Star by Star (43 page)

Big trouble
, he thought.

He sensed the alarm in his hatchmates and heard them begin to splash and rattle in the main duct as they tried to draw the voxyn’s attention. Too clever for such antics, the creature pulled to within a meter of Tesar and let out a burp, but either its acid was depleted or the efflux tube had been burned shut; nothing came out. Tesar fired point-blank and smelled scorched flesh.

The voxyn lurched ahead, its mouth closing around the barrel of the Merr-Sonn blaster. Tesar squeezed the trigger—then snarled in pain as the safety circuits sensed a clog in the emitter nozzle and shut down the actuating module. Releasing the weapon into the voxyn’s mouth, he squirmed away, pressing his back against the duct roof in what he felt fairly certain would be a futile attempt to free his lightsaber.

Bela’s white blade hissed to life somewhere behind the voxyn, but the creature filled the duct so completely that only a few stray rays of light showed past. The beast lunged; Tesar barely saved his breath mask by jerking away, then lashed out and felt his finger talons sink into the thing’s wounded snout.

The voxyn continued to drag itself forward, its jaws snapping at the hand clawing on its muzzle. Tesar shoved its head against the wall.

Tesar exuded triumph to his hatchmates. A heavy foot came forward to catch his elbow, its disease-tipped claws dimpling his jumpsuit’s molytex lining and nearly pushing through. To his sense of triumph, he added urgency.

The drone of Bela’s blade grew louder—then vanished beneath the sharp crack of exploding detonite. An unexpected weight settled on Tesar’s back, and suddenly the duct was filled
with the soft green light of the bioluminescent wall lichen that illuminated the interior of the
Exquisite Death
. Tesar glimpsed the tangled mass of broken fang and scorched flesh that was the voxyn’s mutilated snout, then felt himself rising through the top of the duct as someone levitated him into the cabin above.

The blaster-scarred voxyn scrambled past beneath him, whole chunks of body missing, the stumps of four rear legs dragging uselessly behind.

“You bantha head! It escaped!” Tesar looked over and found himself staring into the blue eyes of Ganner Rhysode, one of the largest and—to judge by his own attitude, at least—most handsome of the human Jedi. “Now it will be twice as hard to kill!”

“Hunting season’s over, my scaly friend.” Ganner lowered Tesar to the passage floor, then called into the hole. “Come out of there, girls. Anakin wants us on the bridge.”

In the adjacent sleeping cabin, Raynar Thul awoke from his healing trance to find himself watching Eryl’s bare back as she sat up and stretched on the opposite side of a narrow walkway. Her skin was freckled and milky, with only the faintest hint of the acid scars and claw slashes he had come to know so well during the first voxyn watch. With the others deep in healing trances or busy learning to fly the ship, he and Eryl had spent a great deal of time talking and rubbing bacta lotion into each other’s wounds. He had a dim memory of a long lingering kiss just before they finally sank into their own bunks, but it seemed so hazy now it might have been only a dream.

Eryl lowered her arms and, glancing over her shoulder, caught him looking. Instead of covering up, she smiled and asked, “How do I look?”

Raynar’s teeth clacked as he snapped his jaw shut, then he managed to stammer, “Fine.” Maybe the kiss hadn’t been a dream after all. “J-just great, in fact.”

Eryl frowned and craned her neck to look down her back, then laughed and, still not covering up, said, “I was talking about my scars, young man. Are they healed?”

“Oh yes.” Raynar wanted to drop back onto his bunk and sink into a healing trance. “That’s what I meant.”

Eryl looked doubtful. “Sure.” She reached for her jumpsuit.

“But it’s okay. After all that bacta rubbing, I don’t think anyone on the strike team has any secrets.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Raynar said.

Still, as he reached for his own jumpsuit, Raynar
did
try to hide his disappointment. Eryl might be only a year or two older, but being called a young man had disabused him of any wrong impressions about their relationship.

Tekli appeared from a few bunks down, her brown fur tousled and gray eyes sparkling as she buckled her equipment harness.

“Sleep well?” she asked.

“Yes, very,” Raynar answered. “And you?”

“Good.” She gave them a tight smile, then lifted her brow as the ship gave a subtle shudder. “We must be coming out of hyperspace.”

Both Raynar and Tekli looked to Eryl, who closed her green eyes and reached out with the Force. When she opened them a moment later, she looked just a little younger and more innocent than before.

“I’ll have to see some stars to be certain, but it feels right,” she said. “We’ve reached Myrkr.”

As the
Exquisite Death
sped insystem, shedding velocity and swinging into Myrkr’s gravity well, the planet swelled from a greenish pinpoint to an emerald disk the size of a thumbnail. Though Anakin did not recall the world having a moon, the pearly fleck hanging beside it was too bright to be a background star and too steady to be an optical illusion. He turned to the sensor station, where Lowbacca sat with his emergency vac suit pulled over his jumpsuit, his head buried in a cognition hood, and his huge hands squeezed into a pair of control gloves.

“Lowie, anything?” Anakin asked.

The Wookiee groaned a reply, which Em Teedee, hovering alongside, translated as, “Master Lowbacca continues to apply his best efforts and assures you he will inform you the moment he succeeds.”

Anakin knew well enough what Lowbacca had really said, but he did not remark on the gentle editing or unnecessary translation. Not everyone knew the language, and Em Teedee insisted it was his duty to make certain the whole strike team understood Lowbacca as well as he did them.

Lowbacca growled something short, and Em Teedee added, “He also wishes me to suggest that frequent requests for information only interrupt his concentration.”

“I know,” Anakin said. “Sorry.”

Though the strike team had quickly mastered most of the
Exquisite Death
’s systems—having studied all available data on Yuuzhan Vong vessels and even experimented with a captured assault boat—the sensors remained a problem. In contrast to the externally oriented observation technologies of the New Republic, the Yuuzhan Vong gathered information by analyzing the
infinitesimal distortions that the gravity of distant objects caused in the ship’s internal space-time. Given that the galaxy’s finest scientists were still struggling to comprehend the basic science of Yuuzhan Vong sensors, it was no wonder Lowbacca was having difficulties operating them—even with Tahiri at his side translating and providing insight into how Yuuzhan Vong thought.

When Anakin looked back to Myrkr, the planet had grown to a cloud-mottled circle the size of Ulaha’s head. The gray fleck beside it was now a tiny disk.

“Definitely a moon,” Anakin said. At this distance, he could not expect to feel anything through the lambent crystal. But he knew what he was seeing. “A Yuuzhan Vong moon.”

Lowbacca let out a victorious growl, and Em Teedee reported, “Master Lowbacca feels it is, indeed, a Yuuzhan Vong worldship.” Lowbacca grunted and yowled a few more times, and the translation droid added, “There are several corvette analogs in orbit around it, though the diameter is quite large for a worldship—approximately one hundred and twenty kilometers.”

That was as large as the first Death Star. Anakin whistled softly to himself, then reached out toward the distant fleck with the Force. Not one to rule out the possibility of coincidence, he was nevertheless suspicious enough of it to inspect it carefully. He felt an all-too-familiar stirring, the feral agitation of a voxyn—but also something else, another presence full of terror and pain … and surprise.

A clear, sharp presence, not hazy. Jedi, not Yuuzhan Vong.

Anakin did not realize he had gasped until a hand took his arm and Alema asked what was wrong. Not answering, he continued to focus on the worldship. The presence touched him back, still full of pain and fear, but now also pity—not for itself, he thought, but for him. He filled his heart with comforting emotions, trying to project an aura of confidence and hope, though he knew the vagaries of the Force might not be capable of conveying the message he wanted. The presence at the other end maintained contact for only a moment longer before abruptly withdrawing, closing itself off to Anakin without any hint of whether it had comprehended what he was trying to communicate.

Tahiri clasped his arm. “Anakin?”

“There are Jedi there,” he said. “With the voxyn.”

“Well, that puts Plan A right out the lock,” Ganner said. Plan A called for them to sneak as close as possible to the cloning facility and destroy it with a baradium-packed missile, then use the resulting confusion to confirm the queen’s destruction and escape. “We’ll have to try something else.”

“That is very brave, of course,” Alema said. Standing beside the commander’s chair opposite Tahiri, she laid a hand on Anakin’s arm and turned to him with a look of entreaty. “But if we forgo our best plan, we stand to lose more Jedi than we would save.”

Jacen emerged from the back of the bridge, his eyes rolling at the Twi’lek’s pouty tone. “Alema, I think Anakin knows what’s at stake here.”

“I can handle this, Jacen,” Anakin said, doing his best to keep the irritation out of his voice. “And there is no need to remind me about the dark side. I understand the consequences of killing our own.”

“Anakin, I only meant—”

“Shouldn’t you be at your battle station?” Anakin asked, deliberately cutting Jacen off. He cast a meaningful look at both Alema and Tahiri. “Shouldn’t everyone?”

Jacen’s face reddened, and Tahiri’s eyes narrowed, but all three retreated to their assigned places and left Anakin to his thoughts. This was one of those times Lando had warned them about, when any choice he made felt like the wrong one—but Lando did not have the Force to guide him, and Anakin still had a few minutes before he had to decide anything. If he waited, maybe things would work out for the better; they almost always did.

Jaina swung the
Exquisite Death
into an approach pattern, and the edge of Myrkr’s enormous green disk began to slide across the port side of the bridge. From space, at least, there was no visible sign of Yuuzhan Vong planet-shaping; it remained the same steam-shrouded forest world depicted in holovids.

The worldship was rapidly filling the viewing dome, swelling from a little smaller than a Kuati banquet plate to the size of a high command conference table. A thin halo of twinkling stars hinted at the escape of radiant heat, while blotchy circles of gray and brown began to define the planetoid’s pocked surface.

Expecting the hailing villip in front of him to activate at any moment, Anakin waved Tahiri close, then used the holoshroud unit on his equipment harness to cloak himself in the prerecorded image of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. Whether the tattoos and scarrings were appropriate for the commander of a corvette-analog vessel was anybody’s guess; there seemed to be the right amount, but New Republic Intelligence was still struggling to learn the significance—if any—of individual patterns.

Lowbacca moaned a warning from the sensor console, informing Anakin that a trio of Yuuzhan Vong corvettes had just appeared from the far side of Myrkr and were lining up for approach behind the
Exquisite Death
. Anakin ordered Jaina to continue as before. Though her face was hidden beneath the pilot’s hood she wore to interface with the vessel, he could feel her apprehension. Not knowing the proper procedure for entering a Yuuzhan Vong base, they had opted to try an open approach, trusting that procedural mistakes would prove less alarming than a furtive advance.

Jaina rolled them to starboard and angled into line behind a string of dark specks drifting across the face of the worldship, now so large that it completely filled the dome. Anakin had Ulaha activate a holocam and begin feeding mapping information to her datapad. The long journey between galaxies had left the massive spacecraft dilapidated and spent. A few black, jagged scars denoted breaches in the outer shell, but most of the planetoid seemed a mottled patchwork of gray dust and jagged yorik coral. A sparse network of surface utility lanes curved along the surface, occasionally converging in starburst intersections or vanishing down the dark mouth of an interior access portal.

The worldship still did not hail them, and the back of Anakin’s neck began to prickle with danger sense. No New Republic base would allow any ship to approach so closely without making contact. Jaina maintained her spacing behind the other ships, following them around the curve of the planetoid. A complex of cone-shaped grashal peaks appeared on the horizon, protruding up through the outer shell, a little to the starboard of the long line of vessels they were following. Even with the naked eye, Anakin
could see that the buildings emerged from the surface close to the city-sized square of a huge black pit.

“Maxmag that, Ulaha,” he said. “What’s it like?”

Ulaha turned her holocam on the complex and increased the magnification. “It appears to be some kind of spaceport,” she wheezed. Though the Bith was much improved after her healing trance, she remained weak and colorless. “There is a large pit surrounded by many entrances, with what look to be loading facilities.”

“Abandoned?”

“Empty,” Ulaha corrected. “No vessels in sight, but the landing pads are stacked with cargo pods … and cages.”

Anakin reached out to the facility with the Force. He no longer felt the pained presence he had noticed before, but the hungry stirring of voxyn was still powerful. The tingle in the back of his neck became a nettling, and, noting that their current approach would keep them well away from the complex, he suddenly understood why the worldship had not yet hailed them.

“They’re trying to lead us into a trap. Jaina, turn toward that complex now!” Anakin activated the comlink. “Ganner, you and Tesar ready that missile. Stand by for targeting coordinates. Everybody, secure your vac suits. We’re in for a rough ride.”