by James Luceno
Again Randa rushed forward, flattening several of the attendants and whipping his tail around to whack the villip out of the commander's hands. The attendants began what would have been a fruitless defense, but the commander ordered them to lower their weapons.
"I congratulate you on getting this far," he said after two of the attendants had helped him back to his feet.
Kyp angled his lightsaber to one side, the blade extended in front of him. "Move out of the way and we'll go the rest of the distance."
Chine-kal turned slightly to glance at the yammosk. "Of course. The life of a yammosk for that of a Jedi. It strikes me as equitable."
From off to Kyp's left, Ganner hurled his ignited light-saber square into the creature's left eye. As the sulfurous-yellow energy blade struck, the yammosk shrieked and its tentacles flailed, generating waves that cascaded down over the yorik-coral retaining wall of the pool and washed across the deck. The yammosk reared up and began to sway from side to side. Gradually the tentacles stopped moving, and the creature sank down into the tank, dead by the time Ganner called the lightsaber back to him.
Chine-kal's sadness endured for only a moment. "Well executed, Jedi. But you have doomed us all."
A shudder passed through the ship even as the words were leaving his mouth.
"The yammosk controls the ship," Randa explained. "The pilot dovin basals are now in the throes of death."
Chine-kal grinned faintly. "No one gets out of here alive."
Kyp returned the grin. "This won't be the first time you've misjudged a situation, Commander." He scanned the attendants, then set his gaze on Chine-kal. "Any or all of you are free to come with us." When it was obvious that none of them were going to budge, Kyp shrugged. "Suit yourselves."
He backed into the passageway, Ganner to one side, Randa to the other. Another death-throe spasm sent the three of them pitching against the bulkheads. Regaining his balance, Kyp started off the way they had come, but Randa stopped him.
"I know a more direct route."
They had just entered an adjacent module when Kyp's comlink toned.
"What's your situation, Kyp?"
Kyp recognized Han Solo's voice. "We're outward bound. The ship's destroying itself."
"A splinter group of Yuuzhan Vong warships are on their way. Not much chance of our holding them off."
"Then don't risk it."
"Somehow I knew you'd say that. Where are the captives?"
"They're being moved to the module we punched through."
"How many?"
"One hundred, give or take a few."
Solo muttered something. "The Trevee is defenseless. We'll have to cram everyone aboard the Falcon."
"Can you bring the Falcon close enough to extend a cofferdam?"
Han snorted. "That's the least of our problems."
"There's an airlock in the central module, but from the outside you probably won't be able to identify it. Look for our signal flare. Otherwise, I'll have Deak or someone lead you to it."
"Don't worry, I'll find it."
"Somehow I knew you'd say that," Kyp said. "By the way, can you accommodate a Hutt?"
Solo launched a surprised laugh. "A Hutt? Sure, the more the merrier."
"Then you'll be glad to hear that one of the captives asked me to send his regards."
"Who?"
"Roa."
"Take the shot!" Sal-Solo hissed through his clenched teeth. "Take it!"
"For the Mrlssi," a more plaintive voice added.
"For the sake of the New Republic," the captain said.
"No, my boy, no," Ebrihim and Q9 said.
As many voices vied for prominence in Anakin's mind as in the control room. He heard the heartfelt words of his mother and father, the harsh voice of Jacen and the understanding voice of Jaina, the counsel of Uncle Luke. . .
Anakin ignored all of them and looked at Jacen. "Tell me," he said.
Jacen responded quietly and calmly, almost as if he had subvocalized the response. "You are my brother, and you are a Jedi, Anakin. You can't do this."
Anakin took a deep breath and moved his hand away from the handgrip trigger. The tension in the room broke with a collective exhalation of disappointment. The technicians grumbled and the Mrlssi hung their heads in defeat. The next thing Anakin knew, someone had shoved him forcibly from the control seat.
"I'll take the shot," Thrackan Sal-Solo shouted angrily as his hand closed on the trigger.
Led by the Yald, the task force from Commenor decanted outside the orbit of Fondor's outermost moon. Following them into realspace came the Battle Dragons and battle cruisers that made up the Hapan fleet, positioned to engage the Yuuzhan Vong armada at close range.
Commodore Brand had allowed Leia to join him on the bridge, where she stood just behind his command chair, gazing through the wraparound viewport at the reverting Hapan warships. Closer to Fondor, explosions flared in the night as vessels and shipyards succumbed to the enemy onslaught.
"Fleet command and control reports casualties in excess of 50 percent," an enlisted-rating updated from his duty station. "Some of the shipyards are managing to defend against coralskipper suicide strikes, but the fleet has been unable to attenuate bombardment from the enemy warships."
Brand swiveled his chair to study various threat-assessor displays and vertical plotting panels. "The Ha-pans will put the fear into those warships," he assured in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the bridge.
Leia hid her trembling right hand beneath her cloak and cut her eyes from the viewport to the plotting panels. She reached out with the Force for Anakin and Jacen. Where earlier the effort had only increased the gravity of her distress, she now experienced relief. A transcendent calm enveloped her, and the apprehension she had known since Hapes was suddenly gone.
But the serenity was fleeting. Almost instantly something raw and uncontrollable flooded into her awareness. Again she reached for Anakin and Jacen, and at once realized that her concerns for them had dammed a deeper though less personalized fear, which suddenly rushed in.
She swung to the viewport to see the Hapan fleet forming up into battle groups and already beginning to close with individual enemy warships.
"You may fire when ready," she heard Brand telling Prince Isolder, but as if at some great distance.
All at once, a flash of radiant energy illuminated local space. From Rimward of Fondor's outermost moon, or perhaps gushed from hyperspace itself, came a torrent of starfire a thousand kilometers wide. Coalescing into a savage beam of focused annihilation, it tore into the midst of the dispersing Hapan fleet, consuming every ship in its path, atomizing some in the blink of an eye and holing others with spears of seething light. Weapons, superstructure, and antennae vaporized by the skewering beam, the ships exploded outward, vanishing in globes of brilliant mass-energy conversions. Even those ships outside the limits of the beam were hurled violently off course, slagged along their inward-facing sides, or thrown into collisions with one another. The mated saucers of the Battle Dragons broke apart and disintegrated, and the battle cruisers were snapped like twigs. Fighter groups vanished without a trace.
Leia was dumbfounded. Nothing in the Yuuzhan Vong arsenal had prepared her for devastation on so immense a scale. For a moment she was certain she was in the grips of another terrible vision, but it quickly became clear that the violence was real.
Her stupefaction deepened when the beam didn't diminish as it punched through the Hapan fleet. Lancing deeper into Fondor space, the shaft of r aging power went on to graze Fondor's penultimate moon, effacing a portion of the cratered planetoid as a surgical laser might a tumor. Then it ripped unabated into the heart of the enemy armada, obliterating masses of coralskippers and pulverizing several of the largest warships. Finished with its work or not, the beam then shot past Fondor, singeing the northern hemisphere in its passing, perhaps to destroy some even more distant target.
All systems had failed on the bridge, and for a long moment,
even as consoles and display screens flickered back to life under emergency power, everyone was simply too stunned to speak or cry out, much less make sense of what they had just witnessed.
"Some sort of repulsor beam," a tech finally said in a stark disbelief. "Delivered through hyperspace."
"Centerpoint," Leia said, as if in shock.
Brand and several others turned to her.
She looked at the commodore. "Someone fired Center-point Station."
Han embraced Roa as he came through the airlock in the Falcon's port-side docking arm.
"Fasgo's dead," Roa said when Han let him go.
Han shook his head in dismay. "He could have been a friend."
"As I was saying on the Jubilee Wheel, fortune smiles, then betrays . . . then smiles once more."
Han ran his eyes over his friend and managed a grin. "You know, you don't look half bad."
"The half that does I'll have repaired. Did my ship survive?"
"Waiting for you at Bilbringi."
Roa loosed a sigh and turned to help a Ryn female out of the airlock. "Han, I'd like you to meet-"
"Any chance you have a clanmate named Droma?" Han interrupted.
The female looked surprised. "I have a brother named Droma."
Han's grin broadened. "You'll be seeing him soon enough."
Roa scratched his head. "Seems I've a lot to catch up on."
"That doesn't begin to say it."
The clustership was already beginning to come apart. Han's fear that he might have to separate prematurely from the trembling ship only made him work harder at getting all the rescued captives aboard. By the time the last of them boarded, the forward hold, bunk rooms, galley, and utility spaces were packed. Han could only hope that the Falcon's air scrubbers would hold out long enough to sustain everyone through a jump to Mrlsst or elsewhere in the Tapani sector. Even assuming that life support continued to function, they were going to be a hungry, dehydrated lot when and wherever they ultimately touched down.
With the airlock resealed, Han, Roa, and two of the Ryn threaded their way to the cockpit. Han squeezed into the pilot's seat and began to maneuver the Falcon away from the Yuuzhan Vong vessel. Through the forward viewport he could see what remained of Kyp's Dozen launching through the hole they had blown in the ruined module.
Roa helped bring the quad lasers on-line as Han nosed the Falcon over the top of the spherical module, expecting to have to engage the enemy warships that had broken from the armada to render aid to the crippled yammosk vessel. Instead he was greeted by a sight that tugged a gleeful cry from him.
"Hapan Battle Dragons!" he said, glancing at Roa. "Now we're getting somewhere."
He was about to add that Leia had more than likely been responsible for enlisting the Hapans' support when an intense, white radiance blinded him. The Falcon died, then was tossed through an end-over-end ride that deposited her two thousand kilometers from where she had been.
The Yuuzhan Vong had coaxed Fondor's sun to go nova, Han told himself. They had wiped out the entire system.
When his vision returned and the moans and groans of his tumbled cargo had died down, Han saw that three-fourths of the Hapan fleet and half the Yuuzhan Vong armada were gone.
On his helix flagship, Nas Choka recaptured enough of his self-control to keep some of the dismay out of the incredulous look he showed Malik Carr and Nom Anor. Against the backdrop of a razed moon, the villip-choir field showed the blackened skeletons and husks of untold numbers of Yuuzhan Vong and enemy ships.
"They killed most of their reinforcements to eliminate half of our force," the supreme commander said. "Is such savagery commonplace?"
Nom Anor shook his head, as much in response as to clear it. "A mistake. It has to be a mistake. Their reverence for life has always been their weakness."
"Then perhaps we've managed to bring out the primitive in them," Malik Carr said in a stunned voice.
A herald appeared. The villip in his trembling hands bore the strained features of Chine-kal.
"The yammosk has been killed," Chine-kal gasped through his communicator, "and the ship is dying. The Hutts betrayed our location to the Jedi. The Jedi captured on Gyndine will die with us, but two of his confederates and Randa Besadii Diori-the murderers of the yammosk-escaped. We-"
The villip fell silent suddenly, then everted to its featureless form. Chine-kal was dead.
Nas Choka turned away in disgust. "Recall all operational coralskippers," he instructed his subaltern. "Order the rest to commit what destruction they can. All warship commanders will prepare their ships for departure. We have accomplished what we set out to do. Now we have a score to settle with the Hutts."
TWENTY-EIGHT
Viqi Shesh sat regally in the straight-backed chair at the center of the deposition balcony, adjusting the fall of her long skirt while Gotal Senator Ta'laam Ranth, head of the Senate Justice Council, studied the display of the personal data device he wore on his left wrist. Shesh's trio of lawyers occupied the table behind her, but they weren't included in the twice-normal-size hologram of Shesh that commanded the attention of the amphitheater's capacity crowd. As a consideration to Ranth, the recording droids normally present at closed-session senatorial inquests had been sequestered in a separate room, to assure that their energy output didn't overwhelm the Gotal's acute senses.
"Senator Shesh," the furred and flat-nosed Ranth resumed at last, "it has already been established that the Advisory Council was briefed by Commodore Brand regarding the eventual deployment of the Yald flotilla, and that Commodore Brand, speaking for the Defense Force command staff, stated at the time that Corellia was assumed to have been targeted for attack."
"That's true," Shesh said in a composed voice.
"Then how is it, Senator, that the flotilla wound up being deployed at Bothawui?"
Shesh set her interlocked hands in her lap and lifted her chin slightly. "Commodore Brand failed to make a convincing case for deploying the flotilla at Corellia, so the matter was put to a vote."
"In his written statement, Chief of State Fey'lya asserts as much," Ranth said in the monotone that was characteristic of his species. "But we now know that it was never the intention of the command staff to argue too strongly in favor of Corellia."
Shesh nodded. "As I understand it, Admiral Sow's plan called for the enemy to be lured into the Corellian sector by leaving Corellia undefended. Deploying the flotilla there would have compromised the admiral's strategy."
Ranth's pair of conelike sensory horns twitched. "In other words, what passed for a briefing was more in the way of a manipulation."
The most well-tailored of Shesh's human lawyers objected. "Senator Shesh has been asked to provide an account of the briefing, not to pass judgment on the tactics or methods of the New Republic Defense Force."
The five members of the chamber's mixed-species tribunal conferred and sustained the objection. Ranth was clearly disappointed but forged ahead.
"Senator Shesh, was yours in fact the vote that swayed the council?"
"My vote broke the deadlock, if that's what you mean."
"What convinced you that Bothawui would be targeted?"
"It would be more accurate to say that I didn't believe Corellia would be attacked."
"Why was that?"
"I didn't accept that the Yuuzhan Vong were prepared to launch an attack on the Core."
"Was Fondor mentioned as a possible target?"
"It was not."
"Had Fondor been mentioned, how might you have voted?"
The same lawyer objected, but Ranth quickly waved his furred hand in dismissal. "I withdraw the question." He approached the deposition balcony. "Did you have occasion to meet with the command staff prior to the briefing on Corellia?"
Shesh nodded again. "I did. Several days prior to the briefing I met with Commodore Brand, who asked me to speak with Consul General Golga before he departed for NalHutta."
"Did you meet with Golga?"
"S
oon after."
"What was the nature of your discussion with the Hutt consul general?"
"We discussed the separate peace the Hutts had forged with the Yuuzhan Vong, and the possibility of their furnishing intelligence to the New Republic."
"Did Consul General Golga indicate at the time that the Hutts might be inclined to provide such intelligence?"
"He implied as much, yes."
"And you were willing to accept him at his word, even though the Hutts were considered to have allied themselves with the enemy?"
"Objection," another of Shesh's lawyers barked. "It has been demonstrated that the Hutts attempted to supply intelligence by renewing spice shipments to Bothawui when it was still being considered a potential target."
Ranth swung to the tribunal. "And by so doing, the Hutts only reinforced the belief that Corellia would be targeted instead."
The tribunal's Mon Calamari chief looked at Viqi Shesh. "Senator, do you wish to answer Senator Ranth's question?"
Shesh smiled faintly. "I can only conclude that the Hutts were trying to keep their options open. I also believe that the Yuuzhan Vong were well aware of the possibility that the Hutts might attempt to leak intelligence to us, and that they exploited the possibility as a means of orchestrating the events that ensued. The fact that Nal Hutta is now bracing for an invasion suggests that Borga was more dupe than conspirator."
The Mon Calamari nodded and fixed one eye on Ranth. "The Hutts are not the subject of this inquest, Senator. Can you show good cause for pursuing this line of questioning?"
Ranth inclined his head, gazing at the tribunal from beneath his jutting brow. "I am merely trying to establish the sequence of events that led to the sneak attack on Fondor."
"Proceed," the Mon Calamari told him.
Ranth turned to Shesh. "Senator, early on, the command staff's suppositions about Corellia were bolstered by information regarding the scarcity of spice in certain planetary systems. Chief of State Fey'lya asserts that the Advisory Council was aware that the information had been supplied by Talon Karrde and the Jedi Knights."