Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  “You need know only this,” he continued. “I will stand at your side or your back. Your foes are my foes. We will kill together, embrace pain together, embrace death together if such is Yun-Yuuzhan’s wish.”

  “You’ll help me rescue Tahiri,” Anakin said dubiously.

  “It’s a stupid goal, but finding her will serve my purposes well.”

  Anakin searched that black diamond gaze, trying to understand. There was nothing there, nothing. The Yuuzhan Vong was more like a holo than a person, an image, an appearance. How could such a thing have feelings to be understood? Without the Force, how could he hope to comprehend such an alien creature?

  “I don’t understand,” Anakin said. “What did your people do to you? Why do you hate them so?”

  Vua Rapuung slapped him, hard, and bounded to his feet, chest heaving.

  “Do not mock me!” he shrieked. “You have eyes! You see! Do not mock me! The gods did not do this to me, they did not!”

  As the Yuuzhan Vong started toward him again, Anakin hefted a rock with the Force and sent it straight for the warrior’s sternum. It caught Rapuung completely by surprise, smacking him against the side of the cave. He sank down, looking a bit dazed.

  Anakin hefted the rock again and poised it over Rapuung’s head.

  The Yuuzhan Vong looked up at the stone and suddenly started hacking as if he had the Dagobian swamp cough.

  It took half a minute of this before Anakin recognized it as laughter.

  When he calmed down, Vua Rapuung fixed the young Jedi with a curious gaze. “I saw what you did to the hunters, but still, to have it turned on me—” His face hardened again. “Tell me the truth, one warrior to another, if you can. In the warrior caste there are rumors. It is said your Jeedai powers come from machine implants. Is this true? Are your people that sick?”

  Anakin returned the challenging stare. “Our powers do not come from machines. Furthermore, some of your people must know that, because they’ve had ample opportunity to dissect some of us. Your rumor is a lie.”

  “Yes? Then the Jeedai Master does not have a machine hand?”

  “Master Skywalker? He does, but—” He broke off. “How do you know this?”

  “We hear many stories from converts and spies. So it is true, then. The leader of the Jeedai is part machine.” Rapuung’s face probably couldn’t have shown more disgust without being surgically altered.

  “One has nothing to do with the other. Master Luke lost a hand in a great battle. He had it replaced. But his power, like mine, flows from the Force.”

  “Do you have implants like your master?”

  “No.”

  “Will you receive them as you attain rank?”

  Anakin laughed briefly. “No.”

  Vua Rapuung nodded. “Then it is as I said. We will fight together.”

  “Not if you keep flying off course like you did a minute ago,” Anakin replied. “I may be injured, but as you’ve seen, I’m not without resources.”

  “I see,” Rapuung growled, “but do not challenge me. I dislike it.”

  “You keep the same thing in mind, pal. Now. You say we’re going to fight together but you won’t tell me why. Can you at least tell me how?”

  “The shapers have planted five damuteks on this moon. That is where your Jeedai companion is held.”

  Anakin let pass the precise definition of damutek for the moment. “Why? What will they do to her?”

  Murder flashed in Rapuung’s eyes again, but this time he mastered it without an outburst. “Who can know the mind of a shaper?” he said, softly. “But you can be sure they will shape.”

  “I don’t understand. What is a shaper?”

  “Your ignorance is—” Rapuung stopped, blinked his eyes slowly closed, open, closed, and started again. “The shapers are a caste, the caste nearest the great god, Yun-Yuuzhan, who shaped the universe from his body. It is they who know the ways of life, who bend it to our needs.”

  “Bioengineers? Scientists?”

  Rapuung stared at him for a second. “The tizowyrm that translates for me makes no sense from those words. I suspect they are obscene.”

  “Never mind. There was a Jedi named Miko Reglia. Your people tried to break his will with a yammosk. They tried to do the same to another Jedi named Wurth Skidder. Is that what you think they’ll do to Tahiri?”

  “I do not care what they do to your Jeedai. But what you describe is—” He grimaced. “I once knew a shaper who spoke of such things, of warriors who thought they could do the task of shapers, as you describe. But breaking is not shaping. It is a child’s parody of it. Understand, the shapers make our worldships. They make the yammosk. They will not try to break your Jeedai—they will remake her.”

  A chill seeped into Anakin’s veins, and he remembered his vision of an older Tahiri.

  He knew what they would make of her. And they would succeed, if Anakin failed.

  What Rapuung offered might be a cruel trick, a part of some devious plan; Anakin would have to take that risk. Without the Force to guide him, he could never be certain the Yuuzhan Vong wasn’t telling the truth. Now was no time to dither. Any course that would take him closer to Tahiri was worth plotting, even if he had to let someone he didn’t trust do some of the figures.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go back to an earlier vector. You said something about damuteks?”

  “The sacred precincts within which the shapers live and work.”

  “How many of them? How many shapers?”

  “I don’t know for certain. Around twelve, if initiates are included.”

  “That’s all? That’s all the Vong on this world?”

  Rapuung spat something Anakin didn’t understand. He didn’t seem to be so much angry as in genuine shock.

  “Do not—never refer to us in that way,” he sputtered. “How can you be so ignorant? Or do you wish to insult?”

  “Not that time,” Anakin said.

  “To use the word Vong alone is an insult. It implies that the person so addressed does not have the favor and kinship of gods or family.”

  “Sorry.”

  Rapuung didn’t answer, but stared out into the forest.

  “We should go,” he said, “I have hidden our scent from the trackers, but they will find us soon enough if we stay still.”

  “Agreed,” Anakin said. “But first—how many Yuuzhan Vong on this moon, total, would you think?”

  Vua Rapuung considered briefly. “A thousand, perhaps. More warriors in space.”

  “And we’ll fight our way through all of them?”

  “Was that not your plan?” Rapuung asked. “Does the number we face mean anything to you?”

  Anakin shook his head. “Only in terms of tactics. Tahiri is there. I’ll find her and get her out, no matter how many Yuuzhan Vong I have to walk through.”

  “Very well. You can walk, now?”

  “I can walk. Soon I can run. It might hurt, but I can do it.”

  “Life is suffering,” Vua Rapuung said. “We go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Vua Rapuung gnashed his teeth. “No, ignorant one,” he growled. “Not that way.”

  Anakin didn’t look at him, but kept his gaze wandering through the whispering Massassi trees, searching for shadows that did not agree with the wind in their motion.

  The two stood at the divide of the ridge top; one stone spine snaked down and away to Anakin’s right, the other continued up and to his left. Anakin had started up the steepening trail.

  “Why?” he asked. “The search craft are over there.” He waved toward the lowlands off the left ridge.

  “They are not ‘craft,’ ” Rapuung snapped.

  “You know what I meant.”

  “How do you know where they are, when you cannot sense Yuuzhan Vong or the life shaped for us?”

  “Because I can sense everything native in this forest,” Anakin replied. “Every whisper bird and runyip, every stintaril and woolamander. And the ones over there
are agitated. I get flashes.”

  “This is so? How many fliers? Five, yes?”

  Anakin focused his concentration. “I think so.”

  “They will split into a lav peq pattern, then. First the lowland, then arcs tightening to the highest point. If they find us up here, they will converge and release netting beetles.”

  “What are netting beetles?”

  “If we do not isolate ourselves on an elevation, you will not find out. This is not air warfare, Jeedai, and unless you plan to fortify this high spot and fight all of the warriors on this moon, altitude is of no use to you.”

  “I want a look at the lay of the land.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’ve gotten us lost, that’s why. You no more know where the Vo—the Yuuzhan Vong base is than a mynock knows how to play sabacc.”

  “I can find the shaper damutek. But if we slash a straight line toward them, they will snare us.”

  “I know this moon,” Anakin said. “You don’t.” He stopped, staring suspiciously at the warrior. “How did you find me, anyway?”

  “I followed the search parties, infidel. You were slashing a straight path, weren’t you? Yes. Without me, you would have been captured ten times by now.”

  “Without you, I would have been in your shaper base by now.”

  “Yes. I just said that,” Rapuung said. He closed his eyes, as if listening to something. “What do your Jeedai senses tell you now?”

  Anakin frowned in concentration. “I think they’ve split up,” he said reluctantly.

  “I can hear them,” Vua Rapuung said. “Not as well as I once could. Once my ears were …” He reached and lightly touched the festering, oozing scar tissue on the side of his head. He snarled and dropped his hand.

  “We go down,” he said.

  “I go up,” Anakin replied. He started up the trail. He didn’t look back, but after he had gone perhaps thirty strides, he heard what he guessed to be a Yuuzhan Vong profanity and the sound of footsteps pacing up behind him.

  “Gee,” Anakin breathed. Tears stung his eyes.

  He stood at the crest of the height, where he could see the familiar meander of the Unnh River. He’d seen this spot from the air maybe fifty times, and knew it as well as he knew any place.

  Except that things had changed. The Great Temple—which had stood for untold thousands of years, watching the passage of the people who built it, of Jedi dark and brilliant, the destruction of the Death Star—was gone without a trace.

  In its place near the river were five spacious compounds formed like many-rayed stars. The walls were thick and perhaps two stories high, and probably had chambers in them. The inner courtyards were open to the sky. Two seemed to be filled with water, another with a pale yellow fluid that probably wasn’t water. Another had structures in its central space—domes and polyhedrons of various shapes, all the same color as the larger structure. The fifth was full of coralskippers and larger spacegoing ships. Lots of them.

  It looked like canals had been dug from the river to connect the compounds.

  “We must descend before they scent us,” Vua Rapuung insisted again.

  “I thought that stuff you rubbed on us fools the sniffers, or whatever they are.”

  “It causes confusion. It gives us time to hide. There is no place to hide here, and they will see us. There is no fooling that.”

  There is for Jedi, usually, Anakin thought. But he could no more cloud a Yuuzhan Vong mind than he could dance on the surface of a black hole.

  “There’s cover,” he said. The hill was blanketed mostly in scrub and lacked the high canopy that grew over most of the moon’s land surface, but the bushes were usually more than head-high.

  “Not from heat-pit sensors,” Rapuung demurred. “Not from netting beetles. No water.”

  Anakin nodded thoughtfully, but he was really still examining the shaper base, barely paying attention to the Yuuzhan Vong beside him.

  “Outside of the big compounds—all of those little structures that look like somebody just threw them down and let them grow—what’s all that? It looks like a shantytown.”

  “I don’t know that word, shantee. That is where the workers and slaves and Shamed Ones live.”

  “Support colony. They do the drudge work.”

  “If the tizowyrm translates correctly, yes.”

  “Workers and slaves I know. What are Shamed Ones?”

  “Shamed Ones are cursed by the gods,” Rapuung said. “They work as slaves. They are not worth speaking of.”

  “Cursed how?”

  “When I say they are not worth speaking of, how do my words confuse you?”

  “Fine,” Anakin sighed. “Have it your way.”

  “My way is to leave this ridge, work spiralwise toward where the gas giant sets. Quickly.”

  “That’s the wrong direction! We’re only a few kilometers away!”

  “All the forest below is trapped,” Rapuung said. “The river, too. There is only one way in for us, and I know it.”

  “Tell me what it is, then,” Anakin said. “Convince—” But he stopped. “Listen.”

  Rapuung nodded. “I hear them. They are weaving the lav peq. I was foolish to trust you. You think with something other than your brain.” He pressed his frayed and ulcerous lips together in an expression of contempt.

  “We aren’t caught yet. Is there a weak spot in this search pattern?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll make one, then. These fliers they’re using—”

  “Tsik vai.”

  “Right. Are they the same as we’ve seen before?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re just atomospheric fliers, right?”

  Rapuung looked wary. “How do you know that?”

  “They look like they have some sort of air intake vents—gills—on the side.”

  “Correct.”

  “Come on, then.” Anakin started down the hill. Rapuung started after him, for once without objection.

  Anakin was feeling considerably better today. Jedi healing and relaxation techniques had drained much of his weariness, and Vua Rapuung’s artificial skin—or whatever it was—seemed to have done its part with his shoulder. He loped down the hill in a series of long, flat, Force-aided leaps. Rapuung kept up, barely, winding nearly soundlessly through the dense underbrush. It actually raised the hackles on Anakin’s neck to look at him. It was hard to believe something so deadly looking could be sentient at all.

  Most of the trees were gone, no doubt burned off in one of the many battles that had occurred on the jungle moon since the Rebel Alliance located its resistance here before the battle against the first Death Star. What remained was waist-high scrub. Farther down, the trees began again, a green necklace around the hill, and Anakin suddenly understood what Rapuung was concerned about. Fire burned up. Anything caught up here when the blaze started had probably died. If these netting beetles were anything like fire …

  He realized, reluctantly, that Rapuung was right. Anakin thought too much like a pilot, where the high ground was everything. He wasn’t a pilot right now; he was prey.

  But dangerous prey—a feral rycrit, not a tame one, he reminded himself, when the first tsik vai flier came over.

  Anakin didn’t hesitate; he knew what he wanted to do. He reached in a ten-meter radius and lifted everything that wasn’t fastened down—leaf litter, twigs, stones—and hurled them in a cyclone at the intake slits on the side of the flier.

  “Fool!” Rapuung shouted. “That was your plan?”

  The tsik vai swooped in low, and the tentaclelike cables fired out at them. Anakin dodged, keeping up his barrage. Undeterred, the flier followed close, dropping lower. A tentacle caught Rapuung. The warrior leapt, gripped the upper part of the tentacle in his hands, and started climbing, a grim expression on his scarred face. Getting the idea, Anakin tried to do the same, but without the Force to give him certainty—without being able to feel the tentacles as well as see them—he m
issed.

  The flier suddenly made a peculiar whine, and its flexible wings began to shiver as if in spasm. The tentacle holding Rapuung released him, and he instantly leapt for the ground. The flier hung there, shaking itself.

  “Run,” Rapuung shouted. “It will clear its lungs quickly. These tsik vai were not shaped by idiot children, as you seem to think.”

  Anakin fell into step with him. “Where are the other fliers?”

  “They know where we are now. They will seed the netting beetles into the lowland, as I told you.”

  “I wish you had told me what these things do.”

  “They draw fibers from tree to tree, from bush to bush. They come in waves that overtake one another, the first wave weaving and the waves behind feeding to replenish their fiber. They move very quickly.”

  “Oh. That’s not good.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “You were climbing toward the flier when it had you. Did you think you could capture it?”

  “No. I thought I might die gloriously rather than ignominiously. My bare hands are not capable of forcing open the cockpits.”

  “But if we can get above the net, somehow …”

  “Some of the beetles will draw strands up into the air and cross them above our heads. If we could fly at this very moment, we might escape.”

  Anakin came to a halt. “Why are we running, then? Whichever way we go, we’re only coming nearer to the net.”

  “True. And if we go uphill, we will only delay our confrontation with it. Do you have your Jeedai blade-that-burns? It might cut the fibers.”

  “No.” Anakin was peering downhill. The trees started perhaps a hundred meters away, but he had enough elevation to see their swaying tops stretching off to the horizon, bending this way and that in a fickle wind.

  Except in a strip, where they weren’t moving at all. Following the strip, he saw it curving around the hill.

  “That’s it, isn’t it,” he murmured. “The net is holding them together.”

  “Yes. The fibers are very strong, the net very fine.”