by Troy Denning
Booster scowled and started to reiterate his denial—then cried out in surprise as his feet rose off the ground and Cilghal floated him out of the way.
“Okay, okay,” he growled. “If it means that much to you, I’ll take a look at this gizmo in action.”
“A wise idea,” Cilghal said. She disliked using the Force on a friend in this manner, but Booster was stubborn and time was short. “I am sure that you’ll be impressed—so impressed that you’ll let us run a power feed off one of your fusion reactors.”
Booster’s scowl returned to its most stubborn. “Don’t push it, Cilghal. We’ll talk about that after you show me what this thing can do.”
As weary as Jacen was of watching Vergere and the shaper argue with Nom Anor, he could think of no way to reach the voxyn. With a frigate full of Yuuzhan Vong in the area, sneaking up on it was out of the question. So was floating a detonator or incendiary at it; the creature had proved many times that it would flee as soon as it felt them using the Force. That left only waiting, but wait he would—until he was fifty, if that was what it took to destroy the queen. He had promised Anakin.
Vergere and the others were still arguing when a series of frantic clicks came over the comm net. Jacen reached out to Tesar and felt the Barabel still waiting at his station on the surface, concerned but not nearly excited enough to be fighting someone. A single click confirmed that Tesar had felt his touch, then the boom of an exploding missile reverberated through the yorik coral. Vergere turned and bounded away around the detritus mound. Nom Anor and the shaper remained where they were, barking questions at her vanishing back.
“Jaina?” Ganner gasped.
“Who else?” Tenel Ka replied.
Jacen reached out to his sister through the Force, found only the same cold anger that he had felt since Anakin’s death, and tried to break through to some vestige of the Jaina he had known all his life. He touched only swirling darkness, stormy and unreasoning and full of hate. Afraid to use the comlink—he could not be sure what channels Vergere had open—Jacen opened his emotions to the others, drawing them into a battle meld and reaching out to Tesar with the same question on their minds: Was this Jaina’s doing?
They were answered with a confirming click.
“An excellent plan, catching the frigate off guard,” Tenel Ka said. “It will greatly aid our final escape.”
Another blast shook the passage, this one closer than the first, then a second eruption even louder. Flakes of glow lichen began to snow from the ceiling. High in the colony interior, the legs of the dead Yuuzhan Vong vanished from sight as the startled voxyn dragged him out the back side of the hive and disappeared, never presenting a shot to the Jedi below. A third explosion shocked the dust off the walls, and loose chunks of ceiling began to bombard the insect city.
Tesar’s desperate voice came over the comlink. “Stickz, not there—stop!”
Even as Tesar yelled, a fourth explosion dropped an avalanche of vault ribbing on the colony. An entire borough of the insect city collapsed into rubble around Nom Anor and the shaper, and then the whole bug pit was filled with an impenetrable cloud of dust.
When a sporadic rain of yorik coral continued to fall from the weakened ceiling, Jacen backed deeper into the tunnel and pulled his equipment harness off his back.
“We’d better get into our vac suits,” he whispered.
After failing to destroy the frigate on the first two passes, Tesar thought the assault shuttle would turn and flee. That would have been the tactic of a wise hunter striking at such dangerous prey. But Jaina was in a killing frenzy and unable to resist the temptation of a 150-meter Yuuzhan Vong frigate sitting motionless on the surface, its debarking ramp still hanging open like the mouth of a winded dewback. She wheeled around, coming in close for a point-blank shot, and loosed a pair of plasma balls that vanished almost instantly into shielding singularities.
The assault shuttle flashed over its target and pulled up sharply, preparing to wheel around for yet another attack.
The frigate finally answered, launching a flurry of magma missiles and plasma balls from its port-side weapons bank. At such short range, the missiles lacked time to fix on their target and streaked past harmlessly, but two plasma balls exploded into the shuttle’s rear quarter, blasting through the firewall and sending it spinning into the sky.
Tesar feared for a moment that the shuttle would explode or spin itself into pieces, but then Jaina—at least he assumed she was the pilot—somehow brought it under control and banked away. The craft climbed five hundred meters, then belched flame and began a long, wobbling descent toward the horizon.
Tesar snapped his tongue against his faceplate in anger, then thought for a moment and finally decided to risk a message over Jacen’s personal comm channel. Even if the Yuuzhan Vong were eavesdropping, this was not something he wanted to try relaying through clicks and Force sensations.
“No!” Jacen gasped.
He had felt something wrong even before Tesar commed, but had not known what. Forgetting about Anakin’s captured comlink, he opened a general channel and would have started calling for a report, had Tenel Ka not ripped the mike off his throat.
“You will not help anyone by getting us killed,” she said. “Jaina will bring them down softly. You know that.”
“No, I don’t. Not anymore.” Jacen took a deep breath, using a meditative calming technique to bring himself back under control. “But you’re right about the rest.”
Jacen reached out to his sister and spent the next minute or so struggling to stay in contact with the dark emotions that now filled her. She did not seem frightened, only angry and focused on the effort at hand. Then, as he sensed her efforts growing even more intense, her anger abruptly deepened to a level that Jacen could not bear, and he lost her.
“She’s gone,” he gasped.
“Dead?” Ganner asked.
“I don’t know.” Jacen looked up. “I didn’t feel that. I just don’t feel her at all.”
Tenel Ka enfolded him in her one arm and pulled him close. “Jacen, I am so sorry.”
Out in the bug pit, the dust had settled enough to see the Yuuzhan Vong clearing rubble. Although pieces of ceiling continued to fall at increasing frequency, it soon grew apparent that the collapse had so far caused few casualties. Nom Anor was already standing at the edge of a fallen hive, glaring down with a sour expression as a pair of assistants pulled the shaper from beneath the debris.
Once the shaper regained his feet and a little of his dignity, he brushed himself off and began to speak sharply to Nom Anor. Jacen thought for a moment they would continue their argument, but after a while Nom Anor only nodded and pointed up the tunnel leading to the surface and their frigate. The shaper nodded back, then took the warriors and started across the colony in pursuit of the voxyn queen. The executor shook his head wearily and started up the tunnel toward the frigate.
He had barely departed before a squeaky voice came over their comlinks. “It is safe to come out now, young Jedi. You have nothing to fear from me.”
Jacen motioned the others to ready their weapons, then activated his comlink microphone. “Who is this?”
“There is no time to explain that now.” As she spoke, Vergere came around the colony on the side opposite the one she had departed, then pointed in the direction the voxyn queen had fled. “Your quarry is escaping.”
FIFTY-ONE
The Solo entourage was halfway across the last pedestrian bridge outside the Eastport Docking Facility when a deafening crackle roared out of the sky and shook the surrounding skyscrapers. Reflexes conditioned to instant reaction by far too many brushes with death, Han dropped to his haunches and looked for the source of the trouble. He found it in the form of a million orange fireballs reflecting off the transparisteel panes of a million tower viewports, silhouetting the dazed figure of his wife with Ben cradled in her arms.
Like almost everyone else on the bridge, Leia was still standing upright, craning her ne
ck to see what was making all the noise. Han grasped her elbow and pulled her down beside him.
“Get down, sweetheart.”
The smell of ozone and ash wafted down on a hot wind. A corvette-sized fireball roared overhead and impacted half a kilometer up the durasteel canyon, vaporizing forty floors of a residential tower and blasting the walls out of three adjacent buildings. The shock wave cleared the hoverlane of traffic, then hit the bridge and turned the air as hot as a Tatooine drought. Adarakh and Meewalh dropped the luggage and used their own bodies to cover Han and Leia, C-3PO skidded three steps across the walkway before both he and the potted ladalum he was carrying were caught by the YVH war droid Lando had given them, and Ben’s TDL nanny was swept off the bridge along with a hundred screaming pedestrians.
“How dreadful!” C-3PO peered over the safety rail. “She’ll be smashed beyond components!”
“And so will we if we don’t get off this bridge,” Han said, rising.
Still holding Leia’s arm, he started to push forward through the crowd. With the battle for Coruscant now being fought in an orbit so low the weapon discharges looked like a colossal sky-dazzle show, the planet was being bombarded with a steady rain of flaming spacecraft. The kilometer-long walk from the apartment had been one long smoke-stroll, and twice they had been forced to detour around impact craters where the bridge came to an abrupt end a hundred meters above the stump of a truncated building.
The closer they came to the docking facility, the slower the crowd seemed to move. Han finally saw why as they drew to within a few meters of the building. A pair of burly Defense Force soldiers in full biosuits and headgear flanked the half-closed access gate, carefully scanning identichips and waving pedestrians through one at a time. It seemed a ludicrous endeavor given the circumstances.
One of the guards turned his dark-visored gaze on Han and held out his scanner. “Identichip.”
“You don’t know?” Han asked, presenting the group’s chips. Not being in disguise, he and Leia had been the subject of countless whispers and pointed fingers along the way; at times, only the menacing presence of Lando’s YVH war droid had kept frightened citizens from besieging them with questions they could not answer and bringing their progress to a halt. “Where’d they recruit you guys, Pzob?”
“Procedure …” The soldier looked at the datareader on the back of his scanner. “Solo. I read only four chips. There are five of you.”
“Give me a break,” Han said. He felt the YVH war droid easing up behind him and quietly signaled him to stay back. “The baby’s only four months old.”
The soldier continued to stare out from behind his visor.
“It takes six months to get the chip,” Han bluffed. If this guy didn’t recognize him and Leia, chances were he wouldn’t know Coruscant documentation law either. “Until then, the kid travels on a parent’s chip.”
“Of course.” The soldier lowered his scanner, then pointed down an exterior walkway to a large balcony packed with droids.
“You may enter, but your mechanicals must remain. There is no room to evacuate them.”
“Remain?” C-3PO echoed. “But my place is with—”
Han waved the protocol droid silent. “They won’t be taking a public berth. We have our own vessel.”
“Which you should use to evacuate living beings,” the second guard said, stepping over. “Not these lifeless—”
“Please remain calm,” the YVH war droid said, pushing an arm between Han and Leia. “This is a military emergency.”
Han started to turn. “What—”
A pair of blaster bolts streaked past his face, burning holes through the chests of both soldiers. Leia shrieked and Ben wailed, and an astonished murmur rustled through the crowd. C-3PO, still holding the pot with Leia’s blast-stripped ladalum, began to distance himself from the larger droid.
“Really, One-dash-Five-Oh-Seven, that was uncalled for! Your primary programming must be garbled.”
The war droid squealed something in machine language that made C-3PO take a step back, then turned to Han. “I apologize for the identification delay. The biosuits were obscuring the criteria.”
“Criteria?” Han broke the seal on one of the helmets and found an ooglith masquer already peeling away from the face of its host. “And I thought you just didn’t want to be left behind.”
Bureaucrats, businessbeings, and bankers, the people pouring through Gate 3700 of the Eastport Docking Facility were not the ordinary sort of refugee. They swirled into the terminal area escorted by droids, sentient assistants, and hoversleds loaded with art treasures and portable gem vaults. Most were protected by hastily armed servants, bodyguards of various intimidating species, and even Ulban Arms S-EP1 security droids. But only one family had Noghri luggage porters, a protocol droid carrying a heat-blasted ladalum, and a fully operational YVH 1 war droid providing crowd control. As ever, the Solos were the most conspicuous of the conspicuous.
Pores still raging against the ooglith masquer she had been wearing since the failed kidnapping at their apartment, Viqi Shesh turned to the child standing with her at the observation deck safety rail. With a mop of unruly brown hair and big blue eyes as round as Old Republic valor medals, he could have been a twin to the twelve-year-old Anakin Solo portrayed in newsvid archives. He ought to have been; it had cost Viqi a small fortune in cosmisurgeon and bacta tank fees to make him look that way.
“You see them, Dab? The ones with the big war droid?”
“How could I miss them?” the boy answered. “Everybody in the galaxy knows the Solos. You didn’t say they were the ones.”
“I didn’t say a lot of things,” Viqi said. Thanks to a thumb-sized Yuuzhan Vong leech-creature lodged in her throat, Viqi’s once-silky voice was now almost reedy and quavery. “But if you and your family want passage off Coruscant with me, I won’t need to.”
The boy looked away. “I understand.”
His mother and two sisters were already aboard Viqi’s yacht, which was berthed under a false name on the other side of the Falcon, just beyond a public starferry named the Byrt. She studied the boy, wondering if she had perhaps misjudged the urchin’s character when she spotted him in the underlevels rifling the pockets of a salted Arcona. If the child turned out to have a sense of honor—or even the shadow of a conscience—she was as doomed as Coruscant itself. After the HoloNet had reported her failure at the Solos’ apartment, Tsavong Lah’s villip had everted just long enough to say as much.
“I hope you do understand, Dab,” Viqi said. “I will not suffer failure lightly … I will not suffer it at all.”
Leave it to the Eastport docking master to squeeze a ronto into a rabac hole. By keeping the dome irised open and landing the Byrt nacelles-down inside a magnolock hull-hoist, the remarkable Shev Watsn had squeezed a two-hundred-meter starferry into a berthing bay designed for yachts and light transports.
Leia could have slapped him with a lightsaber.
Ten thousand terrified people stood waiting to board a vessel that would hold five thousand at best, most standing in front of Docking Bay 3733 where the Falcon was kept under an assumed name. As much as Leia wanted to board their ship and get off Coruscant with Ben, she knew they would be mobbed by desperate refugees the instant they tried to push through the throng.
For now, the best thing to do was wait at the edge until the Byrt began to board, then work their way over to their berth as the crowd pressed forward.
Leia hoped they would have enough time. Through the narrow crescent of sky visible above the Byrt’s nose, she could see a steady stream of government yachts rising out of Imperial City—the New Republic’s dedicated senators and loyal government officials abandoning their posts. So far, the Yuuzhan Vong were still too busy with the New Republic military to harass fleeing civilians, but that would change soon. She had even heard of senators asking admirals from their own sectors to escort them home, and in far too many cases those requests were being honored. She found it difficul
t to believe this was the same New Republic she had helped found—and for which Anakin had given his life.
“General?” The voice that asked this was reedy and quavering. “General, is that you?”
Leia turned with Han, the Noghri, and the droids to see a luggage-burdened woman with a large nose and tired eyes pushing through the crowd toward them. Trailing along at her side was a sandy-haired boy of about twelve, also struggling beneath a mound of baggage.
“General!” As the woman said this, she suddenly found her path blocked by Adarakh and Meewalh. “It is you!”
“I haven’t been a general for a long time.” Han spoke quietly and tried not to be too obvious as he glanced around to see who might be eavesdropping. “Do we know each other?”
“You don’t remember?”
The woman used a bag to sweep her son forward, and Leia was struck by just how much he looked like Anakin at that age. It was more than just the upturned nose and the ice-blue eyes; his whole face was shaped the same, and he even had the same round little chin. Her heart went out to this boy and his mother.
Han studied the woman and her son, then said, “No, I don’t remember.”
The woman did not seem offended. “Well, of course, I’m sure it was more important to me than to you. After all, you were the general, and Ran was only a flight officer in Rogue Squadron.”
“Ran?” Han asked. “Ran Kether?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I was only his girlfriend then, but I met you twice on Chandrila—”
“Okay,” Han said, warming instantly. He motioned the Noghri aside. “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. How is Ran?”
The woman’s expression fell. “You didn’t hear?”
Han shook his head. “I’ve been, uh, out of touch.”
“He was flying refugee transports for SELCORE. We lost him at Kalarba.” The woman glanced at Leia for the first time. “I understand your daughter was injured there, too.”