A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated.
All rights reserved. Used under authorization.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79558-8
v3.1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks go to:
My personal Inner Circle, Dan Hamman, Nancy Deet, Debby Dragoo, Sean Fallesen, Kelly Frieders, Helen Keier, Lucien Lockhart, and Kris Shindler;
My Eagle-Eyes, Luray Richmond and Sean Summers;
The authors of New Jedi Order novels past and future (with special thanks to Elaine Cunningham, for efforts above and beyond the call of duty in setting up the handoff);
Dan Wallace, for questions answered;
My agent, Russ Galen; and
Shelly Shapiro and Kathleen O. David of Del Rey, and Sue Rostoni of Lucas Licensing.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
The Jedi
Luke Skywalker; Jedi Master (male human)
Mara Jade Skywalker; Jedi Master (female human)
Jaina Solo; Jedi Knight, Twin Suns leader (human female)
Kyp Durron; Jedi Master, Twin Suns pilot (human male)
Corran Horn; Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron pilot (human male)
Tahiri Veila; Jedi student (human female)
With the New Republic Military
General Wedge Antilles (male human)
Colonel Tycho Celchu (male human)
Colonel Gavin Darklighter; Rogue Squadron leader (male human)
Captain Kral Nevil; Rogue Squadron pilot (Quarren male)
Flight Officer Leth Liav; Rogue Squadron pilot (Sullustan female)
Captain Garik “Face” Loran; Wraith Squadron leader (human male)
Kell Tainer (male human)
Elassar Targon (male Devaronian)
Bhindi Drayson (female human)
Baljos Arnjak (male human)
Iella Wessiri Antilles; Intelligence director (female human)
Jagged Fel; Twin Suns pilot (human male)
Zindra Daine; Twin Suns pilot (female human)
Voort “Piggy” saBinring; Twin Suns pilot (male Gamorrean)
Beelyath; Twin Suns pilot (male Mon Calamari)
Sharr Latt; Twin Suns pilot (male human)
Tilath Keer; Twin Suns pilot (female human)
Shawnkyr Nuruodo; Vanguard Squadron leader (female Chiss)
Commander Eldo Davip; captain, Lusankya (male human)
YVH 1-1A (masculine droid)
Civilians
Danni Quee; scientist (female human)
Wolam Tser; holodocumentarian (male human)
Tam Elgrin; holocam operator (male human)
Han Solo; captain, Millennium Falcon (male human)
Leia Organa Solo; Republic ambassador (female human)
With the Yuuzhan Vong
Tsavong Lah; warmaster (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Czulkang Lah; commander (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Nen Yim; shaper (female Yuuzhan Vong)
Kasdakh Buhl; warrior (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Maal Lah; warrior (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Denua Ku; warrior (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Viqi Shesh; former Senator (female human)
Harrar; priest (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Takhaff Uul; priest (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Ghithra Dal; shaper (male Yuuzhan Vong)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by this Author
Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe
Excerpt from Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Traitor
Introduction to the Old Republic Era
Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era
Introduction to the Rebellion Era
Introduction to the New Republic Era
Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era
Introduction to the Legacy Era
Star Wars Novels Timeline
ONE
Pyria System
Jaina Solo banked her X-wing starfighter into as tight a turn as she could endure. The g-forces of her maneuver crushed her into her seat, but she called upon the Force to protect her, to keep her centimeters away from the edge of blackout.
She came out of the maneuver pointed back the way she’d come, directly toward the Star Destroyer Rebel Dream and the partial squadron of Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers beyond the ship, and spared a glance to her sensor board. The other members of her shield trio, Kyp Durron and Jag Fel, were right alongside—no problem for Jag and his Chiss clawcraft, far nimbler than the X-wings, but the turn had to have been as taxing for Kyp as it was for Jaina. On the other hand, Kyp was a Jedi Master, not just a Jedi Knight, not yet twenty years of age.
Jaina and her shieldmates passed beneath Rebel Dream, her tremendous length flashing overhead in an instant. “All right, here’s the plan,” she said. “We go in looking like we’re going to punch into the center of their formation, but instead we turn to starboard and skirt along its edge. As each target comes up, we concentrate fire on it, just like those drills we did. Ready?”
Kyp’s voice was smooth, controlled: “Always ready, Goddess.”
Jag merely clicked his comlink once for affirmative.
“Fire and break.”
As the foremost of the oncoming coralskippers came within firing range, it began unloading a stream of tiny red glows in their direction. Each glow was a couple of kilograms of superheated molten rock, plasma. In the coldness of space, these projectiles would rapidly cool, but during the seconds they remained heated they were deadly weapons capable of burning through starfighter armor as though it were sheet ice.
Jaina set her lasers to dual fire and waited. A brief instant later, she felt Kyp reach out to her through the Force, taking momentary control of her hand on the pilot’s yoke. She felt herself aim and fire on the distant coralskipper. Kyp’s lasers flashed at the same instant, Jag’s a fraction of a second later.
In the distance, Jaina’s shot disappeared as a tiny black singularity, a miniature black hole called a void, appeared at the bow of the coralskipper. Kyp’s vanished into an identical void a meter or so back. But Jag’s shot, one too many for the skip’s voids to intercept, punched into the vehicle’s canopy. There was a brief flash from within and the coralskipper’s flight became ballistic instead of controlled.
Jaina, back in full control of her motions, banked and turned to starboard, her wingmates keeping in tight, controlled formation; ahead of her was a second coralskipper, then a third. Sh
e reached out for Kyp, let him fire, regained control, reoriented, reached for Kyp, let him fire—
In seconds two more coralskippers were flaming wrecks in space. She knew, without consulting the sensor board, that the skips from the other side of that formation had to be angling in toward her from her port side; she stood her X-wing on its tail, relative to its previous course, and rose away from the conflict zone, forcing those coralskippers to give chase—away from Mon Mothma and that ship’s mission.
In the distance, Mon Mothma entered the zone of dovin basal mines. Her own complement of fighters—E-wings, X-wings, and TIE interceptors—boiled out of her fighter bays and streaked off into the darkness, toward the ship they had come to escort, to protect.
Coruscant
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, walked point, meters ahead of the rest of his party.
He knew he’d never be recognized as Luke Skywalker, despite his fame. He wore vonduun crab armor, the preferred defensive dress of Yuuzhan Vong warriors. His was artificial, made of lightweight materials carefully textured and colored to resemble the living arthropod plates of the Yuuzhan Vong, but he actually preferred that; some of his companions, wearing the real thing, had to deal with the occasional twitches and contractions made by living armor. Beneath the armor, he wore a body stocking in pale gray with blue highlights that was a close match for some Yuuzhan Vong skin tones. Except for his height, handspans shorter than that of the average Yuuzhan Vong warrior, he was a visual match for the enemy.
Not that he’d be easy to see in his current surroundings. He was in a pedestrian traffic corridor, the sort that continued from building to building via enclosed, elevated walkways, at about the hundred-story level. This had once been a well-to-do residential building, with only a few well-appointed suites per floor. Every door into the corridor had been smashed in, but the state of the chambers beyond—stripped of valuables, but with common machinery left intact—suggested that it had been looters rather than Yuuzhan Vong at work here.
And the smell of decay was everywhere. They’d stumbled across numerous remains of Coruscant residents—some the obvious victims of violence, some whose deaths had no clear cause, most in advanced stages of decomposition.
How much food had there been in these people’s kitchens at the time of Coruscant’s fall and the utter demolition of its infrastructure? How much water would they have been able to find? On a world with no wilderness, no farmlands, no means of obtaining food other than now impossible import and machinery that was vulnerable to destruction by the enemy, it was very possible that a simple majority of the population of Coruscant was already dead, with the proportion growing every day.
In some places the stench of rot was greater, in some places lesser, but it was everywhere. Luke and most of his companions now had patches of cloth saturated with a mild perfume stuffed into their nostrils. Face had supplied them. Luke didn’t want to know what experiences Face had gone through to give him the foreknowledge to bring a large supply of that perfume.
As Luke neared the edge of this building and the start of one of the connecting walkways, he shut off his glow rod, which itself was engineered to resemble a Yuuzhan Vong illumination creature. Dim sunlight spilled in from the opening to the walkway, indicating that the walkway was the sort with transparisteel panels providing what had once been a breathtaking view of this part of the world-city.
He felt, as well as heard, Mara catch up to him. “You did the last one, farmboy,” she said.
He gave her a look. She, too, was dressed in Yuuzhan Vong combat armor and an appropriately colored body stocking. But for the shape of her chin and mouth beneath the edge of her helmet, she was unrecognizable as his wife. “You did the one before that.”
“My turn.” That was Garik “Face” Loran, onetime actor, longtime team leader in New Republic Intelligence. About half his usual team, designated the Wraiths, were along on this mission. He was totally unrecognizable; in addition to the vonduun crab armor, he wore an ooglith masquer, a type of living mask employed by the Yuuzhan Vong, that had been engineered by Wraith member Baljos Arnjak to resemble the branded, mutilated face of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He stopped beside Mara. “Kiss for luck?” He puckered the alien face’s slitted, mangled lips.
She shook her head. “I don’t know whether to mark that down as ‘exceptionally daring’ or ‘unusually stupid.’ ”
Face chuckled. He shucked his pack free and extracted a coil of cord from it, then continued forward, tying one end of the coil around his waist. He handed the other end and the coil itself to Luke. “Kiss for luck?”
“Get out of here.”
They reached the large aperture providing access to the walkway. Like the corridor itself, it was wide enough for four large humans easily to walk abreast, but it was lined on either side and above with transparisteel panels reinforced by metal supports. Through the transparisteel, Luke could see surrounding buildings, most of them coated by green algaelike scum or patches of alien grasses. Many of the buildings seemed to be in an advanced condition of decay, with crumbled roofs and rounded edges.
Face moved ahead on the walkway, each step tentative. Luke couldn’t see the far end of the walkway; it was bowed in the middle, higher there than at either end, the better to support great weights, and was at least fifty meters in length, crossing over what had once been a broad boulevard.
When Face was ten meters away, Luke’s helmet comlink popped, then came alive with Face’s whispered words: “No excess creaking. This one seems pretty solid.”
The other members of Luke’s group moved up to the near end of the walkway. All were in Yuuzhan Vong armor, either real like Face’s or fake like Luke’s.
The largest “warrior,” with distinctive black-and-silver tracery on his mask and torso armor, was Kell Tainer, a Wraith, fond of machinery and high explosives, a skilled hand-to-hand combatant.
Then there were the two “Domain Kraal” sets of armor, colored in swirled silver and coral-pink hues, taken from warriors who’d occupied the world of Borleias before the splintering New Republic had regained it. The one with the more pointed helmet was worn by Baljos Arnjak, the Wraiths’ expert on Yuuzhan Vong society and organic technology; the other, whose broader helmet had larger eyeholes, was worn by Bhindi Drayson, a woman with a broad range of intelligence skills, including military tactics, computers, and robotics. Bhindi’s face was marred by hard-wearing makeup that, short of close inspection, made it look like her lips were cut to tatters and the remainder of her face was tattooed. Baljos wore another of the ooglith masquers, his with a pair of tusks jutting from the lowest portion of the chin.
Next was Elassar Targon, a Devaronian, the Wraiths’ medic. He wore a gray-and-green set of artificial armor; the thought of wearing living armor had apparently filled him with supernatural dread. Even now, as he kept his attention fixed on Face’s progress, his right hand was engaged in making a series of gestures. Were they to keep the Yuuzhan Vong at bay, or to keep Face safe? Luke didn’t know, and Elassar did this sort of thing so habitually that he probably didn’t realize he was doing it.
Beside him was Danni Quee, the New Republic scientist who had been responsible for so many technological developments in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong. She wore the all-black armor, a living set that had originally been slated for Elassar; it was a touch too large for Danni and she was awkward moving in it. With a moment of rest available to her, she dug a small electromagnetic radiation sensor out of her bag and began sampling the local environment. Danni and Elassar also wore makeup, though it was more effective on his typically diabolical, red-skinned Devaronian face than on her even features.
Tahiri Veila stayed meters to the rear of the party, guarding the approach from that direction. She was the third Jedi in the group. Still a teenager, she was officially a Jedi apprentice; in all but official recognition, however, she was a Jedi Knight because of the skills and experience she’d accumulated since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion began. Things changed so fast
in these war years that testing hadn’t kept up with the advancement of her generation of Jedi. Hers was a rust-colored set of armor, and the no-skid soles of her body-stockinged feet were doubtless better, to her mind, than wearing shoes or boots, but not as good as going barefoot, her habitual preference. She wore the last of the three ooglith masquers, hers showing four sharp nail-like spikes protruding from each cheek and deep, red crisscross scar patterns on her jaws and neck.
Luke looked at her. He hardly needed the Force to sense the pain that seemed to be her constant companion these days. Her best friend, Luke’s nephew Anakin Solo, had died not long ago—died during a successful but costly mission to destroy the source of the voxyn creatures that had proven so adept at hunting and killing Jedi. Since then, Tahiri had, except for occasional moments, worn silence and distance like a set of Jedi robes.
Luke had authorized that mission of the young Jedi, and many of them had died. It was hard at times to look Han and Leia, Anakin’s parents, in the eye. And now he was leading yet another mission in which a young Jedi would be in peril. He wondered sometimes if he would ever be allowed to quit sending the young off to suffer pain and death.
Probably not, he thought. I’m not that lucky.
“I’m at the midpoint,” Face whispered. “Still no creaking. I’ll jump up and down at the far end to make sure the attachment there is still secure, and—wait a second. I see some movement …”
Then there was a new voice, a shout in the Yuuzhan Vong language from well beyond Face. The tizowyrm—a Yuuzhan Vong organic translator—installed in Luke’s ear gave him the words in Basic: “Stop where you are! Tell me your name, domain, and mission!”
Luke tossed the coil to Baljos. “Leave the packs here.” He moved forward, Mara and Kell with him, and heard the running feet of Tahiri coming up from behind. The four of them were the only ones with much of a chance in direct battle with fully trained Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Both normally and through his helmet comlink, Luke heard Face’s reply, shouted in the Yuuzhan Vong language, with to what Luke sounded like proper aggression and inflection: “I am Faka Rann. My mission is the destruction of abominations and the training of my warriors. Do not hinder me.”
Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 1