Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (11 page)

“So you will not leave at all.”

“I will leave … eventually.”

Shawnkyr considered his words silently. The distant swearing increased in volume, to match a sudden spate of hammering that sounded like revenge rather than repair, before fading to its normal levels. “May I speak freely? Pilot to pilot?”

“Of course.”

“I think that sentiment is clouding your judgment. I think that the notion of not being here when Jaina Solo is endangered, or killed, is what is keeping you from your duty. But your duty is to our people, and to no one else.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes. You have sworn an oath. An oath of loyalty and obedience.”

“What if the best observation of loyalty leads on a course that diverges from obedience?”

“It can’t.”

“I think you’re wrong. I am not loyal to the Chiss because my parents were accepted by them, or because I
have grown up among them. I’m loyal because they embody traits I admire and respect; they make those traits part of the very fiber of our society. Traits such as strength in the face of aggression, such as acknowledgment of duty before self-interest. The Chiss, however, are not the only people with admirable traits, not the only ones who deserve to survive the Yuuzhan Vong, and not the only ones I identify with. Not anymore.”

“So you think you are supporting a greater good by staying.”

“Yes. We can assemble a report and transmit it by holocomm. We can explain that more evaluation is needed … which is the truth.”

“As you see it.”

“Yes.”

Shawnkyr’s expression changed. It did not harden against him, which was one possibility Jag had acknowledged but did not welcome. Instead, a subtle sadness suffused it. He doubted anyone not well acquainted with her would have detected it.

“I will stay,” she said, “until Borleias falls. Then I will return home.”

“Thank you.”

“But if I die here, I want you to promise to return in my place. If I stay here, I am delaying the execution of my duty. If I die, you must carry out my duty.”

Jag thought about it. And to his way of thinking, she had presented him with an impenetrable argument. His only choices really were to agree, or to bid her farewell now. And the defenders of Borleias would be that much worse off without her leadership and piloting skills.

“I agree,” he said.

* * *

Tarc shook Wolam Tser’s hand and said, “I thought you’d be tall.”

Wolam—graying and distinguished, elder statesman of Coruscant holojournalism—exchanged an amused look with Tam before returning his attention to the child. “I am indeed taller than you.”

“Yes, but I thought you’d be two meters at least.”

“An illusion, child. When you are in front of the holocam, you dominate the image. Everything else is secondary to you. So it becomes easy for watchers to believe you are of extravagant proportions.”

“Oh.” Tarc nodded sagely, as though Wolam’s words made perfect sense to him.

They stood in the lobby of the biotics building, meters from the door out onto the kill zone. The lobby was now set up with desks and stations for junior officers and enlisted personnel. Some directed traffic through the building, others ensured physical and remote security, and still others were located here rather than in locations more appropriate to their specific tasks because there was no room in those locations for them.

But there was still a little open space away from the main flow of traffic, and that’s where they stood, three generations of homeless civilian males surrounded by military operations.

“So, what’s it to be today?” Tam fished around in his expansive bag. He extracted a holocam, a model small enough to be easily concealed in his large hands, with a strap to fit around the back of one hand. This unit he handed to Tarc. He showed the boy how to tighten the
strap, where to peer into the holocam in order to see what the holocam’s lens saw.

“How the defenders live,” Wolam said. “Bedchambers, meals, medicine, refreshers, exhaustion, stolen moments. Spot interviews as I decide. No setups, no analysis.”

“Why record anything?” Tarc asked. “With Coruscant conquered, aren’t you out of a job?”

“Never,” Wolam said. “I am a historian. Unless nothing sapient survives in all the universe, I have a job, a calling. Someday people will be curious about what happened here, and what we do, recording and analyzing, may be the only surviving answers to their questions.”

“In other words,” Tam said, “once you know what you are, nobody can ever take your ‘job’ from you. They can change your circumstances. They can make it hard or impossible for you to get paid.” He shot Wolam a sly look, and Wolam gratified him by giving him an indignant little scowl. “But your ‘job’ is part of you.”

Tarc fell silent, considering that.

Tam pulled out his main-duty holocam, a recently manufactured Crystal Memories Model 17, lighter and possessing more standard memory than previous models. He passed its strap over his head. The strap grazed against the fresh scar behind his right ear, the surgical scar over his new implant, the implant that was now his only defense against the deadly headaches brought on by his conditioning.
Changed circumstances, indeed
.

“What should I record?” Tarc asked. “Everything?”

“At first, if you want to,” Tam said. “What I do is to record everything Wolam points at, until he gives me the kill sign—”

Obligingly, Wolam made a gesture like an abbreviated ax chop. His pale hands against his black garments made the gesture especially easy to see.

“—and also anything I find interesting or unusual. You do the same, and when we review your recordings together I’ll point out what looks interesting from a historical-record perspective.”

“Don’t spend
too
much of your time on the girls,” Wolam cautioned.

Tarc’s face twisted into an expression of disdain. “You don’t have to worry about
that.
”

“I hate this,” Luke said.

“Waiting?” Mara, eyes closed, adjusted her pose, trying to make herself comfortable—as comfortable as one could be propped up against a deformed metal wall in a hallway dripping with rainwater that had filtered through thirty or forty stories of ruined skyscraper above, on a planet ruled and increasingly ruined by alien enemies.

“Of course, waiting.” Luke had returned half an hour before from the latest scattering run. Not everyone was back; a few meters down the hallway, Danni was cataloging plant samples, and Baljos and Elassar were playing sabacc underneath a flickering glowlight. The others were still unaccounted for.

“Which points to a great failing with the Jedi. The lightsabers.”

Luke gave his wife a suspicious look. “A failing?”

She nodded. “You can’t sharpen them. Back when I was, well, in my previous career, I could get through any boring stretch by sharpening my knives. It takes just enough of your attention to keep boredom at bay, and keeps your tools at their best. With vibroblades, even if they lose power, you still have a nice sharp edge for whatever needs cutting.”

Elassar looked back over his shoulder at her. “Sometimes I think you can be spooky just singing nursery songs.”

“That’s easy.” Mara’s face took on an expression of motherly concern. “Hush, child,” she sang, “the night is mild, and slumber smiles upon you …” But she sang the familiar tune in a minor key, making the words unsettling rather than soothing, evoking the mental image of an anthropomorphic Slumber that was a night-monster stealing silently up to a crib.

But she fell silent, and Luke could feel from her what he felt in himself—a wish, one that could not be fulfilled now, that they could be where Ben was, introducing him to all the little surprises and delights that came with just being alive. Instead they were here in this endless expanse of death.

Then Mara opened her eyes and looked back down the hall.

Luke felt it too—not danger, but some agitation expressed through the Force. He rose and put his hand on his lightsaber hilt.

Up through a hole in the floor swung Tahiri. She landed and extended a hand down, helping Face up to this level. She was somber. He looked dubious.

When she saw Luke, she gulped—not out of uncertainty or fear, Luke thought, but out of nausea. “I found something,” she said.

Now he had a name
.

It had taken time, and frequent yanking of thoughts out of their heads, for him to understand names. Sounds that belonged only to one being. Each of them had a name, and when he understood that, it became vital for him to have one, too
.

He was more powerful, more important than any of them. It was not right for them to have names and him not to
.

So they called him Nyax. Lord Nyax. Nyax was his name, and no other might have it. Lord was a thing that made his name bigger, better. Lord meant that he was more important than anything
.

Satisfied with that recognition of his status, he smiled up at the workers crawling over the surface of the tall, tall machine
.

They repaired it. They cleared rubble from around it. Soon it would go. Soon it would knock down the black wall he hated
.

Soon he, Lord Nyax, would have everything he wanted—which was everything. All beings would do his
bidding. Except, perhaps, those whom his senses could not detect; they were surprisingly resistant to pain. Them he would kill, every one
.

“You found a tank of goo,” said Mara.

They stood on a metal walkway high over a deep, vast chamber. They’d descended through several levels of ruined factory machinery to reach it. Now, their comparatively tiny glowrods illuminated tiny patches of the floor far below.

Not that there was much detail to illuminate. The greater portion of the floor was dominated by a gleaming white metal tank, dozens of meters wide and long, but only a meter and a half tall, and filled nearly to its rim by some reddish fluid.

Most of the others looked disinterested, or immediately cast about for another place to sit down and rest.

Not so the scientists. Baljos and Danni immediately pulled out sensor devices and began sampling the local environment.

“Definitely a living thing,” Danni said. “A large quantity of monocellular life-forms.”

“This chamber is unusually high in oxygen, unusually low in carbon dioxide and world-shaping toxins.” Baljos pulled off his helmet and tugged the perfumed patches of cloth from his nose; he took several deep breaths, and a smile broke out on his face. “Clean air. Thought I’d never experience it again.”

The others followed suit. Luke took in several breaths free of the stench of decay; he felt his spirits lift.

He checked himself before congratulating Tahiri on finding such a useful resource. She hadn’t been happy when she’d returned to the others, and she wasn’t happy now. She stared down into the red muck with an expression suggesting suspicion, even dread.

Luke extended his own Force senses in that direction.

He could immediately feel the life-form in the tank. It was simple, undifferentiated. It was also comparatively healthy, though he thought he felt the slightest tinge of hunger to it.

But there was something beyond the life-form, something below. It was a twinge of dark side energy. No, not a twinge—though not strong, it was constant.

“Did you find a way down from there?” Luke asked.

Tahiri shook her head. “I looked around for about an hour but couldn’t find the access.”

“What access?” Danni asked.

There was no power in this chamber, but a surviving metal ladder gave them an easy descent to the floor level. Up close, the tank was no more impressive; it was a rectangular pond of villainous-looking slime.

“I think,” Luke said, “that this is a devourer tank.”

Mara nodded soberly. “Based on your extensive knowledge of factories and city engineering.”

“
Based
on something Wedge Antilles said to me once.” Luke gave his wife an expression of simulated sternness. “There was a time, a few years ago, when he thought he wanted to give up the life of a fighting officer and turn his skills to building things, fixing things. So he headed
a military crew that was deconstructing portions of Coruscant that were falling apart. So new portions of Coruscant could be built there and fall apart later. He described something like this. A huge flat area filled with a living material.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Face said. “You mentioned that the first time I met you.”

“Years ago,” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“But you still can’t tell me when.”

Face shook his head. “Official secrets. If you were to remember what I looked like, who I was then, I still couldn’t admit it to you.”

Luke sighed.

“What’s it for?” asked Danni. “The tank.”

“It’s one type of garbage disposal.” Luke held a hand just above the red surface. In the light from Mara’s glow rod, he saw the fluid swell, just slightly, toward his hand. “Anything organic that gets thrown in here is consumed. Every so often, they pump out the goo and scrape out the material that accumulates at the bottom of the tank.”

“Here’s the pumping equipment.” Tahiri stood a few meters away, looking at a wall console near tubes that led from the tank and entered the wall. She pried the cover off the console and peered within. “Why didn’t the Yuuzhan Vong smash the tank? Everything around here was smashed. We know they’ve been here.”

“Because it’s organic rather than technological, I guess.” Luke watched as the redness under his hand rose almost to touch him; then he pulled his hand away and it settled down again. “That’s interesting. This stuff is obviously able to sense food, and to cooperate to reach it.”

“Interesting isn’t the word I’d use for it.” Face sat down next to the wall, relaxing. “Baljos, can’t you fine-tune that sensor of yours to detect intelligent, unattached ladies between the ages of twenty and forty?”

“If I could, do you think I’d still be working as a scientist?”

“Good point.”

Tahiri, now up to her waist in the hole in the wall where the console cover had been, suddenly shoved her way out. She straightened, a puzzled expression on her face. “It’s a fake.”