Star by Star (73 page)

Then, almost as one, the crippled Yuuzhan Vong vessels dropped out of orbit, hurling themselves into the planetary shields. Disruption static shot across the atmosphere. Whole grids shimmered and winked out. Planet-bound generator stations exploded with flashes brilliant enough to be seen from space. Skips began to drop off the surviving Yuuzhan Vong vessels and dive toward the surface.

On Mara’s tactical display, the cruiser carrying the fourth yammosk was blinking slowly to show damage. But it was still intact, drifting toward the sunny side of the planet.

“Okay, Farmboy,” Wedge commed. “
Now
you are authorized to attack.”

Even before Jaina peered into the sunken compound, she feared they might be too late. An oily column of pyre smoke was rising out of the pit, gathering beneath in a blackened valve that periodically cracked open to puff the fumes out into the vacuum. The air reeked of charred flesh and scorched bone, but also of slower kinds of decomposition that made clear why the place lay so far from anything else. Whatever the Yuuzhan Vong did with their dead, it did not involve preserving them.

Despite the guidance of her comlink’s signal finder, Jaina did not see Lowbacca until a powdery arm rose out of the ash and waved them onto the observation balcony outside the tunnel mouth. She dropped to her belly and, trying not to think about the fact that she was crawling through the incinerated remains of untold thousands of Yuuzhan Vong, advanced to the edge of the pit.

What lay below struck her as more of a processing center than a mortuary. About a tenth the size of the spaceport, the five-sided facility lay at the hub of a dozen large travelways, most of them emerging from the worldship’s murky interior. Many of the subterranean passages had been permanently sealed with yorik coral plugs. The rest were choked with Yuuzhan Vong mourners, their numbers no doubt swollen by the strike team’s efficiency—a thought in which Jaina found herself taking some solace. The Yuuzhan Vong had finally shattered the emotional armor that had been accumulating around her since Anni Capstan, her first regular Rogue Squadron wingmate, perished over Ithor. They had made the war
hurt
again, and now she wanted to hurt them back.

As in the spaceport, long colonnades at the bottom of the five outer walls opened into a network of utility warrens whose purpose
Jaina could only guess at and cared little about. The five grottoes that stood in the facility’s five corners were more interesting. The effigy of a major Yuuzhan Vong god sat in each recess, gazing out at a deep pit directly in front of his—or her—eyes. Beside each pit stood a priest and several assistants, chanting prayers to the gods and inviting the mourners, one group at a time, to step forward and throw a piece of their loved one into the pit. Which piece seemed to depend on the particular effigy. Into one pit, they lowered the skins; into another, they tossed the major bones of the body; into Yun-Yammka’s pit—the only god Jaina recognized—they poured the blood.

The actual preparation of the corpse was performed at one of any number of stations of varying opulence scattered around the interior of the compound. Selection of a preparer seemed to involve a fair amount of barter, as Jaina could see mourners arguing—sometimes violently—with the aproned body-dressers who performed the work. After the work was done, the first stop was always a blazing pyre in the center of the compound, where the skull and hands were thrown.

Jaina grew cold inside. “If they did that to Anakin—”

Lowbacca groaned softly and pointed over the rim. Being careful not to push any ash over the edge, Jaina eased herself forward and saw, twenty meters below, a handful of Yuuzhan Vong warriors playing some game that involved kicking a snarling spike-creature into the opponent’s bare chest hard enough to make it stick. Standing off to one side, weaving Anakin’s lightsaber through a surprisingly smooth practice routine, was Vergere.

“So where’s Anakin?” Tahiri hissed.

Lowbacca gestured at the warren beside the warriors, then to a nearby air lock, explaining in a soft rumble that the lock opened into a small docking pit where Vergere and her companions had a shuttle waiting. Jaina and the others donned their vac suits, then camouflaged themselves with a coat of ash and spent the next hour watching the gruesome rites below. Had they not seen a pair of Yuuzhan Vong emerge from the warren with the husk-encased body of a comrade and depart in one of the small yorik coral transports the Yuuzhan Vong sometimes used inside the world-ship, the wait would have been interminable. As it
was, it merely gave Jaina a chance to watch the ghastly spectacle and hope the warriors who had killed Anakin were among those being offered to their gods.

At last, a Yuuzhan Vong subaltern emerged from the warren and summoned two of the crew inside. The others quickly began to dress, pulling thin tunics over their heads and coaxing their living armor open so they could don it again. Jaina cautiously lifted her power blaster out of the ash, clearing the emitter nozzle and targeting sensors with a quick breath and rub of her tunic.

“Blast them when Anakin’s out where we can see him,” Jaina said over the comlink. She missed the intimacy of the battle meld, but it was probably a good thing that Jacen was not here to link them all together; as angry as she was feeling, she did not want to open her emotions to the others. “We’ll jump down and get him, then commandeer the shuttle, go find Jacen, and finish this thing.”

“Check,” Zekk said, acknowledging the order.

By the time the others had checked off, as well, the subaltern was walking into view. Behind him came the two crew members, an Anakin-sized husk suspended between.

“May I have the officer?” Alema asked, setting the longblaster’s sight on the subaltern.

“Take him,” Jaina said.

The others named their targets, as well, Tahiri taking the front husk-carrier and Zekk the back. Lowbacca set his sights on the pilot, and Jaina aimed her power blaster at Vergere.

“I’ve got Featherbag,” she said. “Fire at—”

Four blaster bolts lanced down into the mortuary pit, but Zekk’s hand crashed down across Jaina’s barrel and her shot went wide, burning into the ground next to Vergere’s feet. The creature was already jumping to one side, Anakin’s lightsaber coming around smoothly, as though she actually knew how to use it—a notion that was dispelled when she let it slip from her hand and clatter bladeless to the ground.

Jaina whirled on Zekk. “What’d you do that for? I had her!”

“And we don’t know you should have,” Zekk retorted almost as hotly. “She’s done us no harm, and she’s had the chance.”

“The company she keeps is harm enough!” Jaina peered back
into the pit, but her target had already snatched Anakin’s lightsaber up and ducked out of sight—as had the spared husk-carrier, taking with him her brother’s body. “Zekk, don’t do that again. Don’t you dare stand in my way!”

By now, an astonished murmur was rolling across the compound as the crowd below began to realize they were under attack. Jaina shouldered her blaster, then snapped her lightsaber off her belt and hurled herself headlong into the pit. Using the Force to slow her descent, she performed a twisting flip and landed facing into the warren, midway between Tahiri and Lowbacca. Alema was on the other side of Tahiri, her longblaster rising to her shoulder. The warrior whose life Zekk had spared was backing under the wall, using Anakin’s body to shield himself from the Twi’lek’s weapon and drawing his coufee.

“You two secure the shuttle,” Jaina ordered Lowie and Tahiri. “Alema and I will get Anakin.”

As they scrambled to obey, the Yuuzhan Vong plunged his coufee into the husk and cut it open near the head. “You want your
Jeedai
?” He thrust the blade through a layer of clear gelatinous slime and placed the tip on Anakin’s cheek. “Stay back, or I give him to you in pieces!”

The longblaster roared, missing the Yuuzhan Vong but demolishing the keystone of the arch behind him. He flinched and looked over his shoulder at the tons of rubble crashing down behind him, then turned back toward Jaina and moved his knife toward Anakin’s eye.

Rage boiling inside her like magma, Jaina reached out with the Force and shoved Anakin’s body hard. The Yuuzhan Vong yelled in surprise and stumbled back into the collapsing arch, his coufee sliding away from the eye. Jaina jerked her brother free of the warrior’s grasp and sent him floating in Alema’s direction.

“Take Anakin,” she said.

As Jaina spoke, she was opening herself to her anger, using the power of its emotion to draw the Force into her as the Dark Masters Brakiss and Tamith Kai had tried to force her to do so long ago, when she and Jacen had been imprisoned at the Shadow Academy with Lowbacca. The power came surging into her in cold waves, feeding on her hatred of the Yuuzhan Vong and pouring it back to her twofold.

In a motion so fast Jaina barely saw it, the warrior sat up and flicked his coufee at her throat. She could have dodged or blocked with her lightsaber, but she did not. Instead, with the fierce energy crackling inside her, she used her free hand to bat the weapon aside, then raised her hand toward her attacker and released the dark power inside. A fork of lightning crackled into existence a few centimeters beyond her glove tips, then blasted a hole through the Yuuzhan Vong’s chest and hurled him onto the rubble pile smoking and motionless.

Jaina felt someone watching and turned to find Vergere staring at her from the shelter of a nearby archway, Anakin’s lightsaber dangling from one hand and her narrow eyes angled in what seemed a peculiar expression of dismay. Jaina sneered at the creature, then raised her hand and loosed another bolt of Force lightning.

Anakin’s lightsaber snapped to life in Vergere’s hand and rose to intercept the attack. Then, eyes going wide, she turned and fled into the warren, the lit blade wagging behind her like a tail.

Alema came to Jaina’s side and, somewhat tentatively, took her by the arm. “We’d better go.”

Jaina grew aware of a roar building on the other side of the vessel and realized that the outraged priests were exhorting their mourners to attack. “The shuttle?”

“Secure,” Alema reported. “Everyone’s aboard but us.”

“Good.” Jaina took Anakin from the Twi’lek, then entered the air lock. As the outer valve opened, she thumbed the fuse of her last thermal detonator to ten seconds and dropped it on the middle of the lock. “The vac breach that leaves ought to burst a few scarhead lungs.”

Like some insectoid model of a Coruscant skyline, the hives had over countless years of habitation climbed entirely out of the bug pit, their serpentine spires now scratching at the vaulted ceiling from atop a thirty-meter mound of carapace detritus and discarded chrysalides. Though the colony was as deserted as much of the worldship, the long-neglected glow lichen still shined just brightly enough to reveal the legs of a dead Yuuzhan Vong protruding from an acid hole in the base of the innermost tower, jerking and jiggling as the body was devoured by a voxyn.

The
voxyn, Jacen hoped. With leaden arms and shaking legs, he felt like they had tracked the thing through the entire diameter of the worldship—though it was impossible to know for sure without Alema’s sense of subterranean direction.

“The reading is good,” Tekli whispered. She used both hands to raise the cell analyzer and show the numbers to Jacen. “Do we want to test a second sample? I see some droppings up there.”

“Not necessary,” Jacen replied. They were studying the colony from the mouth of a dark passageway, and it would have been impossible to retrieve the droppings without either leaving their cover or using the Force—both of which would have exposed their presence to the voxyn. “Tesar has already said the trail is the queen’s. Let’s just kill it.”

“Too bad we don’t have the longblaster,” Ganner said softly. “I can guess where she is, and we could burn a hole right through that nest.”

“This one thinkz it is better for him to sneak around to her blind side,” Tesar hissed. “If she flees, you will be here to attack and pursue.”

When Jacen nodded, the Barabel leapt onto the wall and
climbed silently to the ceiling, where he seemed to melt into the shadows. A faint tingle crept down the back of Jacen’s neck—a tingle that continued to grow as Tesar neared the tunnel mouth. There was something wrong here, something they were not seeing. Tenel Ka touched Jacen’s arm, and he knew she felt it, too.

“Tesar!” Jacen hissed. He did not want to reach out with the Force; they had already learned that doing so would alert the queen to their presence. “Wait!”

“Wait?” Ganner asked, disbelieving. “What for?”

“Be quiet,” Tekli whispered. Ganner had the danger sense of a mynock; he had nearly walked into Yuuzhan Vong search parties twice. “It feels wrong.”

When the Barabel did not immediately return, Jacen began to have visions of losing Saba’s last student. Taking care to remain in the shadows, he slipped along the wall, then nearly cried out when a deep thump shook the passage. Tesar hissed in shock and retracted his claws, almost taking Jacen’s head off as he dropped along the wall. They retreated deeper into the tunnel, their eyes on the dimly shining colony ceiling.

“Something landing?” Ganner asked.

Tesar nodded. “Something big.”

“Ah. Aha. They
were
trying to lure us into a trap.” Tenel Ka bumped her shoulder into Jacen’s. “Perhaps the time has come to withdraw, my friend.”

“Perhaps.” Jacen did not turn back. There was still something wrong here, something yet to be revealed. “But if it’s a trap, why give themselves away?”

Another thump, this one smaller, rumbled down through the yorik coral.

“This one could go look,” Tesar suggested.

Jacen passed over the electrobinoculars, and the Barabel bounded up the passage on all fours. This area of the worldship seemed devoted to producing foodstuffs and other necessities, and every kilometer or so, there were large air locks opening onto the surface access routes. Jacen had traveled enough of the worldship to know that the surface network would be a more efficient system for moving freight than the sometimes cramped, always meandering passages inside.