Star by Star (71 page)

The Solos’ comm unit began to beep for attention. Han frowned and started to rise.

“Han!” Surprised by the alarm in her own voice, Leia caught him by the arm. “Where are you going?”

Han gestured vaguely in the direction of the study. “To answer the comm.”

Leia shook her head and pulled Han back to the couch. “Don’t leave me.”

Han’s face melted. “Never. I’m not going anywhere.”

The comm unit continued to beep. The vidscreen split into three images, one showing the uproar in the senate galleries, another the holograms of Sovv and his supporters, and the third the top of Borsk Fey’lya’s head as he stared at his instrument console.

C-3PO stepped into the door. “Excuse me, Master Han, but the comm unit is requesting attention.”

“We know, Goldenrod,” Han said. “We lost a son, not our hearing.”

C-3PO’s photoreceptors dimmed noticeably. “Oh, of course.” He clumped out of the room. The turmoil in the senate chamber finally began to fade, though there was still too much
noise for the sound droid to pick up Admiral Sovv’s voice when his hologram spoke to Fey’lya again.

The chief of state looked up long enough to signal the commanders to wait, then returned his attention to his instruments and spoke briefly.

A moment later, C-3PO walked into the room with a portable comm screen. He glanced at the vidscreen and tipped his head in robotic bewilderment, then turned to the couch.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but Chief of State Fey’lya is asking to speak with Mistress Leia.”

“Me?” Leia’s mind would normally have leapt immediately to speculations as to why Fey’lya would be calling her at such a time, but all she could think of now was that she hadn’t slept or bathed or even brushed her hair since it happened. “No. Absolutely not.”

C-3PO glanced at the vidscreen again, then said, “He said to tell you it was matter of galactic security.”

Leia looked to Han, and she did not even need to say anything. He simply took the comm screen from C-3PO and put it on the couch between them, with the built-in holocam facing him.

“This is Han, Chief Fey’lya. Leia can’t talk right now.”

On the wall screen, Leia watched Fey’lya’s hand run through his head fur. “Yes, I’ve heard that something might have happened to Anakin. If that’s so, I’d like to express not only my own sympathy, but that of the entire New Republic.”

“We appreciate that.” Han glanced at the wall screen and rolled his eyes, then looked back into the comm unit’s holocam. “Now, I’m sure you’ll understand if I sign off.”

Fey’lya’s hand darted out toward his instrument panel. “Wait—there was one other thing, General Solo.”

“General?” Han looked over the comm screen at Leia and cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re reactivating my commission? You can’t be that desperate for line officers.”

It finally occurred to Leia that her husband was playing with the New Republic’s chief of state not for his own amusement, but in an attempt to cheer her up. The effort touched her, even if it failed to come close to drawing a smile.

“Not yet, General Solo.” Fey’lya’s ears twitched, a rare sign of being flustered. “Actually, I was hoping to prevail on Leia to say
a few words of support for my government to some of her old friends in the military.”

Han glanced over the comm screen.

Fey’lya seemed to realize Leia was listening in, because he quickly added, “I’m sure Leia realizes how supportive I have been of the Jedi recently, and the military has several sizable droid orders pending approval with Tendrando Arms.”

Leia sighed and stared at the floor. Was this what Anakin had given his life for? The thought was so depressing that she started to sob again.

“Sorry, Chief Fey’lya,” Han said, reaching for the comm screen power switch. “This time, you’re on your own.”

To Cilghal’s sensitive nostrils, the foamy fungus eating away the scorched metal of the surviving X-wings smelled almost as foul as the soiled flight suits of the eight exhausted pilots themselves. There was an acidic edge to it, and the metallic mustiness of corrosion—a common-enough smell on oceanic worlds like her own Mon Calamari, but certainly a rarity coming from the rustproof alloys used in starfighters.

Cilghal used a plastifibe agitator to scrape some of the yellow growth into a sample bag, and the musty smell grew stronger. Though she had already scanned for the typical Yuuzhan Vong attack toxins, she found herself wondering if she should have taken the time to return to her laboratory for her breath mask.

Behind her, Kyp Durron sneezed, then asked, “What do you think?” After several dozen terrifying hours zipped tight in his EV suit because of a vacuum leak in his cracked canopy, he was by far the worst-smelling of the survivors. “A new kind of weapon?”

“Not a very effective one, if it is,” Cilghal said. “If this is all it grew in the time you needed to limp back to Eclipse, it will not destroy many fighters before the tech crews steam it off.”

She continued to scrape and finally reached bare hull. As her nose had led her to suspect, the metal was pitted with corrosion. The fungus was metabolizing the X-wing itself—but why? The Yuuzhan Vong would not have gone to the trouble of creating a self-heating, vacuum-hardened fungus unless there was a purpose to it.

Kyp sneezed, and Cilghal turned to face him.

“How long have you been doing that?” she asked. “Were you sneezing in your EV suit?”

Kyp shook his head and wiped his nose on the cuff of his flight suit. “It started when I unzipped.”

“Spores.” Motioning Kyp to follow along, Cilghal took her sample bag and started toward the hangar hatch. “They wanted it to produce spores.”

Cilghal was just about to palm the control pad when the blaring roar of an assault alarm reverberated through the cavern. It continued for fifteen ear-piercing seconds, then was replaced by the watch officer’s voice.

“Attention all crews: This is no drill. We have an incoming yorik coral vessel.”

“Sith blood! It has to be that frigate again.” Kyp had already explained to the watch officer that their return had taken so long because of a frigate that kept turning up behind them. “I could have sworn we had lost him.”

Before Cilghal could stop him, Kyp turned and ran off to join the bustle as the ship crews prepared Eclipse’s motley assortment of backup starfighters for launch. With the
Errant Venture
in a protective orbit around the base and well crewed by refugees from Reecee, there was no question of a single frigate destroying the Jedi stronghold.

Unfortunately, Cilghal knew, there was no longer any chance of keeping the secret of its location. As a vessel traveled through hyperspace, its hull built up a tachyon charge that was not released until it entered realspace again. If she was right about the fungus growing on the eight X-wings—and apparently she was, given the approaching Yuuzhan Vong frigate—the spores were freeing the tachyons in hyperspace, creating a long thread of faster-than-light particles leading straight to Eclipse.

So absorbed in this theory was Cilghal that when she returned to her laboratory, she immediately set to work stripping a tachyon gun from a spare S-thread spinner. The Mon Calamari was not very good with human mechanical equipment—she preferred to rely on Jaina or Danni for such jobs—so the task absorbed all of her concentration for the next quarter hour, until the
base alarm blared again and the dismayed watch officer announced that the frigate had sacrificed itself to slip three skips past Eclipse’s outer defenses.

The whole base shook as the two big turbolasers opened up on the small vessels. At first, Cilghal took the erratic ticking she heard to be subsurface vibration from the weapons, but then she noticed a complicated repeating pattern, and it was coming from the gravitic pulse coder standing in front of the captured yammosk’s cell.

Cilghal rushed over to the observation window and found the creature’s tentacles splayed straight out in the pool, its body membranes pulsing in consonance with the ticking of the pulse coder.

“So you
do
talk!”

Cilghal turned to the pulse coder and found it scratching a complicated series of peak and trough readings onto a flimsiplast drum. They did not yet have enough data to convert the marks into a meaningful message, but it seemed likely that the scratches would translate into identity codes, vectoring instructions, and target priorities. Cilghal activated their own makeshift gravitic wave modulator, adjusted the amplitude to match that being recorded, and began to generate the gravitic equivalent of white noise.

The yammosk stopped pulsing for an instant, then whirled around in its tank and launched itself into the viewport with a resonant thud. Cilghal stumbled back, and the creature held itself against the transparisteel, its tentacles lashing along the edges in search of a seam.

Cilghal turned off her modulator. When the yammosk dropped back into the water and began to pulse again, she knew they had succeeded.

The watch officer’s voice came over the internal comm system again. “Suicide run! Close all airtight hatches, secure environment suits, and prepare for impact in ten, nine …”

Cilghal glanced at the pulse coder’s flimsiplast drum and suddenly knew what was recorded there. Though she could not have translated the message directly, she felt certain it said something like, “Here I am. Destroy me—destroy me at any cost.”

There was no time to disconnect all of the power and data feeds and save the pulse coder. Cilghal ripped the flimsiplast off the scratch drum and flew out of the doomed laboratory, almost forgetting to slap the emergency hatch seal as she left.

The Sabers dropped out of the
Mon Mothma
’s forward fighter bay and saw Coruscant’s thumb-sized disk twinkling at them through a gap in the Yuuzhan Vong fleet, the planet’s trillion-light aura a genial reminder of what they were fighting to protect. Ben was down there beneath one of those lights, sleeping soundly in his aunt’s apartment and dreaming of his mother’s return. That much, Mara could feel through the Force. What she could not feel was when his dream would be answered. Despite the steady flow of New Republic reinforcements—even Admiral Ackbar was rumored to be on his way with a Mon Calamari fleet—the Yuuzhan Vong continued to press their advance. Their route insystem could be traced by the swath of derelict vessels littering space, but they still had half their fleet, and now they were within sight of Coruscant.

It was as close to her child as Mara intended to let them come.

A sheet of blue energy lit space overhead as the
Mon Mothma
’s turbolaser banks opened fire again. A moment later, a Yuuzhan Vong frigate vanished from the tactical display, and the cockpit sensor alarms started to scream as a flight of skips headed their way.

Wedge Antilles’s voice came over the comm. “All squadrons, stand by for close defense. This time, we’re going to make them stop and pay attention.”

Mara was engulfed by the reassuring warmth of her husband’s Force touch. “He’s going to be all right,” Luke said. “We’re not going to let anything happen to him.”

Blue eyes widening as the safe band narrowed, the
Bail Organa
’s young comm officer asked, “Shall I ask Planetary Defense to deactivate a mine sector for us, General?”

Garm Bel Iblis twirled his mustache and, ignoring the tactical display on the bridge’s wall screen, stared out the viewport at the plasma storm blossoming against the Star Destroyer’s forward shields. Between flashes, it was just possible to see a swarm of blocky silhouettes moving forward behind the assault, rapidly swelling into the shapes of New Republic starliners and mass transports. Never one to substitute technology for his own judgment, he knew instinctively that the refugee screen would be on him in less than a minute—just as he knew that Planetary Defense would need to deactivate two sectors of mines—not one—if Fleet Group Two was going to withdraw in order.

“General?” the young woman asked. “I have an open channel to Planetary Defense.”

“Very good, Anga.” Garm’s eyes shot briefly to the tactical display, where he saw that with all the defections from Fleet Group One, his force was actually larger than at the beginning of the battle. “You may tell Planetary Defense to keep all sectors of the mine shell active. We won’t be retreating.”

Anga’s face went as pale as her hair. “Excuse me, General?”

“Give me an open channel to all fleet groups,” Garm ordered. “I’ll need to say a few words.”

Located in a repulsor-equipped satellite hovering on a station in front of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion route, Orbital Defense Headquarters was as large as a Mon Calamari floating city, and the control hub at its heart was the size of a full shock-ball court. Despite being packed to overflowing with weapons directors and traffic coordinators, the nerve center was also, at the moment Lando followed his escort through the hatch, as still as space.

Noting that every pair of eyes in the place was fixed on the ceiling, Lando lifted his chin and found himself staring through a large transparisteel dome at a vast abyss of spiraling magma trails and blossoming fireballs. Some of the explosions appeared close enough to lick the shields. Lando’s instinct was to drop for cover and crawl back to the
Lady Luck
as quickly as his hands and knees would carry him, but it was a matter of pride with him never to be the first to panic. Despite what his eyes were telling him, the station remained stable and, in a room packed with electronics, there was not a single crackle of pulse static.

In a deliberately calm voice, he asked, “Optical ceiling?”

“That’s right,” his escort, a winsome petty officer who would have made even Tendra frown with jealousy, said. “Sometimes it helps to point to the station and
see
what’s going on.”

“Uh-huh,” Lando said.

Now that he was sorting out the scene, he could see the blue circles of several thousand ion drives receding into the firestorm. Garm Bel Iblis had turned on the invaders like a cornered wampa, and Fleet Group Two was accelerating through the refugee screen to meet the enemy head-on. New Republic corvettes and frigates were vanishing by the dozens; cruisers and Star Destroyers were belching fire and falling away one after another.