Reunion (39 page)

In the end, it just wafted gently up into the cloudy atmosphere. When it was several meters away, its elongated tail flexed, and the creature shot over her head with surprising acceleration.

A groan from Droma took her mind away from the strange encounter. He was leaning against the speeder, holding his head.

“I think we should get out of here,” he said.

She nodded. “My turn to drive.”

Through his suit’s visor, she could see a half smile forming below his beaked nose. “Here’s hoping we can get the rest of the way without any more problems.”

“We’ve had our fair share for the day, I think,” she said, hoisting herself up into the saddle and helping him on behind her.

“Solos
always
seem to have more than their ‘fair share’ of trouble,” Droma commented dryly. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Hey, the universe is the one with the problem,” she returned lightly. “It’s just the Solos’ job to fix it.”

The Ryn laughed as Jaina kicked the speeder into life and began winding her way out of the crevasse.

Tahiri ducked. A coufee swished over her head. With a grunt she came back up with her lightsaber in a two-handed blow and drove it into the reptoid’s chest. The blue blade stuck out the alien’s back for an instant before she withdrew it and stepped away. The alien staggered back with an expression of agonized surprise on its face, then toppled over into the snow.

“Jag, over here!” She hurried up the steep slope with the Chiss pilot following close behind, peppering anyone crazy enough to follow them with projectile and energy fire. At the top of the slope, she paused to collect her bearings, mindful that her silhouette would make an easy target for anyone on either side of the ridge, hurried down the far side.

In the distance, delineated as a red dot on her helmet’s display, was an Imperial speeder cruising the far side of the transponder. She tried hailing it by waving her arms.

“Hey, over here!”

“Tahiri, is that you?” Han’s voice came loud and clear over the comm. Now that they were in line of sight, conversing was simple.

“And Jag, too. We’ve lost our speeders.”

“I’m on my way.” Han changed course, disappearing behind the base of the transponder.

“Come on!” Tahiri grabbed Jag’s arm and hurried him down the ridge.

A dark shadow slid across the dimly visible horizon as Han returned with another speeder. The second pilot, Enton Adelmaa’j, sprayed the reptoids coming down the ridge after them, then skidded to a halt in front of Jag.

“Good to see you. We were starting to get a little worried.”

“It’s not over yet,” Tahiri said, pointing. “Here comes the second yorik-trema.”

The Yuuzhan Vong lander was proceeding more cautiously than its predecessor, firing plasma bolts into the ground ahead of it. As she watched, one caught a mine. The explosion sent boiling air upward in a dark mushroom cloud. The yorik-trema rolled on through it, unscathed.

Han grunted. “Well, I guess we move to Plan B,” he said, waving Tahiri onto the back of his speeder.

Jag jumped on to Adelmaa’j’s craft, and together the two speeder bikes raced from the howling reptoids. They split up briefly to locate the other speeders from the party, then regrouped on a relatively clear side of the battle zone. Only one speeder remained unaccounted for, and that belonged to the relay base security chief—a fact that only made Han’s scowl cut deeper into his face.

“We can’t hide the fact that the base isn’t here for much longer,” he said. “Especially if Eniknar has gone over. The sooner we get out of here and finish it, the better.”

There were no arguments. The communications tech produced a remote timer and keyed a short code into it. He waited a second, then shook the timer and tried again.

“There’s something wrong,” he said. “I’m trying to arm the charges but the transmission seems to be blocked. The dish must be damaged.”

“Or sabotaged, more likely,” Han said. He sighed. “Okay, I guess somebody will have to go in and arm the charges manually.”

“I’ll go,” Tahiri said without hesitation.

“And I’ll go with her,” Jag said.

Tahiri turned to face him. “I can manage on my own.”

“I know that,” he answered evenly. “But I still need to go.”

She nodded, understanding the unstated sentiment. She was still new and untested; someone needed to watch over her until they were certain that she wasn’t going to betray them. Which was fine with her. If having him tag along was going to help allay suspicions, then so be it.

They rearranged speeders again while the comm tech explained what needed to be done. The detonator control box was hidden at the base of the transponder. Assuming the box itself was intact, all they’d have to do was input the code into its keypad. The explosion would take out the transponder and anything else within a hundredmeter radius. They would have only a minute to get clear of the blast.

“Got it,” Jag said, taking the controls. “We’ll meet you back at the base—either on this speeder or the crest of a shock wave.”

Han offered a half smile and a lazy salute. “Fly well.”

“I always do.” The Chiss pilot gunned the engine and sped off toward the transponder.

“When I became aware,” Sekot told Luke, “the only person I had to talk to was the first Magister. Jabitha’s father, the second Magister, was the one who realized what I was, and who helped me come to terms with my potential. It was he who helped me survive the attack of the Far Outsiders that laid waste to my southern hemisphere; it was he who encouraged me to retool my shipbuilding facilities to the manufacture of weapons and other means by which I could defend myself and the people in my care. When we were next under threat, I wasn’t entirely ready, but I
was
able to survive. After a long and arduous journey, I took my charges and myself to safety, revealing myself to them along the way. It was there, after the death of the Magister, the confusion of my birth, and the
frantic desperation of my escape, that I finally found time to think.”

The being projecting the image of Anakin Skywalker had all the resources of a planet behind it, yet still it radiated uncertainty. It was easy to believe that it was the child Luke’s father had once been, enormously powerful, tempted by the dark side but still too young to know what was right or wrong.

“The first thing I asked myself was: where did I come from?” Sekot placed a hand on the lamina surface of the table. “Jabitha’s father believed that I arose directly out of the Potentium—that I was a physical incarnation of the life energy he believed filled the universe. To him, that was the only explanation that made any sense, but even then I knew it lacked something. It was a very human response in the face of two incomprehensible phenomena, and it ignored the question of why such living planets had not come into being elsewhere. If intelligence on this scale could spontaneously emerge from a biosphere, why then, in a galaxy of hundreds of millions of star systems, was I the only one? What made me different?”

The intense blue eyes of Sekot’s image stared into Luke’s without blinking. “I have spent decades examining my being in an attempt to unravel the truth of my self. Anakin Skywalker once described me as an ‘immensity,’ yet at the same time a ‘unity.’ All conscious beings could be described as such by the creatures that inhabit them. You all have a multitude of bacteria inhabiting your digestive tracts; from their point of view, you are undeniably immense. And yet at the same time you are also one. The truth of your existence lies on the cellular level, in your genes; I came to suspect that my truth lay on a similarly minute level—comparatively speaking, of course. The people who inhabit my surface are as important to my well-being as the boras, the atmosphere, or the sun. Without them, I would be barren; fallow.”

“They’re part of your mind?” Hegerty asked, listening with fascination to the words of the living planet.

“Would you say that the microbes in your stomach are part of
your
mind?” The image shook its head. “My intelligence is as far above the Ferroans as yours is above those microbes. They fulfill other needs—needs you would have difficulty comprehending. All you need to understand, for the purposes of this conversation, is that I need them as much as they need me. Without them, it is possible that I might never have existed. Or worse: I might have grown stunted and feeble like the rogue boras that Jacen recently encountered.”

The mention of his nephew immediately grabbed Luke’s attention. “You know where they are?”

Sekot nodded. “I’m speaking to them now.”

Jag kept the transponder between himself and Tahiri and the second yorik-trema. He came in low, relying on the large amount of dust kicked up by mines and energy discharges to give them cover. Only once did they encounter resistance, and the single tsik seru was soon dispatched.

Soon they were ducking through a fence of horizontal girders and into the transponder infrastructure. The exterior framework acted as both shield and support for the large and elaborate antenna structure itself. The detonator control was hidden under the skirt of the antenna, in a cavity too low to accommodate the speeder.

Jag deactivated the repulsor engine and hopped off. Tahiri watched his back while he pulled the machine under cover. Then the two of them scurried beneath the skirt and into the complex beneath.

The base of the antenna was a maze of supports and thick cable conduits leading underground. It was so dark that even his suit’s light-enhancing algorithms had trouble coping. They made their way by the shine of Tahiri’s lightsaber to the place the comm tech had described. Sure
enough, the detonator control was exactly where he’d said it would be.

Jag hunkered down next to it, opening the top of the device with the first of three codes he’d been given. A glowing control surface unfolded, providing him with a small 2-D video screen and a keyboard. It was awkward with his gloves on, but Jag soon managed to tap out the commands required until he had the autodetonation window open before him. The second code gained him access to the timer menu. He typed in a one-minute delay.

“Confirm the final code,” he said to Tahiri. “And remember, we only have one chance at this. We get one digit wrong and it’ll reset the codes and shut down for good.”

Tahiri nodded and began to recite the code to Jag. “Zero-eight-eight-two-three-four-one-zero-three-zero.”

“That’s what I’ve got.”

He tapped in the digits one at a time while she watched to make sure he didn’t mistype anything. Just as he was keying in the second-to-last digit, though, something black shot past his faceplate. He jumped back, reaching for his charric blaster as the glowing controls burst into a shower of sparks. Tahiri was one step ahead of him. Two more thud bugs came darting in; she burned them out of the air with her lightsaber just as a Yuuzhan Vong warrior bore down upon them, waving an amphistaff. Tahiri shouted something guttural in return and met him halfway.

Jag stayed down, not wanting to risk hitting Tahiri with an ill-timed shot in the cramped space, but ready to step in if needed. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on; her lightsaber left sheets of glare in its wake. It looked for a moment as though she was being driven back by heavy blows from the amphistaff, but then, just when he felt sure she was beaten, she ducked beneath the weapon and delivered a lazy-looking slash that opened
the warrior up from groin to chin. With a steaming gurgle, the alien fell backward and was still.

Tahiri didn’t even appear out of breath when she returned her attention to Jag.

“How bad is the damage?” she asked.

He looked down at the detonator unit. The control surface was blackened and melted; its glow was completely gone. When he touched it, there was no response.

“That can’t be a good sign.”

“We have to get it working.”

He leaned in to examine the unit more closely. “I think it’s just the controls that are damaged. The unit itself seems to be functioning. There might be another way to activate it.”

Something shuffled out of the darkness toward them. In a heartbeat, Tahiri had turned from Jag, her lightsaber at the ready for another attack. Just as quickly, though, her posture relaxed. It wasn’t another warrior, but a Galactic Alliance–issue enviro-suit limned with frost. Steaming blood caked one side. Through the partially fogged visor, Jag made out square, reptilian features, clenched with pain.

“Eniknar?” Tahiri took some of the base security chief’s weight onto her as the Noghri almost collapsed to the ground next to them. His lips were moving, but Jag couldn’t hear anything.

“His comm is gone,” Tahiri said. “You should be able to hear him if you touch helmets.”

Jag leaned in to the wounded alien.

“Manual release.” Eniknar’s soft voice was even more muted than usual, but there was no mistaking the pain he was in. “There’s a … manual release.”

His hands fumbled for the detonator control unit. Around the back was a panel he managed to twist free, exposing several buttons in numerous colors.

“Manual release,” he wheezed, falling back against
Tahiri in a manner that suggested all of his strength had been spent. “Coded.”

“Will it set off the bombs?”

Nod.

“Is there a delay?” Shake.

“So whoever sets it off will die.”

Another nod.

Jag pulled back, as did Tahiri. They stared at each other over the injured security chief, but before either could speak, Eniknar clutched at the front of Jag’s enviro-suit, pulling him closer.

“Me,” the Noghri wheezed. “I’ll do it. I know the code.”

“No,” Jag said, breaking free of the Noghri’s grip. “You tell us the code, and Tahiri can use the Force to depress the button from a safe distance.”

“I don’t think we have time for that,” Tahiri returned soberly. “And besides, even if we could, we can’t fit three on a speeder. One of us would still be left behind.”

Jag turned over a number of possibilities in his head, each dismissed as quickly as they came to him.

“How do we even know we can trust Eniknar?” he argued, pulling away from the injured security chief so his objection wouldn’t be overheard. “Droma warned us to be careful of him, right? Leia thinks he’s a traitor. What if this is a ruse? If we leave him to—”