Star by Star (80 page)

The general clicked off without awaiting an acknowledgment, then followed a dozen soldiers onto the bridge. Though there were no signs that the
Byrt
’s crew had put up a fight, two had been tortured to death, the rest bloodied to various degrees. Ba’tra looked around until he found a Rodian with a captain’s epaulet hanging off one shoulder.

“This ship is being commandeered.” Ba’tra handed him a piece of flimsiplast with a set of coordinates. “Take us here.”

“You’re not commandeering us, General, you’re rescuing us.” The Rodian studied the flimsiplast, then looked out the viewport as the uncrewed
Lady Luck
streaked past with an entire squadron of coralskippers in pursuit. The funnels atop his head twisted outward in confusion, then he said, “But I don’t understand. This is barely beyond the battle. We won’t be safe there.”

Ba’tra smiled. “We will when the
Venture
arrives.”

Lando was halfway down the service ladder when a shock wave slammed the
Byrt
so hard there was no need to finish the descent. He lost his grip and simply found himself squatting on the starferry’s lowest deck, listening to the roar of a pitched battle around the corner.

“Thermal detonator ignition, General,” 1-1A reported, already standing on the deck. “Tether ship destroyed.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

Lando stood, then heard a familiar drone and dropped back to his haunches as a stray razor bug streaked around the corner. The thing dived at his throat, but 1-1A zinged a low-power bolt past his ear and zapped it out of the air. Lando managed a weak smile, trying not to show his fright, but knowing the war droid had already detected his increased heartrate and the slight rise in skin temperature. He drew his blaster and peered around the corner.

Viqi Shesh and two dozen Yuuzhan Vong were withdrawing into Escape Bay 14, leaving the floor behind them strewn with tiny black seedpods. Though Lando had never seen this particular weapon, he felt sure the husks contained some unpleasant surprise.

“Analysis?” he asked.

“Unknown caltrop device,” 1-1A replied. “High potential for biotoxin attack.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

The
Byrt
lurched slightly as the sublight drives kicked in, and Lando knew they were on their way to the
Venture
. He removed his breath mask from his combat belt.

“You’re sure it’s the right baby this time?” Lando asked. “We’re not going after some Squib trapped in a locker?”

“The sound signature was identical,” 1-1A said defensively. “And the confidence level here is high. YVH One-Twenty-five received a burst transmission from a 3PO protocol droid claiming to have the correct child.”

“That’s them.” Lando covered his face with the breath mask. “Send in a droid, One-One-A.”

Lando had barely finished before 1-25A rushed forward, deftly dancing through husks. He made it two steps, then the pods began to roll toward him. Another two steps, and his foot came down on one. Nothing happened.

Then he moved his foot, and a heart-shaped kernel shot into the air behind him. The droid went motionless, then drained into the nugget.

“Singularity mines.” Lando pulled his breath mask down. “Nasty.”

“Analysis predicts obstacle impassable,” 1-1A reported. “All techniques for bypassing or clearing minefields will fail.”

Lando shook his head in disappointment. “Remind me to speak with the brain department about your ingenuity routines.” He took out his comlink and opened a channel to the bridge. “Calrissian here. Request two-second suspension of artificial gravity and inertial compensation.”

“Copy.”

Lando grabbed a bulkhead and had the droids magnoclamp themselves to the floor. A moment later, his stomach fluttered, and the singularity mines floated into the air. They drifted toward the stern and filled the corridor with eerie grating sounds as they brushed the walls and ripped two-meter holes in the durasteel. When gravity was restored, the remaining husks dropped to the floor and destroyed a five-meter section of service corridor.

Lando released the bulkhead and sprinted toward Escape Bay 14. He had intended to lead the charge himself, but the droids were already there, pouring blasterfire through the hatchway.

“Careful!” Lando ordered. “Watch the baby—and Threepio!”

He peered around the corner. The last Yuuzhan Vong were squeezing into the crowded escape pod, flinging thud bugs at the bay hatch. Viqi Shesh was nowhere to be seen, and the muffled wailing of a terrified infant could just be heard from inside the pod.

“Go!” Lando screamed. “Don’t let it launch!”

YVH 1-1A was already charging. The bug swarm trailed off, then C-3PO’s golden form tumbled out.

“Don’t shoot!” C-3PO screamed. He picked himself up and raised his hands. “I’m one of you!”

The war droids continued to pour fire past C-3PO as they rushed across the launch bay. The pod hatch started to close. YVH 1-1A sprang forward, reached for the gap, arrived a millisecond too late to prevent it from sealing.

C-3PO palmed the automatic launch button.

“See-Threepio!”

Lando rushed for the control panel and hit the cancel pad. There was a soft clunk … then the rockets pounded the blast shielding with efflux.

“What a relief!” C-3PO started across the bay. “I thought they would take me along.”

Lando followed close behind. “See-Threepio, who was that crying in the escape pod?”

“Oh, that was me, General Calrissian,” C-3PO answered in an infant’s voice. He stopped next to an emergency breath-mask locker and withdrew a medpac pouch containing a soundly sleeping infant. “Ben won’t be crying for several more hours, I am quite certain.”

With both valves of the distant air lock drawn open, a bright crescent of blue sun could be seen blazing out from behind Myrkr’s rising disk, illuminating the million pillars of the serpent hall in gloomy streaks of sapphire. The shaper and his escorts were little more than stick silhouettes filing toward the exit in a single line. The voxyn queen was not visible at all, though Jacen knew she was there, in the gap two figures from the front.

“This is not right,” Tesar rasped quietly. “That air lock can’t be open.”

“It is better to seek an explanation than to deny what we all see clearly,” Tenel Ka replied. “There is an atmosphere outside that lock.”

“Yes, but what else?” Vergere asked. “That is the question, is it not?”

“How about you answer it for us?” Ganner replied.

When Vergere spread her arms and gave a feathery shrug, Jacen looked back to the line of Yuuzhan Vong. He filled his mind with thoughts of fear and suspicion and reached out to the queen for the eighth time since leaving the hive colony.

The voxyn reacted even more quickly than she had the last time, whirling on the warriors behind her. She must already have struck the first Yuuzhan Vong with her poison tail barb, for she ignored him and belched acid at the second in line, then leapt past both to slash at the next one. All three warriors went down, and she was attacking a fourth before the shaper and two of his remaining assistants got hold of her leashes and restrained her.

Jacen withdrew his presence. The queen slowly calmed to the point where the shaper felt confident in approaching her, stroking her muzzle and no doubt speaking to her in soothing
tones. It would not be long before that act of bravery turned into a deadly mistake, but Jacen did not want the beast to kill the handler yet. As wary as the warriors were already, the death of the shaper would cause them to send for reinforcements.

The shaper finally backed away and signaled his assistants to release the tethers. They had learned the hard way that the queen would not move with someone holding the other end of a leash—the result of another uneasy feeling planted by Jacen. When the voxyn showed its willingness to resume travel by not killing anyone, the Yuuzhan Vong turned and—leaving their dead and wounded where they lay—vanished through the open air lock.

“Only four left,” Vergere said, rising from the group’s hiding place. “Well done, Jacen Solo.”

Jacen did not thank the strange little creature. He disliked killing, and he disliked even more tricking an animal into doing it for him. But he had his promise to Anakin to keep and his sister to track down—he still could not feel Jaina through the Force—and encouraging the voxyn to follow its nature was his only hope of doing either. He nodded to Tesar, who rose and set off. The Barabel kept them concealed in a fungus-lined rift, for the area was strewn with Yuuzhan Vong workers scavenging the exhausted serpent yards for a usable amphistaff or tsaisi baton.

As they traveled, Ganner remained a step behind Vergere, his repeating blaster pointed at her feathery back. Though she had been of considerable use in tracking the Yuuzhan Vong, the Jedi still did not trust her. Not only had she declined to identify her species—claiming they would not recognize it anyway—she had also refused to explain her presence during Elan’s attempt on the Jedi, or her reason for providing the tears that had saved Mara’s life. While unsure that she was an enemy, Jacen hardly considered her a friend, either. Needless to say, he now had Anakin’s lightsaber clipped to a spare hook on his equipment harness, and Ganner had pointedly confirmed that he would blast her into a feathercloud at the first sign of treachery. Vergere had indulged them with a shudder, undoubtedly insincere.

The fissure and fungus both dwindled away as the group neared the air lock. To avoid drawing attention, the Jedi activated
their holoshrouds and, keeping Vergere screened from view, marched through the air lock disguised as Yuuzhan Vong.

They found themselves standing on the inside rim of what looked like an enormous impact crater, save that the slope was surprisingly featureless and the crest unnaturally even. There was no covering overhead, but the atmosphere was as thick and warm as inside the worldship. In the bottom of the basin lay what resembled a giant honeycomb, save that each cell was a meter across and held a single dovin basal.

Jacen could not sense the emotions of the dovin basals—creatures with no connection to the Force remained as unreadable to him as the Yuuzhan Vong themselves—but he could see by their labored pulsing and flaking hides that the things were in distress. There were even large tracts where the cells contained nothing but shriveled husks. Whether this stemmed from old age, exhaustion, or disease he did not know, but it did suggest another reason the Yuuzhan Vong were deserting the dilapidated worldship.

The shaper and his escorts were already on the floor of the basin, moving along the edge of the basal-comb toward Nom Anor’s frigate, which lay about a fifth of the way around the circle. The executor himself and perhaps fifty Yuuzhan Vong were half a kilometer out on the structure itself, crawling along the narrow walls between the cells and being careful to avoid the dovin basals themselves. From the group’s different dress—many of them wore armor only over their torsos—it was apparent the executor had stripped the ship’s crew to supplement his company.

Nom Anor and his followers were making their way toward the center of the basal-comb, where a huge sweep of cells contained either shriveled husks or nothing at all. In the heart of this dead area rested Jaina’s stolen shuttle, cracked and overturned, but still in one piece. The sporadic stream of blaster bolts and magma missiles arcing out of the wreckage suggested that at least a few Jedi had survived the crash.

Vergere hunched beside Jacen, her gaze running from the queen over to Nom Anor’s frigate, where four warriors stood watch at the base of the boarding ramp. “Interesting … Will you destroy the voxyn, Jacen Solo, or save your sister?”

Jacen ignored the question and continued to study the situation. The longblaster roared and split open a warrior in front of Nom Anor. The executor shuddered, but lowered his head and continued forward.

“I don’t understand,” Tekli said. “The shuttle is helpless. The frigate should be attacking.”

“Yes,” Tenel Ka agreed. “Why crawl so far under fire?”

“Why, indeed?” Vergere said. “Perhaps there is something aboard they want alive?”

“Jaina,” Jacen said.

Vergere spread her hands. “And you. Tsavong Lah promised Yun-Yammka a pair of Jedi twins for the fall of Coruscant. Matters will go badly for Nom Anor if she is already dead.” She stopped there and studied Jacen a moment, then said, “But you could save him the trouble of looking, could you not? I understand that Jedi twins have a special … sense of each other.”

Jacen studied her from the corner of his eye. “I wouldn’t place too much trust in cantina tales, were I you.”

“No?” Vergere smirked. “Are you just cautious, I wonder, or do you have a suspicious nature?”

“Both are the same around you, this one thinkz,” Tesar said. He checked the power level of his minicannon, then braced it on the crest of the slope and trained it on the voxyn. “Jacen, this one has two shots, maybe three. We must destroy the queen.”

Jacen nodded. “And save—” He almost said
Jaina
, then caught himself. “—our friends on the shuttle.”

“You cannot do both,” Vergere warned. “The Yuuzhan Vong have a saying: ‘The fleet that fights two battles loses twice.’ ”

“Do we look like Yuuzhan Vong?” Ganner demanded, pointing at his eyes. “We’re Jedi.”

“So you are,” Vergere said mildly. “But the Yuuzhan Vong have their strengths, as well. Do not dismiss those strengths because the Force is blind to them.”

“I don’t,” Jacen said. “But we
are
going to win two battles—and here’s how.”

He explained his plan to the others, then watched as a plasma ball arced over Nom Anor and crashed twenty paces away. The strike vaporized a ten-meter circle of basal-comb, but as the superheated
gas spread over the adjacent cells, it condensed into nothingness and vanished in a sheet of flashing color.

“What about her?” Ganner motioned at Vergere with his blaster.

“Once you’re on the frigate, she’s free to stay or leave with us as she likes,” Jacen said. “Until then, if she makes a false move—”

“Blast her,” Vergere finished. She gave a flip of her four-fingered hands, then turned to Tesar. “On the bridge of the
Ksstarr
you will find a pilot, a copilot, and a communications subaltern. The master keeper will also be aboard somewhere. They are not permitted to leave while the vessel is in action.”