Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (30 page)

“What do we do instead? Take him back to Borleias, put him in front of the Vong? Ship him off to a refugee camp run by strangers? At least we
know
Kam and Tionne.”

“I just don’t know, Han.”

“But you know
everything
.”

“Only by comparison with my husband.”

“Ouch.” Han stopped whispering. “Hey, kid.”

“What?” Tarc looked back over the arm at him.

“Never get married.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means strap yourself in. You’re going back to Borleias for now.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Just for the time being, kid.” Han let real anger creep into his tone. “And don’t pull that
because I look like Anakin
skifter. Not ever again. Do you understand?”

Tarc’s expression froze. “Yes, sir.”

“Remember this face, kid. It’s telling you that I mean what I say.” Han drew Leia along with him toward the cockpit. “I’ll figure out how to convince him next time.”

“I’ve got a thousand credits that say you don’t.”

It was the dead of night, but the former biotics facility was never truly asleep. Tam could hear movement down side corridors, distant conversations, a rumble in the walls that signified the takeoff of a patrol of starfighters outside.

But this corridor was comparatively still. Guarded day and night against entry by unauthorized personnel, it was empty of traffic at this hour.

Tam paused outside the door to Danni Quee’s laboratories and felt himself rocking in place, moved by the racing of his heart.

But pausing was failure to comply, and the faintest throbs of a new headache joined the rhythm of his heart.

He cursed and moved to the wall opposite the doorway. Reaching up, he brushed his fingers along the wall’s surface, near the ceiling, until he found it—a slick patch as though someone had sprayed oil there.

It wasn’t oil. It was a thing of the Yuuzhan Vong, another living apparatus that they had given him. It had a texture much like the villip—smooth, slick. He rubbed it until he found the crease that was its activation point, and he stroked that more deliberately. Then he wiped his hand on his shirt.

That spot on the wall changed color. Though he knew it remained flat as a sheet of fine flimsiplast, it seemed to him as though it gained depth, transforming into a duplicate of the security keypad and blue readout beside Danni’s door.

As though it were a holorecording, a hand came into view and punched numbers into the keypad. It was a woman’s hand, young, unlined, probably Danni’s. Tam watched the keys as they were depressed, memorizing the sequence, and glanced at the readout that showed the values of the keys.

They weren’t the same. He repeated the letters and numbers he’d seen pressed, and they differed from the ones on the readout in two places.

That meant—what? Either he’d misread the keys as they were being punched, or the readout played back an incorrect sequence.

He nodded, satisfied. It was a security measure. A recording of the readout would yield a password that either wouldn’t work or would alert a security office of an intrusion in progress. Only Tam’s visual memory, very strong and accurate, one of the reasons he’d become a holocam operator in the first place, had saved him from being trapped by this subterfuge.

He wished he’d been trapped. He wished he’d failed.

The headache began to increase in intensity.

He touched the Yuuzhan Vong recording apparatus and watched it fade away to transparency. Then he keyed the password—the correct password—into the keypad. The door slid aside.

Tam froze. Inside the room, two meters from him, Danni Quee sat at her usual desk. But she was motionless, her head down, colors from the monitor before her playing across her hair.

Danni didn’t move, other than from the rhythm of her breathing, and Tam forced himself to enter the office.

It was dim, lit only by monitors and desk lights, and no one other than Danni was present. Tam moved around her station to stand beside her, taking great care not to brush against anything; if he moved slowly enough, he could compensate for his awkwardness. Awkwardness that had caused him to trip when he was being pursued on Coruscant. Awkwardness that had led to his capture. His enslavement.

Danni’s monitor showed something, an object with facets like a gem. There was a lot of writing on the screen, technical terminology he couldn’t grasp, phrases like
reflectivity index
and
refraction
and
power augmentation
.

He squinted at it. His eyes were fine, but he had to squint to alert the little creature now sharing his ocular orbit with his eye that now was the time for it to wake up and begin recording. He felt the thing twitch; then his stomach twitched as nausea rose within him.

Tam moved through the laboratory, looking at each of the other screens in turn, looking at handwritten notes and datapad screens. At the station beside Danni’s lay a couple of data cards; slowly, silently, he brought out his own datapad, inserted the cards in it, copied off their contents, and returned them to their original positions.

There was nothing more to do here.

He felt his headache rise in strength. No, there
was
something more he could do here. His orders were to acquire information … and to aid the Yuuzhan Vong in general in any way he could that did not lead to his capture and exposure.

Danni Quee was here. Tam could overpower her while she slept. She was an enemy of the Yuuzhan Vong, and eliminating her as a New Republic resource would definitely help his masters.

There was no way he could smuggle her out of the biotics building, no way he could even smuggle her out of this hallway. No, to eliminate her as a threat, he’d have to kill her.

He could do it, too, in such a way that there would be no likelihood of blame falling on him. In one of his pockets was a gob of material restraining a razor bug. He could pull it out, free the creature, fling it at Danni. It would chew her to pieces.

And he’d go back to the shuttle and receive praise.

He stood in place and his headache mounted. He cursed himself. Just by thinking of a way to help the Yuuzhan Vong, he’d obligated himself to do it, or suffer the consequences. Danni Quee had to die now.

He stood behind her. He didn’t bother wondering what might have been, had they met in different circumstances. He was a big, clumsy, inarticulate thing and she was an intelligent, beautiful woman with the stamp of destiny on her. Had they been stranded together on an otherwise deserted planet, nothing would have happened between them. They would have ended up friends. Just good friends.

Tam reached out a hand to brush it, ever so carefully, against one of her blond curls, now colored scarlet by light from the screen before her. Then he reached into his pocket and found the razor bug.

He stood and did nothing. The pain increased until it affected his breathing, making it short and halting.

The problem was, no matter how much he wanted the pain to end, he knew it would keep coming. He knew that Danni Quee deserved to live. He knew that he deserved to die.

He turned away. Pain shot through him as though a metal spike had been hammered through both his temples
with a single blow. He staggered and had to put a hand on the floor to keep from falling over.

But the pain didn’t kill him. He strained against it, rose, made it as far as the door. He had to lean for long moments against the doorjamb to give himself strength enough to continue. Then he could open the door and leave.

As he walked, his steps made unrhythmic by the hammering within his skull, he reminded himself that he was taking data to his controller. He was succeeding in his primary mission. And the pain diminished.

But only a little.

As soon as the door slid shut behind Tam, Danni raised her head to stare after him.

She typed a command into her keyboard. The screen before her changed views to follow Tam as he staggered away down the corridor.

When he was well out of earshot, she keyed her comlink. “He’s gone,” she whispered. “He was either memorizing or recording everything on our screens.”

Iella’s voice came back, not a whisper, but the comlink’s volume was dialed down low. “Did he leave anything?”

“I don’t know. I’ll begin analyzing the recordings now. Out.”

“Good work. Out.”

Danni brought up the first of the recordings made by the holocams positioned at hidden points around the room. She felt her shoulders twitch. She wasn’t sure what Tam had been up to in the long minutes he stood directly behind her, and was desperate to be sure that he hadn’t spread Yuuzhan Vong creatures throughout this office.

In the operations chamber, surrounded by analysts and advisers, blaze bug displays and recording creatures, banks of villips and standing rows of guards, Tsavong Lah sat at the center of things and listened to reports.

Most of them came from Maal Lah and Viqi Shesh. As they spoke, Tsavong Lah reflected that some things never changed. Normally, it would be Nom Anor and Vergere standing before him, interpreting, offering advice, sniping at one another, one of them a Yuuzhan Vong warrior and the other a clever female of a lesser species. Now, with Nom Anor and Vergere performing other tasks, their roles were still being acted out by others.

“It is a
superweapon
,” Maal Lah said, using the Basic word rather than the Yuuzhan Vong equivalent. “They have a history of creating devices that can travel faster than light and smash entire worlds, and this is a new one.”

“It’s Danni Quee’s doing,” Viqi said. “It has to be. She’s the only one who could integrate Yuuzhan Vong and New Republic technology this way. I’m going to make that idiot Tam suffer for not killing her when he had the chance.”

Tsavong Lah raised a finger. Viqi bit back on further ranting words. “I just heard heresy,” Tsavong Lah said. “First, the works of the Yuuzhan Vong are not technology. They must never be referred to as such.”

Apparently stricken, though Tsavong Lah suspected it was merely acting, Viqi bowed her head. “I am sorry, Warmaster. I don’t know a word to encompass both disciplines.”

“Perhaps, during your punishment, you will find one. Second, our works could not be melded with infidel technology. The gods would never allow it.”

Viqi and Maal Lah exchanged glances, and it was Maal Lah who dared to correct the warmaster. “This turns out not to be correct. It has already been done. We know that, some time ago, Anakin Solo reconstructed his lightsaber with a lambent crystal … and it appears that he passed knowledge of this technique to others before he was killed. It is also with a lambent crystal that this new device is concerned.”

“Go on.”

Maal Lah gestured to Viqi. She turned to activate the recording creatures on the table behind her. Each, in turn, began to shine, the light above it showing one of the images Tam Elgrin had recorded.

Maal Lah pointed to the image that had been on Danni’s screen. “That is a lambent crystal. Rather, it is a diagram of one. According to the information Viqi’s agent seized, it is being artificially grown in a laboratory in the depths of their garrison building. According to other information we read in these images, they tried to grow the crystals on their ships, but they grow only in true gravity, or dovin basal gravity—their infidel technology gravity ruins them.”

Tsavong Lah offered Maal Lah an expression of revulsion. “So their
Jeedai
will have more lightsabers? We will not allow it.”

“It is worse than that, Warmaster. The diagram you see represents a lambent crystal as tall as one of our warriors.”

“As tall as … what sort of obscenity could they produce with such a …” And then Tsavong Lah knew what they were producing. He found himself standing, shaking in anger, and did not remember rising. “Bring me my father’s villip,” he said.

In moments, he stared into the villip’s blurry but recognizable simulation of his father’s features. With
impatience, Tsavong Lah rushed through the customary greetings. Then he got to the subject of his communication: “I now know what their Starlancer project is. It is another accursed superweapon. The coherent light these vehicles project to one another will at some point be focused through a giant lambent crystal being fabricated in the depths of their building. When this happens, the beam will be of sufficient power to destroy a worldship. The attack we suffered not long ago was a test-firing, perhaps to attune the weapon’s beam to the target.”

“Interesting,” his father said.

“We cannot allow them to perfect this device,” the warmaster continued. “So I now direct you to commit yourself to an all-out assault on that facility and destroy it. Immediately.”

Czulkang Lah was silent for long moments. The villip representing his face froze into such immobility that Tsavong Lah wondered if it had suffered some sort of failure. Then his father spoke again. “To do so would be a strategic mistake,” Czulkang Lah said. “We have not yet gauged our enemy’s tactics or resources. His repertoire of surprises is not fully known. At best, our losses will probably be inappropriately high. At worst, with such a premature attack, we could sacrifice large numbers of warriors needlessly … and still lose. It is too early, my son.”

“My orders stand,” Tsavong Lah said.

His father’s features assumed an expression that all but said,
I expected better of you
. It was an expression Czulkang Lah wore whenever a student had failed him for the last time. It had never before been directed at Tsavong Lah, and the warmaster took an involuntary step back.

But Czulkang Lah said nothing aloud, no words that would shame his son. Instead, he said, “It will be done.”

“May the gods smile upon your actions,” Tsavong Lah said. He gestured at one of his officers, who stroked the villip. It inverted.

The warmaster stood, his breathing heavy. His father’s final disapproval, so implacable, was like a physical blow to him.

When he was under control again, he turned to Maal Lah. “Issue this directive. When Borleias falls to us, it will no longer be the home of the Kraal. Instead, it will be given to the priests of Yun-Yammka, a haven for their order, in thanks to the god for the gains he has brought us.”