He activated his jury-rigged comm board. “Blackmoon Ten, this is Blackmoon Eleven. That’s a copy. Still here, but about to throw up.”
“Hold on … shuttle. It’ll be here … minutes.”
Then there was a new voice, stronger because the broadcasting X-wing hovered only fifty meters away. Wedge recognized the voice as Gavin Darklighter’s. “Blackmoon Eleven, what did you think you were doing going after an entire squadron?”
“My job.”
“That’s ‘My job, sir.’ ”
Wedge grinned. “My job, sir.”
“Son, if you develop piloting skills in proportion to your nerve, someday they’ll call you the greatest pilot of all time.”
Gavin, baffled, stared down at his comm board. “Blackmoon Eleven? Are you still there?”
But Blackmoon Eleven didn’t respond—at least, not with words. The only thing emerging from Gavin’s comm board was laughter. Laughter that was somehow familiar.
The New Republic forces staged mop-up and withdrawal operations. Starfighter squadrons collected themselves, escorted rescue shuttles, defended their capital ships from the uncoordinated attacks of the Yuuzhan Vong.
But it would not be long before a new yammosk was brought into the system, not long before more Yuuzhan Vong reinforcements made the system untenable. One after another, the divisions of Borleias’s defenders launched into hyperspace to travel to their first rendezvous point.
The world they left behind was, for now, Yuuzhan Vong property. The stand here had served its intended purpose. The Advisory Council and its supporters had enjoyed months in which to plot their next moves—defenses, surrenders, tricks. But the Advisory Council might never know what else had been done during those months: what plans had been made, what foundations had been laid for a resistance that would not depend on them.
EPILOGUE
Tsavong Lah sat alone on his seat in his command chamber. He could not speak.
The gods must love him. They had restored his arm to him. They had allowed him to root out treachery that had threatened to topple him. They had given him Borleias, whose defenders had, at last, fled.
The gods must hate him. They had taken his father from him. Not only his father, but the fabled warmaster, Czulkang Lah, whose methods of teaching, whose strategic innovations, though introduced decades before the war on this galaxy was launched, had made these conquests possible. The Yuuzhan Vong would be struck like a coufee in the guts by news of Czulkang Lah’s death and the utter destruction of Domain Hul.
Which was it? Had he earned the hatred or the affection of the gods?
He sat back, hollow with the loss he had just experienced, uncertain within a universe that had just grown darker and stranger.
About the Author
AARON ALLSTON is the New York Times bestselling author of novels in the Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi, Legacy of the Force, New Jedi Order, and X-Wing series, as well as the Doc Sidhe novels, which mix 1930s-style hero-pulp action with Celtic myth. He is also a longtime game designer and in 2006 was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design (AAGAD) Hall of Fame. He lives in Central Texas. Visit his website at AaronAllston.com.
Books by Aaron Allston
Galatea in 2-D
Bard’s Tale Series (with Holly Lisle)
Thunder of the Captains
Wrath of the Princes
Car Warriors Series
Double Jeopardy
Doc Sidhe Series
Doc Sidhe
Sidhe-Devil
Star Wars: X-Wing series
Wraith Squadron
Iron Fist
Solo Command
Starfighters of Adumar
Star Wars: New Jedi Order series
Rebel Dream
Rebel Stand
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series
Betrayal
Exile
Fury
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi series
Outcast
Backlash
Conviction
Terminator 3 Series
Terminator Dream
Terminator Hunt
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
PROLOGUE
THE EMBRACE OF PAIN
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
This nothing is called hyperspace.
A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship.
The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.
The bubble is its own universe.
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain.
In the far infrared, he finds cinders of thirst that bake his throat. Higher, up in the visible wavelengths, gleam the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzle within his shoulders; grinding glass-shard screams howl from his hip joints like the death shrieks of golden Ithorian starflowers. There is green here, too—bubbling tongues of acid hungrily lick his nerves—as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasm his overloaded body into convulsion.
And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolet betrayal that brought him here—the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by Vergere, whom he had trusted—he finds silent shattering gamma-ray bursts sleeting into his brain.
Those gamma-ray bursts are the color of his brother’s death.
Anakin, he moans, somewhere deep within himself. Anakin, how can you be dead?
He has faced deaths in his family before; more than once, he thought Jaina lost, or his father, or mother or Uncle Luke. He has grieved, mourned them—but it was always a mistake, it was a misunderstanding, sometimes even a deliberate trick … In the end, they always came back to him.
Until Chewbacca.
When the moon crashed on Sernpidal, it shattered not only Chewbacca’s life but also the magic charm that had always seemed to guard them all. Something in the universe has tilted to one side and opened a gap in reality; through that gap, death has slipped into his family.
Anakin …
Jacen saw him die. Felt him die, thro
ugh the Force. Saw his lifeless body in the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Anakin didn’t even fade.
He only died.
In one impossible instant, Anakin ceased to be the brother Jacen played with, teased, looked after, played tricks on, fought with, cared for, trained with, loved—and became … what? An object. Remains. Not a person, not anymore. Now, the only person who is Anakin is the image Jacen carries in his heart.
An image that Jacen cannot even let himself see.
Each flash of Anakin—his reckless grin so like their father’s, his eyes smoldering with fierce will mirroring their mother’s, his effortlessly athletic warrior’s grace, so much like Uncle Luke’s—these are the gamma bursts that burn the marrow of his bones, that cook his brain until its boil threatens to burst his skull.
But when he looks away from Anakin, there is nothing to see but pain.
He cannot remember if he is on a ship, or still planet-bound. He finds a vague memory of capture aboard a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but he’s not sure if that happened to him, or to someone else. He cannot remember if such distinctions mean anything. All he knows is the white.
He remembers that he’s been captured before. He remembers Belkadan, remembers his vain dream of freeing slaves, remembers the blank terror of discovering that his Force powers meant nothing against the Yuuzhan Vong; he remembers the Embrace of Pain, remembers his rescue by Uncle Luke—
Master Luke. Master Skywalker.
He remembers Vergere. Remembering Vergere brings him to the voxyn queen, and the voxyn queen sends him slithering back down a despair-greased slope to Anakin’s corpse. Anakin’s corpse floats on a burning lake of torment far deeper than anything that can happen to Jacen’s body.
Jacen knows—intellectually, distantly, abstractly—that once he lived outside the white. He knows that he once felt happiness, pleasure, regret, anger, even love. But these are only ghosts, shadows murmuring beneath the roar of pain that fills everything he is, everything he will ever be; the simple fact that the white had a beginning does not imply that it will have an end. Jacen exists beyond time.
Where Jacen is, there is only the white, and the Force.
The Force is the air that he breathes—a cool whisk of sanity, a gentle breeze from a healthier world—though he can no more grasp its power than he might hold on to the wind. It surrounds him, fills him, accepts his suffering, and sustains his sanity. It whispers a reminder that despair is of the dark side, and that ceaseless murmur gives him the strength to go on living.
Distantly on that cool breeze he feels a knot of anger, of black rage and hurt and despair clenching ever harder, compressing itself to diamond and beyond, crushing itself back into carbon powder—he feels, through the bond they have shared from birth, his twin sister falling into the dark.
Jaina, he begs in a quiet corner of his heart. Don’t do it. Jaina, hold on—
But he cannot let himself touch her through the Force; he cannot ask her to share his torment—she is in so much pain already that to suffer his would only drive her darker yet. And so even his twin bond has become a source of anguish.
Jacen has become a prism, reintegrating the glittering spectrum of pain into pure blazing agony.
Agony is white.
Snow-blind in an eternal Hoth ice-noon of suffering, Jacen Solo hangs in the Embrace of Pain.
The touch of a hand along his jaw leaked time into the white. This was not a human hand, not Wookiee, not family or close friend—four fingers, mutually opposable, hard-fleshed as a raptor’s talons—but the touch was warm, and moist, and somehow not unfriendly. Pain retreated toward the back of his mind until he could think again, though he felt it lurking there, waiting. He knew that it would overtake him again, would break in waves across him, but for now—
The tides of agony rolled slowly out, and Jacen could open his eyes.
The hand that had brought him out of the white belonged to Vergere. She stood below him, looking up with wide alien eyes, her fingers light upon his cheek.
Jacen hung horizontally, suspended facedown two meters above a floor of wet, slick-looking greens and browns—its surface corded, viny, as though with muscle and vein. The walls oozed oily dampness that smelled darkly organic: bantha sweat and hawk-bat droppings. From the darkness above swung tentacles like prehensile eyestalks, ends socketed with glowing orbs that stared at him as the tentacles wove and danced and twisted about each other.
He understood: the enemy was watching.
Something that felt like claws, sharp and unyielding, gripped his skull from behind; he could not turn his head to see what held him. His arms were drawn wide, pulled to full extension and twisted so that his shoulders howled in their sockets. A single strong grip crushed his ankles together, grinding bone on bone—
Yet the greatest pain he now suffered was to look on Vergere and remember that he had trusted her.
She withdrew her hand, clenching and opening it while she stared at it with what, on a human, might have been a smile—as though her hand were an unfamiliar tool that might turn out to be a toy, instead.
“Among our masters,” she said casually, as though continuing a friendly conversation, “it is not considered shameful for a warrior in your position to pray for death. This is occasionally granted, to honor great courage. There are some on this very ship who whisper that your action against the voxyn queen has earned this honor for you. On the other hand, our warmaster claims you for his own, to be a sacrifice to the True Gods. This, too, is a very great honor. Do you understand this?”
Jacen understood nothing except how much he hurt, and how terribly he had been betrayed. “I—” Speaking tore his throat as though he coughed splinters of transparisteel. He winced, squeezing shut his eyes until galaxies flared within them, then gritted his teeth and spoke anyway. “I trusted you.”
“Yes, you did.” She opened her hand, turning her quadrifid palm upward as if to catch a falling tear, and smiled up at him. “Why?”
Jacen could not find his breath to give answer; and then he found he had no answer to give.
She was so alien—
Raised on Coruscant, the nexus of the galaxy, he had no memory of a time when there had not been dozens—hundreds, even thousands—of wildly differing species in sight whenever he so much as peeked out the holographic false window of his bedroom. All space lanes led to Coruscant. Every sentient species of the New Republic had had representatives there. Bigotry was utterly beyond him; Jacen could no more dislike or distrust someone simply because she belonged to an unfamiliar species than he could breathe methane.
But Vergere—
Body compact and lithe, arms long and oddly mobile as though possessed of extra joints, hands from which fingers opened like the gripping spines of Andoan rock polyps, back-bent knees above splay-toed feet—he was acutely, overpoweringly aware that he had never seen any of Vergere’s kind before. Long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers curving around a wide, expressive mouth … but expressive of what? How could he know what the arc of her lips truly signified?
It resembled a human smile, but she was nothing resembling human.
Perhaps her species used the crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge for nonverbal signals: right now, as he stared, feathers near the rounded rear of her oblate skull lifted and turned so that their color shifted from starlight silver to red as a blaster bolt. Was that what corresponded to a smile? Or a human’s deadpan shrug? Or a predator’s threat display?
How could he possibly know?
How could he have ever trusted her?
“But you—” he rasped. “You saved Mara—”
“Did I?” she chirped sunnily. “And if I did, what significance do you attach to this?”
“I thought you were on our side—”
One whiskered eyebrow arched. “There is no ‘our side,’ Jacen Solo.”
“You helped me kill the voxyn queen—”
“Helped you? Perhaps. Perhaps I used you; perhaps I
had my own reasons to desire the death of the voxyn queen, and you were a convenient weapon. Or perhaps you are my true interest: perhaps I gave of my tears to Mara—perhaps I helped you survive the encounter with the voxyn queen—perhaps everything I have done was intended to bring you here, and hang you in the Embrace of Pain.”
“Which—” Jacen made himself say “—which was it?”
“Which do you think it was?”
“I—I don’t know … How can I know?”
“Why ask me? Should I presume to instruct a Jedi in the mysteries of epistemology?”
Jacen stiffened in the grip of the Embrace of Pain; he was not so broken that he did not know he was being mocked. “What do you want from me? Why have you done this? Why are you here?”
“Deep questions, little Solo.” Her ridge feathers rippled through a shimmering rainbow like a diamond-edged sabacc deck riffled by an expert dealer. “It is near enough to the truth to say that I am a messenger of melancholy—a herald of tragedy, bearing gifts to ease the grieved. A mourner, with grave goods to decorate the tomb. A hierophant, to perform the sacred offices for the dead—”
Jacen’s head swam. “What are you talking about? I don’t—I can’t—” His voice failed, and he sagged exhaustedly.
“Of course you can’t. It’s enough that the dead suffer their demise; would it be fair to ask them to understand it as well?”
“You’re saying …” Jacen licked his lips, his tongue so dry it scraped them raw. I can face this, he told himself. I may not be much of a warrior, but I can die like one. “You’re saying you’re going to kill me.”
“Oh no, not at all.” From Vergere’s mouth came a musical chiming like a spray of Endorian wind-crystals; he guessed this must serve her for laughter. “I’m saying you’re already dead.”
Jacen stared.
“You are forever lost to the worlds you knew,” she went on with a liquidly alien gesture that might have been a shrug. “Your friends mourn, your father rages, your mother weeps. Your life has been terminated: a line of division has been drawn between you and everything you have ever known. You have seen the terminator that sweeps across the face of a planet, the twilit division between day and night? You have crossed that line, Jacen Solo. The bright fields of day are forever past.”
Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 30