by Kathy Tyers
“With what?” Jaina asked bitterly.
“Just help me get the mining laser up here,” Leia said. “They still haven’t shut down the main power plant.”
“What about lifting something out of that pit,” Jaina suggested, “using the Force? And just dropping it on them? They wouldn’t have a clue where we are.”
“We could smash them,” Leia said, “or we could try to get some prisoners released.”
“How’s that?”
As Leia explained her sketchy plan, Jacen scrambled up alongside his sister.
“We need you,” Leia said bluntly, hoping he had finally settled his mind. She explained what they wanted to do.
Jacen stared out over the scene. His eyebrows lifted, and he looked bitterly unhappy. “Mom, I … I can’t,” he murmured. “Jaina, you know size doesn’t matter. You can do it. Draw on my strength, if you want to. But this is it. The vortex, the critical moment. I can feel it. I don’t … dare … misstep.”
“Either help us or get out of the way.” Jaina’s brown eyes blazed. “Deserter.”
“Olmahk can’t use the Force, and he’s no deserter.”
Leia frowned, hearing the frustration in Jacen’s voice. She’d never refused to use the Force this way. Still, she hadn’t kept up her training. She’d obviously set Jacen a lousy example, and he was taking it one step further.
Jaina crept forward another half meter, almost to the roof’s edge. One earlobe poked out from underneath her sky-blue cap.
“Okay, Mom. Just lean into the Force, then lean into me. You can do that.”
Leia’s frustration eased a bit. Jaina had figured out how to take charge, even how to give her mother orders without rubbing Leia’s nose in her relative ineptitude.
Leia pushed down inside herself, toward the sensation of pure life that always was there—not a nothingness at all, but a spot that teemed with power and life. Even with hope, she sensed, as she reached out from that spot toward her daughter. For once, their similarity worked for them instead of dividing them. Jaina seemed to wield Leia’s Force energy easily. Slitting one eye open, determined to watch—though she didn’t dare to stop concentrating—Leia saw an ore-smashing droid rise out of the construction shop.
Yuuzhan Vong on that side of the pit scattered. The monsters snapped at it but missed. On the other side of the pit, refugees jumped to their feet. Their guards stomped toward them, turning their backs on the disaster that sailed through the air.
Leia went cold as the Force stopped flowing. The machine smashed to ground, catching at least five Yuuzhan Vong warriors underneath it. Other aliens dashed into nearby garden huts, pitiful shelter.
A Vuvrian leapt to his feet and shouted, “Run! Scatter!”
The throng seemed to explode. People dashed in all directions. Aliens riding their saddled creatures brought some down, but others sprinted, singly and in groups, out of the herders’ range.
Leia hoped some would find the bolt-holes. Deeply satisfied, she exhaled and eyed her daughter. Jaina had rolled onto her back, panting.
“Well done,” Leia murmured.
Jaina smiled crookedly at her, then eyed her brother. “Thanks so much, Jacen.”
He lay prone, staring down his blaster sights, biting his lip.
“All right,” Leia said. “The admin building’s main shaft goes straight down three levels, below ground. The laser should be under guard on the second level.”
“Should be,” Jaina muttered. “What do you bet Nom Anor sabotaged it?”
“Maybe not,” Jacen insisted. “Olmahk and I will cover you.”
Good—except for one more thing Leia had to say.“Listen,” she muttered. “I’m point on this mission, and I’m coming back up here. With Olmahk,” she added, staring down her scowling bodyguard. “If anything happens, get away. Before we move the laser, I’ll show you the way out. You’re my hope for our future. Both of you, and Anakin, and your whole generation of young Jedi. If you carry it on, I can—well, just don’t fail the people who are counting on you.”
“Come on,” Jaina snapped. “We’ve got work to do.”
Exactly the right touch. Jaina was right: No more time for the overture. On with the show.
Leia jumped from the hydroponics plant’s rooftop to a window ledge on the admin building. From there, it was a quick scramble into a vacant office.
Abbela’s.
Fortunately, the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to be congregating at the pit. The office was empty. She considered unhooking her lightsaber, then decided she’d leave lightsaber work to Jacen and Jaina. Drawing her blaster, she started down the dark stairs as silently as possible.
One flight below ground, Leia paused with Olmahk and waited for her twins to catch up.
“Laser,” she murmured, pointing toward a side chamber.
Two blurred smudges marked the dust beside it, and she knew Abbela’s guards had met their mistress’s fate. Between those smudges, not quite so close to the laser, a broad swath had been swept in the dust, as if an even larger corpse had been dragged away.
Randa? she wondered. Where was Basbakhan?
“But I’m going to show you the way out first,” she said.
Jaina shook her head. “I’m going up to the roof with you.”
“No.” Holding her blaster at the ready, Leia silently pushed the next door.
A storeroom filled with storage crates—nitrates, potassium compounds, micronutrients—was dimly lit by a glow lamp near the exit. Leia saw no sign of intruders. Even the dust had a spackled, untrodden look.
Leia stepped through, toward a hatch that looked like one more permastone panel. She tugged it slightly open and jerked her head aside.
“Tunnel. To the mines,” she murmured.
Jaina rolled her eyes. Jacen frowned at his twin, crinkling his lips.
Leia led the way back out. From a canister beside the metal-sheathed power conduit, she took a handful of sand and strewed it out onto the floor, masking their footprints.
Olmahk lingered at the door. As Leia opened it again, she heard harsh voices from the main level and heavy footsteps going up the steps. She held still and waited. In a minute or so, the voices stopped.
But were they really gone? She’d gotten used to being able to sense living presences through the Force. Around Yuuzhan Vong, she felt half-blind.
She glanced aside at her daughter, wearing her mask, then at her son, with his cap pulled down snugly. She pushed the door the rest of the way open.
No one challenged her.
She led across the open area, headed toward the laser.
She’d almost reached it when a harsh shout spun her around. A Yuuzhan Vong warrior in black armor stood on the stairs, sweeping something off a bandolier.
“Go!” she shouted. “Back!”
She fired off a shot, but her blaster bolt only glanced off his armor. She aimed under his arms, at the known weak spot.
A gray streak vaulted past her. Olmahk plunged toward the Yuuzhan Vong’s throat.
A second alien vaulted over the balcony, hit the ground running, and came at her. Leia fell against the duracrete door, slamming it shut with her children on the other side. She didn’t stop firing until the alien’s hands closed on her shoulders, wrenched her away from the door, and then drove her against it.
She crumpled into darkness.
Jacen pounded down the laser-straight tunnel, chasing Jaina. She ran as if she had an assassin droid at her heels.
“Do you have any idea what direction we’re going?” he demanded.
“North. When we hit the main mines, bear to the right, toward the transmitter.”
The main mines. Was Nom Anor still down here?
Jacen grabbed her hand. Jaina almost yanked it free.
“What?” she demanded.
“We’ve got to go back,” he said. This made no sense, but at the back of his mind, something huge and white was spinning. “We can’t leave her.”
“What? Hello. Duro to Jace
n. She sent us away. She’s getting real good at that.”
“This doesn’t feel right.” Jacen listened hard, to the place inside himself where he used to find wisdom. It lay silenced. Help, he begged. What do I do?
“This doesn’t feel right,” he repeated. “Go ahead, get to the freighter. Warn Dad what’s going on, call Luke and Mara. Tell them I’m going back.”
In the distance, there was a throbbing head.
Leia didn’t want to get anywhere near it, but something kept pushing her closer, until finally she went inside.
Then she realized she was lying on her back, eyes tightly closed.
Memory returned in pieces. She didn’t move, barely dared to breathe, waiting for some hint, some clue, of where she lay. She didn’t feel any bonds, any shock cuffs, any binders—anything amiss except that horrible headache, centered behind her left ear.
She did know enough about using the Force to turn that down a few notches.
Then she listened hard.
“Get up, Administrator Organa Solo.”
The voice seemed to echo, and she recognized it. She lay still a moment longer, reaching out with her other senses. All other humans must have fled the building. Most vitally, she couldn’t feel Jacen or Jaina close by. Either they’d escaped, or …
No. The Yuuzhan Vong had not killed them.
“We are aware,” the familiar voice said, “of when you regained consciousness. Get up. Show the courage that proves you worthy.”
Then she knew the voice. She’d heard it over her comlink, but never in person.
She opened her eyes. They showed a gray, weirdly slanted duracrete ceiling.
Stairwell. She’d been felled outside the storeroom. At the edge of her vision, duracrete spiraled up into the distance.
A Yuuzhan Vong stood between her and the nearest gray wall. He was smaller than many, with most of his head covered by tattoos. What little hair he had grew in a black tuft at the back. He wore a khaki-colored tunic over a thinner-looking version of the black body armor. But his face …
The nose was barely present, like two dark holes opening directly into his skull. The right eye was pale blue, with the eerie stripe of a feline pupil. The thing in his left socket was no eye. It looked leathery, except at the center, where a vertical slit split it like another pupil.
The creature held her lightsaber in one hand.
“Dr. Cree’Ar, I presume,” she said. “Or should I say, Nom Anor?”
“We have met,” he said, stretching his lips in a parody of a smile.
She sat up, rested her back against a rough wall, and straightened her head wrap. Now she saw three more of the alien warriors, one standing guard on the next landing up, two more behind her ersatz researcher.
“So you solved our problems,” she said, “using Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology.”
“In part,” he said. “I have dabbled in the kind of alchemy that can change your more useless microbes into powerful tools.”
“You made Mara sick. But here, you were only stalling. Distracting us.”
“You learn wisdom.”
“I suppose,” she said, also stalling—in the hope that her children would be far away before the aliens realized she hadn’t come alone.
Alone? What about Olmahk?
For her to be here, they must have killed him.
Chewie, Elegos, Abbela, and now Olmahk. Again, they made this war personal.
“I suppose,” she went on, “you actually have everything you’ll need to clean up Duro yourselves.”
“That is nothing to you. If the warmaster chooses to do so, he will.”
Warmaster? “Who is that?”
The alien’s lips drew back, exposing even more of his teeth. “Get up,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”
Her legs moved stiffly. Nom Anor and his muscular cronies walked her up the stairs, into her own office-quarters.
The alien who waited between her equipment lockers and her desk was half a head taller than even his tallest guard. Large, rust-colored armor scales covered his body from neck to knees. His lips had multiple slits, his elongated head was tattooed, and a channel-like groove crossed the top of his head, almost from one ear to the other. She didn’t want to guess how he’d gotten it.
A smaller alien, with painful-looking black burn scars crossing her cheeks, offered the warmaster something on a tray. As he picked it up, pinching it delicately between claws that extended from each fingertip and knuckle, she saw that it looked like a worm.
She glanced aside. She’d left her bunk rumpled, rising in a hurry. The remains of her breakfast still sat on a plate beside the focus cooker. On her desk’s other side, near the tall alien, her equipment lockers hung open. Most of their contents lay on the duracrete floor, smashed into a tangle of ruined components.
The big alien tilted his head slightly and let the worm slide into his left ear.
Leia shuddered and planted her feet a shoulder’s width apart. She needed to stall him long enough for Luke and Mara to get back with reinforcements. Long enough for the refugees to escape.
“Warmaster,” she said, “your seizure of this dome, this planet, is utterly illegal. You may not—”
“Silence,” he ordered.
Over his left shoulder, one of the dark iron sconces still hung on her wall. Something about the intruder’s presence seemed to turn its abstract form into a misshapen, multihorned head.
Leia had faced down Borsk Fey’lya. She’d defied Grand Moff Tarkin and a dozen other petty tyrants, but this creature lived by utterly different standards of respect and behavior. She must get through to him. To stop the killing, once and for all.
“Sir,” she said, “we are both leaders. Our people respect us, and we have many things to say to each other. My name is Leia Organa Solo.”
“I know who and what you are. I have vowed to my gods to sacrifice you and your kind. You will merely be the first, and surely one of the most famous Jeedai I give them.”
Leia’s stomach churned. “I am not Jedi,” she said. “Not really.”
“Our reports say otherwise.”
“Your reports are wrong. I have a little training, but that’s all. In this galaxy, we have learned to live alongside each other. Surely, you—”
“We do not live side by side with impurity,” he said. “Your civilization is built on abominations. Your galaxy is polluted. We have come to cleanse it, so that others besides our warrior caste may occupy it and live cleanly here. It is our destiny, according to Supreme Overlord Shimrra and the priests.”
Destiny? She shuddered. “Like this world,” she insisted, sweeping a hand aside, “pollution can be cleansed without killing everyone who lives in it.”
“It will be cleansed,” he answered. “All that mocks life is an abomination. Do you not understand that, Jeedai Organa Solo? Your machines mock life. They are abominable. An affront to life. An insult to the gods, who created all that exists by sacrificing parts of themselves.”
Understanding flashed through her. These people believed that their own creators had mutilated themselves. Naturally, they tried to follow that example.
“We admire your creature-servants,” she said cautiously. “We are deeply impressed by your biotechnology. May I suggest that you, too, have much to learn from us?”
“We are learning,” he said somberly. “We have seen that you deny the all-transcendent reality. Instead of learning the most worthy way to meet it, you forestall it, or pretend it does not ultimately own you … forever.”
“We have also developed creature-servants capable of healing,” she said, rising to the argument. “We call them bacta. Other creature-servants help us make food, and—”
“And still you mock death and try to evade its servant, pain. Death, Leia Organa Solo, is the highest truth of the universe.”
“No,” she said. “Life is the highest truth.”
“Death ends life.”
“There can be no death where there has been no life. L
ife binds the galaxy together. Life—”
“Silence, blasphemer!”
The force of his shout drove her back half a step, but Leia was in her element now. “Sir,” she said, determined to try angle after angle until she forced his vision open a hair, just a hair. “You and I can speak because we are alive. Your gods—” Yes, he’d definitely mentioned gods, plural. “Your gods can only be served by the living, not the dead.”
“You know nothing.”
He turned slightly aside and said something in a strange, guttural language. Behind her, one of her guards laughed horribly, and she realized she must’ve said something that seemed unutterably stupid from their point of view.
“What is it you want, here at Duro?” she asked. “You,” he said, “who mock death, will meet it very soon. Then, for Yun-Yammka—the true master of war—we will purify this world of the abominable machines in their orbits.”
The Duros’ cities, she realized with a sinking sensation. Millions of lives.
“We will preserve the people you call refugees, though. Their labor is needed for the task of cleansing this world.” He nodded at Nom Anor. “Finally, Duro will become our platform to take other worlds. The ones you call the Core.”
Leia’s head felt light, as if it were floating over her shoulders. They meant to take everything—and she no longer doubted that they could.
“Sir,” she said, “even the gods can’t want you to remove all other life from the—”
“You do not speak for the gods! But soon, you will speak to them. Tell my master, Yun-Yammka, that more of your kind—more Jeedai, our most powerful enemies in this galaxy—will crawl into his presence. Give him that message when you meet him, Ambassador.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
One of Leia’s captors stalked closer, brandishing a creature with a tiny body and long, outward-curving claws. Did they mean to sacrifice her here and now? Leia backstepped.
“Wait,” she exclaimed. “I want to know more about these gods of yours.”
The warmaster’s laugh was a horrible bass rumble. “That is wisdom speaking. There will be time.”
The other alien seized her left arm. The creature he held took her wrist between one pair of claws, then grabbed her other arm, holding her as effectively as a pair of stun cuffs.