Remnant: Force Heretic I (34 page)

Any thought that the enemy still had the upper hand was soon dispelled when the door burst open and the squadron of stormtroopers filed in, the snouts of their blasters trained on the aliens. Security droids swooped in behind them. A quick succession of shots brought down two of the Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators. Exposed without their vonduun crab armor, they died with their hideously
scarred visages snarling. The final warrior fell when he raised his amphistaff high into the air in readiness to bring it down on Jacen’s head, and the young Jedi proved to be too fast. Thrusting his own weapon up high, he managed to block the Yuuzhan Vong’s strike when the warrior had barely started the downward swing, then seemingly effortlessly brought his lightsaber down onto the Yuuzhan Vong’s torso. Such was the force of the blow that his weapon cut almost halfway through the alien’s barrel chest before coming to a halt.

Jacen stepped back from the smoking corpse of “Torvin Xyn,” wiping a forearm across his sweat-beaded face as he turned to the panic-stricken traitors clustered together away from all the fighting. A few were jabbering apologies and pleas for mercy, lost in the babble of so many people trying to speak at once.

“There’s no point protesting your innocence,” Jacen said loudly. When the noise settled he let his lightsaber fizz out, replacing the handgrip on his belt. There was a look on the young Jedi’s face that surprised Pellaeon, as though the fighting he’d just been involved in dismayed him. And yet, at the same time, there was a rock-steady certainty there, as well. “Your quarters have been searched and your movements monitored. Your guilt is beyond question. The only question remaining is whether there are any more of you that we should know about.”

The cold-eyed intelligence coordinator took a step forward. “Jedi scum,” he said, spitting on the floor at Jacen’s feet. “You’ve only delayed the inevitable.”

“Permanently, I hope,” Jacen said, unflustered. He looked around the room. “Anyone else have something to say?”

No one answered, but Pellaeon noted two who looked as though they might under different, more private
circumstances. With a gesture from Jacen, stormtroopers took the prisoners away for interrogation.

The young Jedi sagged back into a chair when everyone had gone, pulling back the sleeve of his robe to speak into a wrist comlink.

“Mission accomplished,” he announced tiredly.

His voice came over the private link at the same time as Pellaeon heard it via the microphones in the dummy interview room.

“Well done, Jacen,” Mara Skywalker said from
Jade Shadow.
“Are you all right?”

Pellaeon watched on as the Solo boy examined the back of his hand. “Just a nick,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” He glanced around at the Yuuzhan Vong corpses. “This wasn’t necessary. They had a chance to come peacefully.”

“Did you really think they would?”

“You never know.” He half smiled. “Maybe sending their most dangerous and aggressive warriors in to be killed by us will eventually reduce the gene pool, breed a more temperate Yuuzhan Vong.”

Pellaeon had never had occasion to laugh in a bacta tank before, but he couldn’t help himself now. “Victory by natural selection? An interesting game plan, Solo.”

“Requesting permission to fall back behind the mine rings, Grand Admiral,” Captain Yage interrupted.

Pellaeon had been keeping half an eye on the disposition of the battle while watching Jacen’s handling of the spy situation. The Yuuzhan Vong fleets had engaged on all four fronts, with the fighting fiercest where they’d first entered the system.

“Permission granted,” he said. As the frigate began to drop to a lower orbit around Borosk, Pellaeon switched to a general command channel. To the numerous generals, captains, and commanders to whom he entrusted
the details of the battle, he said: “Commence fallback.
Rule
and
Protector
battle groups first, then
Stalwart
and
Relentless.
Orbital control, activate the mines as soon as the bulk of the enemy comes within range. Ground, make sure the targeting systems concentrate on the smaller ships, where possible; the shields and mines should keep the capital vessels at bay for us to deal with. And remember: we’re playing a waiting game. The more we can bleed them, the more they’ll hurt.”

A series of affirmatives returned over the line. With no Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators left among the Imperial forces, Pellaeon felt sure that the fallback of his fleet would appear as an unruly retreat to the rigid-minded warmaster behind the attack. He was confident that the fully charged turbolasers and cannons waiting for them down on Borosk below would convince the Yuuzhan Vong of their mistake.

Then, at last, the battle proper could truly begin.

Saba hissed as a slave carrier appeared on the edge of the scope, emerging from the planet’s atmosphere. Her tail whacked agitatedly against the floor as the sight of it brought back the memory of the destruction of her own planet.

Captain Yage looked up. “What is it?”

The Barabel pointed at the screen. The carrier had come out of hyperspace well back from the front and was lightly protected. Its tentacles whipped at vacuum like hungry space slugs snapping for food. Where it had been a flattened sphere before, it was now fatter.

Fuller
, Saba thought.

“They are confident of success,” she said. A terrible hunger gnawed at her belly.

“Maybe they have cause to be confident,” Yage said
grimly. The solid woman turned aside for a moment to call instructions to the crew scattered throughout the ship. The bridge of
Widowmaker
was busy in a productive, controlled away, but still noisy to a Barabel’s ears.

“This one can feel them,” Saba said, closing her eyes and reaching out through the Force. Past the many nearby life-sources that comprised the planet of Borosk and the massed navy of the Empire, and beyond the empty gulf of the attacking Yuuzhan Vong, she felt a concentrated scar in the Force—a scar that itched from pain and fear. She sensed suffocation, imprisonment, claustrophobia, darkness—all the things she had failed to notice when her own people had been taken because of the emotions of anger and rage she had been unable to control. The concentration of those feelings now was too intense to ignore—so intense, in fact, that her head reeled from it. But she would not turn away. She couldn’t. She needed to embrace this pain, share in it, in the hope that doing so would somehow alleviate some of the guilt she carried.

Hunt the moment
…

The people inside the carrier had been stuffed in like animals being taken away for slaughter. The chances were that many of them would die before they ever reached their destination. As appalling a thought as that was for Saba, she knew that from the Yuuzhan Vong’s point of view it did make sense. To them, these beings
were
little more than animals, so what did it matter if a percentage of the stock was lost in transit, as long as enough survived to fill the armies at the front?

But Saba Sebatyne was a Jedi, and she could not stand by and allow it to happen. She had to do something—something that could make up for the deaths of all those Barabels she had killed.

How better could they be remembered?

“This one would speak to
Jade Shadow
,” she said to Yage. The captain frowned uncertainly, but made arrangements with her comm officer.

“Over there,” she said, pointing to an empty comm station.

Conscious of the eyes of the crew upon her—possibly the most obvious nonhumanoid many had seen up close for years—Saba moved to the station and spoke softly into the link: “Mara, this one haz a plan.”

There was a slight delay before Skywalker answered. “You have my attention, Hisser,” she said. “Whatever you have in mind, it has to be better than taking potshots and watching Luke’s retrothrusters.”

“Do you see the slave carrier? This iz the prize. If they lose this, the battle will be hollow for them.”

“You’re saying we should take it out? Saba, we can’t do that. It’s full of—”

“We do not destroy it,” Saba cut in, then paused as she considered the audacity of what she was about to suggest. Her stomach rumbled. “This one wishez to liberate it.”

There was an even longer silence this time. “Wait a second,” Mara eventually said. On the scope, Saba saw
Jade Shadow
disengage from the battle, closely followed by Master Skywalker’s X-wing. “I’m going to patch you into the command ring.”

The holoprojectors flickered into life, revealing the faces of Mara and Grand Admiral Pellaeon. Saba moved to allow Captain Yage to take the seat.

“Did I just hear right?” Pellaeon asked.

“Saba wants to free the people trapped in that slaveship,” Mara said.

“And what do you think of that?” the Grand Admiral asked.

“I think that’s a worthy objective,” Mara said.

“Which is not to say it’s
practical
,” Pellaeon countered.

“No, but Saba makes a valid point. Taking that carrier ship might save a lot of lives, Admiral.”

The ageing Imperial nodded, sending wisps of thin white hair swaying in the fluid around him. His expression was mostly hidden behind the breath mask.

“So how would it be done?” he asked. “It’s on the other side of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet.”

“Exactly,” Saba said. “Attention iz forward, on the attack. The rear will be vulnerable.”

“We’d still have to get past their interdictors,” Mara pointed out. “And it wouldn’t stay vulnerable long. There are an awful lot of capital ships out there. An assault party would soon find itself surrounded, Saba, a long, long way from backup.”

“And they won’t bring it forward until they are certain we’ve lost,” Luke said, inserting himself into the conversation via the comm unit.

“Could that be the way?” Pellaeon asked. “We’re on the retreat, anyway.”

“Too risky,” Yage said. “We’d have to basically give them Borosk before they’d believe us, and there’s no guarantee we’d ever get it back.”

Pellaeon nodded again, and Saba received the distinct impression that he was treating the discussion more as a theoretical exercise than a serious proposal—although she also sensed that he would like someone to make it work.

“We require a sacrifice,” she said. “And we muzt deliver it directly to the target.”

“I don’t understand,” Yage said, turning slightly to look up at the Barabel leaning over her. From so close, the woman’s scent was pungent in Saba’s nostrils, but not offensive.

“They will guess that we know what the slaveship iz. Perhapz that iz why they have produced it so early in the battle. They use it to enrage us, to challenge our honor. They are saying,
You are slavez already. It’z only a matter of time.”
Saba’s blunted claws unsheathed at the insult. Embarrassed by the reflexive action, she hid her hands behind her back. It seemed she could put the Jedi into the Barabel, but she couldn’t always take the Barabel out of the Jedi. “We attack it, az they are daring us to.”

“But if they’re daring us, then that means they’ll be expecting us to respond,” Mara said.

“Yez. And we will lose.”

“I think I’m beginning to follow you,” Yage said. “We send in some sort of assault ship to take on the slave carrier. It gets knocked out of the picture, but not before acting as a diversion for another attack, right?”

“No,” Saba said. “It
iz
the attack. If the ship iz not utterly destroyed, itz crew will be bounty. They will not waste it.”

Pellaeon chuckled through his breath mask. “Emperor’s ears—are you suggesting what I
think
you’re suggesting? You don’t mean ‘sacrifice’: you mean
bait
.”

“From the inside,” Saba said, nodding enthusiastically, “this one will be best placed to take over the ship. It iz not a warship, after all. It iz a glorified freighter. It will rely on otherz to defend it. At worst, disabling it will allow the cargo to be unloaded more easily.”

“That’s the next problem,” Yage said. “Where does
that
happen?”

“Right there,” Mara said. “When Saba has killed the ship’s brain, it’s just a matter of getting the captives somewhere safe.”

“This one iz thinking of an old trick played on Barab One,” Saba said. “The best way to poison a bonecrusher
iz to feed it live hka’ka that has eaten poisoned vsst. The bonecrusher doez not taste the poison until itz meal iz over—and then it iz already dead.” She shrugged her heavy, scaled shoulders. “It iz not an honorable way to hunt, but sometimez it iz better than dying.”

The Grand Admiral’s expression sobered. “If you succeed, it’ll be the wildest stunt I’ve ever seen—and you’ll seal the gratitude of the Empire forever. Turning my back on the people the Vong captured was one of the most soul-destroying things I’ve ever had to do. It’s a burden I’ll be happy to be rid of.”

“Luke?”

“I presume you’ll want to be involved, Mara,” Master Skywalker said, ignoring the concerned whistle from R2-D2.

“
Jade Shadow
would make an ideal poisoned vsst,” she said. “And it has a tractor beam that I know will come in handy.”

“You can count me in, too,” said Danni, her head appearing over Mara’s shoulder.

“Are you sure?” Mara asked, frowning slightly.

“Saba and I have worked together before,” she said, “and this’ll be another great opportunity to see Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology at work up close.”

“Too close for my liking,” Yage muttered. “But it’s your choice, I guess.”

Pellaeon’s eyes were dancing behind the translucent shell of his visor. He was clearly seeing 3-D views hidden from those watching his hologram. “If we’re going to do this, then let’s get moving,” he said. “Every minute delayed is another minute my pilots are out there getting killed. We have a lot to put in place in a very short time, and I think I might’ve found our—what was it, Saba?”

“Hka’ka,” she supplied.

“Yes,” said Pellaeon. “You Jedi might be crazy, but
those are Imperial lives you’re saving. I don’t want anything to go wrong. Is that understood?”

Remembering the recent massive and tragic losses of her own people, Saba could only nod solemnly.