Refugee: Force Heretic II (20 page)

Tahiri shook her head again, more vigorously this time, wanting to deny the spreading darkness as much as the words themselves. “It—it
can’t
be true. It just can’t be!”

“It is, Tahiri,” Leia said. “Believe me. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can start doing—”

“No!”
Tahiri screamed in a pitch that surprised herself as much as it obviously did Leia, who took a step back at the outburst.

As though a dam had burst, she was suddenly in motion. With the full strength of the Force flowing through her, fueled by her desperation and her need to escape, she snatched the pendant as she pushed past Leia and Han and headed for the door—too quick for even Cakhmain
to grab her. C-3PO was standing on the other side of the door when she went through, but she didn’t even give him time to utter a single word of objection; she just shoved him aside as hard as she could, throwing the golden droid clean off his feet and into the wall. Then she was through the door and out of the suite, running as if her very life depended on it.

She saw nothing but corridors flashing by, and could feel nothing but the cool pendant of Yun-Yammka against her palm, grinning in vile satisfaction.

And somewhere beyond the sound of her own sobbing, she could hear a name being called. That she couldn’t be sure the name even belonged to her made her cry that much harder, and run that much faster.

Jag listened intently as Han and Leia detailed the incident with Tahiri over the secure subspace channel. The two sounded exhausted, which was hardly surprising given what they’d just been through—and the fact that it was still the middle of the night where they were probably wasn’t helping, either.

“She didn’t hurt anyone, did she?” Jag asked.

“No,” Leia said. “And I don’t believe she would have, either.”

“What about the Riina personality?”

There was some hesitation from the other end. “We’re more concerned about what she’ll do to herself than what she might do to others,” Leia said firmly.

“So where is she now?”

“She ran off,” Leia said.

“And we haven’t heard from her since,” Han put in wearily. “Poor kid was in quite a state when she left.”

Jag acknowledged his frustration at being too far away to be of any direct help with a sigh. “Have you notified security on the ground?”

“And tell them what?” Han asked. “That there’s a
lone Jedi on the loose who’s possibly under the control of a Yuuzhan Vong mind? That’ll really go down well with the authorities.”

“They’d probably lock the lot of us up,” Leia said. “Anyway, it’s not an option. But she does need to be found—and soon. I don’t like the idea of her being alone while she’s trying to deal with this. She needs our help right now.”

Jag shook his head. “I just don’t understand how this could have happened. From what I understood, she was over her experiences on Yavin Four.”

“So we all thought,” Leia said. “But her conditioning went deep. She could speak the Yuuzhan Vong language and fly their ships; and there were moments when Anakin himself said that she acted strangely. But outwardly she
seemed
okay; she appeared to be holding herself together.”

“But then Anakin died,” Han said, “and that must have changed everything.” Jag could hear the echoes of the still-painful grief in Han’s words. He seemed to steel himself against the emotion as he carried on with: “And if this Riina personality is still with the kid, then we have to do something about it.”

Jag agreed, but he knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Tahiri could have been anywhere by now, and if she was as panicked as Han and Leia said she was, then she probably wasn’t going to
want
to be found in a hurry. While Leia was probably right in that Tahiri wouldn’t hurt anyone, Tahiri might see things differently.
Without any control over when the Riina personality emerges, she may see herself as being a threat to her friends and want to keep away for fear of causing them any harm …

“What bothers me, though, Jag,” Leia went on, “is that you and Jaina suspected something was wrong and yet you kept it to yourselves.”

Jag swallowed, wishing it were Jaina, not him, fielding the question.

Leia had every right to be upset, of course. After he had shown Jaina the pendant that Tahiri had found back on Galantos, the two of them had discussed what they should do about the young girl. Clearly she was finely attuned to anything Yuuzhan Vong; and just as clearly there were moments when the alien personality rose up and tried to take over. However, the girl was a trained Jedi, and they felt she should be given the chance to solve the problem on her own. It had never been their intention to keep Han and Leia out of the loop indefinitely, and neither had imagined that anything could go wrong as long as one of them was close at hand to keep an eye on her.

“I’m sorry,” he said shortly. “But we really didn’t expect anything like this to happen.”

“Well, it did,” Han said. “And if Leia hadn’t suspected that something was up, things could have gotten quite ugly down here.”

“Well, again, I’m sorry,” Jag said. “Where is Jaina? She was supposed to be looking out for Tahiri while you were all down on Bakura.”

“Jaina hasn’t returned yet from interviewing Malinza Thanas,” Leia replied. If there was any concern for her daughter, the Princess was hiding it well.

“She still hasn’t reported in?” Jag had been apprised of Jaina’s mission when he’d first come on duty. “But it’s hours past midnight down there. She should have been back by now.”

“We know,” Han said.

Jag felt his fists clench at this news. He wished again that he were down on the surface where he could do more good. “Maybe I should ask Captain Mayn to send a shuttle with backup and—”

“No,” Leia interrupted. “I have faith in Jaina; if she
needs assistance, then she’ll be in touch. Wherever she is, I’m sure—”

An alarm sounded from the console, cutting off the last part of her sentence.

“Hang on a second,” Jag said. “I have another call coming through on a separate channel.” He flipped a switch to hear the incoming message. “Go ahead.”

“Colonel Fel, we have contacts emerging from hyperspace in Sector Eleven.” The voice belonged to Selwin Markota,
Pride of Selonia’s
second in command.

Jag forced the problems on Bakura to the back of his mind. His duty as squadron leader took precedence for the moment over his concerns for Jaina and Tahiri. “How many?”

“Thirty, with more on the way; at least two capital vessels so far. It looks like a fleet.”

“Have they contacted Bakura?”

“They’re being hailed now. I’ll patch you into the defense fleet net.”

“Copy that.” Jag flicked back to the secure channel. “I’m sorry, Leia, Han, but I have to go.”

“We just got the call, too,” Leia responded crisply. “We’ll let you know if anything changes.”

“Flights A and B,” Jag said on the Twin Sun frequencies, “stay here and mind the big bird. C, you’re with me.” He peeled out of formation and was followed by two X-wings and a clawcraft. On the scanner before him, the ships emerging from hyperspace stood out like a nebula in the deep void. The number of contacts now stood at forty, with still more coming.

“This is Bakuran Defense Fleet,” called the local traffic control. “Please identify yourself and state your intentions.”

The response came in the form of a warbling, dissonant fluting.

Jag had been briefed; he knew enough to recognize the language. The fleet had originated from Lwhekk—but who was commanding it? The Ssi-ruuk or the P’w’eck?

The voice of C-3PO came over the comm. “The message says: ‘I come in peace, people of Bakura, to consecrate this world and bond our two cultures in alliance.’ ”

Another voice spoke from Bakura in response to this. Jag recognized it as belonging to Prime Minister Cundertol.

“We welcome the Keeramak to Bakura in the hope that this new friendship will bring prosperity and enlightenment to all.”

The sickly sentiment made Jag roll his eyes. Luckily the speeches didn’t last any longer than that.

“Keeramak Entourage, please assume the following orbits,” the first voice from Bakura said. There followed a long list of requests designed to minimize the disruption caused by the many new arrivals, at the end of which there came a brief burst of alien song, which C-3PO interpreted to mean, simply, “ ‘Understood.’ ”

Jag turned his interception flight into a sweeping, exploratory cruise, examining the alien vessels with a critical eye. The Chiss had fought the Ssi-ruuk on several occasions, contributing behind the scenes to the Imperium’s retreat at the advance of the New Republic. He himself, though, had never seen one outside of a simulation. While their battle droids consisted of simple, angular pyramids with weapon and sensor arrays at each corner, the larger ships possessed a smoothly organic appearance. Great sweeping hulls with relatively few breaks formed bulbous, shell-like structures that bulged in odd but beautiful ways. He spotted two ovoid
Sh’ner
-class planetary assault carriers, accompanied by numerous
Fw’Sen
-class picket ships. The assault carriers were crewed by more than five hundred P’w’eck—plus over three hundred enteched droids, if they were still used—and were nearly
750 meters long. Overall, given their structure, they displaced a greater volume than a Victory-class Star Destroyer.

It seemed an awful lot of hardware to accompany a diplomatic mission. But then, he supposed, the P’w’eck were probably just as nervous of the Bakurans as the Bakurans were of them. With their freedom only recently attained, they wouldn’t be keen to send their leader into the middle of a potentially difficult situation without sufficient backup.

At least they weren’t shy about sharing their battle data, though. On the screen before him, names rapidly appeared next to all the major P’w’eck vessels. The cruiser in the middle of the formation was called the
Firrinree
, while the one lagging slightly behind was designated the
Errinung’ka
. He didn’t even bother to attempt to remember the names of the picket ships.

As he watched, the last of the stragglers arrived and the formation broke in three to assume the orbits given them by the Bakuran Defense Fleet. The maneuver was accomplished smoothly and without fuss—and that spoke loudly of the discipline and flexibility of the P’w’eck fleet. One thing was for certain: they might be new to the idea of being in charge of their own destiny, but the P’w’eck had been exhaustively trained by their Ssi-ruuvi masters to fly battleships. It showed.

He hung around the main chunk of the fleet long enough to follow security negotiations with the reception team on the ground, and to witness the launch of seven heavily armed
D’kee
-class landing ships. The Keeramak was on its way.

Jag only hoped that Bakura was ready for it.

AGGRESSION

The warm, dry air of the library was making Saba’s scales itchy, and she scratched absently at them while skimming through one of the many books suggested by Tris. She barely noticed the discomfort, however; her thoughts were too focused on the information she was reading. It surprised her how effortlessly she had taken to this form of research. When they’d first started, she had thought she’d never get used to the turning of pages—it seemed so time-consuming! And yet now she was skimming through the books with an ease and confidence similar to that with which skotcarp lizards back home would skate down the shaley slopes of Mount Ste’vshuulsz.

“Found anything yet?”

Saba looked up to see Mara peering at her from the end of an aisle of towering bookcases. She shook her head with some apology as she closed the book she’d been browsing through. She’d been reading up on a world on the outer edge of the Unknown Regions where a species of stilt-legged insects lived in a densely oxygenated atmosphere. Their legends spoke of a fire god who burst out of the planet’s core every three years to burn large swaths of their world to the ground, initiating a new cycle of death and rebirth. But as interesting as it was, it didn’t help their search. There was nothing about mysterious planets appearing in the sky anywhere in the text.

“This one has found nothing,” she replied.

Mara nodded. “None of us has, unfortunately. I guess we’re all still trying to come to grips with these books. It’s frustratingly slow.”

“It would be slower still if not in Basic. Our persistence will pay off,” Saba told her. “It alwayz does.”

Mara smiled, then moved off in the direction of Danni; probably, Saba thought, to check on the young scientist’s progress also.

Saba pushed the book she’d been reading to one side and took another from the stack that Tris had supplied. Another species, another dead end. She didn’t mind, though. She was reveling in the diversity of life in the Unknown Regions. The search was a far cry from any of her previous duties as a Jedi, and in many ways she knew it could turn out to be one of the most difficult, given the amount of material they had to work through. But she also knew that finding the data itself would probably turn out to be the easiest part; examining it and determining if it was relevant or not would undoubtedly take a lot longer.