Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (15 page)

“Yes, yes.” Viqi fumed, but thought about it. “The bomb didn’t just blow a hole in the walkway. It took the whole thing down and singed both edges. I conclude that it wasn’t an improvised weapon. Either the people who did it had access to military equipment, or they’re proficient at building such things. This suggests that they’re not ordinary survivors—they’re elites of some sort.”

“
Jeedai
?” asked Raglath Nur.

Viqi shook her head. “I don’t know if Jedi are among them, but Jedi don’t normally use high explosives. So this was something different, or something additional.”

“What else?”

“If I were in their situation and had to use an explosive device—something sure to give away my position—I’d move away from here very fast, to elude any Yuuzhan Vong parties that came to investigate. Meaning that if
we can figure out the route they took, we could search it thoroughly and see if they dropped anything. If they dropped something, we might obtain more information.”

“How will we know the difference between an infidel object left here by the planet-dwellers and one dropped by your ‘elites’?”

Viqi shrugged. “I will know,” she lied.

   The party’s searches turned up no objects that Viqi felt had been dropped by their prey. But as they reached the next building over in the direction the trackers felt the infidels had traveled, the voxyn became more alert. They left off the eternal, searching sweeps of their heads; instead, they both stared in one direction, outward and downward, the muscles of their necks tense, while their tails began to lash.

Raglath Nur allowed the voxyn and their handlers to take the lead. The voxyn led them at a quickened pace; Viqi had to struggle to keep up, and was often prodded by Denua Ku when he felt her progress was not sufficient. But the voxyn did not understand the city’s architecture, and it required the Yuuzhan Vong, and sometimes Viqi, to guide them down stairwells, ramps, and even turbolift shafts as they rushed toward their prey.

Deeper and deeper they descended into the ruins, and when they had not run down their prey within half an hour, Raglath Nur demanded, “Is our quarry running? Can they be aware of us?”

Viqi shook her head and took a moment to breathe. She tamped back on her resentment; a merchant-princess and Senator of Kuat should not have to exert herself in this unseemly fashion. “The voxyn detect the Force, correct?
Perhaps what they’re detecting is very strong—and far away.”

Raglath Nur offered up a noise of vexation, but it was, for a member of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior caste, sufficiently mild that Viqi suspected he had come to the same conclusion—that he had merely hoped Viqi would offer some more satisfying answer.

Another half-hour put them much farther down in the building level. From the general atmosphere of antiquity and seediness, from the driprot that afflicted the duracrete walls, from the stench of decay and increased incidence of corrupting bodies, Viqi could tell that they were nearly at bedrock level.

They passed a side-corridor that sloped downward; it was mostly filled with dark liquid and bodies floating atop it. Viqi skidded to a halt and turned back to give it a second look, putting her hand over her nose and mouth as if to reduce the stench. Denua Ku joined her, and other warriors turned back to see what had drawn her curiosity.

She pointed at one of the bodies. “Get that one,” she said.

Denua Ku and one of the others splashed into the water. The body Viqi had pointed out raised its head. He was a male human, young and frightened. He scrambled around in the shallow water and tried to dive away, but Denua Ku caught him by the ankle and yanked. He dragged the screaming, flailing youth back up to the dry cross-corridor, then hauled him up by the collar of his tunic and held him against the corridor wall.

“How did you know?” Raglath Nur asked.

Viqi gave him a superior smile. “He wasn’t bloated like the rest.”

“Question him,” Denua Ku ordered.

Viqi sighed, then turned to their prisoner. The young man was obviously terrified but knew better than to struggle now that he was surrounded by Yuuzhan Vong warriors. He had long black hair; dark fluid from the pool they’d hauled him from ran from it, pouring from his garments to puddle on the floor. Viqi reflected that, in better circumstances, he would have been pretty enough to serve her as a toy.

“Where are the Jedi?” she asked.

The young man shook his head. “I don’t know about Jedi.”

Viqi gave him a chill smile. “These warriors would like to kill you. In fact, killing you fast is one of the nicest things they’re considering doing to you. So you’d better find some reason,
any
reason, to give me so I can persuade them not to. Do you understand?”

The young man nodded. “I know something. I’m going to take something out. Don’t kill me.” He reached into a pants pocket.

The voxyn roared and surged farther down the corridor, dragging their handlers behind them, drawing the attention of the other Yuuzhan Vong warriors.

The young man held out his hand. Viqi reached for him, and he dropped something into her outstretched palm. “It’s the ugly—”

“Our prey is close,” Raglath Nur said. “We don’t need him.”

Viqi turned toward him and crossed her arms, a gesture she hoped would hide the object the prisoner had given her. “I’m not through.”

But Denua Ku exerted himself, and Viqi heard the snap of the young man’s neck.

Denua Ku dropped the corpse back into the dark pool. “
Now
he will bloat.”

Viqi glared at him.

Raglath Nur set the warriors into motion, following the frantic voxyn. “What did the human want to show you?”

Viqi shrugged. “I might have found out, if Denua Ku hadn’t been so quick to exterminate him.” She waited until Raglath Nur’s attention was on the voxyn before she tucked the object out of sight under the neckline of her robeskin. She got a glimpse of it before it was concealed; it seemed to be a tiny remote, one with a pair of buttons on one side, another button and a screen so small as to be nearly useless on the other.

The ugly what?

   The handlers, dragged by the voxyn, were first to pass through the ruined metal doors, which were three times the height of a human and broad enough to permit ten pedestrians walking side-by-side. The lettering above the door read:

Raglath Nur paused outside the doorway and stared with suspicion at the darkness beyond. He whirled on Viqi. “What is this?”

“A manufacturing plant,” she said. “They manufacture furnishings. Very expensive, very functional furnishings.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as chairs that convert into extravagantly comfortable beds, chairs that carry their owners about in the air, furnishings that massage those who sit in them …”

“Massage?” Evidently that didn’t translate well through Raglath Nur’s tizowyrm. “Inflict pain?”

“Inflict pleasure.”

The warrior gave her a revolted look and led his fellows into the darkness. Viqi, alongside Denua Ku, followed.

Though the manufacturing concern had seemed pitch-black from outside, once her eyes began adjusting, Viqi discovered that it was not so. There were light sources everywhere, but dim ones, mostly at floor level—emergency lighting, she decided, probably running low on battery power. In the faint glows from the light sources, she could see looming production-line machinery and immobile fabricator droids, some of them huge.

She wondered if any samples of their stock were still in existence. But doubtless her Yuuzhan Vong companions would not let her enjoy such a chair, not even for a moment.

She heard the voxyn’s hisses go from excited to ferocious, heard their handlers call after them as they yanked leashes free from the handlers’ grips.

“
Jeedai!
” called one of the warriors. “Now you die!”

Viqi heard the distinctive
snap-hiss
of a Jedi lightsaber igniting. One point on the far wall of the manufacturing chamber and the ceiling above it were illuminated by red light—moving light. The claws of the voxyn scrabbled as they charged for their prey.

Then there was another
snap-hiss
, and another, and another. The distant red glow brightened. Viqi saw the
silhouette of a voxyn leaping high, vaulting intervening machinery, backlit by the glow—and then something rose to meet the voxyn in mid-flight.

It was not a Jedi, not a lightsaber blade. A block of machinery two meters on a side flew up from below and crashed into the leaping voxyn, striking with such force that Viqi heard the creature’s bones shatter. The impact smashed the voxyn back through the air, a wobbly caricature of a once-living beast. The voxyn’s body crashed onto the factory’s duracrete floor and the block of machinery landed upon it, breaking more bones, and stuck there, not bouncing or rolling forward as it should have.

“Forward,” Denua Ku said. He whipped his amphistaff free from his waist and charged after the other Yuuzhan Vong warriors, who now howled in rage and anticipation.

Viqi took two steps in Denua Ku’s wake and then something crashed into her, took her from her feet, slapped her to the duracrete.

It was not a physical thing. It was despair and hatred, loathing and worthlessness, fear and howling rage. It was as though Viqi had spent every one of her years packing all the hateful emotions an ordinary person felt into a storeroom—and suddenly all the pressure had burst through the door and swept her away. She could only lie there, her arms and legs twitching outside her control, her stomach rebelling, her heart hammering inside her.

She heard the howl of the second voxyn, heard the ripping noise of the creature vomiting its acid at its prey. Then there was the sound of lightsabers swinging, hacking. Meat in great quantities slapping down onto duracrete.

Viqi writhed in time with the war cries of the Yuuzhan
Vong and, one by one, she heard them die under the almost musical tones of the lightsabers.

Then there was only the sound of lightsabers cutting, and cutting, and cutting.

The emotional agony that had gripped Viqi lessened—only a little. She managed to roll over onto her stomach and slowly, painfully came upright.

She knew the beings on the other side of the chamber had just killed everything that had entered the chamber with her. She wanted nothing more than to charge at them, to rip them to pieces with her bare hands.

But as she stood, some faint instinct of self-preservation rose within her, and one thought made up of words emerged:
Run, or die
.

She turned toward the doorway, and lurched out toward the light.

As she reached the doorway, she put her hand out to steady herself against the metal door that had once protected the factory’s interior. It fell away from her grip, crashing down onto the duracrete with a tremendous clang.

The lightsabers in the distance switched off. Viqi froze. She waited, ears straining at the sudden silence.

Then she heard it, the padding of feet coming her way.

A noise like a sob escaped her and she ran, her speed enhanced by adrenaline and fear.

   Luke came awake and rose in a single smooth motion.

He didn’t have to ask if Mara had felt it, too. She was awake, gripping her lightsaber, ready to ignite it.

Luke stepped out into the corridor. It was dimmed for
sleeping, but Danni, too, was emerging, and Tahiri, who had been on guard in the corridor as the others slept, stared into one wall,
through
the wall, at something that was far away and toward the ground. “It’s there again,” she said, her voice faint.

Luke took a few deep breaths. He couldn’t remember what he had just been dreaming—only that, for a moment, he had been filled, even saturated, with a desire to rise and kill every living thing in his vicinity. Absurdly, he still felt loathing and contempt for his companions, for his wife, but as his mind and memory struggled to assert themselves, those emotions began to fade. “What did you feel?” he asked.

Tahiri shook her head, and Luke could finally see the lone tear flowing down her farther cheek. “Awfulness,” she said. “More awful than when I was coming out of my conditioning and started to figure out what I’d almost become. It was all through me, through the Force. It almost had control of me. I think maybe it could have had control, if it had known I was here.” The despair in her voice was heartbreaking.

None of the Wraiths had emerged from their new quarters. That made sense. This was a Force sending, a Force problem, and the Wraiths, largely oblivious to the Force, were not troubled.

Mara, dressed, moved down the corridor, rapping on doors. “Everyone up. Get into your armor. It’s time to hunt.”

   Four stories up from the manufacturing chamber, Viqi came off a pedestrian ramp at a dead run. Her legs trembled
from her flight but she could not afford to rest—she’d heard her pursuers crash through doors she’d dragged shut behind her.

She rounded a bend in the corridor and abruptly there was an arm in front of her, stretched at just under neck height. She hit it at full speed, her legs going out from under her, and suddenly she was on her back, looking into two human faces illuminated by dim glow rods, at two blaster pistols pointed at her face.

It was a man and a woman. The man had an ill-trimmed beard. The woman’s eyes were a startlingly pretty blue in eerie contrast to her unsympathetic expression. The two stank and seemed as thin as plasteel support beams.

“Look at you,” the man said.

“About fifty kilos, I’d guess,” the woman said. “Good eating, looks like.”

“How’d you stay so clean?”

“Never mind that. Just kill her.”

There was a distant noise, a low-pitched roar that raised the hair on Viqi’s arms and the nape of her neck. The man and woman hesitated, looking back the way Viqi had come.

Then it washed across her again, the feeling of hatred and lowness that had brought her down in the manufacturing chamber. It had the same effect on the man and woman; they paled and sank to their knees, the woman gagging, perhaps prevented from vomiting only by near-starvation.