Star by Star (42 page)

“A small price for your favor.” The retort was out of Nom
Anor’s mouth almost before he realized it was in his mind. “I certainly don’t mean that Vergere is a traitor—”

“Of course not,” Tsavong Lah said. “Only that I lack the judgment to tell if she were.”

Nom Anor closed his eyes. “I would never disparage—”

“You just did,” Tsavong Lah said. “But that is not what concerns me.”

The warmaster fell silent and remained so until Nom Anor dared to open his eyes.

“What concerns me is that you are foolish enough to think I do not see through you.” Tsavong Lah studied Nom Anor for a long time, then said, “This assignment is more important than any other I have given you. I think it would be wise for you to take an advisor along.”

Having disparaged the warmaster’s judgment once that day, Nom Anor knew better than to do so again. “If the warmaster thinks it wise.”

“The warmaster does.” Tsavong Lah turned to Vergere and, in a voice as stern as he had been using with Nom Anor, said, “You will accompany Nom Anor.”

Vergere’s feathers bristled. “As his advisor?” she gasped. “One does not advise k’lor’slugs. This will never work.”

“It had better.” Tsavong Lah gave them both a hard smile. “I have had enough of this jealousy between you two. From this moment on, you succeed—or fail—together.”

“What was I to think when Ulaha attacked?” Jacen asked. Despite his frustration, he kept his voice low to avoid disturbing Ulaha or any of the others lying in healing trances in the Yuuzhan Vong nestbunks. “It looked as though Anakin had ordered her to—and I’m not the only one who thought so.”

“Fact,” Tenel Ka agreed. She sat hunched into a nestbunk beside him, her shoulder touching his in a manner that was a little more than comfortable. Their lightsabers lay close at hand; with the voxyn still at large in the ship’s duct system, they were taking no chances. “But you are his brother. What seems a mistake in others is judgmental from you. And your objections to Lando’s advice do not help matters.”

“Gamblers and spies can afford to dispense with morality,” Jacen replied. “Jedi cannot. It’s too easy for our power to lead us down a dark path, and we’re not the only ones who suffer when that happens.”

“This is so,” Tenel Ka said. “But, Jacen, do you remember my first lightsaber?”

“How could I forget?” Jacen asked, wondering where this was going. Tenel Ka had made the mistake of building her first lightsaber in a hurry, and a flawed crystal had caused it to fail during a sparring match with Jacen. His blade had sliced off her left arm—his first painful lesson in the burden of wielding great power. “For a long time I felt responsible for that accident—I still do, at least partly—but I don’t see what that has to do with Anakin and me.”

“The accident was no one’s fault but mine.” Tenel Ka tapped her chest with her one hand to emphasize the point. “What I believed
to be confidence in my fighting abilities was arrogance, and that is why I built a faulty lightsaber.”

“Arrogance,” Jacen repeated. Try as he might, he could not quite see how his mistake resembled Tenel Ka’s. “And?”

“Do you believe you are the only Jedi among us who understands the danger of the dark side?”

“Of course not. Most of us have had trouble with the Shadow Academy, and Zekk even turned …” Jacen let the sentence trail off, finally comprehending Tenel Ka’s point. Anakin knew the danger of the dark side as well as any of them. To believe him capable of ordering Ulaha’s mad attack was to doubt more than his judgment; it was to doubt his very character. Jacen shook his head in guilty regret. “That was a mistake. A bad one.”

“Fact.” Tenel Ka bumped him with her shoulder. “But there is no need to sulk. I will always be fond of you.”

Jacen’s stomach grew hollow. “You think he’s that angry?”

Tenel Ka rolled her eyes, then took a canister of bacta lotion and slipped off the nestbunk to check on their insensate fellows. “It was a joke, Jacen.”

“Ah.” Jacen grabbed his lightsaber and followed close behind. “Aha. You have a lot to learn about jokes.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Actually, I thought it quite good.” She came to Ulaha, who was breathing fitfully even in her healing trance, and lifted the Bith’s blanket. “Trust him to forgive, Jacen, and things will return to normal.”

She rubbed a fresh coat of lotion over Ulaha’s wounds. It wasn’t nearly as effective as immersion in a tank, but it was better than almost anything else they could do for her.

On the deck below, a Yuuzhan Vong targeting brain lay open on a wardroom table, its nutrient bath filling the chamber with the stink of rotten seaweed. Nestled in a nutlike shell no larger than a human fist, the organ was a tangle of axons and dendrons webbing together a gelatinous muddle of neuron clusters. Though Jaina found the structure of the biotic computer hopelessly bewildering, Lowbacca was engrossed in dissecting the thing, using a small set of steristeel tools to snip here and move there, grunting in satisfaction as the fibers reattached themselves in new locations. Finally, he fused a short thread of axon
between two lengths of dendron, then chortled in delight as an eyestalk hanging from the front of the casing rose and focused on Jaina.

Lowbacca growled a request, which Em Teedee, recently retrieved from the equipment pod, translated as, “Master Lowbacca asks if you would be kind enough to circumnavigate the table.”

Though Jaina understood Wookiee well enough to know Lowbacca had phrased the request somewhat less eloquently, she did as asked. The eye followed her progress, using a control stem on the back of the shell to spin the brain around as she circled.

“Lowie, get some help,” Jaina laughed. “That’s just Sith.”

Lowbacca growled a chuckle, then steadied the shell with a big hand and slipped a pair of needle-nosed fiber snips inside. Turning away from the targeting brain, Jaina found Zekk waiting with a photon trap from their equipment pod’s sensor system.

“There weren’t any extra detector films in the droid kit,” he said. “Maybe we can take a sheet from this and trim one down.”

“It’s worth a try.”

Jaina led the way across the wardroom to where 2-1S stood, silently regrowing his laminanium armor and running internal diagnostics. Since awakening from their healing trances, Jaina, Zekk, and Lowbacca had been working nonstop to help the war droid repair himself, but 2-1S still looked like he had grabbed the wrong end of a turbolaser. They had replaced his recessed photoreceptors with extras from the repair kit Lando had included in the equipment pod, but several thud bugs had penetrated deep inside the skull casing, smashing circuit boards and detection mediums beyond all hope of repair. Fortunately, having spent much of his life as an equipment forager in Coruscant’s dangerous undercity, Zekk had a Force-enhanced talent for finding things. So far, he had scavenged substitutes for the infrared and ultrasonic sensors, and now possibly the gamma analyzers, as well.

Jaina took the thin sheet of detector film from the photon trap and held it up for 2-1S. “What about this for your gamma system?”

YVH 2-1S ran his photoreceptors over the sheet, then crackled, “Affirmative.” His voice was a static-filled ghost of
Lando’s, but that was the least of their worries. “Double the thickness.”

“Another success for Zekk,” Jaina said. She turned and found herself looking directly into his green two-tone eyes, a sentiment much deeper than friendship evident in the way he held her gaze. Jaina waited a moment for him to look away, and, when he did not, passed the detector film back to him. “Hold this while I get the cutter.”

Though hardly blind to the disappointment that clouded Zekk’s face, Jaina was careful to maintain a neutral expression as she reached for the lasicutter. Her reaction was not because she lacked feelings for Zekk—in fact, a few years ago she had found it difficult to keep her thoughts off him—but over time her feelings had changed from infatuation to something closer to what she felt for her brothers. It was love, certainly, but nothing physical—nothing like the spark that had passed through her on the
Tafanda Bay
, when Jag Fel had ignored Borsk Fey’lya’s entire cabinet to introduce himself to her.

That
had made her stomach flutter … but she was being silly. She had no idea where Jag Fel was—probably not even in the known galaxy—and even less whether they were ever likely to meet again. If she insisted on waiting for a jolt like
that
again, she would be Mara’s age before she ever …

“Jaina?” Zekk fluttered the detector film in her face. “Are you going to cut or not?”

“Of course, but we need measurements.” Jaina turned away to hide her blush. “Where did I put that hydrospanner?”

Only a few meters away, crawling on his belly through the black muck in the
Exquisite Death
’s central elimination duct, Tesar Sebatyne heard the hiss of a large creature drawing deep breath. He immediately raised his makeshift durasteel shield and used the Force to push it down the low conduit. There was a muffled burp and a loud sizzling as the acid struck, then a dull clang as the shield slammed into the voxyn.

Sissing with laughter, Tesar used the Force to shove voxyn and shield down the duct. When the creature snarled and tried to push its snout through the holes its acid had eaten in the durasteel, the Barabel brought up his blaster pistol and loosed a single
bolt. The creature’s nose exploded in a spray of black blood, filling the conduit with toxic fumes. Tesar sissed into his breath mask and fired again.

The voxyn roared and, knocking the makeshift shield from its snout, vanished up the duct. Tesar pictured the beast and reached out to his hatchmates with an impression of movement in his mind, and of the creature growing larger.

A moment later, Bela replied with an image of the creature’s body glow. Like most Barabels, she could see into the infrared spectrum and often tracked her prey by the heat of its body. She sent a sensation of impending danger, and Tesar knew he had to get clear. He retreated two meters and squeezed himself into a side feed.

He counted three slow reptilian heartbeats before a series of
whumpf-thumpfs
reverberated through the yorik coral. The duct lit with the flashing brilliance of his hatchmates’ minicannons, arranged at right angles to each other at the next intersection, and he had to close his eyes. The voxyn’s shrill screech sliced through the dank air like a lightsaber, then dropped in tone and began to undulate.

Had they missed? Tesar wondered. How could they?

The irritation his hatchmates shot his way convinced him they had not. His earplugs detected a sudden redshift in the voxyn’s squeal and closed tight, sealing his ears against the disorienting impact of a compression wave. He experienced a deep, hard vibration in the pit of his stomach, but shared in the exhilaration of his hatchmates as they continued to pour bolts at their prey. By his cold blood, how he loved hunting with his hatchmates!

Finally, the minicannons fell silent and his earplugs opened again. He flicked his tongue into the breath mask and smelled filter-scrubbed ozone and scorched yorik coral—and an antiseptic, coppery odor he recognized as detoxified voxyn blood.

He sent a question-sense the sisters’ way, and received back only an impression of uncertainty. Though Tesar could not exactly
feel
his hatchmates’ actions through the Force, he had lived with them side by side all his life and intuitively knew they would be activating a glow stick to supplement their infrared vision. An image of smoking scales came to his mind, then of a voxyn’s blaster-scorched leg.

Then Anakin’s voice came over the comlink. “Tesar! What’s going on back there?”

The sound of clicking claws sounded from around the corner, and Tesar thought,
Uh-oh
. He worked a hand under his chest up toward the comlink clipped to his collar, at the same time worming his way backward down the duct. It was slow going, for the side feed was little larger than Tesar himself, and he was crawling against the lay of his scales. Even through his thick jumpsuit, the rough walls kept catching the tips and bringing his progress to a painful halt.

The voxyn’s head appeared at the corner, a red heat silhouette barely two meters in front of him.

“Tesar?” Anakin demanded. “What’s going on back there?”

Tesar fired at the voxyn and saw his bolt ricochet off. He should have scales like that! The creature pulled its head out of sight, but pink heat-wisps of breath continued to curl past the corner.

Tesar finally reached his comlink. “You told us to watch the voxyn.”

“And?”

“And to call for help if …” The pink wisps vanished ahead, and Tesar heard a sharp intake of air. “Uh, keep talking.”

He ripped his comlink off and tossed it down the duct. Anakin’s distant voice continued to demand an explanation, but Tesar squirmed away as fast as he could. A mangled snout pushed around the corner and buried the squawking instrument beneath a weak stream of acid. Tesar stopped moving and, using the Force to project his voice down the duct, screamed as loud as he could.

He sensed approval from Krasov and, through her, perceived Anakin’s panic. He had to be on the comlink, screaming for Tesar to answer.

Bela found this funny; Tesar could feel her sissing. He knew without looking that she would be creeping down the main duct behind the voxyn, lightsaber in hand. Krasov was following along behind, a big T-21 repeating blaster pointed over her sister’s shoulder. The voxyn hauled itself around the corner, its claws digging into the yorik coral walls and pulling it forward. Tesar could not see its wounds in infrared, but the creature was
definitely moving slowly and in great weariness. It paused at the small pit its acid had burned into the floor, then, not finding the expected body, raised its head and peered down the duct.

Tesar resumed his retreat, firing blaster bolts into the creature’s head. Many ricocheted off, but many burned through the armored scales and failed to kill it. Wasting no time with another of its screeches, the voxyn pursued him down the duct, stubby legs pulling it forward faster than the Barabel could retreat. For the first time, Tesar’s scales rippled with fear; the beast learned from its mistakes.