Dark Tide 1: Onslaught (17 page)

Ganner immediately dropped to his knees and doubled over. He covered his mouth with his gloved hands as his chest convulsed. What little was left of his supper leaked out through his fingers and puddled in the sand. He shot Corran an incendiary glance, then his body heaved again.

Beyond him, in the space between the huts, the two Yuuzhan Vong towered over their slave. Both of them barked questions at him. Confusion rolled off the slave, then outrage. He coughed out an incoherent comment and composed his face into a mask of defiance. He pushed off the ground with one hand and tried to rise and run, but his captors never gave him the chance to escape.

A kick to the stomach jetted dark fluid from the slave's mouth. Blood rolled down from his cheeks like a flood of black tears. The Yuuzhan Vong circled the slave, their punches and kicks knocking him back and forth between them. If not for the sheer violence of their assault, he would have fallen to the sand. They kept him upright despite the fact that their blows shattered his skeleton and made it impossible for him to keep himself on his feet.

Finally the slave sagged to the ground. He was so far gone that a few more kicks couldn't even send a spark of pain from him to Corran through the Force. The Yuuzhan Vong looked at one another, traded laughter and comments. They mimed blows they had struck and used their hands to mimic the way the slave had bounced between them. Then they stooped and grabbed the slave, wrist and ankle, and carried him to the edge of the village. Swinging him back and forth four times, they lofted him out into the sand, and very quickly a slashrat killball marked the place he landed.

The Yuuzhan Vong picked up handfuls of sand and used it to scrub blood from their bodies, then wandered back to their huts and disappeared back inside.

Corran projected the image of the hills into Ganner's mind, then began his own retreat from the village. He took it slowly and monitored Ganner's progress. He waited close by until the younger Jedi actually got out on the sand outside of the village. He hoped the tang of killscent would remind Ganner how close death lay to them.

Again nestled in the rocks of the hills, the two Jedi removed their sandshoes to begin their ascent. Ganner sullenly strapped the shoes across his back, then turned on Corran.

“If you ever do anything like that again, I will kill you.”

“At least then death will be deferred, not immediate, as it would have been here.”

“That man, you watched them beat him to death, and you did nothing.”

“That's right, I did nothing because our tracks could be followed back to the students. We saw only two of the Yuuzhan Vong, but there could be dozens more, maybe hundreds in the big shell. Cutting those two down, right there,
if
you could have done it, would have doomed Dr. Pace and Trista and the others.”

Ganner snorted angrily. “Not if they were the only two Yuuzhan Vong here.”

“And what do you think the chances of that are?”

The younger man arched a dark eyebrow. “There are only two Jedi here.”

“Unassailable logic, that, Ganner.” Corran settled the sandshoes across his back, then tugged on the cuffs of his gloves. “Maybe there are two, maybe there are two thousand. I don't doubt that before we get off this rock, we're going to have to kill some of them, but the longer we can delay that confrontation, the better.”

“So more people can die?”

“No, so we have a good chance of stopping the Agamarians from being captured. What we saw here is a data point, and one I want to study. That wasn't just a beating.”

“It was sport, cruel sport.”

“Maybe, at the end, yes, but there was something else.” Corran frowned. “The way they spoke to him, they expected something from him. Their contempt, their anger, as shown by the frenzy at the end—something else was going on there.”

“Fine, you think about the motives of our murderers. I don't think that data point will do you any good.”

“Maybe not, but it's not all we've got. Our soil samples are more data points—”

“Killing Yuuzhan Vong will generate precious data points for you.”

“Maybe. Dead Jedi would make for even more data points.” Corran tapped two fingers against his right temple. “The vital thing right now is that we get back to the students, see if they can help us figure out what's going on here, then see if we can get away safely with what we know.”

“And, if we can't?”

Corran shrugged. “The first few times the Yuuzhan Vong fought Jedi, we won. We'll just have to see how far we can extend that streak.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jacen Solo's eyes snapped open, and for a moment, he wondered where he was. He knew he was on Belkadan, but he found himself surprised to be back at the ExGal facility. Why that surprised him he couldn't immediately identify. He kicked off the light blanket covering him, then swung his legs over the edge of the cot and sat up.

Jacen raked fingers back through long brown hair, then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Before he had awakened, he'd been in a Yuuzhan Vong village, the one where the villips were being grown. He'd gone there to free the slaves. He'd waded into the water and called them to him. They'd come, and their master had come after them. As the slave master had done with the old man, Jacen had left the Yuuzhan Vong warrior slowly sinking in the murky, still water.

It feels so real.
Jacen pulled his hands away from his eyes, then focused until his hands emerged as ghostly shadows in the dim light. His hands still tingled with the sense of having held his lightsaber in a duel with the Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He shifted his shoulders and stretched his back, searching for any trace of pain to somehow validate the reality of what he'd seen.

He knew it probably had just been a dream. In the week since they watched the murder of the old man, they had done quite a bit of scouting. The Yuuzhan Vong had indeed turned Belkadan—or at least this section of it—into a shipyard. They were growing villips, coralskippers, and dovin basals all over the place. The laborers were slaves all, by the look of it, though some of the overseers had aides who appeared, to Jacen, to be human and cooperating. They all had the growths on them, too, but the Force was not filled with static from the collaborators, just greatly diminished.

The vision's being just a dream made sense. It was clearly a fantasy being fulfilled to let him drain away his frustration. He was almost willing to accept what he had seen as a dream, then to drop back off to sleep.

Two things prevented him from doing that, however. One was a sense of urgency wrapped around the vision. While he was willing to accept that his frustration was enough to give birth to the dream, his frustration had been strongest the night after watching the murder. Since then, they had not returned to that place.

The second thing was the sheer reality of the vision. It wasn't something he was remembering, per se, but felt as if it was a glimpse at something he had to do. He knew, very well, that if a Jedi was open to the Force, bits and pieces of the future might be revealed to him. His uncle's Master, Yoda, was known for his wisdom and ability to see pieces of the future. Jacen had never really felt he'd been gifted a vision by the Force, but it did seem to him as if this was just the sort of thing a vision like that would entail.

He got up from his cot and staggered out of the room that had once been Danni's. Pretty much everything in it had been smashed, but he'd been able to recover a few static holographs and a couple of other little mementos he'd carry back to her. He shuffled his feet to move aside the detritus in the hallway, then leaned against the door jamb to the room his uncle had taken.

A small glow lamp filled the far corner of the room with warm, golden light. His uncle sat on the floor facing the doorway, all but reduced to a silhouette by the light. Jacen started to say something, but then the sense of peace and concentration he got from his uncle stilled his tongue.

This was not the first time Jacen had seen his uncle enter a Jedi trance to tighten his bonds with the Force. After the peace with the Remnant, when Luke had made changes in the structure of the academy, other apprentices had joked that the Master had become old and needed his Force naps. Jacen had laughed at that, but he envied his uncle's connection to the Force. He wanted that intimacy himself, and he knew what sort of a price his uncle had paid to earn it. While he knew that such a bond could not be won easily, he fervently hoped his course to attaining it would be neither as long nor as twisted as his uncle's.

He turned away from the door and stood there with his back pressed flat against the wall. His uncle had said that experience allowed one to know that hard decisions needed to be made, and deciding if what he had seen was real or not certainly qualified as a hard decision. While his head told him to doubt what he had seen, his heart urged him to go.

That choice
feels
right, and the Force is more about feeling than thinking.
Jacen slowly exhaled, then returned to Danni's room and slowly pulled on his combat suit. He clipped a comlink to the lapel, so he could record the data about his mission.
That way, Uncle Luke's goal will be served even if I can't attain mine.
He didn't warn R2-D2 that he was heading out, however, since he knew the droid would wake his uncle, and the mission would be ended before it ever began.

As he walked past Luke's door, he bowed once to his Master, and then, with a long Jedi robe shrouding him, he emerged from the ExGal facility and strode into the night.

With every step Jacen took, he found himself becoming further and further enmeshed in the vision he'd had. Every leaf, every wisp of cloud, the buzz of insects, the rattle of gravel coursing down a hillside in his wake—all of it matched what he remembered. He stopped thinking and instead concentrated on feeling, choosing his steps almost at random, yet knowing each time that he had made the right choice.

He stalked through the night, taking great care certainly, but with a growing sense of invulnerability because of what he knew he was heading out to do. His vision was coming true. He was drawing closer and closer to a confrontation that would free the slaves and begin to turn back the Yuuzhan Vong. He knew Luke might not understand, and probably would not approve, but Jacen felt bound to fulfill the destiny the Force had presented to him.

Quickly enough he found himself descending to the shore of the shallow lake. Moonlight filled the troughs between ripples with silver, and more of it pooled in the water on top of the villip leaves. Slaves moved through the stalks, anointing the villips with ladle after ladle of the dark water. The only sounds in the basin came from the splashing of water and the villips' haunting whispers.

Jacen stopped at the water's edge and threw back his cloak. He took a deep breath and let calm flow through him. He smiled, just a little, then composed his face in a benign expression. He opened his arms and spread them wide.

“Come to me, people. I will save you.”

The slaves, almost as one, brought their heads up and looked over at him. A series of high whistles coursed back and forth, to be echoed by some of the villips. Jacen recognized the sound as the sort of thing R2-D2 did when the droid was puzzled, so he broadened his smile and waved the slaves toward him.

“Come to me. Your time as slaves is over.”

The slaves began to move, but out of sync with his vision.
They're moving away from me!
The slaves slunk away, crouching as if expecting a punishing blow. Those in the front rank watched him while reaching out for someone behind them. The others in the more distant ranks turned and ran as fast as they could, splashing water up over themselves.

Then, toward the center of the slave formation, a part formed. A Yuuzhan Vong warrior clad in armor and bearing an amphistaff stepped down into the water and faced him. He spun the amphistaff in a circle, first between them, then up over his head and finally around his back. He stopped in an eye blink, with the staff trapped between his right forearm and ribs, then lowered himself into a crouch.

Jacen waded out to midcalf and produced his lightsaber. He thumbed the blade to life and let the hiss-crack drown out the frightened mewing of the slaves. His green lightsaber cast a ghastly light over the villips. Jacen whipped the humming blade around in a lazy infinity arc, first slicing through the villip stalk, then slashing in half both falling villips.

The warrior bellowed loudly and started to sprint at Jacen. Water splashed high, but hardly seemed to slow him at all. His amphistaff had begun spinning again, with the point dipping down to nip at the water with each circuit.

Jacen started to rush at his foe, but because he was smaller, the water slowed him. The young Jedi set himself, drawing the blade up high and back by his right shoulder. Then, as the warrior closed, Jacen cocked his wrists so the blade pointed forward, then lunged.

Just as I did in my vision!

The Yuuzhan Vong warrior, however, did not share in that vision. He twisted back to the right, sliding past the green energy blade, and cracked his amphistaff across Jacen's back. One of the armor's trauma pads absorbed much of the damage, but the force of the blow still sent Jacen stumbling forward. He went to one knee, then spun, bringing his lightsaber up to parry the next slashing attack.

The lightsaber's blade
did
fend off the strike, but didn't have quite the effect Jacen had expected.
My parry should have sheared thirty centimeters off that staff!
The young man came to his feet, parried another attack low and to the left, then twisted his wrists and brought the lightsaber up in a slash that should have opened the Yuuzhan Vong from right hip to left shoulder.

Sparks exploded and smoke rose from the alien armor. The warrior stumbled back a step or two, then lunged with his amphistaff. Jacen batted that attack wide, then cut down at the Yuuzhan Vong's right wrist. More sparks and smoke, and even a sizzling sound to go with it, but the hand didn't come off.

Surprised, Jacen cranked the green blade up and around for another attack on that arm, but the Yuuzhan Vong had already pulled it back wide. Before Jacen could shift his attack to a slash across the warrior's belly, the Yuuzhan Vong's left fist came around and caught the youth in the neck.

The heavy blow staggered Jacen and drove him back. He'd have fallen into the water except that he bumped up against a villip plant and it steadied him. He shook his head to clear it, then ducked as the Yuuzhan Vong arced a roundhouse kick at him. The kick missed Jacen, but exploded one of the villips, drenching him in chunky, viscous fluid that burned his eyes, nose, and mouth.

Choking still, Jacen ducked behind the villip plant, then cut behind another. He splashed a handful of water up to wash his face off, then dodged left and slashed twice quickly at the Yuuzhan Vong. The slashes backed his foe off for a moment, but in the blade's light Jacen noticed that the furrow he'd cut in the Yuuzhan Vong's armor had become little more than a discolored scar.

They don't just grow the armor; it's living still!

The Yuuzhan Vong held his amphistaff high and brought it down in a crushing blow aimed at Jacen's head. The Jedi brought his lightsaber up to block, but the amphistaff went from rigid to fluid and, whiplike, wrapped itself around his right wrist. A quick yank pulled Jacen forward, off balance, and into the Yuuzhan Vong's right knee. The knee caught him in the gut, doubling him over.

Jacen felt the warrior's viselike grip close on the back of his neck, then he had his face plunged into the turgid water. Water boiled around his lightsaber, but the whip controlled the movement of that arm enough that he couldn't strike.

The young man shunted away the panic rising in him and immediately summoned the Force. He reached out to pluck the Yuuzhan Vong off him—exactly as he had done countless times with his siblings or comrades when goofing around at the academy. He discovered the flaw with his strategy about the same time his lungs started to burn for lack of oxygen.

I can't sense the Yuuzhan Vong through the Force. And now I can't affect him.

It occurred to Jacen, as he sucked in the first mouthful of water, that he could use the Force to lift himself out of the water. The concentration necessary for that act died as his body gagged and coughed. The stale air in his lungs bubbled out, then his body reflexively tried to inhale and breathed in more water, which started him coughing and gagging yet again.

Oh, no,
Jacen thought, as the world began to go black,
it wasn't a vision. Or a dream. Just a nightmare . . .