Remnant: Force Heretic I (29 page)

“Not quite the response I was expecting,” Jocell muttered.

Jaina ignored her wingmate. “We do care—why do you think we’re trying to—?”

“Soon I shall join my people,” the Yevetha continued. “Soon the Yevetha shall be no more. But we shall not go down quietly.”

“There is no reason to go down at all! Just let us—”

“In the face of death’s bright dawn,” the Yevetha went
on, “I shall offer one final act of defiance, so that when we are talked about in times to come, they will say that the Yevetha were warriors to the end!”

Jaina felt a cold discomfort pulse through her. “Miza, get out of there!”

“Way ahead of you, Jaina!”

“There is nowhere to run,” the Yevetha said. “The galaxy belongs only to those who had the power to destroy our once-mighty race!” A faint and disturbing hiss issued from the comm unit. “Die with me, won’t you?”

“Miza! Talk to me!”

“Almost—”

A powerful flash of energy lashed out from the ball of rock. Miza’s clawcraft vanished into it a split instant before reaching Jaina’s X-wing, sending her tumbling end over end, shields down and cockpit dead.

“You did it!”

Jacen found himself enveloped in a hug the moment he stepped off the shuttle’s boarding ramp. Taken by surprise, he automatically returned the hug before realizing who was giving it to him. The warm, petite body pressed against his; the hair; the delicate yet very female scent …

“I always knew you would,” Danni said, pulling away slightly. “But I was still worried about you. You Solos have a knack for doing things the hard way.”

“It was Admiral Pellaeon, really,” Jacen protested. “If he hadn’t woken up when he did, I doubt I could have convinced Flennic of anything.”

“You’re just being modest.” Danni laughed, playfully punching his shoulder. “I bet Jacen Solo could convince a Selonian to lie if he really wanted it to.”

Footsteps approaching from the docking bay’s main entrance prevented him from responding to this. Danni
stepped back, looking embarrassed, as Luke walked around the corner.

“I thought I felt you come aboard,” said Jacen’s uncle, dressed in his customary Jedi robes.

“How long have you been here?” Jacen asked both of them. He hadn’t seen
Jade Shadow
anywhere near
Widowmaker
on his return flight.

“Captain Yage sent a shuttle when Gilad woke up,” Luke explained. “By the time Danni and I arrived, they’d used his codes to patch into the Imperial security network without being noticed, and from there eavesdropped on your conversation with Flennic. He insisted on interrupting. I hope you don’t mind us doing that. It wasn’t that we thought you couldn’t manage on your own, Jacen. It just seemed simpler this way, and a chance to prove to Flennic that the Empire’s Supreme Commander is still alive.”

“I’m just relieved that the admiral came out of this all right,” Jacen said. “Can I talk to him?”

“That will be up to Tekli,” Danni said. “He’s still recuperating in the bacta tank. That talk with Moff Flennic tired him out, short though it was.” Then, leaning in slightly toward Jacen, she added, “You know, for someone normally so quiet, she certainly has a lot to say when it comes to her patients.”

Jacen smiled. He had developed a great deal of respect for Master Cilghal’s apprentice. Although not strong in the Force, her knowledge of healing was extensive, and she had clearly demonstrated the ability to handle herself during recent emergencies.

The three of them walked unimpeded through the corridors of
Widowmaker.
Luke seemed perfectly at ease, explaining as they went that Mara and Saba had stayed behind to keep an eye on events from afar. Jacen had to
admire his uncle’s poise. Even surrounded as he was by Imperial trappings, the Jedi Master moved and talked with an air that suggested this ship could have been his own rather than one that belonged to a once-formidable enemy.

They reached the medical bay and were automatically waved through by the stormtrooper guards. Inside they found Tekli studying reports on her patient’s progress while a weary-looking Captain Yage talked to him.

Gilad Pellaeon looked better than when Jacen had last seen him, but not as recovered from his injuries as Jacen would have liked. He was still immersed in the bacta tank, and looked just as terribly thin and pale as before. He was communicating solely via attachments to his breath mask, which gave his voice the faintly muffled tone Jacen had noticed while dealing with Flennic.

“And what about Screed? Is he still alive?”

“Admiral Screed was executed by Warlord Zsinj,” Yage said.

“Really?” As if in thought, Pellaeon paused for the time it took a few handfuls of bubbles to float up past his body. “My memory must be going to have forgotten that. I always had a soft spot for that old hawk-bat.”

Yage glanced at Luke and his companions, realizing for the first time they had company. “You have visitors, sir,” she said.

Pellaeon opened his eyes to peer through the thick nutrient filling the tank, then closed them again. His face was distorted by the curved, transparent wall enclosing him, making it impossible to read his expression with any accuracy.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Skywalker.” There followed a sound like a grunt, but it could just as easily have been a short bleat of amusement. “Come to view the relic, have you?”

Jacen glanced at his uncle. The Jedi Master’s face was calm and unruffled. He offered no response because clearly the comment didn’t deserve one.

“How are things proceeding, then?” the Grand Admiral asked after a few seconds.

“Mara reports that ships are moving in ways consistent with the withdrawal you ordered,” Luke replied. “The jump points are filling up fast.”

“Good.” He nodded slowly, the movement causing his body to swivel gently in the fluid. “It’s nice to know that what Flennic is telling me is the truth. Nevertheless, I’ll wager that he is skimming a percentage off the top to defend his holdings here.”

“I wouldn’t take that bet,” Jacen said. “I don’t think Flennic is going to like sitting here defenseless while the fleet abandons him.”

“You’re probably right,” Pellaeon said. “He’ll be snug and safe where the concentration of firepower is greatest. He wouldn’t do anything that might risk his life. That won’t stop him doing what he can to protect his investment, though.” The Grand Admiral’s eyes opened again, fixing directly upon Jacen. “You did well back there, young Solo, but reason and common sense were never going to bring Flennic around. He understands nothing but force—and I’m not talking about the one you Jedi regard so highly, either. I’m talking about the brute sort.” His eyes closed once more, as if irritated by the solution. “Reminding him of his insignificance, unless he joined the greater scheme of things, might have done the trick, but in the end I’d rather have him angry with me than you. I’m used to it.”

Jacen bowed slightly, even though he was aware that Pellaeon wouldn’t see the gesture. “Moff Flennic is someone whose displeasure I wouldn’t wish to cultivate,
Admiral,” he said. “But I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, either.”

Pellaeon laughed. “Well put, lad. As indeed was your argument back there. We really do find ourselves in a difficult place at the moment. I fear we won’t have much time to practice the new maneuvers while relocating the fleet—or afterward, for that matter. If what you say is true, then the Yuuzhan Vong will be sure to strike when we are least able to defend ourselves. They’ll want to strike hard and fast like they did in Bastion and leave us too battered to be of any use to anyone. I doubt they’ll be converting our worlds just yet; they’ll come back for those when they have both the time and resources to do so.”

“It could be resources they’re after,” Danni said, “as well as neutralizing a threat.”

“They could get resources from anywhere,” Pellaeon said. “There are millions of uninhabited chunks of rock out there just brimming with raw materials. And they wouldn’t require an army to take them, either.”

“They don’t use them the way we do, Admiral,” Danni explained. “They still need planets for their plantations. But that’s not what I meant, anyway. I was thinking of armies. Coralskippers and yammosks they might need to grow from scratch, but cannon fodder is much easier to come by.”

There was a small silence. “You’re talking about combat slaves?” Pellaeon said. “That would explain why they hit Bastion first, not Yaga Minor. If it had been me ordering the attack, I would’ve done it the other way around. And it also explains something else. Arien, that holo you showed me earlier. Put it back up on the screen.”

Captain Yage tapped at a keyboard and instantly one
of the monitors displaying Pellaeon’s vital signs was replaced by a patchy view of the Bastion system. The distributions of Imperial and Yuuzhan Vong forces were marked with sweeping schematics containing thousands of minute details. By scrolling the diagram forward through time, Yage could show how the battle had progressed on any number of fronts, as collated from information gleaned by sensors on all the Imperial vessels.

Jacen noted that the map became patchier as the battle progressed. Great empty spaces appeared in the intelligence as ship after ship was destroyed, along with observational satellites and beacons. Soon it was like trying to watch stars through storm clouds: apart from the area around the gas giant where Pellaeon had made his last stand, the rest of the system was visible only through infrequent, incomplete glimpses.

When she reached the point in the analysis she was looking for, Yage froze the image and zoomed in close on one of Bastion’s poles. There, designated by a ringed dot, was a single ship.

“We don’t know where this came from,” she said. “The last survivors only caught a glimpse of it. Its vector suggests that it came in late into the battle, when the planet was all but taken. That didn’t seem to make sense, since it’s so big.”

She called up some sketchy schematics. The vessel was shaped like a flattened sphere with five trailing stalks of various lengths. It was large enough to hold several of the Yuuzhan Vong carrier analogs Jacen was all too familiar with.

“If it was a military vessel,” Yage concluded, “then why did they wait until the end of the battle to utilize it? But if it
wasn’t
a military vessel, then what’s it doing there at all?”

“It has to be a slave carrier,” Pellaeon said. “They wiped out the fleets in orbit around Bastion, and that gave them an entire population ripe for capture. Those who couldn’t get away in time are probably already on their way to the nearest processing plant to be turned into mindless drones willing to sacrifice themselves for the warmaster. I saw creatures similar to them at work on Duro.”

“They have been used in many other places since,” Luke said. “In fact, I’m sure that this was the same kind of ship that Saba encountered a few months back at Barab One.”

Pellaeon nodded grimly. “Citizens of the Empire—
all
people—deserve better than this. Had we known that this was what they were after …” He trailed off, the thought as obviously disturbing for him as it was for everyone else in the room.

“You were outgunned, Admiral,” Jacen offered. “There was nothing else you could have done.”

“Outgunned and poorly organized,” Pellaeon agreed. “Wherever that ship came from, the chances are it’s probably hundreds of light-years away from us by now. The only thing we can think about now is how to stop it from happening again. At Borosk, or anywhere. To anyone.”

As far as Jag Fel was concerned, very little was going right on Galantos. Councilor Jobath was still tied up somewhere on the other side of the planet, Tahiri remained unconscious, and he and C-3PO had yet to determine precisely why communications with Galantos had been disrupted. On top of that, Jaina, the one person he would have liked to have with him right now, was on her way to N’zoth, while he was still stuck on the planet. All
in all, Jag felt he’d seen better days—
and
been on more successful missions.

Finally, after an hour pacing the common room of their diplomatic quarters, he decided that enough was enough. He had to do
something.
He couldn’t delay rejoining Twin Suns Squadron any longer.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said brusquely.

Thrum stood in alarm from the table at which he was showing Leia plans of recent additions to the planet’s infrastructure. “I don’t think that would—”

“It’s okay,” he cut off the nervous Fia. “I won’t be that long. And I don’t mind if I’m shadowed, either.”

A guard, recently assigned to their door, accompanied him as he strolled through the wide, luxurious corridors, trying to remember the way to where Tahiri had collapsed. There was something about the recording of that moment that had been bothering him. Just before she’d drawn her lightsaber she had looked down. At first he had thought she might have been dizzy and had brought up her hand in the typical response people had to such spells. But then he realized that she’d been holding something, and it was possibly this that had triggered her reaction. No one else had mentioned it, which surprised him, but he had to check for his own peace of mind.

There had been nothing on the holo to indicate what it might have been, though, which meant he had no real idea what he would even be looking for. He still had to try. He’d already checked the pockets of Tahiri’s robes, which had been empty, and he certainly couldn’t ask her directly; so the only chance of finding out just what it might have been was to examine where it had all happened.

He reached the right corridor and strode along it to roughly where he thought the incident had occurred.
Sweeping his gaze along the ground, he began a methodical search of the area while his guard watched on curiously.

“My friend lost something,” Jag explained when he saw the deep furrows in the Fia’s brow press down upon his melancholy eyes. “I just wanted to see if she dropped it here when she fell. It could have been overlooked in all the excitement.”

The guard nodded his understanding, but the expression of confusion remained.

After a couple more minutes scouring the corridor, Jag said, “I don’t suppose you could help me look, could you? It might help things along a little.”