Hero's Trial: Agents of Chaos I (38 page)

C-3PO’s explanation was swallowed by a deafening explosion. Electricity danced wildly along the periphery of the energy dome, and the shield disappeared. At once, the telltales that lined the stun fence flickered and went out. A frightened gasp rose from the crowd.

“The field generator has been hit!” C-3PO said. “We’re done for!”

The crowd surged again, and the soldiers closed ranks. Weapons powered up with an ominous whine.

C-3PO began to back toward the embassy gates. “We’ll be crushed!”

With lethal efficiency, Olmahk moved to Leia’s side. She was about to caution him to remain calm when one of the soldiers panicked and fired a sonic weapon at point-blank range into the crowd, dropping dozens and sending the rest rushing in all directions.

Without thinking, Leia ran to the dazed soldier and yanked the weapon from his lax hands. “We’re supposed to be rescuing these people, not injuring them!”

She threw the weapon aside. Drawing her hand across her forehead, she inadvertently dislodged the brimmed cap, spilling her hair to her shoulders. Wending her way back to the bunker, she grabbed the nearest comlink and demanded to be put through to the task force commander.

“Ambassador Organa Solo, this is Commander Ilanka,” a basso voice responded shortly.

“We need every available ship, Commander—immediately. Yuuzhan Vong forces are entering the city.”

Ilanka took a moment to reply. “I’m sorry, Ambassador, but we’ve got our hands full out here. Three more enemy warships have exited hyperspace on the far side of the moon. Whatever craft are on the surface will have to suffice. I urge you to load and launch. And, Ambassador, I strongly suggest you get yourself aboard one of them.”

Leia thumbed the comlink off and scanned the crowd in alarm.
How can I choose
? she asked herself.
How
?

A storm of blazing yorik coral meteors battered the embassy and neighboring buildings, setting fire to all they touched. The inferno triggered an explosion at a fuel dump near the landing zone, fountaining shrapnel far and wide. The right side of Leia’s face screamed in pain as something opened a furrow in her cheek. Instinctively she brought her fingertips to the wound, expecting to find blood, but the airborne fragment had cauterized the wound in its white-hot passing.

“Mistress Leia, you’re injured!” C-3PO said, but she waved him back before he could reach her. Peripherally she saw that a tall sinewy human was being ushered forward, his arms vised in the grip of two soldiers. Beneath a soft cap he wore low on his forehead, the man’s face was bruised and swollen.

“Now what?” Leia asked his custodians.

“An agitator,” the shorter soldier reported. “We overheard him telling people in the crowd that we’re only extracting New Republic loyals. That anyone with an Imperial past might as well kiss his—”

“I understand, Sergeant,” Leia said, cutting him off. She assessed the captive briefly, wondering what he could possibly have to gain by spreading lies. She had her mouth open to ask him when a meaningful sniff from Olmahk put her on alert.

Leia stepped closer to the man and peered intently into his eyes. As she raised her right forefinger, a low growl escaped Olmahk. The captive recoiled when he realized Leia’s intent, but his reaction only firmed the soldiers’ resolve to hold on to him. Leia’s eyes narrowed in certainty. She thrust her finger into the man’s face, striking him just where his right nostril curved into his cheek.

To the soldiers’ utter astonishment, the man’s flesh seemed to recede, taking with it his expression, to reveal a look that combined pain and pride on a face incised with brilliantly colored designs and flourishes. The fleshlike mask that had taken flight at Leia’s touch disappeared down the throat of the man’s loose-fitting jacket, bunching somewhat as it flayed itself from his torso, only to pour from the cuffs of his trousers like flesh-colored syrup and puddle on the ground at his feet.

The soldiers leapt back in shock, the sergeant drawing his blaster and putting repeated bolts into the living puddle. Free of their grip, the Yuuzhan Vong also took a step back, tearing open the front of his jacket to expose a body vest every bit as alive as the ooglith masquer had been. With his lashless eyes fixed on Leia, he lifted his face and howled a bloodcurdling war cry.

“
Do-ro’ik vong pratte
!” And woe to our enemies!

“Down! Down!” Leia screamed to everyone nearby.

Olmahk drove her to the ground even as the first of the thud bugs were bursting outward from the Yuuzhan Vong’s chest. The sound was not unlike that of corks being popped from bottles of effervescent wine, but accompanying the lively explosions were the pained exclamations of soldiers and hapless civilians who hadn’t heard or heeded Leia’s counsel. For ten meters in all directions, men and women fell like trees.

Leia felt Olmahk’s weight lift from her. By the time she looked up, the Noghri had ripped out the Yuuzhan Vong’s throat with his teeth. Left and right, people lay on the ground groaning in pain. Others staggered about with hands pressed to ruptured bellies, compound fractures, broken ribs, or smashed faces.

“Get these people to the battle dressing station!” Leia ordered.

Yorik coral missiles were continuing to rain down on the embassy and the landing zone, where a dozen soldiers were overseeing the loading of the final evacuation craft.

The crowd had long since pushed through the gates, but stun batons and sonics were keeping many from reaching the waiting craft. Groggily, and with Olmahk falling in behind her, Leia began to move that way herself. She spied C-3PO, whose chest plastron had been deeply dented by one of the thud bugs, just above his circular power-recharge coupler.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He might have blinked if he could. “Thank the maker I lack a heart!”

As the three of them were closing on the evacuation ship a vintage AT-ST limped into view, blackened along one side and leaking hydraulic fluid, its grenade launcher blown away. A lightly armored box perched on reverse-articulated legs, the All Terrain Scout Transport wheezed and clanked to a halt, then collapsed chin first to the permacrete landing apron. In a moment the aft hatch lifted, loosing a cloud of smoke, and a young man crawled coughing but otherwise unharmed from the cockpit.

“Wurth Skidder,” Leia intoned, folding her arms across her chest. “I should have known it was you from the brilliance of your entrance.”

Blond and sharp-featured, Skidder jumped agilely to his feet and threw off his smoldering Jedi Knight cloak. “The Yuuzhan Vong have overrun our defenses, Ambassador. The fight’s lost.” He grinned smugly. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

Leia had heard from Luke that Skidder was on Gyndine, but this was her first contact with him. She had had trouble with him during the Rhommamoolian crisis eight months earlier, when he had downed a couple of Rodian-piloted Osarian starfighters intent on interfering with her then-diplomatic duties. At the time she had found him to be reckless, insolent, and overconfident in his abilities, but Luke insisted that the Battle of Ithor, and the injury Skidder had sustained there, had changed him for the better. No doubt because he reveled in being able to put a lightsaber to constant use, Leia thought.

“You’re a little late with your update, Wurth,” she told him now, “but you’re in time for the final flight out of here.” She nodded in the direction of the landing zone. “My brother would never forgive me if I didn’t see you safely back to Coruscant.”

Skidder returned an elaborately chivalrous bow, extending his right arm toward her. “A Jedi avoids argument at all costs.” He held her gaze briefly. “Nothing in the Jedi Code about having to answer to civilians, but I’ll comply out of respect for your celebrated sibling.”

“Fine,” Leia said sarcastically. “Just see to it that you get aboard.” Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and she twisted around.

“Ambassador, we’re holding space for you, your bodyguard, and droid,” a male flight officer reported. “But you’ll have to come now, ma’am. The New Republic envoy is already aboard, and we’ve received orders to lift off.”

Leia nodded that she understood, then swung back to Skidder, only to see him running toward the embassy gates. “Skidder!” she yelled, making a megaphone of her hands.

He stopped, turned to her, and waved a hand in what at least appeared to be genuine acknowledgment. “Just one small task to perform,” he shouted back.

Leia frowned angrily and turned to the flight officer once more, cutting her eyes back and forth between him and the sizable crowd gathering at the foot of the ship’s boarding ramp. “Surely the ship can accommodate a few more.”

The officer’s lips became a thin line. “We’re already at maximum payload, Ambassador.” He followed her gaze to the crowd, then blew out his breath. “But we can probably cram in four more.”

Leia touched his forearm in indebtedness, and the two of them hastened for the ramp. Behind a barricade of soldiers, at the head of the line of evacuees, stood a group of tailed, spike-haired, and velvet-furred aliens attired in colorful if threadbare vests and wraparound skirts.

Ryn, Leia realized in surprise—the species to which Han’s new friend Droma belonged.

“Four,” the flight officer reminded, even as Leia was doing a head count of the Ryn. “Some of them will have to be left behind.”

Six Ryn, to be exact, she told herself. Even so, four was better than none. She edged between two broad-shouldered soldiers closest to the ramp and beckoned to the aliens in line. “You four,” she said, pointing to each in turn. “Hurry!”

Expressions of relief and joy appeared. The chosen four turned to exchange embraces with those who would be abandoned. A swaddled infant was passed from the rear to one of the females up front. Leia heard someone say, “Melisma, should you find Droma, tell him we’re here.”

Leia gave a start and glanced about for the one who had said the name, but there wasn’t time to seek out the Ryn. Already the soldiers were backing their way up the ramp, taking her with them.

“Hold on!” she said, coming to a sudden stop and refusing to be moved. “Skidder. Where’s Skidder? Is he already aboard?”

She leaned forward to gaze across the devastated landing zone and spotted him dashing for the ship, dragging a human female behind him and cradling a longhaired infant in his left arm. The sight gave Leia pause. Maybe Skidder had changed, after all.

“Make certain they get aboard,” Leia instructed the officer in charge, pausing when a coralskipper-delivered projectile impacted the permacrete only meters from the ramp. “And I don’t care if you have to use a shoehorn to do it.”

Long—
long
—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in
Star Wars: A New Hope
 … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.

Then, a thousand years before
A New Hope
and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.

One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.

But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …