Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (10 page)

When it had been a machine of war, it had been heavily armed. But years ago, after Wolam Tser had stolen it when escaping with recordings of Imperial base-building activities that the Empire didn’t want him to retain, he’d begun modifying the boat. The proton torpedo and concussion missile tubes had been removed to give the boat more cargo and cabin room. The laser cannon turret on top had been replaced with a transparisteel dome, opening up more cabin room and offering those beneath it another view of the stars. The controls had been simplified, making the optimum crew size two instead of four.

Behind the command cabin, room that had been
needed for missile racks was now converted into two smallish cabins, one for Wolam and one for his holocam operator.

Tam offered a false smile and a wave to the mechanics now welding metal plates over the holes in the wings, repairing damage sustained when one of the boat’s companion vehicles had exploded under coralskipper fire. He climbed up the port-side bow wing to the main hatch and entered, his movements hurried. Only if he hurried would the headache be kept at bay.

He didn’t pause as he entered the command cabin but headed into the aft passageway. In two paces he was at the door to his cramped cabin. He entered in a rush—
Hurry, hurry
—and sealed the door behind him.

He lifted the mattress of his bunk to reveal the storage compartment beneath. In it was a large, roughly spherical piece of rock—“A souvenir of Corellia,” he’d explained to Wolam.

Of course, he’d lied. He’d had to.

He set the stone, which was lighter than it should be, atop his bunk and rapped three times on its surface. A moment later, he rapped again, twice.

The stone split along an invisible center seam. It opened like an ocean bivalve, but instead of revealing two linings of flesh and perhaps a pearl, it showed only an amorphous blobby mass of material in the bottom.

His stomach lurching at the thought of touching it again, Tam reached out and found the slight protrusion at the top of the blob. He stroked it, feeling the living thing react to his touch. He snatched back his hand and wiped it on his pants, though there was no residue on his fingers from the smooth thing.

Moments later, the blobby material stretched up and assumed the approximate shape of a human head. Tam didn’t think it was a Yuuzhan Vong female’s head; the
forehead was too pronounced, the features not made irregular by mutilation.

The villip looked at him with the face of his controller. “Report,” it said, its speech unaccented.

Tam felt his headache fade to almost nothingness, but the turmoil in his stomach, the turmoil in his emotions kept this from being the relief it otherwise would have been. “We are on Borleias,” he began.

There was a rap at the door. Wedge jolted upright, his eyes opening, his mind momentarily cloudy about where he was, what he should be doing.

He was still in his office, in his chair, but he’d fallen asleep. He couldn’t let himself do that. Every moment he didn’t push himself, more people might die.

He rubbed sleep from his eyes and turned to the door. “Come.”

The door slid over and out of sight, but there was no one in the corridor beyond. Then his visitor showed himself, peeking in from around the doorjamb.

The man was of average height and bald—shaven bald, Wedge knew, rather than prematurely bald. His mustache and goatee were close-cropped and black, giving him a sinister appearance, but his smile, all cheer flavored with wicked humor, dispelled any sense of dread. He was handsome in a way that only celebrities and a few extraordinarily successful businessmen and criminals could be.

Wedge rose. “Face! I was afraid you were lost back on Coruscant. Come in.”

Garik “Face” Loran, leader of the covert Intelligence team known as the Wraiths, shook his head. “Later. For now, I’m just here to drop off a package.”

“What package—”

She moved around Face, entering the office at just short of a dead run. She was tall, Wedge’s average stature making them the same height, and slender, with dark blond hair now frosted attractively with gray. In her youth she’d been an extraordinary beauty; now, to Wedge’s perception, lines of laughter and worry accentuated that beauty rather than detracted from it.

Suddenly he was on the other side of the desk—by running or vaulting, he could not recall—and enfolding her in his arms. “Iella …”

There was more noise than two voices could account for, cries of “Daddy!” Wedge released his wife, crouched, and grabbed up his dark blond, blue-eyed daughters, who had magically appeared on either side of Iella; he stood with one in either arm, Syal in the left and Myri in the right.

A few days before, when he’d picked them both up in their quarters on Coruscant, he’d complained that they were getting big, too heavy for him to lift. Now, their arms around his neck, he could barely detect their weight.

A moment ago he’d had nothing but a mission. Now he had a future again, a future he could hold to himself, a future he could squeeze and hear and smell. Wedge glanced over at Face, but the Wraith leader had, appropriately, vanished while attention was elsewhere, and the door was sliding closed where he’d been.

They lay in the darkness of Wedge’s quarters. Moonlight spilled in through the turquoise transparisteel, casting everything in shades of blue, bed and walls and skin.

“It’s not the same as watching your home dying,” Iella said. Her voice was thoughtful. She stared at the blue-tinged ceiling as if staring far beyond it, staring all the
way back to Coruscant. “Not the same as if they’d descended on Corellia. But seeing orbital platforms drop onto the city, knowing that millions were dying with every impact, knowing that the few who were streaming into space in private vessels and leaving their homes behind were the
lucky
ones … Coruscant is dying. Wedge, I don’t know if I can describe the misery of it.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. “I know what it was like to leave you behind. To have to tell myself, ‘I
can’t
find them, I
can’t
help them, I
can
keep people alive up here.’ ”

She turned a smile on him. “Didn’t you trust me to get us out alive?”

“Yes. But trust doesn’t keep worry from eating you up from inside.”

She kissed him, rested her head on his shoulder. “What do we do now?”

“Well, you were just promoted to head of Intelligence for my operation here, which frees up Mara to make the Vong suffer in her own inimitable way. I’m going to need you to spread information among our people and see if the Yuuzhan Vong act on any of it—if we have any traitors among us, I want to find out who they are as fast as possible, to use them for our own purposes or eliminate them as a threat.”

“Is that going to be here or at some other station?”

“Here.” And he told her of the meeting with the Advisory Council.

She was silent for a long time as she thought about what he’d said. “Wedge, you’re doing what you never like to do. Fighting a two-front war. The Yuuzhan Vong on one side and the Advisory Council on the other.”

Wedge smiled. “The Advisory Council doesn’t know we’re at war with them.”

“They know they’re at war with us; they just don’t
know
we
know it. But they may figure it out more quickly than you imagine. Even without Borsk to lead them, they have a lot of political smarts. Which means that Yuuzhan Vong spies aren’t the only spies you have to worry about. One of my jobs is going to be leaking information and seeing how our supposed
allies
respond to it … so we can use them for our own purposes or eliminate them as a threat.”

“I knew I was keeping you around for a reason.”

“At least two reasons.”

“Don’t tickle.”

The villip stared at Viqi Shesh with the face of a human man, large-boned, the angle of his head suggesting fear and pain. “I’m not in a position to learn any secrets,” the villip protested. “I just follow Wolam Tser around, recording his observations and interviews.”

Viqi made her voice a purr. She hoped its tones and nuances would carry across the villip. This voice excited men, made them long for her, and the notion that desire for her would torment this man amused her. “You met Danni Quee. Become her friend. Her lover, if you’re capable of it. Convince her to confide in you. Volunteer for additional duties when Tser isn’t making use of you. You can do simple electronics repairs, can’t you?”

Tam’s voice sounded pained. “Yes.”

“Get a job doing that. Put recorders or transmitters in devices that will go in critical places. Iella Wessiri is good enough to find anything
you
might plant, so don’t try to harvest the information those devices might bring you; instead, leave counterpart objects where blame will fall on people within their command structure, people Antilles and Skywalker don’t quite trust yet. Cause paranoia. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Prove it, simpleton.” Viqi stroked the villip and it contracted, cutting off the communication.

She sighed and stretched. The skin of her back, still healing, protested, but she did not let that minor pain show on her face. Then she turned, the bloblike material that served her as a chair accommodating itself to her motion, and faced her own controller.

He was dressed in the loincloth of a warrior, amphistaff in hand. His nose had been smashed flat, an oddly symmetrical mutilation for a Yuuzhan Vong, and part of his right upper lip was gone, revealing teeth beneath. His skin was decorated extensively with tattoos.

But his most extensive mutilation was a single puckered scar. In most places it was an angry red, sometimes graduating to a scabrous brown, everywhere standing out starkly against his skin. It started out at the top of his bald head, wound down his right cheek to his chin and up the other side, then turned downward again just short of his left eye. It continued down his neck and wound back and forth across his chest before disappearing beneath his harness. It reemerged on his right thigh, ending in a circle around his knee. It must have been among his earliest decorations, for his tattoos paralleled it, never running across it.

His name was Denua Ku, and Viqi knew from the few words she had exchanged with him that he had no grasp of Intelligence operations. He was here to guard her, not to help her with her assignment. She gave him a smile that was all contempt and mockery. “All done,” she said.

“Then you will return to your quarters.” His voice suggested mutual contempt, even through the tizowyrm, an organic translator of the Yuuzhan Vong, implanted in her ear.

“I’m sick of my quarters. I do half an hour’s worth of work a day managing this idiot of an operative and
spend the rest of my time in chambers that smell like half-cooked bantha tripe. I want something to
do
.”

Denua Ku said nothing. Viqi took that as a good sign. If he’d been under strict orders to keep her in her quarters, he would have immediately demanded that they go there. But he wasn’t going to suggest any sort of recreation to her; she’d have to find her own diversion.

She knew they’d never agree to a diversion that would get her near spacecraft or pilot training, so she’d have to find some other way to get her into other parts of the worldship, places where she could meet other Yuuzhan Vong—or even some of their prisoners.

“I want to learn how coralskippers and buildings and armor are grown. How everything is grown. I suppose I’ll need a skill for when the Yuuzhan Vong have subjugated everything and don’t need an Intelligence division anymore.” Denua Ku didn’t answer, so she added, “Take my request to the warmaster. I suspect he’ll agree to it.”

It was the carrion-eaters’ hour, or so Tsavong Lah thought of it, the hour in which he permitted visitors to come before him on miscellaneous errands, the hour in which he cleaned away his visitors’ petty difficulties so they didn’t accumulate like carrion. He steered his attention away from that customary thought, as it came too close to his problem with his new arm.

The warrior Denua Ku came before him with Viqi Shesh’s request. Tsavong Lah authorized it. The human woman would never abandon her manipulative ways to learn a productive trade.

Next into the small reception chamber was Maal Lah, his kinsman and one of his best military advisers. Maal Lah’s features were surprisingly regular, his jawline unbroken, but his face was meticulously decorated with red and blue swirls.

“Yes, my servant?” the warmaster asked.

“I have learned a curious thing,” Maal Lah said. “The infidel fleet that took Borleias has not yet begun its withdrawal. And the surviving warriors of Domain Kraal report that the tool-users are digging in as if against a siege.”

“That makes little sense from a military viewpoint,” the warmaster said. “They cannot hope to hold it. They cannot hope for relief.” He considered the matter. “Send Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet to crush them. Domain Kraal despises Domain Cha; having to admit a debt to Cha will be additional punishment for not holding Borleias as they should.”

“Yes, Warmaster.”

“Was there anything else?”

“No, Warmaster.” Maal Lah withdrew.

Next to receive an audience was Takhaff Uul, a priest. Highly placed within the order of Yun-Yuuzhan, the great god of the Yuuzhan Vong, Takhaff Uul was young for his duties; others of his age in the same sect were low-ranking priests, servants and aides to senior priests, while he was already a well-respected interpreter of the god’s will. His tattoos were not geometric designs or exaggerations of deformities; his designs were of eyeballs, small clawed hands, tentacles, all rendered in realistic detail as if to suggest he had had dozens of transplants in his short life. He bowed low before the warmaster.

“Speak,” Tsavong Lah said.

Takhaff Uul straightened. “I speak out of place,” he said, “bypassing the high priest to bring words directly to your ears, so I have come prepared to die if my words displease you.”

“You should always come prepared to die,” Tsavong Lah said. “You should not try to predict when your words will displease me.”