by Troy Denning
“May I stand up?” he said. “Or would you just knock me down again?”
“Try it and see.”
Jag elected to remain seated. Jaina folded her arms and leaned against the wall as far from Jag as the small cabin would permit.
“Last I heard you were clearing Vong off the Hydian Way,” she said.
He nodded. “That’s where I met your parents. It’s important work. If the routes from the Rim to what’s left of the Core were broken, the New Republic would be broken into—well—into even smaller fragments than it is now.”
“Thanks for the lecture. I never would have guessed any of that in a million years.” She frowned down at him. “So you left this important work in order to sneak into my cabin and conduct your experiment?”
“No, that was by way of a bonus.” Jag swept a hand over his dark short-cropped hair. “We’re here for routine maintenance. Since my squadron flies Chiss clawcraft that aren’t in the New Republic inventory, it’s difficult to find maintenance facilities geared to our requirements. Fortunately Admiral Kre’fey’s Star Destroyers have all the equipment necessary to maintain Sienar Fleet Systems TIE fighter command pods, and their machine shops should be able to create anything we need for our Chiss wing pylons.” He smiled up at her. “A lucky coincidence, don’t you think?”
Jaina felt herself softening. “I’ve got six rookie pilots,” she said. “And there’s an operation coming up.”
He gave her an inquiring look. “You weren’t planning on taking them out on an exercise at this very moment, were you?”
“I—” She hesitated. “No. You’ve got me there. But there’s a ton of administrative work, and—”
“Jaina,” he said. “Please allow me to observe, one officer to another, that it is not necessary to do all the work yourself. You absolutely must learn to delegate. You have two capable, veteran lieutenants in Lowbacca and Tesar Sebatyne, and not only will it aid you if you share the work with them, it will aid their development as officers.”
Jaina permitted herself a thin smile. “So it’s to the benefit of my officers and pilots to spend the evening in my cabin alone with you?”
He nodded. “Precisely.”
“Do you play sabacc?”
Jag was surprised. “Yes. Of course.”
“Let’s have a game, then. There’s a very nice sabacc table in the wardroom.”
He looked at her mutely. She broadened her smile and said, “I played your little game, here in the darkened cabin. Now you can play mine.”
Jag sighed heavily, then rose and stood by the door. As she walked past him to open the door, he clasped his hands behind his back.
“I should point out,” he said, “that if you chose to kiss me at this moment, I would be absolutely powerless to prevent you.”
She regarded him from close range, then pressed her lips to his, allowed them to linger warmly for the space of three heartbeats. After which she opened the door and led him to the wardroom, where she skinned him at the sabacc table, leaving him with barely enough credits to buy a glass of juri juice.
Her father, Jaina thought, would have been proud.
Jag contemplated the ruin of his fortunes with a slight frown. “It seems I’ve paid heavily for that stolen kiss,” he said.
“Yes. But you’ve also paid in advance for others.”
Jag raised his scarred eyebrow. “That’s a good thing to know. When might I collect?”
“As soon as we can find a suitably private place.”
“Ah.” He seemed cheered. “Would it be precipitate to suggest that we go immediately?”
“Not at all.” She rose from the table. “Just one thing.”
He gained his feet and straightened his impossibly neat black uniform. “What’s that?”
“I think you’re right about my not doing all the work. I intend to delegate a fair share to you.”
Jag nodded. “Very good, Major.”
“I hope this will contribute to your development as an officer.”
“Oh.” He followed her out of the wardroom. “I’m sure that it will.”
Thrackan Sal-Solo looked out his office viewport at the squalid mess that was Peace City—half-completed construction covered with scaffolding, muck-filled holes in the ground, slave barracks boiling with alien life—and he thought, And all this is mine to command…
If, of course, he could avoid being murdered by one of his loyal subjects. Which was the topic of the present discussion.
He turned to the black-haired woman who sat before his desk and contemplated the suitcase he’d opened on the desktop. The suitcase that contained a kilogram of glitterstim.
“You get one of these every week,” he said.
She looked at him with cobalt-blue predator’s eyes, and flashed her prominent white teeth. “And how many people do I have to kill to earn it?”
“You don’t have to kill anyone. What you have to do is keep me alive.”
“Ah. A challenge.” Dagga Marl steepled her fingertips and looked thoughtful. Then she shrugged. “All right. It’ll be more interesting work than all the boring assassinations the Senate has been handing me.”
“If I ask you to kill anyone,” Thrackan said, “I’ll pay you extra.”
“Good to know,” Dagga said as she closed the case and stowed it neatly under her chair.
He stepped from the viewport to his desk, then grimaced at the stitch in his left side. He massaged the painful area, feeling under his thumb the scar from Onimi’s nasty little batron. Thrackan swore that if he ever caught up with Onimi, that malignant lop-headed little dwarf was going to lose a lot more than a kidney.
The first thing he’d done on Ylesia was be sworn in as President and Commander in Chief of the Peace Brigade.
The second thing he’d done on Ylesia was to meet with the chiefs of the Peace Brigade, an experience that left him undecided whether to laugh, cry, or run in screaming terror.
The Peace Brigade had originally owed its allegiance to something called the Alliance of Twelve. Maybe there had been twelve of them at one point, but there were around sixty of them now, and they called themselves a Senate. One horrified look had shown Thrackan what they were: thieves, renegades, turncoats, criminals, slavers, murderers, and alien scum. The people who had betrayed their galaxy to the terror that was the Yuuzhan Vong—and it wasn’t as if they’d done it out of conviction in the rightness of their cause. They made the Hutts who had built the original colony look like a congregation of saints.
The Hutts were dead: the Yuuzhan Vong had made a clean sweep of the whole caste, then installed the Peace Brigade in their place without altering any of the Hutts’ other arrangements. The flayed skin of the Hutt chief was still on display in front of the Palace of Peace, where the Senate met, just in case anyone was tempted to grow nostalgic about the old order.
Most of the population of the planet were slaves, and most of these, oddly enough, were volunteers—religious ecstatics who worked themselves to death in the glitterstim factories in exchange for a daily blast of bliss directed at them by the Hutts’ telepathic t’landa Til henchmen. The t’landa Til were still very much a part of the picture, having exchanged one overlordship for another.
Thrackan didn’t like slavery—at least for humans—but he supposed there was no alternative under the circumstances. The Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t allow the use of droids, so someone had to dig the ditches, build the grand new buildings of Peace City’s town center, and process the addictive glitterstim that made up the entirety of Ylesia’s gross planetary product.
The son of Tiion Gama Sal had been raised on an estate, as a gentleman, with an army of droid servants. In the place of droids, he needed someone to see to his comforts.
Just as he needed someone to keep him from being murdered by the Senate and their cronies. They’d been madly conspiring and committing quiet violence against one another over control of the glitterstim operation, but now they’d united against their new President.
She was completely mercenary and completely without morals, something Thrackan thought was to his advantage. She made her living as a bounty hunter and an assassin. She’d killed people for the Peace Brigade, and she’d killed Peace Brigade on behalf of other Peace Brigade. She seemed perfectly willing to kill Peace Brigade on behalf of Thrackan, and that was all he asked.
The most important thing about Dagga was that she was smart enough to know when she was well off. Others might offer her a large sum to kill Thrackan, but they weren’t going to offer her a kilo of spice per week.
The spice was the only thing on Ylesia that passed for money. The Yuuzhan Vong intendants in charge of running the supposed economy hadn’t even seen a need for money. Their chief economic principle was that those who obeyed orders and did their work without question would be rewarded with shelter and food. It hadn’t occurred to them that a person might want a little more than organic glop to eat, a membranous cavern to live in, and an overgrown fungus to sit on. A person might prefer to live in marble halls enjoying a bath with golden fixtures, and the latest-model atmosphere craft.
Dagga looked up at him. “Is there anything you’d like me to do right now?”
Thrackan sat, fingers stroking the smooth polished surface of his desk. “Evaluate security here in my office, and in my residence. If you can’t fix whatever’s wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.”
She flipped him a casual salute. “Right, Chief.”
“And if you can recommend any reliable people to assist you…”
She tilted her head in thought. “I’ll think about it. Reliability isn’t one of the more common Peace Brigade virtues.”
“Did I say Peace Brigade?”
Dagga seemed startled by the vehemence of Thrackan’s words.
“I said reliable. I’ll import someone if he’s good enough. Though,” he admitted, “I prefer them human.”
A white smile flashed across Dagga’s features. “I’ll put together a little list,” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Dagga made a slight adjustment to her clothing to enhance her homicidal capabilities, and Thrackan said, “Who is it?”
It was his chief of communications, an Etti named Mdimu. “Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but the advance party for the joint maneuvers has entered the system.”
“When are they scheduled to arrive?” Thrackan asked.
“They’ll be landing at the spaceport in approximately two hours.”
“Very good. Send the quednak to the spaceport now, and I’ll follow in my landspeeder at the appropriate time.”
“Ah—” Mdimu hesitated. “Sir? Your Excellency?”
“Yes?”
“The Yuuzhan Vong—they don’t like machinery, sir. If you arrive at the spaceport in a landspeeder they may consider it an insult.”
Thrackan sighed, then explained slowly and simply so that even an alien like Mdimu could understand. “I’ll arrive before the Vong and then send the landspeeder back to its docking bay. I will return with the Vong on the riding beasts. But I will not ride those stupid six-legged flatulent herbivorous lumbering ninnies to the spaceport when I don’t have to. Understand?”
Mdimu hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“And please tell the construction gangs to keep their machinery out of sight while the Vong are in town.”
“Yes. Of course, Your Excellency.”
Mdimu left the room. Dagga Marl and Thrackan exchanged looks.
“Of this I build a nation,” he said.
The Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog, which looked like a large brownish green lump of vomit, arrived escorted by two squadrons of coralskippers, which looked like rather uninteresting rocks. Thrackan’s official bodyguards—whom he would not have trusted to guard his body if they were the last on Ylesia, and who were most likely in the pay of various factions of the Senate anyway—shuffled into line and presented their amphistaffs.
Amphistaffs. One of the Yuuzhan Vong’s most annoying and dangerous exports. Thrackan gave his official bodyguards a wide berth, as experience had shown they weren’t very good at controlling the weapon their Yuuzhan Vong sponsors had so graciously given them. The previous week he’d lost two guards, bitten during practice by their own weapons’ poisonous heads.
Followed by his real bodyguard, Dagga Marl, Thrackan marched to the frigate analog and waited. Eventually a part of the hull withdrew somehow, and an object like a giant, wart-encrusted tongue flopped down to touch the landing field. Down this ramp came a double file of Yuuzhan Vong armored warriors with amphistaffs—which these warriors looked as if they knew how to use. Once formed on the pavement, they were followed by Supreme Commander Maal Lah, architect of the Yuuzhan Vong capture of Coruscant.
Maal Lah’s appearance was presentable, for a Yuuzhan Vong. Unlike Nom Anor, with his brand-new plaeryin bol implant—this eye replacement even larger and nastier than the one he had lost—or Shimrra, who was so scarred and mutilated that his face looked as if it had gone through a threshing machine, Maal Lah’s regular features were still recognizable as features. He’d restrained the impulse to carve himself up in honor of his vicious gods, and for the most part settled for red and blue tattoos. Thrackan could actually look at him without wanting to lose his lunch. If he let his eyes go slightly out of focus, the tattoos formed an abstract pattern that was almost pleasing.
He made a note to try to keep his eyes slightly out of focus for the rest of the day.
“Greetings, Commander,” he said. “Welcome to Ylesia.”
Maal Lah had fortunately brought a translator along, a member of the intendant caste who had cut off an ear and replaced it with a glistening, semitranslucent sluglike creature the function of which Thrackan preferred not to contemplate.
“Salutations, President Sal-Solo,” Maal Lah said through his translator. “I come to remind you of your submission and to bring your fleet to its obedience.”
“Er—quite,” Thrackan said. A fine way with diplomacy these Vong have. “The intendants on Ylesia have…grown…your damutek. Would you care to see it?”
“First I will inspect your guard.”
Thrackan stayed on the far side of Maal Lah as the warrior inspected the Presidential Guard, hoping that if Maal Lah were accidentally sprayed with poison, Thrackan himself might have a running head start before Yuuzhan Vong warriors began to massacre everyone present. Fortunately no fatalities occurred.
“A shabby lot of useless wretches, totally without spirit or discipline,” Maal Lah commented as he walked with Thrackan to the riding beasts.
“I agree, Commander,” Thrackan said.
“Discipline and order should be beaten into them. What I wouldn’t give to see them in the hands of the great Czulkang Lah.”
Now that might be fun, Thrackan thought, though without knowing who or what Czulkang Lah might be. Thrackan always enjoyed a good thrashing, provided he wasn’t the one on the receiving end.
“I’ll dismiss their commander,” he said. Their commander was a Duros, and therefore expendable. He’d replace the Duros with a human, provided he could find one who might conceivably be loyal.
“I trust the Peace Brigade fleet is ready?” Maal Lah said.
“Admiral Capo assures me that they are fully trained and alert, and eager to serve alongside their gallant allies, the Yuuzhan Vong.” Actually Thrackan had no great hope for the motley force that was the Peace Brigade fleet. In fact he rather hoped that Maal Lah would be so disgusted as to execute the Rodian Admiral Capo, thus providing another vacancy Thrackan could fill with a human.
Again, if he could find one to trust. Here that always seemed to be the problem.
Reflecting that he was a little old for this sort of thing, Thrackan followed Maal Lah up the vine ladder to
the purple-green resinous tower atop the six-legged form of a Yuuzhan Vong riding beast. The quednak’s moss-covered scales reeked of something that needed flushing down the nearest sewer. At the urging of its intendant handler, the beast lurched to its feet and set off for Peace City at a slow walk. Thrackan hoped the motion wouldn’t make him ill.
A pair of swoop analogs—open-cockpit fliers with a crew of two and sped along by dovin basals—rose to take position on either side of the riding beast. Maal Lah wasn’t trusting his life entirely to guards who moved on foot.
Thrackan cast a glance at the double file of Yuuzhan Vong warriors trotting along in the big lizard’s wake. By the time they traveled the twenty-two kilometers to Peace City, perhaps even the fabled Yuuzhan Vong would be tired of the pace.
“Now that we have more of your people on the planet,” Thrackan ventured, “I wonder if we might better provide for their spiritual needs.”
Maal Lah’s answer was dry. “How would you do that, Excellency?”
“There are no temples to your gods here. Perhaps we could provide one for your people.”
“That is a generous thought, Excellency. Of course, it is we who would have to provide the template for the structure, and, of course the priest.”
“We could donate the ground, at least.”
“So you could.” Maal Lah considered for a moment. “As with many of my clan, I have always been a devotee of Yun-Yammka, the Slayer. It would be an act of devotion to foster his worship on a new world. Of course, the worship requires sacrifice…”
“Plenty of slaves for that purpose,” Thrackan said, as heartily as he could manage.
Maal Lah bowed his head. “Very good. So long as you are willing to donate one from time to time.”
Thrackan waved a hand dismissively. “Anything we can do for our brothers.” At least he could make sure none of the victims were human. “I have a piece of land already in mind,” he added.
He certainly did. The land in question was adjacent to the Altar of Promises, where the t’landa Til administered to the slaves their daily dose of telepathic euphoria. The t’landa Til were said to have powers over all humanoid species, and Thrackan was inclined to wonder if that included the Yuuzhan Vong.