Star by Star (56 page)

Not wishing to draw attention to herself by staring too long at the Solos’ apartment, Viqi looked casually away and continued past, just another Eastport bureaucrat heading home on personal business in the middle of the day. Dressed in a fashionable high-collared overcloak and swank slouch hat, she certainly looked the part—well enough to have fooled the young Jedi trailing her when she and an assistant exchanged clothes in the refresher station of a crowded transit hub. She followed the corridor around the corner to a lift bank and stepped into a tube, removing her hat and overcloak as she rose to the rooftop.

Now garbed in the conservative business tabard of a money watcher, she stepped out onto the sky-shuttle landing pad, deposited the clothing in a disintegrator chute, and crossed to another lift bank. After giving the proper visitor authorization for an apartment on the same level, she descended to the Solos’ floor and started back toward the apartment, trying to think of how she could insert the sensislug without being observed. Entering the cul-de-sac, even on the pretext of examining the beautiful ladalums, was out of the question. The greeter droid would be very polite and solicitous, but it would also be scanning her image and voiceprint for a data match.

Viqi approached the entry head-on this time, strolling along and peering over the top of a sheaf of flimsiplast documents she had brought as a prop. There was simply no way to enter the cul-de-sac without being seen by the greeter droid, which meant she would have to find some other way to insert the sensislug. Her contact had assured her that the creatures were capable of finding their own way inside once they had been targeted, but the Yuuzhan Vong understood even less about cleaning droids than she did about sensislugs. Having already lost half a dozen of the insects trying to slip just one into the NRMOC committee room, she felt reasonably certain that the instant the sensislug came within twenty meters of a ladalum, some little pest hunter would zip out to destroy it.

Viqi was starting to consider other options—food deliveries or using a third party—when she heard the solution marching up the corridor behind her.

“… is hardly the time to go sight-seeing, dear,” Han Solo was saying.

“It’s exactly the time,” Leia countered. “They had a reason for trying to keep the capture of Reecee quiet, and that reason will be all the more pressing now that we know about it.”

Still pretending to be absorbed in her documents, Viqi quietly slipped one hand into her pocket and palmed what felt like a thumb-sized leech in her fingers. In place of a head, it had a huge compound eye. She turned the eye toward the Solos’ crystasteel door and squeezed the creature until she felt its body grow warm with understanding. Han and Leia veered toward the center of the corridor as they came up behind her. Some creature in their party gurgled softly as they passed, and two pairs of metallic feet clanked on the floor behind them.

“Besides, we
know
the reason,” Han argued. “Bilbringi.”

“That’s the obvious reason,” Leia countered. “When have you ever known the Yuuzhan Vong to be obvious?”

The Solos swept past Viqi without a second glance, both dressed in rumpled flight suits. Han cradled an infant in one arm. Viqi was hardly an authority on babies—when the time came to bear one, she intended to have a staff and a telbun to care for the thing—but she did know the Solos’ offspring to be adults now—or nearly so. This had to be the Skywalker heir.

The couple’s famous golden droid came clumping after them, a four-armed TDL nanny droid traveling smoothly at its side. Viqi turned a little more toward the wall. The two humans would not see through her disguise, she knew, because this was the last place they expected to find her. The droids were a different matter. Droids scanned and analyzed and did not let their expectations lead them astray, and she felt fairly certain that the protocol droid, at least, would have her face committed to its memory banks.

The droid seemed more concerned with the discussion between its owners than who she might be. When Han did not answer his wife’s objection, it said, “Forgive me for intruding, but I am quite certain that when Master Luke and Mistress Mara said Ben would be safer on Coruscant, they anticipated that we would be staying longer than fifty-seven minutes.”

Leia shot a look over her shoulder that would have melted lesser droids. “You let me worry about that, Threepio.”

“Yes, Princess.”

Viqi guessed from the presence of the Skywalker baby that they had to be coming from the secret Jedi base. Tsavong Lah was still trying to discover its location—that was one of the reasons he had assigned her this task—and, given what Skywalker had done to her in the senate, she was eager to see the warmaster pleased. She waited a moment longer to make certain there was no one else in the Solos’ party. Then, as they approached the intersection in front of the apartment, she flicked the sensislug at the protocol droid’s back.

The worm hit in absolute silence and slithered down toward the waist coupling, but the droid suddenly paused at the corner and swiveled its head around to look behind it. Viqi hid her face behind her documents and turned the corner—then ran into something barely as high as her chest and cried out in surprise, flinging her flimsiplast props in all directions.

A wispy voice below her rasped, “I beg your forgiveness.”

She looked down to see a little bug-eyed alien with gray skin and a mouthful of sharp teeth, gathering her documents in his long-taloned fingers.

The Noghri passed the documents back to her. “I apologize.”

Viqi allowed the alien to place the props in her hand, then sensed the Solos watching her. She had taken care to disguise her appearance by coloring her hair drab ash and making liberal use of an NRI disguise kit, but at the moment, she could not help wishing that she had accepted her contact’s offer to give her an ooglith masquer. Unable to resist looking, she glanced over at the Solos and found them both staring.

Han’s expression grew concerned. “You okay? Would you like to come inside for a minute?”

Viqi’s heart jumped into her throat. She mumbled something indecipherable, then scurried off shaking her head.

Anakin could feel nothing through the battle meld except doubt and resentment, so he was as surprised as anyone when the
crack-crackle
of a thermal detonator reverberated through the street behind him. Raising his lightsaber to high guard and thumbing the activation switch, he pivoted around to discover a ball of blue-white light contracting between Raynar and Eryl, obliterating everything in a five-meter radius and opening a deep crater in the street. Subsurface service ducts began to spew water and sewer gas, filling the hole with steam and flame.

Over the course of several dozen attempts to reach the cloning facility, the Jedi had crossed replications of nearly every environment where voxyn might be sent to hunt them—replications of agritracts, robofactories, swamp farms, even an automated cloud mine. Now they were pushing through the slave city itself. With tiers of windows and balconies built directly into the walls, the metropolis reminded Anakin of the pictures his mother had shown him of Crevasse City on lost Alderaan. In addition to a dozen different species of slave residents, the artificial city contained turbolifts, slidewalks, even droid-operated hovercars.

Anakin stepped past Tahiri and Tekli and peered over Raynar’s shoulder into the flaming crater. Nothing remained of whatever had prompted the attack.

“Voxyn?” he asked. Since their retreat from the walker, the voxyn attacks had been coming with increasing frequency.

Raynar shrugged. “I didn’t see.”

“It came out of the street hatch,” Eryl explained from the other side. Her green eyes flickered briefly in Raynar’s direction, then she added, “There was no time to do anything but toss a detonator down its throat. Sorry for the waste.”

Anakin thumbed his lightsaber off. “I don’t know that I’d call it a waste.” The team was down to a dozen thermal detonators—now eleven—and perhaps twice that many grenades, but at least they had not lost anyone since Ulaha. “Raynar is probably worth the price of a detonator.”

“Probably?” Raynar objected. “If there’s any question, the House of Thul will gladly reimburse the Jedi for all detonators used on my behalf.”

“You’re sure?” Eryl asked doubtfully.

She circled around the burning crater, then pinched Raynar on the cheek and laughed. Behind her came Zekk and Jaina—like Anakin and Lomi, now completely recovered from their encounter with the flitnats. Even Lowbacca and Jovan had nothing worse to show than a bad rash, thanks to Tekli’s quick realization that the insects had been engineered to promote a debilitating allergic reaction.

Anakin’s earplugs sealed themselves against the disorienting blast of a voxyn screech attack. Such assaults came so regularly now that they were no longer startling. Anakin simply pushed his breath mask into place and started forward to where a mob of slaves was staggering away from a convergence of blasterfire.

A lightsaber flashed, sending the tip of a severed voxyn tail tumbling over the crowd, then the creature itself rose into view as Tenel Ka used the Force to lift it out of a street hatch. Ganner and the Barabels set on it instantly, hacking it apart with their molten blades before Anakin could reach them. Killing voxyn was becoming almost routine; the strike team rarely traveled more than a few kilometers without being attacked by at least one of the things.

Anakin reached out with the Force to search for more. There seemed to be no others lurking beneath the street, but he did perceive someone in anguish lying inside the growing cloud of toxins released by the creature’s noxious blood. Slipping past the fighting, he found a mucus-coated slave curled into a fetal ball, so badly acid-burned that only his raw nerve cones identified him as a Gotal.

Anakin called Tekli forward. She should have felt the need on her own, but the battle meld was so full of discord that it served as little more than confirmation that everyone was still alive and
conscious. As the Chadra-Fan knelt beside the dying Gotal, Lomi and Welk came up, now wearing the breath masks Lowbacca had risked so much to retrieve. They watched Tekli’s ministrations not with the disdain or detachment Anakin had expected, but with visible outrage. He knew better than to think they were empathizing with the slave’s suffering; they were simply using the anger it engendered to feed their dark-side power.

“I don’t like coming through here.” Anakin eyed the growing number of slave residents stumbling away from the toxic fumes. “We’re endangering them with our presence.”

“They are already in danger,” Lomi said. “And you are the one who wishes to try the voxyn warren. This is the only way to reach it.”

“You know you’re going to get us killed?” Welk asked. “Even Yuuzhan Vong don’t go down there.”

“Which is why
we
must,” Anakin said. Whether Nom Anor intended to or not, he was wearing the strike team down, steadily depleting its munitions and draining its vigor. “We need to break through soon, or we never will.”

“If this doesn’t work, we may have to accept never,” Lomi said. “There comes a time when we must think of our own lives.”

“Yeah, like after we’ve vaped the queen.” Tahiri stepped to Anakin’s side. “There is no try, only do.”

Lomi flashed Tahiri a condescending smirk. “Very impressive, child. You have memorized Skywalker’s maxims.” She looked back to Anakin. “Seriously, if this does not work, you must signal your extraction team. I won’t throw away my life.”

“There’s more at risk here than your life—or ours,” Anakin said.

Lomi rolled her eyes. “I know—the Jedi themselves.”

“The Jedi are the galaxy’s best hope of survival,” Anakin replied. “Otherwise, the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t be working so hard to destroy us.”

Lomi ran her eyes down Anakin’s figure, her expression almost seductive. “You are so very earnest, Anakin. It is really quite adorable.” Her smile turned icy. “But I did not see Skywalker sending his Jedi Knights to save the Nightsisters when the Yuuzhan Vong captured Dathomir. I will show you to the
voxyn cave, but if we cannot fight through, you must call your extraction team.”

Anakin hesitated a moment, wondering how earnest she would think him after he lied to her—and then he realized there was no need. He returned her smile with one just as icy.

“Extraction team?” he asked. “What extraction team would that be?”

Lomi’s eyes narrowed, and she reached out to test Anakin with the Force. “Do you think you can …” When she encountered no resistance, her jaw fell, and she let the probe drop. “You are on a suicide mission?”

“It’s no suicide mission,” Tahiri said. “We’ve walked rockier trails than this, lots of times.”

Lomi ignored her and continued to stare at Anakin.

“The warmaster anticipated our plans,” he explained. “We lost our ship coming in.”

“And your backup plan?” Lomi asked. “Surely, you have a backup plan?”

Anakin nodded. “Kill the queen and destroy the lab, then hope we can steal a ship in the confusion.”

“I see.” The anger in Lomi’s eyes grew more intent. “There is no try …”

“Only do,” Welk finished, his voice mocking. “If that doesn’t blast my bones!”

The acid-burned Gotal finally died, and the strike team started up the street again. As soon as they left the toxin cloud, the mob closed in, begging the Jedi to free them, thrusting children out for rescue, volunteering to fight. There were thousands of slaves—Ranats, Ossan, Togorians, even some species Anakin could not name, all cognizant of their fate, all desperate to escape their coming doom, the very people who needed the Jedi—the weak, the downtrodden, the defenseless. Anakin’s heart grew heavier each time he was forced to say he could not help, that his mission here was too vital, that he had no way to get them off the worldship. Soon, it grew too painful to explain that much. He simply apologized in a quiet and calm voice, using Jedi persuasion techniques to comfort those in despair and to redirect the wrath of those who were angry.

Lomi started down a cramped alley-canyon that would not
have felt out of place in Coruscant’s underlevels. Barely three meters wide, the lane descended at a steep angle beneath a network of balconies and catwalks, then vanished into the dank-smelling murk ahead. The windows and doors that pocked the walls to both sides were sealed behind curtains of living membrane. An odd double pathway worn into the dusty ground was spaced about right for the wide-set legs of a voxyn. Noting that the slave residents showed no desire to follow them into the alley, Anakin stopped three steps in.