Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 17

  The words, so calm, so clinical, snapped Jaina out of her reverie. She looked after the departing coralskippers and frigate.

  “Don’t do it.” That was Kyp’s voice, and she felt it through the Force as much as she heard it over the comlink. “They’re trying to dictate your responses.”

  “Serenity,” she whispered. She felt as though if she spoke more loudly, the volume would tear open a hole in her and let out the anger growing within her. “The way of the Jedi is serenity.” She reached out through the Force, found the Sullustan female, and tugged at her.

  She could detect no change in the Sullustan’s velocity. She tugged harder. “Kyp, can you save any of them?”

  “Maybe. That’s a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to absorb.” Kyp’s presence in the Force diminished as he turned away from her to the problem at hand. On her sensors, she saw one of the hurtling shapes begin to slow down.

  She pulled harder at the Sullustan and was finally certain that the female was slowing. “Jag, you can’t do anything here. Get back to Borleias, escort some shuttles up—”

  “I’ve called for shuttles. And I’ll let you know when I’m useless. I recommend you follow my lead and discontinue trying to slow them to a stop.” Jag’s clawcraft darted ahead of the X-wings, maneuvered with delicacy into the cloud of victims, matching and then slightly surpassing their speed.

  Then, with skill that was on the wrong side of impossible, Jag rotated his clawcraft and sideslipped it until it was mere meters to the side of a dark-skinned human male. Jag flicked his thrusters and the clawcraft slowed. The clawcraft slammed into the human at somewhere between twenty and thirty kilometers per hour; the man, stunned but not completely incapacitated, flailed around frantically as he was vectored away from Borleias.

  The clawcraft rotated; as soon as that victim was clear of any possible ion wash, Jag touched his thrusters again, and maneuvered until he was alongside a second victim. That one, too, he rammed, as delicately as possible, an impact that appeared to hurt the Twi’lek woman’s arm, but sent her off at an angle that would not propel her into Borleias’s atmosphere.

  Jaina’s flight was able to vector every one of the twenty-two ejected victims away from entering Borleias’s atmosphere. They couldn’t save all twenty-two; four died from exposure before the shuttles could reach them, and the remainder were all removed to the biotics facility’s medical ward, in varying stages of cold exposure. But none ended up as gruesome meteors flaming into incandescence in the planet’s atmosphere.

  The flying it took to save the survivors was remarkable enough to draw applause from the ground crews when Jaina’s flight and the shuttles landed just after midday, but the pilots waved off the appreciation and did not lose their grim demeanor.

  Word came that the Yuuzhan Vong worldship had taken up distant orbit, beyond the orbit of Pyria’s farthest planet. It remained on-station there, its capital ships and coralskippers clustered near it.

  Through the special ops docking bay’s holocam feed, Wedge watched Jaina and her pilots arrive; then he switched off the view. “I was right,” he said. His voice was pitched low enough that it would not carry far in the perpetual babble of sound that was the operations center.

  “You were right,” Tycho said. “The Vong have brought out big guns and someone with a certain amount of personal style to fire them.”

  “Have the recovered victims, including the ones who didn’t make it, and anyone who has been in direct physical contact with them go through decontamination. Have Danni or Cilghal supervise the decontam. I want the surface of Fel’s clawcraft to be checked out and similarly decontaminated. They might have anticipated Jag’s tactics, so they might have booby-trapped all of the victims.”

  Tycho nodded. “I’m on it.”

  One more thing.” Wedge caught Tycho’s eye. “You were listening to Jaina’s comm traffic. Her desperation to save those people.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not dark-side behavior, at least as I understand it. I queried Kyp privately, and he’s pretty sure that she’s bouncing back from her brush with the dark side.”

  “Meaning,” Tycho said, “is she trustworthy? Maybe even enough to be one of the Insiders?”

  “Right.”

  Tycho’s face revealed no emotion other than careful consideration of the question. Finally he nodded. “The brain and the gut are in agreement. I think she’s worth our trust. She’s a Solo.”

  “I think so, too. She goes on the list.”

  Yuuzhan Vong Worldship, Pyria Orbit

  The Yuuzhan Vong pilot with the absurdly human forehead and its concealing tattoos remained bowed with his arms crossed over his chest in salute until Czulkang Lah gestured for him to straighten. Czulkang Lah said, “Your name?”

  “Charat Kraal.”

  “And you are a pilot of Domain Kraal and its colony on this system’s most habitable world?”

  “I am, Warmaster.”

  “Do not call me warmaster. My son is warmaster. And answer this: Why have you seized elements of Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet, suborning those elements to mutiny against his designated successor?”

  Charat Kraal stared back unblinking. “My goals and his diverged. His goal was to save the remnants of his crippled fleet. Mine was to improve the Yuuzhan Vong situation within this system. I believe that mine had precedence.”

  “You had best establish that you have done considerable damage to the infidels’ warriors and machinery with the resources you commandeered, then.”

  “I would say that I have done negligible damage to them. My intent was to do negligible damage to them.”

  Czulkang Lah suppressed a smile. Charat Kraal was marching toward his execution with the plain speech and courage appropriate to a Yuuzhan Vong pilot. “Explain.”

  “Both before and after the arrival of Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet, I used my forces to harass the infidels—not because I imagined I could defeat them with the resources I had, but because this harassment revealed information about them, about their intentions.” Charat Kraal gestured toward the pilot who had accompanied him, the blameless pilot who would, if things went badly, conduct word of his death back to the Kraal. That pilot brought him the recording villip, a spongy creature nearly the size of a Yuuzhan Vong torso. “If I may.”

  Czulkang Lah gave him a curt nod.

  Charat Kraal lay the recording villip on the floor of the command chamber and gave it a stroke to awaken it. It flattened into a disk and then began to glow with a harsh yellow light. The light flowed up from it until it illuminated the air above it, then began coalescing into three-dimensional pictures.

  Charat Kraal continued stroking and prodding the creature, and the pictures changed above it. First was an image of a grashal habitat, doubtless the primary home of Kraal on Borleias, then images of infidel spacecraft performing planetside attacks, images of nighttime spacecraft launches, images of infidel capital ships in orbit.

  Finally the image settled on an aerial view of the infidels’ headquarters, a tall curved building with many outlying buildings and a burn zone that, close to the constructions, was thick with spacecraft. “This is their habitat,” Charat Kraal said. “Their general and his staff live here. He conducts all operations from here instead of from the comparative strength and safety of one of his triangle ships. Many Jeedai live here, and constantly patrol the jungles around the site.”

  “How many Jeedai?”

  “Unknown … perhaps a dozen. The numbers slowly increase. Two of them are Luke Skywalker and his mate Mara.”

  “What of Jaina Solo?”

  “She is here. I think perhaps there is some change in her stature. Before, Luke Skywalker seemed to be the preeminent Jeedai. Now it appears to be her.”

  “Continue.”

  “The infidels’ interest in this site initially puzzled me, but now I think I understand. When the Kraal first occupied this world, interrogation of prisoners who once defended it revealed that it was a site where secret medical
projects were conducted. New life-forms were created. It was, in short, the infidels’ equivalent of a shaping facility, and they defend it so fiercely that I suspect they are doing some shaping now.”

  “Of what?”

  “I do not know. It seems to me that whatever they are doing would be safer on one of their triangle ships, so the project obviously must be done here. This suggests that either the equipment they are working with is too delicate to move, or the creature they are designing must be created upon a living world. And since they are masters at creating and operating equipment, the latter possibility seems more likely.”

  Charat Kraal advanced the images above the villip through several sequences of spacecraft takeoffs, then slowed to show an odd-looking craft leaving the biotics facility. It did not have the smooth lines of most infidel machinery. It looked like a segment of metal pipe, tall as a human and twenty meters long, bent at the middle in a right angle, with another pipe, a meter in diameter and five long, bisecting the angle. A twin-seat cockpit that appeared to have been liberated from a starfighter was attached to the point of the bend, facing away from the smaller pipe, and thruster engines had been mounted on the two larger portions of pipe, oriented in the same direction as the smaller pipe. The pipe ends were capped with a device that looked as though it would iris open.

  “There are three of these,” Charat Kraal said. “And a fourth with three protrusions that extend at even, identical angles and a fourth protrusion that extends at a right angle from all of them; I have seen it but not been able to record it. My scouts, who eavesdrop on the infidels whenever they can get close enough to do so, call them ‘pipefighters’ and say they are part of an operation called ‘Starlancer.’ All three fly very badly. They go up into space and situate themselves at very precise points in relation to one another, far apart from one another, so that the three craft like this are points of a triangle and the fourth craft is at the center of their array. Then they communicate for several minutes. I do not know why.”

  “Speculate.”

  Charat Kraal hesitated. “I am only a pilot, not a shaper, and not one of their infidel scientists. But I had one of my advisers, who understands their mathematics better than I, analyze what they are doing. She says that if the center craft’s right-angle protrusion is precisely a right angle from the triangle represented by the other three craft’s positions, then it traces a course back to the Coruscant system. Perhaps it is a spy device, a communications device, or a weapon aimed at their old capital.”

  “Interesting.” Czulkang Lah evaluated the pilot for a moment.

  “Great One, if I may … if it is your intent now to order my death for my presumption, I ask that you order me to kill myself, rather than having me executed. That way I will have achieved a great ambition: to serve, even for a moment, Czulkang Lah.”

  The old Yuuzhan Vong allowed impatience to show in his expression. “Be quiet. Charat Kraal, I am advancing you to the rank of wing commander. Your forces will be replenished to full fighting-wing status. You will perform special missions for me, often in association with the other fighting wings. One of your tasks will be the capture of Jaina Solo; I will issue you other orders, as well. You will report to me. Do you understand?”

  “I do, Great One.” Charat Kraal’s face twitched as he struggled to retain an impassive expression.

  “Go.”

  Borleias Occupation, Day 39

  The pilots of Twin Suns Squadron piled out of their X-wings, E-wings, and one clawcraft. They drifted off through the special ops docking bay, toward the main building, joking and recounting, pleased to have gone through a mission with no casualties. They’d escorted the cobbled-together Operation Starlancer pipefighters up into space, had escorted them to their precisely plotted positions while their pilots ran a few tests, and had come home without loss. Coralskippers had maneuvered out to take a look at what they were doing, but had not attacked … suggesting that they were studying the activities of the Starlancer ships but were not yet ready to move against them. The betting was that, no matter how slow moving and cautious the new Yuuzhan Vong commander was, he’d take action against the Starlancer ships soon.

  Jaina lingered behind in the docking bay, putting some distance between herself and her pilots. A supposed goddess can’t be too chummy with her servants, she told herself. And a voice from deep in her thoughts, one she listened to when no other Jedi was around to detect it, whispered, And a doomed woman shouldn’t get too close to people who might miss her when she’s gone.

  She leaned against her X-wing, ignoring the sounds of the mechanics around her.

  There was something within her, an alien thing she couldn’t seem to rid herself of. It was a cold hatred of the enemy. Perhaps it had been with her since the start of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, since the death of Chewbacca and its effects on her father and her family, but she had only truly become aware of it when Anakin died. Then the arrival, two days ago, of the worldship, and the attempted showering of Borleias’s atmosphere with innocents, had caused it to swell within her.

  Hate wasn’t the way. It was wrong for a Jedi. And it was pointless for someone who was not likely to survive long in this war, not with all the enemies she was accumulating; she had better things to spend her time on than hating.

  On the other hand, perhaps hate was right for a fighter pilot; it could keep her focused, give her an intensity she needed in combat.

  But it was still emotion, still painful. She didn’t want it. Didn’t need it. She pushed it down, tamping it under the weight of her logic.

  As she calmed, as she opened herself again to the Force, she felt a familiar presence, a reassuring one. Well, it was meant to be reassuring; it was projecting an aura of reassurance.

  Jaina turned to see Tahiri approaching. She gave Tahiri a smile, but she knew it to be uncertain.

  Tahiri had been on the verge of becoming closer to Anakin, might even have become a Solo someday. Now that would never happen, and Jaina sometimes thought Tahiri might just drift away like a planet that had suddenly escaped its sun’s gravity. Jaina knew she was supposed to care, but that was just more emotion to pile on top of what she was already trying to rid herself of. One more relationship to maintain when she knew it was better to begin trimming those away.

  Tahiri’s clothes and the skin of her arms and legs were decorated with patches of green—stains from leaves and grasses, Jaina decided. “You’ve been on patrol?”

  Tahiri nodded. “I spent a couple of hours playing hide and seek with some Yuuzhan Vong warriors out there. I never really caught sight of them. They must have seen me once, since I had to knock a thud bug out of the air. When I got back, I heard that your squadron was coming down. I thought maybe you’d want to talk.”

  “No, not really.”

  “Or maybe you’d want to get in some relaxation. A bunch of Rogue Squadron boys have converted a bio-reactor tank into a heated tub. They’re off on patrol, so it’s unguarded—”

  Jaina shook her head. “I don’t have time. I have a session with an Intelligence group, the Wraiths, coming up. We’re discussing psychological warfare and Yun-Harla, the Vong Trickster goddess. And then I have something to do I don’t want to.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Talk to Kyp Durron. I’m going to hand Twin Suns Squadron over to him.”

  “You just took command, and already you’re giving it up?”

  “For a few weeks only, I hope. I’m going to—you know about Uncle Luke’s expedition.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to invite myself along.”

  Tahiri was silent for a few moments. Then she said, “Jaina, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “I expect everyone to tell me that. But Dad and Mother think Jacen’s …” Jaina suddenly lost the breath to speak. Why was it so hard to say the word alive? She knew the answer as soon as she asked herself the question; it was because she desperately wanted to believe what Leia believed, and couldn’
t bring herself to. She couldn’t allow herself to hope. She had a Force-bond with her twin, and it had been severed. He was dead, and to dream otherwise was just a way of distracting herself with delusion at a time when distractions could be fatal. She found her breath and continued, “They think Jacen’s there. I have to go there … to prove that’s not where he is.”

  “Don’t do it,” Tahiri said. There was quiet urgency to her voice.

  “I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. In fact, you stand a greater chance of getting Luke and Mara killed.”

  “You don’t think very much of my skills.”

  “Yes, I do.” Tahiri didn’t sound apologetic or contrite. “But if it were just a matter of skills, or power for that matter, you’d be trying to send Kyp Durron, wouldn’t you?”

  “Kyp would never work. He and Luke have too much disagreement between them—”

  “Exactly. Which makes my point. Just skills aren’t the only thing you have to look at.”

  “So what are you looking at?”

  “Well, there’s this whole twins thing. The Yuuzhan Vong want you and Jacen together, and whatever they plan for you can’t be good.” Tahiri looked away for a moment. “Jaina, all I have to do is to think a certain way and I become Yuuzhan Vong, for as long as I can stand to. This thing about twins, it’s not a casual interest. It’s an obsession. Where twins are, the eyes of the gods look down. Twins distort reality around them. It’s a sacred thing.”

  “So what?”

  “So, let’s say Jacen is alive. I hope he is. Let’s say you go with Master Skywalker to Coruscant. You’re seen but not captured. The Yuuzhan Vong suddenly know that both the twins are on Coruscant. They’ll devote a lot more resources to finding Jaina Solo than they would to just finding a party of invaders, even Jeedai—Jedi—invaders. Right or wrong?”

  “Well … right. But they might not recognize me.”

  “True. So you’re going to risk Luke and Mara on a ‘might not’?”

  Jaina felt a growing sense of desperation. It was like so many of her fights in early Jedi training with her Uncle Luke. She’d press hard, put him on the defensive … and then realize the degree to which his superior skill was turning her lunges into awkward, off-balance, losing strategies.