Star by Star (64 page)

“Need help, young Solo?” Lomi asked. “I can kill it, but there is that promise—”

“Keep your promise,” Anakin said. He slowly lowered his lightsaber and backed away. “You really don’t want to see Zekk angry.”

“Do not be so sure,” Lomi said. “I hear he is very powerful when he is angry.”

The voxyn retreated to its nest. Anakin dared to breathe again, then he and the others scrambled up the last tier to the exit. Alema and Zekk were already on the other side with Tekli and Raynar, but Jacen and the rest were waiting just inside the arch.

Anakin stepped through and peered at Raynar over the Chadra-Fan’s small shoulder. Four deep gashes ran diagonally across his chest, but the bleeding was not severe and no bone was showing.

“How is he?”

“Well enough for now,” Tekli said, filling the wounds with cleansing foam. “But much will depend on how Cilghal’s anti-disease agents work.”

Anakin continued to stare at Raynar. Another casualty, this one a close friend of Jacen and Jaina—but they had made it across the voxyn warrens. He felt both sorrowful and relieved, but not guilty. He had chosen as well as he could.

Though Raynar was probably too incoherent to notice, Anakin kneeled down and patted his shoulder. “Can he be moved?”

“Have someone levitate him,” Tekli said. “I’ll ride.”

Zekk had the patient in the air before Anakin could give the order. Alema was beside him, holding Tekli’s medpac, her face distressed. Anakin gave her arm a reassuring squeeze, then gently took the medpac from her and passed it to Tahiri.

“We need you to navigate,” he said to Alema. “Lomi’s never been outside the training course, and everyone else is lost down here.”

Alema thought for a moment, then guided them down the passage in what seemed the opposite direction they had been traveling. This corridor resembled the one they had followed into the
arena, save that it lacked acid-scarred caves connected to a parallel tunnel. Eventually, the team passed an intersection that had been blocked with a yorik coral plug, presumably to discourage voxyn from escaping onto the rest of the worldship. Alema passed by the first, then the next, and finally stopped at a third.

“It feels like we’re very near the surface here.” A shudder ran down her lekku as she spoke. “I’m guessing we are far from the gate they were herding us toward. Maybe we can finally take them by surprise.”

Jaina checked her comlink. “Maybe we can. They still haven’t tripped the flechette mine.”

Anakin gestured at the barricade. “Who wants the honors?”

Lowbacca and Tesar ignited their lightsabers simultaneously and set to work. The yorik coral was much harder than that aboard the
Exquisite Death
, and it required nearly twenty minutes to cut through the meter-deep plug. Anakin spent much of the time in meditation, doing what he could for his injury, but Tekli did not want to open it again. Even if a stitch had popped, there would be nothing solid to reattach it to.

Finally, Ganner levitated the last block out of the intersection. Ahead of them, a large access tunnel ascended toward the surface at a shallow angle. About fifty meters distant, it ended in a transparent wall of membrane and an air-locked valveway that opened into one of the deep-walled service routes they had seen from space. This travelway, however, was obviously no longer in use. It was crammed with captured equipment—landspeeders, utility lifts, hovertaxis, even a SoroSuub cloud car—all of it no doubt being stored out of sight until it was needed in the training course.

And there, sitting cockeyed in the middle of the tangle with hatches sealed tight and one landing gear only half extended, was a battered light freighter.

“Well,” Anakin said. “It looks like the Force is finally with us.”

It was a forty-second turbolift drop to the Solos’ floor in their Eastport residential tower, and forty seconds had never seemed so long. Leia pulled her lightsaber from the thigh pocket of her grease-stained flight suit, and Han checked the power level of his famous BlasTech DL-44. Given the tower’s unobtrusive but watchful security department, Leia felt certain there would be a pair of guard droids and a sentient supervisor waiting with a retina scanner when they stepped out of the lift. As long as Han didn’t start a firefight, that would probably even be a good thing. It was always smart to have a little support in situations like these.

“Can’t this thing drop any faster?” Han grumbled.

“They don’t put acceleration compensators in turbolifts,” Leia reminded. “Be patient, Han. We’ll be more useful without our knees in our chests.”

Han was silent for a moment, then asked, “Did Adarakh say they were on the way, or already in the building?”

“On our floor,” Leia said. “He said they were already on our floor.”

With its rare red ladalums and milky larmalstone floor, the Solo atrium appeared as deserted and placid as the first time Viqi Shesh had visited it. Instead of ambling casually by as she had before, she walked straight toward the cul-de-sac, the looming figures of an entire Yuuzhan Vong infiltration cell following close on her heels.

Dressed in the blue jumpsuits of the Municipal Health Bureau and wearing conspicuously similar ooglith masquers, Viqi’s companions looked more like a squad of sextuplet assassins than a
vermin control team—though it hardly mattered. Droids were not capable of making the leap of thought necessary to interpret the odd similarity as a threat, and there would be no sentients awake inside to notice. Ten minutes ago, she had walked past and innocuously blown an ultrasonic whistle, causing her sensislug surveillance bug to self-destruct and release an invisible cloud of sleep-inducing spores. By now, everyone in the Solo apartment, including Ben Skywalker, would be slumbering peacefully.

Viqi had almost entered the atrium when a sudden rustle broke out behind her, and she turned to find the infiltrators opening their collars to reach for the gnulliths concealed beneath their jumpsuits.

“Not yet, gentlemen.” In an attempt to keep the security system from identifying the stress pattern in her voice, Viqi spoke in a bare whisper. “We don’t want to alarm anyone.”

“But the spores—”

“Grow ineffective after five minutes, or so I was given to believe.” Viqi was not at all happy about having her judgment questioned by a male inferior. “It has been
ten
minutes.”

“They settle to the ground after five minutes,” the leader corrected. His name was Inko or Eagko or something similarly odd. “If they are stirred into the air again—”

“We’ll mask when we are inside, Inkle.” Viqi pushed the leader’s hand back beneath his jumpsuit, then tipped her chin toward the Serv-O-Droid GL-7 standing patiently outside the crystasteel door. “If the greeter droid sees a vermin control team approaching in gnulliths, he’ll have tower security down here before we cross the atrium. We must disable him before revealing ourselves.”

The leader considered this for a moment, then nodded to his warriors and removed his hand without the gnullith. “Ingo Dar,” he said. “I am called Ingo Dar.”

“Of course you are.” Viqi rolled her eyes and turned back to the atrium. “Follow me, Ingo—and do only what I command.”

Though Viqi was about to expose herself as one of the most notorious traitors in the short history of the New Republic, she had not bothered to mask either her appearance or her voice. A thorough analysis of the security data would penetrate such a disguise anyway, and she knew from her spy in the security department
that any attempt to avoid all the tower’s hidden holocams and microphones would be hopeless. Besides, there was a part of her—a big part of her—that wanted Luke Skywalker to know who had taken his son. No one could cross Viqi Shesh and hope to escape the consequences—not even the Master of the Jedi.

There would also be consequences for Viqi, of course. She would become a hunted woman and a reviled traitor, and her whole planet would be stigmatized by her betrayal—but not for long, she was certain. Since losing her seat on NRMOC, she had actually expanded her value to the warmaster, recruiting a network of spies who believed she was merely working to regain her lost prestige. She had provided him with not only the secret of the Jedi shadow bombs, but also the technical readouts of the gravity projectors aboard the
Mon Mothma
and the
Elegos A ’Kla
and the disposition of the New Republic hyperspace mines now being laid between Borleias and Coruscant. Tsavong Lah knew that in commanding her to distract the Jedi in this manner, he was forfeiting his most valuable intelligence asset—and Viqi could think of only one reason for him to do that.

Tsavong Lah was coming to Coruscant, and soon.

As Viqi approached the door, the GL-7 swiveled its smiling face in her direction and made a show of scanning her features—though she knew that it had already done that from twenty meters away, when she stepped onto the hidden pressure pad at the entrance to the atrium. She smiled warmly and slipped a hand into her stylish hip pouch, reaching for the powerful two-shot hold-out blaster she had hidden inside a scan-proof cosmetics case.

“Senator Shesh, how kind of you to call!” The GL-7 radiated electronic enthusiasm. “See-Threepio informs me that the household is napping at the moment, but he expects them to awaken shortly. If you and your friends care to wait, he is prepared to offer refreshments.”

“Refreshments?” It was hardly the type of greeting Viqi expected, but perhaps the droid’s programming had not been updated since her “retirement” as the chair of SELCORE. Certainly, Leia Solo would have been eager to offer a warm reception to the senator in control of the refugee effort’s purse strings. Leaving the hold-out blaster in her hip pouch, Viqi said, “Yes, refreshments would be nice.”

“See-Threepio is waiting for you inside.” The crystasteel door slid open. “Please enjoy your visit.”

Only her experience as a politician kept Viqi’s jaw from dropping. “Thank you. I am sure we will.”

Hoping that the infiltrators behind her were not doing something foolish like reaching under their jumpsuits for the amphistaffs twined around their waists, Viqi crossed the threshold and stepped into the foyer, a domed atrium similar to the one from which they had just come, though much smaller and even less grandiose. To the left, a large double door opened onto the apartment’s skyway balcony, where, two meters below, a hoversled from a popular airbed vendor was waiting to provide a fast escape.

The Solos’ golden protocol droid appeared from deeper inside the apartment. “I am See-Threepio, human-cyborg relations.”

“The whole galaxy knows who you are, See-Threepio,” Viqi remarked dryly.

“How kind of you to say so, Senator Shesh.” C-3PO gestured at a set of pouf couches arrayed around a potted ladalum, then said, “We have been expecting you. Please be seated, and I will take drink orders for you and your friends shortly.”

The droid’s tone was so pleasantly matter-of-fact that the significance of what he had said did not strike Viqi until he had turned away and vanished around the corner. The infiltrators instantly began to rustle beneath their jumpsuits for their gnulliths, but Viqi pulled her hold-out blaster from its hiding place and started after the droid.

“See-Threepio! You were
expecting
us?”

“Why, yes, Senator Shesh.” The droid reappeared instantly, his metallic hands grasping a delicate, Vors-glass orb spattered on the inside with some sort of organic material. “I was given to understand that this belongs to you.”

Still struggling to make sense of the situation, Viqi leveled her hold-out blaster at the droid’s head. “Stay there.”

C-3PO stopped. “Oh my.” The glass sphere slipped from between his hands. “Is that really necessary?”

Viqi had time enough to draw one breath before the orb shattered on the tile floor, then a small gray-skinned alien slipped
past the droid with a T-21 repeating blaster in his hands. He was, she saw, wearing a breath mask.

Viqi fired once in his direction and heard the first infiltrator thump to the floor. The alien fired past her twice, and two more warriors crashed down. When a fourth fell, Viqi realized the situation was hopeless and turned to flee. Even if any of the Yuuzhan Vong remained conscious long enough to don their gnulliths, they would never fight past the Noghri.

As she approached the skyway balcony, the double doors slid open automatically, and a second Noghri dropped onto the floor. Viqi took two more steps and loosed the hold-out blaster’s last bolt. The shot missed, of course, but it did force the alien to waste an instant pivoting away.

That instant was all Viqi needed. She raced across the balcony and hurdled the safety rail blind.

With any luck at all, the hoversled would still be there, two meters down.

The crook of Luke’s arm felt strangely empty without Ben there to keep it occupied. At the oddest times, he found himself holding his hand in front of his belly and his elbow slightly out from his body, rocking from one foot to another and humming softly to himself. Sometimes, such as now, it even seemed to him that his ribs were warm where his son would be pressed against him, or that the air was sweet with the smell of the milk on Ben’s breath.

Sensing a sudden silence in the air, Luke looked up to find the three women in the room—Mara, Danni, Cilghal—studying him with knowing smirks. He felt himself blush and knew there was no use denying that his thoughts had been elsewhere.

“Well, nothing else seems to work.” He shrugged and smiled sheepishly, then looked through the transparisteel viewport at the writhing mass of tentacles in the nutrient tank. “I thought we might as well try music.”

“Sure you did, Luke,” Mara said. “I’m sure that every yammosk war coordinator will be mesmerized by ‘Dance, Dance, Little Ewok.’ ”

“Why not?” Cilghal asked. “It works as well as anything we
have tried. We know they communicate through gravitic modulation, but there must be something in the wave pattern we are missing. Whatever we try, it fails to answer.”

“Fails, or refuses?” Luke asked, studying the creature more closely. “We keep talking about yammosks like they’re animals, but I’m not sure. What if it doesn’t
want
to answer? If they’re smart enough to run a battle—”