by James Luceno
“Let’s get out of here,” Tee-ubo suggested, staring at the poignant reminder. She started to take off her pack, but Bendodi stopped her.
“Keep it,” he instructed. “We’ll need them if we can get ahead of the—” He paused and looked at the others curiously. “—of whatever the hell this is,” he finished.
Jerem Cadmir pulled out his comlink and tried to call out, but the static that crackled back at him was too thick for any words to penetrate.
Off they went, as fast as their feet would carry them. After an hour—and half their oxygen—they still could not see the end of the noxious fumes before them. Bendodi sent Luther up yet another tree, while he and the others took out their comlinks and spread out, trying to find some hole in the static.
Nothing. They rejoined at the base of the tree, and a dejected Luther came back down shaking his head, explaining that he couldn’t see anything through the thickening gases.
Hopelessness descended upon them, as thick as the fumes.
To everyone’s surprise, Bendodi Ballow-Reese pulled off his oxygen pack and tossed it to Jerem Cadmir. “Run on,” he ordered. He sniffled, then crinkled his nose in disgust. “Run on. One of us has to get back and warn them.”
Jerem stood dumbfounded, as did Luther and Tee-ubo.
“Go!” Bendodi insisted, and even as Jerem started to argue, the older man turned and sprinted into the brush, disappearing from sight—though the others heard his subsequent hacking coughs.
“He’s gone crazy,” Luther cried, and he rushed to follow. He barely got to the edge of the brush, though, before a blaster rang out and Luther tumbled backward, shot through the chest.
“Go!” Bendodi called from somewhere beyond.
Tee-ubo and Jerem rushed to Luther, but too late—the man was quite dead. Tee-ubo took his oxygen pack, grabbed the stunned and seemingly frozen Jerem by the arm and hauled him after her, breaking into a dead run to the north.
And then they heard another shot and knew that Bendodi, too, was dead.
After another hour, no end to the biological disaster in sight, Jerem had to change tanks. He motioned for Tee-ubo to check her level, as well.
The Twi’lek didn’t move.
“Do you need oxygen?” Jerem asked her.
Tee-ubo tossed him her extra tank. “Run,” she explained. “I’ve been slowing you down for the last hour. You’re the only hope.” Then she took off her belt pouch—the one with the beetle—and tossed it to the stunned man, as well.
“I’m not leaving you,” Jerem declared, and there seemed no room for debate in his voice. The extra tank in hand, he started for the Twi’lek, but stopped fast as Tee-ubo’s blaster came up, leveled at him.
“One of us has to continue with the remaining tanks,” she explained. “You’re faster, and—you’re better trained—to figure out what’s—going on, so I—made you the offer.” Already, from the gasps she took between her words, it was evident that her oxygen was waning. “Last chance,” she said, waving the blaster toward the north.
“Both of us,” Jerem insisted.
Tee-ubo pulled off her hood and threw it far to the side. Then, to Jerem’s absolute horror, she took a deep breath of the noxious fumes about them. Immediately, her eyes turned reddish yellow, and foamy liquid began running from her nose.
“You’re wasting time,” she said, coughing with each word. “And oxygen.”
Jerem started for her, but her blaster came up and she fired a bolt right past his head.
He ran to the north, blinded by the horrid fog and his own tears. He had gone only a dozen strides when he heard the report of a blaster behind him.
On Jerem ran, desperately. He took some hope when he noted that the fumes about him were thinning somewhat, but at about the same time, he had to switch to the last oxygen pack. Soon after that, he came to a sheer wall, only about ten meters high, but one that he could not climb.
Nor could he afford the time searching for a way around it. On the very edge of desperation, Jerem pulled forward the controls of his flight pack. Before he fired it up, though, he hit upon an idea.
He pulled off his oxygen pack, tore the tube right from the side of his hood, and stuffed it into the intake valve on his flight pack.
He fired it up. It sputtered and coughed, but sure enough, he got into the air and up over the cliff, where he found the air even clearer, as if the stony barrier had somehow slowed the plague. But he took little hope when he climbed higher into the air and looked back, for there, in its full yellow-green glory, was the storm Danni had called about. Not a storm at all, but a huge cloud of noxious fumes, a cloud growing by the second, fanning out in all directions.
Flying on, Jerem glanced back several times to watch its progress. He figured it was spreading at about ten kilometers an hour.
ExGal-4 had less than two days before it hit.
Jerem pushed the flight pack full out and came out of the basin later that same day. He didn’t land in the jungle and trudge through, but took his chances in the air, climbing above the treetops and soaring on. He did come down, and hard, when his pack ran out of fuel; he crashed through the branches and tumbled to the thick vegetation, losing his blaster in the process.
He was alone in the jungle, with no weapon, and with night falling.
He ran on.
It loomed before them as soon as they came out of hyperspace, the fourth planet of the Helska system, a gray ball of ice several thousand kilometers in diameter. No mist surrounded the planet, no clouds, no notable atmosphere. To the eye, it appeared quite dead.
Of course Danni Quee and the other two knew better than to trust simple appearances. Many systems boasted of living watery worlds beneath the seemingly dead facade of empty ice. Still, the surface of the planet, on this side at least, appeared perfectly smooth, with no sign of any recent, catastrophic impact.
“Maybe it missed,” Bensin Tomri remarked.
“We travel halfway across the sector in this rattle-and-shake contraption, and maybe it missed?” Cho Badeleg sounded thoroughly disgusted.
Danni eyed Bensin hard, her look pointedly explaining that she didn’t appreciate the man’s sarcasm.
“I’m serious,” Bensin retorted. “If the comet we saw hit that ball of ice, then why is it still here? It should have been blasted into a million pieces, with all of it hanging about in a floating maelstrom.”
Danni looked back at the viewer. Bensin’s words were true enough, she realized, and yet they knew from their observations on ExGal-4 that the incoming comet had indeed hit this planet.
“I am getting some strange signals from it,” Cho Badeleg offered, working the controls of his sensors. He looked up at the other two, their expressions hopeful. “Energy.”
“That could just be the reflection of the sun,” Bensin pointed out.
Cho Badeleg shook his head. “No, it’s different.”
“How?” Danni asked, moving beside him.
“Different spectrum than I’d expect from reflected sunlight,” the man explained, and he shifted aside so that Danni could get a look at his indicators. They showed nothing consistent, more of a pulsating emanation, but indeed, in wavelengths she would not expect from a frozen ball of water.
“Organic?” she asked, and Cho only shrugged.
“Maybe the comet was just a ball of gas,” Bensin Tomri reasoned. “That would explain a lot.”
“How do you figure?” Danni asked.
“Well, the planet would still be here, as it is,” Bensin remarked. “And a combination of gases could give us almost any reading.”
“But how did it stay together, crossing gravity fields?” Cho asked.
“All right, almost a ball of gas,” Danni put in, seeing Bensin’s reasoning. “A small solid mass at the center.”
“With enough gravity to hold together a ball of gases that large?” Cho asked doubtfully.
“Spinning superfast?” Danni asked more than stated, her voice thick with excitement. They all cau
ght on fast enough, and their eyes lit up.
“Call it in,” Danni told Bensin.
“I haven’t been able to reach them,” the man replied. “The tower must still be down.”
Danni considered that for a long while. “Broadcast it generally, then,” she said. “We’re going to need help with this.”
Bensin looked at her hard.
“By the time anyone gets out here, we’ll already have the primary investigation done,” Danni explained. “It’s our find now, no matter if the entire New Republic fleet comes swarming. You keep an eye on the readings,” she told Cho Badeleg, “and I’ll bring us around to the other side.”
Bensin smiled at that notion and opened his communicator to all channels, issuing a broadcast concerning their position and potential findings.
“What was that?” Danni asked a few moments later, when the Spacecaster slipped around the side of the planet and a swarm of small meteors moved just ahead of them and out of sight around the far side.
“I got them, too,” Cho confirmed, his expression curious. “Hundreds.”
“What?” Bensin asked.
Danni throttled up. “Debris?” she asked, and she looked back at her companions, her face beaming. “I think we’ve got something here.”
“Debris put into orbit from an impact,” Cho Badeleg remarked, nodding.
Again, just ahead of them around the curving line of the planet, they spotted the meteor swarm, but it was fast lost in the suddenly blinding sunlight as they came out of the planet’s shadow.
Danni squinted and groaned.
“I’ve still got them,” Cho assured her. “Up ahead and moving fast.” He paused and crinkled his brow. “Faster,” he clarified, and that, of course, made no sense.
“And something else,” Cho continued. “Down to the left. On the surface.”
Following Cho’s directions, Danni wheeled the not-so-agile Spacecaster about, angling the screen to show them again the surface of the planet, flat, except for one large mound, somewhat covered by a thin icy layer, but obviously something other than ice. It seemed to be a milky substance, covering a mound of rough-edged, many-colored stone, or bone.
“There’s the source of the readings,” Cho Badeleg said excitedly.
Danni brought them in slowly.
“Shouldn’t we be going after those meteors first?” an obviously uncomfortable Bensin Tomri remarked, and his sudden sense of dread wasn’t lost on the other two.
“If it’s a creature, it’s still alive,” Cho Badeleg warned, staring at his sensors, not quite knowing what to make of the signals emanating from the mound.
“Let’s go catch the meteors,” Bensin remarked more firmly.
Danni looked to him, and then to Cho, and saw both mesmerized, one by the mound, one by his instruments. Then she looked back at the planet, and above the line of the planet.
“Oh, no,” she muttered.
“Let’s go catch the meteors,” Bensin said again.
“The meteors caught us,” Danni explained, and when the men looked up, they understood.
In soared the meteors, but they couldn’t be meteors, given the formation, a classic attack wedge.
“Get us out of here!” Bensin screamed.
Danni worked furiously, bending the Spacecaster to the side and down. “Setting for the jump to lightspeed!” Danni called.
“That’ll take too long!” Bensin cried, and his point was accentuated when the Spacecaster jolted from some impact.
“Just fire it!” Cho Badeleg agreed.
Danni angled up, looking for a clear vector where she could just launch into hyperspace and take their chances with colliding with some other body millions of kilometers away.
But the screen was full of the meteor-ships, buzzing about like starfighters. One drew very close, and the three looked on in surprise and fear as a small appendage sticking out its front, like a miniature volcano, erupted, spewing forth a burst of fire and a single glob of molten rock that hit the Spacecaster, jolting them hard.
“It’s melting through!” Bensin Tomri cried.
“Engage the hyperdrive, Danni!” Cho pleaded.
“I did,” she replied, her voice calm, almost subdued. She had engaged the hyperdrive engine—to no effect. She figured that the first jolts had been hits to that very drive, as if these attacking … things knew exactly where to shoot.
All three of the scientists jumped back reflexively as a glob of something hit their view shield. They looked on in helpless horror as it seemed to melt, or morph, right through the transparent shield, hanging like a ball of glue inside the window.
It pulsed and opened a single hole in its membranous form, and the two men cried out, and Danni dived for the weapons locker.
And then the ball inverted, seemed almost to swallow itself, and what came out of it, or rather, what it now appeared to be, was a humanoid head, disfigured and frightening, and fully tattooed.
“Good you have come, Danni Quee, Bensin Tomri, and Cho Badeleg,” the ball said—or not the ball itself, Danni realized, recognizing this thing, this creature, as some sort of a communicator and not the speaker himself. She didn’t recognize his accent at all, and he seemed to be stuttering over every word. “I—Da’Gara,” he went on. “Prefect and adviser to yammosk, war coordinator oo-oo-oof Praetorite Vong. Welcome my home.”
The three, too stunned by this Da’Gara creature’s recognition of them, of its knowledge of their names, couldn’t begin to respond.
“You see my home, I be-bel-believe,” Da’Gara went on politely. “You come me there. I show you splendor Yuuzhan Vong.”
“What?” Bensin Tomri asked, looking to Danni.
“An invitation, I guess,” Danni replied with a shrug.
“The see villip,” Prefect Da’Gara explained. “Pet of Yuuzhan Vong.”
The three deciphered his words enough to understand that he was speaking of the creature that had invaded their Spacecaster.
“To talk across long,” Da’Gara went on.
“Living communicator,” Cho Badeleg remarked, his scientist instincts somewhat overruling his fear.
“Where are you from?” Danni managed to ask.
“Place you no know.”
“Why have you come?”
Da’Gara answered with a laugh.
“Get us out of here,” Bensin Tomri pleaded with Danni. She looked at him, then snarled and turned back to her controls, determined to fly her way through.
But the meteors, the rocklike starfighters, were all about the Spacecaster, spewing molten globs at exact points to continually cripple the ship. Before Danni could begin to initiate any evasive maneuvers, they were down to one drive, and that at a minimal capacity; every other compartment in the craft had been breached, and the enviro-unit had taken several hits.
Danni straightened and looked helplessly at her companions.
“Choice none,” the villip of Prefect Da’Gara remarked. “You fol-follow coralskippers in. Now! Or you melt and we take from you honor of gift to Yun-Yammka.”
“Just run,” Cho Badeleg pleaded, trembling so violently that he stuttered through the two words.
“Choice none!” Prefect Da’Gara warned.
Danni, full of frustration and anger, her scientific dreams shattered by some alien nightmare, tore open the weapons locker, pulled out a blaster, and splattered the villip all over the viewscreen. She scrambled to her feet, diving for the controls.
And then they got hit, again and again, and soon they were spinning, tumbling, out of control, and the planet seemed to rush up to swallow them.
And then … nothing.
Darkness fell, and still Jerem Cadmir ran on, stumbling in the blackness, and with exhaustion and fright, horrified with what he had seen and terrified of those dangers lurking all about him. The roars of the redcrested cougars traveled with him that night, and at one point he thought he saw one of the great animals eyeing him casually from a branch high above.
Wheth
er imagination or reality, Jerem would never know, for he had just run on, for all his life, for all the lives of those at the compound. Aside from his locating device, he had only three things with him: the beetle, the plant, and a sample of the noxious fumes he had fortunately and unintentionally trapped within one of his sample bags.
He took little comfort when night turned back to day, for he could hardly think straight at that point. He thought he was traveling in the right direction and in-line, but his locating device was showing some signs of damage—probably from the fumes—and he couldn’t be sure.
“Wonderful for all of us if I run right past the compound,” he lamented. He thought he recognized one tangled tree, but in truth, they all looked alike.
How relieved he was, then, when he scrambled headlong over a thicket, cutting a hundred small scratches on his arm, and found another member of the ExGal team waiting for him.
“The compound?” Jerem gasped.
“Right over there,” Yomin Carr answered, moving to help Jerem back to his feet. “Where are your companions?”
“Dead,” Jerem said, puffing for breath. “All of them.”
Yomin Carr pulled him up straight and stared at him hard.
“We found—we found—the storm, but it wasn’t a storm,” Jerem tried to explain. “Some kind of plague—a biological disaster. It overran us.”
“But you escaped,” Yomin Carr said.
“They gave me their oxygen,” the man replied, and he began to tremble.
Yomin Carr shook him hard.
“One of us had to get back,” Jerem went on. “To warn the rest of you. We have to fire up the Jolian freighter and get out of here.”
“The Jolian freighter?” Yomin Carr echoed with a laugh. “That ship hasn’t been up since the compound was first set up, and half of its components were scavenged for the station operating systems. We will never launch it.”
“We have to!” Jerem cried, grabbing Yomin Carr by the shoulders. “No choice.”
“A plague, you say?” Yomin Carr asked, and Jerem nodded excitedly. “Well, perhaps we will find a way to battle back against it. Or insulate ourselves from its effects.”
“We can insulate,” Jerem said, and he started past Yomin Carr, but to his surprise, the bigger man held him in place.