Reunion (38 page)

“I believe that there should be a way of achieving peace other than fighting,” he said.

“Have you found it, Jacen Solo?”

He looked down to the ground, reluctant to admit his failure to his former teacher—even though he knew in himself that it wasn’t really her. “No,” he admitted quietly. “No, I haven’t.”

“But that doesn’t stop you looking.”

He lifted his gaze again to meet Sekot’s. “As the real Vergere once told me, I have chosen my destiny. Now I just have to deal with the consequences.”

“As must we all,” Sekot said. “As have those who came before us. We inhabit the galaxy that arose as a result of their decisions, just as our descendants will inherit the galaxy that will arise from our own. It is the responsibility of every generation to choose well.”

“And what is your decision, Sekot? What sort of galaxy will you leave for future generations?”

Sekot smiled. “Let me tell you a little about myself, Jacen Solo.”

“No word from the ground as yet, sir.”

“What about those bombers?”

“Orbital insertion for surface run confirmed.” Pellaeon acknowledged the report with a nod. “Hit them hard.”

His aide turned away to issue the orders.
Relentless
immediately fired its main engines and descended to a lower orbit. TIE fighters poured from its launching bays by the hundreds. Every turbolaser and heavy laser cannon targeted the bombers preparing to demolish the transponder on the surface of Esfandia.

Pellaeon didn’t doubt that Vorrik would respond immediately, thereby ensuring an escalation in the battle, but that was unavoidable. As pointless as it was to defend a decoy, he had to make it look as though the effort was
worth
defending, at least, and therefore confirm it as a legitimate target. With any luck, Vorrik would spend entirely too much effort trying to get more firepower on the ground while Pellaeon picked at the commander’s forces from above.

Fire flashed on all screens as Imperial fighters engaged the Yuuzhan Vong. As though that were the spark that lit the fire, conflagrations broke out within minutes in a dozen other locations. The massive warship
Kur-hashan
came about in a ripple of gravitic disturbances, every dovin basal on its hull and in its engine housings wielding arcane energies in order to prepare it for battle.

“All ships,” Pellaeon ordered, “engage at will!”

The first truly conscious thought Jaina had was that she couldn’t feel her left foot—and the sensation was slowly creeping up her legs. The second thought was that she was moving—and fast!

Opening her eyes, she realized with a start that she was actually flying.

“What—?” she called out, clutching the padded seat beneath her.

“Hang on, Jaina,” said the figure sitting in front of her on the cramped speeder bike saddle. “Don’t rock the boat.”

“Droma?”

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

Jaina looked around to see if there were any tsik seru nearby. There weren’t. “Like an idiot. I was downed before the fight even started!”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. This kind of thing
can happen to the best of us, I’m afraid.” The Ryn’s fluting voice was full of sympathy and understanding. “I’m taking you back to the
Falcon
. Your suit is leaking.”

“I know. I can feel it.”

He leaned the speeder over as he skirted a copse of towering rock formations, and she leaned with him, trying to patch together the scattered memories of how she’d come to be here. She vaguely recalled Jag being with her at some point, and Tahiri, but it was mostly a blur.

“Everything’s going according to plan,” he said, straightening the vessel. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

Jaina peered over his shoulder, just in time to see something dark and spiky loom out of atmospheric haze, coming right for them.

“Duck!” she called.

She grabbed the shoulders of the spindly alien and pushed him flat across the speeder. She scrunched down next to him, praying there wasn’t anything else directly in their path. A loud, rasping hum rose up around them, momentarily deafening her, and something fleetingly snatched at her back.

Then the encrusted belly of the yorik-trema they’d grazed was past, and Droma attempted to bring the speeder back under control. It wobbled uneasily for a few seconds, then steadied.

“Do you think they saw us?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder as the alien lander faded back into the haze.

“I’m not sure,” the Ryn said.

“Either way, we can’t afford to take the chance that they might follow us back to the base,” Jaina said. “Hang a right here.”

Droma did as he was told. “You’re thinking we should loop around and distract them, aren’t you?” he said. “Or warn the others, right?”

“You have a problem with that?”

Droma’s helmet moved back and forth as he shook his head. “No, but I do have a problem with you getting frostbite.”

“I’m not so keen on losing any toes, either—but that’s a chance we’re going to have to take.”

“It’s too risky,” Droma said. “Besides, I doubt those Vong would be interested in us. We’re the ones fleeing the fight scene, after all.”

Jaina glanced back over her shoulder. “You might want to tell
them
that, then.”

Droma snapped his head back for a split-second look; then with a curse that would have made her father blush, he returned his attention forward. Jaina felt the engine surge beneath them as he pushed the speeder it to its max in an effort to outrun the pair of tsik seru that had locked on to their tail.

Jaina felt the pockets of her suit. Thankfully the cold hadn’t affected her fingers yet, but it was still hard to feel through so many layers of insulation. She had her lightsaber, a repeating blaster, and two thermal detonators. She quickly withdrew one of the latter and activated it.

“Take a turn when I tell you,” she said, arming one of the detonators.

“Which way?” Droma called.

“
Any
way!” she said, lobbing the device into their wake. “Now!”

The detonator exploded with a flash of heat and light, almost blinding her through her visor’s light-enhancing systems. She couldn’t tell exactly which heading Droma had chosen until her eyesight returned, then saw that he’d slipped them into a narrow crevasse that dipped below the surface of the plain they’d been traveling across.

“Did you get them?” Droma asked, his voice thin with the strain of following the crevasse’s bends.

“One of them, I think,” she said as a shadow fell across
them. One had survived, and it was now above them, attempting to match their speed.

A clutch of netting beetles ejected from a hatch at them, and Droma braked heavily. They decelerated quickly enough to miss the bugs themselves, but there was no chance of avoiding the sticky threads the creatures left in their wake. Two attached themselves to Droma’s back, and one fell across her visor. On the ends of each fiber, grublike finger-length insects began to reel themselves in.

Jaina tried to tug the threads from Droma’s back while he navigated the narrow crevasse, but the threads were strong and refused to break. Reaching into her side pocket, she produced her lightsaber and activated the blade. If she didn’t get the threads off in time, those bugs would soon wrap themselves around the two of them and bind them up for easy capture.

The threads snapped under the bright fire of her lightsaber, and two bugs dropped away from Droma’s back. She followed the thread stuck to her visor and found the bug that was its source barely a meter away from her head, whipping along behind her. She snatched her hand away and sliced the thread in two.

Three down, she thought, but there was no time for self-congratulations just yet. She didn’t know how many more there were. Her visibility at close quarters was poor through the visor, and her gloves weren’t sensitive enough to find them by touch. It would take just one to foul up the speeder’s steering vanes, or close Droma’s fingers together at the wrong moment.

“We have to set down,” she said. “It’s the only way to make sure we’re clean.”

“But the flier—” Droma pointed up at the tsik seru shadowing them high above.

His argument stopped in midsentence, however, when he saw another of the netting beetles dangling from her hand, steadily wriggling its way closer to his suit.

He quickly put them down in a sliding skid across a surface thick with carbon dioxide snow. Jaina tried hard not to think of what standing on such a material was going to do to her toes. There were more important things to worry about for the moment.

She jumped off the speeder, with Droma close behind, frantically brushing himself down in a vain attempt to lose the beetles. When Jaina raised her lightsaber and approached him, he took a step back.

“Hey, wait a second! If that thing nicks my suit I’ll—”

He shut up when she started to dart and weave her lightsaber, removing the bugs with easy, deft strokes. Then she turned the weapon on herself.

“On your thigh,” Droma was saying. “And one on your shoulder!”

Something sizzled as she swung her lightsaber blindly behind her head.

“Okay, you’re clear,” he announced with relief. “Now let’s—”

Before he could finish what he was saying, more threads fell around them. The shadow of the tsik seru, which had swung briefly out of sight, had returned, and a rain of bugs descended out of the flier’s belly. Jaina didn’t think; she just did what she had to do. Her blade seemed to sing in the murky air as she swung it with controlled, precise swipes that prevented a single one of the beetles from reaching her or Droma.

“Nicely done,” Droma breathed in disbelief. “But I fear it’s only a temporary reprieve.”

The tsik seru was backing up and tipping forward.

“It’s going to fire at us,” Jaina said, already tensing to run.

“Do that thing!” Droma shouted, waving his hands. “That thing Tahiri did!”

“What
thing
?”

“She closed the throats of the plasma launchers!”

“
What
?”

“I saw her do it when you were passed out. It works, believe me!”

Time seemed to slow as she worked her way though what he was telling her. Plasma launchers … Tahiri … closing the throat …

Her body was one step ahead of her. At the very instant she realized—or so it seemed—her hand was already heading upward to point at the tsik seru’s wings. The hand clenched into a fist just as it was about to fire, belching out its high-pressure plasma, full of potency and bile.

It hit the obstruction of her will and blew one side of the flier to smithereens. The second side detonated an instant later, showering them with glowing debris. Gas hissed from the ultracold snow beneath their feet. They ducked instinctively, throwing their arms up for protection. Peering through them, Jaina saw the remains of the tsik seru falling into the crevasse, tumbling in a spitting fireball right toward them. She grabbed Droma and dragged him out of the way just in time. Steam exploded around them as its fiery corpse finally came to rest.

Droma picked himself up, staring in amazement at the ruined flier. “Now that,” he said, “was
too
close!”

“Just be grateful it didn’t come down on the speeder,” she said, tugging the dead weight of the vehicle away from the flames. The growing numbness in her left foot was making walking awkward.

“Believe me, I’m grateful,” Droma said, lending her a hand. “More grateful than—”

A roar over their suits’ external receivers cut him off. Something stumbled out of the flames and steam—something humanoid, blackened, and snarling. Jaina adopted a defensive stance as she grabbed her lightsaber, but her frozen foot betrayed her balance and she slipped over onto her side. Droma tried to put himself between her and the creature,
but was smacked away by a smoldering limb. The creature loomed over him, its blackened face splitting where a mouth might have once been.

“
Jeedai
!”

The breath issued from the Yuuzhan Vong pilot in a furious rush. The only thing keeping him alive in Esfandia’s frigid air, Jaina realized, was the fire itself. That wasn’t going to last long—but long enough for one chance to strike.

The pilot raised a viciously sharp splinter of yorik coral and prepared to drive it down into her, where she lay sprawled at his feet. She reached for her lightsaber again, but it wasn’t there. She must have dropped it when she’d fallen.

Before the blow could fall, something moved behind her, well away from where Droma lay slumped against the ravine wall. It caught the Yuuzhan Vong’s attention, too, and his eyes momentarily flicked up to look. It was all the time Jaina needed. She struck upward with both feet, forcing the pilot back. His yorik shard went flying, and Jaina was up on her feet in an instant, reaching out with her mind for her lightsaber. It whipped out of the snow and back into her hand. With a vicious
snap-hiss
, it came to life.

The pilot regained his balance and stood, preparing to rush her. Fire still licked at his back and legs, making him a truly monstrous figure. Jaina tensed, ready to cut him down.

But she didn’t need to. The alien’s stare froze as ice formed across his eyes. Pain and cold couldn’t be kept at bay forever, not even by the prodigious Yuuzhan Vong will. With a despairing gurgle, the pilot folded forward into the snow, dead before he hit the ground.

Jaina stepped back, lowering her blade, her breath loud in her helmet. She should have reacted faster than that. Yes, she was still recovering from her crash and the
cold had crept as far as her knees, now, but that was no excuse. If it hadn’t been for—

She stopped in midthought, remembering what had saved her life. Something had distracted the pilot just as he’d been about to stab her—and that something couldn’t have been Droma, for he was only now struggling to his feet in the snow by the flier.

She turned around to look.

Hanging in the thick air before her, the edges of its circular, kitelike body rippling as though in an unseen current, was one of the natives. It was so close she could have touched it, but she resisted the impulse. It looked quite fearsome, with its many-tentacled maw and strange organs pulsing through translucent skin. Hundreds of tiny bumplike “eyes” around the maw seemed to be watching her as closely as she studied it, wondering what it would do next.