Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I

by Aaron Allston

  Piggy saBinring was the Gamorrean pilot assigned to tutor Jaina in battle management. Perhaps the only one of his kind, he had, in childhood, been modified by a biologist working for the Warlord Zsinj. The biologist had altered his brain structure, giving him patience and an extraordinary mathematical acuity, the latter being necessary for him to learn the complex astronautics and astrogation required of starfighter pilots. Sharr Latt was the pale-haired Coruscant native who had been assigned to work with Jaina on her role as avatar of the Trickster goddess; he and Piggy were just back from their first session with her.

  Bhindi Drayson was a human female. She spoke in the same deliberate way, and with the same innocuous accent, as the late and former Chief of State Mon Mothma, suggesting a background on Mon Mothma’s homeworld of Chandrila. Bhindi was unlovely, as lean and sharp-featured as a naked vibroblade, with dark hair and eyes that contributed to a perception of her as someone brooding and menacing, but Luke felt no aura of menace from her, just a quiet watchfulness.

  “Are you any relation to Hiram Drayson?” Luke asked her. Admiral Hiram Drayson was a former military officer and Intelligence leader, and a friend of Mon Mothma.

  “His daughter,” she said.

  “You have a noble family history.”

  She gave him a brief smile. “And that’s only the parts you’ve heard about.”

  “Bhindi is one of our two tactics experts, with Piggy,” Face said, “and she’s been learning whatever she can about Yuuzhan Vong tactics. Unfortunately, we’re going to lose her on Coruscant.”

  Luke frowned, wondering for a moment if Face was somehow both prescient and extremely inconsiderate, then realized what Face meant. He turned to Bhindi again. “You’ll be staying there when we leave?”

  She nodded. “I’ll be setting up Resistance cells on Coruscant.”

  Luke suppressed a shudder. Going into Coruscant would be bad enough. The thought of being left behind among enemies so antagonistic and alien, deliberately staying there, was not a pleasant one. Bhindi looked faintly pleased at having discomfited a Jedi Master.

  They’d gathered, the Wraiths and Luke, in a chamber deep within the Borleias complex—a chamber that, from its pristine condition, had not, Luke suspected, been found by the Yuuzhan Vong during their brief occupation. How the Wraiths had discovered its existence was not something he knew; all he did know was that it was accessed through a sliding panel in the back of a laboratory. The hidden chamber, too, had been a laboratory; on the shelves on its walls were the left-behind remnants of biomedical gear. Luke saw bacterial culture dishes, injectors, neural monitors … at the back of the chamber was a full-sized bacta tank, empty, the transparisteel of its main compartment scuffed and abraded through hard use so that many portions of it were almost opaque.

  “So,” Face said, seating himself on one of the stools at the chamber’s main table. “Let’s show him what we’ve got. Kell, you first.”

  The big man hefted a green cloth bag roughly two meters long. From its open top he pulled an object like a very shallow one-person boat. It was thick, perhaps thirty centimeters in depth for most of its length, thinning to some ten centimeters all along the edge. Its red underside was both gummy and reflective; it took Luke a moment’s study to see that a thick layer of transparent red material had been closely fitted over a smooth silvery surface. Its top side was a dull gray, with two shoe-shaped clamps protruding from it.

  Kell dropped this apparatus on the table in front of Face. It made a boom as it hit the table; it had to be heavy. Face shot Kell a sardonic look and said, “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Kell turned his attention to Luke. “This is something we’ve been working on for some time. We mount them in shells resembling meteorites or debris. Together with the shells, they act as individual atmospheric intrusion pods.”

  Luke gave them a skeptical look. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning you ride them from orbit into a planet’s atmosphere.”

  “In what?”

  “In the shells I mentioned. Nothing more. The red stuff is an adhesive that affixes to the interior of the shell. The shell doesn’t even have to be airtight. One person rides it in a vac suit, his feet gripped here.” Kell indicated the clamps. “The underside is an ablative heat shield. Slowly ablative, you understand. Layered between the heat shield and the top are a simple repulsor unit and a power cell. The repulsor keeps it angled correctly toward the planet’s surface. You drop into atmosphere at the correct angle and ride it all the way down. The shell burns up from friction with the atmosphere—it’s designed to keep the heat from cooking the occupant. The heat wash also conceals your true nature from most sensors—ours and theirs. When the shell gives way, the silvery surface is your secondary heat shield; it’s ablative, too, so the visual illusion that you’re a burning meteorite continues. In other words, you look and act just like a piece of space debris punching into the atmosphere.”

  “Until you get near the planet’s surface,” Face added. “At which time the repulsor puts out its final effort and slows you down so you crash quite slowly into the surface.”

  “Crash,” Luke said.

  “Quite slowly.”

  “And these have been successfully tested.”

  Face glanced around, looking a bit nervous. “Well, tested, sure. They’ve been tested. Each time they’re tested, we assemble what data we can, and the next generation of pods comes back just a bit more intact.”

  “We’re sure they have them right this time,” Bhindi said.

  Luke looked among them, and it was Bhindi who broke first, losing her worried expression, snickering at Luke’s.

  “We’ve made insertions with them,” Kell said, relenting. “They’re pretty new, but Sharr and I have used them twice, Face and Elassar three times. We’ve never fried anyone yet.”

  Luke shook his head. “I have to say, this sounds like the worst idea in a thousand generations of bad ideas.”

  “You haven’t heard all our ideas,” Bhindi said.

  “Next,” Face interrupted, and nodded at Baljos.

  The scientist rooted around in a bag of his own. From it he drew something that he threw atop the atmospheric intrusion unit. It looked like what would result if someone carefully removed all the skin from the head of a Yuuzhan Vong and meticulously reattached it into the shape of a head. It twitched when it hit the pod, then settled into stillness.

  “An ooglith masquer,” Luke said.

  “Right the first time,” Baljos said. “I’m the inventor. Well, the developer. I was working from captured ooglith masquers.”

  “But this one looks like a Yuuzhan Vong face.”

  Baljos nodded. “Each one is unique. I give them all names. That’s Brand. So called because most of the mutilation decorations come from a technique that resembles branding. They hurt like anything to remove … but you can wear them for hours or days, unlike holoshrouds, where your batteries give out after a few minutes.”

  “This, I like,” Luke said. “It’ll help us move among them without being detected.”

  “Next,” Face said.

  Bhindi rooted around in her own pack. From it she extracted a brown object made up of a thick, curved disk at the top, bent down into the approximate shape of a canopy, mounted atop a thick stem that grew thicker at the other end. It was approximately the size of a human head.

  Luke gave it a close look. “It’s some sort of fungus.”

  “We’ll all be carrying them,” she said.

  “In case we get hungry?”

  “It’s not a fungus,” Bhindi assured him. “It’s a droid.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “It looks like a type of fungus found in dank places in Coruscant’s undercity,” Bhindi said. “We’re hoping that the Yuuzhan Vong won’t destroy them, precisely because they look like something organic. In fact, their covering is organic, a type of mold. Their circuitry is heavily shielded. They have an epoxy reservoir so they can c
ling to whatever surface they’re on if they get grabbed, and an epoxy solvent so they can detach themselves later. They’re mobile and have very advanced sensor arrays and tactical programming.”

  “Meaning,” Elassar said, “that they’re going to sneak around, find Yuuzhan Vong installations, try to get inside, and relay information to one another. They’ll establish a relay chain up to the surface, and the one on the surface will transmit to surviving comm stations there.”

  “It’s a long shot,” Bhindi said, “but any piece of information we get could prove vital at some point. And we have four different shape and coloration schemes on these, including two that look like Yuuzhan Vong worldshaping plants. If the Yuuzhan Vong discover that one is a droid and destroy everything that looks like it, the others could survive undetected.”

  “Fungus droids. I always thought that Intelligence work was supposed to be, I don’t know, sophisticated and charming.”

  Face snickered. “That’s what you told me the first time we met.”

  Luke frowned. “When did we ever meet before?”

  “It was …” Face reconsidered. “Oh, that’s right. I was in disguise. You wouldn’t recognize me now.”

  “But when was it? Now I’m curious.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “We have a few sets of vonduun crab armor,” Bhindi interrupted, “and a few more sets of armor faked up to look like the real thing. If they get close enough to touch it, they’ll know the fakes are made of manufactured materials, of course. And we have lots of tizowyrms—their translator worms.”

  “And we have explosives,” Kell said. “Lots and lots of explosives.”

  “And a Jedi,” Piggy said, his voice a mechanical rasp.

  “Three Jedi,” Luke corrected. “Mara and Tahiri are going with us. All right. Let’s figure out exactly how we’re going to get into Coruscant orbit, where we want to land, and what our priorities are. If we’re crazy enough to do this, we need to be sane enough to do it well.”

  TWELVE

  Borleias Occupation, Day 39

  In the hallway of the senior personnel quarters, where most of the Insiders kept their chambers, Jaina was held up by a crowd—Wedge, Iella, their daughters, Luke, Mara, little Ben, the Jedi Kam and Tionne Solusar from the Jedi academy, Han, Leia, and C-3PO. They were crowded into the hall in a mass of good-byes and last-minute instructions.

  “I don’t want to go.” That was Syal, Wedge’s older daughter. Her voice was not raised in the high-pitched whine of the wheedler; though she couldn’t be older than ten, she was expressing a feeling rather than complaining. She was speaking as befitted a child who’d been trained to think, to express arguments logically, to express emotions clearly.

  “I know,” Wedge said. He knelt beside both daughters and took them in his arms. “But where you’re going, I’ll worry less about you and can do my job better.”

  “We’ll take good care of him.” That was Kam Solusar, to Mara and Luke. But Mara did not seem to hear; she was totally focused on her infant son, whom she held to her. Mara was whispering to her boy, and though Jaina strained to hear, she could not; Jaina wondered if Mara was perhaps not using words, but communing directly through the Force. Luke held them both, watching his son with a wondering expression.

  Mara’s own expression contained none of the edginess and dark humor that were the parts of her everyone saw. This was not exactly a softened Mara, but it was a different Mara, one whose angles and thoughts were unfamiliar to Jaina. Jaina wondered what the baby was seeing, whether this view was, like some optical puzzles, something that only made sense or was recognizable when viewed from one specific angle.

  For a moment Jaina felt a flash of emotion—her own, rather than Mara’s or the baby’s, but it was still unfamiliar to her. Envy, she thought, as it faded, but whom was she envying? Mara, or the baby?

  “Hey, kid.” That was her father, finally noting her presence. “You here to see us off? Or are you running interference?”

  “Uh … I didn’t even know you were going. I’m part of the main task force.”

  Wedge reluctantly released his daughters and rose. “Jaina, this is the first mission to take the Jedi students, and some of the civilian children, such as mine, to the new safe zone. Han, I’ve got Nevil and Corran running interference for you.”

  “Well, blast. Thought I was going to be able to give my daughter some much-needed flying lessons.”

  Jaina didn’t rise to the bait. She just shrugged. “Some other time, maybe.”

  With extraordinary gentleness and a reluctance she couldn’t conceal, Mara handed her son to Luke. She bent to kiss Ben’s forehead, then turned away … not swiftly enough for Jaina to miss the flash of pain in her features. Then Mara was walking back to her quarters, her stride long and her boot heels clicking in a manner that seemed absolutely normal, as if nothing out of the usual had just occurred.

  “Come on, Junior Corellians.” Han turned away from the crowd, stooped just a little, and looked back over his shoulder. “Who wants a ride to the Millennium Falcon?”

  “Me!” That was Myri, closer to Han than her sister. She jumped onto Han’s back; he locked his arms under her knees so she could ride piggyback.

  Han scowled at C-3PO. “Come on, Goldenrod.”

  “I am as ready to depart as I was at the beginning of this discussion, four minutes and thirty-eight seconds ago.”

  “No, you pile of parts, I mean, do what I’m doing.” Han flexed, emphasizing his odd posture.

  “As you wish, but I fail to see what will be gained …” C-3PO bent in an imitation of Han’s position, then added “Oh” as Syal, grinning, jumped onto his back.

  “That’s it,” Han said. “Syal, don’t be afraid to use the whip, he’s willful and skittish.”

  “Sir, I protest. These are adjectives that cannot properly be used to describe my behavior …”

  Han set himself into motion, heading down the hallway, but rolled his eyes at Jaina. “I should have known better. She weighs as much as a wampa.”

  “I do not!” Myri said.

  They passed down the corridor, C-3PO and Syal following. Jaina watched them go. So many times she’d ridden her father’s back that way. The last time … when had it been? Only a few years ago. He’d said she was getting too big, or that his back was getting too old. Probably another Han Solo fib.

  The gathering in the hall was breaking up, Leia accompanying Wedge and Iella toward the complex’s main hall, saying, “I need to talk about some additional matériel.” Luke followed, little Ben in his arms, talking to Kam and Tionne.

  And then Jaina was alone. She followed Mara’s path to the door of the Skywalker chamber and knocked. At Mara’s “come in,” she did so.

  Mara stood in the center of the main chamber. All the chamber’s furniture had been placed against the walls, giving the room a large open area in the middle, doubtless a place for Mara and Luke to exercise or meditate. Perhaps Mara had just started an exercise; she looked a little flushed, her hair slightly disarrayed.

  “I guess it’s a bad time,” Jaina said. She jerked her head back toward the door and the corridor beyond. “I didn’t know all that was going on.”

  “It’s all right. They’re taking the Jedi academy students to a new hiding place. Somewhere they’ll be safe while the Errant Venture is on-station here. Ben is going with them, and Wedge’s kids, and the boy Tarc.” Mara shrugged, and seemed about to add something, but no more words came.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. I just can’t seem to find my breath.”

  This sudden candor, the way Mara seemed to be just short of in control, was unnerving. Jaina tried to find some words to help but realized the ridiculousness, the futility of it. She didn’t have any experience to compare to it.

  Other than losing Anakin and Jacen. It was not the same. On one hand, they were her brothers, not her son; on the other, the loss was permanent. S
he steered herself away from those thoughts. “You could go with him,” she said.

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it. Don’t think I won’t be considering it until the moment your parents blast off. Or even after.” Mara swallowed hard. “But my work here, and this mission to Coruscant, is more important than my feelings. If I’m not here to do something I’m supposed to do, the Yuuzhan Vong could take another few strides toward victory. Down the line, when it counts, that might be the difference for us. It might be the difference between Ben having a galaxy he can grow up in … or not having one. If I just do what I want to, and go running after your father, Ben could end up dying. Or becoming a slave of the Yuuzhan Vong. I can’t do that.”

  Mara’s eyes were closed now, but she was in control—in control of her physical self, anyway. Nothing could control the anguish she was feeling.

  Jaina felt it through the Force, an outpouring of pain that roared out of Mara like water through a shattered dam. It washed across Jaina and she was suddenly lost in it—

  years alone the cold of space in her heart the Emperor’s hand avenge his death and then Luke what does hate become Ben so small so small was I ever that small will I ever see him again do I deserve to be his mother

  It folded Jaina over like a snap-kick to her stomach. She lurched back into the door, but Mara, eyes closed, somewhere deep within herself, didn’t seem to hear.

  Jaina resisted the urge to go to her mentor, to put her arms around her, to comfort her. The numbers had to catch up with Jaina sooner or later, as they had with her brothers. Mara would be better off not having her emotions divided as finely as they were. By stepping away, allowing Mara to concentrate just on her immediate family, Jaina would be helping her. She backed into the doorway and out into the hall.

  The door slid closed in front of her, but the wash of thoughts and emotions from Mara continued. Jaina moved away and began to catch her breath, but Mara’s ache still permeated her, mingling with her own ache from the loss of her brothers, and she wished she could keep from ever hurting that way again.