Star Wars The New Jedi Order - Hero's Trial - Book 4

by James Luceno

  " Do-ro'ik vong pratte! "

  Then several things happened at once.

  As if possessed of a will of its own, the man's skin peeled back from his face, revealing a macabre, misshapen mask of whorls and undulating lines. Undercurrent to his scream, ripping and popping sounds emanated from beneath his clothing; then two torrents of gelatinous muck poured from his pants legs, consolidated into one mass, and streaked away like an animated oil slick.

  Elan leapt to her feet and reared back against the wall, hissing and snarling at the intruder and curving her long fingers into claws.

  "Assassin!" she shrieked through bared teeth. "They've found me!"

  Yintal swung around and stepped in front of the assassin, only to take a backhand to the face that snapped his neck like a twig. The small man flew clear across the room, colliding with Showolter and dropping him to the floor.

  The assassin was preparing to throw himself at Elan when he was suddenly attacked from behind by Mobvekhar and Khakraim, their sinewy limbs and lumpy craniums displaying scarlet bruises and wounds. The two Noghri drove the Yuuzhan Vong forward into the side wall of the hut, narrowly missing Elan, who ducked at the last moment and rolled herself under the cot.

  The Yuuzhan Vong met the wall facefirst with bone-shattering force, and for a moment it seemed that he would succumb to the Noghri's slashing assault. All at once, however, he straightened, propelling the two commandos off him with such power that they sailed to the far sides of the room, crashing into opposite walls and collapsing to the floor.

  The Yuuzhan Vong whipped around, flinging blood in all directions, his closely set eyes searching the room. Barreling between Kalenda and Eicroth, whom he toppled like rag dolls, he overturned the cot with one hand and grabbed hold of Elan with the other. His fingers vised around the priestess's long neck, and he lifted her off her feet and pressed her to the wall.

  At the same instant, Mobvekhar regained consciousness. Powerful legs launching him off the floor, he caught the assassin around the waist and sank his teeth into the enemy's back.

  The Yuuzhan Vong howled. Swinging a flailing Elan to one side, he used his free fist to rain hammer blows on the Noghri fastened to him. Mobvekhar grunted and moaned as the air was driven from his lungs, but he clung tenaciously to his prey.

  Dazed, Kalenda struggled to her feet, gave her head a clearing shake, then leapt onto the assassin's pumping arm, which she rode up and down for a moment, until the Yuuzhan Vong hurled her aside like some minor inconvenience. Her head struck something solid, and she blacked out. Bright shapes punctuated the momentary darkness; then, contorted in a corner of the room, she had an upside-down view of Showolter, his poncho twisted around his neck, crawling out from under Yintal and drawing a small blaster from a shoulder holster.

  From a prone position - and careful to miss Mobvekhar, who had been driven to the floor - the major fired, catching the Yuuzhan Vong between the shoulder blades. Smells of ozone and burned flesh mingled in the air, but the assassin barely reacted. Showolter fired again, catching the Yuuzhan Vong in the back of the neck and setting his hair on fire.

  Showolter fired a final time.

  The assassin stiffened and crumpled to the floor in a scorched heap, his left hand still clasped to Elan's throat. Bleeding from her nose and eyes, the priestess pried open his thick fingers and slid down the wall, gasping for air.

  Gracelessly, Kalenda somersaulted, and was bellying forward to help Elan when the hut was rocked by a powerful explosion. Showolter's comlink chimed, and he fumbled it out of his pocket.

  "Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers," someone reported over the link. "Maybe half a dozen, executing strafing runs over New Nystao. Soothfast has been alerted. Starfighters are on their way."

  Showolter clamped his hand around Kalenda's forearm. "Move her into the hardened area," he rasped, coughing up blood. "Now!"

  At the cold edge of the star system in which Wayland orbited, a solitary Yuuzhan Vong gunboat lurked. On the bridge, Nom Anor stood before a visual field fashioned by distant signal villips, observing coralskippers and New Republic Starfighters exchanging fire in the skies over New Nystao.

  "Don't try too hard," he said aloud to the pilots who manned the coralskippers. "Just enough to convince them."

  ELEVEN Through the Happy Dagger 's wraparound slit of cockpit viewport, Han gazed queasily at the mottled indifference of hyperspace. Alongside him Roa dozed in the pilot's seat, snoring softly, and behind him one of the ship's droids was monitoring the navicomputer.

  If only time were as easily outraced as light, Han thought. Then he might jump forward to a point where Sernpidal was a distant memory, or perhaps backward to a point before that harrowing day on the planet, so that he might restructure the events and put things right.

  As it was, he was trapped in a tragic moment, compelled to relive it over and again ...

  The Falcon , taking on evacuees, hovering just above the bucking surface of Sernpidal. The small moon called Dobido caught in the grip of a Yuuzhan Vong monstrosity and descending.

  Chewie on the ground with a kid under each massive arm, the wind tearing at his coat. Then Chewie and Anakin using blaster bolts and the Force to free a downed shuttle of rubble that held it fast.

  The Falcon holding its own in a deafening wind, as Chewie rescued another child, thrusting him up into Han's arms as he dangled from the extended ramp.

  Sernpidal heaving and breaking apart.

  Chewie lifting Anakin in his arms. His resigned expression as he tossed Anakin to Han. The frightful wail of the Falcon 's repulsorlift engines; the ship drifting up and to one side as Han, a group of evacuees holding him by the legs, reached desperately for Chewie.

  The pitching surface carrying Chewie away.

  Anakin hurrying to the bridge, weaving the upended Falcon through quickly narrowing alleys and around collapsing buildings. A fleeting view of Chewie, his back to the Falcon and his long arms upraised to Dobido, a plummeting streak of fire.

  The arrival of Tosi-karu .

  A searing wind that burned Han's face and hands and sent Chewie flying and buildings toppling. The Falcon 's shields groaning in protest.

  Chewie once more, his blood-matted coat ... regaining his footing ... standing high on a pile of rubble, roaring defiantly at the seized moon, as if to hurl it back where it belonged.

  The Falcon, still in Anakin's hands, clawing for space, abandoning Chewie to fate.

  Han's first utterance to his son "You left him."

  The memory of those words as heartrending, as piercing, as Chewie's death. A condemnation uttered in grief, and impossible all these months later to rescind.

  Hollowed by anguish, Han squeezed his eyes shut and balled his hands. How long might he remain thus still dangling from the Falcon 's ramp, arms extended to Chewie -

  Beside him, Roa stirred, yawned loudly, and stretched his arms over his head. He blinked and swiveled to the droid at the navicomputer.

  "Are we nearly there?"

  "The ship will shortly revert to realspace, Master Roa."

  Roa grinned at Han. "Like old times, isn't it, you and me on a run?"

  Han forced himself from harsh reflection, his blood rushing like acid through his veins. "I remember that first Kessel Run like it was yesterday."

  Roa's smile became enigmatic. "Speaking of Kessel, I've been meaning to ask you something. Now, granted, stories can change quite a bit in traveling from Tatooine to Bonadan. But the way I heard it, you claimed to have made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs."

  Han said nothing in a blank-faced definite way.

  "Well?" Roa pressed.

  "Ancient history, Roa. And that was always my worst subject."

  "Think hard. I'll grade you on a curve."

  Han showed the palms of his hands. "Look, Jabba was breathing down my neck for dumping a load of spice. Chewie and I needed the work, and sometimes you do or say whatever you have to."

  "But it's true - you actually made it under tw
elve?"

  Han brought his fingertips to his chest. "Would I make up something like that? When brag, I mean every word of it."

  Roa regarded him for a moment, then burst out laughing. "Ah, Han, whatever became of those days? Whatever became of chasing fortune and glory?"

  "There's no future in it." Han gave his head a quick shake. "Still, the idea that decent guys like Reck would willingly throw in with the enemy ... The Yuuzhan Vong make the Hutts seem like schoolyard bullies. They make Palpatine seem like an enlightened despot."

  "Perhaps. But the winning side is paying better," Roa said soberly. "Besides, credits don't have to come from clean hands to be appreciated by Reck and his ilk."

  Han smiled. "You've become quite the philosopher in your old age."

  Roa's shoulders heaved in a shrug. "When your partner dies, you suddenly have a lot of time to think." He looked at Han. "You've probably found that out."

  Han said nothing.

  The navicomputer chimed.

  "Master Roa, we are emerging from hyperspace," the droid announced.

  Roa and Han swiveled to the control console to prepare the Happy Dagger for sublight.

  "Sublight engaged," Roa said shortly.

  Han flipped a final switch. "Shields are enabled."

  Elongated, blue-shifted light tunneled them into realspace. Abruptly, the lines collapsed to pinpoints, rotating slightly before coalescing into a star field, each distant sun like a piercing to an alternate reality. Save for a brief shudder, the ship executed the transition smoothly.

  "Entering the Anobis system," the droid reported.

  "Anobis?" Han said in surprise. "This place is the back end of nowhere. I can't see even Reck wanting to hide out here."

  Roa was shaking his head when Han looked at him. "Anobis is only a side-door entry to our final destination. A direct jump might have landed us in the midst of an enemy flotilla or an Imperial Remnant patrol." He aimed a thick finger out the starboard viewport. "Take a look at that."

  Han swiveled to the right. Almost close enough to touch floated the holed and battle-scorched remains of a Star Destroyer. Listed to, port and nimbused by debris, the great ship's command, tower and pointed bow had been blown away. Her once-gleaming aft plating was pockmarked by immense blackened craters. Power cables and ducting trailed from her ruptured innards. Han thought back to the attack on Yuuzhan Vong-held Helska 4 and the Star Destroyer Rejuvenator that had gone down with nearly all hands aboard.

  "Do we have a fighting chance against these thugs?" Roa asked.

  "The Yuuzhan Vong wouldn't have it any other way." Han swung from the view. "So just where are we going, Roa?"

  Roa tapped his forefinger on a star chart he called up on a display screen. "Ord Mantell."

  Han's mouth fell open a bit, then he threw his head back and launched an explosive laugh at the ceiling.

  Roa regarded him quizzically. "Worried about running into someone from your past?"

  "Someone from the here and now," Han muttered. "My wife."

  Ord Mantell was still the same undistinguished sphere Han remembered from previous visits, which had been many over the years, some intentional, more by misadventure. But something new had been added since Han's stint as grand marshal of the Blockade Runners Derby a small space station of outmoded ring design, pieced together from salvaged and Hutt-supplied parts by a consortium of Mid Rim engineering companies. Parts of the station - two of its spokes and perhaps ten degrees of the outer ring - were still incomplete, and were likely to remain that way for some time to come, since construction crews had abandoned the project after the destruction of Ithor.

  The Jubilee Wheel , Roa called it.

  "Except for the gravitation debt, the station doesn't have much to do with Ord Mantell," he told Han from the pilot's seat of the Happy Dagger . "It was a free port. A highly successful one, until the Yuuzhan Vong invasion put a damper on trade. Now it's a transit point, filled with some of the most desperate types you're ever likely to meet."

  "Long as our business doesn't take us down the well, I'm ready for anything," Han said. "It's Ord Mantell that's been bad luck for me."

  Roa nodded, "Then we'll have to do our best to keep our feet from touching the ground."

  Awaiting docking assignments, ships of all types were queued up around the station. Some were empty freighters and barges with nowhere to go - their home ports occupied by the Yuuzhan Vong or their holding companies bankrupted by the war - filled with half-starved spacers caught in a political no-man's-land. Others were fifty-year-old crimson-red diplomatic cruisers, and warships recently recommissioned from mothballed fleets. Then there were the passenger transports - including several shallow bowl-shaped Ithorian herd ships - crammed with displaced beings from conquered or immolated worlds, also in search of some planet to call home, even temporarily. And catering to the needs of those refugees with credits to spend were aged scows and tenders, crewed by pirates selling dreams of a new life to the blindly optimistic.

  Waiting for clearance, Roa and Han passed the time running checks on the SoroSuub 3000's security systems and generally battening down the hatch^ The crowded and filthy docking bay the ship was finally allocated had been salvaged from an MC80 cruiser and, in fact, still bore some of the original Mon Calamari markings.

  First down the ramp, while Roa saw to lockdown procedures, Han was confronted by a group of five aliens of a species he had never encountered.

  "You need perhaps someone to watch over your ship?" their spokesman asked above the din, in whistling, heavily accented Basic.

  Han eyed the alien up and down. "I need perhaps someone to watch over you."

  The alien - clearly a male - took a moment to catch on, then laughed loudly, a hearty, basso laugh that almost made Han smile.

  A head shorter than Han, he was a biped with muscular legs and a slender yet useful-looking tail. Those parts of him left unconcealed by a colorful vest and strategically slit culottes were covered with short, smoke-colored fuzz, save for the backs of his forearms and tail, where the hair was darker in hue, stiff as slender rods, and possibly capable of inflicting damage.

  Like the two other males in the group, the one who approached Han had a soft snow-white mustache that drooped past his pointed chin, and a fright wig of matching white hair. His front-facing eyes were large and bright; his nose was a chitinous beak that curved down over a thin-lipped mouth and was perforated like a musical instrument.

  Slightly smaller than the males', the two women of the group were about the same size, with shapely curves to their compact bodies and splashes of vibrant color highlighting velvety, taupe coats. They lacked the drooping mustachios, and in place of crests had lustrous slicked-back hair that fell to the shoulders. The tips of their smooth tails looked as if they had been dipped in sky-blue paint. Jewelry of a sort hung in loops from their long necks, accented their small ears and five-fingered hands, and studded their nostrils.

  "All right, all right," their mouthpiece was saying, "you perhaps prefer to have someone clean and detail the ship?"

  Han put his hands on his hips and laughed. He was still sniggering when Roa came down the ramp followed by two of the Happy Dagger 's crew - Void and an EV supervisor droid, whose head resembled the curving bill of a large, fruit-eating avian.

  "Roa, you want to hire this bunch to sonic the carpets and clean the 'freshers?"

  Roa regarded the aliens with keen interest. "That's what the droids are for," he told the spokesman.

  "Then we watch over the ship. Lots of thieves about."

  "I do appreciate the offer," Roa said congenially, "but no thanks. Some other time, perhaps."

  The aliens exchanged words in their melodic native language, nodded to Han and Roa, and moved off toward the neighboring ship in the bay, an old Sienar Marauder -class corvette.

  "It's like somebody tossed a manka cat and a woolamander into a blender," Han said, watching the aliens.

  "Ryn," Roa said, identifying the species. "I us
ed to run into them occasionally on out-of-the-way worlds in the CorpSec - Ession, Ninn, Matra VI. They're nomads - that is, when they're not being hunted or enslaved, chased from one place to another, or made the scapegoat for someone else's crimes or misdemeanors. They've a reputation for thievery and confidence games. but I've never had a problem with them. They work hard, at just about any trade, from ship salvaging to jewelry making. And I'll tell you, Han, they perform the most exhilarating music I've ever heard - music you can't help but dance to."

  "I'm sure I could stop myself," Han said.

  "No, riot even you could. I'm not talking about jizz or any of the new music. I mean fiery, passionate music."

  Han gave them another look. "Where's their home-world?"

  Roa shook his head. "No one's ever been able to tell me."

  Han laughed through his nose. "Just when you think you've seen it all."

  Leaving the droids in charge, they headed for immigration and customs, where long lines of mixed species were undergoing document checks and security scans.

  Han showed his documents, which identified him as Roaky Laamu, a freelance laser-welder. He had considered wearing a disguise - synthskin, prosthetics, a beard - but in the end had opted for simply changing his hairstyle and leaving his face undepilated. He had often used the same approach when traveling with Leia and the kids, and it had usually served him well. After all, most circulated images of him depicted a youthful Alliance leader, with bright eyes, sideburns, and a mop of shiny brown hair.

  Things didn't go awry until he reached the scanners.

  "Open your pack," the young agent ordered in response to a prompt from the droid he was partnered with.

  Han unsealed the pack, and the agent quickly located the blaster, its large scope and conically shaped flash suppressor stowed in a separate case.