Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (5 page)

Tahiri stared up at him, scornful. “Do you only ever think about one thing?”

“One thing at a
time
, sure. Now it’s my stomach.”

Another feeling intruded on Luke’s finely tuned senses, a whiff of danger, far more immediate than the previous sensation. He whispered, “Trouble.”

In a moment, the others moved to form a circle, Mara, Tahiri, Kell, and Face on the outside, the others within. No one brought out a technological weapon, but Luke felt to make sure that his lightsaber was still hanging at hand, and Face and Kell snapped their false amphistaffs out into rigidity.

A great roar of voices sounded from ahead and above. Out of two storefronts at this level, and one on either side on the first balcony level above, came a stream of beings, shouting, charging toward Luke and his party.

They were humans and humanoids, male and female, their clothes largely filthy and in tatters, carrying primitive spears and knives and crude swords in their hands. In moments at least a score were charging Luke’s position, and more were pouring out of the doorways.

Luke breathed a sigh of relief. “Time to make contact,” he said. He reached up for his helmet.

“Run,” Bhindi said.

“What?”

“Run.” Bhindi suited actions to words by turning back the way they’d come and racing away from the oncoming mob.

Luke looked at Mara. Both shrugged, then turned to follow Bhindi, the rest close after them.

They charged out through the broad archway that had
heralded the opening into the shopping gallery, quickly outdistancing their pursuers. They took a right at the next broad cross-corridor, charged a considerable distance along it, and then Bhindi angled into a doorway that led to an emergency stairwell. She led them up the stairs two at a time until they’d climbed five flights; then they could emerge into a much darker, narrower corridor. There they stopped, many of them panting.

Kell leaned over to put his hands on his knees as he struggled to breathe. “I’m too old for this.”

Danni leaned against the wall. Sweat poured down her face but did not mar her Yuuzhan Vong makeup. “Would you
mind
telling me why we ran? I thought you wanted to make contact with pockets of survivors! Something about setting up resistance cells?”

Bhindi offered her an unlovely smile. “Two reasons. First, normal people who want to stay alive don’t charge Yuuzhan Vong warriors that way, even if they outnumber them a hundred to one. Meaning that they probably had some way to kill those supposed warriors, like retreating before us and leading us to a spot where fifty tons of scrap can drop on our heads.”

Danni considered that and her expression relented. “Good point.”

“Second,” Bhindi continued, “we don’t have any reason to believe that any of the Vong warriors who attacked us on the walkway are still alive. Some are chopped up, some are blown up, some are flat as a roadway accident three hundred meters down, and some are all three. So our secret, the fact that we’re wandering around in effective Yuuzhan Vong disguises, is probably intact. If we let a hundred
starving survivors know about it, inevitably one will sell us out and the Vong will know, too.”

“So,” Luke said, “a detachment of us take off our disguises and go to talk to them as humans.”

“While the rest wait here and breathe,” Kell said.

“Right.” Luke looked over them. “It’ll be me, Mara, Face, and Bhindi going back. The rest stay here.”

Instead of offering up a noise of complaint, Tahiri grimaced, a cynically adult expression, and lowered her pack to the passageway floor.

Luke shrugged, offered her a smile. “We need at least one Jedi with each group.”

“So I’m baby-sitting people twice, three times my age. Where’s the fun in that?”

Kell snorted, then pitched his voice as an adolescent whine. “Aunt Tahiri, tell me a story.”

   Luke, now dressed in the dark garments he affected whenever making a public appearance in the guise of Jedi Master, stared at the woman on the other side of the heating element protruding from the gap in the floor panels. He, his three companions—also in dark, inconspicuous civilian dress—and six men and women of the Walkway Collective sat cross-legged on the floor, in a loose circle around the heating element, while a pot of greenish soup rested atop the thing and gradually heated to boiling. “How have you survived?” Luke asked.

They were in a back room of what had once been a clothing emporium of the Catier Walkway, the shopping gallery where Luke’s party had so recently been attacked. The woman he addressed—once plump and blond, he thought, now leaner from a subsistence diet,
hair streaked with dirt, brown eyes hard from sacrifice and suffering—was Tenga Javik, nominal leader of the Walkway Collective.

“We’ve rigged photon collection screens and heat harvesters for power,” she said. Her voice was raspy; that, and the light scarf wound around her neck, a curious affectation in the warm, moist air of Coruscant’s landscape of building interiors, suggested that she had taken an injury to the throat in the not too distant past. “One of us worked at a grayweave production plant. Have you ever eaten grayweave, Master Skywalker?”

“On occasion.” Grayweave was the nickname for a sort of single-cell-organism-based food, manufactured for and sold to the poorest of the poor; in texture, it looked like thick gray felt, but didn’t taste anywhere near as good. Its chief virtues were that it was very inexpensive and lasted a long time without preservation.

“We stole the grayweave reactors and scattered them all through our territory,” Tenga said. “Well-hidden. We keep them supplied with power and water, water we process through our own stills. We hide from the Vong most of the time, set traps for them when we’re sure we can take them. We’re going to survive, Master Skywalker.”

“How’s the air?” Bhindi asked.

Tenga looked into the soup as if unwilling to meet Bhindi’s eyes. “Getting worse,” she said. “We’re working on that. Trying to put together a series of blowers to bring in air from where it’s better.” She didn’t sound confident. “If that doesn’t work, we may have to relocate. Go deeper.” She met Luke’s eyes, her expression suddenly fierce. “When will the fleet come, Master Skywalker? When can we expect relief?”

“Not soon,” he admitted. “I wish I could tell you differently, but you’re going to have to rely on yourselves for some time to come.”

Several of Tenga’s fellows sighed or made noises of discontent, but they didn’t direct anger at Luke; his words did not seem to be entirely unexpected.

Tenga returned her attention to the soup. “We need the fleet,” she rasped, her tone lower; she did not seem to be speaking to Luke. “We need the Jedi.”

“This is our first mission back,” Luke said, projecting confidence with his voice and through the Force. “And more will come. We’re not going to let Coruscant remain in enemy hands. You have to decide whether you’re going to be alive when the world is liberated. Because the weariness and disillusionment you’re feeling can kill you as surely as the Yuuzhan Vong.”

“You’ve done very well here,” Bhindi said. “I can show you how to do better.”

That got Tenga’s attention. “Better how?”

“Hide better, ambush and defeat Vong patrols better, repair and maintain equipment better.”

“I’m listening,” Tenga said.

“First things first,” Mara interrupted. “A little more information. Have any of you seen or felt anything unusual in this region? I mean, unusual in excess of all the changes brought on by the Vong?”

Most of those present shook their heads, but one, in the second rank of the circle, a thin, middle-aged man with a dark, suspicious look to his features, said, “Lord Nyax.”

Some of his companions sighed; one or two offered up little groans.

Luke grinned before he could suppress it. “That’s a children’s story.”

“He’s real,” Yassat said.

Mara raised an eyebrow. “I haven’t heard this one.”

“In ancient times,” Luke said, “on Corellia, Lord Nyax was what parents threatened their children with if they didn’t eat their stewfruit or go to bed on time. ‘If you keep on being a bad boy, Lord Nyax will come for you.’ He was a monstrous pale ghost who took children away, and no one ever saw them again.”

“A typical folk tale,” Mara said.

“Yes.” Luke sobered. “But a while back, stories of Lord Nyax got a lot more common. Because during the Jedi purges, there
was
someone who came for children in the night—someone who came for Force-sensitive children.”

Mara’s reply was a whisper: “Darth Vader.”

“That’s right. I think that some of Darth Vader’s covert missions to round up Force-sensitive children became merged with the Lord Nyax legend, and spread from Corellia all over the galaxy during the early Imperial years.”

“Yassat here is one of our far scouts,” Tenga said. “He travels out beyond our territories, exploring and scavenging.”

“And he sees things,” another said. That man tapped his temple with one hand while jerking a thumb at Yassat with the other, suggesting that Yassat was not completely functional in a mental sense.

“I do see things,” Yassat said. “But they’re there.”

“Tell me what you see,” Luke said.

“I saw Lord Nyax for the first time about a month after
Coruscant fell.” Yassat’s voice lowered in tone and volume. “This was over toward the old heart of the government district, where things are crazy now. I was on one side of the main chamber of a textile factory, hiding from a Vong hunting party; they were on the other side. I was already scared, but I got a lot more scared and didn’t know why. Then the screaming started. Where the warriors were, I could see someone moving. A big man, ghostly white. There was a roar, and flashes of red all around it, but no sound of blasters. I got away. Hours later, I came back. I found the Vong warriors dead. Chopped to pieces, burned in places, some of them eaten on.

“The second time was four days ago or so.” From a pocket, he pulled a functional chrono and checked local time. “Four days. I felt that fear again while I was prowling through rooftops well below the skyline. It got worse and worse, and I knew I was being stalked. I knew I was going to end up like those Vong warriors.”

“How did you get away?” Mara asked.

Yassat shook his head, not meeting her gaze. “I just got away.”

“That’s not good enough,” Tenga said. “No one ‘just gets away.’ You get away by getting captured and selling us out?”

“No.” Yassat’s voice became emphatic. He returned his attention to Mara. “There’s a man, calls himself Skiffer. Part of a group not part of the Walkway Collective. They prey on us. They’ve killed a couple of our scouts, found and stole one of our grayweave reactors. Grayweave’s not enough for them; I’m sure some of them are cannibals. I know where their territory is. I led Lord Nyax
through the heart of their territory, and when I heard Skiffer give his people a call to action, I made a break for it. I heard them screaming.” He met Tenga’s eyes. “I didn’t sell us out, Tenga. I sold Skiffer out.”

Tenga clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.”

Another man said, “You were being stalked by Vong, Yassat. There is no Lord Nyax. Just your imagination.”

Yassat glared, but didn’t respond.

“Where have you run into Lord Nyax?” Luke asked.

Yassat pointed northwest, precisely in the direction where Luke and the other Force-sensitives had felt the twinge. “That way. Near the old government center. It’s thick with Vong compared to here, but full of interesting salvage.”

“We need to look at that,” Luke said. He addressed Yassat: “Care to come with us? To guide us?”

Tenga shook her head. “Not unless you leave us this one,” she indicated Bhindi, “in trade.”

But Yassat shook his head. “Prowl around with a big, noisy party when there are Vong hunters about? No. Kill me now, instead. It’d be less painful.”

Luke shrugged. “We’ll be back, then.”

Yassat offered him a look of sympathy. “No, you won’t.”

Jaina stood up, her bedsheet whirling away from her, and lurched to her closet without knowing why. The sun Pyria was just now climbing above the horizon, so she had been in bed for perhaps three hours.

The roaring in her ears resolved itself into an alarm. Yuuzhan Vong were coming. She heard the roar of thrusters from whichever squadrons were at the ready—it would be Blackmoon at this hour.

Jag was waiting for her in the hallway—the special, secured hall of the biotics building reserved for the pilots of Twin Suns Squadron. Other doors were sliding open. Piggy saBinring, struggling to fasten the seal of his pilot’s suit over his expansive Gamorrean stomach, emerged.

“What’s our objective?” Jaina asked. Jag held out a datapad for her to look at, but her eyes wouldn’t focus on it. She irritably waved it away.

“It looks like an assault on this location,” Jag synopsized. “Flying vehicles only, no sign of ground troops.
Lusankya
’s squadrons have some of the enemy forces engaged in orbit. More will be here in moments.”

There was an explosion, not far away, as incoming fire hit the shields that protected the biotics facility. All the transparisteel viewports on the west face of the building rattled.

“Correction,” Jag said. “They’ll be here now.”

“Let’s move.” Jaina led her half-dressed, half-awake squadron to their turbolift.

   Corran Horn, pilot and Jedi Knight, flying as Rogue Nine, activated his repulsors and smoothly lifted off the ferrocrete of Rogue Squadron’s new docking bay, up through a gap where, moments before, the ceiling had been; the building’s roof was still cantilevering out of the way. The altitude gave him a better look at the conflict—Yuuzhan Vong coral ships, the equivalent of light cruisers, hovered in the distance both east and west, protected by
screens of coralskippers, and launched barrages of plasma at the biotics building and its outbuildings. So far, the base’s shields, removed not that long before from faltering New Republic capital ships, were holding up well against the assault. “Come on, Leth.”

“Pick, pick, pick.” Leth Liav’s X-wing rose up beside Corran’s. Leth, a Sullustan female, had been a fighter pilot before being shot down and captured by the Yuuzhan Vong. Placed in an environment bubble and launched through space toward Borleias’s atmosphere in a show of Yuuzhan Vong cruelty, she and several of her fellows had been saved by some fancy flying on the part of Twin Suns Squadron. Corran doubted that, in better times, she would ever have qualified for the famed Rogue Squadron, but here, with attrition high and options few, she’d been welcomed.