to the gods, our leaders, and Domain Kraal," he said. "I will serve gladly."
"Good," Harrar said. "What are your most current operations?"
"We have recently lost our human spy within their great abomination-
building. So I have engineered a plan to introduce one or more new spies into
their camp. We will do this on the next occasion that an assault is made against
their camp."
"Just like that?" Harrar asked. "The infidels get no opportunity to refuse
our gift of a spy?"
Charat Kraal offered a warrior's smile, broken teeth visible through
slitted lips. "They do not, great priest."
"When my audience with Czulkang Lah is done, you will come with me and tell
me of your plan."
Coruscant
As his group entered a long gallery that had once been, flanked by stores
and emporiums, Luke again felt a twinge, some distant wrongness in the Force.
The sensation had come to him before and he had steered toward it, hoping that
it was the source of the unease, the visions that had brought him to Coruscant
on this mission. But his fellow Jedi had not always seemed to share his
perceptions.
He glanced at them. Mara was already looking his. way, nodding. Tahiri
stared off into the distance, in the direction of the twinge, alert as a hunting
beast.
Even Danni was gazing in that general direction, a hint of confusion
evident even through her Yuuzhan Vong makeup. "Did any of you feel something?"
she asked.
"Yeah," Kell said. "Hunger. Time to break?"
Luke shook his head. "Not in the open like this."
"Awww. Explosive charges are so much more vivid when they go off in the
open."
Tahiri stared up at him, scornful. "Do you only ever think about one thing?
"
"One thing at a time, sure. Now it's my stomach."
Another feeling intruded on Luke's finely tuned senses, a whiff of danger,
far more immediate than the previous sensation. He whispered, "Trouble."
In a moment, the others moved to form a circle, Mara, Tahiri, Kell, and
Face on the outside, the others within. No one brought out a technological
weapon, but Luke felt to make sure that his lightsaber was still hanging at
hand, and Face and Kell snapped their false amphistaffs out into rigidity.
A great roar of voices sounded from ahead and above. Out of two storefronts
at this level, and one on either side on the first balcony level above, came a
stream of beings, shouting, charging toward Luke and his party.
They were humans and humanoids, male and female, their clothes largely
filthy and in tatters, carrying primitive spears and knives and crude swords in
their hands. In moments at least a score were charging Luke's position, and more
were pouring out of the doorways.
Luke breathed a sigh of relief. "Time to make contact," he said. He reached
up for his helmet.
"Run," Bhindi said.
"What?"
"Run." Bhindi suited actions to words by turning back the way they'd come
and racing away from the oncoming mob.
Luke looked at Mara. Both shrugged, then turned to follow Bhindi, the rest
close after them.
They charged out through the broad archway that had heralded the opening
into the shopping gallery, quickly outdistancing their pursuers. They took a
right at the next broad cross-corridor, charged a considerable distance along
it, and then Bhindi angled into a doorway that led to an emergency stairwell.
She led them up the stairs two at a time until they'd climbed five flights; then
they could emerge into a much darker, narrower corridor. There they stopped,
many of them panting.
Kell leaned over to put his hands on his knees as he struggled to breathe.
"I'm too old for this."
Danni leaned against the wall, Sweat poured down her face but did not mar
her Yuuzhan Vong makeup. "Would you mind telling me why we ran? I thought you
wanted to make contact with pockets of survivors! Something about setting up
resistance cells?"
Bhindi offered her an unlovely smile. "Two reasons. First, normal people
who want to stay alive don't charge Yuuzhan Vong warriors that way, even if they
outnumber them a hundred to one. Meaning that they probably had some way to kill
those supposed warriors, like retreating before us and leading us to a spot
where fifty tons of scrap can drop on our heads."
Danni considered that and her expression relented. "Good point."
"Second," Bhindi continued, "we don't have any reason to believe that any
of the Vong warriors who attacked us on the walkway are still alive. Some are
chopped up, some are blown up, some are flat as a roadway accident three hundred
meters down, and some are all three. So our secret, the fact that we're
wandering around in effective Yuuzhan Vong disguises, is probably intact. If we
let a hundred starving survivors know about it, inevitably one will sell us out
and the Vong will know, too."
"So," Luke said, "a detachment of us take off our disguises and go to talk
to them as humans."
"While the rest wait here and breathe," Kell said.
"Right." Luke looked over them. "It'll be me, Mara, Face, and Bhindi going
back. The rest stay here."
Instead of offering up a noise of complaint, Tahiri grimaced, a cynically
adult expression, and lowered her pack to the passageway floor.
Luke shrugged, offered her a smile. "We need at least one Jedi with each
group."
"So I'm baby-sitting people twice, three times my age. Where's the fun in
that?"
Kell snorted, then pitched his voice as an adolescent whine. "Aunt Tahiri,
tell me a story."
Luke, now dressed in the dark garments he affected whenever making a public
appearance in the guise of Jedi Master, stared at the woman on the other side of
the heating element protruding from the gap in the floor panels. He, his three
companions-also in dark, inconspicuous civilian dress-and six men and women of
the Walkway Collective sat cross-legged on the floor, in a loose circle around
the heating element, while a pot of greenish soup rested atop the thing and
gradually heated to boiling. "How have you survived?" Luke asked.
They were in a back room of what had once been a clothing emporium of the
Catier Walkway, the shopping gallery where Luke's party had so recently been
Stacked. The woman he addressed-once plump and blond, he thought, now leaner
from a subsistence diet, hair streaked with dirt, brown eyes hard from sacrifice
and suffering-was Tenga Javik, nominal leader of the Walkway Collective.
"We've rigged photon collection screens and heat harvesters for power," she
said. Her voice was raspy; that, and the light scarf wound around her neck, a
curious affectation in the warm, moist air of Coruscant's landscape of building
interiors, suggested that she had taken an injury to the throat in the not too
distant past. "One of us worked at a grayweave production plant. Have you ever
eaten grayweave, Master Sky walker?"
"On occasion." Grayweave was the nickname for a sort of single-cell-
organism-based food, manufactured for and sold to the poorest of the poor; in
texture, it looked
like thick gray felt, but didn't taste anywhere near as good.
Its chief virtues were that it was very inexpensive and lasted a long time
without preservation.
"We stole the grayweave reactors and scattered them all through our
territory," Tenga said. "Well-hidden. We keep them supplied with power and
water, water we process through our own stills. We hide from the Vong most of
the time, set traps for them when we're sure we can take them. We're going to
survive, Master Skywalker."
"How's the air?" Bhindi asked.
Tenga looked into the soup as if unwilling to meet Bhindi's eyes. "Getting
worse," she said. "We're working on that. Trying to put together a series of
blowers to bring in air from where it's better." She didn't sound confident. "If
that doesn't work, we may have to relocate. Go deeper." She met Luke's eyes, her
expression suddenly fierce. "When will the fleet come, Master Skywalker? When
can we expect relief?"
"Not soon," he admitted. "I wish I could tell you differently, but you're
going to have to rely on yourselves for some time to come."
Several of Tenga's fellows sighed or made noises of discontent, but they
didn't direct anger at Luke; his words did not seem to be entirely unexpected.
Tenga returned her attention to the soup. "We need the fleet," she rasped,
her tone lower; she did not seem to be speaking to Luke. "We need the Jedi."
"This is our first mission back," Luke said, projecting confidence with his
voice and through the Force. "And more will come. We're not going to let
Coruscant remain in enemy hands. You have to decide whether you're going to be
alive when the world is liberated. Because the weariness and disillusionment
you're feeling can kill you as surely as the Yuuzhan Vong."
"You've done very well here," Bhindi said. "I can show you how to do
better."
That got Tenga's attention. "Better how?"
"Hide better, ambush and defeat Vong patrols better, repair and maintain
equipment better."
"I'm listening," Tenga said.
"First things first," Mara interrupted. "A little more information. Have
any of you seen or felt anything unusual in this region? I mean, unusual in
excess of all the changes brought on by the Vong?"
Most of those present shook their heads, but one, in the second rank of the
circle, a thin, middle-aged man with a dark, suspicious look to his features,
said, "Lord Nyax."
Some of his companions sighed; one or two offered up little groans.
Luke grinned before he could suppress it. "That's a children's story."
"He's real," Yassat said.
Mara raised an eyebrow. "I haven't heard this one."
"In ancient times," Luke said, "on Corellia, Lord Nyax was what parents
threatened their children with if they didn't eat their stewfruit or go to bed
on time. 'If you keep on being a bad boy, Lord Nyax will come for you.' He was a
monstrous pale ghost who took children away, and no one ever saw them again."
"A typical folk tale," Mara said.
"Yes." Luke sobered. "But a while back, stories of Lord Nyax got a lot more
common. Because during the Jedi purges, there was someone who came for children
in the night-someone who came for Force-sensitive children."
Mara's reply was a whisper: "Darth Vader."
"That's right, 1 think that some of Darth Vader's covert missions to round
up Force-sensitive children became merged with the Lord Nyax legend, and spread
from Corellia all over the galaxy during the early Imperial years."
"Yassat here is one of our far scouts," Tenga said. "He travels out beyond
our territories, exploring and scavenging."
"And he sees things," another said. That man tapped his temple with one
hand while jerking a thumb at Yassat with the other, suggesting that Yassat was
not completely functional in a mental sense.
"I do see things," Yassat said. "But they're there."
"Tell me what you see," Luke said.
"I saw Lord Nyax for the first time about a month after Coruscant fell."
Yassat's voice lowered in tone and volume. "This was over toward the old heart
of the government district, where things are crazy now. I was on one side of the
main chamber of a textile factory, hiding from a Vong hunting party; they were
on the other side. I was already scared, but I got a lot more scared and didn't
know why. Then the screaming started. Where the warriors were, I could see
someone moving. A big man, ghostly white. There was a roar, and flashes of red
all around it, but no sound of blasters. I got away. Hours later, I came back, I
found the Vong warriors dead. Chopped to pieces, burned in places, some of them
eaten on.
"The second time was four days ago or so." From a pocket, he pulled a
functional chrono and checked local time. "Four days. I felt that fear again
while I was prowling through rooftops well below the skyline. It got worse and
worse, and I knew I was being stalked. I knew I was going to end up like those
Vong warriors."
"How did you get away?" Mara asked. Yassat shook his head, not meeting her
gaze. "I just got away."
"That's not good enough," Tenga said. "No one 'just gets away.' You get
away by getting captured and selling us out?"
"No." Yassat's voice became emphatic. He returned "is attention to Mara.
"There's a man, calls himself Skiffer. Part of a group not part of the Walkway
Collective. They Prey on us. They've killed a couple of our scouts, found and
stole one of our grayweave reactors. Grayweave's not enough for them; I'm sure
some of them are canni-bals. 1 know where their territory is. I led Lord Nyax
through the heart of their territory, and when 1 heard Skiffer give his people a
call to action, I made a break for it. I heard them screaming." He met Tenga's
eyes. "I didn't sell us out, Tenga. I sold Skiffer out."
Tenga clapped him on the shoulder. "Good work." Another man said, "You were
being stalked by Vong, Yassat. There is no Lord Nyax. Just your imagination."
Yassat glared, but didn't respond. "Where have you run into Lord Nyax?" Luke
asked. Yassat pointed northwest, precisely in the direction where Luke and the
other Force-sensitives had felt the twinge. "That way. Near the old government
center. It's thick with Vong compared to here, but full of interesting salvage."
"We need to look at that," Luke said. He addressed Yassat: "Care to come
with us? To guide us?"
Tenga shook her head. "Not unless you leave us this one," she indicated
Bhindi, "in trade."
But Yassat shook his head. "Prowl around with a big, noisy party when there
are Vong hunters about? No. Kill me now, instead. It'd be less painful." Luke
shrugged. "We'll be back, then." Yassat offered him a look of sympathy. "No, you
won't."
Borleias
Jaina stood up, her bedsheet whirling away from her, and lurched to her
closet without knowing why. The sun Pyria was just now climbing above the
horizon, so she had been in bed for perhaps three hours.
The roaring in her ears resolved itself into an alarm. Yuuzhan Vong were
coming. She heard the roar of thrust-ers from whichever squadrons were at the
ready-it would be Blackmoo
n at this hour.
Jag was waiting for her in the hallway-the special, secured hall of the
biotics building reserved for the pilots of Twin Suns Squadron. Other doors were
sliding open. Piggy saBinring, struggling to fasten the seal of his pilot's suit
over his expansive Gamorrean stomach, emerged.
"What's our objective?" Jaina asked. Jag held out a datapad for her to look
at, but her eyes wouldn't focus on it. She irritably waved it away.
"It looks like an assault on this location," Jag synop-sized. "Flying
vehicles only, no sign of ground troops. Lusankya's squadrons have some of the
enemy forces engaged in orbit. More will be here in moments."
There was an explosion, not far away, as incoming fire hit the shields that
protected the biotics facility. All the transparisteel viewports on the west
face of the building rattled.
"Correction," Jag said. "They'll be here now."
"Let's move." Jaina led her half-dressed, half-awake squadron to their
turbolift.
Corran Horn, pilot and Jedi Knight, flying as Rogue Nine, activated his
repulsors and smoothly lifted off the terrocrete of Rogue Squadron's new docking
bay, up through a gap where, moments before, the ceiling had been; the
building's roof was still cantilevering out of the way. The altitude gave him a
better look at the conflict - Yuuzhan Vong coral ships, the equivalent of light
cruisers, hovered in the distance both east and west, protected by screens of
coralskippers, and launched barrages of plasma at the biotics building and its
outbuildings. So far, the base's shields, removed not that long before from
faltering New Republic capital ships, were holding up well against the assault.
"Come on, Leth."
"Pick, pick, pick." Leth Liav's X-wing rose up beside Corran's. Leth, a
Sullustan female, had been a fighter pilot before being shot down and captured
by the Yuuzhan Vong. Placed in an environment bubble and launched through space
toward Borleias's atmosphere in a show of Yuuzhan Vong cruelty, she and several
of her fellows had been saved by some fancy flying on the part of Twin Suns
Squadron. Corran doubted that, in better times, she would ever have qualified
for the famed Rogue Squadron, but here, with attrition high and options few,
Rebel Stand Page 4