Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  Even as Anakin watched, more trees froze in place, and the strip deepened.

  “Will the netting beetles eat us?”

  “They will attach to our flesh and draw fiber, using some of our cells in the process. It will not be fatal.”

  “Right. Because it’s not going to happen.” Anakin stopped, knelt, and took off his pack. After an instant of rummaging, he’d found what he was after: five phosphorous flares.

  “Are those weapons? Machines?”

  “Not usually,” Anakin said. “Don’t look directly at this.” He struck one alight, then, using the Force, hurled it in a long arc downhill.

  He struck another and hurled it similarly, along a different vector.

  “I don’t understand,” Rapuung said. “How will the light stop the netting beetles?”

  “The light won’t. The fire will. The beetles can’t attach to trees and bushes that aren’t there.”

  He struck another flare. As he cocked his arm back to throw it, Vua Rapuung backhanded him in the face.

  Anakin’s nostrils filled with the iron scent of blood, and he fetched hard against the ground before he could react to cushion himself. Rapuung was all over him, snarling like a beast, fingers curled around his neck. He smelled sour and sick.

  Spots dancing before his eyes, Anakin did the only thing he could. He found a stone with the Force and hit the crazed warrior right between the eyes with it. Rapuung’s head snapped back and his hands came away. Anakin hit him in the chin so hard that sparks of pain exploded in his knuckles. The Yuuzhan Vong fell off of him, but by the time Anakin had scrambled to his feet, Rapuung was up, assuming a martial stance.

  “Sithspawn!” Anakin snapped. “What are you doing?”

  “Combustion!” the Yuuzhan Vong roared. “The first abomination is the use of fire from a machine!”

  “What?”

  “This is forbidden, you stinking infidel! Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

  “You’re insane!” Anakin shouted back, rubbing knuckles that felt shattered, drawing breath through an aching windpipe. “You were just asking me if I could use my lightsaber! You think that’s not a machine?”

  A look of what might have been horror dawned on Rapuung’s face. “I … yes, I prepared myself for that, But fire, the first of all sins—”

  “Wait,” Anakin snapped. “You’re not making any sense. The Yuuzhan Vong have used fire breathers against us in the past.”

  “Living creatures producing flame is another thing entirely!” Rapuung shrieked. “How can you possibly imagine it is the same as what you’ve just done? As well say that the hand of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior and the metal grip of one of your made-thing abominations are the same because either can hold an amphistaff.”

  Anakin took a deep breath. “Look,” he said. “I don’t pretend to understand your religion. I don’t even want to. But you’ve chosen to fight with an infidel against your own people, haven’t you? You were perfectly willing for me to use my abominable lightsaber. Now you deal with this or go your own way. Unless you’ve got another way out.”

  “No,” Rapuung admitted. “It’s just the shock …” He dropped his head. “You really don’t understand. The gods don’t hate me. I know they don’t. I can prove it. But if I soil myself like this, they will have reason to hate me! Ah, what have I become?”

  The wind shifted, and the charred pepper scent of burning blueleaf set Anakin to coughing. The last flare had gone only about three meters, and now the bushes upwind of them were blazing merrily. It was the dry season, and jungle burned very well in the dry season.

  “You’d better get a grip fast, Vua Rapuung, or the first abomination is going to eat you alive.”

  The Yuuzhan Vong stood there for a long moment, head cast down, but when he raised his head, his eyes were beacons of rage. Anakin tensed, preparing to fight again.

  “She has driven me to this,” the warrior said. “These sins will settle on her. I leave it to the gods to judge.”

  “Does that mean we can go?” Anakin asked, watching the fire sweep toward them. Down the hill, smoke poured thickly from where the other flares had lodged.

  “Yes. Let us go. We still embrace pain together, Jeedai.”

  The fire drove them around the side of the hill and up it; the change in the wind seemed to be a lasting one. Smoke boiled and crept close to the ground.

  The jungle burned fast.

  “My opinion of you as a strategist improves,” Rapuung said. “The fire drives us directly into the other side of the net. We have our choice of being burned to death by the first abomination, or being captured and then burned.”

  “The wind shifted. My plan was to follow along the fire’s exhaust, walk on the ashes. The net will collapse where the fire burns through, and then we’re clear.”

  “Then perhaps the gods have spoken after all,” Rapuung said. He coughed violently on the smoke, which was becoming so thick that Anakin was seeing spots in front of his eyes. He remembered most people who died in a fire were dead before the flames ever reached them.

  “Keep low,” he said. “The smoke rises.”

  “Low. Crawling like a tso’asu.”

  “If you want to live, yes.”

  “I do not fear death,” Rapuung choked out. “But my revenge will not be thwarted. I …” He convulsed in another series of racking coughs, fell, climbed back to all fours, and collapsed again.

  “Get up!” Anakin exhorted him.

  Rapuung quivered but did not move.

  Through the smoke, the yellow teeth of the fire appeared, chewing toward them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Everything went pale gold as Anakin dropped to his knees next to Vua Rapuung. His breath felt like broken shards in his lungs, and his head rang like an alarm.

  He lay flat, trying to find sweeter, cooler air, but if it was there, it was traveling in disguise. If he was going to find something he could breathe, it would be somewhere above him. Sure, it would be smoky up there, too, but it was worth a shot.

  Anakin reached up and pulled, creating a tube that sucked higher air straight down on him and the Yuuzhan Vong. His breathing eased immediately.

  The fire liked it, too. The underbrush exploded like a bomb. Anakin felt the heat briefly, heat he knew would blacken and crack his flesh in seconds. He had not tried to alter energy before, but Corran Horn could do it. Their lives depended on his success. Anakin opened himself again to the Force, focused his efforts, and leached the fire’s heat from a radius around them both.

  How long he kept this up, Anakin did not know. He slipped into a sort of fugue state, each breath pulling life from the sky, each exhalation bleeding heat into the crust of Yavin 4. But eventually he blinked and realized it was over, that the fire had burned past him and he knelt in ashes.

  Vua Rapuung still lay motionless. Anakin shook him. Where did one check for vital signs on a Yuuzhan Vong? Did they have hearts like humans, linear pumps, something stranger?

  He slapped Rapuung, hard, and the warrior’s eyes flickered open.

  “Are you okay?” Anakin asked.

  “Pray me you are not one of the gods,” Rapuung muttered. “If you are, death will be tedious.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome,” Anakin replied. “Can you walk? We need to go before the fliers think to look here.”

  “Smoke and heat will confuse them,” Rapuung said. He sat up and looked around. “The fire—it passed over us.”

  “It did.”

  “And we live.”

  “We do,” Anakin assured him.

  “This was your doing? Another Jeedai sorcery?”

  “Something like that,” Anakin admitted.

  “Then you saved my life. How disgusting. How unfortunate.”

  “No, don’t gush on so,” Anakin said. “It was nothing, really.” He offered his hand to help Rapuung up. After a long moment of staring at it as if it were nerf dung, the warrior took it.

  “Come on,” Anakin said. “No
w all we have to do is follow the fire.”

  Under cover of the smoke, they slipped through the ruins of the netting beetle web. The strands themselves had not burned, but lay silvery and glistening in the ashes, draped like shrouds on the smoking trunks of trees. When Anakin’s foot tangled in some, he found that it had cut into his boot a little. None of the web had broken, and he didn’t try to tear it with his fingers, but instead gently untangled it. After that he was more careful where he stepped.

  The fire had burned on past the end of the web. Anakin could see fliers nosing around in front of it. One made a pass back, far to their left.

  They pushed right, eventually cutting out of the path of the fire into unburned, unnetted woods, and though they did not slacken their pace for another two hours, Anakin felt suddenly safer, surrounded by the living pulse of the forest.

  But in that pulse was a raw edge of pain.

  Only then did it strike him what he had done. To save himself, he had burned countless square kilometers of forest. He had felt beasts dying, peripherally, but in the moment his own pain had been paramount. Now the forest’s anguish hit him like a hard slap in the face. He was a swarm of stintarils, clustered in the top of a tree, the fire climbing after them. Their fur was beginning to singe. He was a big, harmless runyip, too slow to outrun the flame, trying to nose its calves ahead to safety, but not herself knowing where that was. He was charred flesh and scorched lungs. He was dead and dying.

  “You were right,” he told Rapuung later, when they stopped to splash water on themselves, to clear the ash from their eyes, nostrils, and lips.

  “About what, infidel?”

  “What I did with the fire. It was wrong.”

  The Yuuzhan Vong’s eyes narrowed. “Explain.”

  “I killed innocent life to save us.”

  Rapuung laughed harshly. “That is nothing. Killing and dying are nothing; they are the way of the world, part of the embrace of pain. What you did was wrong because it was an abomination, not because you killed. Do not fool yourself. I see now how determined you are to rescue your Jeedai companion. If you could reach her only by filling in a chasm with corpses to walk over, you would do it.”

  “No,” Anakin said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “A goal desired so lightly is not a goal at all.”

  Anakin sighed. “We’ll get her. But I don’t like to kill.”

  “Then the warriors will kill you.”

  “Warriors are different,” Anakin said. “I will defend myself with extreme prejudice. But the forest did nothing to me to deserve what I did to it.”

  “You make no sense,” Rapuung said. “We will kill who and what we must.”

  “And I say no.”

  “Indeed. So you would have me pollute myself with the first abomination in order to achieve your purposes, and yet you will force me to cling to a childish fear of killing? All life ends, Jeedai.”

  Anakin felt that one. Did the Yuuzhan Vong really think nonbiological technology was as wrong as the Jedi philosophy taught indiscriminate killing was? Intellectually he supposed he’d understood that, but it had never reached his gut. Only now, when they both agreed something terrible had been done—but for absolutely different reasons—did it make any kind of sense to him at all.

  If only he could feel Rapuung in the Force. If only he could tell if the Yuuzhan Vong were of the light or of the dark side.

  Or was that even a relevant question, without the Force? Were Jedi so dependent on their Force-given senses that without them they were moral cripples?

  Rapuung had kept a stinging gaze on Anakin as the Jedi searched for a response. Now he suddenly looked away toward some middle distance.

  “You make no sense,” Vua Rapuung said. “But … I acknowledge you have saved my life. My revenge will owe to you, when it is complete.”

  “You’ve saved me a couple of times,” Anakin replied. “We’re not even yet.”

  “Not what? What is that word?”

  “Never mind. Vua Rapuung, what is this revenge you seek? What has been done to you that would make you turn against your own people?”

  Rapuung’s eyes hardened. “Do you really not know? Can you really not see? Look at me!”

  “I see your scars fester. You have implants that seem dead or dying. But I don’t have the faintest idea what that means.”

  “It does not concern you,” Rapuung said. “Do not presume, infidel.”

  “Fine. Then tell me this plan of yours, the one that will get me to Tahiri.”

  “Follow and see,” Rapuung answered.

  They crouched in a tangle of roots at the water’s edge on a tributary of the great river.

  “We’re farther away from the shaper base than we were yesterday,” Anakin complained.

  “Yes, but in the right place, now,” Rapuung said.

  “Right place for what?”

  “Wait. See.”

  Anakin’s mouth twitched around a retort but didn’t form it. Was this what people were complaining about when they accused him of being tight with words? Rapuung was as stingy with facts as a Bothan courier. Six days running and fighting together, and Anakin still knew nothing about the warrior except that he was mad about something. Maybe even crazy. He’d mentioned some “she” and seemed to have an obsession with his worthiness before his gods.

  But maybe all Yuuzhan Vong were like that. It was not like Anakin had chatted with a lot of them. Maybe Rapuung was as normal as normal could be. Maybe he kept his motives and plans secret because that’s just the way Yuuzhan Vong were.

  Or maybe he was afraid—afraid that if Anakin knew what he was up to or knew how to get into the shaper base, Anakin would kill him or abandon him.

  He sneaked a glance at the fierce, flat-nosed visage and gave that a silent negative. He couldn’t imagine Vua Rapuung being afraid of anything. Maybe prudent was a better word.

  So Anakin waited, quietly, and found himself gradually mesmerized by the gentle flow of the stream. He stretched out tentatively to the life around him, feeling again the shadow of the pain and death he had caused.

  I’m sorry, he told the forest.

  How close was he to the dark side? Was Rapuung right?

  He’d argued with Jacen that the Force was a tool that was neither good nor evil, but that could be used, like any tool, to do good or evil with. Could evil be as simple as not thinking? He supposed so. Corran Horn had once told him that selfishness was evil and selflessness good. In that light, selfishly causing death to save himself was evil, regardless of the fact that he simply hadn’t considered the consequences of his actions at the time. And yet he wasn’t just fighting for himself, was he? Tahiri’s life was at stake. Maybe more than her life, because if the Tahiri of his vision ever came to be, it could mean the end of a great many people.

  If he was honest, he had to admit he hadn’t been thinking about those larger consequences, either. He’d had a problem to solve, and he’d solved it, the same as he might solve a mathematical equation or a problem with the hyperdrive motivator in his X-wing. He just hadn’t thought about the problems his solution might cause, which seemed pretty typical of him lately.

  Mara Jade had pointed out this tendency of his ages ago, when they were camping together on Dantooine. Apparently he hadn’t learned anything. Maybe it was time he started to.

  Which brought him back to Vua Rapuung. The man was self-admittedly out for revenge, and if there was one thing that had been drilled solidly into Anakin, it was that revenge was of the dark side. If he continued working with Rapuung, would he be implicated in that revenge? What tragedy was he helping to bring about by cooperating with this half-crazed Yuuzhan Vong?

  Something stirred the life of the forest. A thousand voices changed slightly as they smelled and heard something unfamiliar, something not included in their limited vocabulary of predator and prey, hunger and danger.

  Something new to Yavin 4 was approaching, on the river.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Ana
kin asked.

  “Yes.”

  Anakin didn’t ask who. He was tired of asking questions that he knew wouldn’t be answered. Instead he sharpened his senses and watched.

  Soon something appeared on the river, coming upstream.

  At first he thought it was a boat, but reminded himself that if it was a Yuuzhan Vong boat, it was something organic, as well. Studying it, he picked out the details that proved him right.

  The major visible portion was a broad, flat dome poking up from the water, banded with scutes or plates. Whatever moved it was below the surface of the water, but it did move. Now and then something that might be the top of a head broke the water in front of it. If it was a head, it was a big one, nearly as wide as the visible portion of the shell, and scaled and dull olive in color.

  Sitting on top of it was a male Anakin could not feel in the Force, but the closer he came, the less he looked like a Yuuzhan Vong. At first Anakin didn’t understand why he got that impression; he had the same sharply sloping forehead, and his nostrils were set nearly flat into his face just like every other person of that species Anakin had seen.

  But he had no scars. Not one. Not a single tattoo that Anakin could detect, and he could see most of the fellow because he wore only a sort of loincloth.

  Now and then he touched something on the surface of the carapace, and the boat creature altered course slightly.

  “Stay hidden,” Rapuung said, and stood.

  “Qe’u!” he called.

  Through the concealing roots, Anakin saw the other man’s head snap around in surprise. He uttered a string of words Anakin didn’t understand, and Vua Rapuung replied in kind. The floater began turning in their direction, and Anakin dug himself lower.

  The two Yuuzhan Vong continued their conversation as the floater drew nearer to shore.

  Anakin took several deep, steadying breaths. He’d been thinking about Vua Rapuung’s prudence; it was time to start thinking of his own. When would the Yuuzhan Vong stop needing him? Now? When they reached the shaper base? When he’d exacted whatever revenge he was after? It could be anytime. He remembered what he had told Valin about the Yuuzhan Vong and their promises. Was there any reason to believe Rapuung would keep his?