back to Coruscant with him really baffles me.”
“I suspect that he’s pretty persuasive.”
“He is.” Tam thought furiously, trying to remember what normal people did in these situations, then extended his hand. “Tam Elgrin.”
She shook it. “Danni Quee.”
“Say, I know your name. You’re almost famous.” Then he winced. “That came out wrong.”
Her smile said that she was amused rather than offended. “Listen, Tam, I have a question for you. Do you have any recordings that Wolam Tser didn’t show us back there? Any recordings of the Yuuzhan Vong?”
“I—” He felt the onset of a headache but ignored it. He hadn’t been told that he couldn’t share his recordings. Wolam Tser might fret about it, but then again, in these times of war, when it was vital to share information with appropriate parties, he probably wouldn’t. “I do. I have some recordings of a Yuuzhan Vong hunting pack. In the midlevels of Coruscant. I was with some people. After I stopped recording and really started running, I got toward the front of the pack and the Yuuzhan Vong fell on those in the rear.” He shrugged. “So I got away.” He pulled up the bag he always carried with him, the one that held his holocam, his miniature backup holocam, his recordings, his recording blanks. He found the recording he was looking for and pressed the data card into her hand. “That’s the one. I’d like it back.”
“I’ll copy it and get it back to you soon. Today, even.”
“Thanks.”
“Nice meeting you.” She flashed him a smile and headed back into the building.
“Likewise.” Finally able to get his heart rate under control, Tam headed away from the building, out into the kill zone.
Within the half kilometer nearest the front of the building, the burned-out area that had once been jungle was heavily occupied by vehicles and vessels; two large docking bays were under construction, duracrete being poured, prefabricated metal walls being raised. All around them were shuttles and starfighters, speeders and hovercrafts, transports and one large freighter with extensive damage to its bow.
Tam brought out his holocam and took a few moments to record the scene. Someday, if the New Republic survived, people would want to know how these events played out.
The headache grew in strength so suddenly that it felt as though he’d been stabbed. He cried out, clutched his head, and struggled to keep from falling.
He knew why the headache was back. It was because he wasn’t obeying. His instructions were clear. He dropped the holocam back into his bag.
Tam weaved his way between the ships in the kill zone to reach his—well, really, Wolam’s—shuttle.
Of course, it was a shuttle in function, not a shuttle in design. It had begun its career as a Sienar-built Skipray blastboat, an Imperial four-person gunship. An ungainly-looking thing, it had a bow that looked like an eccentric cam gear, the narrowest portion pointed forward and broadened by a pair of fixed wings angled downward at a sharp angle. The bow was attached to a stern that was little more than a huge axle. Mounted on the axle were the stabilizer fins, forward-sweeping wings that could rotate to be horizontal for landing or vertical for stabilization in atmospheric flight.
When it had been a machine of war, it had been heavily armed. But years ago, after Wolam Tser had stolen it when escaping with recordings of Imperial base-building activities that the Empire didn’t want him to retain, he’d begun modifying the boat. The proton torpedo and concussion missile tubes had been removed to give the boat more cargo and cabin room. The laser cannon turret on top had been replaced with a transparisteel dome, opening up more cabin room and offering those beneath it another view of the stars. The controls had been simplified, making the optimum crew size two instead of four.
Behind the command cabin, room that had been needed for missile racks was now converted into two smallish cabins, one for Wolam and one for his holocam operator.
Tam offered a false smile and a wave to the mechanics now welding metal plates over the holes in the wings, repairing damage sustained when one of the boat’s companion vehicles had exploded under coralskipper fire. He climbed up the port-side bow wing to the main hatch and entered, his movements hurried. Only if he hurried would the headache be kept at bay.
He didn’t pause as he entered the command cabin but headed into the aft passageway. In two paces he was at the door to his cramped cabin. He entered in a rush—Hurry, hurry—and sealed the door behind him.
He lifted the mattress of his bunk to reveal the storage compartment beneath. In it was a large, roughly spherical piece of rock—“A souvenir of Corellia,” he’d explained to Wolam.
Of course, he’d lied. He’d had to.
He set the stone, which was lighter than it should be, atop his bunk and rapped three times on its surface. A moment later, he rapped again, twice.
The stone split along an invisible center seam. It opened like an ocean bivalve, but instead of revealing two linings of flesh and perhaps a pearl, it showed only an amorphous blobby mass of material in the bottom.
His stomach lurching at the thought of touching it again, Tam reached out and found the slight protrusion at the top of the blob. He stroked it, feeling the living thing react to his touch. He snatched back his hand and wiped it on his pants, though there was no residue on his fingers from the smooth thing.
Moments later, the blobby material stretched up and assumed the approximate shape of a human head. Tam didn’t think it was a Yuuzhan Vong female’s head; the forehead was too pronounced, the features not made irregular by mutilation.
The villip looked at him with the face of his controller. “Report,” it said, its speech unaccented.
Tam felt his headache fade to almost nothingness, but the turmoil in his stomach, the turmoil in his emotions kept this from being the relief it otherwise would have been. “We are on Borleias,” he began.
There was a rap at the door. Wedge jolted upright, his eyes opening, his mind momentarily cloudy about where he was, what he should be doing.
He was still in his office, in his chair, but he’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t let himself do that. Every moment he didn’t push himself, more people might die.
He rubbed sleep from his eyes and turned to the door. “Come.”
The door slid over and out of sight, but there was no one in the corridor beyond. Then his visitor showed himself, peeking in from around the doorjamb.
The man was of average height and bald—shaven bald, Wedge knew, rather than prematurely bald. His mustache and goatee were close-cropped and black, giving him a sinister appearance, but his smile, all cheer flavored with wicked humor, dispelled any sense of dread. He was handsome in a way that only celebrities and a few extraordinarily successful businessmen and criminals could be.
Wedge rose. “Face! I was afraid you were lost back on Coruscant. Come in.”
Garik “Face” Loran, leader of the covert Intelligence team known as the Wraiths, shook his head. “Later. For now, I’m just here to drop off a package.”
She moved around Face, entering the office at just short of a dead run. She was tall, Wedge’s average stature making them the same height, and slender, with dark blond hair now frosted attractively with gray. In her youth she’d been an extraordinary beauty; now, to Wedge’s perception, lines of laughter and worry accentuated that beauty rather than detracted from it.
Suddenly he was on the other side of the desk—by running or vaulting, he could not recall—and enfolding her in his arms. “Iella …”
There was more noise than two voices could account for, cries of “Daddy!” Wedge released his wife, crouched, and grabbed up his dark blond, blue-eyed daughters, who had magically appeared on either side of Iella; he stood with one in either arm, Syal in the left and Myri in the right.
A few days before, when he’d picked them both up in their quarters on Coruscant, he’d complained that they were getting big, too heavy for him to lift. Now, their arms around his neck, he could barely detect their weight.
A moment ago he’d had nothing but a mission. Now he had a future again, a future he could hold to himself, a future he could squeeze and hear and smell. Wedge glanced over at Face, but the Wraith leader had, appropriately, vanished while attention was elsewhere, and the door was sliding closed where he’d been.
They lay in the darkness of Wedge’s quarters. Moonlight spilled in through the turquoise transparisteel, casting everything in shades of blue, bed and walls and skin.
“It’s not the same as watching your home dying,” Iella said. Her voice was thoughtful. She stared at the blue-tinged ceiling as if staring far beyond it, staring all the way back to Coruscant. “Not the same as if they’d descended on Corellia. But seeing orbital platforms drop onto the city, knowing that millions were dying with every impact, knowing that the few who were streaming into space in private vessels and leaving their homes behind were the lucky ones … Coruscant is dying. Wedge, I don’t know if I can describe the misery of it.”
“You don’t have to,” he said. “I know what it was like to leave you behind. To have to tell myself, ‘I can’t find them, I can’t help them, I can keep people alive up here.’ ”
She turned a smile on him. “Didn’t you trust me to get us out alive?”
“Yes. But trust doesn’t keep worry from eating you up from inside.”
She kissed him, rested her head on his shoulder. “What do we do now?”
“Well, you were just promoted to head of Intelligence for my operation here, which frees up Mara to make the Vong suffer in her own inimitable way. I’m going to need you to spread information among our people and see if the Yuuzhan Vong act on any of it—if we have any traitors among us, I want to find out who they are as fast as possible, to use them for our own purposes or eliminate them as a threat.”
“Is that going to be here or at some other station?”
“Here.” And he told her of the meeting with the Advisory Council.
She was silent for a long time as she thought about what he’d said. “Wedge, you’re doing what you never like to do. Fighting a two-front war. The Yuuzhan Vong on one side and the Advisory Council on the other.”
Wedge smiled. “The Advisory Council doesn’t know we’re at war with them.”
“They know they’re at war with us; they just don’t know we know it. But they may figure it out more quickly than you imagine. Even without Borsk to lead them, they have a lot of political smarts. Which means that Yuuzhan Vong spies aren’t the only spies you have to worry about. One of my jobs is going to be leaking information and seeing how our supposed allies respond to it … so we can use them for our own purposes or eliminate them as a threat.”
“I knew I was keeping you around for a reason.”
“At least two reasons.”
“Don’t tickle.”