Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 21

  She felt another sensation in the Force, a hunger that seemed decidedly out of character for Lord Nyax. She returned her attention to him.

  The thing with Irek Ismaren’s face stopped just short of the nearest work crew and was now looking toward the corner of the chamber immediately beneath Luke’s entry point. There were shrieks from the stairwell there.

  Figures burst up from the stairwell—armed and armored Yuuzhan Vong warriors emerged, moving fast, and the fifth one out of the stairwell was being dragged by a leashed voxyn. That was the hunger, the desperate craving of the voxyn to find and destroy all Force-users.

  The voxyn’s head turned as its gaze swept the room. Mara saw its attention flash across Luke, across her—she felt its awareness of her like a physical touch—and then come to rest on Lord Nyax. It lunged in his direction, its handler unable to hold it back despite the leash. A second warrior grabbed the leash, added his strength to that of the first, and they managed to drag the voxyn to a halt.

  Lord Nyax smiled as the warriors, twenty of them now, spread out in a semicircle. They approached him, amphistaffs ready, some of them handling thudbugs or razorbugs. They moved through the crowd of workers, contemptuously shoving those beings aside, hurling them off their feet.

  The beam Mara was on bobbed more deeply as Luke arrived. He stretched out behind her and pulled out his own macrobinoculars.

  Mara felt a sudden surge of hatred—not for Luke, not for Lord Nyax, but for the Yuuzhan Vong. She knew it to be a sentiment from outside her, and that kept it from being quite as compelling as it could have been.

  And in that same instant, the workers screamed in rage of their own and swarmed the Yuuzhan Vong warriors.

  The warriors swung and stabbed. Mara saw workers pierced through heart and gut and brain. When those attacks were not instantly mortal, they continued running and leaping at the Yuuzhan Vong, crashing into them, bearing them to the floor by weight of numbers.

  The voxyn handlers went down. The voxyn leaped free and charged Lord Nyax, its growl of rage rumbling through the chamber.

  A lightsaber, a red one, ignited in Lord Nyax’s hand. Then Mara took another look. This wasn’t a normal lightsaber; the energy blade emerged from the back of his metallic glove. It pivoted as he flexed his right hand. Another emerged from his left glove.

  The voxyn, canny and old, charged to within three meters of Lord Nyax and then arched its back. It made a noise like a bedchamber’s worth of carpet being suddenly ripped in two, and a gout of dark, smoking liquid sprayed from its mouth.

  A portion of flooring between the voxyn and Lord Nyax tore free, lifting into the fluid’s path. The voxyn’s acid splashed across it, almost instantly burning through it, but its momentum was arrested. It and the flooring fell, the sound of the chemical reaction of the acid audible even at this distance.

  Fallen Yuuzhan Vong warriors were rising now, having torn themselves free of the masses of people bearing upon them. Mara saw limbs being severed from torsos by expert amphistaff blows, saw trails of blood, some of it jets of arterial blood gouting high into the air, from the frenzied but ineffective workers as they were cut down.

  More red lightsaber blades sprang forth from Lord Nyax’s body. Mara saw blades emerge downward from his elbows, upward from his knees.

  “We have to help,” Luke said.

  Mara turned. Luke was wrapping the cord of his beltgrapnel, long abandoned but definitely a useful tool for the exploration of Coruscant’s lower reaches, around the metal beam.

  “Help who?”

  “Help the Vong. Yeah, I know, I know, it’s something you’ve never heard anyone say before.” Luke rolled off the beam and fell, his descent arrested by his hand on the cord; more cord deployed from his belt as he descended. “I’m not worried about the fate of the Yuuzhan Vong,” he told her. “But we desperately need any resources we can use against Lord Nyax.”

  Mara hissed in vexation. She tucked her macrobinoculars away, grabbed Luke’s cord, and swung out over open space, then slid down after her husband.

  In the corner of her eye, she saw the voxyn charge Lord Nyax. He dodged under the beast’s leap and flexed an arm. His elbow-blade sheared through the voxyn’s gut, slicing the beast cleanly in two. It landed in pieces behind him.

  Then, as Mara swung around on the rope during her descent, she saw the woman.

  The woman was dark-haired, attractive, standing at the top of the staircase by which the Yuuzhan Vong had arrived. Unlike the workers, she was alert, watching the fight with an expression of detached interest.

  She was Viqi Shesh.

  Mara felt coldness sweep over her. The woman who had helped betray Coruscant to the Yuuzhan Vong, the woman who had stolen Mara’s son, Ben, was here, palling around with her Yuuzhan Vong masters while the world crumbled around them.

  She opened herself to Luke through the Force, something she preferred not to do while cold thoughts of murder were strong in her, and let him see Viqi through her eyes. “Viqi first,” she said.

  “Lord Nyax first,” he answered. At ten meters above the floor, he detached the cord spool from his belt and let go with his hand, dropping the remaining distance. He landed in a tuck and roll and came up in a full-speed run straight at Lord Nyax.

  Mara spared one last look at Viqi, a glance that, had it become a physical manifestation of her anger, would have sliced through the woman as cleanly as an amphistaff point, and dropped. She came up in a roll and followed her husband.

  Ahead, the first pair of Yuuzhan Vong warriors had reached Lord Nyax.

  Viqi watched the huge pale man slaughter Yuuzhan Vong warriors.

  The first two warriors stopped a dozen steps from the thing and hurled thudbugs. The pale man twitched and the lightsaber blades from one forearm and one knee rose, incinerating the living weapons.

  Two more warriors raced up and, under cover of more thrown thudbugs, charged, whipping their amphistaffs around, one lashing out with the tail and the other with fangs.

  The pale man stepped in close to the second warrior. The first warrior’s fang attack missed by a meter. The pale man’s left forearm blade lashed out at the second warrior, who blocked the attack by catching the blade in an amphistaff coil. Then the pale man’s left elbow blade raked across the warrior’s throat, separating it from his body. Meanwhile, the pale man’s right-arm, right-elbow, right-knee blades rose, darted, swayed, and wherever they went, incandescences flared—sign of thudbugs being vaporized.

  The pale man flipped the dead warrior’s amphistaff toward the first warrior. The warrior contemptuously swept it out of the way, overcorrected as his own staff came back to block a lightsaber thrust—and could not block the other lightsaber blade as it simultaneously thrust into his helmet’s eye socket. He fell, smoke pouring from the mask as he died.

  More warriors arrived—two still threw thudbugs, four more skidded to a stop beside them and waited for a bare second to calculate their strategy.

  A piece of ceiling steel whirled down like a spinning sawblade from above. It flashed across the warriors’ position at knee height, and just for a fraction of a second Viqi thought that it had missed. Then those six warriors collapsed, legs severed at the knees, blood gouting from the stumps and limbs.

  Seconds had passed. Eight Yuuzhan Vong warriors and their voxyn were dead. Seventeen more remained.

  These warriors approached more cautiously. Directed by Denua Ku, they circled around the smiling, confident pale man who towered over them.

  The whirling steel panel came around for another pass, but this time, a chunk of machinery, an air-cooling unit a meter on a side, fired off from the floor as though it were a guided missile and hurtled into the sheet’s path. The sheet wrapped around it with a ferocious, almost feral shriek of metal bending, and both fell to the floor.

  The pale man looked off to Viqi’s left. She followed its gaze. There, advancing on the pale man, lightsabers lit, were Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade.

  Viqi’s eyes g
rew wide. What were they doing here?

  The Yuuzhan Vong, too, seemed caught off-guard. Denua Ku had no more love of the Jeedai than any warrior, but he was smart; Viqi saw him wave his warriors back, waiting for the intentions of the Jedi to be revealed.

  It was time to go. No matter who the victor was, Viqi would either end up dead or pressed once more into the service of the Yuuzhan Vong. She spun to sprint to the stairwell.

  She tripped over an outstretched leg. It was clad in vonduun crab armor.

  She looked up, confused. All the Yuuzhan Vong warriors had been ahead of her. Where had this one come from? He was the tallest she’d seen, and wore unusual black-and-silver armor. So did the shorter warrior next to him, the one with the distinctive branding marks on his face.

  That one said, “What do we have here, Explosion Boy?” His voice was cultured, his Basic perfect.

  The tall one said, “Dunno.” He, too, spoke Basic. He reached down, seized one of Viqi’s ankles, and straightened. He held her upside-down at arm’s length. “Runt of the litter, I’d say.”

  Disoriented, Viqi could only watch as a lithe female Jedi, lightsaber blazing, ran past the three of them, paying these Yuuzhan Vong warriors no attention.

  A clang over her head startled her. She looked up—down, at the floor—and saw her locator lying there.

  She reached for it, but the tall warrior swung her to one side. “Grab that, would you, Poster Boy?”

  “Got it.” The one addressed as Poster Boy seized the device and straightened. “Ah, a military-spec vehicle locator. Uulshos makes these. Hey, it’s live.”

  Viqi finally found her voice. “That’s mine.”

  “Not anymore, Senator.”

  Luke and Mara approached Lord Nyax and his Yuuzhan Vong attackers. They kept their guards up, their senses—both physical and Force—alert.

  Luke searched the face in front of him. He looked for some trace of humanity. He saw only smiling mockery, and he could feel the thing through the Force, its appreciation at having slaughtered warriors, its appreciation at the thought of slaughtering Luke and Mara.

  There was no recognition in its emotion, no acknowledgement of kinship of any sort.

  “I don’t know if you can understand me,” Luke said. “But whatever you’re doing, whatever your plans are, I have to stop you.”

  Lord Nyax’s smile grew broader. It seemed to recognize Luke’s intent, even if it could not grasp his words.

  Then it answered—not in words, but in images. Luke saw the power of its will, expressed through the Force, rolling over the remaining people of Coruscant like water roaring down a canyon through a burst dam. He saw them sweeping across Coruscant, killing and eating everything in their way—the Yuuzhan Vong, the disobedient, the Force-blind. He saw the workers here boarding the machine beneath their feet, crashing it through kilometers of buildings until they came to some place, a source for more power to fuel this glorious, deliriously happy destructive impulse.

  In that instant, Luke joined in the plan. He longed to slaughter the outsiders, those who did not understand or join. He longed to taste their flesh.

  He turned to Mara, beckoning her to join. She was facing the Yuuzhan Vong warriors, preventing them from surprising Luke with an attack, but her gaze was yanked to Luke. Her eyes widened, and he could feel her leaning toward him, leaning toward acceptance of this crucial duty.

  But the sight of her brought memories. Luke saw worlds of beauty. He saw his son, composed of Luke and Mara and years to come. Around the edges of Lord Nyax’s command he felt the Force, its other natures, the life from which it flowed.

  He turned back toward Lord Nyax and struggled to find the words to express his thought. “I … stand … in … your … way.”

  It was the Jedi way. Jedi did not attack. But to position oneself in the path of a violent aggressor who would not yield achieved the same result.

  All he could ever do as leader of the wartime Jedi was lead them into the path of the enemy. That was, Luke realized, perhaps his greatest limitation, and in struggling against it without understanding it, he may have hampered the Jedi effectiveness against the enemy.

  But once recognized and accepted, it was also perhaps his greatest strength. Whether by accident or design, by his own will or by the permutations of the Force, he had always found his way into the path of the great enemies of all things living.

  And here he was again. “I stand in your way,” Luke repeated, and was pleased that he had regained control over his voice. “What you see, you will not achieve.”

  The expression on Lord Nyax’s face turned from mocking amusement to seriousness … even sadness, for a brief moment, as though the thing had at last recognized some kinship and discovered that it did not bridge the gulf between the two of them.

  Then it charged.

  Kell finished binding Viqi’s hands behind her back and looked up in time to see Lord Nyax lunge toward Luke.

  Luke raised his lightsaber, caught the downward sweep of Lord Nyax’s right-hand forearm weapon. He spun clockwise, narrowing his profile as the left-hand forearm blade thrust toward him, and kept his guard up in time to intercept the right-hand elbow blade. Mara leapt forward, unleashing two fast blows that the thing’s left-elbow blade caught, then folded over nearly double as she leaped back from a strike from its left knee.

  The Yuuzhan Vong warriors unloaded handfuls of thudbugs and razorbugs, heedless of which of the targets they might hit, but the two Jedi and Lord Nyax flicked the weapons out of the air or dodged them entirely.

  Two Jedi? Three. Suddenly Tahiri was in their midst, coming up on Luke’s left, blocking a follow-up blow from the elbow blade on that side.

  “Bad,” Kell said.

  Face nodded. “Bad bad.” He pulled his blaster rifle from the wrappings on his back. “But who to shoot first?”

  “We’re no good here.” Kell gestured toward the stairwell. “Let’s see what they’re doing down below. If it’s important, I can blow it up.”

  “That’s our Kell.”

  Kell set Viqi on her feet, then hauled her up over his shoulder. Following Face, he descended the stairwell.

  Denua Ku watched the pale Jeedai, and for a moment admiration almost drowned out the revulsion he felt at the notion of having abomination-machines like lightsabers touching one’s own flesh.

  The pale thing fought with a savagery and speed unlike those of any warrior he had ever seen. And it was untrained. With his experienced warrior’s eye, he could see that its movements were instinctive, a fact revealed in the creature’s failure to throw effective combinations of blows, its inability to gauge which way its enemies would leap when it attacked them.

  If it had been born Yuuzhan Vong, if he’d been able to train it for a year, even half a year, he could have turned this thing into the greatest warrior who was not himself a god. As it was, he’d have to kill this thing.

  Even if the Jeedai, too, wanted it dead, it was still an abomination. And it was the greater threat. It had to die first. He threw his last razorbug, then lunged forward into hand-to-hand range, probing at the pale thing’s back with the tail-tip of his amphistaff.

  The pale thing spun, sending its knee blade toward Denua Ku’s guts. He blocked the sweep with his amphistaff, but the impact was tremendous; it threw him back off his feet. He rolled backward and came upright, saw one of his warriors perform a similar probing assault … and this warrior took a forearm blade through the throat.

  Nine Yuuzhan Vong warriors down. Sixteen to go. The numbers were becoming worse.

  A tremendous mechanical roar shook the chamber. It lowered slightly in volume but became steady, filling the air.

  FOURTEEN

  “It’s a delaying tactic!” Mara shouted over the roar.

  “I know!” Luke shouted back. “It’s working! I’m being delayed!” He stopped a forearm-swing and was driven back a step, stopped the follow-up elbow swing and was driven back a step, jumped back to avoid the knee-strike and di
scovered it was only a feint; Lord Nyax’s leg snapped back and caught a Yuuzhan Vong warrior in the crotch, collapsing the warrior despite its armor.

  Every step took the Jedi and the warriors toward the center of the chamber. The floor vibrated beneath their feet.

  “What?” Mara said.

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “Not you! Speak up, Face!”

  Luke waved Mara back. She jumped up and backward in a somersault, taking her out of Lord Nyax’s range, and took out her comlink, holding it up to her ear. Tahiri took her place, swinging her lightsaber defensively, eyes wide as she analyzed her attacker’s motions and patterns.

  “I said, it’s a big machine,” Face shouted. Here, at the source of the vibration, the noise was much worse.

  He, Kell, and their struggling cargo were on a catwalk two levels down from the floor where the Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong fought, one level down from the side-passageways by which the Vong must have arrived. And the catwalk itself was the top level of a deep, deep chamber—a chamber that housed a single vehicle.

  Had that machine been set up on any world but Coruscant, it would have been considered a skyscraper. It was hundreds of meters tall. At its base were treaded appendages that could roll like tank treads or lift and move independently like feet. All along its surface were hydraulic arms; some ended in what looked like plasma cutters, others in huge ball-like weapons, still others in manipulator hands.

  At the top was a sensor station surrounded by transparisteel panels, and packed into that station were living beings. Many of the workers who had not been on the floor above at the onset of the Yuuzhan Vong attack were here, and more were shoving their way way along a catwalk extension that led to a door in that station.

  Down below were more beings, tirelessly carrying hunks of debris away from the machine’s base.

  The whole thing roared like a fleet of antiquated Pod-racers. The vibration cut into Face’s skin wherever the vonduun crab armor did not cover it.

  “Tell her it’s a construction droid,” Kell shouted. “It looks completely functional.”