Reunion: Force Heretic III

by Sean Williams

  When there was still no reply after a couple of minutes, he decided the fault had to lie in one of the relay bases between the Unknown Regions and the rest of the galaxy. There was no other possibility that he could think of.

  “What’s the emergency?”

  Jacen turned to see Danni silhouetted in the doorway. “We’re out of blue milk,” he lied. He didn’t want to alarm anyone until he’d had a chance to speak to his uncle. “You know how cranky Mara gets when she doesn’t get a proper breakfast.”

  She moved around to take position in the copilot’s seat beside him.

  “There is no denying that you are an amazing Jedi, Jacen Solo, but you are a terrible liar.”

  Jacen smiled. For all the new understanding of the Force he had received under Vergere’s tutelage, all the skill as a Jedi he’d amassed over the years spent fighting the Yuuzhan Vong, Danni could see right through him.

  “I can’t raise Mon Cal,” he said, his expression becoming more serious. “There seems to be some sort of break in transmission between here and there.”

  “What sort of break?”

  “It’s hard to tell from this end. I do know, though, that if we can’t contact Mon Cal, we won’t be able to tell them what we find here.”

  “If we find anything. There are no guarantees, Jacen.”

  “You saw the data—”

  “I did, and I agree with you. I’m just trying to encourage debate in your own thoughts.” Danni’s curly blond hair framed her head like a halo, glowing in the instrument lights, and her green eyes seemed to bore into his. “I feel your tension, Jacen. You’re humming like an overloaded shield. What if we don’t find anything, or it’s not what you’re hoping for? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Underneath everything else, that’s what really bothers you.”

  He nodded. That fear was running at the back of his mind, a steady rhythm constantly unsettling him, encouraging him to overreact. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I guess we’re not completely cut off. We can still reach Csilla. Maybe I should check with them to see if they can get through to Mon Cal. If not, they can keep trying while we go ahead with our mission.”

  Her smile broadened. “Sometimes all we need to do is get the thoughts that trouble us out of our head and into the open where we can see them more clearly.”

  She reached out to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, but her hand never fell. Something powerful and strange rolled through him. Jacen pulled away from her, thinking at first that what he was feeling must somehow have had something to do with her. But the sensation persisted, and her expression echoed his alarm.

  “You can feel that?” Whatever it was, it was getting stronger—and it was coming through the Force.

  Danni nodded, covering both ears with the flats of her palms. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” His head was starting to vibrate like a bell. He turned to the displays ahead of him, searching for information. “But I intend to find out.”

  * * *

  Saba started awake from a deep sleep feeling as though someone were trying to crack open her skull. She called out in alarm, flailing wildly at the empty air before realizing where she was: resting up against the wall in one of Jade Shadow’s crew quarters. She’d closed her eyes to meditate when Mara had announced the mission had stalled, and she must have fallen asleep.

  No alarms were ringing; she couldn’t smell panic pheromones in the air; everything seemed completely normal—except for the fact that the crack in her skull seemed to be widening …

  She sat up with a growl, sharp teeth clenched in a tight zigzag line. Her eyes peered out from under heavy, knotted brows. She focused upon a spot on her bed, desperately trying to concentrate on who or what was causing the intense discomfort.

  Find the pain, she told herself. Trace it back to your attacker!

  She breathed deeply through her nostrils and sought to find her inner calm, the still center of her being. It had taken her years to overcome the natural instincts of her species, and in times of stress—when every cell wanted to slash and tear instead of contemplate and respond with careful forethought—the urges were particularly hard to suppress. But she was strong, and determined.

  The Force came to her bidding with familiar ease, flooding her with energy that swept the tiredness and confusion away. And with it, too, came the knowledge that what she was feeling was coming through the Force itself, as though something very large and powerful had been disturbed nearby.

  Through the discomfort of such intense feelings, she felt the first glimmerings of excitement. It could be only one thing!

  Saba hurried forward through the ship. She could tell that the others gathered there shared her excitement. Master Skywalker, Mara, Jacen, Tekli, Danni—they could all feel it! On a ship full of Force-sensitives, it was impossible to hide something as powerful as this. Only Soron Hegerty seemed immune, asleep as she was in one of the cabins.

  R2-D2 tootled as Saba went past. She tapped the droid’s shining dome, but didn’t stop. The smell of human uncertainty emanating from the fore of the ship was strong, and Saba breathed through her mouth to ensure her thoughts remained clear and focused.

  “—can’t be sure at this range,” Mara was saying, addressing the others standing around in the passenger bay. “It could be anything. Massive psychic disturbances occur for all sorts of reasons.”

  Master Skywalker nodded. “She’s right, Jacen. When Alderaan was destroyed by the Death Star, Obi-Wan felt it from a great distance.”

  “I know, but this is close,” Jacen insisted, his voice thick with excitement. “I can feel it. What else could it be?”

  Saba could sense the others wanting to believe but remaining reluctant to gamble on the young Jedi’s hunch.

  “Jacen iz right,” she said, the words emerging in a rough approximation of Basic from her stress-tightened throat. “Zonama Sekot criez out in the void.”

  The Jedi Master faced her. “But why?”

  “It feelz … distressed.” The pained looks on the faces before her showed that they felt it, too. It was impossible to keep out.

  “Almost frightened,” Danni ventured, hugging herself. “But angry, too.”

  “Okay, suppose it is Zonama Sekot,” Mara said. “What then? Do we attempt to contact it?”

  “That depends on whether you think you can follow this signal to its source.”

  The red-haired woman frowned. “It’s possible, but I’m not sure I like the idea of turning up uninvited. This thing sounds agitated as it is. Barging in there might only antagonize it further.”

  “Maybe,” her husband replied, “but I think that turning up and showing it our intentions rather than trying to explain them from a distance is the better option.” He turned to the Barabel. “Jacen, Saba—you’re our life-sensitives. What do you think?”

  Jacen looked uncertain.

  “I can no more read this mind than I could the entire contentz of the Chiss library,” Saba told Luke, her tail tapping restlessly against her right ankle.

  “Won’t going closer make the situation worse, though?” Danni asked.

  Master Skywalker looked uncertain. “All I’m sure of is that this our best shot at getting where we want to go. If we ignore it, we might never get another one.”

  Mara inhaled deeply. “Okay, then let’s do it while we still can.”

  Luke reopened the line to the captain of the Widowmaker. “Arien, I want you to lock onto our navicomputer and prepare for immediate departure. We’ve got a lead, and if our hunch is right we’ll soon be exactly where we need to be. We don’t know what we might be getting into, so be prepared.”

  “Ready when you are,” came the immediate reply. “Yage out.”

  Luke looked around the cockpit at the nervous faces watching him. “Maybe we should meld,” he said. “Pooling our concentration might make it easier for Mara to trace the source.”

  Danni had had only limited experience with the Jedi practice of mi
nd-melding, but she nodded along with the others. Saba began the familiar exercises with a series of deep breaths. She felt the life-sparks of those around her, glowing like embers in a white-hot furnace. The strength of the signal was such that it almost totally blanketed them. But she concentrated, bringing them steadily into focus, and slowly their thoughts joined in a tight embrace.

  Mara’s mind danced with hyperspace coordinates, instrument panels, and other space flight paraphernalia. Saba added her perceptions of the distant world-mind to the mix of thoughts and impressions gathering around Mara. Danni offered the clearest knowledge of astronomical forces. Saba imagined herself on the dark, red-lit world of Barab I, prowling low for shenbit bonecrushers, every sense keen. Zonama Sekot wasn’t the same thing as a flesh-rending giant lizard, but the principle was the same. They were hunting, and she was a good hunter …

  Mara took everything she was given and plotted a course. Jade Shadow’s hyperdrive roared into life, and Saba felt the familiar sensation of lights streaking past them and falling behind as the strange topology of hyperspace enfolded them.

  Here the territory belonged to Mara. Even with the Force to guide them, the way was tortuous and fraught with danger. Jade Shadow did her best to follow the path laid down for her, with the Widowmaker firmly in tow, but almost immediately she encountered the same barrier she had earlier. With a sickening wrench she was dumped back into realspace, only slightly closer to Klasse Ephemora than she had been before.

  Mara didn’t give up. The signal from the distant mind was as strong as ever. Saba concentrated on it, feeling out the insubstantial pathways between it and them. There was nothing but vacuum in the way, she told herself. Crossing that vacuum should be as easy as leaping across a room. Her tail quivered with effort as she imagined that hyperspace leap in detail.

  Jade Shadow jumped again. The hull vibrated as Mara plunged the ship headlong through the strange spaces surrounding their objective. Saba received impressions of incomprehensible shadows sweeping by, bizarre n-dimensional membranes reluctantly unfolding to let them pass. She didn’t know what they were or where they came from, but it seemed for a time as though Mara was making progress. They were getting closer—they had to be!

  Then, rattling like an old freighter, they were dumped back into realspace. They stopped long enough to check on the Widowmaker. The frigate limped from hyperspace seconds after Jade Shadow.

  “Is the Widowmaker holding up?” Mara asked.

  “It’s seen worse,” the Imperial captain assured her. “I imagine she’ll keep going long after we give up.”

  Satisfied, Luke gathered the Jedi minds around him for another try.

  “I think we can do it this time,” he encouraged them. “Mara was right when she said before that there had to be a way in. All we have to do is find it.”

  Grimly determined, they tightened the meld and tried again. Saba felt herself dissolving in the confusing sensations passing through and around her as hyperspace folded around them. The pull of Zonama Sekot was stronger than ever, and growing stronger with each passing second. She felt as though she were drowning in the massive outpouring of emotions, a mote of sand caught in a dust storm, swept up on a rising surge, unable to control where it took her.

  For a timeless moment, she completely lost all sense of herself. She was subsumed, absorbed, erased. The hunt consumed her. All her attention was focused on her quarry—on tracking it, finding it, catching it …

  Then, abruptly, something changed. She didn’t know what it was, but the thoughts changed in pitch. It was as if they’d reached the eye of a storm. Energy still swirled around them, but at the center there was a kind of peaceful balance. Saba felt her thoughts regain a sense of normality, joining up again in a single coherent stream. They had emerged from hyperspace once more, only this time the screens were alive with data: there was a sun blazing on one, a gas giant looming on another. A faint green-blue speck hung in the center of a third screen—and it was to this that her senses clung. Green meant chlorophyll; blue meant water. If a world was ever to live, it had to have both.

  Zonama Sekot!

  But as the view zoomed in closer, she saw yellow and bright red clouds blossoming as energy weapons flashed and flared around the atmosphere. Thin-hulled spaceships burst open under the influence of stupendous forces, casting countless lives into the harsh vacuum of space.

  And that wasn’t all. What Saba saw behind the space battle was completely beyond her experience. Bright feathery ribbons trailed from the planet’s poles like liberated coronas. Fleeting sprites danced in the upper atmosphere, sending towering flashes of energy spiking far above. Massive sheets of lightning swept around the equator, gathering speed until they joined in a smooth ring; then, with a piercing crack, they lashed out and up like a whip of pure energy. Magnetic field fluxes measured by Jade Shadow accompanied what appeared to be tractor beam effects on scales Saba had never imagined possible.

  Zonama Sekot’s attackers were obviously Yuuzhan Vong vessels: two mid-size cruiser analogs and countless numbers of coralskippers. But they weren’t the only ships in the air. Among them darted and wove tiny points of light like no ships Saba had ever seen before. Every one was different; every one was beautiful; every one was deadly.

  Zonama Sekot was fighting back!

  Anger blazed—ugly in its ferocity, devastating in its efficacy—and with it came a return of the storm. Saba barely had time to wonder what would happen when the mind they’d been seeking finally noticed them, when a wall of psychic energy struck them, tossing them into oblivion.

  “Spare me, Master! Spare me!”

  Supreme Overlord Shimrra gazed down with cold contempt at the squirming thing at his feet. The Shamed One had been tortured and beaten, but still she hadn’t broken. If the godlike ruler of the Yuuzhan Vong found this puzzling, he didn’t let it show.

  “Spare you?” he said, slowly pacing around the prostrate figure. “Why? So you can continue to pollute my chambers with your false protestations of innocence?”

  “Not false, Lord! You must believe me.”

  “You dare to tell me what I must do?” Shimrra snarled.

  The object of his ire quivered piteously. “Forgive my ignorance! If I knew the answers to the questions you ask, I would surely tell you!”

  “But you do know. You are a pawn of the vile sect that dares follow the Jeedai.”

  “Master, I swear by—”

  “Spare me oaths to your infidel gods. I will hear no more of your foul lies.” Shimrra gestured imperiously, and the Shamed One was dragged away. The charnel pits where the heretics were taken for dishonorable execution had been working day and night in recent times. A swarm of ravenous yargh’un—toothy rodents as long as a Shamed One’s leg—devoured the victims in swift order. Crippled, their limbs broken prior to being tossed to their doom, those found guilty of heresy were shown no mercy, nor afforded any honor in the manner of their death.

  “Destroy the yargh’un,” Shimrra ordered of the guards who had stepped forward to do his will.

  The guards stopped in their tracks, confused by the Supreme One’s command. “Master?”

  “The beasts have been defiled by heretical blood,” he said. “Take them from the pit and have them burned.”

  “What shall we do with this one, Master?” The guards indicated the Shamed One quailing between them.

  “Deal with it as you normally would. Break its legs and throw it into the pit.” Shimrra ascended his throne, climbing heavily across pulsating hau polyps. “It can die slowly of starvation and thirst, like an animal. Its body will stay where it lies to serve as an example of what will happen to anyone who dares allow this heresy to propagate. There will be no easy deaths for those who turn their backs on the gods.”

  The guards obeyed Shimrra’s will with grim determination, ignoring the plaintive cries of the condemned. The cries turned to shrieks as all hope fled, then faded to distant wails as the Shamed One was dragged away from the throne ro
om.

  Shimrra waited until the last echo had passed before speaking again.

  “You do well, Ngaaluh. Once again your investigations have exposed the enemy within.”

  The slender priestess bowed deeply. “I am honored by your acknowledgment, Supreme One.”

  “You find success where many others have failed.” Shimrra’s baleful gaze scanned the faces of the priests, shapers, warriors, and intendants who had been assembled for the interrogation. “We must be ever watchful to ensure that the roots of heresy spread no farther than they already have. More than that: we must actively seek out nests of perfidy and find their source.”

  Assent came loudly and without hesitation.

  “Be assured, Great One,” said High Perfect Drathul, senior intendant of Yuuzhan’tar, “that we are making every effort to arrest this terrible tide.”

  “Your will—the will of the gods—is not to be denied,” seconded Warmaster Nas Choka, cutting the air with his ceremonial tsaisi. “We will not rest until the last heretic lies crushed beneath our soles!”

  “Nor would I expect anything less,” the Supreme Overlord said. “In fact, henceforth anything short of enthusiasm for the heresy’s eradication will be regarded as collaboration. And collaboration will be punishable in the same fashion as treachery. Is that understood?”

  The echoes of the Supreme Overlord’s pronouncement rumbled around the throne room, and all who heard it bowed solemnly in agreement.

  “You will continue this work, Ngaaluh,” Shimrra intoned. “I cannot personally oversee every interrogation and execution, yet it is my misfortune to be the one responsible for upholding all that the gods have entrusted to us. I am therefore glad to have someone in whom I can place my trust. Go forth and find me more bodies for the yargh’un pit. When it is full, I will build another, and another, until the curse of this foul heresy is erased from the galaxy once and for all, and the gods favor us again.”

  “Yes, Supreme One.” Ngaaluh’s bow was even deeper than her first.