by Troy Denning
“What are you waiting for?” she demanded.
“Really?”
Leia nodded. “Do it.”
The edge in her voice unsettled Han, and it occurred to him that Nom Anor might have failed to mention Jaina or Mara for another reason—a reason Leia had already thought of. It was entirely possible the pair had been aboard when the Nebula Chaser was destroyed, and the Yuuzhan Vong simply did not realize who they had killed.
Han pushed the void button, and a seal hissed open along the edge of the ceiling panel. Nom Anor’s one eye grew wide.
“Are you mad?” He jumped to his feet. “You’ll kill millions!”
Leia reached over and depressed the void button again, stopping the ceiling panel where it was. “Not us, you.”
The air continued to hiss out of the chamber, causing the image of the Nebula Chaser to flicker out of existence as the villip creature curled in on itself. Nom Anor glanced at the ceiling, then back to Leia, his gruesome face slack with surprise. She waited until he pressed his fingers to his ears, then hit the void button again and closed the panel.
When Nom Anor took his hands away from his ears, Leia said,
“Go back to your warmaster and tell him how you were treated. Tell him the Jedi accept no responsibility for the lives he threatens, and that any emissary issuing a similar threat will not be returned.”
Nom Anor nodded, if not meekly, then at least not haughtily. “I will tell him, but that will change nothing.” He went to the door and waited until it opened, then added, “The warmaster believes this will work, and he has not been wrong yet.”
Luke Skywalker knew that a few days in the bacta tank would heal the physical damage, but there was an anguish in Alema that would never fade. He could feel it even now, while she floated in a restless healing trance, and the torment would only grow worse when she awakened to the news of the Nebula Chaser’s fate. There would be more feelings of guilt, more anger, more fear of the … thing that had killed her sister. Already perilously close to the dark side in her leadership of the New Plympto resistance, now she would find it an irresistible alternative to accepting whatever responsibility she bore for her sister’s death, for New Plympto’s destruction, and for the star-liner’s fate. It was not a question of whether Alema Rar would turn to the dark side, but how soon and for how long.
The infirmary door whispered open behind Luke, and he turned to find Cilghal’s liquid eyes studying him from the threshold.
“I am sorry to interrupt, Luke, but your brother-in-law is demanding to speak with you. He seems to think we’re keeping something from him.”
Luke smiled. “Good old Han. It’s nice to have him back to normal.”
Cilghal’s huge mouth parted in a Calamarian grin. “Yes, isn’t it?”
Luke followed her into a round corridor and started toward the conference vault. Like much of the new base, the tunnel had been laser-cut from solid rock, but it had been sealed against vacuum leaks with a white plastifoam that made it appear much softer and brighter than the typical cave warren. The foam was also an excellent insulator, trapping equipment-generated heat so efficiently that most species elected to wear their vacuum emergency suits—still necessary far too often—with all closures open. Engineering was trying to correct the problem, but most inhabitants already referred to their sleeping quarters as sweat lodges.
Luke entered the conference vault and found his nephews, Jacen and Anakin, waiting with Danni Quee, Tahiri Veila, and a group of other Jedi. A small hologram of Han and Leia hovered above the holoprojector in the center of the conference table. Han was grilling his sons about exactly why their sister was not in the room; Leia was looking a little embarrassed.
Luke joined the others at the table and, much to the gratitude of his two nephews, took their place in the holo’s sensor arc. “Han, Jaina is in the signals center with Artoo, trying to enhance a transmission they received from the Nebula Chaser. She’ll be here as soon as she can, but she can’t drop what she’s doing.”
Han frowned, but appeared to accept this. “You heard about the threat?”
Luke nodded. “A few minutes ago.”
“Then what took you so long?”
“I was with Alema Rar,” he said. “She wasn’t strapped in when the pod ejected and got beat up. She couldn’t say much on the way back except ‘voxyn,’ so I was hoping to get a subconscious impression of what happened to her sister.”
Han narrowed his eyes. “Subconscious impression?”
“Through the Force, Han,” Luke said, beginning to lose patience with his brother-in-law. Though Han was largely back to himself, his grief over Chewbacca’s death continued to manifest itself in peculiar ways. The latest was a nervous streak that had both Leia and his children ready to walk asteroids. “Jaina is fine—so is Mara.”
The attempt at subtlety was lost on Han. “So how come Mara isn’t there?”
“Mara can’t exactly drop what she’s doing either,” Luke answered. “She’s feeding Ben.”
“You’ll have to excuse us for being a little nervous.” Leia flashed an annoyed look at her husband, then continued, “That was quite a demonstration Nom Anor put on. Ten thousand people dead, and I doubt he would have stopped if I had told him where to find Eclipse. What are we going to do about Talfaglio?”
“First, remember that by allowing the Yuuzhan Vong to make the responsibility ours, we would only be playing into their hands,” Luke said. “We must always remember that they’re the murderers here, not us.”
“That is true as far as it goes, Master Skywalker,” Cilghal said, addressing Luke more formally now that they were in a larger group. “But I am not comfortable closing my eyes to the death of so many. Whether the responsibility is ours or not, we must do something if we can prevent it.”
“And we’re not entirely innocent in this, either.” Jaina entered the vault leading R2-D2 and several Jedi. News of Tsavong Lah’s threat was spreading fast, and base personnel were pouring into the conference vault. “There were Jedi on the Nebula Chaser, and those Jedi were leading the resistance on New Plympto. The Rar sisters put the whole starliner at risk by boarding it—as we did by rendezvousing with it.”
“And you know the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t have taken them for sacrifices how?” Danni Quee asked, always quick to pinpoint the flaw in any argument. A small-framed woman with green eyes and curly blond hair, Danni had been one of the first Yuuzhan Vong prisoners—and the first to witness their breaking tortures. “We can’t presume to know how these killers think,” she went on. “It will cause mistakes. Bad ones.”
As Danni spoke, she stepped aside to let Jaina join Luke in the holocomm’s sensor arc.
“Hi, Dad, Mom,” Jaina said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“We weren’t waiting that long,” Leia said.
The tension drained from Han’s face, and he added, “Yeah, no problem.”
The calm lasted about a second before Anakin Solo, his brown hair as unruly as ever, stepped forward to kick the discussion into hyperdrive. “Look, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re responsible or not. There are hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of lives at risk. We’ve got to do something, that’s all.”
“What would you have us do, Anakin?” Luke asked.
Tahiri answered for him. “Break their blockade, of course.” Blond and willowy, Tahiri resembled in many respects a fifteen-year-old version of Danni Quee—even down to having been a Yuuzhan Vong prisoner, until Anakin rescued her from a shaper laboratory. “We make them pay, so they don’t try it again. It’s the only way we turn this back on them.”
“And that may be exactly what the Yuuzhan Vong expect us to do,” Danni said. “If they see the Jedi as warriors like themselves, they will expect an honorable response.”
Han nodded in the hologram. “They’re calling the Jedi out. You’d be fools to go—especially when they’re waiting for you.”
“So we let a world die?” Jacen’s quiet voice was a st
ark contrast to the rising tension in the room. He turned toward Tahiri and Anakin. “But waving our lightsabers around will only get more people killed, too.”
Anakin scowled, as he so often did when talking with his older brother these days. “Maybe you can just stand aside and watch—”
Jacen raised a hand. “Let me finish, Anakin. I’m saying that neither choice is good.” He glanced at the others in the room. “If we fight, the Yuuzhan Vong kill more people; if we don’t fight, they kill them anyway. We can’t permit either. The Jedi are supposed to be the defenders of life in this galaxy.”
“What are you saying, Jacen?” Han demanded. “That the Jedi have to surrender?” He closed his eyes and winced. “Tell me that’s not what you’re saying.”
“Nobody is going to surrender, Han,” Luke said.
He was sympathetic to Han’s concern. Of all the young Jedi Knights who had come to Eclipse, Jacen was the most philosophical, often struggling with the paradoxical idea that it was sometimes necessary to destroy in order to preserve. Luke knew his nephew’s concerns to be the result of a disturbing vision on the planet Duro, in which Jacen had seen the galaxy tipping toward darkness and been unable to stop it. Fearful of tipping the balance even farther, the young Jedi had temporarily abandoned the Force altogether. Though he had resumed its use when events necessitated it in order to save his mother’s life, Jacen remained uncertain enough about his vision that at times his uneasiness still moved him close to inaction—a situation as perilous, in its own way, as the one that would soon be leading Alema into danger.
“We’re not surrendering,” Luke repeated. “And we won’t let the Yuuzhan Vong lure us into battle unprepared.” He turned to Danni and Cilghal. “Does the Eclipse Program have anything to offer yet?”
Danni shook her head. “Nothing. We can tell from the holos when there’s a yammosk coordinating the battle, but it’s been impossible to identify posting patterns or determine how it communicates. We just have to get closer.”
Luke looked to Cilghal. “And the villips?”
“I fear my group has made even less progress,” she said. “The Yuuzhan Vong obviously stop using the villips we have captured, which leaves us only with dissection. So far, we haven’t the faintest idea how they work.”
Luke nodded to both scientists. “It’s too early to expect progress, but it will come.” He turned to the others—now numbering nearly fifty, including Mara, their infant son, Ben, and more than a dozen non-Jedi support volunteers. “Our path is not yet clear, but I am confident in this much: It would be folly to let the Yuuzhan Vong draw us out before we are ready. I hope you can be patient and trust in the Force to steer blame for the Nebula Chaser’s destruction onto the proper shoulders.”
As the group murmured its consent and began to break up, Mara came to his side. “Well said, Luke.” Cradling Ben in one arm, she rose to her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “But I’d feel better if the Force weren’t blind to Yuuzhan Vong shoulders.”
THREE
One of a thousand pagan blasphemies excluded from the redemption of Obroa-skai, the Museum of Applied Photonics rose above the surrounding bugyards in a glittering massif of transparisteel towers and crystalplas galleries. Though Nom Anor had spent too much time among the infidels to find the sight offensive, he knew better than to let his comfort with the place show. He paused at the threshold to cast a yearning glance out over the droning black plain, then put on a sneer of disgust and followed his escorts into the lobby, where a hundred Verpine captives stood watching their Yuuzhan Vong guards with unfathomable insectoid eyes. After a brief conversation with the subaltern of the detachment, Nom Anor’s escorts led him through a maze of corridors profanely lit by wandering balls of pure light.
They found Tsavong Lah in a chamber surrounded by what looked like a hundred kilometers of snarled translucent threads. A fully tattooed warrior with fringed lips and bone-implanted armor, the warmaster was holding a small holopad in his hand, gazing at its projector disk with a look most others would reserve for cowards and slaves.
“Now,” he said into the instrument.
Tsavong Lah had barely spoken before an instantaneous flash lit the whole thread tangle, then leapt through the empty air into the holopad. A millisecond later, the full-sized image of an infidel X-wing appeared over his hand, obscuring the warmaster’s upper body and much of the room. The starfighter turned slowly toward the door and opened fire; only Nom Anor did not duck for cover.
“Do you know what I would do with this, were I the infidels?” Tsavong Lah asked, speaking from inside the hologram.
“Destroy it, I am certain,” Nom Anor answered. “Such lifeless things are an abomination to the gods. I cannot tell you how it disgusted me to abide them while I prepared the way for our invasion.”
“We all do what is necessary, Executor, and you have already been commended for enduring the enemy’s filth.” Tsavong Lah’s tone was irritated, and perhaps a little distracted. “We cannot defeat what we do not understand. For instance, our coralskipper pilots could easily be misled by an image such as this. Were I the enemy, the galaxy would be littered with these devices.”
“The galaxy is littered with them,” Nom Anor answered, bristling. “They are not really much to admire, Great One. They are as limited in their capacities as are our enemies.”
The X-wing vanished, then Tsavong Lah dropped the holopad to the floor and crushed it beneath the armored vua’sa claw that he now stood upon in place of the foot taken by Jacen Solo.
“The enemy has proven challenging enough to thwart you several times.” The warmaster’s voice was full of loathing; a true believer in the supremacy of the Yuuzhan Vong gods, he disavowed the influence of chance and viewed any failure as a sign of the instrument’s spiritual decadence. “I trust that was not the case this time?”
“The chilab worked beautifully.” Nom Anor tipped his head to one side, then covered his nostrils and blew air into his sinuses. Though he lacked the faith to truly enjoy the pain of the neural grub’s detachment, he feigned a smile of satisfaction as the thing tore its dendrites from his optic chiasma and exited through his nasal cavity. He let it drop into his palm, then presented it to Tsavong Lah. “I had a good view on the way in. I am certain the chilab’s memories will prove useful in planning your attack.”
“No doubt.” Tsavong Lah slipped the grub into the pocket of the sharp-clawed cape clinging to his shoulders. “I will view them later. Your meeting with Leia Solo went well?”
“Very well.” It would have been unthinkable to answer anything else. “I have no doubt that the Jedi will respond to our challenge.”
“You are more confident than I would be in your place,” a wispy voice said, low and behind him. “The Jedi will smell our trap and be wary.”
Nom Anor turned and saw a motley featherball hopping past the guards on thin, reverse-jointed legs. Her willowy ears and corkscrew antennae bestowed on her a vaguely mothlike aspect, though Nom Anor considered her a pest more on the magnitude of a radank.
“Vergere,” he fumed. “I was not aware you knew the ways of the Jedi.”
“Vergere knows them better than I,” Tsavong Lah said. “She was the one who said the Jeedai would let you live. I believed they would kill you outright.”
“You were perhaps closer to the truth than your pet.” Nom Anor refused to call Vergere an aide, for the peculiar little creature was no more than the familiar of an agent who had perished during an ill-fated attempt to disease the Jedi. She had become an adviser to Tsavong Lah after a brief captivity in the hands of New Republic Intelligence, where she managed to learn as much about the enemy in a few weeks as had Nom Anor in all his years as an agent provocateur. Questions had been raised about her loyalties, but once the reliability of her information had been established, she had quickly become Nom Anor’s greatest rival.
“Leia Solo and her consort did attempt to kill me as you expected,” Nom Anor continued, “but I was able to play on her h
uman emotions to save my life.”
“So now you can control the emotions of the Jedi?” Vergere mocked. “Then perhaps you should make them surrender.”
“One can lure a tana into the spatter pit with a smile and soft words.” Nom Anor spread his hands and turned to Tsavong Lah. “Even I cannot persuade it to lay its neck in the cleaving yoke.”
The warmaster rewarded him with a curt nod. “I am more interested in what Leia Solo said than why you are still alive. How did she respond when the Gift of Anguish destroyed the infidels?”
“She wanted to kill me.”
“But she did not,” the warmaster observed. “What did she do instead?”
“I convinced her she would also be killing millions of refugees.” Even Nom Anor realized he was clinging to the claim a little too closely—perhaps because of the shame he had already suffered at Leia’s hands on Duro. “She yielded.”
“Not yielded—she refused to accept blame.” Vergere stated her rebuttal as fact, not supposition. She hopped over to Tsavong Lah. “She’s been a diplomat all her life. For her to fall into such a trap would be akin to you flying into an ambush.”
Tsavong Lah considered her argument for only an instant. “It may appear so, but something else is happening.” He looked over Vergere’s feathery back at Nom Anor. “She let you live for a reason. What is it?”
The answer, of course, was because she had given her word, but Nom Anor knew better than to say so. Such an answer would contradict the opinion the warmaster had expressed earlier, and while a Yuuzhan Vong subordinate could insinuate, thwart, even subvert and still hope to live, he could never contradict. Sometimes Nom Anor wondered if the infidels’ way was not better, and he supposed the fact that he did not immediately cower in fear of the gods’ retribution was in itself a sign that he had spent too long away from his people. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why he had been forced to endure the painful introduction of the chilab if the warmaster had not expected him to return, Nom Anor shrugged.