The lab occupied most of the building. Side shelves held transparisteel containers, large and small, holding tissue samples, and bins on two of the three large tables bubbled and slurped with chunks of what looked like skin or meat floating in fast-growth liquid environments. The place smelled as appetizing as the Hutt space station Voort had recently visited.
Scut, not wearing his human disguise, stood beside the third table. On it lay a body that looked like a corpse that had been hollowed out and allowed to deflate. The skin was reddish brown with short, spiky extrusions that did not look particularly sharp but did seem to have a defensive function. The elbows, the kneecaps, and the knuckles on hands and feet had sharper spurs projecting from them. The forehead featured hornlike extrusions that looked dangerous.
The face—Voort had never seen its like. Two eye sockets were set deep under a massive supraorbital ridge. There was no nose; directly beneath the eyes was the lower jaw, broad and massive, with lips that were segmented plates. Toothlike ridges of blood red were visible behind them. The head looked just large enough to contain a human-sized skull.
Voort looked the body up and down. “This is the final form of the suit?”
Scut tugged at the thing’s chest. It split open along a vertical seam that had been impossible to see before. It ran from the creature’s neck to where the navel would be on a human. The seam opened with a moist noise.
Not looking at Voort, Scut leaned down, his head entering the empty chest cavity. He looked back and forth. His voice was hollow inside the cavity as he answered. “Not quite the final version. It conforms to Turman’s dimensions, but I’m having trouble stabilizing its life cycle. This one will live only two days or so. If you must have a week, I must make more modifications.” He withdrew and finally looked at Voort. “It shares thirty-eight percent of its genes with one of Kuratooine’s ocean crustaceans. Genes I haven’t worked with before. It’s tricky.”
“I believe you.”
“I have been here all afternoon and evening. What news is there?”
“Muscle Boy and Ranger Girl got back with the Thadley Biolan recordings. They’re studying those. Thaymes has found out a few things about Biolan. Supposed to have been a citizen of Alderaan, but grew up shipboard and built his own fleet of cargo vessels plying Rim space and the Unknown Regions. A good fit for Usan’s new-identity profile.”
“Ah.” Scut released the creature’s body. The seam began to close, starting at the bottom and working its way up, as if the gap were a quickly regenerating wound. “You are not here to talk about the suit.”
“No, I’m here to talk about our upcoming action. About you causing the deaths of all the Wraiths.”
Scut looked skyward, a here we go again gesture. “Because I am Yuuzhan Vong. Because we are all destroyers, ravagers, and monsters.”
“No, actually. Because you don’t support me as Wraith Leader.” Voort looked around for a chair, saw none. He leaned against a wall and tried to look nonchalant. “You think I’m unfit to lead. Meaning that you’ll be questioning every one of my orders in the field. Which can result in a mistake in our very complicated timing, or a miscommunication of new orders, or a last-second decision to refuse to do part of your job.”
“I cannot just set aside my own judgment.” Scut returned his attention to the neoglith masquer suit, watching it seal itself.
“So you think your judgment may be superior to mine.”
Scut shrugged. “I know it is.”
“And the fact that your father arrives in two days is kicking your protective instinct up to maximum power. Scut, I’ve got to prove to you that I’m right and you’re wrong. If I don’t, the probability that you’ll do something that gets some of us killed increases exponentially.”
Scut stood silent, staring at Voort with his blank features and black Yuuzhan Vong eyes. “I will admit, this sounds different from your usual ravings.”
“It is different. But here, just to make you feel more at home, I’ll throw in something familiar to you. You were correct on Vandor-Three. I hate your kind.”
“I know.” Scut moved to another table. There a white metal tub held a quantity of reddish liquid. Scut dipped his hands into the stuff, spread it liberally on his bare arms up to his elbows. It did not flow or drip off his skin. “This is a neutralizing agent. It cancels the digestive juices that coat the inside of the Embass prototype.”
“The inside where Turman would be?”
“Yes. Another problem I am working on. Figuring out how to modify the design so Turman will not be digested.”
Voort snorted. “Back to the subject. When you were still with the Yuuzhan Vong, when you were a Shamed One, were you afraid for your kind? Afraid that they would become extinct?”
“No.”
“And when you were with the Cheems family?”
“No ...” Scut’s voice sounded thoughtful. “They kept me away from much of the war news. I simply studied. And I have seen your hatred of my kind before. My parents lost many friends when they adopted me.”
“Scut, I was in the war. Not on the front lines—often behind them. Sometimes breaking into the Yuuzhan Vong’s weird complexes. Seeing how they dealt with captured populations. Seeing how they twisted the worlds they conquered. Then I’d get back to safety, just beyond the front lines, and see all that fear and resoluteness and pain on the faces of the people of the New Republic. People who did think not only that they were going to die, soon, in agony, but that their whole civilization would die. That not only would they, individually, not be remembered, but that nothing would—nothing they grew up with, nothing they loved and admired. All gone forever.”
Scut began peeling the gel off his arms. It came off like two gloves. He held them over a silver cylinder; its top surface irised open, then closed once he’d dropped the gloves within. “After the war, I learned from my parents that they had those feelings. They insulated me and their other children, my human brother and sisters, from them.”
Voort nodded. “So that was five years of my life. Years in which I lost friends and watched the universe I knew being eaten away as if by a cancer. The only being I really ever acknowledged as my family died during that time.”
“This was the one called Runt?”
Voort nodded. “So is it any wonder that when I think of the Yuuzhan Vong, I find myself in the middle of all those thoughts, those memories?”
“No. No wonder. I do not judge you for that. But you are irrational. And irrationality kills people in this trade. So Bhindi told me, and so I have heard from many stories.”
“Ah.” Voort stood away from the wall. “Good. Which gets us to what I wanted to talk about. You would follow Bhindi but not me. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Despite the fact that her own irrationality got someone killed in the time since you joined the Wraiths?”
Scut frowned. The Yuuzhan Vong brow was already a brooding type; when he frowned, he looked like a judge ready to issue a death sentence. “You think she somehow caused Face Loran’s death?”
“No. Her own.”
“This is—what does Sharr call it? Transference. In your mind, you transfer your own bad trait to another.”
“Bhindi was my friend.” Even though the human voice issued by the throat implant remained pleasant, Voort’s true voice, under it, turned heavy. “I loved and respected her. But I’ve been thinking about this since you and I talked on Vandor-Three, and it’s clear that she made a series of bad, irrational mistakes that led to her death. She would have doomed the mission here on Kuratooine the same way ... and you’re not experienced enough to understand that.”
“I want fresh air.” Scut moved past him and headed to the door. “Convince me.”
Outside, they took a walk along the treeless strip of land immediately around the buildings. Far overhead, just moving away from the face of the larger moon, a tiny spoke-and-ring shape, Skifter Station, drifted serenely.
Voort watched it as he wa
lked. “You see her mistakes in several of her decisions. The Concussor. We could have prepared a dozen different offenses that would have given us a fighting chance if we chose or needed to fight. Sure, we didn’t want to kill any innocent Alliance military personnel. But it could have been a Pop-Dog transport coming after us. It could have been Thaal, admitting guilt and just begging for a missile strike. We weren’t prepared for any aggressive action. We were prepared only to cut and run. Why?”
Scut shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“The answer was in one of the last things she said. Here, I’ll try again. All six of you going into that Pop-Dog base on Vandor-Three. That was a mission for Jesmin and Trey alone. Or Jesmin and Turman. Instead, five Wraiths went down into the installation. Which, as Trey puts it, dropped more security flags, which eventually tipped off the Pop-Dogs and sent us running. Why did Bhindi do that?”
“I still don’t know.” But Scut now sounded curious.
“Fleeing toward Mount Lyss, we had an improvised plan. Jesmin conducted Myri out of the comm-jamming zone so she could get us some backup. Good idea, ultimately successful. Bhindi went with Huhunna to take out the closest pursuit and provide an ongoing distraction. Was Bhindi the best choice to be on that action?”
“No.” Scut frowned. “But she couldn’t necessarily know who would be best because she didn’t know Sharr’s Wraiths. So, like you asking who is the best pilot, she should have asked who is best in fieldwork. It should have been Wran. Or you, with your experience. Bhindi was perhaps the worst choice.” He sounded startled with the realization.
Voort changed direction, turning them so they would not walk to the very edge of the cliff overlook. “So. What was Bhindi’s irrationality?”
It took Scut a few moments to answer. “Almost her dying words. Get these kids home safe.”
“Good. Correct. Sometime in the last few years she must have lost something, some objectivity about putting people at risk, especially the young. I bet she jumped at the chance to put Wraith Squadron together again. It was a chance to get back in the game. To, I don’t know, prove that the unit should never have been disbanded. But the new team she assembled, most of its members so young, tripped that overprotective instinct. Kids. She was unwilling to put kids in harm’s way, and when there was no other choice, she put herself in harm’s way instead. And died.”
“I ... think you may be correct.”
“And I’m the only one both experienced and objective enough to have seen it.” Voort heaved a sigh. “And even I didn’t see it in time. I was too out of practice, too far removed from the mindset.”
“Can you put the kids in harm’s way? As Bhindi could not?”
“I almost wish the answer was no. But it’s yes. I can. We have a job to do. We have to take Thaal down. It’s another mercy killing. We’re going to kill what Thaal has become so he can’t kill others with his betrayal.”
“Very well.” Scut nodded. He stopped where he was and peered into the black gulf that was the rock quarry in shadow. “I will ... give you a chance. I will support you as leader.”
Voort stopped, too. “Thank you.”
“But understand something.” Scut kicked a pebble. It flew out over the cliff edge. Two seconds passed before it clattered on stones far below. “I have heard my father’s story of his meeting with the Wraiths since childhood. He knew their objective was the destruction of an admiral and a biological warfare facility. They used my father to achieve it ... but saved him in so doing. They did not have to. Perhaps it cost them extra effort to do it that way.”
“It did.”
“And still they saved him. That was on my mind as I grew up. I never met anyone who had been on that operation. Then I was recruited by Bhindi and heard that I would finally meet one, the Gamorrean-who-talks.” He stopped speaking for a moment, evidently sorting his thoughts. “I am offtrack. What I mean is, I will hold you to the standards of those Wraiths.”
“Fair enough.” Then Voort felt a wave of something like dizziness as bits of Scut’s speech broke apart, forming up in his mind like columns of numbers. They added together into a sum he could understand.
... heard ... story of ... Wraiths since childhood ...
... on my mind as I grew up ...
... never met ... the Gamorrean-who-talks ...
Voort’s stomach lurched. He bent over, put his hands on his knees, drew in a couple of shaky breaths.
“Voort?”
“It’s nothing.”
Voort remembered Scut’s eyes from every time the Yuuzhan Vong had stared at Voort. They had been hard and flat and full of hatred. Voort had seen them as a Yuuzhan Vong’s eyes. But in the fifteen years after that war had ended, he had seen eyes like those many, many times, not on Yuuzhan Vong.
Students. Defiant, resentful, eloquently stating with their stares, You don’t have the right to keep me here and tell me what to do.
Scut had joined the Wraiths to be like the heroes of his childhood stories and even meet them.
Voort had been one of his heroes.
Voort had been a hero to somebody.
And Voort had looked Scut straight in the eye and told him he was a monster.
“Voort?”
“It’s nothing. Just one of the side effects of getting older.” Voort straightened. “Thanks for your support, Scut.”
“You are welcome.”
“And, Scut?”
“Yes?”
Voort held out his hand. “Welcome to Wraith Squadron.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Well before the two X-wings reached Tildin, Kuratooine’s smaller and more desolate moon, the enemy starfighters overtook them.
First they were distant blips on the sensor board, moving along the flight path of the X-wings, mere hundreds of kilometers behind. Then they crept near enough for the sensors to identify them by class. Finally they were close enough, only a few klicks back, that the astromechs’ visual sensors could capture images to show Myri and Voort.
Myri glanced at the image on her screen. The starfighter creeping up behind her looked very much like what would result if an X-wing with strike foils open in attack position mysteriously lost its top two foils. What was left was a nose assembly and fuselage very much like an X-wing’s, with only two wings in open and down locked position.
It was an E-wing. It was painted brown and had a distinctive set of stylized triangular teeth painted across the nose in white.
Pretending she had just noticed her follower for the first time, Myri clicked her comm board. “Hey, sweetheart, it looks like we have company.”
Voort’s implant voice responded. His Gamorrean grunts were not audible beneath it. “We could use some recordings of our practice runs. Let’s ask them if they’ll help.”
Then Myri’s comm board popped and a male voice, louder than Voort’s only because the other pilot was almost bellowing, came across it. “Unknown flight approaching Tildin, identify yourself at once.”
“Unknown?” Myri let her voice climb into an angry squeak. “We filed a flight plan with Rimsaw Station and Kura City Flight Control. And we had to fill out different forms for each one!”
“But you didn’t file with us. I say again, identify yourself. We have a lock on you.” It was true; Myri’s sensor board showed that her pursuer had a sensor lock, suitable to launch either laser or missile attack, on her X-wing.
Voort was next, sounding ridiculously meek. “Maybe we’d better do what they say, dear.”
“Oh, all right. Bully.” Myri switched to internal comm and spoke to her R2 unit, a flaking gray thing barely brought back to functionality by Trey. “Fuzzy, transmit Packet One to Sith-for-brains back there.” Then she switched back to a broadcast channel and her sweeter voice. “I’m Rima Farstar and the fellow behind me in the silly costume is Matran Farstar, and we’re doing some practice run on your moon for a holodrama I intend to make when the rest of the backers give me the money they promised but haven’t yet transferred
. We’ve been here for days and days, but the money still isn’t here yet, my actors are bored—”
“Say again. Did you say costume?”
“Did I? Oh, yes. Matran’s costume. He can barely see out of the head! He’s going to crash into the side of a crater because he can’t see, I swear.”
“Maintain your course and speed. I’m coming up for a visual.”
Myri smiled. “A visual what? Visual is an adjective, you know. It can’t just float around by itself like an asteroid. It needs a what-do-you-call-it, a noun. I know this because I had to learn all about adjectives and nouns so I could write the script.”
“Maintain comm silence.”
Myri suspected that the pilot wanted to add, Or I’ll kill you. But that would not have been a suitable threat. It might be recorded and presented at a complaint hearing. Apparently, even a Pop-Dog knew better than to utter it.
The lead E-wing rapidly closed the distance between the two flights. It came up behind Voort’s X-wing, positioning itself behind and above in classic dogfight laser-attack position. It maintained that position for about thirty seconds, then accelerated and repeated the process with Myri.
She loosened her seat restraints, twisted around so she could look back at the E-wing pilot, waved, and blew him a kiss.
“Rima Farstar.” The pilot sounded pained. “Confirm that there is a Gamorrean piloting the second X-wing.”
“I don’t have to maintain comm silence anymore?”
“No! Confirm ... species of your wingmate.”
“Oh, he’s human. That’s his costume. I’m surprised I forgot to mention his costume. He can barely see out through the eyeholes in the mask, you know.” Myri faced forward again and tightened her straps. “It’s a heavy, sweaty, gross costume. Don’t you know the Legend of the Flying Pig? That’s also the name of my script.”
“Negative.”
“Negative. Oooh, I love that word. I’ll have to use it. No, this was from a long, long time ago. In the war against the Empire. People started seeing a Gamorrean pilot. What a great story! So I thought, this needs to be a holodrama. Or a holocomedy. I’m still not sure which. I’ve written it both ways. What do you think?”
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