Star by Star (28 page)

Seeing the advantage of the situation, Leia ignited her lightsaber. “Time to make a stand.”

“Too dangerous!” The near-panic in Han’s voice surprised Leia. “You go.”

He shoved her after Fey’lya, nearly losing a hand as he reached past her lightsaber, then dropped the nearest Yuuzhan Vong with an impressive under-the-arm shot. Bad timing. A blaster bolt—one of 1-1A’s nonlethal green bolts—caught him in the chest and hurled him into Leia. He dropped, not dead she could tell, but out, really, really out. She caught her balance and stumbled around to meet the last two Yuuzhan Vong, one slashing at her head, the other slipping past after Fey’lya.

Leia dropped to a crouch and tumbled backward, using the Force to carry her along. A flying somersault would have been better, but she was no dueling master. She rolled to her feet and spun, catching Borsk’s would-be assassin across the back. Her ruby blade cleaved him nearly in two, and the smell was sickening.

Leia continued her spin and found the last Yuuzhan Vong where she expected, whipping his amphistaff at her legs, also as expected. She blocked low. He dropped his weapon and reached for his utility pouch.

Something struck at Leia’s knee. She caught it on her blade, saw the amphistaff had reverted to snake form, and flung the thing away. The Yuuzhan Vong’s hand was in his utility pouch. Leia summoned the Force and kicked with everything she had. The blow caught the assassin square and sent him stumbling back all of two steps.

The warrior sneered and withdrew his hand from the utility pouch. Vowing for the thousandth time to spend more time practicing her Jedi skills, Leia hurled her lightsaber at his arm. Still sneering, he pivoted to let it pass … and suddenly found himself folded into 1-1A’s laminanium arms.

The droid crushed the stolen blast armor like an eggshell, squeezing black gore out onto the ground. “Blasters ineffectual,” he said, stunned and confused. “Alternate tactics required.”

With the milky splendor of the galactic core pouring down through its transparisteel ceiling, the crater room on Eclipse was one of the few that still had light. An attempt to feed more power to the central cooling system had blown a primary switching bank, shutting down all nonvital systems and compelling the Jedi to hold their assembly in one of the Eclipse Program’s labs. Several empty villip tanks—even Cilghal could not make the things grow—had been moved aside to create a gathering area. Han and Lando stood a little off to the side with Leia’s Noghri bodyguards. After the close call on Coruscant, the Noghri had emerged from their bacta tanks a day early and now refused to let Leia out of their sight.

Leia was near the front with Mara, Cilghal, and the older Jedi, while Jacen and Jaina stood with Tenel Ka, Lowie, Raynar, Zekk, and the more thoughtful of the younger Jedi Knights. Anakin, with his pretty friend Tahiri at his side, was surrounded by his growing gaggle of companions, now including the three Barabel hatchmates, Ulaha Kore, a red-haired human woman named Eryl Besa, and the Twi’lek dancer, Alema Rar.

Han was only slightly less pleased than Tahiri to see how closely Alema pressed into his son’s space. Though the Twi’lek was about the same age as Anakin, he could tell by how she used her eyes and touch that she was much older in at least one sense—and now was not a particularly good time for Anakin to learn those lessons. Though Luke had called the gathering to report a breakthrough in Cilghal’s research, they had just received word that Anakin’s friend Lyric had fallen to the voxyn. Almost as alarming, Corran Horn had been seen with his wife, Mirax,
fleeing a pack of the creatures while resupplying on Corellia. No one had been able to contact them since.

Cilghal was the first to break the silence. “I asked Master Skywalker to call this meeting because I wanted to give you some hopeful news. Instead, I must again apologize for my tardiness in solving the problem.” The Mon Calamari turned her bulbous eyes toward the floor. “Forgive me.”

“Don’t think like that.” Though Anakin’s eyes were wet with barely restrained tears, his tone was warm. “No one could do better. Without you, we wouldn’t even know these things were part vornskr.”

Anakin’s words made Han proud. He knew from his own experience how difficult it was not to lash out after the loss of someone close, and his son’s reassurances would help ease Cilghal’s overactive conscience.

“That’s right,” Ganner Rhysode agreed. The big man’s scarred cheek lent a dangerous air to an otherwise rakishly handsome face. “Everyone knows how hard you’ve been working—just by how hard we’ve been working.”

This drew a chorus of agreement, for Cilghal was keeping many of the Jedi busy trying to identify the location of the original voxyn—the queen, as they now called her. Ganner had retraced the
Sweet Surprise
’s route to and from Nova Station, Streen had searched the log for suspicious gaps, and Cheklev was still keeping a dozen scientists busy analyzing pieces of the destroyed ship. Meanwhile, Anakin and his group rushed from planet to planet retrieving voxyn corpses for Cilghal, who plotted dispersal patterns and correlated data. The result of all that effort had been to confirm that all voxyn were indeed clones of a single creature, but also—and more importantly—to establish that their cells deteriorated at an accelerated rate. Cilghal estimated that the creatures could survive no more than a few months after release, and Han knew she had been searching for a way to use the Force to make them age even more rapidly. With any luck, she had called today’s meeting to announce her success.

Luke allowed everyone a chance to express their support, then raised a hand to quiet the gathering. “We have no complaints
about Cilghal’s progress, but there is reason for concern. If Corran and Mirax are missing, Booster Terrik may take it on himself to go into the war zone after them.”

“Not with Tionne and Kam aboard,” Han said. He and Leia had finally caught up to Booster between trips to Coruscant. “They know where to find us. They won’t let him try anything stupid without swinging by here to drop the students off.”

“You’re sure?” Luke asked. “That ship is carrying the next generation of Jedi Knights.”

“Two of whom are his own grandchildren,” Leia said. “Booster won’t risk Valin and Jysella, even for Mirax.”

Luke considered this, then nodded. “Good. I’ve been friends with Corran long enough to know he can take care of himself, but we’ll all breathe easier if we don’t have to worry about the academy students.” He fell silent for a moment, then said, “Let’s turn our attention to preventing the voxyn from taking any more of us. Cilghal has some interesting news.”

Luke stepped over to Mara and smiled at the infant sleeping in her arms. The sight filled Han with a sense of calm, and he wondered if that was what it felt like to touch the Force. For a moment, the galaxy did not seem to be coming apart after all; the glue that held it together remained, and Yuuzhan Vong or not, it would still be there tomorrow.

Cilghal blinked twice and choked on her emotion, then found her voice. “My friends, I discovered something very interesting in that last voxyn retrieved by Ulaha and Eryl.” She tipped her head toward the pair, both standing with the flock of young females that always seemed to gather around Anakin these days. “In its stomach was a full-grown ysalamiri, and in the ysalamiri’s stomach were several olbio leaves.”

“So these things eat ysalamiri?” Raynar asked. During Han’s visits to Yavin 4, he had noticed that questions seemed to boil out of the boy the way words bubbled out of young Tahiri—two more things that had survived the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong. “Is that what you’re telling us?”

“No, Cilghal is telling us where to find the queen,” Jacen said. “You ran a metals study on the leaves?”

Cilghal smiled. “A perfect match. The leaves came from Myrkr.”

Lando let out a low whistle, and Han drew a disapproving glance from Leia by expressing his emotions in a less eloquent fashion. Myrkr was famous among smugglers for the high metal content of its trees, a trait that rendered orbital sensor readings unreliable and made the place perfect for secret bases. It was also the world of origination for both vornskrs and ysalamiri—the former being nasty four-legged predators that hunted the Force in their prey, the latter being docile reptiles that pushed the Force away from them in small areas. Under the best of conditions, it was hardly an ideal place to go voxyn hunting, and the task was bound to be complicated by the fact that it lay about four hundred light-years behind Yuuzhan Vong lines.

“Okay,” Raynar said. “So what’s the good news?”

“It’s a start.” Mara passed Ben to Luke, then looked to Cilghal. “You’re sure the queen is there? The ysalamiri couldn’t have come from another place?”

It was Jacen who answered. “Not with those leaves in its stomach. If the leaves had come from somewhere else, the metal content would be far less.”

“The ysalamiri ate on Myrkr shortly before its death,” Cilghal agreed. “And was eaten itself a short time later. I saw no sign of freezing or other preservation in the leaves.”

The room fell eerily silent. The question before the group was as obvious as it was pressing, and the Jedi were well-enough attuned to each other to realize their next task was making a plan.

“Let us dismiss any thought of a massive attack out of hand,” Ulaha Kore said. “Even if we could assemble a large-enough fleet—and we cannot—our probability of success is below single digits.”

“And the mere attempt would telegraph our intentions,” Luke said. “We must think of a better way.”

“A commando force,” Zekk said. “We sneak a small strike team in the back way—”

“Not unless you’re better at it than Wraith Squadron,” Han interrupted. Before leaving Coruscant, he had stopped by the New Republic Defense Force medcenter to check on Wedge and found the general in a garrulous mood. “They’ve been trying to penetrate the frontier between Corellia and Vortex for six
months. The Yuuzhan Vong have dovin basal interdictors everywhere; the Wraiths were pulled out of every hyperspace lane they tried. And the stretch between the Perlemian Trade Route and the Hydian Way was especially bad; they were jumped this side of the frontier.”

“Now we know why,” Luke surmised. “The Yuuzhan Vong suspect we will discover this secret, and they’re prepared for us to take action.”

“I think they’re counting on it,” Tahiri said. Despite her age—at just over fifteen, she was the youngest Jedi present—her comment commanded attention. Having survived a Yuuzhan Vong shaper’s attempt to turn her into a Jedi-hunting slave, she understood the Yuuzhan Vong better than anyone present. “They have a saying, ‘Let the enemy fight.’ I don’t think they’re trying to be fair.”

“You are very right, Tahiri,” Alema said. The praise drew only an icy glare in response, but the Twi’lek pretended not to notice. She addressed herself to Luke and the senior Jedi. “On New Plympto, the Yuuzhan Vong always tried to anticipate our response and build a trap around it. You can be sure they’re looking for us now.”

“Then we have to fool them,” Anakin said, speaking in his typical tone of teenage certainty. He turned to the younger Jedi gathered around him. “The Yuuzhan Vong want us to surrender, right? So we do—and let
them
ferry us across the frontier.”

“Go on,” Luke said, deftly drawing attention back to the assembly’s more mature side. “We’re listening.”

Anakin disengaged himself from Tahiri and stepped toward his uncle. “It’ll buy time for Talfaglio, too.”

“That would be a plus,” Luke said. “How do we do this?”

“
You
don’t,” Anakin said. “
We
do.”

Han felt Lando’s hand on his arm even before he realized he was starting forward. Lando had been there when Leia finally laid into Han for nearly getting her killed at the droid demonstration. In no uncertain terms, she had told him that while she was glad to have him back, she would not tolerate overprotectiveness in a husband any more than she would in a Noghri bodyguard—who was certainly much better at it. The next time Han smothered
her or one of their children with his deranged need to control, she had warned, he would find himself flying the
Falcon
alone. Han vowed to hear his younger son out, then stepped back and quietly thanked Lando for the reminder.

Anakin looked back to his group. “We’ll have a traitor turn us over to the Yuuzhan Vong on the pretext of buying time for the Talfaglion hostages. We’ll set up a transfer for somewhere near Obroa-skai, let them cross the frontier, then take over the ship and fly to Myrkr.” He turned to his older sister. “I know Wedge—General Antilles—has let you fly a couple of captured Yuuzhan Vong vessels. Can you teach Zekk?”

Jaina studied him suspiciously. “Why would I need to? You’re not doing something that crazy without me.”

A look of distress came to Anakin’s face. “But you’re only on temporary leave. The Rogues could call you back anytime.”

“Sure they could.” Jaina rolled her eyes; then her face grew hard in the same way Leia’s did when she would abide no argument. “If you go, I go.”

“Me, too,” Tahiri said.

Anakin frowned. “You? You’re too—”

“If you say
young
, I’ll kick you where you really don’t want to be kicked,” Tahiri interrupted. “Nobody here knows the Yuuzhan Vong from the inside like I do. Can anyone else—except you, maybe—be sure they’d know a shaper laboratory? Can anyone else understand the language?”

“Good point,” Jaina said. “We’ll need her help to run the ship.”

Anakin frowned at his sister. “Can you fly a Yuuzhan Vong ship or not? If Wedge just had you put on the cognition hood or something—”

“I’ve flown—and so has Tahiri, unless you’ve forgotten,” Jaina said. She was referring to Anakin’s narrow escape in the Yag’Dhul system a few months before, when, along with Corran Horn and Tahiri, he escaped an almost certain death by capturing a Yuuzhan Vong scouting ship. “Most of the piloting stuff is symbolic, but who knows about the rest? There’s more to this than flying.”

“And what happens when they start hailing us?” Tahiri asked. “You’ll need to know what they’re saying—and how to answer.”