Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  He felt a tremor in the tree, and his hand went to his lightsaber. But then he felt Valin, below him, climbing up.

  The younger boy reached him and settled in the crotch between two branches. As he watched, the last of the flitters seemed to be moving off.

  “You should have stayed in the cave,” Anakin told Valin.

  “Maybe,” Valin replied. “But I didn’t.” He nodded at the departing craft. “I thought they would search longer,” he said.

  Anakin shook his head. “Two days is longer than I thought they would give it. They’re after the bigger prize—the rest of the students. They’ve got a time limit, remember? When the Yuuzhan Vong show up, they’ve got to be successful or gone. The last thing the Peace Brigade would want the Vong to know is that they were the ones who spoiled their mother lode.” He motioned down. “Get back in the cave, though. They might make a last-minute sweep.”

  “Anakin, why do the Yuuzhan Vong want us so bad?”

  Anakin blew out a breath. “I’m not sure. Mostly because they hate us. The fact that they don’t seem to exist in the Force cuts both ways. We can’t sense them or affect them directly, but we can do things they can’t understand. And we’re the ones who have hurt them most. I guess the last stroke was when Jacen humiliated their warmaster.”

  “But those guys with Vehn weren’t Yuuzhan Vong.”

  “No, they’re worse. They think by turning us in they’ll get the Yuuzhan Vong to stop their conquest at the planets they have.”

  “Will they?”

  Anakin snorted. “Senator Elegos A’Kla turned himself over to them. He hoped he could come to understand them, forge a common bond of trust, something to begin the process of finding a peaceful solution.”

  “They killed him,” Valin said quietly. “I heard about that.”

  “And sent his polished bones back to us.”

  “But then my dad killed the Yuuzhan Vong who killed Elegos.”

  Anakin hesitated. He hadn’t thought through where his example might lead.

  “Yeah,” he said briefly.

  “But now everyone hates my dad, and not the Yuuzhan Vong.”

  Anakin shook his head. “No. It’s not like that. It’s just—it’s politics, Valin.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I hate politics. Ask my brother, next time you see him, or my mom.”

  “But—”

  “What it means,” Anakin interrupted, “is that your father, Corran Horn, is a good man, and everyone with even a little sense knows that. The problem with people is that a lot of them don’t have any sense, and a lot of others are liars.”

  “You mean they would say my dad was bad even if they didn’t think so?”

  “You got it, kid.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  Anakin looked into the determined young face, and suddenly saw what Kam, Tionne, Uncle Luke, Aunt Mara—all the adults in his life—must be used to seeing by now on his face.

  “Maybe not,” Anakin replied. “But here’s what I was trying to get around to saying a minute ago. The Yuuzhan Vong have never shown the slightest tendency to keep their word. I don’t think they even believe lying is wrong. And Elegos—well, it was a worthy try, and I honor him. But what the Yuuzhan Vong want from us is our worlds and our people as slaves. They believe our machines are abominations, and they won’t rest until they’ve all been destroyed. The only way to avoid fighting them is to surrender and let them do whatever they want with us. That’s the only terms of peace they can understand. The Peace Brigade think they can do something in between. Elegos was brave, noble—and wrong. It cost him his life, and that was his to spend. The Peace Brigade are cowards and they’re stupid, and they want to spend our lives. Our lives are not for them to spend.”

  Valin nodded, then smiled a little. “You talk more than you used to. Tahiri said she would rub off on you eventually.”

  It struck Anakin that Valin was right. He’d been practically pontificating, something he wouldn’t have dreamed of doing a few years ago except maybe in an argument with his siblings or Tahiri. It was something he wasn’t good at, didn’t like, avoided like raw cobalt. His father had once joked that it was easier to drag a neutron star with a landspeeder than it was to drag two words out of him.

  But more and more, people seemed to want something like this from him. Some of the things he had done had gotten around, and he guessed he had something of a reputation. That part was fine, and though he wouldn’t say so out loud, he sort of liked it. It made him feel that he could be like Uncle Luke, back when he was young and fighting the Empire—like a hero, though he knew he wasn’t really that.

  He felt a pang, and suddenly knew where these thoughts were taking him.

  “Why did you and Sannah and Tahiri come to help me, Valin? Why didn’t you go on with Kam and Tionne?”

  Valin looked up at him with guileless eyes. “We want to be like you, Anakin. We all do. And you—you would never have run from a fight.”

  Anakin’s lips tightened and his eyes felt gritty and hot. That settled that. He’d lied when he told Sannah and Valin that the Yuuzhan Vong and the Peace Brigade were responsible for this mess. Like Chewie’s death, like Centerpoint, this was his mess, Anakin Solo’s mess.

  But this time he would clean it up. Somehow.

  “Doesn’t look like they took much,” Sannah observed, as they picked through the wreck of Vehn’s transport. Four days had come and gone since the crash, and a day since they had seen the last of the flitters.

  “Why should they?” Valin asked. “There’s not much left they would want.”

  “No,” Anakin said. “There’s plenty. It would have taken too much time to salvage it, that’s all.”

  “But you think you can?” Vehn sneered from where he sat, cuffed hands resting on his knees.

  “I can fix it,” Anakin replied. “The hyperdrive is fine.”

  “That’s great. We’ll just go to lightspeed from here. At least no one would have to worry about disposing of our remains. And we sure wouldn’t have to worry about the Vong anymore.”

  “If Anakin says he can fix it, he can fix it,” Valin snapped.

  “Shut up, you smelly little Hutt,” Vehn grunted. “I may be your prisoner, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to your smart mouth all day. I—hey! Ow!”

  Vehn was suddenly scratching furiously at his legs, then thrashing on the ground.

  Anakin straightened. “Stay away from him. It’s a trick!”

  “Trick?” Vehn screamed. “I’m being eaten alive!”

  That’s when Anakin noticed Valin was laughing. So was Sannah, but she was hiding hers behind her palm.

  “Valin, are you doing that?”

  “He deserved it.”

  “Stop it. Right now. Immediately.”

  “I just—”

  “Now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Valin said. And he didn’t sound sarcastic.

  Anakin knelt by Vehn. A swarm of multisegmented worms a centimeter in length were detaching themselves from the pilot’s arms and face, leaving purplish welts behind. Vehn pushed at them frantically, but when Anakin moved to help him, he jerked away with a hoarse rasp of anger.

  When they were all finally off, Vehn turned his head toward Valin. His chest was heaving.

  “You did that, didn’t you? With some kind of Jedi magic.” He rose clumsily to his feet. “I hope the Vong do get you. The whole lot of you.”

  “Yeah?” Valin started. “Well—”

  “Valin!” Anakin said a little sharply. “Keep quiet and listen. You know better than that. I know you know better than that, because we had the same teachers.” He turned on Sannah. “And you were laughing. You think it’s funny to use the Force to torture a helpless captive for no better reason than that he called you a name?”

  Sannah reddened. “No,” she said.

  “Valin?”

  “No,” the boy said. “I guess not.”

  “There are tim
es to use the Force in self-defense, Valin, and there are times when defense means attack. And if I have to squeeze Vehn’s brain to learn what we need to rescue Tahiri, I might even do that. But torture for the sake of torture—never.”

  Valin nodded and sat down. To Anakin’s surprise Valin didn’t look so much sullen as reflective. In fact, like a flash, for an instant, he looked almost impossibly like his father, Corran. It was so bright and true that Anakin wondered if it was a real vision of an older Valin or just a striking resemblance.

  He cleared his throat. “Let’s just get to work, shall we? The engines aren’t as bad as they could be. I think with parts salvaged from the other ships we can get it limping, and that’s all I need—a way to orbit. At the very least we can get the comm unit fixed.”

  Anakin actually had his doubts about this, but it would give them something to do while he figured out how he was going to get halfway around the moon to find Tahiri. If they were occupied, they wouldn’t worry as much. Meanwhile, Talon Karrde must have arrived by now.

  And Tahiri—she was still here, and he was pretty sure she was even still on Yavin 4, not in orbit.

  Still, it galled him. It made his very bones ache not to set off on foot, though in his head he knew that it would take him months to cross the wilderness separating him from the Great Temple. Maybe he needed the work as much as Valin and Sannah.

  With a sigh, he went to see what the power cell couplings looked like.

  Something beeped and whistled. His hand was already on his lightsaber before he realized the sound was coming from his wrist comm. He was being hailed.

  He stared at the comm for a moment. It could be a trick by the Peace Brigade, an attempt to triangulate his location. It might be Talon Karrde, trying to find them.

  Reluctantly, he acknowledged, and words began to scroll across the display.

  PURSUIT EVADED. X-WING BADLY DAMAGED. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

  “Fiver!”

  AFFIRMATIVE.

  “Fiver, lock on this signal and come straight here. Where are you?”

  252.6 KILOMETERS FROM YOUR PRESENT POSITION.

  “Great. How long will it take you to get here?”

  20 STANDARD HOURS.

  “What? Why?”

  REPULSORLIFT MOTIVATION ONLY. SHIP BADLY DAMAGED.

  “But you’re okay?”

  OPERATIONAL.

  “Good. Good going, Fiver. Get here as soon as you can. We need you.”

  AFFIRMATIVE, ANAKIN.

  “Anakin?” Despite everything, Anakin grinned. The astromech hadn’t been memory-wiped lately. He was starting to develop a few quirks. Flying the X5 X-wing alone—a task Fiver wasn’t really built for—had probably contributed. In fact, Anakin couldn’t believe the little droid had really done it. He’d thought he was sacrificing his ship and Fiver as a diversion. Finding that it hadn’t worked out that way was an unexpected break. He now not only had more parts to work with, but an astromech droid to help with repairs.

  Things weren’t exactly looking up, Anakin thought, but maybe he could take his eyes off his feet, at least.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Darkness wrapped around Anakin like a cloak and whispered to him like a mother. It promised him a face of durasteel and a heart of ferrocrete. It offered him supernovas of power and the unflinching will to use it.

  He had been to this place before, often. It was his oldest dream, perhaps dreamed for the first time when the clone of the Emperor Palpatine touched him through his mother’s womb. And when he learned about his namesake, his grandfather Vader, the dreams grew stronger, more detailed. He saw futures in which he was grown, his blue eyes gone as gray as hull plating. He saw himself in Darth Vader’s mask, the Knight of Darkness reborn.

  He had made a sort of peace with his dreams in the cave on Dagobah, the same cave where his uncle Luke had faced his own dark side and failed. But peace did not mean silence, and here, on a moon as deeply stained by the dark side as the Sith themselves, the dreams were particularly troubling.

  But now, something broke, a dam holding back ebon waters that hit him so cold and strange that the tattoo in his chest stopped, as if a fist had closed on his heart.

  Soft laughter began, familiar yet strange; the pitch and timbre were wrong, but the cadence was as known to him as his father’s speech. A woman’s laughter, throaty and sardonic. It made the hair on his neck prickle up.

  He turned and saw her.

  Her hair was gold, the gold of a vein in a sunset on Coruscant or of the sudden spark from an inferno. One of her eyes was jade and the other obsidian. Her lips were fringed by a hundred incisions, and a white scar ran from the top of her forehead to her chin. Armor of a black-and-gray-banded chitinous substance fit close to her body, a very adult, very human body, though the armor was plated and jointed like an insect’s. Knobs and spurs stuck out from her shoulders and elbows.

  She smiled at him through those split lips and held up something baton-shaped, which flexed in her grip like a sluggish pupa. Sudden light blazed from one end of it and resolved into a blazing blue blade. Dark-side energy crackled around her, calling to him, and he felt a sudden terrible attraction to her, every part of him yearning for her in a way he had never even begun to feel before.

  She grinned more widely and laughed again, and with sudden understanding Anakin realized that she wasn’t looking at him at all, but at someone else in the vision, someone Anakin couldn’t see.

  “The last of your kind,” the woman said, her voice made whispery by what had been done to her mouth. “The last of my kind.” And she raised the blade, and Anakin recognized her.

  “Tahiri!” he shrieked. She paused, as if she might have heard something very far away. Then she came forward, sweeping the weapon down, and Anakin choked on the look in her eye, the mixture of glee and despair, joy and sickness.

  He awoke still choking. A strong hand was clamped over his mouth. He squirmed, but the grip on him was sure and strong. He tried to get his feet under him and failed.

  Calm. No fear, he thought. Get it together, Anakin. You’re supposed to be on watch. They won’t even hear this, in the cave, if you die.

  He used the Force to twist the hand away from his mouth and shove his attacker sprawling, and in the next instant got his feet under him and his lightsaber in hand. In its sudden light he made out a bearded face, a blaster. He leapt foward.

  “Wait! Jedi! I’m—I’m a friend.”

  “Yeah? Why did you attack me?”

  “Didn’t know—didn’t—” He wheezed off, his voice sounding strange, weak, as if he rarely used it. “Name’s Qorl. I have been a friend to Jedi. I didn’t know who you were.”

  “Qorl? My brother and sister knew a Qorl. He made them fix his ship at blasterpoint.”

  “Jacen. Jaina,” the old man said. “Qorl also saved them from the Shadow Academy.”

  “You were a TIE fighter pilot, stranded here when the Death Star was destroyed. You went off—”

  “And came back. I left as an enemy to your brother and sister. I came back their friend. You’re really their brother?” He squinted. “Can’t see so well anymore.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Saw some ships fly over, fighting. Thought I saw one go down, so I followed to see.” He shrugged. “Seven days later, here I am.”

  “So you are.” Anakin struggled to remember what he knew about this grizzled old man. Jacen and Jaina had found his wrecked TIE fighter and set about fixing it, not realizing its pilot was still around, hiding in the jungle, unaware that the war was over. Qorl had forced them to finish the repairs and left them to die, but had later helped them escape the Shadow Academy. Anakin remembered that Qorl had ended up back on Yavin 4, but none of the details. He did know that Jacen and Jaina counted him a friend, and Uncle Luke had been content to leave the old man alone.

  Qorl gestured at the lightsaber. “Could you put that away, please?”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Wh
o were you fighting?”

  “Peace Brigade.”

  “Who?”

  “Er—how long since you’ve had news from the outside, Qorl?”

  “I don’t know. Old Peckhum dropped off some supplies for me, maybe two or three years ago. I told him not to come back.”

  “Oh. Well, this will take some explaining, then. A lot of explaining.”

  “Will it explain the new ships I’ve seen? The strange ones?”

  Anakin felt his chest constrict. “What ships?”

  “They look like—growths of some kind. Ugly.”

  “Oh, no,” Anakin whispered. “Okay, I’ll have to tell this as fast as I can, and then—” He remembered his vision, that future Tahiri, a dark Jedi with Yuuzhan Vong scarring and implants. “And then there’s something I have to do, no matter what.”

  “I need to talk to you, Vehn.” Anakin settled down across from the man.

  “So talk. Hey, who’s the old guy?”

  “A hermit of sorts. I’m putting him in charge of you.”

  “What do you mean?” Vehn asked suspiciously.

  Anakin drew a deep breath and plunged into it. “Okay. Here’s the thing, Vehn. I need your help.”

  “I’ve been telling you that for a while.”

  “And you were right.”

  “Yeah, well—too bad. You’ve treated me like Hutt slime. Why shouldn’t I return the favor?”

  “The Yuuzhan Vong are here.”

  That got his attention. Vehn’s face closed over his fear, but Anakin could still feel it.

  “Qorl’s seen their ships.”

  “They’ll find us,” Vehn said flatly.

  “Why should they? They aren’t looking for us. Unless the Peace Brigade tells them about the crash—but I don’t think they will. It would only show their incompetence, right? So the Yuuzhan Vong see us only if they notice us on a random patrol, and the odds of that—”

  “Depends on how many ships they have patrolling,” Vehn interrupted. “You don’t know the one, so you don’t know the other.”

  “True. The thing is this—I’m going after my friend, back at the temple. I’m going now. I want you and Qorl to get Sannah and Valin off of this moon.”