Reunion: Force Heretic III

by Sean Williams

  “But the flier—” Droma pointed up at the tsik seru shadowing them high above.

  His argument stopped in midsentence, however, when he saw another of the netting beetles dangling from her hand, steadily wriggling its way closer to his suit.

  He quickly put them down in a sliding skid across a surface thick with carbon dioxide snow. Jaina tried hard not to think of what standing on such a material was going to do to her toes. There were more important things to worry about for the moment.

  She jumped off the speeder, with Droma close behind, frantically brushing himself down in a vain attempt to lose the beetles. When Jaina raised her lightsaber and approached him, he took a step back.

  “Hey, wait a second! If that thing nicks my suit I’ll—”

  He shut up when she started to dart and weave her lightsaber, removing the bugs with easy, deft strokes. Then she turned the weapon on herself.

  “On your thigh,” Droma was saying. “And one on your shoulder!”

  Something sizzled as she swung her lightsaber blindly behind her head.

  “Okay, you’re clear,” he announced with relief. “Now let’s—”

  Before he could finish what he was saying, more threads fell around them. The shadow of the tsik seru, which had swung briefly out of sight, had returned, and a rain of bugs descended out of the flier’s belly. Jaina didn’t think; she just did what she had to do. Her blade seemed to sing in the murky air as she swung it with controlled, precise swipes that prevented a single one of the beetles from reaching her or Droma.

  “Nicely done,” Droma breathed in disbelief. “But I fear it’s only a temporary reprieve.”

  The tsik seru was backing up and tipping forward.

  “It’s going to fire at us,” Jaina said, already tensing to run.

  “Do that thing!” Droma shouted, waving his hands. “That thing Tahiri did!”

  “What thing?”

  “She closed the throats of the plasma launchers!”

  “What?”

  “I saw her do it when you were passed out. It works, believe me!”

  Time seemed to slow as she worked her way though what he was telling her. Plasma launchers … Tahiri … closing the throat …

  Her body was one step ahead of her. At the very instant she realized—or so it seemed—her hand was already heading upward to point at the tsik seru’s wings. The hand clenched into a fist just as it was about to fire, belching out its high-pressure plasma, full of potency and bile.

  It hit the obstruction of her will and blew one side of the flier to smithereens. The second side detonated an instant later, showering them with glowing debris. Gas hissed from the ultracold snow beneath their feet. They ducked instinctively, throwing their arms up for protection. Peering through them, Jaina saw the remains of the tsik seru falling into the crevasse, tumbling in a spitting fireball right toward them. She grabbed Droma and dragged him out of the way just in time. Steam exploded around them as its fiery corpse finally came to rest.

  Droma picked himself up, staring in amazement at the ruined flier. “Now that,” he said, “was too close!”

  “Just be grateful it didn’t come down on the speeder,” she said, tugging the dead weight of the vehicle away from the flames. The growing numbness in her left foot was making walking awkward.

  “Believe me, I’m grateful,” Droma said, lending her a hand. “More grateful than—”

  A roar over their suits’ external receivers cut him off. Something stumbled out of the flames and steam—something humanoid, blackened, and snarling. Jaina adopted a defensive stance as she grabbed her lightsaber, but her frozen foot betrayed her balance and she slipped over onto her side. Droma tried to put himself between her and the creature, but was smacked away by a smoldering limb. The creature loomed over him, its blackened face splitting where a mouth might have once been.

  “Jeedai!”

  The breath issued from the Yuuzhan Vong pilot in a furious rush. The only thing keeping him alive in Esfandia’s frigid air, Jaina realized, was the fire itself. That wasn’t going to last long—but long enough for one chance to strike.

  The pilot raised a viciously sharp splinter of yorik coral and prepared to drive it down into her, where she lay sprawled at his feet. She reached for her lightsaber again, but it wasn’t there. She must have dropped it when she’d fallen.

  Before the blow could fall, something moved behind her, well away from where Droma lay slumped against the ravine wall. It caught the Yuuzhan Vong’s attention, too, and his eyes momentarily flicked up to look. It was all the time Jaina needed. She struck upward with both feet, forcing the pilot back. His yorik shard went flying, and Jaina was up on her feet in an instant, reaching out with her mind for her lightsaber. It whipped out of the snow and back into her hand. With a vicious snap-hiss, it came to life.

  The pilot regained his balance and stood, preparing to rush her. Fire still licked at his back and legs, making him a truly monstrous figure. Jaina tensed, ready to cut him down.

  But she didn’t need to. The alien’s stare froze as ice formed across his eyes. Pain and cold couldn’t be kept at bay forever, not even by the prodigious Yuuzhan Vong will. With a despairing gurgle, the pilot folded forward into the snow, dead before he hit the ground.

  Jaina stepped back, lowering her blade, her breath loud in her helmet. She should have reacted faster than that. Yes, she was still recovering from her crash and the cold had crept as far as her knees, now, but that was no excuse. If it hadn’t been for—

  She stopped in midthought, remembering what had saved her life. Something had distracted the pilot just as he’d been about to stab her—and that something couldn’t have been Droma, for he was only now struggling to his feet in the snow by the flier.

  She turned around to look.

  Hanging in the thick air before her, the edges of its circular, kitelike body rippling as though in an unseen current, was one of the natives. It was so close she could have touched it, but she resisted the impulse. It looked quite fearsome, with its many-tentacled maw and strange organs pulsing through translucent skin. Hundreds of tiny bumplike “eyes” around the maw seemed to be watching her as closely as she studied it, wondering what it would do next.

  In the end, it just wafted gently up into the cloudy atmosphere. When it was several meters away, its elongated tail flexed, and the creature shot over her head with surprising acceleration.

  A groan from Droma took her mind away from the strange encounter. He was leaning against the speeder, holding his head.

  “I think we should get out of here,” he said.

  She nodded. “My turn to drive.”

  Through his suit’s visor, she could see a half smile forming below his beaked nose. “Here’s hoping we can get the rest of the way without any more problems.”

  “We’ve had our fair share for the day, I think,” she said, hoisting herself up into the saddle and helping him on behind her.

  “Solos always seem to have more than their ‘fair share’ of trouble,” Droma commented dryly. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

  “Hey, the universe is the one with the problem,” she returned lightly. “It’s just the Solos’ job to fix it.”

  The Ryn laughed as Jaina kicked the speeder into life and began winding her way out of the crevasse.

  Tahiri ducked. A coufee swished over her head. With a grunt she came back up with her lightsaber in a two-handed blow and drove it into the reptoid’s chest. The blue blade stuck out the alien’s back for an instant before she withdrew it and stepped away. The alien staggered back with an expression of agonized surprise on its face, then toppled over into the snow.

  “Jag, over here!” She hurried up the steep slope with the Chiss pilot following close behind, peppering anyone crazy enough to follow them with projectile and energy fire. At the top of the slope, she paused to collect her bearings, mindful that her silhouette would make an easy target for anyone on either side of the ridge, hurried down the far side.


  In the distance, delineated as a red dot on her helmet’s display, was an Imperial speeder cruising the far side of the transponder. She tried hailing it by waving her arms.

  “Hey, over here!”

  “Tahiri, is that you?” Han’s voice came loud and clear over the comm. Now that they were in line of sight, conversing was simple.

  “And Jag, too. We’ve lost our speeders.”

  “I’m on my way.” Han changed course, disappearing behind the base of the transponder.

  “Come on!” Tahiri grabbed Jag’s arm and hurried him down the ridge.

  A dark shadow slid across the dimly visible horizon as Han returned with another speeder. The second pilot, Enton Adelmaa’j, sprayed the reptoids coming down the ridge after them, then skidded to a halt in front of Jag.

  “Good to see you. We were starting to get a little worried.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Tahiri said, pointing. “Here comes the second yorik-trema.”

  The Yuuzhan Vong lander was proceeding more cautiously than its predecessor, firing plasma bolts into the ground ahead of it. As she watched, one caught a mine. The explosion sent boiling air upward in a dark mushroom cloud. The yorik-trema rolled on through it, unscathed.

  Han grunted. “Well, I guess we move to Plan B,” he said, waving Tahiri onto the back of his speeder.

  Jag jumped on to Adelmaa’j’s craft, and together the two speeder bikes raced from the howling reptoids. They split up briefly to locate the other speeders from the party, then regrouped on a relatively clear side of the battle zone. Only one speeder remained unaccounted for, and that belonged to the relay base security chief—a fact that only made Han’s scowl cut deeper into his face.

  “We can’t hide the fact that the base isn’t here for much longer,” he said. “Especially if Eniknar has gone over. The sooner we get out of here and finish it, the better.”

  There were no arguments. The communications tech produced a remote timer and keyed a short code into it. He waited a second, then shook the timer and tried again.

  “There’s something wrong,” he said. “I’m trying to arm the charges but the transmission seems to be blocked. The dish must be damaged.”

  “Or sabotaged, more likely,” Han said. He sighed. “Okay, I guess somebody will have to go in and arm the charges manually.”

  “I’ll go,” Tahiri said without hesitation.

  “And I’ll go with her,” Jag said.

  Tahiri turned to face him. “I can manage on my own.”

  “I know that,” he answered evenly. “But I still need to go.”

  She nodded, understanding the unstated sentiment. She was still new and untested; someone needed to watch over her until they were certain that she wasn’t going to betray them. Which was fine with her. If having him tag along was going to help allay suspicions, then so be it.

  They rearranged speeders again while the comm tech explained what needed to be done. The detonator control box was hidden at the base of the transponder. Assuming the box itself was intact, all they’d have to do was input the code into its keypad. The explosion would take out the transponder and anything else within a hundredmeter radius. They would have only a minute to get clear of the blast.

  “Got it,” Jag said, taking the controls. “We’ll meet you back at the base—either on this speeder or the crest of a shock wave.”

  Han offered a half smile and a lazy salute. “Fly well.”

  “I always do.” The Chiss pilot gunned the engine and sped off toward the transponder.

  “When I became aware,” Sekot told Luke, “the only person I had to talk to was the first Magister. Jabitha’s father, the second Magister, was the one who realized what I was, and who helped me come to terms with my potential. It was he who helped me survive the attack of the Far Outsiders that laid waste to my southern hemisphere; it was he who encouraged me to retool my shipbuilding facilities to the manufacture of weapons and other means by which I could defend myself and the people in my care. When we were next under threat, I wasn’t entirely ready, but I was able to survive. After a long and arduous journey, I took my charges and myself to safety, revealing myself to them along the way. It was there, after the death of the Magister, the confusion of my birth, and the frantic desperation of my escape, that I finally found time to think.”

  The being projecting the image of Anakin Skywalker had all the resources of a planet behind it, yet still it radiated uncertainty. It was easy to believe that it was the child Luke’s father had once been, enormously powerful, tempted by the dark side but still too young to know what was right or wrong.

  “The first thing I asked myself was: where did I come from?” Sekot placed a hand on the lamina surface of the table. “Jabitha’s father believed that I arose directly out of the Potentium—that I was a physical incarnation of the life energy he believed filled the universe. To him, that was the only explanation that made any sense, but even then I knew it lacked something. It was a very human response in the face of two incomprehensible phenomena, and it ignored the question of why such living planets had not come into being elsewhere. If intelligence on this scale could spontaneously emerge from a biosphere, why then, in a galaxy of hundreds of millions of star systems, was I the only one? What made me different?”

  The intense blue eyes of Sekot’s image stared into Luke’s without blinking. “I have spent decades examining my being in an attempt to unravel the truth of my self. Anakin Skywalker once described me as an ‘immensity,’ yet at the same time a ‘unity.’ All conscious beings could be described as such by the creatures that inhabit them. You all have a multitude of bacteria inhabiting your digestive tracts; from their point of view, you are undeniably immense. And yet at the same time you are also one. The truth of your existence lies on the cellular level, in your genes; I came to suspect that my truth lay on a similarly minute level—comparatively speaking, of course. The people who inhabit my surface are as important to my well-being as the boras, the atmosphere, or the sun. Without them, I would be barren; fallow.”

  “They’re part of your mind?” Hegerty asked, listening with fascination to the words of the living planet.

  “Would you say that the microbes in your stomach are part of your mind?” The image shook its head. “My intelligence is as far above the Ferroans as yours is above those microbes. They fulfill other needs—needs you would have difficulty comprehending. All you need to understand, for the purposes of this conversation, is that I need them as much as they need me. Without them, it is possible that I might never have existed. Or worse: I might have grown stunted and feeble like the rogue boras that Jacen recently encountered.”

  The mention of his nephew immediately grabbed Luke’s attention. “You know where they are?”

  Sekot nodded. “I’m speaking to them now.”

  Jag kept the transponder between himself and Tahiri and the second yorik-trema. He came in low, relying on the large amount of dust kicked up by mines and energy discharges to give them cover. Only once did they encounter resistance, and the single tsik seru was soon dispatched.

  Soon they were ducking through a fence of horizontal girders and into the transponder infrastructure. The exterior framework acted as both shield and support for the large and elaborate antenna structure itself. The detonator control was hidden under the skirt of the antenna, in a cavity too low to accommodate the speeder.

  Jag deactivated the repulsor engine and hopped off. Tahiri watched his back while he pulled the machine under cover. Then the two of them scurried beneath the skirt and into the complex beneath.

  The base of the antenna was a maze of supports and thick cable conduits leading underground. It was so dark that even his suit’s light-enhancing algorithms had trouble coping. They made their way by the shine of Tahiri’s lightsaber to the place the comm tech had described. Sure enough, the detonator control was exactly where he’d said it would be.

  Jag hunkered down next to it, opening the top of the device with the first of three
codes he’d been given. A glowing control surface unfolded, providing him with a small 2-D video screen and a keyboard. It was awkward with his gloves on, but Jag soon managed to tap out the commands required until he had the autodetonation window open before him. The second code gained him access to the timer menu. He typed in a one-minute delay.

  “Confirm the final code,” he said to Tahiri. “And remember, we only have one chance at this. We get one digit wrong and it’ll reset the codes and shut down for good.”

  Tahiri nodded and began to recite the code to Jag. “Zero-eight-eight-two-three-four-one-zero-three-zero.”

  “That’s what I’ve got.”

  He tapped in the digits one at a time while she watched to make sure he didn’t mistype anything. Just as he was keying in the second-to-last digit, though, something black shot past his faceplate. He jumped back, reaching for his charric blaster as the glowing controls burst into a shower of sparks. Tahiri was one step ahead of him. Two more thud bugs came darting in; she burned them out of the air with her lightsaber just as a Yuuzhan Vong warrior bore down upon them, waving an amphistaff. Tahiri shouted something guttural in return and met him halfway.

  Jag stayed down, not wanting to risk hitting Tahiri with an ill-timed shot in the cramped space, but ready to step in if needed. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on; her lightsaber left sheets of glare in its wake. It looked for a moment as though she was being driven back by heavy blows from the amphistaff, but then, just when he felt sure she was beaten, she ducked beneath the weapon and delivered a lazy-looking slash that opened the warrior up from groin to chin. With a steaming gurgle, the alien fell backward and was still.

  Tahiri didn’t even appear out of breath when she returned her attention to Jag.

  “How bad is the damage?” she asked.

  He looked down at the detonator unit. The control surface was blackened and melted; its glow was completely gone. When he touched it, there was no response.

  “That can’t be a good sign.”

  “We have to get it working.”

  He leaned in to examine the unit more closely. “I think it’s just the controls that are damaged. The unit itself seems to be functioning. There might be another way to activate it.”