Star by Star (74 page)

A minute later, Tesar reported, “Frigate analog—perhapz the one that brought Nom Anor. Its shuttle is missing.”

Despite the extra weaponry and personnel such a vessel carried, Jacen was no more worried than before. Frigates of this size were known to carry only three assault companies, and by his count, they had already destroyed one and cut up the other two pretty badly. If Nom Anor intended to launch an attack from this ship, it would either be with worldship personnel or the vessel crew—neither of which was likely to be experienced enough to keep them from escaping.

“Any sign of an assault company?” Jacen asked.

“The boarding ramp is down,” Tesar replied. “But the ones who used it are already gone.”

“Then there couldn’t be many.” Tekli’s voice sounded more hopeful than confident.

“Okay, Tesar,” Jacen said. “Keep an eye on things while we decide what to do here.”

“We could telekinese a thermal detonator at the voxyn and hope for the best,” Ganner suggested. “Or I could carry it up.”

“And that would work better than the other times why?” Tenel Ka asked. “We have only two detonators left. We must conserve.”

Ganner acknowledged her point with a shrug, and the Jedi fell to contemplating the situation in silence. No one felt any compulsion to flee—at least not until they knew what was happening. They had been dodging Yuuzhan Vong search parties since their escape from the cloning grashal, and the frigate’s arrival was the first hint that the enemy had guessed their location.

A few minutes later, Tenel Ka said, “Perhaps the Force brought the frigate to us, after all.”

She pointed into the hive colony, where several dozen Yuuzhan Vong silhouettes had emerged from hiding places near the voxyn. The unarmored leader appeared from inside a spire and stomped down the detritus mound, circling toward a passage about seventy meters around the pit from that of the Jedi. He was met just inside the colony by an eight-fingered shaper whose cage of glow bugs revealed the leader’s face to be that of Nom Anor.

The two immediately began to speak and gesture harshly. A
moment later, Vergere came waddling out of the tunnel, Anakin’s equipment belt strapped around her body like a bandolier, lightsaber and utility pouches still hanging in place, his comlink set dangling in the empty blaster holster.

The sight of his brother’s captured equipment filled Jacen with sorrow and self-reproach. Jaina’s angry accusations had compelled him to rethink nearly everything he had done since his blunder aboard the
Exquisite Death
, and he could not help believing that had he been less worried about making amends and more concerned with tempering his brother’s rashness, Anakin might still be alive. Jacen was troubled, as well, by the refuge he had taken in Anakin’s calm response to the theft of the
Tachyon Flier
. If Jaina, who remained collected under even the most heated attack, could not bear their brother’s death, how could he still be worrying about the mission? How come
his
grief was not driving him mad?

Vergere glanced in the direction of the Jedi. Her hand brushed Anakin’s comlink, and suddenly two angry Yuuzhan Vong voices were coming over the comm net.

Jacen barely noticed. His gaze remained fixed on Vergere. As much as it hurt to see her wearing Anakin’s gear as a war trophy, he felt no urge to attack her, nor even Nom Anor. Truth be told, though he was determined to destroy the queen, he really did not
want
to kill her either. None of it was going to bring Anakin back.

Tenel Ka squeezed the back of his arm, then quietly reached over and killed his comlink mike. “I do not know what game she is playing at, but it would be better if they could not hear us, as well.”

“Thanks,” Jacen said.

Though he could not understand the conversation coming over his comlink, he did hear two familiar words—
Jeedai
and
Anakin
. Nom Anor gestured angrily toward the voxyn’s hiding place. Vergere spread her hands, then pointed up the passage from which she and the shaper had come. She rattled off something that included the word
Jaina
, which prompted the eight-fingered shaper to turn and gesture into the hives, repeating the word
voxyn
time and again.

Nom Anor snapped at him, then he and Vergere began to yell at Nom Anor, and soon all three were shouting at once.

“Looks like Jaina has been busy,” Ganner observed.

“Why am I not surprised?” Tenel Ka asked. “But it is going to be difficult to destroy the queen now. That frigate will complicate matters.”

“Not for long,” Jacen said. He could feel something in the Jaina-place inside him, something angry and dark coming their way. “Not if I know my sister.”

Relying heavily on both lightsaber technology and several borrowed focusing crystals to help control the enormous power it would need to jam yammosk waves, Cilghal’s new gravitic amplitude modulator was part gravity generator and part plasteel rectenna. It was also even larger than the one that had been destroyed when the skips from the Yuuzhan Vong tracking vessel had attacked her lab, so when she and Kyp started across the hangar with the unwieldy apparatus in tow, Booster Terrik did not look happy. He came striding down the
Jade Shadow
’s boarding ramp to meet them, shaking his head and wagging his finger.

“Your orders are to evacuate, not relocate,” he growled. “The
Venture
’s already packed bilge to bridge with Reecee refugees. We’ve no room for Jedi sculptures.”

“This is no sculpture,” Kyp said. “This is a GAM, and it just might win the war for us.”

Booster rolled his eyes. “And a Gamorrean
might
be the next chief of state—but it won’t happen today.”

Kyp’s face reddened with temper. “Listen, you old—”

“That’s enough, Kyp,” Cilghal said, cutting him off. She passed him the hoversled controls, then turned to Booster and raised her hand toward him. “I’m sure that when Captain Terrik sees this instrument in action, he will be happy to find a place for it aboard the
Errant Venture.
”

Booster scowled and started to reiterate his denial—then cried out in surprise as his feet rose off the ground and Cilghal floated him out of the way.

“Okay, okay,” he growled. “If it means that much to you, I’ll take a look at this gizmo in action.”

“A wise idea,” Cilghal said. She disliked using the Force on a friend in this manner, but Booster was stubborn and time was short. “I am sure that you’ll be impressed—so impressed that you’ll let us run a power feed off one of your fusion reactors.”

Booster’s scowl returned to its most stubborn. “Don’t push it, Cilghal. We’ll talk about that
after
you show me what this thing can do.”

As weary as Jacen was of watching Vergere and the shaper argue with Nom Anor, he could think of no way to reach the voxyn. With a frigate full of Yuuzhan Vong in the area, sneaking up on it was out of the question. So was floating a detonator or incendiary at it; the creature had proved many times that it would flee as soon as it felt them using the Force. That left only waiting, but wait he would—until he was fifty, if that was what it took to destroy the queen. He had promised Anakin.

Vergere and the others were still arguing when a series of frantic clicks came over the comm net. Jacen reached out to Tesar and felt the Barabel still waiting at his station on the surface, concerned but not nearly excited enough to be fighting someone. A single click confirmed that Tesar had felt his touch, then the boom of an exploding missile reverberated through the yorik coral. Vergere turned and bounded away around the detritus mound. Nom Anor and the shaper remained where they were, barking questions at her vanishing back.

“Jaina?” Ganner gasped.

“Who else?” Tenel Ka replied.

Jacen reached out to his sister through the Force, found only the same cold anger that he had felt since Anakin’s death, and tried to break through to some vestige of the Jaina he had known all his life. He touched only swirling darkness, stormy and unreasoning and full of hate. Afraid to use the comlink—he could not be sure what channels Vergere had open—Jacen opened his emotions to the others, drawing them into a battle meld and reaching out to Tesar with the same question on their minds: Was this Jaina’s doing?

They were answered with a confirming click.

“An excellent plan, catching the frigate off guard,” Tenel Ka said. “It will greatly aid our final escape.”

Another blast shook the passage, this one closer than the first, then a second eruption even louder. Flakes of glow lichen began to snow from the ceiling. High in the colony interior, the legs of the dead Yuuzhan Vong vanished from sight as the startled voxyn dragged him out the back side of the hive and disappeared, never presenting a shot to the Jedi below. A third explosion shocked the dust off the walls, and loose chunks of ceiling began to bombard the insect city.

Tesar’s desperate voice came over the comlink. “Stickz, not there—stop!”

Even as Tesar yelled, a fourth explosion dropped an avalanche of vault ribbing on the colony. An entire borough of the insect city collapsed into rubble around Nom Anor and the shaper, and then the whole bug pit was filled with an impenetrable cloud of dust.

When a sporadic rain of yorik coral continued to fall from the weakened ceiling, Jacen backed deeper into the tunnel and pulled his equipment harness off his back.

“We’d better get into our vac suits,” he whispered.

After failing to destroy the frigate on the first two passes, Tesar thought the assault shuttle would turn and flee. That would have been the tactic of a wise hunter striking at such dangerous prey. But Jaina was in a killing frenzy and unable to resist the temptation of a 150-meter Yuuzhan Vong frigate sitting motionless on the surface, its debarking ramp still hanging open like the mouth of a winded dewback. She wheeled around, coming in close for a point-blank shot, and loosed a pair of plasma balls that vanished almost instantly into shielding singularities.

The assault shuttle flashed over its target and pulled up sharply, preparing to wheel around for yet another attack.

The frigate finally answered, launching a flurry of magma missiles and plasma balls from its port-side weapons bank. At such short range, the missiles lacked time to fix on their target and streaked past harmlessly, but two plasma balls exploded into the shuttle’s rear quarter, blasting through the firewall and sending it spinning into the sky.

Tesar feared for a moment that the shuttle would explode or spin itself into pieces, but then Jaina—at least he assumed she
was the pilot—somehow brought it under control and banked away. The craft climbed five hundred meters, then belched flame and began a long, wobbling descent toward the horizon.

Tesar snapped his tongue against his faceplate in anger, then thought for a moment and finally decided to risk a message over Jacen’s personal comm channel. Even if the Yuuzhan Vong were eavesdropping, this was not something he wanted to try relaying through clicks and Force sensations.

“No!” Jacen gasped.

He had felt something wrong even before Tesar commed, but had not known what. Forgetting about Anakin’s captured comlink, he opened a general channel and would have started calling for a report, had Tenel Ka not ripped the mike off his throat.

“You will not help anyone by getting us killed,” she said. “Jaina will bring them down softly. You know that.”

“No, I don’t. Not anymore.” Jacen took a deep breath, using a meditative calming technique to bring himself back under control. “But you’re right about the rest.”

Jacen reached out to his sister and spent the next minute or so struggling to stay in contact with the dark emotions that now filled her. She did not seem frightened, only angry and focused on the effort at hand. Then, as he sensed her efforts growing even more intense, her anger abruptly deepened to a level that Jacen could not bear, and he lost her.

“She’s gone,” he gasped.

“Dead?” Ganner asked.

“I don’t know.” Jacen looked up. “I didn’t feel that. I just don’t feel her at all.”

Tenel Ka enfolded him in her one arm and pulled him close. “Jacen, I am so sorry.”

Out in the bug pit, the dust had settled enough to see the Yuuzhan Vong clearing rubble. Although pieces of ceiling continued to fall at increasing frequency, it soon grew apparent that the collapse had so far caused few casualties. Nom Anor was already standing at the edge of a fallen hive, glaring down with a sour expression as a pair of assistants pulled the shaper from beneath the debris.

Once the shaper regained his feet and a little of his dignity, he
brushed himself off and began to speak sharply to Nom Anor. Jacen thought for a moment they would continue their argument, but after a while Nom Anor only nodded and pointed up the tunnel leading to the surface and their frigate. The shaper nodded back, then took the warriors and started across the colony in pursuit of the voxyn queen. The executor shook his head wearily and started up the tunnel toward the frigate.

He had barely departed before a squeaky voice came over their comlinks. “It is safe to come out now, young Jedi. You have nothing to fear from me.”

Jacen motioned the others to ready their weapons, then activated his comlink microphone. “Who is this?”

“There is no time to explain that now.” As she spoke, Vergere came around the colony on the side opposite the one she had departed, then pointed in the direction the voxyn queen had fled. “Your quarry is escaping.”

The Solo entourage was halfway across the last pedestrian bridge outside the Eastport Docking Facility when a deafening crackle roared out of the sky and shook the surrounding skyscrapers. Reflexes conditioned to instant reaction by far too many brushes with death, Han dropped to his haunches and looked for the source of the trouble. He found it in the form of a million orange fireballs reflecting off the transparisteel panes of a million tower viewports, silhouetting the dazed figure of his wife with Ben cradled in her arms.

Like almost everyone else on the bridge, Leia was still standing upright, craning her neck to see what was making all the noise. Han grasped her elbow and pulled her down beside him.