by James Luceno
“I still don’t understand how any of that concerns the Jedi,” Jaina remarked.
“Nom Anor was stirring up anger against the Jedi long before he ever came to Rhommamool,” Mara explained. “Here, he’s just found a convenient receptacle for his wrath.”
“And with the Jedi Knights scattered throughout the galaxy, and so many of them following their own agendas, Nom Anor might just find plenty of ammunition to add to his arguments,” Leia added grimly. “I’m glad that my brother is thinking of reestablishing the Jedi Council.”
Mara nodded, but Jaina seemed less convinced. “Jacen doesn’t think that’s such a good idea,” she reminded her mother.
Leia shrugged. Her oldest son, Jaina’s twin, had indeed expressed serious doubts about the course of the Jedi Knights.
“If we can’t bring some sense of order to the galaxy, particularly to isolated planets like Osarian and Rhommamool, then we’re no better than the Empire,” Mara remarked.
“We’re better than the Empire,” Leia insisted.
“Not in Nom Anor’s eyes,” Jaina said.
And Mara reiterated her warning to Leia not to take the man lightly. “He’s the strangest man I ever met,” she explained, and given her past exploits with notorious sorts like Jabba the Hutt and Talon Karrde, that was quite a statement. “Even when I tried to use the Force to gain a better perspective on him, I drew …” Mara paused, as if looking for some way to properly express the feeling. “A blank,” she decided. “As if the Force had nothing to do with him.”
Leia and Jaina looked at her curiously.
“No,” Mara corrected. “More like he had nothing to do with the Force.”
The perfect disconnected ideologue, Leia thought, and she expressed her feelings with a single sarcastic word: “Wonderful.”
He stood on the platform surrounded by his fanatical Red Knights. Before him, ten thousand Rhommamoolians crowded into every open space of the great public square of Redhaven, once the primary trading spaceport of the planet. But those facilities had been leveled in the early days of the uprising, with the Rhommamoolians declaring their independence from Osarian. And more recently, since the coming of Nom Anor as spearhead of the revolution, the place had been renamed the Square of Hopeful Redemption.
Here, the citizens came to declare freedom from Osarian.
Here, the followers came to renounce the New Republic.
Here, the believers came to renounce the Jedi.
And here, the fanatics came to discredit progress and technology, to cry out for a simpler time, when the strength of a being’s legs, and not the weight of his purse, determined how far he could travel, and the strength of his hands, and not the weight of his purse, allowed him to harvest the gifts of nature.
Nom Anor loved it all, the adulation and the fanatical, bordering on suicidal, devotion. He cared nothing for Rhommamool or its inhabitants, cared nothing for the foolish cries for some ridiculous “simpler time.”
But how he loved the chaos his words and followers inflicted upon the order of the galaxy. How he loved the brooding undercurrent of resentment toward the New Republic, and the simmering anger aimed at the Jedi Knights, these supercreatures of the galaxy.
Wouldn’t his superiors be pleased?
Nom Anor flipped his shiny black cape back from his shoulder and held his fist upraised into the air, drawing shrieks of appreciation. In the center of the square, where once had stood the Port-master’s Pavilion, now was a huge pit, thirty meters in diameter and ten deep. Whistles and whines emanated from that pit, along with cries for mercy and pitifully polite words of protest—the voices of droids collected by the folk of Rhommamool and dropped into the hole.
Great cheers erupted from all corners of the square as a pair of the Red Knights entered from one avenue, dragging a 9PO protocol droid between them. They went to the edge of the pit, took up the poor 9PO by the arms and the legs, and on a three-count, launched him onto the pile of metal consisting of the astromech and mine-sniffer droids, the Redhaven street-cleaner droids, and the personal butler droids of the wealthier Rhommamoolian citizens.
When the hooting and cheering died down, Nom Anor opened his hands, revealing a single small stone. Then he clenched his fist again, squeezing with tremendous power, crushing the stone in his grasp so that dust and flecks of rock splinters slipped out the sides.
The signal to begin.
As one the crowd surged forward, lifting great chunks of stone, the debris from the wreckage of the pavilion. They came to the edge of the pit one after another and hurled their heavy missiles at the pile of droids.
The stoning went on for the rest of the afternoon, until the red glare of the sun thinned to a brilliant crimson line along the horizon, until the dozens and dozens of droids were no more than scrap metal and sparking wires.
And Nom Anor, silent and dignified, watched it all somberly, accepting this great tribute his followers had paid to him, this public execution of the hated droids.
Danni Quee looked out from the western terra-tower of ExGal-4, a solitary outpost on the Outer Rim planet of Belkadan in the Dalonbian sector. Danni came here often at this time of day—late afternoon—to watch the Belkadan sunset filtering through the thirty-meter dalloralla trees. Of late, those sunsets had been more spectacular for some reason, with tinges of orange and green edging the typical pinks and crimsons.
She had been on Belkadan for three years, an original member of ExGal-4, and traced her roots to the always underfunded ExGal Society back another three years before that, to when she was only fifteen. Her homeworld, a Core planet, was badly overcrowded, and for independent Danni, even trips to other nearby worlds didn’t seem to alleviate the feeling of being squeezed by too many people. She wasn’t a fan of the government, be it the Empire or the New Republic; she wasn’t a fan of anything bureaucratic. In fact, she considered the “ordering” of the galaxy a terrible thing, robbing people of excitement and adventures, burying cultures beneath the blanket of common civilization. Thus, the notion that there might be life beyond the galaxy, the thought of something undiscovered, excited the young woman.
Or once had.
Now, standing there, staring at the same landscape of towering trees and unbroken green canopy, the young woman wondered again if she had chosen her life’s path correctly. At twenty-one, she was one of the youngest members of the fifteen stationed on ExGal-4, and one of only four women. She had developed into a very attractive young woman, small of frame, with long curly blond hair and green eyes that always seemed to be asking questions of everything they surveyed, and of late, it seemed as if she had spent more time resisting the advances of several young men than in staring out at the galactic rim.
In truth, Danni didn’t blame the young men, though. They had all come out here full of hope and adventure, pioneers on the edge of the galaxy. In short order, they had established a base, a walled fort, actually, to hold out the savage wildlife of Belkadan, and had set up their listening and looking equipment: great dishes and telescopes, including orbiting scopes. That first year had been full of dreams and hard work, and danger—two of the original members had been seriously wounded when a redcrested cougar had leapt over the wall from a nearby tree.
And so the work had continued, clearing the trees back thirty meters, further securing the outpost.
All that work was done now, with ExGal-4 secured and self-contained, with an abundant clear-water well right below them and multiple gardens. A smoothly functioning, scientific outpost.
Danni missed the old days.
Even the faces of those around her had become stale, though half the members were not original colonists, but had rotated in from other ExGal satellite stations, or from the independent ExGal Society’s home base.
The bottom rim of the sun dipped below the distant horizon, and the orange and green tints spread wide from north to south. Somewhere unseen in the jungle, a redcrested cougar gave a long and low growl, heralding the onset of twilight.
<
br /> Danni took it all in and tried to dream, but given the reality of her current tedium, the endless listening for signals that never came, the endless staring at the same intergalactic haze, she wasn’t quite sure of what she should dream about.
Behind her, from one of the windows of the station’s center structure, Yomin Carr watched the young woman’s every move. He was new to the station, the most recent to join the crew, and it hadn’t taken him long to recognize that many of the others looked up to Danni Quee, and that many of the men were obviously attracted to her.
Yomin Carr didn’t understand that sentiment at all. He found Danni, as he did all humans, quite repulsive, for while Yomin Carr’s people, the Yuuzhan Vong, resembled humans in form—though they were on average a dozen or so centimeters taller and quite a bit heavier and had less hair on their heads, both face and scalp—their ways were hardly similar. Even if Yomin Carr might admit that Danni was somewhat attractive physically—though how could she be, with not a single scar or tattoo to mark her rise toward godhood!—those tenet differences, attitude differences, made him consider any union with her with disgust. He was Yuuzhan Vong, not human, and a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. How ironic then that the pitiful humans thought him one of them!
Despite his revulsion, he did watch Danni, and often, for she, above all others, was the leader of this democratic group. According to the others, she had been the one to kill the cougar that had slipped into the compound that first year; she had been the one to take the creaking old Spacecaster shuttle into orbit to repair the damaged orbiting telescope only a couple of months earlier, and she had been the one to figure out how that scope might be repaired in the first place.
They all looked up to her.
She was the one Yomin Carr could not ignore.
“Early again?” came a voice behind Yomin Carr.
He turned to regard the speaker, though he knew from the voice, particularly the teasing tone, that it was Bensin Tomri.
“Or is it that you’re still here from last night?” Tomri went on, and he gave a chuckle.
Yomin Carr smiled, but did not reply—no answer was needed, he understood, for these people often wasted words merely to hear the sound of their own voice. Besides, there was more truth to the words than Bensin Tomri could ever guess. Yomin Carr had not been in here straight through since his shift the previous night, but he had been present more often than not. The others of the station thought it was simply “newbie” excitement, the feeling they had all shared when they had first arrived that the elusive extragalactic signal could happen at any time. In their eyes, Yomin Carr had taken that excitement to the extreme, perhaps, but he had done nothing, he was confident, to arouse any real suspicion.
“He’ll get bored with it soon enough,” Garth Breise said, another of the night-shift controllers, sitting up on the wide room’s higher level, where the comfortable chairs, the gaming table, and the food could be found. The room was elliptical, with a wide viewscreen on the front wall, seven control pods in a three-one-three pattern before it, and the raised galley area taking up the rear quarter.
Yomin Carr forced another smile at the remark and made his way down toward the front of the room, to his usual position at Pod 3, the left-hand one of the first row. He heard Garth and Bensin whispering some remarks about him from above, but he ignored them, taking the attack on his pride—normally a call for a death duel—in stride with the knowledge that soon enough they would know better.
Danni Quee entered next, moving down to Pod 4, the central pod, the one whose viewing scan overlapped the quadrants scanned by all six of the others. Then came the last member of the night shift, Tee-ubo Doole, the Twi’lek woman—the only nonhuman, as far as the others knew, among the fifteen at the station.
Tee-ubo gave Yomin Carr a sly look, almost a wink, and stretched languidly and shifted her lekku, the twin tentacles that grew out of the back of a Twi’lek’s head. She had made no secret of her interest in the newcomer, which amused Yomin Carr greatly. For he was coming to understand these people, and their constant insecurities. Normally a Twi’lek woman, with her exotic lekku and greenish skin, and typically scarce clothing, would be the center of male attention anywhere outside her home planet of Ryloth—and Twi’lek women were known to enjoy such attention greatly!—but Tee-ubo had found more than her match in Danni.
Still looking at Yomin Carr, the Twi’lek held up a small vial and gave it a shake.
Ryll, Yomin Carr knew, a recreational intoxicant that several of the compound members used to alleviate the boredom.
He noted, too, that Danni crinkled her nose in disgust at the sight and even shook her head in disapproval. For a long while, Danni had forbidden Tee-ubo from bringing the stuff anywhere near the control room, but even the resolute Danni had relented—though her motion to Tee-ubo now made it clear that she wanted the intoxicant off the main floor.
Both Bensin and Garth were more than happy with that request. Tee-ubo was running low of the ryll now and had become stingy about handing any out. They weren’t expecting any cargo shuttles for several months, and despite the Twi’lek’s best efforts, there was no guarantee that any of the illicit drug would even make it aboard the next shuttle.
They settled in then to their usual positions. After a quick check of all systems from the central pod, and setting the forward screen to cycle through the smaller viewers of each individual pod, Danni joined the others, who were done with the ryll and were all laughing, in the galley area. On her suggestion, they began a four-way game of dejarik, a board game where holographic monsters of varying strength traveled specified paths along the rows of squares, vying for tactical advantages against their opponents.
At his post, Yomin Carr, as he did every night and most days when he could inconspicuously hang out about the pod, dialed down the volume so that only he would hear any telltale signals, and covertly locked his dish on sector L30, the location he knew to be the entry point: Vector Prime.
“You want to play?” came Bensin Tomri’s call an hour later, his tone making it clear to Yomin Carr that Tomri was not faring well in the strategic battle.
A part of Yomin Carr wanted to go up there and engage in the game, particularly waging against Danni, who was a strong strategist. Such competitions were good; they kept the warrior mind sharp and focused.
“No,” he answered, as he had for every night in the last few weeks. “Work to do.”
“Work?” Bensin Tomri scoffed. “Like the greatest scientific discovery of the last millennium will happen at any second, to your waiting eyes.”
“If you feel truth to that, on the next shuttle you should go?” Yomin Carr politely returned, and he saw by their curious expressions that he had mixed up his sentence structure again. He made a mental note to review with his tizowyrms later on.
“Newbie,” Bensin muttered sarcastically under his breath.
“He’s got a point,” Danni said, and Bensin threw up his hands and turned away from the table.
“Are you sure?” Danni asked Yomin Carr.
“I enjoy this,” he replied haltingly, paying careful attention to every word, then settling comfortably into the pod’s chair.
Danni didn’t argue; in fact, Yomin Carr understood that she respected his dedication, that she wished some of the others would follow his example.
And so it went as the night lengthened. Bensin Tomri was soon snoring contentedly, while Tee-ubo and Garth Breise argued and tittered about everything and nothing at all, and Danni continued to play dejarik, but against three computer opponents.
Then it happened.
Yomin Carr caught the slight blip on the very edge of the pod’s viewscreen out of the corner of his eye. He froze, staring intently, and dialed up the volume just a bit.
It came again, accompanied by the rhythmic signal that could only emanate from a ship.
Yomin Carr could hardly find his breath. After all the years of preparation …
The Yuuzhan Vong warrior shook such dis
tracting thoughts from his head. He waited a moment longer, to confirm the positioning, Vector Prime, the predetermined entry point into the galaxy, then he quickly shifted his dish all the way over to Sector L1. That would buy him a couple of hours on this screen. He looked up at the main viewer, repeating the image of the central pod, and breathed a sigh of relief to see that it had already cycled past Pod 3 and wouldn’t be back for at least an hour—and even then, it would not overlap past L25, and the signal would be long past that point.
With the dish angle changed, Yomin Carr dialed his volume back up to normal, then stood up and stretched, his movement attracting Danni’s attention.
“Walk I—” he started to explain, and realized that he was confusing the sentence structure once more. “I need to take a walk,” he corrected.
The woman nodded. “It’s quiet enough,” she replied. “You can knock off for the rest of the shift if you want.”
“No,” he answered. “I need jus—jus—only to stretch out a bit.”
Danni nodded and went back to her game, and Yomin Carr walked out of the room. As soon as the control room’s door was closed behind him, he removed his hard boots and broke into a dead run.
He had to pause for a long while when he got into his private quarters, forcing himself to steady his breathing. It would not do for the executor to see him so obviously rattled.
Nor would it do for the executor to see him in this horrid human disguise, he reminded himself. Never mind that humans did not typically appropriately paint their skins or mutilate any part of their bodies to show their worship to a worthy pantheon—human eyes did not droop with the appealing bluish sacks beneath them, as did Yuuzhan Vong eyes, and the human forehead was flat, not enticingly sloped, as were those of the Yuuzhan Vong. No, even after these months as an advance agent of the Praetorite Vong, Yomin Carr could hardly stand the sight of the infidels.