by Troy Denning
Seef, his communications attendant, stepped into his view bearing the already everted villip of Maal Lah, a shrewd officer from the warmaster’s own domain and the supreme commander charged with securing today’s victory. Though Tsavong Lah could see the alarm in his subordinate’s face, he waited in humbleness until Vaecta finished her blessing, then gestured at the villip.
“Is it permitted?”
Vaecta nodded. “The gods are never offended by one who answers to his duty.”
The priestess immediately began to make the obeisances that would be required to Yun-Yuuzhan and the other gods before dedicating the warmaster’s sacrifice to the Slayer, and Tsavong Lah turned to the villip.
“Your commanders grow too bold,” he said.
“They are eager to win your praise,” the villip replied. The image was that of a square-jawed warrior with so many battle swirls that he been forced to start laying red tattoos over blue. “I have warned them that they will not do so by risking their vessels here.”
“But you favor bolder tactics yourself,” Tsavong surmised.
“I understand the need to conserve ships, Warmaster. Coruscant is well defended.”
Tsavong Lah was surprised. After the loss of the great ship, he had expected the supreme commander to argue for an insertion assault to lay dovin basal gravity traps in the inner ring of defense platforms. Costly as the tactic was, it would quickly clear their way to the planet by pulling the minefield down onto the inner ring of orbital platforms. Provided enough of the assault force survived to actually execute the plan, it would also telegraph the tactic he intended to use to clear the far more formidable defenses around Coruscant.
“You are to be commended on your patience, Maal Lah.” The warmaster looked out at the battle, where Borleias’s dark moon was just swinging around the horizon, tiny flecks of crimson fire erupting in a jagged line down its murky face. “How are matters on the moon?”
“The infidels are putting up a stiff resistance, but they cannot hold much longer,” Maal Lah assured him. “The dovin basal will be on the surface within the hour.”
They had sent three assault divisions to install a giant dovin basal on Borleias’s dark moon. Instead of crashing the satellite into its planet as the Praetorite Vong had done on Sernpidal, however, the dovin basal would be used to sweep the planetary defenses out of position. Given the moon’s thirty-two-hour orbit, the stratagem would take more than a day to execute fully, but it would also conserve ships and avoid alerting the infidels to his plan for Coruscant.
Vaecta took Tsavong Lah’s coufee from its sheath and began to cut a ritual offering from the thigh of the shaper who would attach the radank claw to his wrist. Realizing he had only a few moments before he would be fully consumed by the ceremony, the warmaster returned his attention to Maal Lah’s villip.
“You have matters well in hand, my servant.” Tsavong Lah could not help being secretly disappointed. As the warmaster, it was his privilege to decide what was to be done and how, but once the battle started, the actual doing fell to his subordinates. “But I doubt that is what you wished to report.”
“I would never disturb you only to report that I am performing as you expect, Great Warmaster,” Maal Lah said. “The yammosk informs me that her little ones are feeling gravity pulses from the outsystem side of the planet.”
In his astonishment, Tsavong Lah forgot himself and nearly removed his hand from the cutting block. The yammosk was Maal Lah’s war coordinator, with whom the supreme commander shared thoughts, and her “little ones” were the dovin basals linked to the sensor systems of each vessel. “Gravity pulses, my servant?”
“The modulation is clumsy and erratic, Warmaster, but it is definitely a code of some sort. Certain elements even bear a resemblance to our own. Mass mapping identifies the source as an armored space yacht similar to the Jade Shadow, a vessel present at the battle of Duro and later confirmed to be Jeedai property.”
“Jeedai!” According to Tsavong Lah’s spy, the Jeedai were still on Coruscant, refueling and rearming their fleet. His readers had assured him they would not reach Borleias until nearly a day after the projected end of the battle. “When did it enter the system?”
“That is unknown,” Maal Lah said. “But it is unlikely the vessel was here when we arrived.”
“Based on what knowledge?”
“Had the Jeedai been here when we arrived, they would already have been in contact with Borleias and established a more secure mode of communication. They have several methods we cannot yet detect, so it would hardly be necessary to draw attention to their presence now by hailing the planet so openly.”
“And you have surmised their purpose in taking such a risk?” Tsavong Lah asked.
The villip looked uncomfortable. “Great Warmaster, my judgment in these matters is a blaze bug before the nova of your wisdom, but what if your spy on Coruscant is riding both ends of the rajat?”
Tsavong Lah fell quiet, considering the likelihood of this. It was possible that he had underestimated this Viqi Shesh, that she was playing him for the fool—or even that the New Republic deception sect knew of her contact with him and was feeding her false information as a means of passing it along. Nor could he place any faith in the HoloNet vidcasts the readers had used to confirm her story; the enemy deception sect could have planted those as easily as his own agents could infiltrate a planetary shielding crew.
As Tsavong Lah puzzled his way through the significance of the supreme commander’s report, Vaecta cut a strip of flesh from her own thigh and, letting her black blood run free, twined it with the one she had taken from the shaper. She laid the result on a ceremonial gatag-shell platter and blessed it in the name of Yun-Yammka, then held it out to the warmaster.
“One moment.” Tsavong Lah lifted his hand from the cutting block.
Harrar’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “You ask the gods to wait?”
“They will understand.” Tsavong Lah turned back to Maal Lah and asked, “This is the first pulse-message we have intercepted from the enemy, is it not?”
Maal Lah nodded. “To my knowledge, yes.”
“Then why should we believe it is Borleias they are trying to contact?” He switched his gaze to Seef. “Find out what happened to the yammosk at Talfaglio, and issue orders to all supreme commanders that their war coordinators must be destroyed if threatened with capture.”
Seef nodded, her eyes now bulging as far as Harrar’s. “It will be done.”
Maal Lah said, “I will assign a task group to capture the Jeedai vessel—”
“It would be better to ignore the vessel than to inform the Jeedai of their success,” Harrar suggested. He motioned to the cutting block. “If you please, Warmaster. The gods are waiting.”
“Only a moment longer.” Tsavong Lah relayed Harrar’s suggestion to the supreme commander in the form of an order, then added, “And I no longer wish to let the moon do our work for us. Order an insertion assault to lay the gravity traps.”
“But what of Coruscant?” Maal Lah’s expression grew as surprised as Harrar’s and Seef’s. “If you are right about the yammosks, there is no need to betray ourselves now.”
“Perhaps not, but sometimes the blaze bug is right and the nova is wrong.” Tsavong returned his hand to the cutting block, then glanced out at the defensive shell protecting Borleias and slid forward until his elbow lay beneath the shaper’s saw. “Our need will be great today—give him the arm.”
THIRTY-THREE
Jaina crested the latest in a long series of chalk dunes and found an Imperial walker looming over the next one, its white cockpit and armored passenger hump silhouetted against the darkness deeper in the passage. She hissed a warning to those behind her, then dropped into a defensive crouch and snapped her lightsaber from her harness. An obsolete All Terrain Armored Transport was the last thing she expected to see inside a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but a hundred Rogue Squadron actions had taught her never to be surprised by anything. When
a glow stick came to life in the AT-AT’s cockpit viewport, she yielded to her battle-honed instincts and hurled herself down the slope in a series of evasive zigzag somersaults.
As Jaina rolled, she felt herself sinking into that odd state of emotional numbness that seemed to accompany any fight these days. Other pilots sometimes spoke of feeling detached or outside themselves in combat—usually about two missions before they made some stupid mistake and let a scarhead send them nova—but this was closer to resignation, to a weary acceptance of the horror and heartache that was battle. She would have liked to attribute such feelings to her trust in the Force, but she knew better. Her reaction was emotional armor, a way to avoid the anguish that came with watching a friend or wingmate die horribly—and to deny the fear that her turn was coming.
Jaina reached the bottom in a billowing cloud of chalk dust and rolled to a stop. She sprang into a low battle crouch and brought her lightsaber around in a middle guard—then heard a familiar hissing sound.
“Stickz, you should grow a tail,” Tesar Sebatyne said. “Maybe you would not be so clumsy.”
This drew of series of chortles from Krasov and Bela.
“Very funny,” Jaina retorted. Even without the battle meld, which Jacen was leaving down in an attempt to dampen the growing discord in the group, she was cognizant of the rest of the strike team’s silent amusement. “You could have said something.”
“And I could pluck the scales from over my heart,” Bela rasped. “But I do not.”
There was more sissing.
Jaina stepped out of the chalk cloud to find the Barabels waiting with Anakin and the other team members, their vac suits now folded into their self-storing protection packs and clipped to the back of their equipment harnesses. Caked hood to heels in dust and looking more like Jedi ghosts than Jedi Knights, they were sitting against the passage wall, keeping a sharp watch for the coralskippers that always seemed to come around spraying some enervating breath agent whenever they stopped. Two pairs of footprints—one set huge and obviously Wookiee—led over the next dune toward the AT-AT.
Jaina stretched out through the Force and felt Lowbacca inside the walker with Jovan Drark. “Where did that thing come from?”
“The trainers are very thorough,” Lomi explained. “They keep an entire city of slaves to operate captured equipment so they can habituate their voxyn to ‘lifeless abhorrences.’ There is nothing they will not do to rid the galaxy of Jedi.”
“There’s even a starliner berthed in a grotto hangar,” Welk offered.
Notions of crashing a million-ton spacecraft into the cloning facility began to fill Jaina’s mind. “Is it—”
“The energy converters have been removed,” Lomi said. “Even the walkers and landspeeders run on low-capacity battery banks instead of fuel slugs. They cannot range much farther from the slave city than this.”
“Of course,” Jaina sighed.
Given a few resources and a little time, she and Lowbacca might well have found a way to restore the machinery—but with the infiltration already thirty hours old, the last thing the strike team could do was give the Yuuzhan Vong more time to react. A pale green tint began to come over the chalky passage, and Jaina looked up to see Myrkr pushing its emerald disk across a jagged patch of window membrane that had been used to mend a twenty-meter breach in the outer shell of the worldship. She suddenly felt rejuvenated, a little less jittery and worried. There was something about the arrival of a bright body in the sky that always made her feel as though she had just risen from a long night in a warm bunk.
Jovan Drark’s Rodian voice buzzed over the comlink. “The Force has favored us today. The batteries still have a charge, but the power feeds have been isolated by mineral secretions.”
A shiver of danger sense raced down Jaina’s spine. “Secretions?” she commed.
“It appears to be an insect nest,” Jovan reported. “Lowbacca is cleaning it off now.”
Jacen’s voice came over the comm channel. “What kind of insects?” Though her twin brother was always interested in new creatures, Jaina sensed through their bond that he was asking out of more than curiosity. “If they look like worms with legs—”
“It’s no shockapede hive,” Jovan commed. “These are little flitnats, completely harmless.”
“Nothing the Yuuzhan Vong create is harmless,” Alema Rar said to Anakin. “This is a trap.”
“Everything’s a trap with you,” Tahiri objected. As she spoke, the walker’s cockpit illumination activated, creating a band of pale light above the next dune. “Why can’t the Force just be with us for once? We could all use the ride.”
Anakin wisely looked to Lomi. “What do you know about those things?”
“That they are an unnecessary risk.” She pointed down the way to where the passage ended in a sheer face of yorik coral. “We have almost reached our destination. The main cloning lab is only a kilometer beyond that wall.”
“About time,” Zekk said, joining the rest of the group. “I was beginning to think you were stalling.”
Lomi smiled sourly. “You will understand if I prefer alive over fast, Zekk. Our fates will be the same in this.”
“She’s kept us out of trouble so far,” Anakin added, scowling at Zekk’s provocative tone. In contrast to nearly everyone else on the strike team, Anakin seemed completely untroubled by the time it had taken to negotiate the training course. “Let’s make the safe play and avoid the walker. We’ll be done and on our way home in two hours anyway … four at the most.”
“Careful, Anakin,” Jaina said. “You’re beginning to sound like Dad.”
Despite the jovial smile she flashed, Jaina was distressed by her younger brother’s overconfidence. Having lost only Ulaha and the two droids despite all their setbacks, Anakin seemed to think that the strike team was untouchable, that even an entire worldship full of Yuuzhan Vong could not stop a single platoon of well-trained Jedi. That might even be true, but Jaina had learned in Rogue Squadron that being best guaranteed nothing, that plans went awry for everyone—and always at the worst possible moment.
Anakin nodded to the Barabels, who never seemed to tire of walking point, and the strike team started up the dune in a billowing dust cloud. Jaina stayed at her brother’s side, debating the wisdom of pointing out how much trouble they were in. Before leaving Eclipse, Ulaha and the tacticians had estimated that the mission’s likelihood of success would drop 2 percent with every hour of duration, which meant that the strike team’s chances had to be approaching zero by now. Add to that the fact that the Yuuzhan Vong had anticipated their assault far enough in advance to set an ambush and send Nom Anor to recapture them, and the odds had clearly fallen to minuscule.
Even the Wraiths would have given up at this point and called for extraction—but that was not an option for the strike team. They had known from the outset that any flotilla sent to support the operation would be destroyed either crossing the war zone or once it was detected near Myrkr. Seeing this as his chance to save the galaxy, Anakin had insisted on coming anyway, arguing that if the group needed to be rescued, the Jedi were already doomed—and with them, the New Republic itself. As much as it frightened her, Jaina thought he was probably right.
As they neared the top of the dune, Anakin asked, “Jaina?”
She looked over and was struck by how tall her brother had grown, by how handsome he had become—even with several days of beard growing through the chalk on his face. “Yeah?”
“What are you doing out of line?” He glanced over his shoulder, then spoke so quietly he had to use the Force to carry his words to her ears. “Is there something you want to say?”
Jaina smiled. “There is.” She reached over and squeezed his forearm. “You’re doing a good job, Anakin. If we’re going to get this done, it’s because of your confidence and determination.”
“Thanks, Jaina.” Anakin probably meant his lopsided grin to be cocky, but to his sister it seemed more surprised—perhaps even relieved.
“I know.”
“Sure you do.” Jaina laughed. She punched him in the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble, then added, “Just remember to keep your guard up.”
They crested the dune and found themselves looking into the AT-AT’s transparisteel viewport. Jaina thought at first that the interior lighting had been dimmed, but then she noticed Lowbacca’s jumpsuit-covered rump protruding up behind the instrument console and realized the murk had less to do with illumination than swarming flitnats. So thick were the insects that the main access tunnel was not even visible, only a slight darkening where it led out of the cockpit back into the passenger compartment.
Anakin was instantly on his comlink. “Streak, what are you doing in there? I said—”
Lowbacca growled a terse reply, his shaggy hand reaching up to slap a filter housing on the console.
“Master Lowbacca reports that he is simply trying to retrieve some needed equipment,” Em Teedee translated for those who did not understand Shyriiwook. “And please forgive his brusqueness. The flitnats are starting to bite.”
“Bite?” Jaina echoed. She eyed the distance up to the cockpit and began to gather the Force in preparation for a long jump. “What about you, Jovan?”
When no answer came, Anakin commed, “Jovan?”
Lowbacca’s furry head appeared from behind the instrument console and turned toward the rear of the cockpit. He barked a query through the access tunnel, then rose to his feet, a second filter housing dangling from his hand.
“Jedi Drark fails to answer,” Em Teedee reported. “Master Lowbacca can see him—”
“Dangling from a belly hatch,” Tesar interrupted. “Krasov will bring him down.”
Lowbacca grunted an acknowledgment and, scratching furiously beneath the collar of his jumpsuit, turned back to the instrument console.