Dark Tide 2: Ruin

by Michael A. Stackpole

  And they needed to be shown that hard work is going to be vital here. She opened her eyes and looked up at her commander. “Colonel, I—Boy, this is humbling, and I guess I didn’t realize I needed to be humbled.”

  Gavin laughed heartily, then nodded. “You didn’t need it as much as others might have thought you needed it. You’re not the first pilot in this unit to be taken down a notch or two, and remember, all of us were treated similarly. Rogue Squadron is the best unit in the New Republic, but now our comrades know we’re all on equal footing when it comes to how we are treated.”

  He held up a finger. “One more thing that I hope you’ll take away from this. In my time with Rogue Squadron I’ve seen a lot of people die. I’ve lost a lot of friends, people I was close with, and some I was very close to. What Admiral Kre’fey managed to do is remind all of us, through the persons of your brother and Corran, that none of us are immune to death out here. He reminded us that we may be called upon to make sacrifices we don’t want to make, and that’s good. If we go out there thinking we’re invulnerable, we’ll get stupid. Stupid people die, and all too often, they take friends with them.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” Jaina had already seen, in the simulations she’d flown after Garqi, that she was flying sharper than before. She had more of an edge, and she knew she’d need it against the Yuuzhan Vong.

  “Very good, Lieutenant.” He straightened up in his chair. “Go find your squadron mates and tell them they have two hours before we report to the belly launch bay. Admiral Kre’fey thinks he has a way to neutralize some of the Yuuzhan Vong threat facing us, but we’ll still be out there patrolling in case there’s a miscalculation. I want everyone ready to go because, at the end of this little foray, I want to recover as many fighters as we put out there.”

  Sealed inside the cockpit of his X-wing, which was nestled deep in the lower launch bay on the Ralroost, Gavin never saw the Bothan Assault Cruiser revert to realspace. The second the capital ship’s sensors became operational, they flooded Gavin’s computer with systems data for Sernpidal. Launch control cleared him for launch, so he powered up his repulsorlift coils and nudged the throttle forward. The X-wing picked up speed as it moved into the launch tube, then burst through the magnetic containment bubble at the end and looped up to the rendezvous point.

  He raised his right hand and flicked a canopy switch that locked his fighter’s S-foils in attack position, then checked his shields, lasers, and finally his target acquisition system. “’Roost, Rogue Leader here. Scopes are negative for an immediate threat.”

  “Copy, Leader. Commence run.”

  “As ordered.” Gavin flicked his comm unit over to the squadron tactical frequency. “One flight on me. Two, you’re with the snoop. Three, take low. So far, so good, but be careful.”

  Gavin checked his scopes again and saw some movement out at the fringes of the system. The data came from the Ralroost’s sensors and registered the distant craft as coral-skippers. Short of making a microjump through hyperspace, they couldn’t get to the Ralroost in less than four hours, by which time the ship should have been long gone. And if they do get to the Ralroost before then, it will be long gone.

  Admiral Kre’fey had agreed that the slamming of a moon into Sernpidal had not just been a terror attack. The resources it required demanded some other gain, since Sernpidal was hardly a threat and could have been useful for whatever the sorts of things were that the Yuuzhan Vong were doing with Dubrillion. Getting a mission in to see what was going on there was very important.

  A standard scouting mission would generally appear at the fringes of a system and employ probe droids or just long-range sensors to learn what it could. Kre’fey assumed the Yuuzhan Vong would place defenses at the edges of the system to prevent this strategy from working. The admiral had his astronavigators run countless analyses of data from the Millennium Falcon’s outbound run. Using that information, they created models that showed how the planet would break up over time. The models helped determine how the fragmenting world would change the gravitic profile of the system as it slowly broke apart. They found a point very close to the crushed world where a ship could get in and out, yet intrasystem jumps would be difficult for the Yuuzhan Vong.

  So, we’re dropped into that space and get to go. Gavin brought his fighter around and headed into the labyrinth that the debris from Sernpidal had created. While the moon’s fall had shattered the world, it had not done as complete a job with it as the Death Star had with Alderaan. Gavin had flown through the Graveyard of Alderaan, but the remains of Sernpidal were bigger than the asteroid-size shards of Alderaan.

  He could see huge chunks with what were once coastlines etched on them. He suspected, were he to fly in close enough, he would see the ruins of cities. The idea of doing that, aside from being well outside mission parameters, held no appeal for him at all. My job is to get past the debris screen and see what else is going on here, if anything.

  The screen of coralskippers at the edges of the system did suggest the Yuuzhan Vong wanted to protect something, but until Gavin threaded his flight through fragments of the planetary crust and around stone that had been molten and flowing until frozen by the vacuum of space, he had no inkling of what the Yuuzhan Vong would be doing. Once he did make his way through, and brought his X-wing out into the light of Sernpidal’s sun, his mouth went dry.

  “Emperor’s black bones!”

  Gavin heard the curse over the comm and almost snapped at the lack of comm discipline, when he realized he’d been the one to say it. “Snoop, are you operational?”

  “Affirmative, Leader. Pods deployed.”

  “Good, get it all.”

  Gavin couldn’t be certain what he was seeing because, while he had seen similar things, it had never been in space. With his wife, back on her homeworld of Chandrila, he’d gone diving and had marveled at the life hidden under the surface of the water. Having come from a desert world, the idea that much of anything could hide beneath the waves just hadn’t occurred to him. He had come to love diving and especially watching the teeming life around various reefs in the Silver Sea.

  Clinging to the sunny faces of Sernpidal’s fragments were things that looked very much like snails, only huge. Large enough to house a flight of X-wings! He could see where some of them had worked their way down along the rock, leaving a softened trail behind them, as if they were eating the rock. In their wake came countless smaller creatures of a similar design. They seemed to be following up on specific veins of minerals the large ones had exposed.

  The snails clinging to the rock were not the only ones he saw. Others—a cloud of them—drifted out to a nexus point that seemed vaguely equidistant between most of the fragments. There Gavin made out a stony lattice somewhat ovoid in shape and easily the size of a small moon. Some of the snails, both big and small, moved over it, layering rock across it. Some of the snails, with decidedly different shells than those eating rock, were being incorporated into the lattice, along the spine and located in a couple of other places. Slender filaments that glistened in the sunlight linked them, calling to mind images he’d once seen of nerve plexuses.

  They’re growing a ship, a huge ship. Gavin glanced at his range finder and saw he was still a good forty kilometers from the skeleton. That’s as big as the Death Star was.

  “What do we do, Lead?”

  Gavin heard Major Varth’s request for a mission and immediately started picking out targets. He stopped only when the absurdity of it struck him. One proton torpedo might have killed a Death Star, but this thing had no shielded reactor exhaust port. It has no reactor. It is alive . . . or will be. Even a direct hit by every proton torpedo in the squadron would only thin the work force, not even cripple it.

  “Nine, we do nothing. We’re here as eyes.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth, but he could say nothing else. “Someone wiser than me will have to figure this out, Rogues. Let’s hope they can.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 
Corran Horn knelt on one knee in the brush near the rendezvous site he’d worked out with his local contact. He wore a padded combat suit that had been supplemented with some duraplast panels encasing his arms and legs. They, like the padded suit, were a motley pattern of red, gray, and purple, matching them to the vegetation on Garqi. Sunk as he was back in the brush, his suit made him all but invisible to the naked eye.

  His contact was late, and while Corran sensed nothing out of the ordinary through the Force, it didn’t lessen his apprehension at all. Of course, had the Yuuzhan Vong been closing in to ambush him, he’d have felt nothing through the Force. As a hedge against that possibility, Jacen, Ganner, and the Noghri had set up a perimeter. Corran was certain that if anything happened to them and somehow they were not able to use their comlinks to get him a message, he’d pick up their distress through the Force and be alerted.

  Having an alarm because I’m losing someone, though—that’s nothing I want. The mission to Garqi had, so far, passed a week without incident. The Best Chance had gotten well away from the crash site, and the Yuuzhan Vong seemed unable or uninterested in following up the little bits and pieces of the trail they’d left behind in making their escape. They’d brought the ship to ground at an agri-combine facility about forty kilometers north of Pesktda, the world’s capital, and secreted it away in buildings that had once housed the large harvester droids.

  Going in, they’d expected the Yuuzhan Vong to wreak havoc with the droids that were used to do all the farming on the world. The harvester droids of various shapes and sizes had been uniformly reduced to amorphous blobs of melted durasteel that stained the ferrocrete thoroughfares around the facilities. The crops themselves were close to time for harvest, but without the huge machines, there would be no way to get it all in. This worked to the team’s advantage, since it made living off the land much easier.

  Corran found it in himself to grudgingly admire the Yuuzhan Vong’s stand on machines. The world of Garqi was not terribly important in the overall scheme of things, but it did manage to produce a lot more food than the local population could use. Assuming the Yuuzhan Vong could actually eat the same food as the people of the galaxy they were invading, Garqi was one huge welcoming fruit basket waiting to be devoured. If I were the commander here, I would have harvested the food, then destroyed the machines because, barring machines of my own, there is no way all this can be gotten in. But he obviously decided it was better to let the food rot than to use hated machines to harvest it. Interesting stand on principle.

  This left open the question of what the Yuuzhan Vong were doing on Garqi. The survey team had seen no people as they slowly made their way in toward the capital. At the appropriate local times, they set their comlinks for the frequencies and scramble codes the New Republic had set up in the event an attack from the Remnant had overrun Garqi. For the first several nights they heard nothing, and then, four days in, they caught a quick burst of sound that, when fed into a datapad and decompressed, became a long text message to anyone who had survived the crash down south of Pesktda. The message included a list of times and places to meet, with several of the sites within easy range for the team.

  Ganner and Jacen had both argued that the message was a trap, but Corran had disagreed. “If the Vong aren’t going to use machines to harvest crops, which have obvious value, they aren’t going to use one on a task with little chance of return. Besides, the Vong haven’t shown a skill for guile. We stake out one site, watch it, see what happens, then make a meeting at the next site.”

  The Noghri offered no opinion one way or another about whether or not they were going to be walking into a trap. Corran suspected that because a Noghri had been killed by a Yuuzhan Vong who was trying to murder Leia Organa Solo, all Noghri saw themselves honor-bound to avenge that death. The reputation of the Noghri as being very lethal was quite well known, and Corran was more than happy to have them angry with the Yuuzhan Vong.

  At least I know they’re not going to let themselves get out of control. He had no similar assurances concerning Jacen and Ganner. Ganner’s enmity toward the Yuuzhan Vong stemmed from acts he’d witnessed on Bimmiel. While Corran didn’t think Ganner would be stupid and precipitate trouble, he did figure him for doing his utmost to take the fight to the Yuuzhan Vong. That desire to engage the Yuuzhan Vong could get Ganner in a lot of trouble.

  Jacen was another case altogether. On Belkadan he’d been defeated and captured by a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. While he had engaged and defeated warriors on Dantooine, and killed a lot of Yuuzhan Vong slave soldiers there, as well, he still hadn’t the distinction his younger brother did of having fought and possibly slain upwards of a dozen of the warriors on Dantooine. Corran didn’t think Jacen would go on a killing spree just to even up the score, but that put him a long way from being able to predict the younger man’s actions.

  A sense of determination tinged with apprehension came to Corran through the Force. He looked to the south where a solitary young man ambled up the trail through the rain forest. Because of the Force, Corran had no trouble spotting him, yet the way the man moved through the forest would have made tracking him tough for anyone else. Clearly the man had lived on Garqi long enough to learn how to avoid detection in its forests.

  Corran gathered the Force and projected the image of someone moving swiftly through the brush off to the man’s left. The man turned quickly, bringing a blaster carbine around to cover the movement. Corran slipped from his hiding place and closed with the youth. The young man’s hand came up to press against his right ear—Corran assumed he was comlinked to someone else who’d seen the Jedi move—then the man spun and leveled the blaster at him.

  A jolt of fear rolled out of the man, but he quickly shut it down. “Green.”

  Corran nodded. “Yellow.”

  The youth smiled, straightened up, and lowered his blaster. The agreed-upon challenge had been a color in the visible light spectrum, and the countersign the color immediately contiguous with it. “I’m Rade Dromath.”

  Drawing closer, Corran found something familiar in the man’s face. The name likewise tickled at his memory. “Dromath, the name’s familiar.”

  “My father was with the New Republic. He died during the Thrawn war.”

  Things slowly trickled back into Corran’s brain. “Your mother, she was from Garqi.”

  The tall, blond man nodded. “Dynba Tesc. She fled the Empire, met my father, and married him. She came back after he died.”

  A shiver ran down Corran’s spine. “I met her once, here. How is she?”

  The young man shook his head. “She’s dead. The Yuuzhan Vong got her in the first wave. Because of the stories she told of the old days here, of fighting against the Empire, and being so close to the Remnant, she’d prepared things. Wasn’t like she was a nut about it, but just hid some things away. Her foresight is why we’re alive—the Resistance, that is.”

  “Sorry to hear she died.” Corran sighed. He remembered Dynba Tesc as a naive but enthusiastic woman who’d been brave enough to oppose the Empire on a world where no rebellion was really necessary. Her stand on principle, though it made trouble for her, had enabled him to escape the same world and eventually join Rogue Squadron. “She was very special, your mother.”

  Rade squinted his blue eyes and nodded. “Okay, now I know you. Horn, the one who got her off Garqi.”

  “She got herself away. I was just along for the ride.”

  Rade smiled. “My father was her hero and the love of her life, but she remembered you fondly and was proud of your successes.”

  A pang of regret arced through Corran. I should have gotten in touch with her, should have known to do something when her husband died. He shook his head. “If we have time, you’ll have to tell me more about her. This isn’t the time or place, I suspect. I’ll call my people in, you call yours. You have a safe place nearby?”

  “Right, a klick east of here. The Yuuzhan Vong haven’t been anywhere near it.”

  Corran qu
ickly contacted his team. Jacen and Ganner arrived first, followed by three of the Noghri. Corran didn’t mention that three more Noghri were out there, knowing they would act as a rear guard. Rade brought in four people: two women, another man, and a female Trandoshan. Together they headed east and found a half-buried, overgrown bunker that appeared to predate even the Empire.

  Once inside, Rade explained. “In the early days of the colony they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. They’d clear whole areas, overplant, exhaust the land, then move on and allow the forest to reclaim everything. This bunker once housed the agridroids working this area.”

  Jacen Solo leaned against a rusted girder that curved up to support the arched ferrocrete structure. “We saw what the Yuuzhan Vong did to the current crop of droids. We’ve not seen any signs of their setting up villip paddies or anything else I saw on Belkadan.”

  Ganner nodded. “This is such a fertile planet, I assumed they would be growing things here.”

  “They are.” Rade shivered. “Tomorrow, we’ll show you. They’re growing an army.”

  Before dawn they set off on a long trek west and then south, to the outskirts of the capital. There, just west of the Pesktda Xenobotanical Garden, Rade led them to a hillside from which they could study a complex of buildings that had been part of Garqi Agricultural University. Several blocky buildings ringed a central rectangular grassy redsward. Pouring out of the dormitories came file upon file of tall and fit men and women. They lined up in ranks facing the rising sun, with little reptilian creatures bustling about, snapping orders.

  Jacen lowered his macrobinoculars. “The little reptoids are like the troops used against us at Dantooine.”