Star by Star (50 page)

“Presence detected,” 2-4S warned.

Lomi rushed the team down a swampy side rift with scaly trunked trees rising out of green water.

“Two-Four-S, secure the intersection,” Anakin ordered. “Affirmative,” the droid responded.

They were barely a hundred splashes into the swamp when the
whumpf-whumpf
of the droid’s blaster cannon reverberated down the canyon.

“Lead ship destroyed,” 2-4S reported over their comlinks.

The fire continued another second before it was joined by the roaring sizzle of a plasma volcano. Through the treetops, Jacen glimpsed the dark disk of a coralskipper swinging toward the canyon mouth, a fan of dark mist pouring from its belly.

“Breath masks!” he shouted.

Most members of the strike team were already pulling the masks over their faces, but the two Dark Jedi could only glance helplessly at the others. Lomi turned to Anakin with an outstretched hand.

“I need a mask.”

“Hold your breath,” Zekk said nastily.

“And who will guide us if she falls?” Alema demanded.

The Twi’lek tossed her breath mask across the swamp, using the Force to propel it into Lomi’s hands, then the roar of 2-4S’s propulsion rockets sounded from the intersection. Jacen glanced back to see the droid rising out of the swamp on a column of yellow flame, all weapon systems pouring fire into the nose of the coralskipper. The enemy pilot countered with a pair of plasma balls to the chest. YVH 2-4S vanished inside a ball of white flame, but still managed to steer himself into the oncoming coralskipper and trigger his self-destruct charges.

Coralskipper and droid vanished together in a brilliant flash. Jacen’s vision spotted, then the shock wave sent him stumbling backward through the water. He was caught by Tenel Ka’s strong hand. After steadying him, she said something he could not hear over the ringing in his ears, but the sentiment of which he recognized through the battle meld: His breath mask would do him no good dangling from his hand.

Jacen pulled the straps over his head, more than a little distressed by 2-4S’s annihilation. Not only had the droid been a valuable and respected comrade, but with both him and 2-1S destroyed, the entire strike team felt far more exposed, as though their protector had vanished and left them to fend for themselves.

When the spots cleared from his eyes, Jacen saw a cloud of oily smoke drifting down the canyon toward them. Beneath it hung the same dark mist that the coralskipper had been releasing
when 2-4S destroyed it. He turned to warn the others and found Anakin already motioning the team forward—then he felt the familiar agitation of a voxyn somewhere ahead.

“Sith blood!” Tahiri put her lightsaber in one hand and her blaster in the other. “When does something go right?”

A forest of lightsabers snapped to life, and Anakin ordered, “Keep going—let’s stay ahead of that mist until it disperses.”

The Barabels inserted their earplugs, then dropped to their bellies and glided out across the water, their thick tails propelling them quietly forward. The rest of the strike team put in their own earplugs and waded after the hatchmates, some with blaster weapons in hand, others with lightsabers, some with both.

They advanced no more than twenty meters before a loud purling rippled through the trees ahead, and Jacen felt an outpouring of surprise from Bela. He pointed toward her side of the gorge and started to shout the alarm, but the rest of the team was already splashing in her direction.

The Barabel shot from the water like a rocket, plastering her body against a nearby tree trunk and scrambling for the top. Behind her came a voxyn’s flattish snout, its beady lips drawing open to spray acid. A flurry of blaster bolts converged on the creature’s head. Many hit scales and bounced harmlessly away, but several more burned through or buried themselves into the soft tissue around its eyes and ear slits. Ganner and Alema leapt forward and hacked off the smoking head with their lightsabers, leaving the neck stump to slide back beneath the surface.

“Found it!” Bela called, dropping back into the swamp.

The three Barabels broke into a fit of sissing inside their breath masks, then the mist curtain caught up to them and tiny droplets of black vapor began to melt into the water.

“Alema, Welk—into the water!” Jacen yelled.

Alema was already underwater by the time he finished, but, not being part of the battle meld, Welk was slower. He looked around in confusion for a moment, then finally grasped what was happening and threw himself beneath the surface—only to bob to the surface a few seconds later, limp and floating facedown.

Lomi used the Force to summon him to her, then held him above the water while Tekli examined him.

“His breathing is fine,” the Chadra-Fan said. “I think it’s only …”

She let the sentence trail off as she—and everyone else in the battle meld—experienced a sudden surge of panic from Alema.

“You think what?” Lomi asked, unaware of what the others were feeling. “Will he recover, or am I—”

She was interrupted by the crackle of liquid turning instantly to vapor as Alema’s lightsaber ignited underwater. The Twi’lek shot out of the swamp in a cloud of steam, using the Force to somersault backward over Ganner.

“Another voxyn!” Alema yelled, pointing. “It caught me by … the …”

Her eyes closed before she finished, and she splashed into the water on her back. Ganner and Bela ignited their own lightsabers and began to back away, stabbing at the water as they moved. Jacen concentrated on muting the team’s negative feelings and keeping the battle meld efficient, and Anakin used the Force to lift Alema out of harm’s way and float her over to Tahiri.

“Take her.” Anakin pointed back toward the murky forest where the coralskippers had found them. “Take Lomi and Tekli, wait for us on dry land.”

“Me?” Tahiri let the Twi’lek sink half into the water before reaching out with the Force to keep her afloat. “Why do I have—”

“Because Anakin asked you to,” Jacen said. He stretched a hand toward where Alema had fallen and summoned the Twi’lek’s lightsaber from beneath the water, then slapped it into the girl’s hand. “Now is no time for jealousy, Tahiri.”

“I’m not jealous,” Tahiri snapped. “I just don’t like being sent off like some child.”

With that, she motioned to Lomi and Tekli, then took Alema and retreated up the canyon. Jacen activated his own lightsaber and started forward to join the others searching for the voxyn, but saw the Barabels spreading across the channel with a handful of concussion grenades and realized they had a better idea.

“Everybody back,” Anakin ordered, approving the plan even before the Barabels suggested it. “Watch those trees—we don’t want them falling on someone.”

The Barabels began to throw their grenades in simultaneous trios, working inward from the farthest distance they guessed
the voxyn could have traveled. With each column of water the explosions sent shooting into the air, Jacen felt a sharp concussion against his legs. On the second throw, three voxyn floated to the surface with glazed eyes and bleeding ears. Ganner and Lowbacca used their lightsabers to finish the stunned creatures.

“That’s four.” Anakin deactivated his lightsaber. “The whole pack.”

“Perhaps, but it would be wise to be sure,” Tenel Ka said, glancing in Jacen’s direction. “Do you feel any more?”

Jacen reached out to see if he could locate any other creatures. It took a moment, but he finally located a large group of presences several hundred meters up the canyon.

“There are more,” he reported. “A half a dozen, at least. They seem kind of stunned and wary.”

“Good,” Tenel Ka said. “Then that will give us plenty of time to go the other way.”

Anakin nodded, and the strike team turned to go. Twenty meters from the intersection, they found Tahiri and the others rushing back toward them.

“No! Go that way!” Tahiri pointed up the canyon toward the voxyn. “Nom Anor and his bird are coming this way with about a hundred Yuuzhan Vong!”

“What next?” Raynar complained. He slapped a hand to his forehead and ran it over his blond hair. “Can anything else go wrong?”

Zekk glanced at Lomi, then turned away shaking his head as if to say this was what came of consorting with Dark Jedi. Jacen realized that he needed to speak with Zekk at the first opportunity about his impact on the battle meld, but Anakin seemed oblivious to the strike team’s growing sense of fatalism.

Not seeming to hear Raynar, Anakin clapped a hand on Tahiri’s shoulder and flashed a brash Solo smile. “This is no problem,” he said.

Lowbacca growled a question, which Em Teedee translated almost accurately as, “Master Lowbacca wishes to inquire if you have lost your mind.”

“That was a long time ago,” Jaina answered, not quite laughing. “And if he’s thinking what I’m thinking, it’s just crazy enough to work.”

Hoping to share with the others the positive emotional spark from which Jaina’s words sprang, Jacen reached out to his sister—and found only the same battle numbness as before. Trying not to let his concern show, he asked, “What
are
you thinking?”

“Ambush,” Jaina said.

Anakin nodded and pointed to four trees. “That will be our killing zone. We’ll close the Yuuzhan Vong off from behind and fire from adjacent sides, with high in the back covering low on the side.”

The battle meld remained tight enough so that was all he needed to say. The firing teams rushed to their assigned places, the humans spreading out in the water along the canyon wall, while Lowbacca took Jovan Drark and the Barabels high into the trees and spread out across the channel. Tekli used the Force to lift Alema and Welk into the trees well outside the ambush area. Jacen placed himself at the corner of the angle, where he would be as close as possible to everyone in the battle meld.

Lomi waded up to Anakin, who was standing in the water just five meters from Jacen. “Very impressive, young Solo,” she said. “Where would you like me?”

“Out of the way. You have no weapon.”

Lomi gave him a sarcastic smile. “A Jedi is never without a weapon, Anakin. Would you rather I use a blaster or the dark side?”

Anakin sighed, then used his comlink to have Lowbacca pass down Alema’s G-9 power blaster and grenade belt.

“Anakin, you can’t!” Zekk protested. He was so loud that Anakin could hear him even without using the comlink.

“Not your choice, Bounty Hunter,” Anakin said. “This might get ugly, and she has a right to defend herself.”

“Tell him that Welk and I will promise not to use the dark side—as long as we remain armed,” Lomi said, sneering. “That should calm him.”

Anakin relayed the message.

“I suppose you’ll be bringing them into the battle meld next,” Zekk said sarcastically.

A warning click came over the comm channel, and the human Jedi lay down beneath the surface of the swamp, relying on their
breath masks’ backup oxygen canister for air. It was not long before they began to feel the tension of those watching the enemy’s approach from the trees, though this sensation was all but overwhelmed by the qualms Zekk and several others felt at seeing an armed Dark Jedi in their midst. Though Jacen was not entirely happy about the matter himself, it seemed a better alternative than having her call on the dark side. He did his best to subordinate Zekk’s resentment and keep everyone’s emotions focused on the task at hand, but the discord was hurting their combat effectiveness. He could feel it.

Finally, the faint sloshing of wading Yuuzhan Vong came to his ears underwater, and an eruption of glee from the Barabels let everyone know it was time to attack. Jacen rose quietly out of the swamp and saw a mass of enemy warriors moving through the trees with far too much confidence—convinced, apparently, that even Jedi would not attack at an odds disadvantage in excess of five to one.

Obviously, they had not done their research on the Solo family. Jacen armed the fragmentation grenade in his hand and threw it into the midst of the still-oblivious Yuuzhan Vong, then raised his T-21 repeating blaster and opened fire.

The Yuuzhan Vong reacted like the well-trained warriors they were. Even with the swamp exploding into shrapnel and blaster bolts all around them, they did not panic or fall into helpless confusion. Their officers immediately began to shout orders—and were promptly picked off by Jovan Drark’s deadly sharpshooter blaster rifle—the “longblaster.” Jacen caught a glimpse of Nom Anor yelling into a shoulder villip near the back of the company and swung his G-9 power blaster in the executor’s direction, but could not bring himself to fire—at least not instantly. It was one thing to attack an impersonal foe in the necessity of battle, quite another to murder a much-despised enemy. Jacen had learned on Duro, when he had been forced to act to prevent Tsavong Lah from killing his mother, that a Jedi was free—no,
obligated
—to protect others from evil. But targeting a specific person out of anger still felt like murder—and using a battle as an excuse to commit such a sinister act still seemed like the way to the dark side.

Before he could work the matter out, Vergere stepped out
from behind a tree, inadvertently placing herself between Jacen and his target. Jacen raised his weapon, training his aim on Nom Anor’s head. Vergere glanced at him with her slanted eyes and briefly locked gazes, then grabbed the executor and pulled him to safety behind a tree. Jacen squeezed his trigger and watched the bolt flash harmlessly across the swamp, then swung his weapon back toward the battle.

With their officers dead and vonduun crab armor shattering all around them, the Yuuzhan Vong warriors were seeking cover underwater. Someone called “concussion” over the comlink, and Jacen stopped firing to pull a grenade from his equipment belt—then realized that he had no idea who had spoken. Clearly, the battle meld was suffering.

“Two-second delay,” Anakin commed. “Arm.”

In the time it took Jacen to thumb the arming switch, the Yuuzhan Vong began to regroup, at least two dozen rising out of the water behind the cover of tree trunks or fallen logs.

“Throw.”

Jacen tossed his grenade into the center of the killing zone with everyone else’s, then raised his rapid blaster and began firing again. The swamp surface bucked upward, and several Yuuzhan Vong floated up bleeding from eyes and ears, staring vacantly at the sky.