Star by Star (14 page)

Jaina reached over to toggle the ion drives active, but stopped when R2-D2 whistled an alarm. The heads-up display holo contorted through a maddening array of colors and shapes, then settled on the image of a tiny, tube-shaped craft swinging toward them well beneath the luminous haze of the sun’s orange corona.

“That explains their silence,” Mara said. Though the navigator’s station lacked a heads-up holo, the seat was surrounded
by a complete set of conventional displays. “Can we can take it, Artoo?”

A message appeared on both displays, sternly informing Jaina and Mara that the representation was not to scale. A series of sensor readouts began to relate the craft’s true size, velocity, and probable hull composition. Jaina whistled softly and glanced through the tinted canopy, where the new arrival’s speckish silhouette was streaking up behind the
Nebula Chaser
.

“Looks like a frigate analog,” Jaina said. “What do you want to do?”

“The only thing we can.” There was a note of caution in Mara’s voice that would have seemed foreign to her before Ben’s arrival. “Damp down all systems and wait.”

In Captain Pollux’s private quarters aboard the
Nebula Chaser
, the Rar sisters stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the offbridge vidconsole, their long head-tails—lekku—writhing nervously as they watched a large piece of yorik coral detach from the frigate and start toward the
Nebula Chaser
. Pocked and lumpy, the smaller craft looked more like a mined-out asteroid than a boarding skiff, but the sensor displays showed the heat signatures of at least a hundred warriors inside. There was also some other creature, larger and colder, but the sisters needed no sensor readings to know this. When they reached out with the Force, they could feel the same hungry presence that had touched them as the frigate appeared from behind the sun. Whatever the Yuuzhan Vong were bringing across, it was attuned to their galaxy in a way its masters would never be.

Alema isolated the creature’s heat signature and asked the computer to find a match, then turned to see Numa already at the captain’s bunk laying out their disguises: a pair of diaphanous dancing shifts, some face paint, and not much else. Having spent the last year leading a fierce resistance movement on the occupied world of New Plympto, the sisters were certainly the object of the boarding party’s search. Fortunately, their enemy would be searching for a single human woman instead of two Twi’lek dancing girls; in their role as the resistance leader, they had taken the precaution of never appearing together and always in disguise, with their lekku hidden beneath the cowl of a Jedi robe.

By the time the sisters changed out of their jumpsuits and returned to the vidconsole, the Yuuzhan Vong were disembarking in the docking bay. With bald sloping brows and saggy eyes rimmed underneath by drooping blue membranes, they were half a head taller than a typical human and much heavier. Their brutal faces had been reshaped into leathery masks of disjoined cartilage and torn flesh, and their powerful bodies were adorned with religious tattoos and ritual disfigurements. Most wore shells of living vonduun crab armor, and all carried the ubiquitous Yuuzhan Vong amphistaff, a serpent that could change on command into a cudgel, razor-sharp polearm, or poison-fanged whip. The most hideous of the warriors, a stoop-shouldered brute with only dark cavities where there should have been a nose, pushed arrogantly past the guards surrounding Captain Pollux.

“You have
Jeedai
aboard?”

“No,” Pollux lied smoothly. “Is that why you stopped us?”

The warrior ignored the captain’s question. “You come from Talfaglio … or Sacorria?”

“You can’t believe I would tell you that,” Pollux said. “The last I heard, our whole galaxy was at war with you.”

The retort drew a grudging sneer of respect. “We are only a picket ship, Captain, and you are carrying refugees. You have nothing to fear from us … provided you tell me now if you have
Jeedai
among your passengers.”

“We have none.” Pollux did not look away when he answered, and his voice did not crack. Even civilian starship captains knew the Yuuzhan Vong were blind to the Force. “Feel free to search.”

The warrior cracked a smile. “But I do, Captain. I do.” He glanced toward his boarding skiff and, in his own language, ordered, “
Duwin tur voxyn.
”

A seam appeared near the back of the craft and began to open, the yorik coral puckering outward like a set of pursed lips. A pair of yellow oval eyes appeared in the darkness, and Alema felt the hunger in the Force grow more distinct. Then, when the aperture had opened a half meter, an ebony streak shot from the portal and clattered to the deck in a ripple of darkness.

“Clouds of fire!” Numa gasped.

The creature—the
voxyn
, Alema guessed from what she had
learned of the Yuuzhan Vong language—began to pad around the deck on eight bandy legs. Though it stood no higher than a human waist, it was more than four meters long, with a flattish head and an undulating body covered in black scales. A line of coarse sensory bristles ran down its spine, and a white barb protruded from its flickering whip of a tail. The beast circled the captain and his wary guards only once, then went off toward the rear of the docking bay.

In the vidscreen, Pollux fixed his gaze on the Yuuzhan Vong warrior. “Why have you brought that … that thing on my ship?”

The warrior knocked Pollux to the deck with a backhand slap. “You can’t believe I would tell you that,” he laughed.

Though Pollux’s guards did not appear in danger of attacking, the captain signaled them to stand down and returned to his feet with as much dignity as possible.

Alema rotated an idle narrow-beam antenna toward the dark planet where their rendezvous craft would be waiting, then keyed in a secret Jedi comm channel and began to broadcast what they were seeing. The proximity of the orange sun would interfere with the signal, but signals could be enhanced—and it would be better than nothing if she and Numa failed to escape.

The voxyn circled away from the shuttles and wandered the docking bay for a few minutes more, then exited into an adjoining passage. The sisters lost sight of it until Alema found the right scanner, and by then it was padding down the main boulevard as though it had been riding slidewalks all its life. Along one side of the passage raced a company of Yuuzhan Vong, their distrust of lifeless technology keeping them on the stationary band at the edge of the broad corridor. Eventually, they gave up trying to keep pace and spread through the ship in small groups.

Alema activated a surveillance lock on the voxyn, and for the next hour she and Numa watched it roam the
Nebula Chaser
’s primary activities deck, occasionally circling a petrified refugee or cocking its head at some eruption of machine noise. Finally, it leapt into a decorative water fountain and began to circle the statue of a Calamarian star-urchin, its sensory bristles on end and its yellow eyes fixed on the ceiling. With a drooping feeling, Alema turned to the holopad and called up a three-dimensional schematic of the
Nebula Chaser
. After a few adjustments, it
grew clear that Captain Pollux’s cabin was directly over the creature, ten levels above.

“Unpleasant,” Numa said. The tips of her lekku flicked sharply. “It seems to have an idea of our location.”

“That makes no sense.” Alema reached out with the Force and felt the same hungry stirring as before, but now much stronger and distinctly below. “Unless it’s using the Force to track us.”

A shudder ran down Numa’s lekku, and she glared at Alema out of the corner of a slanted eye. “You do have a way of springing to the most alarming explanation, sister.”

“Alarming, but no less likely.” Alema pointed to the vidscreen, where the voxyn was bounding down the corridor toward the nearest lift tube.

Numa studied the image for a moment, then said, “You seem to have a point. Perhaps we should shut down.”

They took a moment to meditate, then began to pull in on themselves, shutting down their presence in the Force. When they could not even feel each other, Alema looked back to the vidscreen. The voxyn had just reached the lift tube. It slapped the activation pad with a front claw, then pushed its foresection into the cylinder and allowed the repulsor current to pull its long body up into the shaft. She traced the lift to an officers’ deck outlet less than a hundred meters away, perhaps twice that distance by the time the creature found its way through the corridor grid.

“No good, sister. It still senses us.” She turned toward the satchel holding their jumpsuits and lightsabers. “We can catch it as it steps out of the tube.”

“Then what?” Numa asked. “The scarheads will know Captain Pollux was lying to them.”

“They’ll know anyway when it comes scratching at his door.” Sorry there was no time to change back into her jumpsuit, Alema pulled her lightsaber from the travel satchel and activated its silver blade. “And I’d just as soon take a few Yuuzhan Vong with us.”

“No.” Numa reached over and shut down Alema’s lightsaber. “I won’t have that, not after New Plympto.”

Frustrated by the planet’s stubborn resistance, the Yuuzhan Vong had released a life-destroying plague that wiped the whole
world clean. The sisters and a few thousand others had waited out the destruction inside a small fleet of intrasystem ore freighters, then sneaked into space after the enemy abandoned the dead world.

“They’re
Yuuzhan Vong
, sister,” Alema said. “Do you think they’ll just forgive the captain’s lie?”

“Hardly.” Numa returned to the console. “We must make them think their creature is wrong.”

She called up a hologram that showed the Yuuzhan Vong frigate floating half a kilometer beyond the
Nebula Chaser
’s docking bay. At only two hundred meters, the enemy craft was a mere fraction of the starliner’s size, but the weapon nodules bristling along its flank left no doubt about its destructive capabilities.

Alema saw at once what her sister was thinking. “We’ll pick our escape pod on the way.”

She returned her lightsaber to their travel satchel and tossed the bag to Numa, then grabbed a datapad from the captain’s bunkside table and comlinked it to the offbridge vidconsole. The sisters left the captain’s suite and scurried toward the opposite end of the officers’ deck. At the lift tube, Alema consulted the datapad and found the voxyn splashing through a Damp Deck basin two levels below. Its yellow eyes were fixed on the ceiling, tracing their path.

“It knows we’re moving,” Alema said.

“But its sense of distance is poor.” Numa was ever the optimist. “Where are we going?”

Alema called up a display of midship escape stations, then chose the one most directly opposite the Yuuzhan Vong frigate. “Engineering deck, Bulkhead Forty-two.” She performed a sectional security scan and found a team of Yuuzhan Vong smashing a droid in gravitational control. “We’ll have to trick a squad of scarheads.”

“Alternate?”

Alema checked the other escape stations, then shook her head. “Nothing, unless we leave the
Chaser
’s sensor shadow.”

“Out of the question.” Numa’s lekku curled inward at the tips. “We’ll have to go bare.”

“Bare?” It was the term they had used on New Plympto for
caching their weapons and disguising themselves as slaves. “You must be brightsick. I’m not leaving my lightsaber behind!”

“You would risk the lives of everyone aboard?” Numa pulled her lightsaber from their travel satchel and twisted the handle open, then plucked the Adegan focusing crystal from its mount and secured it over her navel with a few drops of fleshglue. Through her filmy shift, the golden jewel looked like a dancer’s decoration. “Do you think such selfishness worthy of the memory of Daeshara’cor?”

Alema coiled her lekku, then let them slap against her back. Though not exactly their Master, Daeshara’cor had certainly been the sisters’ deliverer. During one of the Jedi’s rare visits to Ryloth, she had recognized the Rar sisters’ innate Force talents and rescued them from one of the darkest ryll dens in Kala’uun, then arranged their transport to the Jedi training academy. Alema sighed and held out her hand.

“If we must.”

Numa placed Alema’s lightsaber in her palm. Alema removed the Adegan crystal and secured the silver jewel over her own navel. They tossed their Jedi robes and the remains of their weapons into a disintegration chute, then stepped into the lift, descended twenty levels to the engineering deck, and left their satchel on the floor halfway across the tube threshold. Though a far less obvious act of sabotage than smashing the actuation panel, it was just as effective. A collision override circuit would hold the tube static until the safety hazard was removed.

“Time to look flighty,” Alema said.

She called up a banal emotidrama on the datapad, and the sisters started toward Bulkhead 42. As they advanced down the corridor, they peered into each room they passed and called loudly for someone named Travot. When they reached inducer control, a Yuuzhan Vong warrior stepped out to confront them. With only three long scars on each cheek and a single disfigured ear, he was clearly a warrior of low rank. The sisters pressed themselves against the corridor’s far wall and, doing their best to look shocked and repulsed, started to ease past.

He blocked their way with a lowered amphistaff. “Where do you go?”

“To s-see Travot?” Numa made her voice sound frightened and tentative. “He works in the coil room.”

“The coil room?” the Yuuzhan Vong echoed.

Alema shrugged and glanced back to her datapad, as though unable to resist the emotidrama. “His workstation.”

A second Yuuzhan Vong with the crooked nose and scar-laced face of a minor officer stepped into the corridor. He scrutinized the sisters briefly and, seeing there was no place beneath their dancing shifts to hide a lightsaber or anything else, pointed back the way they had come.

“This ship is under seizure. Return to your berthings.”

Numa and Alema put on looks of fear and confusion and remained where they were.

“Obey!” the subordinate said.