Remnant: Force Heretic I (36 page)

“Anything other than optimal would be wasteful,” the droid replied.

Saba sissed slightly at the droid’s annoying pragmatism.

“I can’t help wishing we had a few of Lando Calrissian’s YVH droids here to lend us a hand,” Danni said as she looked up from adjusting the webbing of her pack.

“You’re not the only one,” Mara said sourly. “They might show those SD brains that they’ve got more to worry about than being precisely on schedule. Obsolescence is a terrible thing for a droid, you know.”

Jacen chuckled, but the droid remained silent. Saba hissed again and settled back to wait, her claws retracted and tail relaxed, to all appearances a perfect example of Jedi patience. Only another Barabel would have recognized the signs of nervousness she was actually displaying: the slight stiffness to the scales down her back and the restless extension and retraction of her inner eyelids. Not even her Jedi training could completely remove her anxieties.

Hunt the moment
 …

The tunnel extruded by the chuk’a ended in a complicated series of whorls and loops, all of them easily large
enough to admit an adult. There were no rooms as such, just random chambers spawned like bubbles in blorash jelly where the chuk’a had meandered to a halt. The lambent Nom Anor held high in his hand sent strange colors and oily reflections dancing all around him. The going was difficult, and Nom Anor stepped carefully on the slippery surface, wary of sharp edges. He wasn’t sure how far the torturous passages led; all he knew was that the top of the chuk’a itself was to be found at the very lowest point of the passage. There its soft tissues would be exposed and sensitive; there lay his means of escape.

As he wove through the basement of the place he had briefly called home, he became aware of the sound of breathing. At first he thought it might have been his own echoing back, but the faint thudding noise that accompanied it suggested otherwise. He smothered the lambent in his fingers, turning the light it cast a dull red, and followed the sounds to their source.

Creeping around a jagged hairpin bend, he saw a huddled figure crouching on the floor of a dead end, dressed in the familiar rags of a Shamed One. Nom Anor felt his body sag in relief as he exhaled heavily. For a moment he had feared it might be a warrior sent to cut off escape.

“I’pan, you fool,” he said. “You almost—”

He stopped when the figure turned to face him. It wasn’t I’pan at all. It was Kunra.

The disgraced warrior half rose to his feet, holding a chunk of yorik coral in his right hand. It was black-stained in the reddish light.

“What are
you
doing here?” Kunra asked, making no attempt to hide the bitterness he held for Nom Anor.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Nom Anor said. “But I imagine we’re both here for the same reason.”

The warrior looked down, then back up at Nom Anor.

“That
is
the chuk’a cap, isn’t it?” Nom Anor added, indicating the bloody patch by the warrior’s feet.

With its job done, the shell-excreting chuk’a now blocked the rest of the shaft and acted as plug, keeping any subterranean dwellers from coming up from below—as well as preventing anyone from going down. Opening that plug would allow him, and Kunra, to get away before the warriors reached them, and with any luck they might not follow them down into the darkness.

But the creature’s “cap” was anchored securely into the side of the shaft, and getting it to withdraw those anchors wasn’t easy. There was a soft, spongy layer of flesh just below the hardened cap, and somewhere beneath that was the nerve connected to the creature’s right ganglion network. Once that nerve was stimulated, the cap’s multiple pincers that were thrust into the rock would retract defensively, causing the chuk’a to fall. From the blood on Kunra’s hand and around his feet, Nom Anor guessed he hadn’t had much success doing that.

Kunra nodded in response to Nom Anor’s question. “But it’s not responding. I can’t reach it.”

“Let me try.” Nom Anor moved forward, handing the lambent to the warrior and pulling the homemade coufee from his belt. He did this slowly, making sure Kunra had a chance to see the blade before stooping over to examine the fleshy portion of the shell-making beast. Then he set about digging for the nerve with the point of his coufee. It wasn’t easy; he was distracted the whole time, constantly wondering whether Kunra would vent his dislike of the ex-executor by bringing the piece of yorik coral down on the back of his head.

“I can’t see,” he said. “Move the light over here.”

The light wobbled as Kunra shifted, then steadied at a more useful angle. Nom Anor breathed an internal sigh
of relief.
We are allies again,
he thought.
For now, anyway. But there are still things I need to know.

“Did you lead them here?” he asked without turning to face Kunra. “The warriors?”

“No!” The shock in Kunra’s voice that such a thing could even be suggested left no doubt in Nom Anor’s mind that the ex-warrior was telling the truth. “What would make you think such a thing?”

Nom Anor shrugged. “You and I were the only ones who got away, and I know I didn’t call them.” He glanced up. The ex-warrior’s face was a mess of half-finished scars and internal anguish.

“It wasn’t me,” Kunra reasserted. “I don’t know why they’re here. I escaped because—” He hesitated for a second then forced out the words: “I was with Sh’roth when they came. While they fought him, I—I ran.”

Nom Anor studied Kunra a moment longer, then returned to his work with barely a nod of acknowledgment.
I ran.
That explained everything: why Kunra had been the only one given enough time to escape,
and
why he was Shamed in the first place. Warriors didn’t run, no matter what the circumstances; judging by the look on Kunra’s face, this clearly wasn’t the first time he had displayed cowardly tendencies. He was probably lucky to have escaped the first time with just a Shaming.

“Then what brought them here, do you think?” he asked. He couldn’t help but wonder if someone else had betrayed him to the authorities. If Shimrra had learned of his existence, sending such a band of warriors to finish him off in the dead of night was exactly the kind of thing he’d do.

“What else?” Kunra said, more animated after the change of subject. “The one thing the high castes are afraid of, of course: the heresy.”

Nom Anor admitted to himself that the idea made
sense. The priests would tolerate the Jedi sect as much as Shimrra would the Jedi themselves, perhaps even less. The Shamed Ones preaching it would be the enemy within, and rooting them out would be a priority. But if that
was
the case, then why had he never heard of such cleansing raids through the underworld of Yuuzhan’tar before his fall from grace? He assumed the answer to that lay in the nebulous way the message spread: even if Shimrra captured a convert, that one would only lead him to two or three others, who would in turn lead him nowhere, or in circles. There was no clear trail—as Nom Anor himself could attest. He had tried to find it, and failed.

Perhaps his own inquiries had, for the first time, established a clear trail to follow. He might have brought premature death down upon his fellow Shamed Ones by trying to find a way to use their beliefs to his own end. If so, the irony wasn’t lost on him. Without them—and without a way out of the bottom of the shaft—he might very well find himself caught in a trap he had inadvertently laid for himself.

Frustration made him stab deep into the chuk’a cap over and over again, until his right arm was buried in it up to his elbow, black with gore. Finally he felt the creature respond with a spasm, and knew he had to be close to the nerve. He twisted the blade deeper, and for his effort felt a tremor ripple through the chuk’a. Another twist and the tissue around his hand tightened like muscle pulling taut. Fearing his fingers might be broken—or worse, that he might lose the only weapon he had left—he hastily pulled the coufee from the cap. A spurt of dark blood followed it, and the shell around them shook even more.

Kunra looked relieved.

“You’ve done this before?” he asked, the beginnings of a smile on his scarred lips.

Nom Anor was about to confess that in fact he had never done anything like this in his life, when the floor suddenly fell out from beneath them, consigning them both to the depths of the vent.

Not far from
Jade Shadow,
Jacen Solo’s thoughts were very much focused on the present, not the future. In the minutes remaining till the end of jump, there was so much to do: systems to familiarize himself with, droid brains to program, decoy strategies to scrutinize, along with innumerable other checks to be made on an unfamiliar system. It was time-consuming, but necessary. Once he gave the order to jump, then the mission would truly be under way, and there wouldn’t be time to make sure everything was in order.

Sealed in the cockpit of a flightless TIE fighter that was in turn wrapped in an energy web dense enough to stop a comet—all of it huddling inside the belly of
Braxant Bonecrusher
with
Jade Shadow
and numerous TIE fighters—he was electronically patched into the mind of the Dreadnaught and able to oversee its every move. He felt like a Phindian puppeteer, using tricks of light to cast shadows many times larger than himself onto a screen. Jacen only hoped the Yuuzhan Vong would be fooled by the illusion. If they weren’t, the Dreadnaught wouldn’t last long, and the mission would turn out to be very short indeed. It packed only the one surprise; once that was gone there would be nothing else. All they’d have to rely upon then was luck. And while good fortune was one of the things his family was famous for, it was not something he wanted to base the success of this mission upon. The death of Anakin had proven once and for all that luck did not stay in one’s favor indefinitely.

The seconds ticked by as he continued his last-minute
checks. The chores were complicated, but they only occupied the analytical part of his brain. Another part—the more intuitive section that he usually assigned to the understanding of his place in the Force—turned to Danni and Saba in
Jade Shadow.
As he observed them and their own preparations from a distance, he suddenly realized just how little he was really adding to the mission itself: he was there mainly just to double-check what the SD brains would be doing. Nevertheless, he still believed it was important for him to be around for at least part of the mission. And he believed it for reasons that, until now, he had kept hidden even from himself …

Danni’s nervousness touched him deeply. She didn’t have a lightsaber or a full Jedi’s training in the Force; she would essentially rely on Saba throughout this mission into the belly of the slaveship; but she was still going, and her courage made him like her even more. He vividly remembered the moment they had shared while waiting for Captain Yage to board
Jade Shadow.
There had been something there, a connection of some kind. Had that been the result of boredom? he wondered. Or was it evidence of larger, genuine feelings? There was no denying he’d had a mild, juvenile crush on her shortly after rescuing her from the Yuuzhan Vong on Helska 4, but that had been a fleeting and insignificant thing. He had put it down to mere emotions affected by circumstances, nothing more, and so had effectively buried the impulses. But now those feelings were back, and what troubled him more than anything else was how it had taken so little to rouse them.

When the mission was over, he would have to examine the situation more closely. And delicately, of course. He had proven himself as a pilot, a warrior, and—some would say—a Jedi, but when it came to matters of the heart, he was a definite novice.

“Jump complete,” the droid brains announced, snapping him out of his reverie.

“Er—halfway there,” Jacen said quickly to the others, worried that any hesitation might somehow reveal something of his thoughts. His fingers flew over the controls, calculating then laying in the second jump. The layout of the instruments in the TIE cockpit was different from what he was used to, but not radically dissimilar.

“That sounds just
optimal
,” Mara said from the cockpit of
Jade Shadow,
not far from where he was sitting.

“Correct,” the droid brain said. They hadn’t been programmed to recognize sarcasm.

Jacen’s course matched that of the droid brains. Unless the slaveship had radically altered position, they should come out practically on top of it.

He okayed the jump. According to the instruments, the drives surged back into life; thanks to the energy web, he felt as though they’d remained completely stationary.

“On our way,” he informed the passengers of
Jade Shadow.
“We’ll be there soon.”

“In seven point four-seven standard minutes,” the droid brain informed them. “Tactical circuits engaged. TIE decoys ready for launch. Shield generators programmed. Hull detonators primed.”

The droid brains cycled through their precombat checklist once every minute with no variation. Jacen found himself half hypnotized by the steady mantra, and his mind began to wander again. His thoughts turned to Danni once more, and he called up a view of
Jade Shadow
’s cockpit, where she and Saba waited with Mara for the mission to truly begin. Her breathing became heavier as her tension increased. But there was an edge of excitement to that tension—and it was infectious, too. He could feel his own heart beating a little faster, and his palms began to sweat …

He was thankful when the droid brain announced their imminent arrival. He busied himself with double and triple checks to
Braxant Bonecrusher
’s systems, ensuring everything was locked down nice and tight—including himself.

“Here we go,” he said over the comlink. “Hang on. This is going to be rough.”

“I’m sure you’ll look after us, Jacen,” his aunt said. He smiled uncomfortably at her confidence in him.

Not if I don’t focus on what I’m doing,
he thought to himself.

“Five seconds,” the droid brain announced. “Status: optimal. Three. Two. One.”