“So,” Luke said, “a detachment of us take off our disguises and go to talk to them as humans.”
“While the rest wait here and breathe,” Kell said.
“Right.” Luke looked over them. “It’ll be me, Mara, Face, and Bhindi going back. The rest stay here.”
Instead of offering up a noise of complaint, Tahiri grimaced, a cynically adult expression, and lowered her pack to the passageway floor.
Luke shrugged, offered her a smile. “We need at least one Jedi with each group.”
“So I’m baby-sitting people twice, three times my age. Where’s the fun in that?”
Kell snorted, then pitched his voice as an adolescent whine. “Aunt Tahiri, tell me a story.”
Luke, now dressed in the dark garments he affected whenever making a public appearance in the guise of Jedi Master, stared at the woman on the other side of the heating element protruding from the gap in the floor panels. He, his three companions—also in dark, inconspicuous civilian dress—and six men and women of the Walkway Collective sat cross-legged on the floor, in a loose circle around the heating element, while a pot of greenish soup rested atop the thing and gradually heated to boiling. “How have you survived?” Luke asked.
They were in a back room of what had once been a clothing emporium of the Catier Walkway, the shopping gallery where Luke’s party had so recently been attacked. The woman he addressed—once plump and blond, he thought, now leaner from a subsistence diet, hair streaked with dirt, brown eyes hard from sacrifice and suffering—was Tenga Javik, nominal leader of the Walkway Collective.
“We’ve rigged photon collection screens and heat harvesters for power,” she said. Her voice was raspy; that, and the light scarf wound around her neck, a curious affectation in the warm, moist air of Coruscant’s landscape of building interiors, suggested that she had taken an injury to the throat in the not too distant past. “One of us worked at a grayweave production plant. Have you ever eaten grayweave, Master Skywalker?”
“On occasion.” Grayweave was the nickname for a sort of single-cell-organism-based food, manufactured for and sold to the poorest of the poor; in texture, it looked like thick gray felt, but didn’t taste anywhere near as good. Its chief virtues were that it was very inexpensive and lasted a long time without preservation.
“We stole the grayweave reactors and scattered them all through our territory,” Tenga said. “Well-hidden. We keep them supplied with power and water, water we process through our own stills. We hide from the Vong most of the time, set traps for them when we’re sure we can take them. We’re going to survive, Master Skywalker.”
“How’s the air?” Bhindi asked.
Tenga looked into the soup as if unwilling to meet Bhindi’s eyes. “Getting worse,” she said. “We’re working on that. Trying to put together a series of blowers to bring in air from where it’s better.” She didn’t sound confident. “If that doesn’t work, we may have to relocate. Go deeper.” She met Luke’s eyes, her expression suddenly fierce. “When will the fleet come, Master Skywalker? When can we expect relief?”
“Not soon,” he admitted. “I wish I could tell you differently, but you’re going to have to rely on yourselves for some time to come.”
Several of Tenga’s fellows sighed or made noises of discontent, but they didn’t direct anger at Luke; his words did not seem to be entirely unexpected.
Tenga returned her attention to the soup. “We need the fleet,” she rasped, her tone lower; she did not seem to be speaking to Luke. “We need the Jedi.”
“This is our first mission back,” Luke said, projecting confidence with his voice and through the Force. “And more will come. We’re not going to let Coruscant remain in enemy hands. You have to decide whether you’re going to be alive when the world is liberated. Because the weariness and disillusionment you’re feeling can kill you as surely as the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“You’ve done very well here,” Bhindi said. “I can show you how to do better.”
That got Tenga’s attention. “Better how?”
“Hide better, ambush and defeat Vong patrols better, repair and maintain equipment better.”
“I’m listening,” Tenga said.
“First things first,” Mara interrupted. “A little more information. Have any of you seen or felt anything unusual in this region? I mean, unusual in excess of all the changes brought on by the Vong?”
Most of those present shook their heads, but one, in the second rank of the circle, a thin, middle-aged man with a dark, suspicious look to his features, said, “Lord Nyax.”
Some of his companions sighed; one or two offered up little groans.
Luke grinned before he could suppress it. “That’s a children’s story.”
“He’s real,” Yassat said.
Mara raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t heard this one.”
“In ancient times,” Luke said, “on Corellia, Lord Nyax was what parents threatened their children with if they didn’t eat their stewfruit or go to bed on time. ‘If you keep on being a bad boy, Lord Nyax will come for you.’ He was a monstrous pale ghost who took children away, and no one ever saw them again.”
“A typical folk tale,” Mara said.
“Yes.” Luke sobered. “But a while back, stories of Lord Nyax got a lot more common. Because during the Jedi purges, there was someone who came for children in the night—someone who came for Force-sensitive children.”
Mara’s reply was a whisper: “Darth Vader.”
“That’s right. I think that some of Darth Vader’s covert missions to round up Force-sensitive children became merged with the Lord Nyax legend, and spread from Corellia all over the galaxy during the early Imperial years.”
“Yassat here is one of our far scouts,” Tenga said. “He travels out beyond our territories, exploring and scavenging.”
“And he sees things,” another said. That man tapped his temple with one hand while jerking a thumb at Yassat with the other, suggesting that Yassat was not completely functional in a mental sense.
“I do see things,” Yassat said. “But they’re there.”
“Tell me what you see,” Luke said.
“I saw Lord Nyax for the first time about a month after Coruscant fell.” Yassat’s voice lowered in tone and volume. “This was over toward the old heart of the government district, where things are crazy now. I was on one side of the main chamber of a textile factory, hiding from a Vong hunting party; they were on the other side. I was already scared, but I got a lot more scared and didn’t know why. Then the screaming started. Where the warriors were, I could see someone moving. A big man, ghostly white. There was a roar, and flashes of red all around it, but no sound of blasters. I got away. Hours later, I came back. I found the Vong warriors dead. Chopped to pieces, burned in places, some of them eaten on.
“The second time was four days ago or so.” From a pocket, he pulled a functional chrono and checked local time. “Four days. I felt that fear again while I was prowling through rooftops well below the skyline. It got worse and worse, and I knew I was being stalked. I knew I was going to end up like those Vong warriors.”
“How did you get away?” Mara asked.
Yassat shook his head, not meeting her gaze. “I just got away.”
“That’s not good enough,” Tenga said. “No one ‘just gets away.’ You get away by getting captured and selling us out?”
“No.” Yassat’s voice became emphatic. He returned his attention to Mara. “There’s a man, calls himself Skiffer. Part of a group not part of the Walkway Collective. They prey on us. They’ve killed a couple of our scouts, found and stole one of our grayweave reactors. Grayweave’s not enough for them; I’m sure some of them are cannibals. I know where their territory is. I led Lord Nyax through the heart of their territory, and when I heard Skiffer give his people a call to action, I made a break for it. I heard them screaming.” He met Tenga’s eyes. “I didn’t sell us out, Tenga. I sold Skiffer out.”
Tenga clap
ped him on the shoulder. “Good work.”
Another man said, “You were being stalked by Vong, Yassat. There is no Lord Nyax. Just your imagination.”
Yassat glared, but didn’t respond.
“Where have you run into Lord Nyax?” Luke asked.
Yassat pointed northwest, precisely in the direction where Luke and the other Force-sensitives had felt the twinge. “That way. Near the old government center. It’s thick with Vong compared to here, but full of interesting salvage.”
“We need to look at that,” Luke said. He addressed Yassat: “Care to come with us? To guide us?”
Tenga shook her head. “Not unless you leave us this one,” she indicated Bhindi, “in trade.”
But Yassat shook his head. “Prowl around with a big, noisy party when there are Vong hunters about? No. Kill me now, instead. It’d be less painful.”
Luke shrugged. “We’ll be back, then.”
Yassat offered him a look of sympathy. “No, you won’t.”
Borleias
Jaina stood up, her bedsheet whirling away from her, and lurched to her closet without knowing why. The sun Pyria was just now climbing above the horizon, so she had been in bed for perhaps three hours.
The roaring in her ears resolved itself into an alarm. Yuuzhan Vong were coming. She heard the roar of thrusters from whichever squadrons were at the ready—it would be Blackmoon at this hour.
Jag was waiting for her in the hallway—the special, secured hall of the biotics building reserved for the pilots of Twin Suns Squadron. Other doors were sliding open. Piggy saBinring, struggling to fasten the seal of his pilot’s suit over his expansive Gamorrean stomach, emerged.
“What’s our objective?” Jaina asked. Jag held out a datapad for her to look at, but her eyes wouldn’t focus on it. She irritably waved it away.
“It looks like an assault on this location,” Jag synopsized. “Flying vehicles only, no sign of ground troops. Lusankya’s squadrons have some of the enemy forces engaged in orbit. More will be here in moments.”
There was an explosion, not far away, as incoming fire hit the shields that protected the biotics facility. All the transparisteel viewports on the west face of the building rattled.
“Correction,” Jag said. “They’ll be here now.”
“Let’s move.” Jaina led her half-dressed, half-awake squadron to their turbolift.
Corran Horn, pilot and Jedi Knight, flying as Rogue Nine, activated his repulsors and smoothly lifted off the ferrocrete of Rogue Squadron’s new docking bay, up through a gap where, moments before, the ceiling had been; the building’s roof was still cantilevering out of the way. The altitude gave him a better look at the conflict—Yuuzhan Vong coral ships, the equivalent of light cruisers, hovered in the distance both east and west, protected by screens of coralskippers, and launched barrages of plasma at the biotics building and its outbuildings. So far, the base’s shields, removed not that long before from faltering New Republic capital ships, were holding up well against the assault. “Come on, Leth.”
“Pick, pick, pick.” Leth Liav’s X-wing rose up beside Corran’s. Leth, a Sullustan female, had been a fighter pilot before being shot down and captured by the Yuuzhan Vong. Placed in an environment bubble and launched through space toward Borleias’s atmosphere in a show of Yuuzhan Vong cruelty, she and several of her fellows had been saved by some fancy flying on the part of Twin Suns Squadron. Corran doubted that, in better times, she would ever have qualified for the famed Rogue Squadron, but here, with attrition high and options few, she’d been welcomed.
“Leader to squad, less chatter, please.” Colonel Darklighter sounded as businesslike as ever. “Indicate readiness. Leader is ready. Two?”
“Two ready.”
“Three?”
As the roll call continued, the third member of Corran’s shield trio, Dakorse Teep, rose into position. “Rogue Seven, all green.”
Corran grimaced. In Teep’s case, green didn’t just refer to the condition of his engines. Teep was a teenager who should have been palling around on the playground with Corran’s son Valin, only a few years Teep’s junior. Corran heard Leth announce “Eight, four lit and ready,” then he said, “Nine, optimum.”
He was the last one to call in readiness. Rogue Squadron was reduced to nine members now, three shield trios. Other squadrons were in worse condition, some of them reduced in numbers so fast that they had to be decommissioned or temporarily merged with other depleted units until reinforcements could swell them out into discrete squads again.
“We’re on the cruiser to the east,” Gavin announced. “Senior members have proton torps; everyone else, you’ll have to make do with lasers. Sorry. Break by shield trios … now.” He suited action to words, and the three members of One Flight lofted, rising above the protection of the facility’s vertical shields, staying only a few dozen meters beneath the horizontal shield overhead.
Corran waited a beat while Two Flight followed, then he led Leth and Teep up. To her credit, Leth kept tucked in professionally close, but Teep lagged, offering his shieldmates no protection from his shields, receiving no protection from theirs.
“Close it up, Seven,” Corran said.
“Sorry, Nine. Coming.”
As Corran and Leth cleared the building’s shields and dropped toward the jungle on the far side, a plasma barrage from the cruiser analog they were supposed to destroy arced toward them. If it had been slightly better aimed, it might have slid in between the top of the vertical shields and bottom of the horizontal. As it was, it angled in toward Teep, directly over Corran’s head. “Seven,” he shouted, “break to port—”
Corran chose port over starboard only because it took half the time to say, giving Teep one more fraction of a second to comprehend and react. Teep did veer to port, as much on repulsorlifts as thrusters, and the main ball of plasma flashed harmlessly past him.
Then it hit the building’s vertical shields and exploded. The concussion hammered Teep, Corran, and Leth. His cockpit swathed in flame, Corran watched his artificial horizon gauge spin. Relying on instinct more than his gauges, he leveled off and hit his thrusters. A moment later, the fire peeled away from his cockpit and he could see again.
Teep and Leth were both rolling as they fell, out of control, toward the jungle below.
Leth came out of her roll, leveling off not far above the treetops, and Corran heard her over the comm board, her voice raised in a wordless shout of both fear and exultation.
Teep didn’t come out of his roll. He punched through the treetops, and a moment later a fireball roiled up through the hole he’d made.
Corran swore. This war was gobbling up children like a starved wampa. “C’mon, Eight. Form up.”
In his transport, far below the Lusankya conflict and as far above the war waging around the biotics building, Harrar stared into the viewing lens mounted in the transport’s belly. “Is this operation yours, or Czulkang Lah’s?” he asked.
Charat Kraal knelt beside him at the edge of the lens. “It is the great master’s. But it is merely a probe, a way to test strength and evaluate the enemy’s strengths, to deny him the opportunity to rest. I have attached my mission to this operation.”
“When do your units enter the battle?”
“Soon. When the enemy is stretched thinnest.”
Twin Suns Squadron roared westward, toward the Yuuzhan Vong cruiser analog there. It and its protective squadrons were already being harassed by Blackmoon Squadron and a pair of TIE squadrons off Lusankya. “Piggy, analysis,” Jaina called.
The mechanical voice of her Gamorrean pilot boomed from the comm unit; Jaina winced and slid the volume control lower.
“They’re not concentrating on the biotics building this time,” Piggy said. “Probably to avoid a disaster like the last assault. They’ve learned their lesson from orbital bombardment. And yet they’re not systematically taking General Antilles’s defensive structure to pieces. They should be concentrating their efforts o
n removing Lusankya from the battlefield, so they can then move against the facility with minimal opposition. They are not.”
Jaina didn’t have to ask what that meant. The Yuuzhan Vong didn’t intend to overrun the facility this time. They had some other goal, such as staging another attempt to capture Jaina. To the Yuuzhan Vong, twins were sacred, and Jaina, as the twin of Jacen, held special fascination for them. “Keep your eyes open for particular attention on us,” Jaina said.
“Yes, Great One.”
“Twin Suns, don’t fire torps unless you have a clear shot you know the voids can’t stop,” she added. “We’ve all got a full load, but other squads don’t. So don’t waste a shot unless you’re just anxious to cause hard feelings. Tilath, are you ready with your payload?”
“Yes, Great One.” Tilath Keer, flying Twin Suns Eleven, sounded distinctly unhappy. On the underside of her X-wing was attached something that looked like a missile, the newest experimental weapon in the Twin Suns’ arsenal, but it was longer than the X-wing’s cockpit and heavy enough to turn her starfighter into something as maneuverable as a flying boulder.
“Don’t worry, Tilath. No one has to do the dishes every time.” Jaina hit her thrusters and accelerated toward the enemy. “Let’s do this thing.”
Charat Kraal and Harrar watched as the battle developed. The Yuuzhan Vong capital ships were being used as mobile artillery, keeping up a steady bombardment on the biotics building and the buildings around it to test, and potentially overwhelm, the infidels’ protective energy shields. Their coralskipper squadrons were charged with protection of the capital ships and elimination of enemy starfighters. It was a simple enough situation, and Harrar grasped the details readily as Charat Kraal explained them.
“Where are the Starlancer vehicles kept—the pipefighters?” Harrar asked. He referred to the craft that had, not long before, set up a complicated energy matrix in space in the Pyria system, then fired a laser attack—one that had been somehow accelerated through hyperspace and had actually struck the Yuuzhan Vong worldship in orbit around Coruscant.
Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 4