Star by Star (37 page)

Eryl frowned in puzzlement, then seemed to understand and shook her head. The daughter of a fanatic space racer, Eryl had been conceived and born on a long cross-galaxy run, then spent most of her childhood speeding up and down the mapped arms of the galaxy. Somewhere along the way, she had developed the ability to tell by the texture of the Force where she was in the galaxy at any given moment. It was her job to alert Anakin once they were safely behind Yuuzhan Vong lines, where they would be far less likely to run into space mines and curious picket ships. Unfortunately, it was taking longer to cross the war zone than anyone expected—perhaps, Jaina suspected, because Duman Yaght hoped to make a name for himself by returning to his masters with the location of the Jedi base.

“What harm is there in admitting it?” Duman Yaght asked. “The Yuuzhan Vong already know of its existence. Just admit what we know already, and you can rest. You can go into your healing sleep.”

“There … is … no base …”

“No, don’t lie.” Duman Yaght’s voice remained as eerily calm as always. “Give me your hand. I want to tell you about the neuropoison.”

An involuntary whistle of terror escaped Ulaha’s nasal cavities, but she said nothing. Jaina imagined the commander holding the Bith’s hand over the sensory bristles along the voxyn’s back, for Cilghal had detected a powerful neurotoxin coating the spines. There would be an antidote in the equipment pod, but it was as untested as the rest of the inoculations and antivenins she and Tekli had administered before the strike team’s departure.

“Your skin is so thin, and the tiniest puncture will inject the poison,” Duman Yaght said. “Our shapers claim the effect is not the same on all species. Some fall into convulsions and sink into an endless sleep of pain. Others weaken over many hours, slowly growing so feeble they can no longer breathe or swallow. Some drown in their own saliva.”

In the silence that followed, Ulaha’s pain and fear grew heavy in the Force. Jaina opened herself to both sensations, hoping to ease her comrade’s burden by taking some upon herself, but she was too frightened to be of much help. Bith had only one lung, and the coufee attack aboard the
Lady Luck
had pierced Ulaha’s. If she had to fight a neurotoxin, as well … Jaina
wanted
her to admit the existence of Eclipse. She couldn’t help it; she just did not want to see Ulaha die.

No sooner had she given thought to this emotion than she felt a flood of similar feelings from the others. Jaina knew that persuading Ulaha to admit the planet’s existence was only the first step of the breaking, but what harm was there, really? The strike team would be seizing the ship soon, and at least Ulaha would still be alive. She felt a flash of alarm from Alema and a certain bewilderment from the Barabels, but there was no doubting the general feeling of the group. They agreed.

“Bighead, you must think carefully before you answer,” Duman Yaght said. “This may be your last chance. Is there a
Jeedai
base?”

Tell him
! Jaina wanted to scream.

“You know … the answer,” Ulaha gasped.

“I am sorry, Bighead. That is not good enough.”

Say it
!

“Yes!” Ulaha cried.

The group let out an emotional sigh of relief, but now Alema seemed worried and the Barabels sad.

“Yes what?” Duman demanded.

“Yes, there is a Jedi base,” Jaina said, yelling into the wall. “She admitted it! Now let her rest.”

“Jaina, be quiet!” Alema hissed. “He’s trying to break—”

The admonishment was interrupted by a hollow crack, and Jaina looked over to see a Yuuzhan Vong warrior holding the butt of an amphistaff over the Twi’lek’s unconscious form. There was a surge of anger from the other Jedi, but Jaina felt only guilt. It had been her outburst that prompted Alema to speak without permission.

Duman Yaght said something in his own language, and the guard tossed a small button-shaped beetle on the floor beside each of Jaina’s wrists and ankles. The blorash jelly released its adhesive hold on her flesh and slid away to encase the struggling insects. The guard jerked Jaina to her feet and spun her toward the center of the room, where the commander stood holding Ulaha’s hand over the voxyn’s sensory bristles. The Bith’s normally pale skin had gone translucent with blood loss, and she was so weak that a Yuuzhan Vong warrior had to hold her up. The rest of the strike team sat along the edge of the small hold, partially clothed, filthy, and facing the walls. Only Ganner, whose presence they sometimes sensed forward and sometimes not at all, was absent.

Duman Yaght studied Jaina, then asked, “You think I do not keep my word?”

Jaina fixed her eye on Ulaha’s hand. “That remains to be seen.”

The commander seemed confused by her challenging tone, then recovered and smirked. “Very well. You are the one in control here.”

He said something to the guard holding Ulaha, who returned the injured Jedi to her place next to Tekli, laying the Bith on her back instead of the uncomfortable sitting position in which everyone else was bound.

“The Bith may rest and heal.” Duman Yaght smiled at Jaina. “And you will determine how long.”

Jaina began to feel sick and frightened, but forced herself to raise her head and step forward without being summoned. Warm feelings of encouragement and confidence flooded into her as the others reached out to prepare her for the breaking. She felt fairly confident that Duman Yaght would not let the voxyn kill her—he had already bragged to her about the place he had been promised at the Great Sacrifice—so she saw every reason to think that with her companions supporting her, she could buy Ulaha enough time to enter a healing trance and stabilize her wounded lung.

But Jaina’s confidence was not enough to keep her from trembling as she approached. Only the strength flowing to her through the Force had prevented her from wailing like an infant the first time Duman Yaght tried to break her, and this time would be worse—much worse. The commander could not allow her to challenge him and succeed, and there were so many ways he could hurt her without killing her, so many things to remove or disfigure or break.

A fresh surge of confidence buoyed Jaina up as Jacen relayed Anakin’s resolve to keep her healthy, Zekk’s admiration of her bravery, Ulaha’s weary gratitude, Tekli’s calm assurance that all of their injuries could be repaired. She stopped before Duman Yaght and looked up into his face.

“I hope you don’t expect me to thank you.”

He soured her stomach by clasping the back of her neck. “No need.”

He guided her to the voxyn’s head. Though the creature’s malicious hunger rippled through the Force with a carnal urgency, the thing seemed very much the master of its instincts, quivering with excitement, yet keeping its yellow eyes fixed on its master to await his command. Duman Yaght paused a meter from its jaws, turning Jaina to watch the beads of sour-smelling drool as they dripped from the voxyn’s fangs and landed, smoking, on the floor. Jaina swallowed; her back was covered with thumb-sized circles where the drops had fallen the time before. She started to kneel.

Duman Yaght’s hand tightened, holding her up. “That is not what I was thinking.” He guided her past the voxyn to the wall where her brothers sat affixed to the floor. “Choose.”

“What?” Jaina felt the shock of his demand not only in the hollowness of her own stomach, but in the stunned outrage coming to her through the Force. “Choose what?”

“You are the one in control, Jaina Solo. Who will be next?” He kicked first Anakin in the kidneys, then Jacen. “Your brother, or your twin?”

“They’re both my brothers.” In Jaina’s shock, it registered only vaguely that Duman Yaght now realized her relationship to Jacen. “And I choose neither. I choose me.”

Duman Yaght shook his head. “That is not your choice. You must choose Anakin or Jacen.” Again, he kicked them, drawing involuntary groans from both. “Choose one, or I will be forced to return Ulaha to the breaking. The warmaster knows of her wound, so no one will think anything of it should she happen to die. You are the master now, Jaina Solo.”

Jaina felt a surge of anger and would have whirled on Duman Yaght to attack, had a flash of alarm from her brothers not brought her up short. Each wanted to be the one chosen—she would have felt that much from her brothers even without the group’s emotional bond—and her tie to Jacen went farther yet. She could sense that for him it was more than a matter of being noble, that he had good reason to believe himself the best choice. Jaina suspected those reasons included the fact that Anakin would need a clear head when the time came to escape—it had to be soon, she hoped—but she could not be certain; even the bond between the twins was not strong enough to share complete thoughts.

“Your choice?” Duman Yaght demanded.

“You can’t ask that,” Jaina said. She told herself that as facilitator of the battle meld, Jacen was just as important as Anakin, but the truth was that she could not bring herself to harm either one. Though Anakin was a war hero and leader to everyone else, he would always be a little brother to her—someone to look after, protect, keep out of trouble. And Jacen had always been her best friend, the person who understood her when she did not understand herself, the presence that enveloped her like a second
skin. How could she send either of them? She looked away from Duman Yaght. “I can’t choose.”

“No?” His hand tightened on the back of her neck, and he started to pull her away. “A pity for the Bith, then.”

Anakin craned his head around. “Jaina, you
can
choose.” The weight of the Force was behind his words, not as much to compel her as to make clear that this was an order. “You can choose me.”

Jaina’s connection to the others diminished as Jacen withdrew into himself. He looked toward their younger brother.

“Anakin—”

“Be quiet, Jacen.” Anakin continued to stare at Jaina. “Choose.”

Duman Yaght looked at her expectantly. “The Bith will probably die anyway, you know.”

Jaina closed her eyes. “Anakin,” she said. “Take Anakin.”

Duman Yaght nodded to the guard standing behind her brothers, then said something to another standing beside one of the gelatinous membranes that covered the hold doorways. The warrior tickled the membrane until it drew aside, then disappeared into the next room with a thin smile of anticipation.

Instead of returning Jaina to her place on the wall, Duman Yaght forced her to stand beside him as Anakin was secured to the floor facedown. The commander summoned his pet forward and began to give orders, and for the next quarter hour Jaina was forced to watch.

Bolstered by the support of the strike team, Anakin never cried out. Eventually even Duman Yaght clucked his tongue in admiration.

“He takes pain well, your brother,” the commander said. “Perhaps we try something new, yes?”

He barked a command, and the voxyn held a foot over Anakin’s back. The sharp claws were coated in green slime—the medium, Jaina knew, for the retroviruses that flourished in the thing’s toe pads.

“Is that fear in your eyes, Jaina Solo?” Duman asked. “Then there is no need to tell you about the fevers. You know what will become of your brother if he is scratched.”

“You wouldn’t disappoint your priests.” As Jaina spoke, she reached out to the others, sharing with them the uncertainty her brave words concealed. The vaccine Cilghal had given them was
untested; it might destroy all the diseases or only some, and she was not happy about experimenting with her brother’s life. “Not when they have promised you a place at our sacrifices.”

“True, but think of my place if I could tell them in which region the
Jeedai
base is located,” Duman Yaght said. “I would be only a few tiers behind the warmaster, close enough so that you could see the gratitude in my eyes.”

An overwhelming sense of defiance came to Jaina—Anakin’s feelings on the matter, no doubt, as relayed by Jacen.

“You’ll just have to watch from the back,” Jaina retorted.

Duman Yaght’s hand tightened on her neck. “You believe I won’t do this?”

He whistled sharply, and the voxyn raked its claw down Anakin’s back. Jaina felt a shock through the Force, but somehow her brother still did not scream.

“You overestimate your brother’s value,” Duman Yaght said. “The priests will be happy as long as I return with you and Jacen. You two are the twins.”

He said the word
twins
as though it were some sort of state secret. There was something there Jaina did not understand, but it hardly mattered. One way or the other, she and Jacen were going to disappoint both Duman Yaght and the priests.

The guard who had been sent out earlier reappeared at the hold door. Duman Yaght had a pair of guards lay a lump of blorash jelly over the voxyn’s two rear feet, trapping the creature in place. They moved Anakin well beyond the voxyn’s reach and secured him to the floor by a single foot.

This was something new, and Jaina did not like the look of it. “What are you preparing, a stare-down?”

Duman Yaght cracked a smile. “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

He nodded to the door guard, who stood aside and stretched the membrane back to admit what looked like a small tree. About the size of a grown Wookiee, the plant had a small but thick crown of foliage. In the center of its trunk was a single knothole with a glassy black orb, which it turned in the commander’s direction. Duman Yaght pointed at the center of the hold, and the tree clumped forward on three gnarled root burls.

As the thing approached, the voxyn’s forked tongue flickered
out to test the air. The sensory bristles rose on its back, then it strained to curl its long body around and look behind it.

The tree was about seven meters away when the voxyn went wild, hissing madly and gouging furrows into the floor as it tried to tear itself free. The creature seemed to have lost all its intelligence, acting more like a mindless beast than the shrewd predator the Jedi had learned to fear.

The tree continued to advance, and two meters later Jaina lost all contact with her companions. She reached out with the Force and felt nothing. Then, as the tree drew nearer and the rest of the strike team struggled to see what was cutting them off from the Force, Jaina glimpsed a lizardlike shape clinging to the back of the tree—no doubt trying to hide itself from the voracious predator clambering to get it.