Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (34 page)

“It’s not real,” Mara observed, moving over, even nudging the thing a bit to upright it. While the specific features of the head did not resemble the warrior she had recently battled, the scarring and the tattooing looked similar.

The head said something else they could not comprehend, lips and eyes moving as if it was indeed the actual speaker. One phrase jumped out at them, the voice inflection seeming to give it great importance:
Praetorite Vong
.

As it finished speaking, the leathery bag inverted suddenly, rolling back in on itself and appearing again exactly like the other one.

“A hologram recording,” Mara remarked, daring to prod the seemingly lifeless thing again.

“For Yomin Carr,” Luke agreed. “From his superior, is my guess.”

“These are communication devices, then,” Mara reasoned. “But for whom?”

“Did you get all of that, Artoo?” Luke asked, and the droid beeped affirmative.

“Can you translate?” Mara asked.

“Ooo,” R2-D2 replied sadly.

“Threepio will figure it out,” Luke insisted. “Once Artoo can transfer the information to him.”

Mara nodded.

“The Praetorite Vong?” Luke mused.

“What’s going on?”

Luke didn’t have any answers for that one.

“Artoo, have you got anything on space activity near Belkadan yet?” he asked the droid.

R2-D2 whistled and clicked something in response.

“Check the charts of the last few days, for incoming or outgoing ships,” Luke suggested.

R2-D2 whistled and clicked the same pattern again, and this time Luke understood that the droid was trying to show him something. He and Mara moved over beside R2-D2, and immediately an image came up on the small viewscreen atop the droid’s work pod, a replay of ExGal-4’s tracking of the superspeeding comet streaking in from outside the galaxy.

Luke blew a sigh and wondered then if they should go back to Belkadan to see if there might be other evidence they had missed.

“Fast forward it to conclusion,” he instructed R2-D2, and they followed the course of the comet, across the sectors until it was lost from view. R2-D2 brought up ExGal’s determinations about its course: the fourth planet of the Helska system.

Luke and Mara watched it all in disbelief, with too much to digest, too many possibilities, and none of them adding up in a good way.

Luke directed R2-D2 on what to search for, then went back to the pilot chairs with Mara and laid in a course for the fourth planet of the Helska system.

The ice of that fourth planet seemed a tomb to his heart, a cold-encasing eternal torment for the Jedi Knight. Miko sat curled in the lichen-lighted and -heated chamber, head down in his arms, an attempt at meditation that would not come, the road to freeing emptiness blocked by the barrier of horrible recollections.

He saw that maw, the chewing, pointy teeth, and felt the great power of the yammosk overwhelming him, mocking him and all of his Jedi training.

Nothing he had ever known in all his life could have prepared Miko for the tactics and devious techniques of the Yuuzhan Vong mind-breaking. In his training, he had faced the dark side of the Force, the specter of his innermost horrors, but even that paled beside the reality of the yammosk.

How many times had the horrid creature feigned his execution? How many times had he been drawn in to within a hairbreadth of those chewing teeth? And each time, no matter what logic might yell at him, he could not believe other than that this would be the moment of his death.

That reality did not get any easier with repetition.

And worse: Each feigned execution replayed in his mind a thousand times, and each of those recollections seemed nearly as vivid as the actual experience. He could not sleep, could barely force down enough food to keep himself alive.

Across the chamber, Danni watched it all helplessly, knowing that her companion was near to breaking. She had tried everything to comfort him, had held him while he thrashed in his dreams, had offered him her words of comfort and her shoulder to cry on.

But it didn’t matter, she knew. These Yuuzhan Vong warriors, whoever they were, had clearly decided, for some reason
that escaped Danni Quee, that Miko, the Jedi Knight, was not worthy, and so they were going to destroy him utterly, his heart first, then his mind, and finally his body.

And she could only watch.

The ground rumbled and rolled, and a great wave of splintering rock reared up at them, toppling a building into the street. Anakin banked the landspeeder and throttled up, weaving in and out of falling and bouncing chunks of stone, sweeping past people screaming in terror and pain. A couple of soldiers, Sernpidal City guards, stood by the northern checkpoint exit, waving for Anakin to slow.

He didn’t.

Outside the city, the quakes were even more violent. A strong wind was blowing now, and Anakin feared that the atmosphere itself might be compressing under the disturbance of the descending moon. He knew the calculations, knew that they still had a couple of hours before the moon came crashing down, but he had to wonder if the planet would hold together that long, or if the residual disasters, the quakes, the brewing violent winds, the rushing seas, would destroy the place so that by the time the moon arrived, there would be nothing left to kill.

He pressed the landspeeder on, redlining the drives, and almost felt as if he was in the asteroid belt again, moving on instinct, on anticipation instead of reaction. Beside him, the old mayor sat quietly, apparently comfortable, hardly jumping even on those occasions when a bouncing stone or rolling
wave of dirt nearly buried them. Anakin gave him hardly a thought, other than a quick survey, visually and with the Force, an inspection that showed him the old man was truly calm, that it was not a facade, that he had come to accept his doom without despair.

Somehow Anakin used that calm to keep his own cool head. He checked his coordinates to ensure that he was in the right area.

But what was he looking for?

A gigantic machine? An Interdictor cruiser, with its gravity-well projectors? There were none about. A rift in the planet’s surface? Again, nothing, other than the cracks from the tremors.

He slowed the landspeeder and closed his eyes, feeling the sensations about him, feeling the calm of the old man, the unrest of the planet as it was pulled and twisted by the swiftly passing low moon, the fear of the creatures, reasoning and animal, a palpable terror that the young Jedi could almost taste in his mouth.

Anakin looked deeper, deeper. Anything exerting the kind of power necessary to grab on to a moon could not be invisible to the Force.

The moon, now enormous, crested the horizon, rolling up into the sky. The wind roared; the ground swelled and rolled.

And Anakin felt the tug, not on him, not on anything except for that moon. He opened his eyes, though he kept his mind in that other sensibility, and there before him, he clearly “saw” the tractor beam.

He throttled up the landspeeder, swerving through a ravine between two unstable peaks, a move that almost cost him dearly as one huge boulder smashed down right behind the small craft as it passed. Speed was their ally, for the rocks on both cliff walls were crumbling fast, but as they neared the end of the narrow valley, they were hit by tremendous head winds, as if all the air was being squeezed. Anakin glanced up
at the moon and saw a tail of fire trailing it, the first contact with the atmosphere.

“We’re barely moving,” the mayor commented calmly.

Anakin banked to the side, climbing along one narrow trail, trying to get behind a jag in the stone, and nearly getting smashed against the wall by one particularly furious gust. He made it, though, skimming into a narrow channel and running the length of it, and when he came out, he found the wind diminished enough so that he could again make forward progress.

Exiting the pass, they came to a wide and empty field, a barren stretch of stone and dirt, a bowl within the low mountain range. Anakin immediately spotted the crater in the middle of that field and didn’t have to fall back into the Force to know that this was the source. He approached swiftly but cautiously to within a dozen meters, then shut the landspeeder down and hopped out, running low to the ground, not knowing what to expect.

The crater was not large, barely a couple dozen meters across, nor was it deep, perhaps ten meters, and there in the bottom sat something that resembled a huge, pulsating, dark red heart, with deep blue spikes all about it. Anakin studied it, looking for some controls, or some connection to a power source.

“What is it?” the old man asked when he joined the boy at the rim of the crater.

Anakin looked more deeply, using the Force, seeing the thing more distinctly and coming to the unnerving conclusion that not only was this definitely the source of their troubles but that it was a living creature. Gasping for breath, he drew his blaster.

“That thing’s bringing down Dobido?” the old man asked incredulously.

“Get back,” Anakin instructed, taking aim. The old man didn’t move, but Anakin, so entranced by this completely
alien and undeniably powerful life-form, didn’t notice. He leveled the blaster and fired.

The energy bolt ripped down into the crater and then … disappeared. Just flickered out, like a candle in a strong wind. He fired again and again, but the bolts seemed to have no effect.

“What is it?” the old man asked again, more emphatically.

“Get in the landspeeder and go back for my father,” Anakin instructed, pulling the lightsaber from his belt.

“The ugly one or the big hairy one?” the old man asked.

Anakin ignored him and moved one foot to the very edge of the crater.

And then he and the old man went flying away, jolted by a sudden and violent thrust of the ground. The young Jedi scrambled about, to see dirt and stones flying from the crater, a volcanic eruption, it seemed, without the lava.

It ended abruptly, and Anakin rushed back, only to see a deep, deep hole where the creature had been. He understood: the creature had recognized the attacks and had reversed its gravity pull, probably latching on to the core of Sernpidal, and was now far, far below.

What was he to do now?

A familiar roar turned his eyes skyward, and he saw the
Millennium Falcon
swooping down from the mountains. It landed fast on the gravel plain to the side, and the landing ramp dropped almost immediately, Han running down to his son, and many other people, refugees, poking their heads out of the
Falcon
to see what might be going on.

“We’ve got to get back!” Han cried. “Chewie’s organizing the retreat from the planet, but we’ve barely got enough ships!”

“The creature’s down there,” Anakin replied, pointing to the crater. “It’s a living thing!”

Han shook his head. “Doesn’t matter anymore,” he replied with a wry twist of his lips, and Anakin understood. For Sernpidal,
it was too late. Even if they somehow managed to kill this creature or stop its tractor beam, Dobido’s orbit was lost, and the moon would come crashing down.

“Every second means someone else dies,” Han remarked, and Anakin sprinted for the ramp. The old man, though, didn’t follow; instead, he walked back up to the crater rim.

“I must at least ensure that this devil doesn’t escape to destroy another world,” he explained, smiling, and he opened his cloak and produced a meter-long tube.

“Thermal detonator,” he said. “You should be leaving.”

“You’re crazy,” Han started to say, but the old man, the mayor of Sernpidal City, just went over the edge of the crater and calmly leapt into the hole.

The
Falcon
had barely lifted away when the detonator blew, lifting tons and tons of dirt into a gigantic mushroom cloud over the gravel plain.

“Strange old man,” the stunned Han muttered.

Anakin stared out the window, back toward the area of the original crater. He felt no more pull from the alien creature. “He got it,” he informed his father.

Han nodded. The old man hadn’t bought them a minute of time, hadn’t saved Sernpidal at all, but still, they both understood, he had done something truly valuable and heroic.

For Prefect Da’Gara, it was the moment of highest glory, honor, and spirituality, the epitome of his purpose, the reward for his efforts, the most welcomed task.

He stood alone on a pedestal before the yammosk, the creature’s massive eyes boring into him. Chanting the appropriate prayers to Yun-Yammka, he lifted his hand to gently touch the creature between those eyes, along a huge blue pulsating vein, the point of transference.

Then they were joined as one, the yammosk’s consciousness overwhelming Da’Gara’s. The prefect felt the binding power of the war coordinator, the purpose of its being, and
through its sensitive energies, he felt the commune that was his task force, the Praetorite Vong.

Da’Gara fell deeper into the yammosk, gave it his feelings as it recited its own to him, and they knew they were of like mind. It was time to expand, to reach out and begin consuming vast reaches of the galaxy.

But first, they had to lure a portion of their enemies in, destroy the New Republic’s warships on a Yuuzhan Vong battleground, where the yammosk’s control and coordination were complete.

The prefect left the meeting both exhilarated and exhausted, physically drained but emotionally charged. He went right to his private quarters, to Yomin Carr’s villip, but then changed his mind and opened contact to Nom Anor instead.

The executor responded immediately.

“We reach out this day,” Da’Gara explained.

“Go with glory and victory,” came Nom Anor’s proper response. “Die as a warrior.”

Da’Gara snapped to attention. “We shall not dishonor the Yuuzhan Vong,” he answered, again the proper response. “Sernpidal dies this day.”

“And her people?”

“Many attempt flight, and there, our warriors will find their next challenge,” Da’Gara replied. “The war coordinator has dispatched four full battle groups to intercept and to give chase. They will allow the refugee convoy to lead them to the next planet in line, and there they will begin the open warfare.”