Ylesia

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Surrender at discretion.” Jaina was surprised by Thrackan’s sarcastic voice coming from the back of the room. Her cousin rose from the chair he’d occupied and limped forward. She could see that the long muscles of his back had also been sliced open by a razor bug.

  “Up until now I’d thought the Jedi were the most pompous, annoying gasbags in creation,” Thrackan said. “But that was before I met you. You take the prize for the most preposterous, self-important, prolix fiasco I have ever seen. And on top of that—“ He stared at close range into Pwoe’s indignant eyes. “On top of that, sir, you are a fish! So sit down and shut up, before I take a harpoon to you!”

  Pwoe drew himself up. “Your display of rank prejudice is—“

  Thrackan waved a hand. “Can it, Chief. Nobody’s listening to your speeches now. Or will ever again, I guess.”

  Pwoe returned Thrackan’s glare for a long moment, and then his gaze fell, and he retreated. Then Thrackan turned his scowl on the others—Jaina, Jamiro, and the rest. “I’m not a Vong collaborator, no matter what the rest of you think. And I’m not about to let a subaquatic imbecile sell us out to the enemy.”

  With an air of painful triumph, Thrackan dragged himself to his seat.

  From above came the peculiar creaking roar of a claw fighter, passing slowly overhead. Jaina could imagine Jag in the pilot’s seat, flying the clawcraft inverted to give himself a better view of the scene below. When Jag’s voice returned, it was thoughtful.

  “Our forces are on the north side?”

  “Yes, but—“

  “The Yuuzhan Vong are regrouping—they’ll be launching another assault in a few minutes. I’ll commence a bomb run with our two squadrons to break up the attack. Tell your people to stay under cover, and be ready to run.”

  “No!” Jaina said. “I know my rookie pilots! They don’t have the experience!”

  “Stand by, Twin Leader. And tell those soldiers standing on the dead animal to take cover.”

  Jaina almost dashed the comlink to the ground in frustration. Instead she gave a despairing look to General Jamiro, who was looking at her with a furrowed, thoughtful expression. Jamiro raised his own comlink to his lips.

  “Fighters are about to make a run. Everyone is to get under secure cover, and prepare to run for the landspeeders on my command. Tosh, get your people off that creature and under the speeders’ shields again.”

  And then, with weary, silent dignity, General Jamiro took shelter beneath a table. The others in the room did their best to follow suit.

  The roar of starfighters floated through the broken viewports. Jaina, remaining on her feet, stepped to the viewport and took a quick look out.

  Black against the western sky was the Chiss squadron, the craft flying nearly wingtip to wingtip, echeloned back from the leader in a kind of half wedge.

  Of course, Jaina thought in admiration. Jag Fel would be in the lead, flying along an invisible line down the battlefield between the Yuuzhan Vong and the New Republic troops. The others were echeloned onto the Vong side of the line—as long as they maintained their alignment on the leader, their fire couldn’t hit friendly forces.

  Laser cannons began to flash on the Chiss leader, then on the others. Bolts fell on the street and on the roofs of the buildings opposite, a clatter of high-energy rain. Jaina dived under the nearest table and found Lowie already taking up most of the room.

  “You know,” she said, “sometimes Jag is really—“

  Her thought was left unfinished. The first wave seemed to suck the air from Jaina’s lungs, then transform it into light and heat that Jaina could feel in her long bones, her liver and spleen and bowel.

  Twenty-one more detonations followed the first as the Chiss unloaded. Whatever was left of the restaurant viewports exploded inward. Storms of dust blasted in from the street, and bits of debris. And then there was a silence broken only by the ringing in Jaina’s ears.

  Slowly she became aware that her comlink was talking at her. She raised it to her lips.

  “Say again?”

  “Hold your positions,” came the faint voice. “Twin Suns is next.”

  Tesar would be in the lead position, with the rest echeloned in the same formation Jag had used. Jaina had no fear that any of the fire would go astray.

  “Hold your positions!” Jaina called. “Another strike coming!”

  There were sixteen runs this time, two from each of the X-wings remaining. Jaina coughed as wave after wave of dust blew in the viewports.

  Again there was silence, broken only by the sound of sliding rubble from the buildings opposite. As she blinked dust from her lashes Jaina could see General Jamiro rise painfully from his position under one of the tables, then raise his comlink to his lips.

  “Soldiers, take up positions to cover the civilians! All noncombatants to the speeders—and then the rest of us follow!”

  Hands tore the rubble off him, and Maal Lah saw the sky where he had thought he would never see the free sky again. He wheezed as he coughed dust out of his lungs. “It’s the commander!” someone called, and a host of hands joined to rip the debris away, then lift Maal Lah free of the wreckage.

  Maal Lah gave a gasp at a sudden, nauseating wave of pain, but he clenched his teeth and said, “Subaltern! Report!”

  “The infidels made their escape after the bombing, Supreme Commander. But they’ve left hundreds of dead behind.” The subaltern hesitated. “Many of them our Peace Brigade allies.”

  Pain made Maal Lah snarl, but he turned the snarl into one of triumph. “The treacherous infidels deserved their fate! They should have died fighting, but instead they surrendered and left it to us to give them honorable death!” He managed to turn another grimace of pain into a laugh. “The invaders feared us, subaltern! They fled Ylesia once they had felt our sting!”

  “The Supreme Commander is wise,” the subaltern said. Dust streaked the subaltern’s tattoos, and his armor was battered. His eyes traveled along Maal Lah’s body. “I regret to say, Supreme Commander,” he said slowly, “that your leg is destroyed. I’m afraid you’re going to lose it.”

  Maal Lah snarled again. As if he needed a young infant of a subaltern to tell him such a thing. He had seen the duralloy beam come down like a knife, and he had felt the agony in the long minutes since . . .

  “The shapers will give me a better leg, if the gods will it,” Maal Lah said.

  He turned his head at a series of sonic booms: the infidel landers leaping skyward from their landing field.

  “They think they’ve escaped, subaltern,” Maal Lah said. “But I know they have not.”

  Before the enemy fire blew the building down on him he had been in contact with his commanders in space, and devised a strategy that would give the enemy another surprise.

  Was it possible to die of surprise? he wondered.

  As a tactician, he knew that it was.

  Jacen stood in silence and held the Jedi meld in his mind. The last of the landing party was leaving Ylesia, with Jaina and Lowbacca, and the enemy commander still had not made his move. Instead he continued to extend his flank, shifting a constant trickle of ships into the void. Admiral Kre’fey matched each enemy deployment with one of his own. Both lines were now attenuated, too drawn out to be useful as a real battle line.

  But why? Why had the enemy commander handicapped himself in this way, drawing out his forces until they were no longer able to fight cohesively? He had similarly handicapped Kre’fey, that was true, but he wasn’t in a position to take advantage of it. What he should have done was attack immediately and try to trap the ground forces on Ylesia.

  In Jacen’s mind he could feel the Jedi pilots in their patrolling craft, scattered up and down the thinned-out enemy line. He felt their perceptions layered onto his, so he knew as well the positions of most of the fleet. And through their unified concentration on their own displays, he understood where they were in relationship to the enemy.

  Why? Why was the Yuuzhan Vong commander
maneuvering this way? It was almost as if there were a piece missing.

  A missing piece. The piece fell into place with a snap that Jacen felt shuddering in his nerves. With some reluctance he banished the Force and the comforts of the meld from his mind, and he called up his Vongsense, the strange telepathy he had developed with Yuuzhan Vong life-forms during his captivity.

  An immeasurably alien sense of being filled his thoughts. He could feel the enemy fleet extending its wing out into space, the implacable hostility of its every being, from the living ships to the breathing Yuuzhan Vong to the grutchins that waited packed into Yuuzhan Vong missiles . . .

  Jacen fought to extend his mind, extend his senses deep into space, into the void that surrounded the Ylesia system.

  And there he found what he sought, an alien microcosm filled with barbarous purpose.

  He opened his eyes and stared at Kre’fey, who was standing amid his silent staff, studying the displays.

  “Admiral!” Jacen said. “There’s another Vong fleet on its way!” He strode forward among the staff officers and thrust a pointing finger into the holographic display. “It’s coming right here. Right behind our extended wing, where they can hammer us against the other Yuuzhan Vong force.”

  Kre’fey stared at Jacen from his gold-flecked violet eyes. “Are you certain?”

  Jacen returned Kre’fey’s stare. “Absolutely, Admiral. We’ve got to get our people out of there.”

  Kre’fey looked again at the display, at the shimmering interference patterns that ran over Jacen’s pointing finger. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that has to be the explanation.” He turned to his staff. “Order the extended wing to rejoin.”

  A host of communications specialists got very busy with their microphones. Kre’fey continued staring at Jacen’s pointing finger, and then he nodded to himself.

  “The extended wing is to fire a missile barrage here,” Kre’fey said, and gave the coordinates indicated by Jacen’s finger.

  The capital ships on the detached wing belched out a gigantic missile barrage, seemingly aimed into empty space, and scurried back to the safety of the main body. When the Yuuzhan Vong reinforcements shimmered into realspace the missiles were already amid them, and the new arrivals hadn’t yet configured their ships for defense, or launched a single coralskipper.

  In the displays Jacen watched at the havoc the missiles wrought on the startled enemy. Almost all the ships were hit, and several broke up.

  Kre’fey snarled. “How can I hurt the Vong today? We’ve answered that question, haven’t we?”

  One of his staff officers gave a triumphant smile. “Troopships report the landing party has been recovered, Admiral.”

  “About time,” someone muttered.

  Since the wing was contracting inward anyway, Kre’fey got the whole fleet moving in the same direction. The newly arrived Yuuzhan Vong were too disorganized, and too out of position, to make an effective pursuit. The first arrivals charged after Kre’fey, but they were strung out while Kre’fey’s forces were concentrating, and their intervention had no hope of being decisive.

  But even though Kre’fey had assured the escape of his force, the battle was far from over. The Yuuzhan Vong commander was angry and his warriors still possessed the suicidal bravery that marked their caste. Ships were hard hit, and starfighters vaporized, and hulls broken up to tumble through the cold emptiness of Ylesian space, before the fleet exited the traitor capital’s mass shadow and made the hyperspace jump to Kashyyyk.

  “I don’t want to do anything like that again,” Jaina said. She was in the officers’ lounge of Starsider, sitting on a chair with a cup of tea in her hand, her boots off, and her stockinged feet in Jag Fel’s lap.

  “Ylesia was like hitting your head again and again on a brick wall,” she went on. “One tactical problem after another, and the solution to each one was a straightforward assault right at the enemy, or straightforward flight with the enemy in pursuit.” She sighed as Jag’s fingers massaged a particularly sensitive area of her right foot. “I’m better when I can be Yun-Harla the Trickster,” she said. “Not when I’m playing the enemy’s game, but when I can make the enemy play mine.”

  “You refer to sabacc, I take it,” Jag said, a bit sourly.

  Jaina looked at Jacen, sitting opposite her and sipping on a glass of Gizer ale. “Are you going to take Kre’fey up on his offer of a squadron command?”

  Jacen inhaled the musky scent of the ale as he considered his answer. “I think I may serve better on the bridge of Ralroost,” he said finally, and thought of his finger floating in Kre’fey’s holo display, pointing at the enemy fleet that wasn’t there.

  “Ylesia,” he continued, “showed that my talents seem to be more spatial and, uh, coordinative. Is coordinative a word?”

  “I hope not,” Jag said.

  Jacen felt regret at the thought of leaving starfighters entirely. He had joined Kre’fey’s fleet in order to guard his sister’s back, and perhaps that was best done by flying alongside her in an X-wing. But he suspected that he’d be able to offer a higher order of assistance if he stayed out of a starfighter cockpit, instead using the Jedi meld to shape the way the others fought.

  “Look,” Jag pointed out, “Jaina’s got it wrong. Ylesia wasn’t a defeat. Jaina’s downed pilots were rescued, and so were mine. We hurt the enemy a lot more than they hurt us, thanks in part to Spooky Mind-Meld Man, here.” He nodded toward Jacen. “We destroyed a collaborationist fleet and captured enough of the Peace Brigade’s upper echelon to provide dozens of splashy trials. The media will be occupied for months.”

  “It didn’t feel like a victory,” Jaina said. “It felt like we barely escaped with our necks.”

  “That’s only because you don’t have a sufficiently detached perspective,” Jag said seriously.

  Mention of the Peace Brigade had set Jacen’s mind thinking along other channels. He looked at Jaina. “Do you think Thrackan’s really innocent?”

  Jaina was startled. “Innocent of what?”

  “Of collaboration. Do you think the story he told about being forced into the Presidency could possibly have been true?”

  Jaina gave a disbelieving laugh. “Too ludicrous.”

  “No, really. He’s a complete human chauvinist. I know he’s a bad guy and he held us prisoner and wants to rule Corellia as diktat, but he hates aliens so much I can’t believe he’d work with the Yuuzhan Vong voluntarily.”

  Jaina tilted her head in thought. Jag’s foot massage had put a blissful expression on her face. “Well, he did call Pwoe a Squid Head. That’s a point in his favor.”

  “If Sal-Solo wishes to prove his innocence,” Jag said, “he need only volunteer for interrogation under truth drugs. If his collaboration was involuntary, the drugs would reveal it.” Grim amusement passed across his scarred features. “But I think he’s afraid that such an interrogation would reveal how he came to be in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong in the first place. That’s what would truly condemn him.”

  “Ahh,” Jaina said. Jacen couldn’t tell if she was enlightened or, in light of the foot rub, experiencing a form of ecstacy.

  Jacen, sipping his ale, decided that whatever the truth of the matter, it wasn’t any of his business.

  Thrackan Sal-Solo paced across the durasteel-walled prison exercise yard, his mind busy with plans.

  Tomorrow, he’d been told, he would be transferred to Corellia, where he would undergo trial for treason against his home planet.

  He’d accept the transfer peacefully, and behave as a model prisoner for most of the way home. But that was only to lull his guards.

  He’d catch them at a disadvantage, and bash them over the head with an improvised weapon—he didn’t know what exactly, he’d work that out later. Then he’d take command of the ship—he hoped it was an Incom model, he could fly anything Incom made. He’d crash the ship into a remote area of Corellia and make it appear he died in the flames.

  Then he’d make contact with
some of the people on Corellia he could still trust. He’d reorganize the Centerpoint Party, strike, and seize power. He would rule the world! No, five worlds.

  It was his destiny, and nothing could stop him. Thrackan Sal-Solo wasn’t meant to be condemned to a miserable life on a prison planet.

  Well. Not more than once, anyway.

  An Interview with Walter Jon Williams

  DR: How did you get the opportunity to write a Star Wars novel, and what attracted you to the idea? Are you a longtime fan of the series?

  WJW: I got the job because, well, they asked me. I’d like to think it was because they’d read my other books and liked them. I was a fan of the films, but had never read any of the books. Imagine my surprise to discover that Han and Leia had produced three children and that Luke had married a woman who wasn’t in any of the movies!

  DR: How much input and creative freedom did you have in writing Destiny’s Way?

  WJW: There is a NJO series arc, and the arc demanded that certain things take place in Destiny’s Way. The rest of it was up to me. The demands of the story arc were fairly flexible, and I experienced little difficulty building a story around them.

  DR: Was this the first time that you’ve worked in someone else’s universe? What are some of the difficulties involved in this kind of corporate collaboration?

  WJW: I’ve worked in the Wild Cards shared-worlds universe—some of those books are coming back into print—and I’ve also written for films and TV, which are collaborative media. I was used to the give-and-take, so I experienced few problems in working within the shared-worlds format.

  DR: What can you tell us about Destiny’s Way? To what does the title refer? What is the destiny, and whose destiny is it?

  WJW: Fate has a good deal in store for the Jedi twins! Jaina’s destiny is revealed in the book, and we find out more about what the universe has in mind for Jacen.