Reunion (15 page)

Surprise me
.

A Yuuzhan Vong corvette and a cruiser analog, hugging the planet jealously in a low orbit, dominated the northern flank. Presumably the yammosk was in one of those two ships. Swarms of coralskippers were gathering to them like nanja flies to a thawing corpse. Outnumbered four to one, Imperial TIE fighters did their best to keep the alien warriors from gaining a foothold. Once they got themselves organized, Pellaeon’s second Star Destroyer,
Relentless
, would become vulnerable on that side, as would the planet itself and the relay base with it. As it was, Pellaeon was only just managing to hang on and avoid the Yuuzhan Vong pinning him down, and ending the battle once and for all. And if the relay base was taken out, the battle itself would become altogether meaningless.

Jag could see the importance of securing that section of the battleground. But sending three fighters against a cruiser, a corvette, and countless fighters was madness of the first order. What was he supposed to do? Ram the cruiser? He’d be lucky to get past the dovin basals! And even if he did, what would the momentum of one small starfighter do against a ship of that size?

What would Jaina do
? he asked himself again, forcing himself to think laterally.

Then, unexpectedly, a creeping sense of unreality spread over him. An idea had formed in his mind. A crazy and reckless idea that seemed perfectly fitting. It certainly wasn’t the sort of tactic he’d have normally employed. It was, for all intents and purposes,
surprising
.

“Jocell,” he called to Twin Four, deliberately dropping the formalities now that it was just the three of them. “You in the mood to pick a fight?”

“Not sure exactly what you mean by that, sir,” she replied uneasily. “But I’m always ready.”

“Not just any fight.” He scanned the region around the northern flank. There: a dead gunship, drifting like a
lost asteroid, its biological systems slowly dying. Half the ship was black with fire; the other half radiated heat by the terawatt out into the sunless vacuum, chilling rapidly in the process. It was moving in an elliptical orbit that would take it in the direction he wanted. He nudged his vector minutely closer to it, and his wingmates obediently, and unquestioningly, followed.

“Now all we need are some skips.”

“I take it you have something in mind, sir?” asked Enton Adelmaa’j in Twin Eight.

“I do,” he replied. He couldn’t quite believe it himself, so there was no point in attempting to explain it to them just yet. “Behave as normal, and don’t be surprised if I go into a spin for no reason. Just cover me, okay? Make sure nothing picks me off while I’m playing dead.”

“What if you
are
dead? How will we tell the difference?”

“In the long run, I think you’ll know.”

He quickly double-checked the calculations. Yes, this could work. He wasn’t used to relying on chance, but he was prepared to make an exception here, and the idea of that gave him an unaccountable thrill. Not just because he would be surprising Pellaeon, either: it was also because he was surprising himself.

As he angled his flight toward a knot of coralskippers harrying a nearby Imperial squadron, he sent his thoughts out to Jaina. He wasn’t Force-sensitive and he doubted she could hear him, but he was sure she’d understand.

Wish me luck, Jaina
.

Then, gunning his engines, he swooped in to attack.

Jaina struggled through blackness. She had never experienced a mind-meld like this before. It was as though she were trying to swim through mud. The normally bright center of Tahiri’s mind was muffled and distant, buried.

“Tahiri?” She called her friend’s name as she searched for that bright center. Occasional flashes of memory and emotions lunged out of the blackness, startling her. She saw two figures dueling in a place that looked disturbingly familiar, glimpsed as though on a fogged screen. Then she saw those figures running, possibly hunting, lightsabers slicing bright swaths through the fetid air. The light they cast confirmed her first impressions. Even with the prominence of shadows around them, she could tell where they were: it was the worldship around Myrkr; it was the place where Anakin was killed.

Vast statues loomed over them, offering razor-tipped tentacles in return for devotion; deep shadows hid hints of voxynlike monsters, and the air stank of death and grief. The moment she’d melded with Tahiri’s mind and stepped into the young Jedi’s private torment, Jaina had been inundated with memories of the pain she’d felt when Anakin had died, and the grief she had endured afterward. The inner landscape reflected all of these dark emotions back at her; every craggy shadow seemed to emanate all manner of negative emotion: grief, anger, fear, betrayal, loneliness …

These were all things she couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by, though. She had to stay focused, to help as she could. She could play no role in whatever fantasy Tahiri was embroiled in, but she could offer strength.

As another image flashed through the darkness, though, she wondered whom exactly she was giving strength
to
.

Tahiri’s scarred, grim-faced mirror image had murder in her eyes. Although Jaina knew it to be Riina whom Tahiri was fighting, or hunting, she kept seeing Tahiri. The only way to separate them was by the hand that held the lightsaber: in the real world Tahiri was left-handed, while Riina held hers in her right hand.

“Tahiri? Can you hear me?”

Jaina wanted Tahiri to know that she wasn’t alone; that help was at hand if she needed it.

Grishna br’rok ukul-hai
, a voice snarled in her mind.
Hrrl osam’ga akren hu—akri vushta
.

“I don’t understand,” Jaina said into the void.

An image came of Tahiri’s face lunging out of the darkness, eyes glaring with hate. She flinched. Not for the first time, Jaina wondered if she was out of her depth. Psychic healing was Master Cilghal’s field, not hers. Her intentions were good, but that wasn’t enough.

I think it’s time to get out of here
, she thought.

When she attempted to break the meld, however, she found that she couldn’t. The illusion of the worldship seemed to close in around her like the walls of a cage, and she realized with alarm that she was trapped.

Ash’nagh vruckuul urukh
, mocked the voice of Riina from the shadows.
Esh tiiri ahnakh
!

Jaina saw an image of Tahiri hunting her shadow flashing out of the void. Jaina quelled a sense of dread and frustration rising in her. There had to be something she could do. She just hoped she could find it in time …

Luke’s thoughts should have been clear when the time came for the meeting with the Magister, but instead they were an untidy tangle. Ever since Jacen had told him about his encounter with the young Ferroan girl, that was all he’d been able to think about.

Anakin killed the Blood Carver without a lightsaber …

He could understand Jacen’s initial confusion. At first he, too, had assumed that Tescia had meant Anakin Solo. But he knew that wasn’t possible. Luke’s youngest nephew had never come to the Unknown Regions, and he certainly couldn’t have kept his encounter with a living planet a secret if he had. No, the girl had clearly been referring to Luke’s father. Before Zonama Sekot had vanished into
the Unknown Regions, Anakin Skywalker must have come here—and he’d come with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Why they had done so, though, Luke couldn’t imagine. To look for Vergere, perhaps? In search of the same thing she’d been after: the planet’s biological technology? And what had happened to them here? What did it mean that the boy had killed a Blood Carver without using a lightsaber? That he had used the power of the dark side?

Without more information, it was all just speculation. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to turn his thoughts away from the matter. His mind was still spinning with possibilities when Darak and Rowel finally came to inform them all that it was time.

Luke took a deep, calming breath and let himself be led with the others from the habitat. Night had fallen, turning the tampasi into a vast, starless space that chattered with half-heard rustlings and strange calls from unseen animals. The only light came from balls of bioluminescence balancing atop slender stalks. Standing a meter taller than Luke, they cast a bright greenish glow across the undergrowth. A double row of these lightstalks led a path around the bulk of a nearby tree, a path that Darak and Rowel took them along without ceremony or conversation. Far above, where they’d been tethered for the night, the massive shapes of the kyboes shifted restlessly in their sleep.

The light-stalk path wound through the trees for several hundred meters before culminating in a large, bowl-shaped depression. There, gathered in a circle, a dozen Ferroans awaited them. Standing in the center of these was the black-robed figure of the Magister. She bowed her black-maned head respectfully as they entered the natural amphitheater. The Ferroans—four men and eight women—offered no such gesture; they just stared at the visitors with undisguised suspicion and hostility.

Darak and Rowel guided the group to the center of the
depression, then stepped back to stand symbolically at the end of the path that had brought them there. The Ferroans now surrounded them: to leave the meeting place they would have to break the circle.

When all was still, the Magister spoke.

“Once again the Jedi come to us,” she said. Her voice was soft, like a cool breeze on a hot night, but it carried clearly to those gathered around her. “As always, you bring more questions than answers.”

“We are here to answer those questions,” Luke said, wondering why the Magister looked different. Her presence in the Force was strong, but much more muted than it had been on the landing field. The impression nagged at him, even as he put it aside to concentrate on the conversation. “There are many we would ask of you, too.”

She inclined her head slightly, then straightened. “There are some among the council who would have me ask Sekot to send you away immediately. You come to us, by your own admission, as harbingers of doom. I have heard it said that you are more than that; that you bring a direct and deliberate threat to us and to our way of life.”

“What do you mean?” Jacen asked. “We haven’t made any threats. We mean no harm.”

“Three times, now, we have had to defend ourselves,” the Magister explained, “and each time Jedi were present. You cannot blame us for wondering: is it the circumstances that attract you, or are the circumstances a result of your visits?”

“Magister,” Luke said, “if these attacks upon you are in any way connected to our being here, then I assure you it is unintentional on our part. The Far Outsiders arrived before us; we had no idea they would be here until we arrived. Their presence here is a mystery to us. Perhaps we can solve it together, if you allow us to.”

“How would you have us do that?”

“We begin by talking. As I have said before, we are here to discuss our common enemy—the ones we refer to as Yuuzhan Vong. It is a long story, but perhaps in its telling you will come to see the truth of what I say—and the sincerity of our intentions.”

The Magister pondered this for a long moment. Again Luke sensed a fundamental difference between their first meeting and the present. Where before she had been curious about the Jedi, welcoming them cheerfully and openly, now she seemed wary and protective. He wondered what had changed her mind.

Her gaze swept the visitors gathered before her. With a slight nod, she seemed to come to a decision. Her legs folded beneath her and she sank gracefully to the ground. Her robe pooled around her on the soft undergrowth.

“My name is Jabitha,” she said. “We shall hear your story.” She indicated for Luke and the others to likewise sit upon the grass. The other Ferroans, perhaps pointedly, remained standing. “Sekot invites you to talk freely.”

Luke took a deep breath, and began. He started from the time the Yuuzhan Vong had first come to the attention of the New Republic on Belkadan, when Danni Quee had witnessed the launch of their invasion. The grim progression of the war was burned in his mind: from Sernpidal, where Chewbacca died, to Helska 4, Dubrillion, Destrillion, Dantooine, Bimmiel, Garqi, Ithor, Obroa-skai, Ord Mantell, Gyndine, Tynna, Fondor and its shipyards; Kalarba, Nal Hutta, Nar Shadaa, Sriluur, Druckenwell, Rodia, Falleen, Kubindi, Duro; the Jedi academy lost with Yavin 4, Ando, Myrkyr, where Anakin Solo fell, and Coruscant, the capital, where for a while all hope seemed lost.

He talked about the hundreds of billions of deaths across the galaxy, trying to capture in words how it felt to watch everything he had loved slip away—not just
the government he’d helped form from the ashes of the Empire, but also the principles on which it had been based. As the Senate had dissolved into bureaucracy and corruption during the last days on Coruscant, he had seen former allies turn against each other, driven by fear and self-preservation—but in the end only hastening the Yuuzhan Vong’s steady march.

He talked about biological technologies, and the Yuuzhan Vong’s philosophy of pain and sacrifice. He described worlds succumbing to insidious growths, free people plucked from their homes and turned into blaster fodder, spies sent to disrupt the peace by spreading lies about those encouraging the survivors to band together against the enemy. He talked of desperation and of genocide, of plans to end the oppression that were rooted in the very same evils, of the Jedi’s hope to find a middle ground, to keep the people of the Galactic Alliance free of the stain of mass murder. He spoke of his love for Ben, and his hope that his son might one day grow to know a peaceful life in a galaxy in which war was not the norm.

“What does this have to do with Zonama Sekot?” the Magister, Jabitha, asked when Luke had finished. “What is it that brings you here, so far from your home, from your war?”

Jacen took up the thread of the story to answer her question.

“We have come here because my teacher, Vergere, advised that the answer to our problems might lie on Zonama Sekot.” He described their mission to find the living planet through the Unknown Regions, not omitting the defense of the Empire or the tense internal conflict in the Chiss territories. He followed their path through the Chiss library, tracing legends and folktales of the wandering planet. He successfully evoked the despair they’d felt when it seemed that the living world might slip through their fingers, despite their best efforts. The
realization that Zonama Sekot might be masquerading as a moon rather than an independent planet, he told Jabitha, had been the key to resolving the mystery. The location finally found, they’d set off immediately from Csilla to find their objective.