Remnant: Force Heretic I (38 page)

The contractions around her grew stronger as she approached the end of the tentacle. She wondered briefly if Danni was following, but didn’t have time to check; she was too caught up in the moment and what she was experiencing to sense anyone else. Still, she wanted to reach back and feel for Danni, just to be able to
touch
her and find some reassurance. Just to get a hand to her right now would have made the discomfort that much easier to deal with.

Then, abruptly, the ride was over, and she was spat into what felt like a thick mass of jelly. She was knocked repeatedly across the face and body by the large number of hard lumps in suspension, so much so that she feared for the integrity of her faceplate. But when she finally came to a halt, she was relieved to find it was still fully intact.

She gasped for air and felt a pain in her ribs. Nothing
seemed to be broken, but she was definitely bruised. All around her was a uniform, infrared glow—unfortunately too diffuse or muffled to see by. She spread her legs to orient herself and felt objects pressing in all around her. Soft on the inside and firm in the middle, the objects felt strange to her touch. Her fingers sought purchase, but they kept slipping in the jelly.

Then something scrabbled at her faceplate, making her jerk backward. Her hands found the torch in her equipment pack and snapped it on. Just enough light came through the jelly to reveal that something leathery and star-shaped was trying to force its way across her face. She firmly brushed it aside and suddenly came face to face with a human.

She gasped with shock, then cursed herself. Of course. She was in a slaveship; what did she expect? The goop around her was probably a softer version of blorash jelly, used in combat to pin an opponent’s limbs down. The thing flapping at her face might have been a gnullith, living breath masks for Yuuzhan Vong’s pilots. The human floating upside down in front of her—just one of thousands trapped in the jelly—didn’t have a gnullith and was, as her questioning hands determined, quite dead. The black-haired woman must have drowned before the gnulliths reached her—or worse, died during ingestion.

A pressure wave rolled through the jelly from above her, and Saba assumed that Danni had just arrived. She moved her powerful legs and arms to propel herself forward, attempting to swim for the outer shell of the belly, but it was impossible to tell if she was making any progress. And even if she was, she had no real idea of which direction she was in fact moving. It was like trying to swim through a sap pool while blindfolded.

She tried climbing instead of swimming, using the people
around her for leverage. They all seemed to be in a state of drug-induced unconsciousness, and as such didn’t respond when she grabbed hold of them. Again, she wasn’t sure if she was making any real progress. For all she knew, she could have been simply pushing the bodies behind her rather than moving along them. Any sense of direction had abandoned her in her free fall. She wouldn’t have minded so much had it not been for the gnulliths swimming through the jelly. Everywhere she turned she encountered their strange flapping motions as their slithering air tubes constantly groped for her mouth.

So she gave in and centered herself. Switching out the light and closing her eyes, she sought her innermost point, and
then
she reached out.

The people around her created a concentrated ball of life pressing in on all sides. She was deep within it, and had been heading deeper until she’d stopped. Reorienting herself, keeping her claws carefully sheathed and her tail limp, she used the Force itself to move her through the resistant jelly.

The edge gradually came closer, and she found herself reaching for it well before it arrived. It was almost as though she was groping for breath from the bottom of a lake. All of the captives were unconscious, but many of them were fearful and suffering in their dreams; not even sleep could protect them from the trauma of what their bodies were undergoing. The overlapping nightmares were suffocating, and Saba found herself humming a childhood tune she hadn’t thought of for years to keep them at bay. It worked, but only just.

When she finally hit the edge of the belly, she clutched tightly at it, allowing herself the time to regain her strength. The interior surface was ribbed, so movement along it wouldn’t be difficult once she got going again.
All she had to do was collect her thoughts, orient herself with respect to the ship around her, and then—

Something clutched at her from out of the jelly. She pushed herself between a couple of the immense ribs, kicking out at what she thought to be another gnullith. But it came back, groping insistently for her. For a moment she panicked, completely flustered by the oppressive, grotesque environment.
The same one the last of her people had endured, before
 … She reached automatically for her lightsaber, even though she knew that lighting it would inevitably hurt the unconscious captives pressing in around her.

Then a light appeared out of the reddish murk. It grew brighter as whatever was grabbing at her found purchase, and pulled. Saba realized with a flood of relief that the thing that had taken hold of her equipment belt was a human hand—and that the hand belonged to Danni Quee.

The Barabel couldn’t help it. She laughed at herself, amused by her mistake and buoyed by the fading of her intense but fleeting panic. Her sissing fit continued until Danni’s faceplate pressed up against hers and she could see the human woman frowning in concern.

“Saba? Are you all right?” Danni’s voice was muffled by the thickness of their masks. “You’re shaking!”

“This one iz very glad to see you, Danni Quee,” she said, forcing herself to be calm. Given their situation, uncontrolled laughter could be just as detrimental as panic. “How did you know where to look?”

“Through the Force,” she said. “Can’t you see me that way?”

Saba shook her head. “There are too many people in here with us. I am drowning in their mindz.”

Danni removed her faceplate from Saba’s and looked around. It was her turn to shiver.

“It’s dark in here,” she said upon turning back to face Saba. “I’m glad I’ve got this light.”

Saba nodded. “This one iz more glad that you found me.”

“Do you know where we are?”

Saba concentrated again. She couldn’t feel the alien ship or its Yuuzhan Vong crew, but she could sense the shape that the sac of imprisoned humans made, then work out where they were from that.

“We’re past the halfway point,” she said. “There iz a bulge that I suspect containz the ship’s control centers. It’z not far from here—about a hundred meters or so.”

“Point me in the right direction, then, and let’s go,” Danni said with determination—although it obviously came with some effort. She was as uneasy about the whole thing as Saba was. “The sooner we’re out of here, the better.”

Saba led the way, propelling herself along the wall by digging her claws into the ribbing and pulling herself forward. Danni followed, using Saba’s tail as a guide. As before, Saba had to shoulder aside unconscious or dead bodies on her way, and the extra energy this required soon tired her.

Movement along the wall was certainly simpler than swimming through the jelly, but it still wasn’t easy. The interior of the slaveship was muscular and slippery, the surface soft but resistant to her probing digits. The ridges, she decided, were formed by vast muscle fibers wrapped around the hold, keeping the pressure in and allowing it to flex when new additions arrived. It wasn’t as tough as yorik coral, small plates of which she noticed had coated the exterior. With the slaves kept unconscious—presumably by a compound delivered via the gnulliths, since contact with the blorash jelly hadn’t affected Danni
at all—it seemed obvious that the Yuuzhan Vong had ignored any threat from the inside. Saba felt reasonably confident that, if worse came to worst, they could cut through the inner layer and find a way out between the yorik coral plates. But that would mean risking explosive decompression, sending the contents of the belly out into hard vacuum …

The image of six-pointed stars tumbling into space flashed through her mind. She fought down the thought angrily.

I
won’t
let that happen again!

Time was passing quickly, so she forced herself to hurry. She didn’t know how long the slaveship would hover around the Dreadnaught, sniffing for new captives. There had been a couple of small movements through the ship, suggestive of slight attitude adjustments, so she knew it hadn’t made any dramatic moves yet. The moment it left, though, their job would become a thousand times more difficult.

When they reached the bulge, its dimensions became clearer. The bulge was shaped like a volcano, with a round lip surrounding a slight dimple at the top. Feeling her way to the dimple, she was disappointed to find that it wasn’t an exit as she had imagined. It was, in fact, an entrance, but not one she could fit through. It was from here that fresh gnulliths were constantly pumped into the vast sac, riding on a gentle current of blorash jelly. Avoiding them proved difficult, and Saba pressed herself as flat as she could against the fleshy inner wall to present as small a target as possible.

Danni pressed her faceplate against Saba’s. “This place is getting worse by the minute.”

“At least they don’t seem to know we’re here,” Saba replied. “We seem safe enough.”

“For now,” Danni added.

Danni reached awkwardly for her pack and slid a fat cylinder from it. Saba helped her unscrew its cap and clear away the jelly long enough to activate its contents. Six modified Mark VII scarab droids came to life at the touch of a switch on Danni’s remote controller. Each had six legs as long as a human’s index finger and two retractable injection fangs. They had high-gain photoreceptors and sensitive biodetectors that had been tuned to Yuuzhan Vong rhythms and pheromones. They didn’t normally need remote operators, although their sensors could be accessed from a distance. These had been further modified to give Danni a measure of remote control—since the interior of the slaveship was a completely unknown environment—without jeopardizing their mission. Each scarab would lay a threadlike molecular wire behind it, virtually invisible to the naked eye, which would allow her to keep in touch without using comlink channels.

Heads-up displays in Danni’s face mask allowed her to see what the scarabs saw. As she keyed a series of instructions into the tiny droids and sent them scuttling for the gnullith vent, Saba accessed the information and watched, too.

The droids soon found the vent and burrowed into its muscular sphincter. The view through infrared was little different from what Saba saw around her in the hold: lots of indistinct, warm blurs and not much else. But the scarabs slid between the folds of tissue for three meters, nudging gnulliths aside with ease along their way.

The moment the lead scarab began to detect light, it slowed its crawl through the vent. They had clearly reached the end of the narrow passage. Danni instructed the droid to carefully extend a photoreceptor out toward the light, and found a tank filled with clear fluid that was thicker than water and held bubbles in suspension like human saliva. Throughout, the tank was teeming
with star-shaped creatures that twitched and writhed in the liquid. This was the source of the gnulliths.

The scarab didn’t detect any nearby Yuuzhan Vong biorhythms, so the droid slipped free of the vent and swam awkwardly around the edge of the gnullith pool. Ignoring the scarab’s presence, the flapping star-shaped organic masks continued to swim into the vent from the bottom of the pool where, presumably, they were grown. The other scarabs followed the lead out of the pool, fanning out to find different hiding spots. The remote-control view became a mess of six slightly different images of the same place, and Saba cut them back to only the lead droid to keep it simple. The scarab found a promising passage through the bony wall, leaving its siblings behind.

The view became nothing more than a series of close-ups of unpolished yorik coral at very close quarters as the scarab scurried along the narrow fissure. Eventually it came to a dead end, then backtracked until it reached a turnoff it had ignored before and took that instead. That, too, led to a dead end, so the droid went back to another turning and tried that instead. After a few times of doing this, Saba began to feel frustrated. If they didn’t find the equivalent of a control room soon, they were never going to be able to rescue the captives. And worse:
they
would end up captives themselves!

“Got ’em,” Danni said suddenly, her voice low but excited.

Saba snapped from her pessimism. “Where?”

“Scarab Four.” Saba selected the view and watched biorhythm readings glowing in many colors across a view of yet another narrow fissure. The scarab was moving stealthily closer to the end of the fissure, visible just around a turn up ahead. Bright light shone from around
the corner, and Saba could hear the harsh sound of the Yuuzhan Vong language in her earplugs.

The scarab instinctively froze the moment it managed to get one of its photoreceptors around the corner for a look, finding itself at about shoulder height in a small control room containing two Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Brutally scarred, although not as extensively as some Saba had seen, they were elbow deep in the sort of organic controls typical for these vessels. On a strangely shaped screen before them, Saba saw something that she suspected represented the wreckage of the Dreadnaught at close quarters. It was hard to say for sure, though, because the biological display wasn’t configured to frequencies her eyes were sensitive to.

Danni, however, was more certain. “That’s
Bonecrusher
,” she said. “At least we know we’ve still got a way off this thing.”

But for how long?
Saba thought as she shifted in the blorash jelly, brushing to one side yet another gnullith.

“I’m going to send the other scarabs in to join Four,” Danni said. “We’ll get them to attack once they’re all there, okay?”

Saba nodded. Given that they hadn’t been able to find a way out of the hold from within, this had become the human woman’s show. Nevertheless, she still had reservations. “Only two pilotz for a ship this big?” she asked dubiously.