Conquest: Edge of Victory I (30 page)

“Jeedai …,”
he croaked, but his words drowned in a fit of hacking.

Anakin’s pain lessened, but he found he could move little more than his eyes. He could see Mezhan Kwaad held something in her other hand that resembled some sort of nut.

“This is huun,” Mezhan Kwaad shouted to the crowd. “It releases a nerve toxin sufficient to kill each and every one of you. I am immune to its effects. Your deaths will be useless; they will not serve the Yuuzhan Vong. Commander Vootuh and these others are the real traitors. I am Mezhan Kwaad, and I answer only to Supreme Overlord Shimrra. When he hears of these incidents, he will set things right. In the meantime, I will take this ship, to better defend myself. I do not wish to harm my fellow Yuuzhan Vong. I will do so only if I must.”

The crowd, led by Hul Rapuung, had started up the ramp. Now they stopped.

Mezhan Kwaad turned to her assistant. “Nen Yim. Drag those two on board.” She motioned toward Anakin and the fading Vua Rapuung.

The younger shaper hesitated, then started toward Anakin. She stopped when she saw Anakin’s lightsaber floating up from behind him.

Mezhan Kwaad saw it, too. She sent a jolt of pain coursing through Anakin’s body that scrambled his thoughts into random impulses.

But the lightsaber continued on. Mezhan Kwaad redoubled her torture of Anakin.

Tahiri plucked the blade from the air and ignited it with a
snap-hiss
. Mezhan Kwaad’s expression froze halfway between puzzlement and the sudden, fatal understanding that it hadn’t been Anakin levitating the weapon at all.

Then Tahiri decapitated her.

Tahiri stood for a moment, looking at what she had done, and smiled. Like heat lightning, Anakin’s vision struck back into him, the older Tahiri, the dark Force around her, her pitiless, glacial laughter.

“Tahiri!” he managed.

She looked at him, then, and took a hesitant step toward him, then another. She let the point of the blade drop so it was almost stroking his cheek.

“My friend,” she said, her voice low and weird. “My best friend. You left me.” Her eyes were wrong. They were the same color they had always been, but they had once been warm, full of laughter. Now they were chlorine ice.

“I’ve been trying to find you,” Anakin said. “This whole time …”

“You aren’t real,” Tahiri said. “None of this is. You are a lie.”

He held her gaze and saw the bleakness there, the confusion. He could sense her turmoil. “It’s not a lie, Tahiri. You are my best friend. I love you.”

The blade stroked off a lock of his hair, but he didn’t flinch.

“I love you,” he repeated, the seeds of his vision beginning to take root.

Tahiri closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they became the green eyes he knew—or almost. “Anakin? Are you really—?” She looked around, as if noticing the crowd for the first time. “Well, this doesn’t look good,” she observed.

Anakin saw what she meant. With Mezhan Kwaad down, the warriors in the crowd had come to the forefront.
Armed to the teeth, they stood watching the strange spectacle only meters away.

They wouldn’t just watch for long.

“We have to get out of here,” Anakin said.

“And this is your plan?” Tahiri asked, in something like her old voice.

“Hey, I’m doing my best. I’ll hold ’em off and you run into the ship.”

“No. I don’t care about dying, Anakin. Not after what they did to me. Let’s just take as many of them with us as we can.” She lifted the lightsaber. Her eyes were cooling again.

“Can I have that back?” Anakin asked softly.

She looked as if she would say no, but then shrugged and handed it to him. “Sure. It’s your blade. I lost mine.”

Anakin took the weapon, stood shakily, and faced the gathered warriors.

Hul Rapuung raised his amphistaff to guard. “
Jeedai
, you have proven yourself a great warrior. It will be my honor to kill you.”

“No,” a voice from behind Anakin grated.

Impossibly, Vua Rapuung rose to his feet. He took an amphistaff from one of the dead guards. “No. While I live, none of you shall fight the
Jeedai
.”

“Vua Rapuung,” his brother said, “we all heard what Mezhan Kwaad said. You are Shamed no longer.”

“I was never Shamed. But now you
know
it is a warrior you face.”

“Vua Rapuung, no,” Anakin said. “This is over for you.”

Rapuung turned to him. “I will die soon,” he said. “I am able to give you only a small chance. Take it. Now.” He turned back to the crowd.

“A salute to the
Jeedai!
” he shouted. “A salute of blood!”

With that he leapt at the front rank of warriors, amphistaff spinning. His first blow struck his brother, knocking him to the ground unconscious, but still alive. The others he attacked with much more lethal precision.

“Anakin?” Tahiri asked.

“Into the ship,” he shouted. If he could get her safe, maybe he could come back for Rapuung.

No. His first duty was to Tahiri. If he tried to help Rapuung, they would all die.

“Can you fly it?” Tahiri asked.

“We’ll worry about that once we figure out how to get the boarding ramp up.”

They ducked inside the hatch and started searching frantically for some sort of control.

“What are we looking for?” Tahiri asked.

“A knob, a smooth place—a cluster of nerves. I don’t know.”

“I don’t see anything like that! This is hopeless!” Tahiri said.

Anakin ran his hands over the spongy interior of the ship. Tahiri was right. If they couldn’t even get the ramp up, what chance did he have of flying the stupid thing?

Next to none, probably, but he had to try. He couldn’t have come this far just to fail.

He saw Vua Rapuung die. Already surrounded by a pile of corpses, his feet were trapped, forcing him to fight without footwork. An amphistaff struck Rapuung a downward blow in the neck and came out the small of his back. He dropped his own amphistaff down like a blaster bolt and crushed the skull of the one who had wounded him before collapsing. Then the other warriors were on him, amphistaffs slashing, surging past him up the ramp.

“Sithspawn,” Anakin snarled, planting himself in the doorway, lightsaber blazing, determined to go out at least as well as Rapuung had.

“Oh!” Tahiri exclaimed.
“Tsii dau poonsi.”

The tizowyrm translated it as
the mouth, cause to close
.

The ramp sucked in, out from under the feet of the charging warriors, and the hatch shut.

“You have to know how to talk to it, I guess,” Tahiri said. She’d tried to say it lightly, but it was almost a parody of her old self. She knew it, too. Tears brimmed in her eyes. “They put things in my head, Anakin. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

He reached for her shoulder. “I’m real. And I’m going to get you out of this. Believe me.”

She folded into him, suddenly, and his arms went around her without him even telling them to. She felt warm, and small, and good against him.

Then his wounded leg refused to support him any longer.

   They cut part of Tahiri’s garment to make a tourniquet. The living fabric worked even better than anticipated, because after the shock of being severed, it contracted, perhaps dying. Anakin wished he had some of Rapuung’s healing swatches. Maybe they could find some on the ship.

They found the controls just as the craft rocked to a tremendous blast.

“Boy, that didn’t take long,” Anakin said. “I wonder why they didn’t just open the hatch.”

“I sealed it,” Tahiri said “It won’t listen to anyone outside.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I mean, I’m sure they have
someone
who can open it, but not before we get off the ground.”

“Assuming we can get off the ground,” Anakin said, looking at the controls and fighting a feeling of helplessness. He recognized a villip and an acceleration couch, and that was all. A wide array of not-quite-geometrical shapes extruded from the “console,” along with a variety of patches of differing color and texture. Nothing about any of them spoke to him. There seemed to be no writing or numerals either, no gauges or readouts. The walls of the room were opaque, as well. He couldn’t even see what the Yuuzhan Vong outside were doing, though it was obvious they had dragged up some sort of big gun or explosives.

The ship rocked again, and several of the patches emitted a dull phosphorescence, which probably indicated damage to something-or-other.

“Okay,” Anakin said. “Maybe I
can’t
fly anything.”

Tahiri lifted a sort of loose bag from the acceleration couch. A thin creeper attached it to the console.

“Put this on your head,” she suggested.

“That’s right!” Anakin said, remembering. “Uncle Luke tried one of those on. It’s some sort of direct brain interface.” He looked at the thing dubiously, then tried it on. Immediately he heard a distant voice, murmuring something he couldn’t understand.

“The tyzowyrm isn’t translating,” he said. “I guess it’s being bypassed by the hood.”

He tried a few mental commands, with no result.

“This could be bad,” he muttered. “It must be like the lambent. Without attunement, our brains won’t interface directly with Vong technology.”

“Yuuzhan Vong,” Tahiri corrected absently.

“Right. Maybe it’s just the language barrier. Maybe … Tahiri, you try it.”

“Me? I’m no pilot.”

“I know. Try it anyway.”

Tahiri shrugged and placed the sack over her head.

It squirmed and shrank to fit.

“Oh!” she said. “Wait.”

The walls became transparent as another concussion set the ship quivering. Anakin could now see what was causing this; another ship, also grounded, was firing on them with one of its plasma weapons. The Yuuzhan Vong had cleared out a safe lane for the shots. Anakin reflected that they probably hoped to break through the hull—skin?—without seriously damaging the ship.

“Okay,” Tahiri murmured, her fingers caressing the various nerve nodes. “Let’s see what—yow!”

The ship jumped off the ground like a fleek eel from a hot pan. Anakin gasped and then whooped, slapping Tahiri on the back.

“We’ll do this yet!” he shouted. “Let’s burn out of here.”

“Which way?”

“Any way! Just go!”

“You’re the captain,” she said. The damutek suddenly blurred away beneath them.

“Not bad,” Anakin said. “Now, if you can figure out how the weapons work—”

Tahiri shrieked suddenly, clawing off the headgear.

“What’s wrong?” Anakin asked.

“It’s in my head! Telling me to turn back! In another second it would have had me!”

“This isn’t good,” Anakin said, watching the ground rush up. It seemed to him he had seen altogether too much of that lately. Gravity was highly overrated.

   By the time they found the hatch and crawled out, Anakin could hear the drone of another Yuuzhan Vong ship approaching.

“Tahiri,” he said, “run for it. I’ll just slow you down with this leg.”

“No,” Tahiri said simply.

“Please. I came all this way to rescue you. It can’t have been for nothing.”

Tahiri brushed his cheek with her hand. “It wasn’t for nothing,” she said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I know we used to be in everything together. I know if this is the end, there’s nobody I would rather be standing with. I know that we can still make them sorry they ever tried to mess with the two of us.” She took his hand.

Anakin gripped it back. “Okay,” he conceded. “Together.”

It didn’t take the ship long to find them; they hadn’t made it more than a kilometer beyond the river. This was no speeder analog, either, but something more corvette-sized.

Tahiri touched Anakin in the Force, tentatively, and for the first time he really felt what they had done to her—the pain and confusion, the sickening nightmare
sense of unreality. He poured his sympathy and strength back into her, and the bond strengthened. And as she gripped his fingers tighter, as he finally surrendered the last of his barriers against her—against
them
—the Force blew through him like a hurricane.

Tahiri laughed. It was not a child’s laugh.

Together you are stronger than the sum of your parts
, Ikrit had said.

Together
.

They wrenched a thousand-year-old Massassi tree out of the ground and launched it straight up. By the time it struck the Yuuzhan Vong ship it was traveling as fast as a speeder. It smacked into the dovin basal and splintered, twisting the ship half-around. Another tree jerked out of the ground, and another. The ship listed, firing gobs of molten plasma into the trees, not understanding exactly what was happening. One of the trees rammed into the cannon structure, and flame burst out all along one side of the ship.

In theory, a Jedi could use the Force effortlessly, without tiring. In practice, it seldom went that way.

Anakin and Tahiri had gone beyond their limits, and now their strength was ebbing.

The ship wobbled and molten fire dripped from its ruined weapon, but it was still there, and there were plenty more where it came from.

Still, Anakin gripped Tahiri’s hand. “Together,” he said.

The air above them shrieked and strobed, and sharp lines of red light carved into the Yuuzhan Vong ship as if it were a root vegetable. A too-bright-to-watch ball of flame followed close after, striking the craft in its already bleeding wound, and then the Yuuzhan Vong ship was a corpse hurtling to the ground. Anakin looked up, mouth open.

Another ship was descending, a ship made of metal and ceramic, not living coral.

It was Remis Vehn’s battered transport, and it was the most beautiful thing Anakin had ever seen.

It dropped on repulsorlifts, and the hatch swung open.

Qorl stuck his head out. “What are you waiting for?” the old man shouted. “Come aboard.”

Talon Karrde followed the pinpoint on the long-range scanner with a raptor gaze.

Still, he was fully aware when Kam Solusar came silently up behind him.

“What is it?” the Jedi asked.