Dark Tide 2: Ruin

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Her blade came up in a guard high by her right ear. Corran faced her, his blade held in two hands and running from his belly toward a point beside his right instep. The light from their blades turned their sweat into an iridescent sheen visible on Mara’s face and bare arms and on Corran’s dripping torso.

  Mara attacked and Corran parried. They exchanged blows, each retreating and attacking in turn. Luke marveled at the complexity of the Force flows around them. He had seen greater displays of the Force—years ago before I understood the Force’s subtleties—and more fluid displays of swordsmanship, but the fight he witnessed here was altogether different. Mara and Corran, longtime friends, each sought to push the other to the limit, and relied on guile and skill and strength to do it. They shifted from defense to attack, and through a myriad modes of each. The object was not to do damage, but to force the other person to prevent damage.

  What made it even more remarkable was that neither of them was in full, good health. Mara had been battling a disease that sapped her strength and defied Luke’s best efforts to help her. He knew things could have been worse: of a hundred people diagnosed with the ailment, only she had survived. Her strength in the Force has sustained her, and in combat she lets the Force race through her.

  Corran had only recently completed bacta therapy for life-threatening wounds he’d earned in a fight with the Yuuzhan Vong on Bimmiel. While the injuries had healed, including the long-term effects of a biotoxin, getting his conditioning back and regaining his combat edge was not easy. Luke could see Corran’s chest heaving with the exercise and smiled. Neither of us is as young as we once were.

  Mara crashed her blade against Corran’s, driving him back. Corran’s right ankle twisted, dumping him to the workout room floor. He rolled back through a somersault and came up on his right knee, with his left flank closer to Mara than his right. He held his lightsaber in toward his belly, then rotated his right hand. The weapon’s internal assembly shifted, more than doubling the length of the lightsaber’s blade and infusing it with a deep amethyst hue.

  Mara laughed sharply and swung her blade at the slender purple energy rod opposing her. While Corran’s weapon did give him reach on her, a simple beat attack would swing the blade wide, then she could dart forward and spit Corran with a lunge. The surprise of Corran’s blade-lengthening tactic had worked on enemies before, but Luke knew Mara must have been expecting it and had long since worked out a strategy to deal with it.

  She swung her blue blade to batter Corran’s blade aside, but got no spark and no hiss from a collision of the blades. Her mighty swing spun her around, and as she completed the circle, the blue blade carved an infinity symbol in the air before her. She dropped back two steps, then thumbed her blade off and bowed in Corran’s direction, before slumping to her knees with sweat pasting locks of hair to her cheeks.

  Luke arched an eyebrow at Corran. “How long have you been waiting to use that tactic?”

  Corran shut his blade off, then rotated the assembly back into its original position. He slid off his right ankle and onto his butt, then sat cross-legged on the floor. “The Vong got me thinking about it. We can’t feel them through the Force, so we can’t feel where they are. That makes them difficult to defend against.”

  Mara snorted. “Turning your blade off in the middle of a fight like that is a foolish thing to do.”

  “I know, but I could have just as easily switched blade lengths as you went to beat my blade aside. A stop thrust is very effective against an incoming enemy, if you know the enemy is incoming. I figured you’d have to press your attack. I doubled the blade, giving you a way to take my weapon out of play, then killed the blade as you went to knock it aside. Another touch of the thumb and you get spitted.”

  Luke felt a chill run down his spine. He recalled his teacher, Obi-Wan Kenobi, raising his lightsaber in a salute, then killing the blade even as Darth Vader killed him. It worked that time as a tactic, too. The ultimate in self-sacrifice for the ultimate in victories.

  The Jedi Master smiled and opened his hands as he walked to the center of the training floor. Above and around him, through a great transparisteel dome, he could see the orderly flow of airspeeders and hovertrucks moving through Coruscant’s sky. Everything seemed so natural and normal when he looked at the outside world, yet beneath the dome, in the Jedi headquarters on Coruscant, things boiled like storm clouds on the horizon.

  “Both of you did very well, all things considered.”

  Mara forced herself to her feet. “We can do better. We have to do better. C’mon.”

  Corran shook his head, spraying sweat from his brown hair and beard. “I’ve got at least one more go-around in me, I think.”

  Luke frowned. “No, right now, this was enough for you both.”

  Beyond the two of them, striding boldly through an archway, came a Jedi with a black cloak billowing behind him. Slender and sharp featured, the Jedi had an incendiary gaze. His upper lip curled with a hint of contempt, then he smiled carefully. And coldly. “Good afternoon, Master Skywalker.” The way he spoke the word Master made it a simple title, draining it of any sense of respect.

  “Good afternoon to you, Kyp Durron.” Luke kept his voice even, despite his dislike of Kyp’s tone. “I thought you’d be here later.”

  Kyp stopped on the other side of the sweating combatants. “I convinced the others to speed their arrangements.” He waved a gloved hand back toward the archway. “We’re ready to convene the council of war right now.”

  Luke raised his chin slowly. “This is not a council of war. The Jedi do not go to war. We are protectors and defenders, not aggressors.”

  “With all due respect, Master Skywalker, the difference is a mere semantic one.” Kyp clasped his hands together at the small of his back. “The Yuuzhan Vong are here and are intent on conquering at least some, if not all, of our galaxy. As defenders we have already failed, and yet, as aggressors we knew success. Ganner Rhysode and Corran attacked on Bimmiel and came away with their prize. We defended at Dantooine and were driven away.”

  Corran sighed. “Bimmiel belongs to the Vong now, too, Kyp, in case you hadn’t noticed. And Ganner and I did what we did to protect some people taken prisoner. It was that simple.”

  Kyp frowned at Corran, allowing annoyance to ripple off him. “Semantics again. You attacked the Yuuzhan Vong and slew them, which is the only way you succeeded in getting your charges freed. Regardless, I have the others here with me. They are waiting below in the auditorium. What shall I tell them, Master?”

  Luke closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded once, wearily. “Tell them I appreciate their coming here so quickly. I wish them to relax. They should spend this evening in contemplation of the Force. Their input will be treated with respect and considered fully. We will meet with them tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? I understand and obey, Master.” Kyp bowed once, quickly and shallow, then spun on his heel and marched out very precisely. Luke noticed Corran watching the other man’s departure, his thumb caressing the black ignition button on the lightsaber’s grip. Mara spared no glance for Kyp, but flashes of fury came off her like bursts of radiation from a pulsar.

  “I know you find him annoying . . .” Luke said.

  Corran turned at the sound of Luke’s voice. “Annoying? Either I’m covering my feelings, or you’re being kind. If I had any talent for telekinesis at all, I’d have strangled him with his own cloak.”

  “Corran!” Mara frowned as she looked at him.

  “Sorry, I suppose that would have been out of character for me—”

  “Out of character to be so obvious.” Mara’s green eyes narrowed. “You need to be more subtle. Locate a partially blocked artery in his brain, then just pinch it off. Bang, he’s down and it’s over.”

  Corran smiled. “Now I’m really sorry I don’t have TK.”

  “Stop it, both of you.” Luke shook his head. “Even joking that way compounds the problem we have with Kyp and his faction. They’ve all
grown up in the post-Empire era. They’ve always had dreams of being Jedi that could destroy the greatest evil we’ve ever known. What I did fighting the Empire, what I had to do fighting the Empire—that’s how they think we should handle all evil. The slash of a lightsaber is the last word in justice. They know better than that, but the Yuuzhan Vong, because they are outside the Force, seem to leave us with only the lightsaber to deal with them.”

  The Corellian Jedi flicked sweat out of his beard. “I suppose that killing two Vong at Bimmiel didn’t help dispel that impression, did it?”

  “You had no choice, Corran, and you came very close to dying on Bimmiel.” Luke sighed heavily. “That lesson was lost on Kyp’s faction, too. You got hurt; they see you as weak. They’re missing how good the Yuuzhan Vong are. Since Kyp’s followers see themselves as better than you, your ability to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong means they, too, can defeat them, and easily.”

  Mara nodded. “And Anakin killing even more of them on Dantooine likely has encouraged some to severely underestimate the Yuuzhan Vong. The lesson of Dantooine is a terrifying one. The Yuuzhan Vong care more about doing their duty than worrying about death. Those Jedi who use fear or intimidation to keep enemies in check should be terrified of an enemy that isn’t afraid to die.”

  Luke pressed fingertips to his temples. “That’s what has me worried the most: fear and terror, pain, envy, and contempt. They’re all of the dark side.”

  “Yes, but, Master, we have to be realistic.” Corran clipped his lightsaber to his belt. “The Vong are formidable and merciless. We can’t sense them with the Force. This takes away a lot of the abilities most Jedi have come to rely on. The loss of our edge has got to bring fear.”

  “No, Corran, you’re wrong.” Luke made his right hand into a fist and thumped it against his heart. “Being Jedi is what we are. It’s not the power we wield and the weapons we carry. I don’t stop being a Jedi when stripped of the Force by an ysalamiri. The others are letting fear distance themselves from this basic truth. We serve the Force, whether our enemies are part of it or not.”

  Corran frowned as he thought for a moment, then nodded. “I see your point, but I’m not sure they will. Face it, a normal reaction to fear is to strike out at that which frightens us.”

  “Or,” Mara added in ominous tones, “to curry favor with it in the hopes of being spared.”

  Luke hissed. “I don’t like the sound of that, Mara.” On Belkadan he had seen beings that had been enslaved by the Yuuzhan Vong, but he had wondered if some of them had accepted their role or welcomed it. Fear can motivate people to do all manner of irrational things. Having to fight people of the New Republic to fend off the Yuuzhan Vong was something Luke didn’t want to consider.

  “Still, Corran’s point is good. Kyp’s calling this gathering a council of war is a clear sign that some want to strike hard at the Yuuzhan Vong.” Luke rubbed a hand over his forehead. “The missions for us, as Jedi, are simple. We go to the frontier worlds and help evacuate the helpless. We go and coordinate defensive postures. Dantooine seems like a poor example of how that sort of thing can turn out, but we did allow some people to escape who would not otherwise have made it.”

  Mara looked up sharply. “What about scouting missions? That’s what you did on Belkadan and it was useful. We learned a lot from your being there. Corran and Ganner brought back useful information from Bimmiel, too, including those samples of biotech the Yuuzhan Vong use and that mummified Yuuzhan Vong body. The more intelligence we can gather on the Yuuzhan Vong, the better off we’ll be in dealing with them.”

  “I agree, but with fewer than a hundred Jedi, and with hundreds of worlds as potential targets, how do we allocate our people?”

  Corran nodded. “Well, there is no winning the political battle here, I think we all know that. If no Jedi is on a world the Vong hit, we’ll be blamed. If too few Jedi are there to stop them—and we know that’s a given—we lose again. I’m not suggesting that we do nothing, but we have to know that we’re never going to satisfy those that we can’t help.

  “On the other hand, Mara’s point also carries with it a truism: the only place we know for certain that we can find the Vong is on worlds they’ve taken. I can review data on the conquered worlds and see if there is any way we could get a mission in. It won’t be easy.”

  “None of this will be easy, Corran.” The Jedi Master reached out and took Mara’s left hand in his right. “We’ll just have to make sure that the Jedi do everything we can to fulfill our mission. I’m less afraid of criticism from outside than I am that failure on our part may shatter the Jedi from within. If that happens, the Yuuzhan Vong will face no opposition at all.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Something about returning to the suite of rooms where he’d spent much of his time on Coruscant felt very odd to Jacen Solo. He would have said he’d grown up there, but he knew that wasn’t close to the truth. He’d traveled all over the New Republic with his parents, then spent a lot of time at the Jedi academy.

  The place didn’t look that much different than he remembered it. His room was down the hallway; his parents’ suite was upstairs. C-3PO still puttered about, dashing from one seeming crisis to another, stopping only to say how good it was to see Jacen again. The golden protocol droid’s antics, while annoying, made up one of the elements Jacen still found familiar about the place, and for some reason even that made him uneasy.

  The unsettling nature of the suite bothered him. Anakin, his younger brother, stood over by the transparisteel viewport, studying the lines of speeders tracing their paths through the sky. Jacen got almost no sense of Anakin through the Force, as if his brother were a continent away. What little he did get was somber and tinged a bit with apprehension.

  Jaina, his twin, on the other hand, brimmed over with bright emotion. Seeing her, dark hair gathered into a thick braid, dark eyes bright, brought a smile to his own face. Her joy at having joined Rogue Squadron infected him, broadening that smile. As twins, they had always been close and shared much; still, the way Jaina had blossomed in this new role had taken him by surprise.

  But a pleasant surprise.

  Jacen enfolded her in a hug after he stepped down into the large living room area. “I’ve missed you. The squadron has been keeping you busy, has it?”

  Jaina returned the hug fiercely, then gave her brother a kiss on the cheek. “Yes. We’re recruiting new pilots and I’m helping to screen them. I monitor their reactions when we show them what the Yuuzhan Vong do in combat. We work on weeding them out based on performance and such things.”

  Jacen smiled. “Jedi senses are good for that sort of thing.”

  “I know, but what’s amazing is this: We compile our reports after simulations and interviews, and everyone on the board does it independently. Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu are helping, and it’s weird, but without using the Force, they seem to flag the same people I do as being unsuitable. Years of experience is serving them the way the Force does me.”

  Anakin laughed lightly. “I don’t think years of experience will lift big rocks.”

  Jaina gave him a big-sister frown. “You know what I mean.”

  Jacen moved past his sister and seated himself on the tan couch. “Experience is one thing that can help anyone, including Jedi. Learn from things, don’t repeat mistakes.”

  Anakin nodded, then resumed staring out the viewport. “Good thing some mistakes can’t be repeated.”

  His sister sighed and started toward him. “Anakin, it wasn’t your fault—”

  Anakin held up a hand, stopping her. He didn’t resort to the Force to do it, but Jacen sensed he would have, had Jaina not stopped and lowered her arms. “Everyone keeps telling me that, and I know it, deep down in my heart. Being cleared of blame, though, doesn’t mean I don’t still feel some responsibility. Maybe I didn’t kill him, but was there something I could have done that would have saved him?”

  Jaina shook her head. “There is no way of knowing that.” />
  Anakin turned, and somehow banished a haunted expression. “If you are right, Jaina, then I’m doomed. I have to believe there is, so when there’s a next time—”

  Jacen sat forward. “You’ve been through your ‘next time,’ Anakin. You saved Mara.”

  “Sure, right up to the point where you and Luke saved me and her. Don’t think I’m not grateful, I am.” One corner of Anakin’s mouth cocked itself into a grin. “You got me halfway to an answer. I just have to get myself the rest of the way.”

  Jacen nodded. It had not escaped him that Anakin had not actually spoken the name “Chewbacca.” The Wookiee’s death had hurt them all, terribly and deeply. He had always been a part of their lives, and when he was taken away, they saw how vastly and to what depth he had been involved with them. His death opened up a gaping wound that, for Jacen, had not yet begun to heal.

  All three of them fell silent, turning inward. Anakin looked out the viewport again, but his eyes were focused too distantly to be watching any one thing. Jaina folded her arms across her chest and flounced down on the couch next to Jacen. Her brows furrowed, and Jacen could almost read the memories of Chewbacca radiating off her. For himself, he remembered the softness of the Wookiee’s fur and the gentle strength in his arms, his sense of humor and his infinite patience with human children possessed of Force powers.

  “Hey, it’s so quiet down there . . .”

  Jacen looked up at the stairs and saw a man standing there, but it took him a heartbeat to realize it was his father. The voice had helped, but the hitch at the end, and the raw nature of it, surprised him. His father’s clothes hung looser, and his flesh was tinged with a gray pallor instead of the rich bronze from being kissed by so many suns. Han Solo had swept his hair back out of his eyes, but wore it longer than Jacen could ever remember. The length hid some of the gray, but not all of it, especially at the temples.