Conquest: Edge of Victory I (26 page)

“No,” Nen Yim replied. “Our approach has followed two axes. We have mapped and remapped her nervous
system. We have identified her memory networks and are using the provoker spineray to discourage their use.”

“You mean her old memories trigger pain?”

“Yes. Accessing her long-term memory extracts a pain sacrifice. The more connected memories she tries to bring to conscious thought, the greater her suffering.”

“Why not simply wipe clean the centers of memory and begin again?”

“Because she retains the knowledge of her
Jeedai
powers. A day will come—after we’ve shaped her—when we’ll want her to remember how to use them.”

Tsun studied the human. “I see you have scarred her forehead with the Domain Kwaad sign.”

“We will do more, in time. We will alter her face, especially that strange nose of hers. But that is superficial. Attend.”

Nen Yim squatted near the vivarium membrane, opened it again to sound, and spoke to the
Jeedai
. “What is your name?” she asked.

The
Jeedai
didn’t react. With a sigh, Nen Yim stimulated a minor pain center and cortical nerve with the provoker spineray.

What would have once made the young
Jeedai
shriek in agony only cycles before now merely made her flutter her eyes and frown.

“Yes, Adept?” the
Jeedai
said, as if waking reluctantly from a dream.

“What is your name?” Nen Yim asked.

“My name?”

“Yes.”

“It is—” She frowned, then suddenly her eyes bulged and she gripped her head. “My name is—” Her teeth clenched and her face went white. Then, as if in sudden remembrance, the
Jeedai
’s face cleared.

“My name is Riina Kwaad,” she said.

“Very good, Riina,” Nen Yim said. “You have learned. And today you will learn more.”

“I see now,” Tsun said. “You trellis her thoughts. Unwanted responses bring pain. Desired ones do not.”

“No,” Nen Yim replied. “That name came from an implanted memory.”

“But you just said that the protocol of Qah was ineffective.”

“Yes. But we can build a kind of Qah cell using her own, human brain cells.”

A look of sheer delight crossed the initiate’s face. “So it
is
true,” he whispered. “Here, you pursue our dream, the superprotocol—the methods of finding new knowledge without asking the gods.”

Nen Yim felt infected by his joy, but she drew her tentacles into a mild admonishment. “Here, in these chambers of the master, such things may be spoken in security,” she cautioned. “But outside of this room, have a care.”

“Yes, of course. I know what happens to heretics as well as you. But what am I to do? Command me, Adept Nen Yim. Make me a part of this!”

He was very like Yakun, Nen Yim reflected. How had she not seen it immediately, the passion in his eyes? It was almost as if her lover had been reborn.

Keep to the task at hand
, she counseled herself. “The modified memory cells are weak,” she told Tsun. “Most are rejected within a matter of hours and have to be reimplanted. My task is to understand why; it is not a biochemical matter, as I see it—difficult to explain, and perhaps connected to her
Jeedai
powers. Your task, Initiate Tsun, is to grow new memories for her. We are in the process of transferring a complete set of false memories developed in the Qah protocol to a human-cell equivalent. We can then bud them as many times as we wish. When I have found a way to condition her to accept implanted memories permanently, we will then have a complete set to transfer. Meanwhile, we modify the cells, try them out, and see how long they last. We might stumble
on a biological solution in the process, or at the very least learn more about how her memory works.”

“I hear and obey,” Tsun said eagerly. “But since there is no protocol to follow …”

“I will demonstrate. The trials were rigorous and required much testing—”

“Testing,” Tsun breathed. “A word I never thought to hear spoken aloud in this context.”

“Are you listening, Initiate, or will you comment on my every word?” Nen Yim remonstrated, trying to keep her voice stern.

“Apologies, Adept,” he said. “I am all attention.”

“Good. I was saying,
Initiate
, that developing the process was difficult, but the resulting protocol is simple, and as easy to follow as any of the god-given ones. If you come here, I will describe it to you.”

He genuflected and followed her eagerly, but did not interrupt her again except with necessary questions.

   Riina watched the two Yuuzhan Vong go about their work in confusion. Who were they? Why was she here?

Discontinuity
. She came to, trembling, her thoughts drifting in angry swarms, unwilling to associate with one another. She remembered the female asking her name, and answering “Riina.” That hadn’t hurt.

But somehow it was
wrong
.

There were things she could see from the corner of her eye she could never see looking straight on. Her real name was like that, lurking just out of sight. When she tried to stare straight at it, it bit her with hot needle teeth.

That was true of a lot of things. The face that kept appearing in the dark of her mind, the voice that sometimes rang in her head, the memory that kept trying to surface of how she had gotten here—all were shifting trails in the sand, all led to agony.

But she couldn’t give up. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

Or was she? Brief flashes of color and sound came, now, of a world turned inside out, with no sky but only land that curved up to meet itself. A crèche-mother with a sloped forehead and nearly noseless face. The prickly sweet scent of fuming omipal during the ritual of appellation. The spicy, slightly rotten taste of von’u, a rare treat given her by her naming-father.

Riina
they called her.
Riina Kwaad
.

She felt as if she were drifting down a stream of soothing water, surrounded by comforting voices. She rubbed her forehead and felt the marks of her domain, and even the raw pain of them felt good, in its own way.

Tahiri!

The voice again. Memories of her past splintered like crystal and cut into her brain. Other images flashed, names. One name.

Anakin
.

The stream became a river, raging, sucking her under, and Anakin was in it with her. She held to the image, though paroxysms shook her body.

This was real. This happened! We were little, at the academy, we were following dreams that drew us together—

She screamed, leapt, and slammed into the barrier that separated her from the Yuuzhan Vong. She reached out in the Force to try to choke them, but they weren’t there, somehow. There was nothing real behind their startled faces.

“My name is Tahiri!” she screamed at them. “I am Jedi! Tahiri!”

Then a tidal wave of dazzling anguish crawled up every single nerve, centipedes with legs of fire, and she lost consciousness.

   “What did it say?” Tsun asked.

“That was Basic, the language of the infidels,” Nen Yim told him.

“Should she be able to access that?”

“No. She still resists. We found that she somehow reroutes to nerve clusters we have not mined. However, the provoker spineray follows the reroutes and stimulates them, as well. In time, she will have no way into or out of those memories save through the embrace of pain. By that time it will not matter. She will be infidel no longer, and will welcome the challenge.”

“Thank you for explaining,” he said.

Nen Yim acknowledged him with a twist of her headdress, returning to her work.

The damutek root was a hollow tube, and when Anakin and Vua Rapuung entered it, it was almost a meter in diameter. Close, but not claustrophobic.

As soon as it sensed their presence, it constricted, hugging the contours of their bodies with insistent strength. Anakin had to straighten his arms in front of him and drag himself downward with the strength of his fingers.

He felt as if he was suffocating. He couldn’t go backwards, not with Vua Rapuung behind him. To make matters worse, he was moving against a gentle but unrelenting current. When the pressure against him grew too great he would curl his body into a fetal position, something that took almost every bit of strength he had. When he released and straightened his body, it took several seconds for the root walls to contract and conform to his body again. It felt like trying to crawl up the esophagus of a snake intent on swallowing. The only problem with that analogy was that if he were doing that, he would be assured of light at the end of the mucilaginous tunnel. Here he was crawling toward darkness, maybe nothingness. What if the root ended in a sealed aquifer? How long would the breather shoved down his windpipe continue to work? Until he starved, probably.

If he ever got off Yavin 4, he promised himself, he would visit his uncle’s homeworld, Tatooine, or some other similarly desiccated place. He had had more than
enough of water and other fluids on this trip to last him decades.

Fighting a nattering little panic, Anakin continued dragging himself forward. Minutes piled into hours.

He thought of sunlight, wind, infinite space.

He thought of Tahiri. Was he wrong to try to rebuild his lightsaber? Should he have gone on charging after her without it? The strong, early contacts in the Force had faded to occasional brushes, most powerfully when she was in agony. Anakin had the clear impression that Tahiri was actually avoiding contact, shoving him away.

Despite this, an image of her prison had assembled itself in his mind—a small chamber divided from a larger one by a thin but unbreakable membrane. Her jailers were Yuuzhan Vong like the one he had seen by the succession pool, the one with the tentacled headdress. Several other cells like the one she was in were visible, but these were empty and dark, presumably waiting for more young Jedi captives.

The other thing he was certain of was that Tahiri was in a great deal of confusion. Not only did she not respond to his touch, she sometimes didn’t even recognize it.

If he thought he could save her without his lightsaber …

But he couldn’t. Even the insanely reckless Vua Rapuung thought so, or they would never be squeezing themselves down a kilometer of small intestine.

Tahiri could hang in there for another two days. She had to. And to save her, he could crawl through anything.

Muscles trembling, even when he freshened them with the Force, he moved on.

   When he finally emerged into a space large enough that he could float free and touch nothing, he silently celebrated it by stretching, bending, kicking his arms, and waving his feet. It was the most delicious feeling he could
imagine at that moment. For perhaps a minute he thought of nothing but this simple jubilation, but then the darkness lurking in his mind reminded him he would have to crawl right back up the Sith-spawned thing if this cavern didn’t go anywhere. He took out his lambent crystal and willed it to life.

Rapuung appeared, floating facing him, looking like a reptilian water monster. Beyond him Anakin saw the tube opening extruding from a stone surface that bent to envelop them in a cavern of indeterminate size. Anakin found gravity’s direction and started following the surface up, trailing one hand on it. At the same time he stretched out with the Force, sensing water drumming slowly through stone, searching for the sounding boards, the hollow places where air held court.

   Anakin thought he’d been happy to leave the tube. Pulling himself onto damp stone, yanking the gnullith from his mouth, was infinitely better. He sat there, gasping and wet, as Vua Rapuung climbed out of the water behind him.

“I hope this was worth it,” Rapuung growled.

“It will be.”

“Heal your weapon so we can leave this skulking pit.”

“I’ll start in a moment,” Anakin said. “But first, Vua Rapuung, tell me something. Do you really believe that the marks of your shame were inflicted upon you by a shaper? That she did this to you for rejecting her love?”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“The other Shamed Ones talk. They saw me with you.”

Rapuung’s face contorted as if he had swallowed the foulest thing in the world, but his head chopped affirmatively.

“Our love was forbidden. We both knew it. For a time neither of us cared. We believed that Yun-Txiin and Yun-Q’aah had taken pity on us, dared the wrath of Yun-Yuuzhan,
and given us a special dispensation. Such things have happened before, no matter what ignorant things you may have heard.” His lip curled. “It did not happen with us. We were wrong.”

“And you broke it off.”

“Yes. Love is a madness. When my sanity began to return, I knew that I could not violate the will of the gods. I told her so.”

“And she didn’t like that.”

Rapuung snorted. “She blasphemed. She said there
were
no gods, that belief in them was superstition, that we are free to do whatever we dare so long as we are strong.” His eyes turned away from Anakin. “Despite her heresy, I would never have told anyone her words. She did not believe that. She feared I would denounce her, or that one day our forbidden trysting would come to the attention of her superiors. She is ambitious, Mezhan Kwaad. She is spiteful. She made me appear Shamed because she knew no one would credit my words then, that anything I said would be taken as the ravings of a lunatic.”

“Why didn’t she just kill you?” Anakin asked. “Give you some poison or fatal disease?”

“She is more cruel than that,” Rapuung snarled. “She would never give me the release of death when she could debase me instead.”

Rapuung’s eyes focused on the lambent. “What else did the other Shamed Ones say? They called me insane, yes?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“I am not.”

Anakin measured his words out carefully. “I don’t care if you are,” he said. “I don’t care about your revenge any more than you care about Tahiri. But I need to know how far you will go. You say you’re reconciled to me using my lightsaber.”

“I have said so.”

“I’m going to rebuild it, as I told you. What I didn’t mention is that I’m going to rebuild it using this.” He held up the lambent.