The Final Prophecy (25 page)

“Welcome aboard!”

Jaina looked over to see her reception committee—two humans and a Rodian, all wearing the uniform of the old Bilbringi defense force—dark blue slacks and military-style blue jackets over gold-colored shirts.

The male human, a fellow she guessed to be about as old as her father, with hair that might have once been red but had faded to auburn and silver, came forward with his hand out.

“I’m Lieutenant Prann,” he said as he shook her hand. “We spoke a moment ago. These are my associates, Zam Ghanol and Hiksri Jith.”

Ghanol was the other human, an older wiry woman with gray hair and a crooked nose. Jith was the Rodian. Both shook her hand.

Prann flashed her a big smile. “I really can’t say how glad we are to see you—” He glanced at her insignia. “—Colonel? …”

“Solo,” she replied.

“Solo? Not the one from the holos? Jaina Solo?”

“ ’Fraid so,” she replied. “And I hate to be rude, but could we cut straight to the situation? I need to assess this station and report to General Antilles as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Prann said. “It’s just such a surprise and such an honor. If you’ll follow me, please?”

“If you don’t mind me asking, Lieutenant Prann, what in blazes are you people doing here?”

He uttered a short chuckle. “I suppose that does require a little explanation, doesn’t it? We were part of a crew sent
out here to overhaul the station.” He paused as the turbolift came and they stepped into it. “You might have noticed it’s way out here.”

“Yes,” Jaina said. “I was wondering about that.”

“In fact, we didn’t know it was here for years. It was cloaked, you see.”

“Cloaked?”

“Yep. The theory is that Grand Admiral Thrawn cloaked it for some reason, back when he cloaked all of those asteroids to blockade Coruscant. It showed up missing in the later inventory, but nobody could find it. When a Yuuzhan Vong invasion looked imminent, however, we wanted every advantage we could get, of course. One of the brass guessed it might be cloaked and sent us out here with an old crystal grav-trap to find it. As you can see, we did, but—our bad luck—the invasion started while we were out here. We had taken the cloak down, but didn’t have the shields working. A flight of skips came out here and pretty much fried our transport—you may have noticed the damage to the docking bay.”

Jaina nodded. The lift opened, and Prann gestured for her to step out into the fire control area, where several other sentients waited—two more humans, a Twi’lek, a Barabel, and a Toydarian. Over banks of controls, through a broad viewport, she could see the distant battle as a series of tiny winking lights. The seeming smallness of it didn’t fool her—a lot of people were dying back there. It made her itchy to be so far away.

“Anyway,” Prann went on, “we managed to get one of the turbolasers on-line and the shields up. We gunned down the skips and put the cloak back on—it was the only thing we could think of to do. There was a whole fleet out there. The Vong apparently thought we’d gone to hyperspace—seems they don’t know Golans don’t usually come equipped for that.”

“But that was more than a year ago,” Jaina said.

“You’re telling me. We’ve just been waiting, tinkering with the station. Everything works fine, by now, at least those things we had the parts to fix. This thing has a terrific power core—had to, to run the shield for so long. We floated a small probe out on an insulated cable so we could see what was going on, which as you’ve probably guessed wasn’t much that was helpful to our situation—just the Vong setting up shop.”

His grin broadened. “This morning, though, we swept and saw your fleet. We dropped the field, hoping you would spot us. We’ve got limited sublight communications, but no hyperwave or HoloNet.” He grinned again. “And here you are.”

It was about then that Jaina understood something was wrong. The feeling in the Force that she took as relief at the end of a long, dangerous isolation was there, but seething beneath it was something hungry.

She was reaching for her lightsaber when something hit her, hard. Her hand, midway to her weapon, suddenly refused to obey her commands, and the room spun dizzily. She tried to focus and use the Force, but the dizziness got worse, and she was vaguely aware that her legs weren’t holding her up anymore. She didn’t feel the deck when she hit it, but she had a strange view of boots and legs moving her way. She heard faraway sounds that resembled thunder, but which she understood to be speech. Then—

Then she woke, strapped down to a table with some sort of webbing, her head pounding, and everything still doing a slow spin.

“Sorry about that,” she heard Prann say. “Sonics leave you with a terrible hangover without the benefit of ever having the fun.”

He was standing a meter away. The Toydarian stood across the room with a blaster trained on her.

“I hear Toydarians are more resistant than most species to Jedi mind tricks,” Prann said. “I hope we don’t have to test that. I’d like to see all of us walk out of this healthy.”

“Prann, what’s going on?” she managed. “Who are you really?”

“Oh, that name’s as good as any.”

“What are you, Peace Brigade?”

His eyebrows squinted together. “Colonel Solo,” he said, “now you’re hurting my feelings. That pathetic bunch of collaborationists? Hardly. I’m a liberator.”

“Of what?”

“Technology, actually.”

“Ah,” Jaina said. “You’re a thief and a smuggler.”

Prann shrugged his shoulders. “What I do is more like emergency salvage. I haven’t taken anything the Vong wouldn’t have destroyed anyway. Remember Duro? We got some good stuff there, in hit-and-run raids after New Republic forces pulled out. If we hadn’t it would have been wasted. The Vong sure weren’t going to use it.”

Her head was starting to clear. “So you came here after the Vong took Bilbringi?”

“Nope, this job was a little different. Most of my story was true—except that it was Vel, here, who discovered the missing station in the shipyard databanks. I’d heard a story that one of the Golans disappeared right before the New Republic forces invaded. A few of us got jobs in the shipyards, and Vel managed to slice into the old Imperial records.” He beamed. “One of the best slicers in the business.”

“Ah, just average,” the Toydarian replied. He didn’t take his gaze off Jaina.

“He’s very modest,” Prann added. “Anyhow, he found an old encryption that suggested the station
had
been cloaked—apparently Thrawn was keeping it in reserve as a little surprise, but when Thrawn died the station was lost, because he obviously didn’t share the information with his
command structure. We were able to reckon a general sector and calculate for drift and then we sort of—um—
borrowed
a crystal grav-trap detector from the Bilbringi dry docks to find it. After that, the story is more or less the one I already told you.”

“So what do you want with me?” Jaina asked. “Why did you stun me?”

“Well, frankly, Colonel Solo, I don’t want anything from
you
, especially trouble. But I need to borrow some parts from your X-wing.”

“You can’t all escape in a single X-wing.”

“No, we can’t. We’re going to escape in the station itself.”

“Come again?” Jaina said. “I thought you said it isn’t equipped with hyperdrive.”

“No, I said Golans aren’t
usually
equipped with hyperdrive. This one wasn’t, either. But how do you think we were planning on salvaging a space station without the Bilbringi authorities noticing?”

“You brought your own drive,” Jaina realized.

“Yes. We almost had it installed when the Vong showed up and torched our transport. Unfortunately, the motivator was still
on
the transport. No motivator, no hyperdrive.” He held his palms out. “So—we’ve been waiting.”

“You can’t use an X-wing motivator to jump a station this size,” Jaina pointed out.

“No, but we can cobble one together from seven.”

Jaina jerked at the webbing. “Leave my squadron alone!”

“Hey, calm down,” Prann said. “They’re all okay. We hit them with ion beams, hauled them in with tractor beams, and stunned them with sonics. And that wasn’t easy—not with the Wookiee and that crazy Twi’lek. Look, I’m not trying to make any enemies, here.”

Jaina could only stare at him in the face of such an absurd statement.

“We were hoping you would all dock,” he continued,
“and make the whole thing easier, but we’ve been working out contingencies for a while now. Not a lot else to do here, you know.”

“Look, Prann,” Jaina said, “General Antilles
needs
this battle station.”

Prann laughed. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but we’ve all invested a
little
too much in this baby to just hand it over to be destroyed. Do you know how much I can get for the cloaker alone? No, forget it. In a few hours we’ll be ready to jump. Meanwhile, we’ve put the cloak back on.”

“And what about me?”

“You’re a bit of a problem. I know enough about you to know that the longer I keep you around, the better the chance you’ll be able to use those Jedi powers of yours to—well, I don’t
know
, do I, and that’s the problem. On the other hand, I don’t want to kill Han Solo’s daughter. I mean, I respect the guy, and I know he’s already been through a lot.”

“You’re just afraid he would hunt you down and kill you,” Jaina said.

“Yeah, that, too. Look, I’m a businessman—this is business. Once we’ve got the hyperdrive working and jump out of here, we’ll put you all off someplace safe
—with
your starfighters. Okay?”

“No,” Jaina said, “
not
okay. Who are you going to sell your cloaker to, Prann? The Vong? Because they’re going to be the only ones around to buy it if you don’t help us here.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?” Prann said. “I mean, there’s still plenty of market for this sort of thing in the Corporate Sector—heck, in lots of places. A small planetary government is what I’m looking for, one afraid they’ll soon need negotiating power. If this battle here goes sour, it’ll only make the market that much better.”

“Until there
is
no market,” Jaina snapped. “Until the Vong have everything, because Huttoads like you are still
trying to make a profit rather than doing what they can to help us win.”

Prann’s smile vanished. “We sat out here for a
year
surrounded by Vong,” he said angrily, “in constant fear that they would find us. Sure, they can’t see us when we have the cloak on, but we can’t see them either. Every
single
time we pushed out the probe we all got the shakes. And who knew what the Vong have that might detect us at any second? Do you know what it’s like to be surrounded by that kind of pressure every day for a year and not be able to do a single thing about it?” His face was getting redder, and his voice was rising. “After what we’ve been through—sister, you can
keep
your platitudes. I’m taking this station, I’m selling it, and I’m going to take my share and retire to some little backwater so far away the Vong won’t reach it in my lifetime and sip cool drinks on a hot beach.”

“There’s no place that far away,” Jaina said.

“I’m willing to look,” Prann replied.

Jaina focused the Force on the Toydarian. “He’s crazy,” she told the Toydarian. “Stun him and help me out of this.”

The Toydarian blinked, looked briefly confused, and then laughed.

Prann smiled, too, his tirade apparently over. “So it’s true, then. Good. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to help get those motivators coupled together. Vel, I’ve changed my mind. Take her to fire control and watch her there. I can’t spare you just to be a guard during this. Just—keep an eye on things, and don’t let her talk to anyone.”

“I want to see my pilots,” Jaina said.

“After we’ve made the jump,” Prann told her. “Not before.”

With that he left the room.

“Nothing,” Corran grumbled, folding down to rest on a log. “I must have looked for ten kilometers in every direction, and there’s no sign of natives.”

“Maybe there aren’t that many,” Tahiri said, reaching up to pick an oblong fruit with a serrated corona of leaf at the top. They had dubbed it a pingpear, and it was one of the eight fruits that Nen Yim had identified as edible and nutritious. Since their food stores were limited, Corran had insisted that they eat native food when possible. The gathering expeditions also gave them an opportunity to talk away from the Yuuzhan Vong without leaving them too long unobserved.

“Or maybe we had the misfortune to crash in the one uninhabited region they have left,” Corran said. “It doesn’t matter—we can’t stay here forever. I’ve been trying to think of a way to attract the attention of that Imperial frigate, if nothing else.”

“Any thoughts on how to go about that?”

He nodded. “Yes. I’ll have to go to the one place I’ve been avoiding.”

“Oh. The giant hyperdrive.”

“Right.”

“Which you don’t want the Yuuzhan Vong to know is a giant hyperdrive because you’re afraid it will disillusion them somehow.”

“You get two marks,” Corran said. “But it’s the only sign of civilization around. There might be someone tending it. Failing that, there might be other things—a hyperwave, for instance, or even a subspace transceiver. And Harrar’s been after me to check it out, anyway.”

“How do you think he’ll react when he finds out what it is?”

“You tell me.”

She thought about that for a moment, trying to recall how she had felt when she’d gone to the top of the ridge a few days before.

She held up the pingpear. “It’s like discovering a perfect piece of fruit has a nasty worm in it—after you’ve already taken a few bites.”

Corran nodded. “That’s what I figured. Still, we have to do something, and I can’t imagine he’d let me go without him, not as curious as he’s been about it.”

“How far away do you think it is?”

“I eyeball it at about twenty klicks.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figured, too,” Tahiri said. “So when do we start?”

“
We
don’t,” Corran replied. “Harrar will go with me. I need you to stay and look after the other two.”