Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  Soil. She reached down, bent, and scratched up a fistful of the rich black dirt. It smelled like nothing she had ever known—a bit like the sluices beneath the mernip breeding pools, or the exhalations of the maw luur of the great worldships. The latter took in waste through its vast capillary network and digested it into nutrients, metals, and air. As a child, she’d often stood where the maw luur exhaled; until now, it was the only wind she had ever known.

  “Your first time on a true world, Adept?”

  Nen Yim turned, thinking to find one of her fellow adepts speaking to her, but suddenly arranged the tentacles of her headdress into genuflection when she saw it was no such lowly creature, but her new master, Mezhan Kwaad.

  The master let her finish, then beckoned her to face her. “You may turn your eyes on me, Adept.”

  “Yes, Master Mezhan.”

  Mezhan Kwaad was a female nearing the final edge of youth. If she were not a shaper, she might yet bear a child, but of course that was the one form of shaping forbidden to masters of their caste. She was lean but still wore the form of a mature female, despite her high status. Her broad, high-cheekboned face bore the ritual forehead scars of her domain, and her right hand was an eight-fingered master’s hand. Her other alterations, in keeping with the aesthetic of the shapers, were more discreet. The marks of her sacrifices were not external, as they tended to be for the other castes. She wore the body-hugging oozhith of a master, its tiny cilia rippling in subtle waves of color as it sought and captured the alien microorganisms in the atmosphere to feed itself.

  “And answer my question,” the master went on.

  “Yes, Master. I have never before known a world outside of our worldships.”

  “And what are your impressions?”

  “Our worldships are built for centuries, perhaps millennia. Yun-Yuuzhan created planets and moons for millions and billions of cycles. The resources in the moon’s interior are released slowly, by tectonic processes, or by life adapting to lack.” She looked back down at the dirt beneath her feet. “But it does feel so strange, the unimaginable wealth I’m standing on. And the life! Different from our own, and varied, and none of it made to serve us!”

  The master shaper narrowed her eyes. “It is made to serve us,” she said quietly. “It is the will of the gods that life serves us. You were taught this.”

  “Of course, Master,” Nen Yim said. “I only meant we have not shaped it yet. But we shall.”

  “Yes, we shall,” Mezhan Kwaad agreed. “And I emphasize we. Do you know why you are an adept, Nen Yim? Do you know why you are here, and not correcting the mutations of methane-fixing recham forteps in a decaying maw luur?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Because I saw your work on the endocrine cloister in the worldship Baanu Kor.”

  Nen Yim knotted her headdress in a humble posture. “I only did what needed to be done,” she said.

  “You did it optimally. Many would have stopped short at the molding of tii, but you went beyond that. You applied the Vul Ag protocol, though such has never been used in an endocrine cloister.”

  “I thought it would make the outer osmotic membranes more efficiently transpire—”

  “Yes. Tradition and propriety are of absolute importance to our task, and yet immersion in those qualities can lead to hidebound thinking. I need adepts who are resourceful, who can use the sacred, unchanging knowledge in new ways. Do you understand?”

  “I believe so, Master,” Nen Yim answered cautiously. A small lump of fear formed in her throat. Did the master know?

  But she couldn’t. If she knew that Nen Yim had dabbled in heresy, she would never have promoted her. Unless she herself—

  No. Not a master. That was impossible.

  “Don’t believe,” the master said. “Know, and you shall go far. Do you see? As you say, after generations we have a whole new galaxy of life at our fingertips. It is time to demonstrate exactly what Yun-Yuuzhan intended us for.”

  Nen Yim nodded, watching the damuteks again. They were already splitting from their protective skins and beginning to expand, to grow into highly specialized shaper compounds.

  “Come, Adept,” the master said. “It is time to receive your hand.”

  “So soon?” Nen Yim asked.

  “Our work begins tomorrow. We have one of the Jeedai, you know. Only one, but we shall have more. Supreme Overlord Shimrra himself is watching what we do here most carefully. We will not disappoint him.”

  Nen Yim stepped from the ceremonial bath into a darkened oozhith. At her touch it wrapped itself firmly about her, and she felt the tingle as it inserted cilia into her pores. It was not a full-skin oozhith, but a shortened garment that left her arms and most of her legs bare. She smoothed back her short dark hair and held out her right hand, looking at it as if for the first time rather than the last. Then she allowed the attendant to escort her into the darkened grotto of Yun-Ne’Shel, where the master waited.

  The grotto smelled of brine and oil. It was close and damp and reacted faintly to the touch. The grotto was a distant relative of the yammosk; what you felt in the chamber came back to you, enhanced.

  And so now both her eagerness and her trepidation had her pulse hammering as she knelt at the mouth of the grotto, a hole the size of a fist surrounded by a massive bulge of muscle. Without pausing or flinching, she placed her hand through the opening.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the teeth slid out of their sheaths, eight of them, and pricked into her wrist.

  Sweat started on her brow as she surrendered to the pain, as the teeth, with glacial slowness, sank through tissue, grated into bone. The lips closed occasionally to suck away the blood. The grotto gave her back her pain, amplified, and her breath went choppy. She lost her sense of time; every nerve ending in her body was raw, as if the cilia of her garment were writhing needles.

  Until, finally, the teeth met in the center of her wrist; she felt them click together. She tried to take a long, calming breath to prepare for what was to come next.

  It happened quickly. The mouth suddenly rotated ninety degrees. Her arm twisted with it no more than a degree or so, and then the hand came off with a wet snick. Nen Yim held up the stump of her wrist and stared at it in dull astonishment. She barely noticed the attendant taking her by the shoulders, guiding her toward the dark basin in the center of the grotto.

  “I can do it,” she whispered. She knelt by the basin, her head spinning. Dark things moved in the waters, five-legged things that came to the scent of her blood eagerly. She pushed her gushing stump into the water.

  She had thought her body could feel no greater pain than it already had. She was wrong. She didn’t feel it in her hand at all, but in a great spasm that arched her body like a bow and kept it cramped there. She couldn’t see the creature grappling with her wrist. For a horrible moment, she didn’t want to. A great flash of light exploded in her head, and for a time she knew nothing.

  She awoke, and tears of shame started. Through them she saw the master standing over her.

  “No one has ever endured it without a brief lapse the first time,” she said. “There is no shame, on this occasion. If you ever receive your master’s hand, it will be different. But you will be ready.”

  Hand. Nen Yim raised it before her.

  It was still seating itself, a thick greenish secretion marking the line between it and her wrist. It had four narrow fingers and a thumb protruding from the thin but flexible carapace that now served as the top of her hand. Thousands of small sensor knobs covered the fingers and palm. The two fingers farthest from her thumb ended in small pincers. The finger nearest the thumb had a thin, sharp, retractable claw.

  She tried to wiggle the fingers; nothing happened.

  “It will take some days for the nerve connections to complete themselves, and some time after that for your brain to become used to the finer modifications,” the master said. “Rejoice, Nen Yim—you are now truly an adept. You will join me in shaping the Jeeda
i, and will bring glory to our caste, our domain, and the Yuuzhan Vong.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Anakin sank farther beneath the roots of a marsh-grubber tree and submerged himself up to his mouth, peering through the twisted growths at the elusive sky. For long moments he thought perhaps he had been mistaken, that the noise from above had been his imagination, but then he saw a shadow much too large to be any native bird pass across the fetid U-shaped lake that concealed him.

  His hand went to his useless lightsaber and then fell away.

  For three days he had been avoiding the Yuuzhan Vong speeder analogs. It helped that he knew the sounds of the jungle moon; the irritated cries of woolamanders in the distance or a flight of a group of lesser kitehawks had become his best allies, warning him of approaching fliers kilometers before they passed overhead. Still, as he approached the site of the academy, the searchers came with greater regularity. He didn’t think they were random flights, but rather that they were part of some sort of expanding search net spiraling out from the flier he had brought down with his lightsaber.

  Well, at least now he knew better than to cut into a dovin basal. From what he could tell, his weapon had passed through or very near the part of the thing that warped gravity; the crystal in his weapon had been subtly warped, then fused by the energy it generated. That was both good news and bad; focusing crystals had been found on Yavin 4 before, in the old Massassi temples, and they could be used in lightsabers. Unfortunately, Massassi temples had been in short supply lately.

  Sighing, he renewed his grip on the makeshift staff he had managed to cut with his utility knife. He doubted very much that it would be of any use whatsoever against Yuuzhan Vong armor, but it was better than nothing. He’d run across some explosive grenade fungi earlier—a local plant that, when dry, could generate a respectable bang. At the moment, however, they weren’t available. He’d stashed them on dry ground before hiding here.

  So he sat, waiting for the shadow to return, and tried not to think about what would happen when he finally reached Tahiri and her captors. How many Yuuzhan Vong were there? Why were they still here?

  All good questions, all totally moot if Anakin Solo died or was captured on the way.

  He would have to face the answers soon enough, of course. By his calculations, he was only about twenty kilometers away from the academy.

  He was so busy watching the sky that he didn’t notice ripples of a wake approaching him until it was nearly too late.

  Even then he first thought it was a large crawlfish, one of the harmless crustaceans that had been furnishing him with food since he came to ground. He caught a glimpse of mottled chiton as it approached.

  But crawlfish got to be only a meter or so long, and he suddenly realized that this creature was more on the order of three meters.

  He quickly lowered the sharpened end of his staff, which was promptly yanked from his hands by something very strong. The head surfaced then, a nightmare of mandibles and hooked feelers reaching for him. For an instant, fear and shock got the better of him, then he grabbed its mass with the Force and pushed. As it blew back and up, he got a good view of it: flat, wide, and segmented with thousands of legs.

  It splashed down, milled about, and started for him again. Quickly, he clambered out of the water.

  Someone called behind him, in a language he didn’t understand. He spun and saw one of the Yuuzhan Vong craft, side extruded open. A Yuuzhan Vong warrior was just stepping out.

  The warrior hesitated for a second, then stepped back into the craft. As it rose into the air, Anakin uttered a brief curse and ran. He paused only long enough to grab his pack.

  The flier stayed with him, but kept its distance. Adrenaline hummed in Anakin’s blood, but his mind was curiously calm. He dodged through the undergrowth, looking for a cave, temple ruins, any place to remove him from his observer. His fatigue sloughed from him like dead cells in a bacta tank, and the Force flowed through him like a river, wild, almost frightening in its sheer, joyous strength.

  It was not a state he had quite ever achieved before, an utter awareness of everything around him. Yavin 4 was so alive. And in that matrix of living, pulsing Force, the fliers were bubbles of nothing. The Jedi had learned to detect the Yuuzhan Vong by not detecting them, but before it had always been a matter of focus. He would look at a suspected Yuuzhan Vong, and if he felt nothing, that was likely what he had.

  But this was different. It was like suddenly noticing the spaces between words. It was a fragile thing, probably something he could never have achieved if he had tried for it, something that might go away if he thought too hard about it.

  But for the moment he wasn’t doing much thinking. He knew before he should have that the first Yuuzhan Vong he came across on foot was there. The warrior sprang from behind a tree, long, snakelike amphistaff held in a guard position. He was missing two fingers at the knuckle, and his ear had been cut into fringe. He wore the usual vonduun crab armor and an expression of gratification.

  Anakin snapped a heavy tree bough, already rotten and fatigued, and yanked it with more than the force of gravity down upon the warrior. The Yuuzhan Vong was quick and nearly dodged, but nearly wasn’t enough as half a metric ton of tree crushed him into the ground. Anakin didn’t know if the warrior was dead or alive, injured, or merely compromised. He didn’t care, but changed beats, aiming himself away from the bubbles of nothing crawling at the edges of his expanded senses, tightening themselves around him like a vast noose.

  The next Yuuzhan Vong caught him by surprise, telescoping his amphistaff across the path so it caught Anakin just below the knees. Pain was a bright line across his shins, but he wrapped himself in the life of the forest and lifted himself up, returning to ground three meters away. The Yuuzhan Vong was charging by then, weapon retracted but ready to flip out once more. Anakin spun to face him, dancing back from the attack, until his enemy whipped the weapon out with a peculiar snap of the wrist. Not entirely limp or stiff, the amphistaff arced over Anakin’s shoulder, poisonous fangs aimed at some spot on his lower back.

  Anakin didn’t try to parry; the staff would only wrap around his weapon and find its target anyway. Instead he leapt toward and to the left of the warrior, closing the distance so quickly that the staff slapped painfully against his shoulder. The head, however, snapped short, and by then Anakin was ducking, driving the point of his weapon up into the warrior’s armpit. He pushed his own body and the staff away from the forest floor with the Force, resulting in a blow that sent the warrior hurling almost vertically, three meters in the air.

  Again, without waiting to see what the effect was, Anakin hurried on, opening his pack and tossing out the dried fungi he had gathered earlier. He didn’t let them fall, but held them gently aloft with the Force, spread out around and just ahead of him. Two exploded because his Force grip was too tight, but then he was in the zone again, one with everything but the Yuuzhan Vong.

  A pair of warriors hit him next, but he hardly slowed down. Each got two explosive grenade fungi. One of the Yuuzhan Vong managed to block one of the spheroids with his amphistaff, but the resulting explosion broke the warrior’s concentration, and the next hit him in the head. His companion went down as well, venting a hoarse cry of anger.

  The net was tightening, but there was a way out. Anakin could feel a hole in their search pattern. He lunged on ahead, lifting a virtual cloud of stones and sticks to join his remaining fungi. He was like a strange, strong wind, rushing through the trees.

  Then something thudded dully into his left shoulder, and he stumbled, his legs refusing service. He hit the forest floor, wondering what had happened. The forest resounded with the sounds of his explosive grenade fungi rupturing on the ground.

  He tried to sit up, then he saw the blood, spattered on the dead leaves and along the sleeve of his flight suit.

  A Yuuzhan Vong stepped from out of the bushes, holding something about the size of a carbine, a tube that swelled into a sort of stock or m
agazine.

  Grunting, Anakin struggled to his feet. The whole left side of his body felt curiously numb. He reached back and found that a hole had been gouged in his shoulder. He felt something hard in the hole and pulled it out.

  It was a mass of cracked chiton.

  His legs threatened to buckle again. The Yuuzhan Vong was advancing, weapon trained on him. All around him, Anakin could hear more enemies rushing toward him.

  Oddly enough, he still didn’t feel frightened or angry. He didn’t feel much of anything, except the Force.

  And a familiar presence, something not too far away. Not one presence, really, but one that was legion.

  “Two can play that game,” Anakin whispered.

  He dropped his weapon and held his hands up. “Nice going,” he told the Yuuzhan Vong. “You shot me in the back with a bug. Very brave.”

  He could see three or four of them now, with his peripheral vision.

  He hadn’t expected the warrior to answer, but he did, in Basic.

  “I am Field Commander Sinan Mat. I salute your bravery, Jeedai. I must deny you the embrace of death in battle. For this I apologize.”

  A little closer, Anakin thought. If they don’t mean to kill me …

  “Will you fight me, Sinan Mat? Just you and me?”

  “That is my desire. It cannot be. I am to bring you living to the shapers.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And … well, I’d feel worse about this if you hadn’t shot me in the back, but … forgive me.”

  Mat frowned and touched his ear. “The tizowyrm doesn’t know that word, forgive. What—” Then his eyes widened. The forest was screaming a song of death.

  The piranha-beetles fell upon the Yuuzhan Vong in a cloud. Sinan Mat dropped his weapon and clawed at his face as it disintegrated beneath the fierce mandibles. The piranha-beetles didn’t spare the other Yuuzhan Vong, either, and a chorus of pain and rage rose counterpoint to the strident song of the insects.

  Anakin picked up his staff and hobbled away, knowing his legs wouldn’t carry him much farther. He needed to find a place to hide.