Star by Star (83 page)

“Hold on, Skywalker.” Mara stood and limped after him. “You’re not going anywhere without me.”

Computer operators began to pour out of both targeting bays, but the officer who had waved at Luke stayed long enough to shake a finger at a vid display.

“Your droid frizzed out and said you had to see this.” He turned to depart with the others, calling over his shoulder, “He picked it out of a teletargeter data stream—it was in one of the old flash codes.”

The display showed a string of times and orbital coordinates, then a four-word message: “
Byrt
bet covered—Calrissian.”

“Lando!” Mara exclaimed. “I could kiss him.”

Luke tapped the console keys, ordering a flimsiplast printout. “And I could let you.”

*  *  *

Instead of continuing down into the teeth of Coruscant’s still-plentiful light artillery, the second wave of drop fleets pulled up at two thousand meters and began to disgorge spiraling lines of dark flecks. As they came closer, the flecks resolved into V-shaped wings over tiny dark rectangles, then into Yuuzhan Vong warriors suspended in the grasp of huge, mynocklike creatures. Watching from the privacy of his office balcony, Borsk found himself admiring the way Tsavong Lah built one attack off another, lulling the enemy into believing he was trying one thing while actually doing something else. It was classic cutthroat dejarik strategy, and the warmaster was executing it like one of the old Bothan masters.

Borsk hated him for it. The Yuuzhan Vong were robbing him of all he had spent a lifetime seeking, and they were ensuring that he would be forever remembered as the Bothan who lost Coruscant. For that, Borsk would have liked to teach the kintan strider death gambit to Tsavong Lah; such a coup would certainly have changed how New Republic historians remembered Chief of State Fey’lya.

When the descending warriors began to fling firejellies down on the palace, Borsk took a last gulp from the snifter of Endorian port in his hand, then stood and went to his desk. Not allowing himself to hesitate or tremble, he reached down to his bottom drawer and keyed a code he had never expected to use. He removed a small medkit scanner/transmitter, then depressed the activation switch and held the device next to his heart. When the function light began to beep in time with his pulse, he placed it in the center of the desk and reached down again, this time arming a fuse attached to the proton bomb that filled most of the drawer. The bomb was not huge, but it was large enough to destroy this wing of the palace—and all the secrets within it.

By the time he finished, the enemy drop troopers were circling the palace’s burning data towers and fighting their way onto its bitterly defended balconies. Finding no guards outside the chief of state’s office, a squad dropped onto the balcony where he had been sitting. Borsk waited behind his desk and watched as the warriors kicked in a door they could have opened with the touch of a button. The first two raced to his side and thrust amphistaffs
toward his throat, but stopped short of killing him when they saw his furred paws resting in plain sight. Several more rushed through the room to secure the doors and equipment, then a heavily tattooed officer came to his desk.

Before the Yuuzhan Vong could ask, Borsk said, “I am Borsk Fey’lya, chief of state of the New Republic. Harm me at your own peril.”

This drew a derisive snort. “It does not look like I have much to fear from you or your New Republic, Borsk Fey’lya.”

“Then from your own warmaster,” Borsk said evenly. “Tsavong Lah will certainly wish to speak with me. You may tell him I will receive him here.”

“You will see the warmaster when and where it pleases him.” The officer glanced at the heart-rate scanner on Borsk’s desk. “What is this abomination?”

“A communications device,” Borsk lied. “I can use it to communicate with all New Republic troops on Coruscant.”

Quicker to see the obvious than the chief of state had dared hope, the officer thrust it at Borsk’s face. “Tell your troops to lay down their arms, and they will be spared.”

“
After
I have worked out terms with Tsavong Lah.”

The officer slapped his amphistaff across Borsk’s hand. Something sharp penetrated his furry flesh, then the Bothan felt a fiery tide of venom rolling up his veins and noticed the frantic blinking of his heart-rate scanner. Quickly regaining his composure, he reached over with his free hand and pinched the pressure point inside his armpit, then looked up at the officer and shrugged.

“Pump me full of all the poison you wish. It makes no difference to me if you offer your gods a spoiled sacrifice.”

“You assume much in thinking yourself worthy, Fey’lya.”

Despite his words, the officer turned and spoke into the air. One of the villips on his shoulder said something in reply. He nodded curtly and, saying nothing else to his prisoner, stationed his squad at various points around the tower suite. Borsk wished he had thought to bring in the port from the balcony. He felt sure he would die the instant he released the pressure point, but the pain was not bad enough to prevent him from holding the snifter
in the poisoned hand—and, judging by his success so far, he could probably have bluffed the officer into letting him finish it.

Outside, Yuuzhan Vong drop troopers continued to swirl around Coruscant’s aeries, trading fire with light artillery emplacements and slowly claiming control of the towertop strongholds. As the cannonfire dwindled, the blast boulders started to venture down again, melting stubborn pockets of resistance into naked skeletons of durasteel. Finally, the drop ships descended, landing whole brigades of reptoid slave-soldiers on captured rooftops. The Yuuzhan Vong might claim to be great warriors, but Borsk knew who would be doing the hard fighting down in the underlevels.

Despite the pains shooting up his arm, Borsk called upon his long experience as a diplomat to keep an impassive face. At last, a large blast boulder stopped outside his balcony and disembarked a company of much-tattooed warriors.

An earless individual wearing a cape of colorful scales over armor entered the office and came to Borsk’s side. He had fringed lips and a face so mutilated it was difficult to tell the tattoos from the scars, but Borsk knew this was not Tsavong Lah. Like nearly everyone else in the New Republic, the chief had watched the warmaster’s broadcast after the fall of Duro, when he had demanded the surrender of the Jedi, and even this grisly face could not compare to Tsavong Lah’s.

“You may stand,” the newcomer said.

“When I see Tsavong Lah.”

The Yuuzhan Vong held his hand out and received an am-phistaff from one of his subordinates. He brought the butt of the weapon down on Borsk’s poisoned hand. The Bothan bit his tongue to keep from screaming and grew immediately dizzy.

“Tell the warmaster to hurry,” Borsk said, fighting to stay upright. “I will be dying soon.”

“I am Romm Zqar, commander of the drop,” the Yuuzhan Vong said. “You must surrender to me.”

Borsk shook his head. “Then there will be no surrender.”

Instead of striking again, Zqar pressed the amphistaff’s fanged head to the hand holding the pressure point. “Why must you speak with the warmaster personally?”

“Honor.” Borsk had been expecting this question and had
long ago thought of a suitable answer. “If I am to surrender, I must do it to someone of equal station.”

Zqar surprised him by speaking into the air in Yuuzhan Vong. There were a few minutes of silence. Borsk continued to grow dizzy, and the light on his heart-rate scanner began to blink more slowly. Finally, one of the commander’s shoulder villips answered. Zqar nodded and uttered a single Yuuzhan Vong word, then ordered the others to evacuate the office.

When his subordinates filed onto the waiting blast boulder, Zqar said, “You are not Tsavong Lah’s equal, but he sends his compliments.” He flicked the amphistaff, and the head sank its poisoned fangs deep into the hand holding the pressure point. “He believes the kintan strider death gambit to be the only worthy move in your infidel dejarik game.”

The detonation flash would have been visible from orbit even without the magnification of the
Kratak
’s great eye, but through the lens Tsavong Lah saw the white sphere of Borsk Fey’lya’s death bomb flash into existence across a full kilometer. It hung there for many seconds, its heat melting the faces of the surrounding towers and shattering every yorik coral vessel within two hundred meters. In addition to Zqar’s departing command vessel, the blast destroyed two drop ships and at least twenty airskiffs, and the warriors inside a good portion of the Imperial Palace, as well—in all, perhaps twenty-five thousand Yuuzhan Vong.

“I should have had Zqar let him bleed to death,” Tsavong Lah said. “Our losses today are already too heavy.”

“I am glad you are not among them, Warmaster.” Seef was standing next to him at the edge of the great eye, staring down on the world they were conquering. In her hands, she held the villip of the priest Harrar, whom the warmaster had dispatched to Myrkr to consecrate the capture and return of the Solo twins. “Eminence Harrar was wise to advise you not to go.”

Tsavong Lah considered this, then addressed the villip. “Seef praises your wisdom, my friend. She does not think me ready to stand before Yun-Yammka either.”

“It is not a matter of your readiness, Warmaster,” Harrar’s villip said. “It is a matter of what the gods desire. If it was not
their wish to take you when the
Sunulok
was destroyed, it would have been a blasphemy to let the infidel leader slay you.”

The warmaster looked back to the Imperial Palace and watched the fiery sphere contract into its own vacuum, drawing clouds of smoke and rubble and tumbling bodies after it. The blast had annihilated most of what Viqi Shesh’s diagrams identified as the executive and administrative wings of the Imperial Palace. Only the Grand Convocation Chamber and senatorial offices remained more or less intact, and there was no reason to believe they would contain many of the vital records the readers had hoped to capture.

“I am not so certain the gods will be all that pleased with my survival, Eminence Harrar.” Tsavong Lah glanced down at the scales and spines protruding from the still-rotting flesh at his shoulder, then said, “It is better to die in the service of a victorious end than suffer the disgrace of a Shamed One.”

“Then the corruption is advancing again?” Harrar asked.

“It has not abated,” Tsavong Lah corrected. “The gods have given me Coruscant. Now I must give them their
Jeedai
twins.”

“You will, Mighty One.” It was a mark of their friendship that Harrar addressed him so, for priests rarely afforded warriors such respect. “Vergere’s ruse was successful. She reports that Jacen Solo is her prisoner even now.”

“And Jaina Solo?”

“When last we spoke, Nom Anor assured me she was within his reach.”

Seef exhaled in relief, but the warmaster’s stomach grew queasy. Yal Phaath had already contacted him to complain about the destruction of the cloning grashal and the loss of the voxyn primary, so he knew just how short Nom Anor’s reach truly was. He folded his hand and radank claw together before his chest and bowed to Harrar’s villip.

“Glory to the gods, Eminence. All Coruscant awaits your return.”

They brought the
Ksstarr
around again. The targeting mask on Jaina’s face showed three yorik coral corvettes coming straight at them. Behind the trio, the worldship was silhouetted against Myrkr, a huge gray disk overlapping an even larger
green disk. The basin where she had last seen Jacen was smaller than the last time they had come around, about the size of a fefze’s compound eye.

“Zekk!” she yelled into the targeting mask. “We’re farther away!”

“Because
they
keep getting closer,” Zekk growled back. “We won’t save him by getting blasted ourselves. Clear me a lane!”

“Done!”

Cursing Zekk for a Sith-spawned coward, Jaina raised her left thumb. The control glove on her hand activated the mask’s targeting reticle, basically a set of increasingly blurry rings. She fixed her gaze on the rightmost blur and—working through trial and error, with no idea what the strange flashes in the viewfinder might mean—ran her right hand through an awkward finger dance that brought each concentric ring into focus. When the center disk showed a clear image of her target, she made a fist with her left hand.

From the other side of the blastule came the loud plop of the plasma gun’s automatic loader, then the deafening bang of the actuator charge ionizing the medium. Jaina’s mask went dark, and the blazing sphere streaked away.

The viewfinder cleared two seconds later. Her plasma ball was arcing toward her target—and a long line of enemy rounds was streaking back toward her.

“Incoming!” she yelled.

Zekk put the frigate into a tight rising turn, and they swung away from the worldship.

“Zekk!”

Lowbacca cut her off with an urgent bellow.

“A
fleet
?” Jaina cried.

She craned her neck around, and a dozen oblong flecks appeared in her targeting mask, streaking in from the edge of the system. Her heart fell. It wasn’t a fleet—not exactly—but if they tried to return to the worldship, they would be trapped.

A flurry of plasma balls blazed past under the
Ksstarr
’s belly, then one slipped past Tesar at the stern shielding station and impacted the hull. The frigate shuddered.

Zekk’s voice came through the mask. “Jaina, what do you want to do?”

Jaina could not answer. There was only one thing
to
do. But how could she abandon Jacen? After rebuking him for leaving Anakin, how? The
Ksstarr
shuddered again. A wet pop sounded somewhere aft, a door valve sealing against a vacuum breach.

“Jaina!” Zekk yelled.

“I—”

The words caught in her throat, like she was choking. She closed her fist and sent a plasma ball streaking into space.

“Better for Jacen if we flee,” Tenel Ka said. “With only one twin, perhaps they will delay the sacrifice until we can organize a rescue.”

What rescue
? Jaina thought. They had lost so many Jedi already. Even Luke would risk no more to rescue Jacen. But he would not stop Jaina. Nobody would.