by Troy Denning
“Fooled myself,” Jacen said. “I thought I was the only one who knows the difference between right and wrong. I realized that wasn’t true—actually, Tenel Ka pointed it out—after what I said on the Exquisite Death. I’ve been trying to apologize to you since.”
“Really?” Anakin grimaced as one of Tekli’s tiny hands brushed an organ that did not like being brushed. “Didn’t know.”
Jacen flashed a lopsided Solo grin. “I figured.”
The zipping sound of blasters gave way to the snap-hiss of lightsabers, and Anakin raised his head. Atop the rubble pile, a solid line of colored blades was dancing against the darkness beyond.
“Got to go!” He pushed himself to his elbows. “Not getting anyone else killed.”
“Except yourself, if you don’t let me finish!” Tekli snapped. She nodded to Tahiri, who promptly pushed Anakin back down. “We can leave in a few seconds.”
Anakin dared to look and found the Chadra-Fan coating the interior of his wound with salve. He was alarmed to discover he no longer felt her working.
“You numbed me?” he asked.
“To help with the pain.” Tekli took a pad of bacta gauze from Tahiri and packed it into the wound. “But I can only do so much. You need a healing trance.”
Anakin nodded. “When we’re done.”
Tekli looked up, her flattish nose twitching. “Sooner. Much sooner.”
“Sooner?” Tahiri echoed. She glanced back toward the fight on the rubble pile. “But healing trances take hours—even days!”
Tekli ignored her and continued to speak to Anakin. “Your spleen was punctured.” She looked back to her work, joining the edges of the wound with thread instead of synthflesh in case she needed to reopen it. “I closed the hole, but it will continue to seep until you enter a trance and heal it yourself.”
“How’s he going to do that?” Tahiri demanded. “We can’t stop, not with the Yuuzhan Vong so close!”
There was an uneasy silence as the situation grew clear. Jacen tightened his lips to keep them from trembling and reached out to Anakin through the Force, trying to reassure him. Tahiri grabbed Tekli by the arm and pulled her to her feet.
“Do something! Use the Force!”
The Chadra-Fan laid a comforting hand over the one holding her arm. “I have.”
“We must start with what’s possible,” Jacen said, pulling Tahiri away. “Maybe we’ll find a way to buy enough time.”
“Not by staying here,” Anakin said. He felt more guilty than frightened; it was his wound placing the mission—and his companions’ lives—at risk. He rolled to his elbows and sat upright, grimacing when Tekli’s bacta numb proved weaker than he had expected. He activated his comlink, then said, “Prepare to break off. Buy some space.”
Parrying with her one arm, Tenel Ka used the Force to pluck a fragmentation grenade from her harness and activate the thumb switch, then sent it hurling past her opponent. Two seconds later, it exploded with a brilliant flash, and the battle din quieted to a rumble.
“Lowbacca, Alema, Ganner, Lomi, Raynar—you first,” Anakin commanded.
The five Jedi leapt backward off the rubble pile, flipping through the air and landing safely out of the reach of their foes. Anakin assigned Alema, Lomi, and Ganner to cover the others, then motioned Lowbacca and Raynar up the passage to gather their dead, Eryl and Jovan.
“Where?” Raynar demanded. “Eryl’s body isn’t here! Neither is Jovan’s!”
“What?” Anakin glanced back to find Raynar and Lowbacca standing over a pair of bloodstains. “They’re gone?”
Lowbacca rumbled indeed they were, then squatted to inspect some marks on the floor. He rumbled something more.
“Master Lowbacca wishes to inquire whether the feral voxyn might have taken them?” To this fairly accurate translation, Em Teedee added his own opinion. “I must say, it hardly seems possible—not from beneath our very noses.”
Anakin turned to Jacen, who had already closed his eyes and reached out to the ferals through the Force.
“There are four—no, five—moving up the passage ahead of us. They seem, uh, excited.”
“Excited?” Alema asked, turning her attention forward. “How?”
The cacophony atop the rubble pile grew suddenly louder, and Anakin looked up to see Yuuzhan Vong silhouettes clambering into the gaps between his friends.
“Later, Alema,” Anakin said. “Keep covering.” He activated his comlink. “Break off, everyone!”
As the rest of the Jedi battle line stepped off the rubble pile, Anakin grabbed his brother’s arm and pulled himself to his feet—and instantly collapsed. It was as if a lance had pierced his heart, and he screamed so loud his voice echoed back to him a dozen-fold. Then Jacen and Tahiri had him under the arms, dragging him half a dozen steps down the passage before they levitated him into the air.
Bugs swarmed down from the top of the rubble pile, drawing angry curses as they splattered against the strike team’s armored jumpsuits. Someone thumbed a remote, triggering the mines planted on opposite sides atop the rubble pile, and the bug storm fell silent. Anakin glanced back to see the area clouded in blast shrapnel, the fragments burying themselves two millimeters deep in bare flesh, vonduun crab armor, or even yorik coral before detonating again. The Yuuzhan Vong literally vanished in a fog of detonite fume and blood spray.
The anguish in Anakin’s chest subsided, and was quickly replaced by a different kind, coming to him through the battle meld—a heavier, sadder pain that could be described only as sorrow. He swung his feet around, breaking Tahiri’s Force grip, and began to run alongside the others. A large Barabel body was floating between her hatchmates, being pulled along by her arms. The amphistaff that had felled her still wagged between her shoulder blades.
“Bela!” Anakin half turned toward Jacen. “Is she …”
There was no need to finish the question. He could feel that she was dead, knew that the amphistaff buried in her back was the source of the pain that had driven him down earlier. He had let another Jedi die—worse, had not even noticed until she was gone. Yet again, he had failed his strike team.
Nom Anor’s muted voice shouted an order somewhere on the other side of the rubble heap, and a muffled clatter rolled up the passage as warriors began to clamber over the bodies of their fallen comrades.
Jacen took Anakin’s arm. “Let Tahiri lift—”
“No.” Anakin jerked free. “Not again. It was my wound. I forced us to stop.”
Lowbacca triggered a second set of mines, and again the rubble pile quieted. By now, the strike team was around the corner, out of sight of their pursuers and opening a substantial lead. Anakin drew heavily on the Force and made himself keep pace. He was weakening—and he knew by his friends’ anxious glances how obvious it was—but he would not let Tahiri tire herself for him. Not anyone. No more Jedi were going to die because of him. Not even Dark Jedi.
It was not even a minute before Anakin felt the Yuuzhan Vong gaining ground again. There was no ambush, no trap that would delay them. Nom Anor just kept coming, forcing the Jedi onward, soaking up munitions with his warriors’ bodies and drawing down power packs with their lives. And the Jedi could do nothing to slow him, could only keep running.
A sour stench began to fill the passage. Everyone but Tesar and Krasov donned their breath masks. They rounded the corner and saw Eryl’s red hair disappearing into a low jagged tunnel on the right. Raynar raced forward and dropped to his knees, screaming for the voxyn to release her, reaching inside its acid-melted lair.
Anakin stretched out with the Force and plucked him back into the main passage.
“Hey!” Raynar yelled, flailing.
A low burping sound erupted from the lair, and a spray of sticky acid shot out into the passage. Raynar stopped struggling.
“Uh, thanks.” He glanced over. “Anakin, you can put me down. I’m not going in there.”
“Are you certain?” Alema went over to the tunnel and—cautiously—stoo
ped in front of it, peering inside. “This is exactly where we need to go.”
“You’ve gone space happy,” Welk said.
“Twi’leks do not go space happy,” Alema replied mildly.
The distant sound of Yuuzhan Vong feet began to rustle up the passage.
Alema held her palm over the tunnel entrance, then pulled it away and looked up the main passage. “Has anyone else noticed that we have been circling around something?”
Anakin shook his head with the others. “We’ll have to trust your instincts on that,” he said. As a Twi’lek, Alema’s sense of direction was undoubtedly more accurate than that of anyone else; her species inhabited a vast warren of underground cities on the inhospitable planet Ryloth. “What are you thinking?”
“This hole is breathing.” Eyes twinkling, she took Anakin’s hand and held it in the steady breeze that carried the foul stench from the voxyn tunnel. “It goes somewhere big, and it bisects whatever we’re circling around. It could be a shortcut.”
“Not one we can use,” Jacen said. “The voxyn are protecting something down there. I’m trying to make them think they need to stay with it.”
The sound of tramping began to roll up the passage. They all glanced back toward their unseen pursuers.
Ganner said, “Then you make the voxyn leave instead.” He turned to Anakin. “We’ve got to do something.”
Even before Anakin turned to ask if what Ganner suggested was possible, Jacen gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
Anakin looked to Lomi. “What’s down there?”
The Dark Jedi shrugged. “Voxyn, I am sure—but the snake-head may be right. It could be a shortcut. There are more tunnels like this one near the gate.”
“Gate?” Anakin was already imagining the difficulty of fighting through a company of gate guards with Nom Anor rushing them from behind. “A guarded gate?”
Lomi nodded. “You can be certain.”
Anakin began to feel sick. There was no way, no escape.
The tramping grew louder.
“Anakin?” Ganner asked.
“There’s no choice,” Jaina said, inserting herself between the two. “We need time for your healing trance.”
“We are unlikely to buy much time in a cavern full of voxyn,” Tenel Ka observed. “Quite the opposite, I am sure.”
Anakin glanced guiltily in Bela’s direction. He knew what he wanted to do, but he had been wrong so many times on this mission, and every time, someone fell. Now he had to choose again. No matter what he decided, more Jedi would die. Maybe they all would.
“Young Solo?” Lomi inquired. “We are waiting.”
Anakin turned to Jacen. “What do—”
“Thanks for asking,” Jacen interrupted, not quite hiding his surprise. He took a thermal detonator from his equipment harness and dropped to his hands and knees in front of the foul-smelling tunnel. “But you know what we need to do. I think we all do.”
THIRTY-NINE
The smell was more sweet than rank, at least to Tsavong Lah, whose limb was the one rotting. The radank leg with which the shapers had replaced his arm was overbonding to his elbow, the aggressive linking cells attacking and killing his own tissue well above the amputation point. Scales and spines were already emerging as high up as his swollen biceps, and above that his arm swarmed with the diptera maggots seeded by the shapers to eat away his dying flesh.
If the alteration stopped at his shoulder, he would be accorded the respect of one who had sacrificed much and risked more in his devotion to the gods. If it continued onto his torso proper, or he lost the arm itself, he would be excused from his duties and shunned by his caste as a Shamed One, disfigured by the gods as a sign of their displeasure. Tsavong Lah suspected that where the alteration stopped would depend on how long he allowed the loss of his Reecee fleet to delay the capture of Coruscant—and that, in turn, depended on how long it required Nom Anor and Vergere to capture the Solo twins. With half his assault force now gone, and the possibility—no, likelihood—that the Jeedai had captured a live yammosk, he did not dare attack until he had secured the blessing of the gods.
His mind made up, the warmaster grasped a villip resting beside him and began to tickle it awake. Though he was sitting naked in the purifying steams of his private cleansing cell, Tsavong Lah did not bother to cover himself. The villip in his servant’s possession would show only a head.
After an irritating wait of nearly a minute, the villip everted into the likeness of a huffing Nom Anor. Giving the executor no opportunity to apologize for making him wait, Tsavong Lah scowled.
“I trust you are chasing the Jeedai, Nom Anor, and not fleeing them.”
“Never,” the executor assured him. “Even as we speak, I am leading the Ksstarr’s Two Scourge in pursuit.”
“Will you catch them?”
“Yes,” Nom Anor said. “We are taking casualties, but Three Scourge is waiting in ambush at the end of this transit. There is no escape this time.”
The casualties did not interest Tsavong Lah. He had already heard how many vessels the Jeedai had destroyed above Myrkr and how they had slain the Ksstarr’s first company—One Scourge—to a warrior, and he would have considered twice the losses insignificant.
“You will not harm the twin Solos.” It had to be the fourth or fifth time Tsavong Lah had given the order, but, now more than ever, he wanted Nom Anor to understand. “Your warriors understand the fate awaiting the one who kills either of them?”
“As do I, Warmaster,” Nom Anor said. “The twins are forbidden targets. I have also commanded Yal Phaath to have his own troops stand off—though he bristles at my authority. It would be wise of you to underscore the order.”
“As you suggest,” Tsavong Lah agreed, ignoring for the moment his servant’s audacity in telling him what to do. “I need those sacrifices, Nom Anor. Our situation is deteriorating while I wait for you.”
“You will not need to wait much longer, Warmaster,” Nom Anor promised. “My plan is an excellent one.”
“That would be healthy for you,” Tsavong Lah warned. “I expect to hear from you soon.”
He pressed his thumb into the villip’s cheek, causing it to break contact and invert. The warmaster set this one aside and picked up Viqi Shesh’s, considering whether the time had come to expend this particular asset. Since her removal from the New Republic’s military oversight committee, she had been working doubly hard to prove her usefulness to the Yuuzhan Vong—less out of greed or power lust, Tsavong Lah thought, than a simple thirst for vengeance. Such weapons tended to be very explosive—which could be good or bad, depending on when they were detonated.
The steam-cell door spiraled open behind him, admitting a cool draft that wafted pleasantly across his naked back. Without turning around, he snapped, “Did I not say I was cleansing? How dare you disturb me.”
“My life in payment, Warmaster.” The voice belonged to Seef, his female communications assistant. “But the choice was not mine. Lord Shimrra’s villip has everted.”
Not bothering to cover himself, Tsavong Lah stood and turned, already reaching for the coufee Seef held ready for him. Except in circumstances involving breeding, it was forbidden for a subordinate to look upon his naked body and live—but when he saw her eyes flickering away from the suppurating flesh above his graft, he left the weapon in her hand. If he killed her now, the gods might well believe that he was simply trying to keep the condition of his arm a secret.
Tsavong Lah studied the communications officer a moment, pushed the coufee away, and narrowed his eyes in a way that left no doubt about his intentions. “You will prepare yourself.”
“Yes, Warmaster.” Her face betraying no hint of whether she considered this a better fate than death, Seef returned the coufee to its sheath and inclined her head. “I will await you in your chamber.”
After she stepped aside, Tsavong Lah left his steam cell and draped a cloak over his shoulder hooks, taking care to keep the sleeve well a
bove his elbow so that the condition of his graft would be visible to all. He found Lord Shimrra’s villip set out on the table, its features cloaked in obscurity beneath the cowl-like protrusion of an epidermal mane. The warmaster touched his breast in salute and placed his palm and new talon on the table in front of the villip, then pressed his forehead to the back of his hands.
“Supreme One,” he said. “Forgive the delay. I was cleansing.”
“The gods value the pure.” Shimrra’s voice was a wispy rumble. “But also the triumphant. What of this fleet you lost?”
“The gods have reason to be displeased. The loss was total—six clusters.”
“An expensive feint, my servant.”
Tsavong’s throat went dry. “Supreme One, it was no—”
“I am sure your plan warrants the sacrifice,” Shimrra said, cutting him off. “That is not why we are speaking.”
“Indeed?” Tsavong did not try to correct Shimrra; if the supreme overlord declared the fleet’s loss a feint, then it was so. The warmaster’s mind leapt immediately to the problem of shattering Coruscant’s formidable defenses with only a single-pronged attack—perhaps a variation of the mine-sweeping moon he had intended to use at Borleias, or something involving refugee ships. Refugee ships would be good—the furor over the hostages at Talfaglio had proven how vulnerable to such techniques the New Republic really was. As the rough outline of an idea began to take shape in the warmaster’s mind, he said, “I assure you my plan is an excellent one, Supreme One, but I am honored to speak with you regarding any matter.”
Before continuing, Shimrra hesitated just long enough to express his displeasure without speaking it, then said, “The success of your new grafting is in doubt?”
“It is so,” Tsavong Lah answered. He did not ask, even of himself, how Lord Shimrra knew of his troubles with the radank leg. “I fear my arm may have offended the gods.”
“It is not your arm, my servant. I saw nothing of that.”
Tsavong Lah remained quiet, desperately trying to work out in his own mind whether Shimrra’s vision was the reason they were speaking or merely the excuse.