Reunion: Force Heretic III

by Sean Williams

  Leia nodded solemnly. “That way you avoid accidental deaths like the ones we were responsible for.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do they communicate with you often?”

  Ashpidar came as close to smiling as Leia had seen, but her tone remained dull and lifeless. “The Cold Ones love to talk. Their calls can travel great distances. Sometimes the whole planet seems alive with their chatter.”

  “Are there many of them?” Leia asked.

  “They’re not a bountiful species, and never have been. We estimate their numbers to be in the thousands.”

  “That’s not a lot.”

  “No, but then Esfandia isn’t the sort of world that can support a large and varied ecosystem. As the core temperature winds down, the available niches are contracting. The fact that there are no tides or seasons tends to mean that the same species have propagated across the entire planet. What Esfandia has at the moment is a sort of equilibrium. Relatively speaking, the Cold Ones are like rancors, at the top of the food chain, eating anything they can get their mouths around farther down. They tend vast gardens that stretch for kilometers, and herd flocks of flying insects that they trade for trace minerals filtered from the air. It’s a complex system that’s very gradually devolving, but it serves them well for the moment.”

  “And now the Yuuzhan Vong have come along and disrupted everything.”

  Ashpidar nodded her great horned head. “Explosions and vehicular wakes have a profound effect on the biosphere. That’s why this base’s design was structured on that of an All Terrain Armored Transport. In time, perhaps, the energy input to the system will actually increase growth in some areas, but initially it causes nothing but widespread destruction. I have suggested that the Cold Ones take shelter in the nesting plains until the crisis is over, but they are a curious species. Many of them, particularly the younger ones, would happily risk death for just a little excitement in their lives.”

  Later, back in the Falcon, it was these words that Leia found herself pondering. Some things, it seemed, were universal. Her own children were no different from those of the Cold Ones—and they were no different from how she had been at their age, either. What was it about youth, she wondered, that sent them on such extreme quests for selfhood and experience? What was the point of finding out who you were if it meant dying in the process?

  “I must be getting old, Threepio,” she said to the golden droid.

  “We all are, Mistress,” he chirped mournfully in reply.

  The atmosphere was gloomy and close when they reached the floor of the valley. Jacen looked warily around him, sensing hostility but not able to identify its source. Hanging vines and ropelike roots, sliding in and out of cracks in the rock like snakes, hid the steep V of the valley below. High above, the dense canopy formed a distant ceiling from which rain fell steadily. He felt as though they’d entered a vast underground chamber.

  Their destination wasn’t far away. A narrow river flowing noisily along the bottom of the valley had been blocked by a rockfall, forming a dam around which a stand of boras grew. These trees clawed their way through the stone walls and floor of the valley, their trunks coiling around each other, knotted in a dense and sinister-looking mat. Jacen sensed a furious struggle caught in the posture of the trees, as though the boras had been frozen in the act of trying to devour one another. The strangely motile limbs of the giant trees swayed and snapped between the trunks, unnervingly like the tentacles of a sarlacc, seeking prey.

  “We’re going in there?” he asked the Ferroan ahead of them.

  “Yes,” she replied, as curtly as she had to every other question he’d asked.

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

  The carapod bearing Danni plodded along behind them. Jacen felt a strange excitement brewing in the creature’s mind—as though it recognized this place—but he could get nothing more from it than that. Its hide was as thick as a bantha’s, and oddly rich in metals, glinting occasionally in the poor light.

  At the edge of the stand of boras, Senshi stopped the party. The Ferroans riding carapods quickly dismounted. Danni’s and Jabitha’s stretchers were unloaded.

  “We walk the rest of the way,” Senshi said.

  “Wait a minute.” Jacen shouldered his way through the knot of kidnappers to the Ferroan leader. “I don’t like the look of that place.”

  Senshi shrugged. “That’s not my concern. You chose to accompany us, and this is where we are going. You can either come with us or leave. The choice remains yours.”

  “There iz a third choice,” Saba hissed menacingly. Jacen put a hand on her arm to stay any hostile actions. He could feel her muscles vibrating like overtightened wires beneath her scales. “We’ll come with you,” he said. “But if you make any attempt to harm—”

  “What?” Senshi interjected sharply. “What will you do, Jedi? All I hear are empty words. Make good with your threats or stay out of my way!”

  Without another word, the kidnappers continued into the stand of boras. Their silent compliance unnerved him as much as their destination. Senshi seemed to have them all hypnotized.

  They circled the muddy lake and came to the natural dam that was its genesis. It rose like a scar across the bottom of the valley, ten meters high, blocking off the river. Waterfalls trickled down the far side of the dam, creating a series of smaller rivers that joined up farther down the valley. The stand of boras was densest there, towering above them. Their trunks merged and joined in one particular space, isolating a blackened pit with a stone floor. Charred tentacles rose from its edges like frozen smoke.

  Jacen looked nervously around him as the party continued their descent. He and Saba kept to the rear, stepping carefully from root to root down the steep slope. The air around them smelled of damp charcoal, as though countless fires had been kindled and quashed here over the years.

  At the bottom of the pit, the kidnappers came to a halt again. Senshi ordered the stretcher bearing the Magister to be placed on the buckled stone floor, Danni’s beside her.

  “This one iz concerned,” Saba muttered to Jacen, her eyes searching the gloom. “The life energies here are … tangled. We are all in danger.”

  Jacen wasn’t about to argue with that; he had exactly the same reservations. He confronted Senshi with his concerns. “What is this place, Senshi? Why are we here?”

  “Boras have a complex life cycle,” the head kidnapper said. “They are a magnificent species in all respects. Their seeds are more like animals than plants. They channel lightning to fuel complex organic processes, deep within their trunks. Their roots link and merge in a communications network that spans the globe. We cohabit the surface of Sekot, the boras and us, and we respect each other’s differences.”

  The ground seemed to tremble beneath their feet. “Just like all organic systems,” Senshi went on, “there can be injuries, diseases, cancers. This is one such place, where the natural patterns of Sekot have been stunted, twisted. There are malignant boras, just as there can be malignant people. On the whole, such boras are perfectly safe—unless you disturb their seeding grounds, of course, in which case you are in great danger.”

  Jacen felt compelled to ask, even though part of him already knew the answer: “Where are they, these seeding grounds?”

  A sudden swirling of antipathy swept around them, radiating from the boras.

  Senshi smiled. “We’re standing on them.”

  Saba had had enough. She snatched her lightsaber from her side and ignited it with a touch of its activation stud. Everyone around the pit turned to her, their faces painted by the bright red glow from her blade.

  The action seemed to whip the malignant boras to a new level of excitement. Saba felt subsonic rumblings pass through her claws to the pads of her feet as the tentacles of the trees flailed over their heads, snapping and crackling like an angry brushfire.

  “Saba, wait!” Jacen called out.

  �
�We cannot stay here.” She kept her stare fixed on Senshi as she spoke. “It’z not safe. And Danni needz attention! This one iz telling you to take us out of here now.”

  She flexed her muscles to add her considerable Barabel weight to the request.

  “No,” Senshi returned, unmoved by either her words or her posturing.

  “It’s okay, Saba,” Jacen said, stepping up to her and motioning for her to lower her weapon.

  She stared at him, confused. Couldn’t he see the danger they were in? Couldn’t he sense through the Force that something wasn’t right here?

  “Please,” he urged. “Trust me.”

  Despite her reservations, she deactivated her lightsaber and lowered it as he requested. He nodded his appreciation, then faced Senshi.

  “Please, before someone gets hurt, can’t you explain to us what is going on? What is it you hope to achieve by bringing us here?”

  “That all depends on what you intend to do about it.”

  “What does that mean?” Jacen said in obvious exasperation. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will, soon enough.”

  “Great is the Potentium …” A low chant came from the combined voices of those around them. “Great is the life of Sekot.”

  Saba felt the energies of the boras gathering together. The trunks shuddered and stretched, as though reaching for the sky. She felt a gathering potential in the air, building with every second. Whatever was going to happen, it was coming fast.

  “All serve and are served,” the crowd chanted. “All join the Potentium!”

  Jabitha moaned. Before Saba had chance to react, Senshi was on the ground beside the Magister, one hand across her throat and the other pressing one of the organic lightning rods against her temple.

  “Move and I’ll kill her,” he said to the stunned Jedi Knights.

  Saba froze, her thumb hesitating over her lightsaber’s activation stud.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” the Magister said, her eyes flickering open to look at those gathered around her.

  “That was the idea,” Senshi hissed, dragging her and the stretcher closer to the edge of the pit. “Now what, Jedi?” he asked Jacen. “Now what?”

  “Now we’ll see,” Mara whispered as Darak hurried back into the habitat—armed, Luke hoped, with the results of the analysis of the anomalous gravity readings from Mobus’s third moon.

  Darak whispered to Rowel in a language that Luke couldn’t understand. Then, as one, both the Ferroans turned to face him.

  “Our sensors detect no gravitic anomaly,” Rowel said.

  “What?” Mara said. “You’re saying you detect nothing?”

  Rowel nodded. “Your comrades must have been mistaken with their readings.”

  “Either that,” Darak put in, “or you have been attempting to mislead us.”

  “Or you could be wrong,” Mara said angrily.

  “We have studied this system for decades,” Rowel said, rearing back defensively. “We know its moons intimately. We are not wrong.”

  “Perhaps you are being lied to,” Luke said, trying to ease the growing tensions. “Tell me, who did your information come from?”

  “From Sekot, of course, via the boras network,” Rowel replied in a tone that suggested Luke had to be a fool for even asking. “Everything on Zonama begins and ends with Sekot.”

  Luke nodded his understanding, raising the comlink to his lips. “Captain Yage, I want you to send a flight of TIEs to investigate that anomaly.”

  “I have a flight on standby now, sir,” Yage responded immediately, clearly picking up on the more formal tone in Luke’s voice. “They’ll break formation in ten seconds.”

  “What—?” Darak stepped forward, her face pinched in alarm.

  Luke ignored her, speaking to Yage again via his comlink. “Good work, Captain. You may authorize them to use destructive force if necessary.”

  “You can’t do this!” Darak protested heatedly. “You don’t have the authorization to maneuver in our vicinity—let alone take aggressive measures!”

  “If you aren’t prepared to do what needs to be done,” Luke said smoothly, “then I will do it for you.”

  “This is unacceptable!” Rowel exclaimed. “Recall those fighters immediately or—”

  Mara rose to her feet and placed both hands defiantly on her hips. “Or what, exactly?”

  “You don’t intimidate me,” Rowel said—although the tremor in his voice belied his words. “Nor do you intimidate Sekot! Remember, it is only by its goodwill that you are here at all. Push that goodwill too far, and your fate will be the same as that of the Far Outsiders!”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Mara said. “Maybe that’s why you’re lying to us—to provoke us into getting on your precious planet’s bad side!”

  “That’s preposterous! Why would we bother going to such lengths—”

  “You tell me,” Mara said, coming around the table to face Rowel.

  He retreated a step, eyes widening. “Great is the Potentium,” he whispered hastily, as though in prayer. “Great is the life of Sekot!”

  Luke sent a mental prompt to Mara, and she backed off. “We’re not here to threaten you,” he said to Darak. “We’d just like to help, that’s all.”

  Rowel snorted. “Sekot is the only help we require.”

  “Really?” Luke said. “Suppose one of the Far Outsiders’ ships managed to survive the attack we saw; what do you think would happen if the pilot of that ship slipped out of your bubble of safety and reported to his superiors about what he found here? The next thing you know, you’d have a fleet ten times bigger than the one you saw here yesterday bearing down upon you. Could Sekot defend you against that?”

  “Easily,” Darak said.

  “And the fleet after that?”

  “Of course!”

  “And the one after that?” he pressed.

  She hesitated this time, the notion of repetitive attacks clearly dawning behind her confident facade.

  Before anyone could speak again, Luke’s comlink bleeped. He answered the call. “Yes?”

  “The fighters are approaching the moon,” Captain Yage reported. “I’ll patch a live telemetry feed through to Jade Shadow. Tekli can relay the information to you from there.”

  There was a delay of two seconds before the Chadra-Fan’s voice came over the line.

  “I’ll do my best to describe what’s going on,” she said. “There are three TIEs closing in on the source of the gravity waves.”

  “I insist you turn them back,” Rowel said.

  With a look from Mara, the Ferroan fell silent and stormed from the room.

  “The source is steady,” Tekli continued. “It’s a regular pulse coming from behind M-Three.”

  “Does it match any known dovin basal patterns?”

  “No, it’s not something we’ve seen before. It could be a beacon, or a long-range carrier wave of some kind.” There was a slight pause. “The TIEs are conducting a preliminary survey of the moon now. It’s old with a rugged, heavily cratered surface. Deep and cold—it’s perfect for hiding in. There seems to be traces of several recent flybys.”

  “We occasionally mine this moon for selenium,” Darak said when Mara faced her questioningly.

  “Recently?” she asked.

  “No, but—”

  “They’ve found the source,” Tekli said. “It’s a deep pit on the far side. Very deep, in fact. One of them is going in to investigate.”

  “Tell them to be careful,” Luke said.

  “They’re taking every precaution,” Captain Yage assured him over the line. “They’re following standard Imperial search procedures. Two remain back while one sweeps the location. If they see anything they’ll pull back immediately to report. Depending on the data—”

  Yage came to an abrupt halt.

  Luke stiffened, feeling a premonition through the Force. “Captain Yage? Tekli? Report!”

  “The emissions just spiked,”
Tekli said after a few seconds’ silence. “There’s definitely something in there. Whatever it is, it reacted when the TIE came closer to take a look. The TIE is moving in for a second pass. The gravity waves are all over the place and there are seismic vibrations—”

  Again the transmission ceased in midsentence. The break was only for two seconds, but it felt longer to Luke. “It’s out!” Tekli cried. “They flushed it out! It looks like a coralskipper, and it’s making a break for it!”

  Luke spoke rapidly into the comlink. “That ship cannot be allowed to leave the system! Captain Yage, you must deploy all available forces to intercept. Whatever is required, it has to be stopped!”

  “There is no ship,” Darak fumed as she hurriedly exited the room also. “This is just a ruse to allow you to mobilize your forces against us!”

  “Check your sensors if you still don’t believe us,” Mara called after her. “You couldn’t possibly be missing this.”

  “The Widowmaker has deployed all its TIEs and broken orbit itself,” Tekli reported. “The skip is evading pursuit, using Mobus’s gravity to whip itself out to the edge of the system. The three TIEs that found it are following as best they can.”

  “Is it going to get away?” Luke asked.

  There was another pause. “It might.”

  Luke could hear Mara’s teeth grinding in nervous tension. “If we had Jade Shadow, none of this would be a problem.”

  Darak returned with Rowel, with a small contingent of Ferroan guards in tow.

  “Our sensors show nothing,” Rowel said. “The system is empty! You have betrayed our trust—just as we knew you would!”

  “Seize them!” Darak pointed and the guards moved in on Luke, Mara, and Dr. Hegerty.

  In a flash, Mara was on her feet, lightsaber in hand. Luke joined her, his bright green blade in front of him and the doctor safely behind.

  The guards hesitated, and in the brief silence before anyone spoke, Luke found himself wondering in dismay how the quest for Zonama Sekot could have come to this. Whatever Vergere had intended by sending them here, it now looked like it was going to come to naught.