Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (42 page)

“The ship,” Lando explained. “It’s a living organism, not a machine. And it’s beautiful—to look at
and
in pragmatic design.”

Luke’s skeptical expression remained, but he didn’t question Lando further until a few moments later, when they turned a bend in the hallway and came before a huge window, beyond which lay the interior dock that now held the captured alien fighter.

“That’s a living organism?” he asked, somewhat surprised to see how much the captured ship resembled the craft that he and Mara had just battled about the fourth planet of the Helska system. He couldn’t deny Lando’s claim of the beauty of the thing, though, now that he had the chance to see one up
close and not buzzing about him in battle. This one was roughly triangular in shape, resembling a miniature version of an Imperial Star Destroyer. In his fight with such fighters, Luke had thought their sides smooth, save the many volcanic cannons, but now he understood that the whole of the ship was even more integrated than that, like one piece of what looked like living coral.

Lando nodded. “And as beautiful a starfighter design as my scientists have seen,” he explained. “Fast, and can snap-turn with an A-wing, and with more firepower than almost anything that size we can put up.”

Luke looked at the multicolored craft carefully. There were many tubelike projections growing on it, protruding from various places and bending in various angles. They looked like no gun turrets he had ever seen, but he remembered well the volcanic missiles launched from the craft.

“The pilot wore a mask,” Lando went on. “No, more than that. It was a connection to her … companion.”

“Her companion?”

“More that than a ship,” Lando tried to explain, grasping for the proper words. Indeed, neither he nor his many skilled scientists had ever seen anything quite like this, at least not on a starfighter. “The pilot was connected to her ship,” he said. “It’s like she was riding it more than flying it, like the Sand People on Tatooine and their bantha mounts.”

Luke glanced at him somewhat accusingly—this was too important a matter for Lando and his friends to be making guesses about.

“We can’t know for sure yet,” Lando admitted. “We’re testing the thing, but no one’s about to put that mask on … yet.”

“Sure I am,” Luke answered, staring hard at the strange starfighter, and he started for the door.

Lando looked at him quizzically, eyes widening as he caught on to Luke’s intent. He finally caught up to the Jedi, just as Luke was beginning to climb the side of the small
craft—and with Lando’s scientists looking on with complete amazement. Lando grabbed Luke by the arm, turning him about. “We don’t know enough about it,” he claimed. “Like this thing at the nose,” he added, pointing to the front of the starfighter, where some of the multicolored coral-like substance had been chipped away, revealing a thumb-sized, dark red, membranous ball.

Luke climbed down and moved for a closer inspection.

“It’s alive,” Lando explained. “Or at least it was, we think.”

That brought a curious look from Luke.

“And it’s not a part of the bigger ship, any more than the pilot was,” Lando went on. “You should see her—the pilot, I mean—full of muscles and full of tattoos, and with her face all scarred and her nose broken, probably a dozen times.”

The description only further confirmed Luke’s suspicions that all that was happening—on Belkadan, in the Helska system, and this attack here at Dubrillion—was closely related. He remembered vividly the appearance of Yomin Carr; it could not be coincidence that both he and the pilot of this ship bore such a resemblance of—could it be?—uniform.

“Have you seen the body Mara and I brought back?”

“Not yet,” Lando admitted, and then he caught on. “Same thing?”

Luke nodded, then stared hard at the membranous ball mounted in the starfighter’s nose; it was clearly dead, showing no more life energy than would a rock. He nodded to Lando, then moved right back to the side and started up the starfighter, despite Lando’s protests. With no hesitation at all, he climbed into the cockpit, a snug fit. He saw the mask to which Lando had referred sitting before him, and tentatively reached for it. It was alive, he knew before he touched it, and was indeed a part of the larger organism and not some separate creature. This was a living ship, a mount, as Lando had described it.

Without further hesitation, Luke pulled the mask and helmet over his head, and immediately he felt the joining.
And he heard … a voice, a distant murmuring, in what sounded like the same language he had heard the membranous ball on the
Jade Sabre
use.

Luke fought hard to focus all of his instincts and thoughts, for while he couldn’t make out the particular words, he could discern a pattern to them.

He pulled off the mask and climbed out of the cockpit.

“You’re crazy,” Lando remarked.

“We need Threepio,” Luke replied, and he looked back at the amazing starfighter, hoping that the droid would be able to decipher the language, wanting—needing—desperately to learn all that he could about this ship, and about the people who flew it.

But even as Lando and Luke stepped into the hallway, Luke’s train of thought, his mounting excitement about the possibilities of discovery here, abruptly halted, for he saw his wife not so far away, staring at him, the look on her face telling him that something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Luke looked to Lando and understood then that the man knew, had known. “I had to show you this stuff,” Lando remarked, somewhat an apology. “I … I thought this was important. I thought that maybe you already knew, that you had picked it up on communications on your way in.”

“What is it?” Luke demanded, his anxiety escalating with each word.

“She’ll tell you,” Lando said, patting his friend on the shoulder.

It was a moment of tears and memories, a time for Luke and Mara to feel the weight of the loss of Chewbacca and to remember all their times with the Wookiee, and all the times the Wookiee had saved them and those they loved.

It was that unreal moment that inevitably followed the death of a loved one, the same impact and feeling of helplessness, of smallness, that Luke had experienced when he had
watched Obi-Wan Kenobi fall to the swishing lightsaber of Darth Vader. That dreamlike moment every being experienced of loss of control, of insignificance, of sudden and stark realization of vulnerability and mortality. Both Luke and Mara called upon their understanding of the Force then, of the binding truth of life, and found comfort there. As Ben Kenobi had remained with Luke, as Yoda remained with Luke, so, too, would Chewbacca remain an integral, living being within the hearts and minds of those who so loved him.

It was a moment of grief, and one, both Luke and Mara understood, that could not last the appropriate time. And it was a moment of terror, of fears for Anakin, out there alone in the vastness of space, yet those concerns, too, could not supercede the urgency of the moment.

Something very big and very bad was going on.

They had to get to work.

“The key is that planet,” Luke explained to Lando, after the man had shown Luke two other surprises they had pulled from the downed enemy starfighter: a suit, more like a second skin, and a star-shaped creature with a sixth appendage, similar to the mask within the starfighter. Both were alive, and Luke had dared to experiment with them, even going so far as to let the suit creature slide up his body and join with him, and to put the mask-thing onto his face, resisting the urge to gag and the ultimate revulsion. Now he understood the truth of the fourth planet of the Helska system; now he knew that their enemies were living not on the frozen planet, but beneath the icy crust, in the cold watery depths.

“The ice ball?” Lando replied skeptically when Luke revealed his suspicions.

Luke nodded. “That’s the base, and I’ve got to get there.”

“You already were there,” came the reminder.

“No,” Luke said. “I’ve got to get down onto it, down
into
it.”

The skeptical look on Lando’s face only increased.

“They’re not on the planet, but it’s the base for all of this,”
Luke explained. “I’m sure of it. And if they’re not on the planet, they’ve got to be underneath the crust.”

Lando nodded and rubbed his chin. “There is a way,” he admitted.

“You’ve mined ice planets before,” Luke reasoned.

“I’ve mined every type of planet,” came the response. “And there are ships used to get through the crust of icy planets, both for individuals and for larger expeditions.” “Where can we find them?”

Lando nearly laughed aloud. If there was a vessel used for mining any type of planet, it was here, at Dubrillion’s sister planet, Destrillion, part of what Lando called his prototype fleet. Just to make sure that technology wouldn’t be lost or hard to locate, Lando always procured a single version, at least, of every new innovation, to keep it safe for study and, if need be, replication.

“I can have one here before the morning,” he told Luke. “I don’t know what kind of condition it’ll be in.”

“But you can fix it,” Luke prodded.

Lando shrugged. “Should be able to.”

Satisfied with that, and exhausted from the trials of the last few days, both physical and emotional, Luke took his leave. He went back to his quarters, where he found Mara peacefully asleep, a sight that surely bolstered him. She needed this rest, Luke knew profoundly. Her mind and body had taken a step back in her battle with the disease that raged within her, the good fight weakened by the physical and emotional demands of their recent escapades. And now, her grief over Chewie and her fears for the missing Anakin could only be suppressing her ability to battle that disease.

Not wanting to disturb her, Luke left the room, left the building altogether, walking outside under Dubrillion’s starry night sky. He saw Destrillion rising in the east and was struck by the serenity of the sight, contrasting so greatly with the heightening tumult beneath the softness.

Luke stood calmly and stared long and hard, becoming one
with the galaxy about him, feeling its rhythms, its timelessness, its seeming indifference to the events of transient mortal beings.

And in that joining, Luke heard a call, and that call, he knew, came from his nephew, from Anakin, alive and alone and reaching out.

Luke’s first instinct was to run for the
Jade Sabre
and blast off after Anakin, to follow the call and bring the missing young Jedi to safety.

He smiled and resisted the urge. He had heard the call, and thus, so had Leia, as she had heard his call when he hung, wounded and desperate, under Lando’s Cloud City. She would bring Anakin home.

Indeed, at that very moment, the
Millennium Falcon
was speeding for the drifting TIE fighter. Leia had heard the call, loud and clear, and had actually viewed the star formations through Anakin’s eyes. Using that visual image, she’d had little trouble scrolling the navigational computer and locating the sector.

Now the only fear was that they would not arrive before Anakin’s wounded TIE fighter gave out, or before some of the enemy starfighters happened upon him. So Han and Leia’s relief was palpable when they came out of hyperspace in the region and located the TIE fighter with conventional sensors, and when Leia heard the continuing telepathic call to tell her that her son was indeed alive and well.

They docked soon after, and once Anakin had boarded the
Falcon
and run into his mother’s waiting arms, Han put the TIE in tow and turned back for Dubrillion.

Somewhat more tentatively than he had rushed to his mother, Anakin, with Leia hovering behind, walked onto the
Falcon
’s bridge, where his father was waiting.

Han turned and stared hard at his son, and then his stern edge melted away and he bolted from his seat, wrapping Anakin in a bear hug. He jumped back almost at once,
though, and slugged his son in the shoulder. “You ever do that to me again, kid, and I’ll kick you from here to Coruscant!”

The scolding hit Anakin’s ears like the sweetest music ever played.

They were back on Dubrillion the next morning, landing soon after the curious mining craft that Lando had spoken to Luke about was towed in. It was called an iceborer, also known as a stylus ship, Lando told Luke, because of its shape: long and narrow, with a tapered front end. The pilot would lie down along the length of this translucent cylinder, head forward.

It didn’t look promising to Luke.

“It’s not for long-distance flight,” Lando explained. “It’ll have to be towed to the Helska system.”

“How does it get down and through the ice?”

Lando led him around to the front. “Pretty simple,” he said. “We’ve got a shaped, vaporizing heat charge up here. You fire it off just before you hit, it drills a hole in the ice before you, and you dive in before it freezes up again.”

Luke snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”

“You’ve got to be good,” Lando remarked with a sly grin. “Coming out is the same thing—you do plan to come back out, don’t you?” he asked, only half-kiddingly. “Except that the process getting off planet takes a bit longer, a slow burn and crawl until the sensors indicate the ice is thin enough for a second, less violent charge.”

They were interrupted by Jacen’s call, “They’re back,” as the young man ran into the room and to Luke’s side. “Mom and Dad, and they’ve got Anakin!”

Luke nodded, not surprised. “And Threepio,” he said eagerly to Lando. “Let’s get some more answers.”

“It’s not a difficult language at all, Master Luke,” C-3PO announced a short while later to Han and Luke, as they sat discussing plans. Off to the side in the small room, R2-D2 beeped and clicked, adding his own interpretations to that
which C-3PO had just heard. “Somewhat like the Janguine tongue of the jungle barbarians of—”

“What’d it say?” an obviously impatient Han interrupted.

C-3PO turned to regard him.

“The message to Yomin Carr,” Luke pressed.

“It was indeed,” C-3PO said to Luke. “And might I comment on your sharp hearing in catching that name amidst the fast-talking jumble of—”