Vua Rapuung gnashed his teeth. “No, ignorant one,” he growled. “Not that way.”
Anakin didn’t look at him, but kept his gaze wandering through the whispering Massassi trees, searching for shadows that did not agree with the wind in their motion.
The two stood at the divide of the ridge top; one stone spine snaked down and away to Anakin’s right, the other continued up and to his left. Anakin had started up the steepening trail.
“Why?” he asked. “The search craft are over there.” He waved toward the lowlands off the left ridge.
“They are not ‘craft,’ ” Rapuung snapped.
“You know what I meant.”
“How do you know where they are, when you cannot sense Yuuzhan Vong or the life shaped for us?”
“Because I can sense everything native in this forest,” Anakin replied. “Every whisper bird and runyip, every stintaril and woolamander. And the ones over there are agitated. I get flashes.”
“This is so? How many fliers? Five, yes?”
Anakin focused his concentration. “I think so.”
“They will split into a lav peq pattern, then. First the lowland, then arcs tightening to the highest point. If they find us up here, they will converge and release netting beetles.”
“What are netting beetles?”
“If we do not isolate ourselves on an elevation, you will not find out. This is not air warfare, Jeedai, and unless you plan to fortify this high spot and fight all of the warriors on this moon, altitude is of no use to you.”
“I want a look at the lay of the land.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve gotten us lost, that’s why. You no more know where the Vo—the Yuuzhan Vong base is than a mynock knows how to play sabacc.”
“I can find the shaper damutek. But if we slash a straight line toward them, they will snare us.”
“I know this moon,” Anakin said. “You don’t.” He stopped, staring suspiciously at the warrior. “How did you find me, anyway?”
“I followed the search parties, infidel. You were slashing a straight path, weren’t you? Yes. Without me, you would have been captured ten times by now.”
“Without you, I would have been in your shaper base by now.”
“Yes. I just said that,” Rapuung said. He closed his eyes, as if listening to something. “What do your Jeedai senses tell you now?”
Anakin frowned in concentration. “I think they’ve split up,” he said reluctantly.
“I can hear them,” Vua Rapuung said. “Not as well as I once could. Once my ears were …” He reached and lightly touched the festering, oozing scar tissue on the side of his head. He snarled and dropped his hand.
“We go down,” he said.
“I go up,” Anakin replied. He started up the trail. He didn’t look back, but after he had gone perhaps thirty strides, he heard what he guessed to be a Yuuzhan Vong profanity and the sound of footsteps pacing up behind him.
“Gee,” Anakin breathed. Tears stung his eyes.
He stood at the crest of the height, where he could see the familiar meander of the Unnh River. He’d seen this spot from the air maybe fifty times, and knew it as well as he knew any place.
Except that things had changed. The Great Temple—which had stood for untold thousands of years, watching the passage of the people who built it, of Jedi dark and brilliant, the destruction of the Death Star—was gone without a trace.
In its place near the river were five spacious compounds formed like many-rayed stars. The walls were thick and perhaps two stories high, and probably had chambers in them. The inner courtyards were open to the sky. Two seemed to be filled with water, another with a pale yellow fluid that probably wasn’t water. Another had structures in its central space—domes and polyhedrons of various shapes, all the same color as the larger structure. The fifth was full of coralskippers and larger spacegoing ships. Lots of them.
It looked like canals had been dug from the river to connect the compounds.
“We must descend before they scent us,” Vua Rapuung insisted again.
“I thought that stuff you rubbed on us fools the sniffers, or whatever they are.”
“It causes confusion. It gives us time to hide. There is no place to hide here, and they will see us. There is no fooling that.”
There is for Jedi, usually, Anakin thought. But he could no more cloud a Yuuzhan Vong mind than he could dance on the surface of a black hole.
“There’s cover,” he said. The hill was blanketed mostly in scrub and lacked the high canopy that grew over most of the moon’s land surface, but the bushes were usually more than head-high.
“Not from heat-pit sensors,” Rapuung demurred. “Not from netting beetles. No water.”
Anakin nodded thoughtfully, but he was really still examining the shaper base, barely paying attention to the Yuuzhan Vong beside him.
“Outside of the big compounds—all of those little structures that look like somebody just threw them down and let them grow—what’s all that? It looks like a shantytown.”
“I don’t know that word, shantee. That is where the workers and slaves and Shamed Ones live.”
“Support colony. They do the drudge work.”
“If the tizowyrm translates correctly, yes.”
“Workers and slaves I know. What are Shamed Ones?”
“Shamed Ones are cursed by the gods,” Rapuung said. “They work as slaves. They are not worth speaking of.”
“Cursed how?”
“When I say they are not worth speaking of, how do my words confuse you?”
“Fine,” Anakin sighed. “Have it your way.”
“My way is to leave this ridge, work spiralwise toward where the gas giant sets. Quickly.”
“That’s the wrong direction! We’re only a few kilometers away!”
“All the forest below is trapped,” Rapuung said. “The river, too. There is only one way in for us, and I know it.”
“Tell me what it is, then,” Anakin said. “Convince—” But he stopped. “Listen.”
Rapuung nodded. “I hear them. They are weaving the lav peq. I was foolish to trust you. You think with something other than your brain.” He pressed his frayed and ulcerous lips together in an expression of contempt.
“We aren’t caught yet. Is there a weak spot in this search pattern?”
“No.”
“We’ll make one, then. These fliers they’re using—”
“Tsik vai.”
“Right. Are they the same as we’ve seen before?”
“Yes.”
“They’re just atomospheric fliers, right?”
Rapuung looked wary. “How do you know that?”
“They look like they have some sort of air intake vents—gills—on the side.”
“Correct.”
“Come on, then.” Anakin started down the hill. Rapuung started after him, for once without objection.
Anakin was feeling considerably better today. Jedi healing and relaxation techniques had drained much of his weariness, and Vua Rapuung’s artificial skin—or whatever it was—seemed to have done its part with his shoulder. He loped down the hill in a series of long, flat, Force-aided leaps. Rapuung kept up, barely, winding nearly soundlessly through the dense underbrush. It actually raised the hackles on Anakin’s neck to look at him. It was hard to believe something so deadly looking could be sentient at all.
Most of the trees were gone, no doubt burned off in one of the many battles that had occurred on the jungle moon since the Rebel Alliance located its resistance here before the battle against the first Death Star. What remained was waist-high scrub. Farther down, the trees began again, a green necklace around the hill, and Anakin suddenly understood what Rapuung was concerned about. Fire burned up. Anything caught up here when the blaze started had probably died. If these netting beetles were anything like fire …
He realized, reluctantly, that Rapuung was right. Anakin thought too much like a pilot, where the high ground was everything. He wasn’t a pilot right now; he was prey.
But dangerous prey—a feral rycrit, not a tame one, he reminded himself, when the first tsik vai flier came over.
Anakin didn’t hesitate; he knew what he wanted to do. He reached in a ten-meter radius and lifted everything that wasn’t fastened down—leaf litter, twigs, stones—and hurled them in a cyclone at the intake slits on the side of the flier.
“Fool!” Rapuung shouted. “That was your plan?”
The tsik vai swooped in low, and the tentaclelike cables fired out at them. Anakin dodged, keeping up his barrage. Undeterred, the flier followed close, dropping lower. A tentacle caught Rapuung. The warrior leapt, gripped the upper part of the tentacle in his hands, and started climbing, a grim expression on his scarred face. Getting the idea, Anakin tried to do the same, but without the Force to give him certainty—without being able to feel the tentacles as well as see them—he missed.
The flier suddenly made a peculiar whine, and its flexible wings began to shiver as if in spasm. The tentacle holding Rapuung released him, and he instantly leapt for the ground. The flier hung there, shaking itself.
“Run,” Rapuung shouted. “It will clear its lungs quickly. These tsik vai were not shaped by idiot children, as you seem to think.”
Anakin fell into step with him. “Where are the other fliers?”
“They know where we are now. They will seed the netting beetles into the lowland, as I told you.”
“I wish you had told me what these things do.”
“They draw fibers from tree to tree, from bush to bush. They come in waves that overtake one another, the first wave weaving and the waves behind feeding to replenish their fiber. They move very quickly.”
“Oh. That’s not good.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “You were climbing toward the flier when it had you. Did you think you could capture it?”
“No. I thought I might die gloriously rather than ignominiously. My bare hands are not capable of forcing open the cockpits.”
“But if we can get above the net, somehow …”
“Some of the beetles will draw strands up into the air and cross them above our heads. If we could fly at this very moment, we might escape.”
Anakin came to a halt. “Why are we running, then? Whichever way we go, we’re only coming nearer to the net.”
“True. And if we go uphill, we will only delay our confrontation with it. Do you have your Jeedai blade-that-burns? It might cut the fibers.”
“No.” Anakin was peering downhill. The trees started perhaps a hundred meters away, but he had enough elevation to see their swaying tops stretching off to the horizon, bending this way and that in a fickle wind.
Except in a strip, where they weren’t moving at all. Following the strip, he saw it curving around the hill.
“That’s it, isn’t it,” he murmured. “The net is holding them together.”
“Yes. The fibers are very strong, the net very fine.”
Even as Anakin watched, more trees froze in place, and the strip deepened.
“Will the netting beetles eat us?”
“They will attach to our flesh and draw fiber, using some of our cells in the process. It will not be fatal.”
“Right. Because it’s not going to happen.” Anakin stopped, knelt, and took off his pack. After an instant of rummaging, he’d found what he was after: five phosphorous flares.
“Are those weapons? Machines?”
“Not usually,” Anakin said. “Don’t look directly at this.” He struck one alight, then, using the Force, hurled it in a long arc downhill.
He struck another and hurled it similarly, along a different vector.
“I don’t understand,” Rapuung said. “How will the light stop the netting beetles?”
“The light won’t. The fire will. The beetles can’t attach to trees and bushes that aren’t there.”
He struck another flare. As he cocked his arm back to throw it, Vua Rapuung backhanded him in the face.
Anakin’s nostrils filled with the iron scent of blood, and he fetched hard against the ground before he could react to cushion himself. Rapuung was all over him, snarling like a beast, fingers curled around his neck. He smelled sour and sick.
Spots dancing before his eyes, Anakin did the only thing he could. He found a stone with the Force and hit the crazed warrior right between the eyes with it. Rapuung’s head snapped back and his hands came away. Anakin hit him in the chin so hard that sparks of pain exploded in his knuckles. The Yuuzhan Vong fell off of him, but by the time Anakin had scrambled to his feet, Rapuung was up, assuming a martial stance.
“Sithspawn!” Anakin snapped. “What are you doing?”
“Combustion!” the Yuuzhan Vong roared. “The first abomination is the use of fire from a machine!”
“What?”
“This is forbidden, you stinking infidel! Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”
“You’re insane!” Anakin shouted back, rubbing knuckles that felt shattered, drawing breath through an aching windpipe. “You were just asking me if I could use my lightsaber! You think that’s not a machine?”
A look of what might have been horror dawned on Rapuung’s face. “I … yes, I prepared myself for that, But fire, the first of all sins—”
“Wait,” Anakin snapped. “You’re not making any sense. The Yuuzhan Vong have used fire breathers against us in the past.”
“Living creatures producing flame is another thing entirely!” Rapuung shrieked. “How can you possibly imagine it is the same as what you’ve just done? As well say that the hand of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior and the metal grip of one of your made-thing abominations are the same because either can hold an amphistaff.”
Anakin took a deep breath. “Look,” he said. “I don’t pretend to understand your religion. I don’t even want to. But you’ve chosen to fight with an infidel against your own people, haven’t you? You were perfectly willing for me to use my abominable lightsaber. Now you deal with this or go your own way. Unless you’ve got another way out.”
“No,” Rapuung admitted. “It’s just the shock …” He dropped his head. “You really don’t understand. The gods don’t hate me. I know they don’t. I can prove it. But if I soil myself like this, they will have reason to hate me! Ah, what have I become?”
The wind shifted, and the charred pepper scent of burning blueleaf set Anakin to coughing. The last flare had gone only about three meters, and now the bushes upwind of them were blazing merrily. It was the dry season, and jungle burned very well in the dry season.
“You’d better get a grip fast, Vua Rapuung, or the first abomination is going to eat you alive.”
The Yuuzhan Vong stood there for a long moment, head cast down, but when he raised his head, his eyes were beacons of rage. Anakin tensed, preparing to fight again.
“She has driven me to this,” the warrior said. “These sins will settle on her. I leave it to the gods to judge.”
“Does that mean we can go?” Anakin asked, watching the fire sweep toward them. Down the hill, smoke poured thickly from where the other flares had lodged.
“Yes. Let us go. We still embrace pain together, Jeedai.”
The fire drove them around the side of the hill and up it; the change in the wind seemed to be a lasting one. Smoke boiled and crept close to the ground.
The jungle burned fast.
“My opinion of you as a strategist improves,” Rapuung said. “The fire drives us directly into the other side of the net. We have our choice of being burned to death by the first abomination, or being captured and then burned.”
“The wind shifted. My plan was to follow along the fire’s exhaust, walk on the ashes. The net will collapse where the fire burns through, and then we’re clear.”
“Then perhaps the gods have spoken after all,” Rapuung said. He coughed violently on the smoke, which was becoming so thick that Anakin was seeing spots in front of his eyes. He remembered most people who died in a fire were dead before the flames ever reached them.
“Keep low,” he said. “The smoke rises.”
“Low. Crawling like a tso’asu.”
“If you want to live, yes.”
“I do not fear death,” Rapuung choked out. “But my revenge will not be thwarted. I …” He convulsed in another series of racking coughs, fell, climbed back to all fours, and collapsed again.
“Get up!” Anakin exhorted him.
Rapuung quivered but did not move.
Through the smoke, the yellow teeth of the fire appeared, chewing toward them.