Remnant: Force Heretic I

by Sean Williams

  Others appeared before him, taking his hand, patting his back, and speaking animatedly. He heard little of what was said; his attention kept going back to his sister, now standing at the back with Jag—who respectfully kept his hands to himself. Nevertheless, even though he didn’t hear a lot of what was being said to him, Jacen could feel the sentiments expressed. The air was almost crackling with the Force as so many emotional Jedi clustered around him.

  He would miss the ones who would remain behind, but he wouldn’t grieve—no more than he would for Vergere. Even now, so many weeks after she died, he could still hear her voice in his mind as clearly as though she was one of those standing right there beside him.

  “You have always been alone, Jacen Solo. Even in the midst of your family, and your friends. Even when you touched the Force. You have always been set apart, distanced, separated and alone, through no choice or action of your own.”

  He hadn’t understood everything his teacher had said to him, and suspected he would be picking at the meaning of her words for many years to come—if not the rest of his life. Vergere had been a creature of contradictions, a pet of the Yuuzhan Vong at one moment, an ancient Jedi Knight in another.

  “Everyone is part of you,” she had said, “just as you are part of everyone.”

  It was a simple truth, and one he embraced now as he said good-bye to his friends and family. While his loved ones lived, wherever they were, he had no cause to grieve …

  At that moment, Danni Quee bustled into the bay, her shoulders laden with bags. Following her, looking some-what dazed and confused, was Tahiri.

  “I found this one wandering in the corridors outside,” Danni said.

  Tahiri flushed pink. “I-I got lost on the way here,” she stammered. “I’m sorry.”

  Jacen felt a wave of compassion for the girl. The three deep scars on her forehead stood out strongly against her blood-filled face. She still looked terribly thin and uncertain of herself; there was little in the girl’s appearance and nervous manner to suggest the Jedi he knew her to be.

  He reached out with the Force to touch her, comfort her. She glanced over at him, a faint trace of gratitude in her smiling eyes. But she turned away quickly, uneasily, back to the others.

  “So this is it?” Danni said, her eyes bright, her curly blond hair standing in a nimbus around her head. “We’re really going?”

  “We’re really going,” Luke said. Mara went aboard Jade Shadow to prime the yacht’s systems. Saba and Tekli followed. The sound of mechanical systems whirring into life gave the farewells a new urgency. The Solo/Skywalker clan gathered for one last moment while the others moved aboard. Jacen was unsurprised to see tears in Tahiri’s eyes when she was invited to join in, but was glad she agreed.

  “May the Force be with us all,” Luke said after a moment.

  “It always is,” Jacen said automatically, paraphrasing another of Vergere’s teachings. “The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. The only uncertainty lies in ourselves.”

  Jaina smiled at her brother; Leia did the same, and kissed his cheek.

  Then it was time to go. Everything was loaded, and everyone was there. There was no point delaying any longer. As R2-D2 glided ahead of him up the ramp into Jade Shadow’s belly, Jacen felt the premonition rush through him once more. It prompted him to halt momentarily and cast a quick glance back to his parents and sister.

  What if I’m wrong about Zonama Sekot? he wondered anxiously. What if this grand quest is nothing more than an elaborate means of running away from conflict? What if I misunderstood Vergere completely? Even if he had understood her perfectly and was doing exactly the right thing for the moment, it still wouldn’t be easy. As she had said: “No lesson is truly learned until it is purchased with pain.” The lesson the Galactic Alliance had to learn was a difficult one, and he was in no doubt that the people most likely to bear the cost would be those on Jade Shadow.

  He offered a brief wave and then continued into the maw of the ship. At the top of the ramp he saw Danni standing there, waiting for him. Her smile did little to hide her own anxieties.

  “There’s nothing to be nervous about, Danni,” he said, looking calmly and evenly into her eyes. “Everything is going to work out just fine.”

  “Really?” she said, shucking the larger of her bags. “Well, either you know something I don’t, Jacen Solo, or you’re one of the best liars I’ve ever met.”

  PART TWO

  DESTINATION

  The moment Jade Shadow dropped out of hyperspace near Bastion, capital of the Imperial Remnant, Saba Sebatyne knew something was wrong. Her mind rang with the distinctive and unsettling harmonics of life extinguished in great amounts. But it was more than that—this was the absence of life itself, as though chunks of the vital universe had been hollowed out, deeper than vacuum.

  She roared at the same time Mara announced: “Yuuzhan Vong!”

  “Where?” Luke asked from the copilot’s seat.

  “Everywhere!” Mara’s hands played across the controls. “Hold on, everybody. This could get rough!”

  The ship lurched violently. Saba didn’t need viewscreens to tell her that they’d been seen by the enemy. The empty points that were the Yuuzhan Vong and their strange, living vessels spun around her like pollen in a miniature hurricane. Jade Shadow danced among them, weaving in and out of confrontations, desperately trying to shake off any enemy craft they picked up on their trail. The ship rang with the sound of weapons fire, both incoming and outgoing.

  Saba’s blunted claws left great dents in the fabric of the navigator’s chair she occupied. She wasn’t aware of the low rumbling coming from her throat until Jacen Solo braved the shaking deck to come and crouch down next to her.

  “Do you feel it, Saba?” he asked. “Can you tell through the Force what’s going on?”

  “I feel …” Her teeth clenched tight as another wave of death rolled over her. Bastion was being pummeled by the Yuuzhan Vong; lives were being extinguished by the millions. She didn’t have words.

  “I’m sensing life here,” Jacen said, “but in great disarray.”

  Saba agreed. She could sense the life energies scattered around the system: some on the planet, panicked, trying to escape the invaders; some in orbit, pulling back before an overwhelming invasion; and several other clusters throughout the system where forces were attempting to regroup. They were outnumbered by the Yuuzhan Vong, but they were there.

  “I can make out at least fifteen capital ships!” Mara shouted from her position at the controls. “Big ones, too!” She shook her head in frustration. “Bastion is going to take a pummeling, no matter what we do.”

  “It looks to me like they’re pulling out,” Luke said.

  “Falling back to regroup elsewhere. Look.” One figure stabbed at a screen. “They’re civilian ships. They’ve evacuated Bastion.”

  There was a moment of tense silence as the significance of that statement sunk in. To evacuate Bastion, the Empire must have been hit hard. But it wasn’t finished. As galling as a retreat was, sometimes it made the best tactical sense. The ships flooding in waves from Bastion were getting out under cover of the planetary shields. It looked like they would hold long enough to save much of the population. If the population had stayed put, however, the concentrated fire of the Yuuzhan Vong would have eventually overwhelmed them.

  That portion of the battle was already decided. Saba sent her mind out across the system, to where life-lights clustered in smaller groups. The largest, she guessed, contained the equivalent of two Star Destroyers as well as a number of support vessels. They were swinging around the back of a gas giant, caught in its gravity shadow and harried by a powerful enemy contingent.

  Saba focused on the viewscreens before her, trying to match what she’d seen against the coordinates in the real world. Jade Shadow was too small to affect what happened on Bastion, but it might make a difference in a smaller arena.

  “There,” she growled, pointing
with a thick finger.

  “That section there. But you must be quick. They’re in trouble.”

  Jacen stood and stepped over to his aunt to relay the information. Saba shut her eyes as Jade Shadow leapt forward, ducking and weaving. Mara made a short hyperspace jump to take it closer to the gas giant, and for one brief and blessed moment there was nothing but silence.

  Just another planet attacked by the Yuuzhan Vong, she told herself. Hunt the moment.

  A small, furred hand grabbed Saba’s scaly wrist. Opening her eyes again, she saw that Tekli now occupied the space that Jacen had just vacated. The diminutive Chadra-Fan emitted a wave of pheromones that Saba found soothing. She knew that the healer’s apprentice had learned how to control her chemical scents to produce compounds with properties therapeutic to various species, but she hadn’t realized that the Barabels were included among those.

  Although it might once have seemed strange to her to be comforted by a creature that looked more like a meal than an equal, she sighed gratefully, allowing herself to relax and be taken by the peaceful scent. A moment later, all too soon, it was back to the fighting.

  The screen was filled with a bloated, orange-yellow gas giant. Numerous rings and moons crowded around it, as if for safety; many already showed signs of disruption as warring fleets plowed past or sometimes even directly into them. Far below, through the dense atmosphere, Saba felt alarm spreading through a colony of balloonlike life-forms; similar to the giant beldons of Bespin, they were too primitive to understand the meaning of the disturbances taking place in the sky.

  Jade Shadow came around the planet as though intending to ram the remains of the Imperial fleet, trailing two determined coralskippers. As Mara neared the two Star Destroyers that Saba had sensed, she performed a deft gravitational whip around one of the gas giant’s larger moons. The coralskippers followed, tugging at Jade Shadow’s shields with their dovin basals. Plasma fire peppered at their rear until, when Jade Shadow’s vector had matched that of the Imperial fleet and it was in full view of the Star Destroyers, Mara stutterfired to distract them, then used the Force to drop two shadow bombs under their guard. The coralskippers blossomed into energy. Once the afterwash of the explosion had passed, Jade Shadow slowed and leveled out.

  “This is Mara Jade Skywalker, captain of the Galactic Alliance transport Jade Shadow, hailing Imperial Star Destroyer Chimaera. Are you receiving me, Chimaera?”

  The subspace receiver crackled before a reply came in:

  “You’re a long way from home, Captain Skywalker.”

  “Just thought we’d drop in to see how you guys were doing,” she said sardonically. “And from the looks of things, I’m guessing not so good.”

  “Your timing could be better.” The comm operator sounded weary. “I don’t suppose you’ve brought a fleet with you.”

  “I’m afraid not, Chimaera, but you could do worse than concentrating your fire on that cruiser lurking at the back. It’s holding a yammosk. Take it out, and you might find your luck changing.”

  “A yammosk?… How could you possibly know that?”

  “Ask questions later, when you know I’m right.”

  “Understood, Captain Skywalker. Passing on the information now.”

  “Before you do that, I need to speak to Grand Admiral Pellaeon.”

  “Patching you through to the bridge now, Captain Skywalker.”

  The line went dead and, barely seconds later, a squadron of TIE fighters left the launching bays of Chimaera, angling away from the gas giant below to target the yammosk-bearing cruiser. Although the Yuuzhan Vong had eased off their attack for the moment, it was obvious that prior to Jade Shadow’s arrival the fighting had been intense. Both Star Destroyers were scarred from weapons fire; black gashes had been torn through Chimaera’s underside, exposing a large number of decks to naked space. Saba could feel its crew fighting to stay alive, along with the fading traces of those who had failed. She couldn’t tell exactly how many were injured or dying, only that there were many.

  “If you’ve come to say I told you so, Skywalker, then I’m not interested,” the Grand Admiral announced curtly.

  “This isn’t the time for—”

  “I’m not known for gloating, Gilad,” Luke said, leaning past Mara to speak into the comm. “No more than you are for giving up.”

  “Both Skywalkers? To what do we owe this honor?”

  “Call it destiny, or good luck. Either way, your forces are taking a pounding. Can you tell us what went wrong? Considering the size of your home fleet, I would have thought you’d be able to hold your own.”

  “They took us by surprise,” the Grand Admiral said irritably. “We were holding our own to begin with. Then the Vong pulled back. We thought we had them on the run, but they were just getting out of the way.”

  Mara nodded in understanding. “Grutchins?”

  “Thousands of them,” the admiral said. “Once they’d punched a hole in our defenses, the Yuuzhan Vong came back into the fray. We’ve been on the back foot ever since.”

  Saba hissed at the mention of the hideous, insectoid creatures. Swarms of grutchins had laid waste to too many defenses during the war with the Yuuzhan Vong for her to doubt that the same had happened here.

  “Admiral,” Master Skywalker said, “the offer to join forces is still open.”

  “Your sister was up here a while back, trying to sell us on that idea. I thought the Moffs made it quite clear then that your help wasn’t required.”

  “And where are the Moffs now, Gilad?”

  Saba noticed Pellaeon’s hesitation. He may have been a commander with pride, but he was also smart enough to acknowledge when he needed help, no matter how much it hurt to do so.

  “Okay, Skywalker,” the Grand Admiral said after a moment. “We’ll discuss this later, if there is a later. I understand you’ve given us some telemetry that might shift the balance here. If that works, we’ll regroup with the rest of the fleet at Yaga Minor. Civilian refugees are heading for Muunilinst, but we suspect the Vong will follow our forces, to keep us off balance. If you beat us there, look for Captain Arien Yage of the frigate Widowmaker. She used to serve with me on the Chimaera; if she survived Bastion, she’ll listen to you.”

  “Understood.” Mara and Luke exchanged glances. “Good luck.”

  The Grand Admiral closed the line. For a moment, no one on Jade Shadow spoke. It was Jacen who finally stated the obvious.

  “It had to happen,” he said. “We knew it was inevitable, even if they didn’t want to admit it.”

  “That doesn’t make it any easier to watch.” Luke’s voice was slightly reproving. His eyes were haunted by the deaths everyone was feeling.

  “I wish there was something we could do,” Tekli muttered.

  “Unless it’s likely to create a fleet out of thin air, you’re better off not wishing,” Mara said, glancing back at her briefly. “They had their chance to join with us, and they didn’t take it. I’ll bet the Yuuzhan Vong left them alone, knowing the Imperials would never join in—not until provoked, anyway. When their spies said they’d had just enough time to get over Ithor, to relax the defenses, the Vong hit them with everything they could spare. It’s what I would have done in their shoes. Flatten the Empire with whatever resources they can get, this far out, and get rid of a niggling irritant. Then put those resources back into the real battle, elsewhere. Do it quickly enough and those forces won’t be missed.”

  “If the Empire survives, it may prove to be more than just an irritant,” Luke said. He backed away to give his wife clear access to the controls. “What’s the name of that other Star Destroyer? Do you recognize it?”

  “It’s pretty banged up, but I think it’s the Superior.”

  “The Yuuzhan Vong aren’t going to let them wander around here forever.”

  “Your guess at how much longer they can last is as good as mine, Luke. Pellaeon can probably handle this lot, if they take out the yammosk, but anything tougher will turn h
im into metal rain for that moon over there.”

  “And us with him, if we stick around.” Master Skywalker was clearly unhappy about the decision he was being forced to make. On the one hand, Saba guessed, he wanted to stay and add the Jade Shadow to the Imperial forces withdrawing from Bastion. On the other, he had the mission itself to think of: the hunt for Zonama Sekot. Being destroyed wouldn’t solve anything.

  Her claws itched at the thought of running from battle, at leaving another planet to the nonexistent mercy of the Yuuzhan Vong. But harsh though it sounded, it seemed that leaving Bastion in favor of the mission did make the most sense.

  “We’ll meet them at Yaga Minor,” Master Luke said, sighing heavily.

  “The old stomping ground.”

  “Can you get us safely out of the giant’s gravity well?”

  Mara responded unhesitatingly. “Of course. I can outfly the scarheads with my eyes closed.”

  “Then do it,” her husband said.

  “Better strap in. This isn’t going to be the gentle scenic stroll we were promised.”

  Saba left them to handle Jade Shadow and strapped herself into a seat in the passenger bay. Danni Quee, who had sat pale-faced and silent through the entire encounter, remained in position to Saba’s right, next to Jacen Solo and Tekli. This was a familiar configuration. They had spent much of their voyage in readiness for mishap, despite Mara’s words. Every time they had come out of hyperspace—and even during longer jumps, for the Yuuzhan Vong interdictor ships were an ever-present concern—they had been safely strapped in, just in case.

  Now that “in case” had happened, Saba found the familiarity soothing. The hunt had begun. All that remained was to see if the prey perished, or if the hunter went hungry. The matter of who out of the Yuuzhan Vong and the Empire was the hunter, and who was the prey, she hadn’t decided yet. But even from what little she had experienced of Grand Admiral Pellaeon, she already knew that he was not the sort to be readily preyed upon. He would have surprised many would-be hunters by turning on them at the last moment and showing unsuspected teeth. Perhaps this time would be another.