Remnant: Force Heretic I (37 page)

The white of hyperspace streaked and became stars as the Dreadnaught barreled back into realspace with all the subtlety of an asteroid. Sensors swept the immediate area, searching for the slaveship. Once it was found—almost exactly where predicted—the Dreadnaught’s cannons and batteries locked on and began firing at the tentacles. At the same time, the squadron of decoy TIE fighters launched from the flight deck and swooped in to attack.

This was a crucial phase in the operation, and Jacen couldn’t help but feel anxious. The attack had to be stiff enough to convince the Yuuzhan Vong that it was a serious threat, but not so stiff that it would seriously damage the slaveship. The last thing they wanted to do was burst it open and destroy its contents.

But there seemed to be little danger of doing that. The slave freighter was armored against attack, and its tentacles were tough. It wasn’t equipped with plasma guns to defend itself, and its dovin basals weren’t responding the same way as those on combat vessels, but coralskippers soon launched from nearby vessels and powered hard
to intercept the attack. Jacen watched the views on the screens surrounding him with apprehension, fists clenching uneasily: it was impossible not to be nervous so deep in enemy territory, with so little standing between success and destruction.

But then, that was the point. They were pretending to be a suicide mission, and the Yuuzhan Vong would instinctively accept it as such. It fit perfectly into their philosophy. The arrogance of the species didn’t allow them to learn from their mistakes, it seemed—or at least accept that others thought differently from them.

The droid brains were in their element here. Scattered throughout the ship but linked by a high-speed network, they fired turbolasers and bolstered shields while broadcasting objectives to the simpler TIE fighter brains. Their reports were uniformly flat-toned and perfectly objective. Even when a freak missile squeaked through the shields and took out one of their own, the pitch of reporting didn’t vary. This was battle, Jacen thought, and losses were expected. The droids probably regarded the jolting and jarring of the Dreadnaught as an indication that they were doing their job properly.

Two TIE fighters were destroyed almost instantly when the skips arrived; another three fell within the following minute. The remainder of the fighters managed to cripple one of the slaveship’s tentacles, while
Bonecrusher
dispatched three coralskippers using the random-stutter technique Jacen had programmed into the droid gunners. For a brief moment it looked like they might hold out longer than anticipated, but then fortune’s tide turned and the TIE fighters were destroyed with deadly precision.

Within minutes, the last one had been picked out of the sky by two converging streams of plasma. Barely had the burning cloud of wreckage dissipated when the attack
turned on the Dreadnaught itself, pounding it from every direction. The droid brains brought the craft about, as though intending to flee. Skips swooped around it, firing round after round into its shields. Explosions rocked the ship as one by one the shields were permitted to fail. Debris sprayed into space as one of the hyperdrive engines blew, rattling Jacen in his protected roost like he was nothing more than a die in a cup. Even through the hull of the Dreadnaught, the energy web, and the TIE cockpit shell, there was still enough leftover energy to give him a shake. The steady thrum of
Bonecrusher
’s generators stuttered as the Dreadnaught’s course began to twist back upon itself.

That was all the encouragement the Yuuzhan Vong needed. Sensing the kill, they sent streams of plasma fire into the weakened points along the hull. Quad batteries exploded; deflector shield projector bays burst into flames as air leaked out of decompressing decks; the Dreadnaught’s rounded, almost beaked nose burst open as though its command decks had been breached. Artificial gravity failed along with the remaining drives. Then the reserve power generators took a direct hit, blowing an enormous hole in the side of the ship, venting air and even more debris into the vacuum.

Then it was over. Generators shut down and—since Jacen was there to bring them back when required—the SD droid brains shut down with them. Something groaned deep and long as the Dreadnaught settled into a state of inactivity. The clanking and rattling of debris escaping through gashes in the outer hull sounded like garbage being ground and mangled in a compactor.

Eventually total silence fell in the secret heart of the ship. Jacen unconsciously held his breath, sensing the TIE fighter pilots and his crewmates in
Jade Shadow
doing the same. This was the moment that would determine whether the mission failed or succeeded. If the Yuuzhan Vong didn’t believe the ship to be truly dead, then they certainly soon would be.

To the rest of the universe, the
Braxant Bonecrusher
looked as though it had spent its fighters in a failed attack and been taken out itself. With everything powered down, there would be no reason to suspect that another squadron waited within for the word to launch, along with
Jade Shadow,
Jacen in his TIE cockpit, and the droid brains. Everything depended on this illusion remaining intact.

Jacen had only two holocams on the hull transmitting data back to him. He kept his eyes on the views—one above the breach in the Dreadnaught’s back, the other from the stern, looking along the ship. Stars rotated around the Dreadnaught; the last explosion had given it a convincing tumble.

It was Mara who finally broke the silence. “Anything, Jacen?” She spoke in barely a whisper.

“Nothing conclusive yet,” he returned equally as quietly. “They’re not firing, which is a good thing, but the slaveship isn’t visible at the moment, either.”

“This one iz convinced by the quiet,” Saba said.

Jacen listened. It was impossible to hear through a vacuum, so what the Yuuzhan Vong were doing would be impossible to detect aurally. But there was a quality to the silence that suggested Saba was right: the Yuuzhan Vong had called off the attack. What happened next was not yet known, but there was really only one possibility.

“Okay,” he said. “Everyone take your positions. I’ll click you when I have something definite.”

Jacen reached out into the Force.
Good luck,
he sent to Danni and Saba. If they received the thought, they were too busy to respond.

He picked up a slight electromagnetic hum as the yacht’s air lock cycled through, but he doubted anyone outside the ship would notice. And if they did, they were likely to put it down to the wreckage settling. Ships took time to die all the way through. There might be pockets of mechanical life still ticking futilely away. There might even be survivors …

A shadow moved across the screens in front of him. He stiffened, even though he knew what to expect.
Braxant Bonecrusher
’s slow roll around its center of gravity brought the slaveship gradually back into view a minute later—and, sure enough, it was looming much larger than before.

Jacen clicked once to confirm that everything was going to plan. A second later, a powerful jolt ran through the Dreadnaught. For a second he thought that that one almost imperceptible click might have given them away, until he realized that what he’d in fact felt was the dovin basal of the slaveship grabbing on to
Bonecrusher.

Everything’s going according to plan,
said Mara. His aunt had sent out a bubble of both encouragement and reassurance to everyone on board.

Another jolt followed, accompanied by the sound of twisting metal. He feared for the structural integrity of the ship; without the inertial dampeners, it wasn’t used to such stresses on its frame. Thankfully, though, it held.

When everything settled down again, the stars were no longer moving as fast, and the slaveship was rotating, too, anchored to the hull of
Bonecrusher
by the Yuuzhan Vong’s version of artificial gravity. It was coming at them tentacles-first, like something out of a nightmare.

He clicked again, this time speaking into the comm.

“They’ve got us,” he said. “And our friendly slaveship is moving in fast.”

“Any sign of the ships?” Mara asked.

“I think it’s safe to assume that most of them have gone back to their capital vessels,” he answered. “They seem to have left just enough to—”

A voice over the comlink cut him off. Although not allowed to transmit, the Dreadnaught’s receivers were still intact.

“This is Commander B’shith Vorrik,” said an abrasive Yuuzhan Vong voice. Jacen was initially nonplussed. The villips the Yuuzhan Vong used to communicate among themselves didn’t transmit over electromagnetic frequencies, unless they were modified by an oggzil. The only reason they would use one of those would be to speak to the enemy—and that was confirmed with Vorrik’s next words: “All infidels will surrender immediately, or be destroyed.”

Jacen’s heart sank. The commander knew they were there. The plan had failed; it had all been for nothing!

Wait, Jacen,
Mara sent, sensing the despair welling up inside of him.

“We have no intention of surrendering to become
slaves,
” came another voice over the receiver.

The growled words came from Grand Admiral Gilad Pellaeon. Jacen almost laughed out loud in relief: the Yuuzhan Vong’s ultimatum had been addressed to the Imperials, not
Braxant Bonecrusher
at all.

“Surrender the Jedi you harbor among you,” Vorrik continued.

Jacen chuckled grimly to himself. Clearly the tactics they had introduced to the Imperials hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Why should we turn on those who help us?” Pellaeon replied.

“What good is the help if it results in your destruction?” Vorrik responded.

“You attacked us without provocation,” Pellaeon shot
back. “It would seem our destruction was always your intention.”

“The presence of the Jedi is provocation enough,” Vorrik growled. “Your resistance is provocation! Your very
existence
is provocation! Now, power down your weapons, infidel, and surrender.”

“I have a better idea,” Pellaeon said evenly. “Leave the system now while you’re still in a position to do so.”

Jacen knew that the Grand Admiral was playing for time—either that or he wanted to
seem
as if this was what he was doing. With the Dreadnaught powered down around him, there was no way of telling the disposition of the Imperial forces, but he assumed that Pellaeon was still working to the original plan: to make it appear as if they were in retreat. B’shith Vorrik’s announcement was probably nothing more than an attempt to hurry things along.

The Yuuzhan Vong commander’s laugh boomed out from the receivers. “If you were counting on the cowardly attack to our rear flanks to change the course of this battle,” he said, “then you should know that it has failed. Your survival, now, fool, rests solely upon
my
goodwill.”

Grand Admiral Pellaeon hesitated just long enough to give the impression that this news had rattled him.

“I don’t think there’s an atom of goodwill in the entire Yuuzhan Vong culture,” he said. There was a tremor in his voice. Jacen had to admit, the Grand Admiral was playing his role well. “We would sooner die than submit to you, Vorrik.”

“Then so be it,” Vorrik said, laughing again. “And may Yun-Yammka devour your bodies as well as your souls.”

The Yuuzhan Vong commander added something more, but Jacen stopped listening. A faint
click
had
indicated that Saba and Danni had arrived in position and were preparing to cross over to the slaveship.

Cross over
 … Jacen shook his head. If that wasn’t a euphemism, he didn’t know what was. He felt Mara joining him in wishing Saba and Danni luck as somewhere on the damaged hull of
Braxant Bonecrusher
they prepared themselves for what they had to do.

He felt them leave, felt their rush of apprehension as the tentacles took them. Then their Force-signatures were muffled among the many trapped in the belly of the slave freighter. They were completely out of his reach now, and the situation out of his control—as was Pellaeon’s fight around Borosk. The only thing he could do from here on in was wait for a sign, and hope.

When the mouth of one of the slaveship’s surviving tentacles came groping for her, Saba Sebatyne almost felt her courage desert her. A two-meter-wide, well-muscled sphincter nosing through the holes in the Dreadnaught’s hull was enough to make anyone think twice.

Pellaeon’s minions had appropriated a number of cadavers from the nearest Star Destroyer’s morgue and scattered them around the intended blast hole. Saba felt dismay for the families of the dead soldiers, but she also knew it was necessary if they were to pull off this mission. A dead ship with no dead bodies might have aroused suspicions and put their plan in jeopardy.

The tentacles didn’t waste time with the bodies, though, passing over the dead tissue to continue searching for something more useful. They poked deeper into the punctured hull, looking for anything alive—anything at all. Danni blanched behind her faceplate as one fumbled blindly closer, but she didn’t back away.

Nor did Saba. Putting her faith in the Force, as well as her pressurized jumpsuit, she pushed out gently from
her hiding place in the direction of one of the tentacles. With surprising speed, the tentacle noticed her and swung around to take her. Her body tensed as she remembered her people spilling out from the slaveship all those months ago, filling the void with six-pointed stars that drifted lifelessly from the ruptured wall of the ship. She closed her eyes and forced the memory down; now was not the time to be reliving such grief. She needed her wits about her; she needed to focus on the assignment at hand.

“For this one’s home,” she whispered. “For this one’s people.”

She forced her muscles to relax as she was engulfed by the maw of the tentacle and swept along a slippery, ribbed tube toward the hold of the ship.
Hold? Who am I kidding?
It was the slaveship’s belly, and right now she was being
eaten
by it, her body pummeled by every muscular surge of the tentacle.