Conquest: Edge of Victory I

by Greg Keyes

  As soon as it sensed their presence, it constricted, hugging the contours of their bodies with insistent strength. Anakin had to straighten his arms in front of him and drag himself downward with the strength of his fingers.

  He felt as if he was suffocating. He couldn’t go backwards, not with Vua Rapuung behind him. To make matters worse, he was moving against a gentle but unrelenting current. When the pressure against him grew too great he would curl his body into a fetal position, something that took almost every bit of strength he had. When he released and straightened his body, it took several seconds for the root walls to contract and conform to his body again. It felt like trying to crawl up the esophagus of a snake intent on swallowing. The only problem with that analogy was that if he were doing that, he would be assured of light at the end of the mucilaginous tunnel. Here he was crawling toward darkness, maybe nothingness. What if the root ended in a sealed aquifer? How long would the breather shoved down his windpipe continue to work? Until he starved, probably.

  If he ever got off Yavin 4, he promised himself, he would visit his uncle’s homeworld, Tatooine, or some other similarly desiccated place. He had had more than enough of water and other fluids on this trip to last him decades.

  Fighting a nattering little panic, Anakin continued dragging himself forward. Minutes piled into hours.

  He thought of sunlight, wind, infinite space.

  He thought of Tahiri. Was he wrong to try to rebuild his lightsaber? Should he have gone on charging after her without it? The strong, early contacts in the Force had faded to occasional brushes, most powerfully when she was in agony. Anakin had the clear impression that Tahiri was actually avoiding contact, shoving him away.

  Despite this, an image of her prison had assembled itself in his mind—a small chamber divided from a larger one by a thin but unbreakable membrane. Her jailers were Yuuzhan Vong like the one he had seen by the succession pool, the one with the tentacled headdress. Several other cells like the one she was in were visible, but these were empty and dark, presumably waiting for more young Jedi captives.

  The other thing he was certain of was that Tahiri was in a great deal of confusion. Not only did she not respond to his touch, she sometimes didn’t even recognize it.

  If he thought he could save her without his lightsaber …

  But he couldn’t. Even the insanely reckless Vua Rapuung thought so, or they would never be squeezing themselves down a kilometer of small intestine.

  Tahiri could hang in there for another two days. She had to. And to save her, he could crawl through anything.

  Muscles trembling, even when he freshened them with the Force, he moved on.

  When he finally emerged into a space large enough that he could float free and touch nothing, he silently celebrated it by stretching, bending, kicking his arms, and waving his feet. It was the most delicious feeling he could imagine at that moment. For perhaps a minute he thought of nothing but this simple jubilation, but then the darkness lurking in his mind reminded him he would have to crawl right back up the Sith-spawned thing if this cavern didn’t go anywhere. He took out his lambent crystal and willed it to life.

  Rapuung appeared, floating facing him, looking like a reptilian water monster. Beyond him Anakin saw the tube opening extruding from a stone surface that bent to envelop them in a cavern of indeterminate size. Anakin found gravity’s direction and started following the surface up, trailing one hand on it. At the same time he stretched out with the Force, sensing water drumming slowly through stone, searching for the sounding boards, the hollow places where air held court.

  Anakin thought he’d been happy to leave the tube. Pulling himself onto damp stone, yanking the gnullith from his mouth, was infinitely better. He sat there, gasping and wet, as Vua Rapuung climbed out of the water behind him.

  “I hope this was worth it,” Rapuung growled.

  “It will be.”

  “Heal your weapon so we can leave this skulking pit.”

  “I’ll start in a moment,” Anakin said. “But first, Vua Rapuung, tell me something. Do you really believe that the marks of your shame were inflicted upon you by a shaper? That she did this to you for rejecting her love?”

  “Who have you been talking to?”

  “The other Shamed Ones talk. They saw me with you.”

  Rapuung’s face contorted as if he had swallowed the foulest thing in the world, but his head chopped affirmatively.

  “Our love was forbidden. We both knew it. For a time neither of us cared. We believed that Yun-Txiin and Yun-Q’aah had taken pity on us, dared the wrath of Yun-Yuuzhan, and given us a special dispensation. Such things have happened before, no matter what ignorant things you may have heard.” His lip curled. “It did not happen with us. We were wrong.”

  “And you broke it off.”

  “Yes. Love is a madness. When my sanity began to return, I knew that I could not violate the will of the gods. I told her so.”

  “And she didn’t like that.”

  Rapuung snorted. “She blasphemed. She said there were no gods, that belief in them was superstition, that we are free to do whatever we dare so long as we are strong.” His eyes turned away from Anakin. “Despite her heresy, I would never have told anyone her words. She did not believe that. She feared I would denounce her, or that one day our forbidden trysting would come to the attention of her superiors. She is ambitious, Mezhan Kwaad. She is spiteful. She made me appear Shamed because she knew no one would credit my words then, that anything I said would be taken as the ravings of a lunatic.”

  “Why didn’t she just kill you?” Anakin asked. “Give you some poison or fatal disease?”

  “She is more cruel than that,” Rapuung snarled. “She would never give me the release of death when she could debase me instead.”

  Rapuung’s eyes focused on the lambent. “What else did the other Shamed Ones say? They called me insane, yes?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “I am not.”

  Anakin measured his words out carefully. “I don’t care if you are,” he said. “I don’t care about your revenge any more than you care about Tahiri. But I need to know how far you will go. You say you’re reconciled to me using my lightsaber.”

  “I have said so.”

  “I’m going to rebuild it, as I told you. What I didn’t mention is that I’m going to rebuild it using this.” He held up the lambent.

  The Yuuzhan Vong’s eyes widened. “You would graft a living servant to your machine?”

  “A lightsaber isn’t exactly a machine.”

  “It isn’t alive.”

  “In a way it is,” Anakin said.

  “In a way dung is the same as food, at the molecular level, perhaps. Speak plainly.”

  “To do that, I have to tell you about the Force, and you have to listen.”

  “The Force is what you Jeedai kill with,” Rapuung said.

  “It’s much more than that.”

  “Why do you wish to explain this to me?”

  “Because when I use my lightsaber, I don’t want any surprises from you like I got when I lit the fire. I want to have this out here and now.”

  “Very well. Explain your heresy to me.”

  “You’ve seen me use the Force. You have to admit it is real.”

  “I’ve seen things. They may have been tricks. Talk.”

  “The Force is generated by life. It binds all things together. It’s in everything—the water, the stone, the trees in the forest. I am a Jedi Knight. We’re born with an aptitude for the Force, an ability to sense it, to control it—to guard its balance.”

  “Balance?”

  Anakin hesitated. How to explain sight to a blind man? “The Force is light and life, but it is also darkness. Both are necessary, but they have to be kept balanced. In harmony.”

  “Putting aside the stupidity of that whole idea,” Rapuung said, “you’re telling me you Jeedai Knights keep this ‘balance’? How? By rescuing your comrades? By killing
Yuuzhan Vong? Does fighting my people bring balance in this Force? How can it, when you admit we do not exist in it? You can move a rock, but you cannot move me.”

  “That’s sometimes true,” Anakin admitted.

  “Very well. If your superstition demands you seek to balance this mysterious power, why are the Yuuzhan Vong your concern? Why bother with us at all?”

  “Because you’ve invaded our galaxy, killed our people, stolen our worlds. You don’t expect us to fight back?”

  “I expect warriors to fight, to embrace pain and death, to sing the song of slaughter with bloody lips. That is what Yuuzhan Vong do, and we do it not to bring balance, but truth. What you describe makes no sense. Tell me—are the Yuuzhan Vong part of this ‘dark side’ you speak of?”

  Anakin looked at him frankly. “I think so.”

  “Does your magical Force tell you this?”

  “No. Because—”

  “Because we do not exist in it. It is not a part of us or we a part of it. So again, how do you judge us a part of your dark side?”

  “By your actions,” Anakin said.

  “Actions? We kill in battle. You kill in battle. We kill in stealth. You kill in stealth. You fight for your people. I fight for mine.”

  “It’s our galaxy!”

  “The gods have given it to us. They have commanded we bring you the truth. This Force of yours is for lesser beings, those who do not know the gods.”

  “I do not accept that,” Anakin said.

  “And yet you would have me accept something I cannot see or smell? Something you merely tell me exists? Do you believe in the gods?”

  Anakin hesitated, then tried again. “You’ve seen me use the Force.”

  “I’ve seen you do amazing things. I haven’t seen you do anything that we Yuuzhan Vong could not accomplish. Our dovin basals can move planets. Our yammosks and even the lowly lambent you hold there can speak mind to mind. I admit what I see—that you have powers I do not have. I need not believe your superstitions as to where these powers come from.”

  “Then don’t,” Anakin said hotly.

  “And what does all of this have to do with building your abominable weapon?”

  “A lightsaber is more than just an ordinary weapon. Each Jedi builds his or her own. The pieces are bound together by the Force and by the Jedi’s will and make something greater than the sum of its parts. It becomes a thing alive in the Force.”

  “It is made of inanimate parts. It cannot be alive.”

  “All living things are made of inanimate parts, if you look small enough,” Anakin pointed out. “Nothing is really inanimate. As I said, the Force is in everything. There will be something of me in my lightsaber, and something of this lambent in me.”

  Vua Rapuung nodded thoughtfully. “I begin to see the roots of your foul heresy, now. You make use of abominations because you somehow think them alive?”

  Anakin stood abruptly. “I’ve explained what I’m going to do. Will you oppose me? Are you going to snap when I start fighting your people with my lightsaber?”

  Vua Rapuung glared at him in the dim light of the lambent. Anakin could hear his teeth clicking together.

  “The gods led me to you,” he said at last. “Not Yun-Shuno, that many-eyed mother of snivelers, but Yun-Yuuzhan himself. He told me in a vision that the Jeedai infidel with his blade of light would lead me to my revenge and vindication. That is why I followed you down here, when my instincts screamed against it. It is why I did not kill you when you used the first abomination. Everything you say sounds to me as a lie. The reasons you give for me to accept your weapon make no sense. But Yun-Yuuzhan has spoken to me.”

  “Then you accept what I told you about the Force?”

  “Of course not. As I said before, I can admit that what my senses tell me is true without believing your delirious justification of it. Your weapon may be acceptable to the gods; your heresy is not. Build your blade.”

  With that, Rapuung stalked off into the darkness.

  “And you say I don’t make any sense,” Anakin sighed.

  Disappointment edged at Anakin, but he fought it back.

  He could feel the lambent, but not in the Force, not the way he could feel everything else about his weapon. Everything was in place, fitted, ready to work. But what he had told Rapuung was the truth; the real moment a lightsaber became a Jedi’s weapon was when the first amperes of power trickled through it, when each piece became a part of the other and a part of the Jedi building it.

  But the lambent was resisting that. Well, not resisting actually, but not going along with the whole scheme, either.

  And time was passing, each moment bringing Tahiri closer to something terrible.

  Concentrate, he thought. There is no try.

  But there was failure, especially here. Master Yoda’s words, his entire philosophy, required the presence of the Force in everything.

  But the Force wasn’t in the Yuuzhan Vong. It wasn’t in their biotech. They could be fought only indirectly, with things that could be sensed in the Force.

  Something slapped him, then, something that had been cocking its hand back for a long time.

  Master Yoda was wrong.

  The Jedi were wrong, and Vua Rapuung was right. If the Jedi stood for nothing but seeking balance in the Force, then he did have no business fighting the Yuuzhan Vong. Oh, he could rescue Tahiri; after all, preventing her from becoming a dark Jedi was at the core of the philosophy. But were actions—however bad or evil they seemed—were the actions of the Yuuzhan Vong in and of themselves worth opposing if they had no effect on the Force?

  To be sure, the aliens were killing people, which always disturbed the Force. But did it unbalance it? The Yuuzhan Vong weren’t gathering dark energy about themselves. If anyone ran the risk of doing that, it was Jedi like Kyp and maybe even himself. Seen like that, fighting the Yuuzhan Vong was more likely to unbalance the Force than any action they themselves might take.

  Sure, that all made sense. It almost sounded like something Jacen or Uncle Luke would say. But that was all predicated on the certainty that the Force was in everything.

  And it wasn’t. And while the facts of the matter were staring them all in the face, no Jedi had had the guts to confront the new reality. Instead they were acting like spoiled children, complaining that the Yuuzhan Vong didn’t play fair, weren’t following those black-and-white rules. So Kyp went out to shoot them, to try to make the problem go away by killing it. Jacen huddled away in indecision. Maybe he was right.

  No. It wasn’t right for the Yuuzhan Vong to kill whole planets. It wasn’t right for them to enslave people. Those actions were evil, they were wrong, and they had to be fought. If the Force did not draw that line and set great dark-side alarms wailing, then maybe Anakin didn’t serve the Force. Or to put it more precisely, he served something more fundamental than the Force, something of which the Force was a manifestation, an emanation—a tool. Not Rapuung’s gods, or any god, but some fundamental truth built into the universe at a subatomic level. In his galaxy, the Force was the servant of that truth. Wherever the Yuuzhan Vong were from, some other manifestation must prevail. But light remained light, and dark, dark. And whatever had happened to the Yuuzhan Vong, they had turned to the dark side long ago. If the Empire of Palpatine had prevailed and traveled to another galaxy on an errand of conquest, a galaxy where the Force was not known, what evidence would the people there have of the light side of the Force? Could they know that the Empire was an aberration of what ought to be? No. Similarly, Anakin didn’t know—couldn’t know—what manifestation of the light the Yuuzhan Vong had left behind them. But they had left it behind.

  Maybe this was even the result of a whole people turning entirely to the dark side. Maybe the Force simply rejected them, or they it.

  That didn’t make them all evil, any more than everyone who served the Empire was evil. But it made them worth opposing. Without anger or hatred, yes. But they had to be stopped, and Anakin Solo would
never turn his eyes from that.

  With a sudden surge of confidence, he reached for the parts of his lightsaber in the Force and then pressed deeper.

  So he had to work indirectly with the Yuuzhan Vong and their things. Fine. But behind the seeming disunity, there must be unity.

  And in a flash of epiphany he had it. The link between the rest of his lightsaber and the lambent was Anakin Solo. It was in him the changes had to happen.

  Power surged and crackled, and the cavern echoed with a snap-hiss, and somewhere Vua Rapuung snarled.

  Anakin opened his eyes to the purple glow of his lightsaber and felt a grin slash his face in half.

  “I am Jedi again,” he said quietly.

  Perhaps a new kind of Jedi altogether.

  “Two cycles have come and gone,” Vua Rapuung growled, a few moments later. His features were hollow in the violet glow. “Your abominable weapon works, it seems. Are we done with skulking? May we at last embrace our foes?”

  “You embrace them,” Anakin said. “I’m going to knock them down. Your shapers want Jedi? One is coming to them.”

  PART THREE

  CONQUEST

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mezhan Kwaad curled her headdress in recognition at Nen Yim as she entered the laboratory.

  “Detail your progress, Adept,” the master said. Her tone was curt and her tendrils suggested irritation.

  “We made good progress in your absence, Master,” Nen Yim said cautiously. “I think with only minor genetic adjustments, the memory implants will be permanent. She resists them less than she did when last you were here.”

  “Yes,” Mezhan Kwaad replied, anger twitching her tendrils. “Valuable days, missed.” She turned to Nen Yim. “But at least you were here, my adept, and competent to carry on.”

  Nen Yim watched Mezhan Kwaad cross to the vivarium. The Jeedai still had a blank look most of the time, but now and then Nen Yim thought she saw something working behind those alien green eyes. Something more Yuuzhan Vong than human.