by Greg Keyes
It took him an instant to sort out that that battle was over, too. The
Noghri were still dismembering one of the Yuuzhan Vong boarders. The second
floated near Leia; his head was drifting a few meters away. Han seemed to
have just come in, brandishing a blaster.
"Jacen?"
"Got both of 'em," he acknowledged grimly.
"Great. Leia, you keep watch. Let us know if they send anything else
our way. Jacen, you check out those skips and figure out some way we can
accelerate without opening ourselves to space."
Right, Jacen thought. The minute the drive went on, the coralskippers
would exert their inertia. At some point acceleration would make them
massive enough to tear the couplings, no matter how strong they were.
"I'm on it, Dad. And hang on before you engage the drive. I have
another idea."
"Always thinking. That's my boy."
FOUR
Nen Yim pushed up through the clear membrane and stroked the pale,
feathery coils of the ship's brain, the rik-yam, with her shaper's hand. She
trembled, her specialized fingers twitching. Once those digits had been the
legs of a crustaceanlike creature, bred for no other purpose but to be hands
to shapers. Its animal origins were still obvious; her fingers-narrower,
slimmer, and stronger than those of the average Yuuzhan Vong-protruded from
beneath a dark, flexible carapace that now served as the back of her hand.
Two of the "fingers" ended in pincers; another had a retractable blade. All
were studded with small, raised sensory nodes that tasted anything they
touched. Nen Yim's training as a shaper required that she know by taste all
elements and more than four thousand compounds and their variants. She had
known the quick, nervous flavor of cobalt with those fingers, savored the
pungency of carbon tetra-chloride, wondered at the complex and endless
variations of amino acids.
And now she trembled, for the scent here was morbid.
"The rikyam is dying," she murmured to the novice at her side. "It is
more than half dead."
The novice-a young man named Suung Aruh-twitched the tendrils of his
headdress in dismay.
"How can that be?" he asked.
"How can it be?" Nen Yim repeated, anger creeping into her voice. "Look
around you, Novice. The luminescent mycogens that once sheathed our halls in
light now cling in sickly patches. The capillaries of the maw luur are
clotted with dead or mutated recham forteps. The Baanu Miir
worldship is dying, Initiate. Why should the brain be any different?"
"I'm sorry, Adept," Suung said, his tendrils knotted in genuflection.
"Only . . . what is to be done? Will a new rik-yam be grown?"
Nen Yim narrowed her eyes. "Under whom were you trained before my
arrival?"
"I-the old master, Tih Qiqah."
"I see. He was the only master shaper here?"
"Yes, Adept."
"And where are his adepts?"
"He trained no adepts in his last year, Adept Nen Yim."
"Nor did he really train any initiates, it seems. What did you do for
him?"
"I. .." His mortification deepened.
"Yes?"
"I told him stories."
"Stories?"
"Creche-tales, but with adult overtones. He insisted."
"He used you merely to amuse himself? As personal servants?"
"Essentially, Adept."
Nen Yim closed her eyes. "I am assigned to a dying ship. At the mere
rank of adept, I am the highest member of my caste, and I haven't even a
trained initiate."
"I have heard," Suung said, "that the lack is due to the need for
shapers in the battle against the infidels."
"Of course," Nen Yim replied. "Only the senile, inept, and disgraced
remain to tend the worldships."
"Yes, Adept," Suung said.
"Aren't you going to ask which I am?" Nen Yim snarled.
The novice hesitated. "I know you were once part of one of the holy
programs," he said cautiously.
"Yes. A program that failed. My master failed. I failed. We failed the
Yuuzhan Vong. The honor of death was denied me, and I have been sent here to
do what I can for our glorious people." Sent? she thought in her cloistered
mind. Exiled.
Suung made no answer, but waited for her to continue.
"Your training begins now, Initiate," Nen Yim said. "For I have need of
you. To answer your question, no, we cannot grow a new rikyam for the ship.
Or, rather, we could, but it would do the ship no good."
She glanced around. The inner torus of the worldship was sharply curved
in floor and ceiling, the color of old bone, illuminated only by the
lambents the two shapers carried with them. She looked back up at the
rikyam, or what she could see of it. Its numberless coils of neurons grew in
the still center of the ship, where neither up nor down existed-unlike the
more affluent worldships, the Baanu Miir got its gravity from spin, not
dovin basals, which had to be fed. Encased in multiple layers of coral-laced
shell perforated by osmotic membranes, the brain could be accessed from the
inner torus of the ship, where only shapers were allowed. Here, where the
ship's spin only imparted a vague rumor of artificial gravity, the membrane
could be exposed by stroking a dilating valve in the shell. Only the hand of
a shaper could pass through the membrane to the nerve curls within.
"This ship is almost a thousand years old," she told Suung. "The
organisms that make it up have come and gone, but the brain has always been
here. It has managed the integration of this ship's functions for all of
those years, developing outrider ganglia where they were needed, shaping the
ship in its own unique way. It is for this reason that our worldships live
so well, for so very long. But when the brain sickens, the ship sickens.
Things can be done, but ultimately the ship, like all things, must embrace
death. Our duty, Novice, is to keep this ship from that desired embrace for
as long as possible, until new worldships can be grown or planets settled.
In the case of this ship, we must await the former; Baanu Miir could never
stand the strain of faster-than-light travel. It would take us decades or
centuries to reach a habitable world."
"Couldn't the habitants be transferred to a new world on swifter,
smaller vessels?" Suung asked.
Nen Yim smiled tightly. "Perhaps when the galaxy has
been cleansed of infidels and the warriors no longer need every vessel
available to carry on their war."
"Is there anything to be done now, Adept Nen Yim?" Suung asked. He had
a certain eagerness in his voice that amused and even slightly heartened
her. It wasn't Suung Aruh's fault he knew nothing.
"Go to the qahsa, Initiate, where the knowledge and history of our
people are kept. There you will find the protocols of shaping. Your scent
and name will give you access to them. You will memorize the first two
hundred and recite them to me tomorrow. You should be able to recall them
byname, by indications, by applications. Do you understand?"
His tendrils scarcely managed the genuflection, so disarrayed with
excitement had they become. "Yes,
Adept. It shall be done."
"Go now and leave me to contemplate this matter."
"Yes, Adept."
A moment later, she was alone in the inner torus. Even so, she looked
about furtively before peeling down the front of the living oozhith that
clung to her body and served to cover most of it from sight. Beneath the
oozhith, clinging to her belly, was a film-flat creature. It retained the
vestigial eyes of its fishlike ancestor but otherwise resembled an
olive-and-black mottled pouch, which was more or less what it was- a very
special sort of container.
She reached back through the osmotic membrane to touch the fractal
coils of the rikyam again. With the pincer on her smallest finger, she
clipped off four discrete pieces of the brain and placed them in the pouch.
The material closed lovingly around the coils, lubricating them with
oxygen-rich fluids that would keep them healthy until she reached her
laboratory and a more permanent way of keeping the neurons alive.
She took a deep breath, contemplating the enormity of what she was
about to do. The shapers were guided and strictured by the protocols, the
thousands of techniques and applications given them by the gods in the misty
past. To experiment, to try to invent new protocols, was heresy of the first
order.
Nen Yim was a heretic. Her master, Mezhan Kwaad, had been as well,
before the jeedai child Tahiri took her brilliant head from her neck.
Together Nen Yim and she had dared to formulate hypotheses and test them.
With her death, Mezhan Kwaad had absorbed most of the blame for both the
heresy and the failure. Even so, Nen Yim had been spared only because
shapers were already too scarce.
Baanu Miir was dying, as a single glance at its decaying chambers made
clear her first day within it. For a brain this ill no protocol she knew
would serve, and as an adept she could not access the mysteries beyond the
fifth cortex of the qahsa. She would have to make her own protocol, despite
already being tainted with heresy, despite the fact that she was certainly
being watched.
Her first duty was not to the calcified shaper codes, but to her
people. The gods-if they existed at all-must understand that. If the
worldship failed, twelve thousand Yuu-zhan Vong would die-not in glorious
battle or sacrifice, but smothered in carbon dioxide or frozen by the chill
of space. She was not going to let that happen, even if it meant this would
be her last shaping and her last act in this life.
She replaced the pouch-creature on her abdomen and rolled the oozhith
back over it, feeling the tiny cilia of the garment digging into her pores
and resuming their symbiotic relationship with her flesh. Then she left the
dying brain and returned through dim and opalescent chambers and corridors
to her laboratory suite.
FIVE
"Arrest us?" Mara asked Hamner as the droid set his drink down. Her
voice was radium at absolute zero, and Luke shivered. It was the voice of
the woman who had once tried to kill him and very nearly succeeded.
"What's the charge?" Luke asked.
"Fey'lya has evidence that you were behind the unsanc-tioned military
action at Yavin Four a few months ago," Hamner said. "That opens you to a
variety of charges, I'm afraid, especially since as chief of state he
expressly forbade you to engage in any such activity."
"What evidence?" Luke asked.
"The Yuuzhan Vong released a prisoner taken on Yavin Four," Hamner
said. "Fey'lya's calling it a 'hopeful sign of goodwill.' The prisoner
testified that Jedi were involved with and in fact led an unprovoked attack
against the Yuuzhan Vong in a neutral system. He claims to have been a part
of that force, which he asserts was led by Talon Karrde. He further
maintains that Karrde had frequent communication with you, and that he
witnessed those communications."
Mara's eyes had narrowed to slits. "It's a lie. None of Karrde's people
would talk. It must be one of the Yuuzhan Vong's Peace Brigade
collaborators, coached in what to say."
"But it is true, at the bottom of it all?" Hamner said.
Luke nodded tersely. "Yes. After the Yuuzhan Vong war-master offered to
stop with the worlds he had already conquered so long as all of the Jedi
were turned over to him, I realized the students at the Jedi academy were in
danger. I asked Talon Karrde to evacuate them. When he arrived, the
Peace Brigade was already there, trying to capture the stu-
dents and turn them over to the Yuuzhan Vong as a peace
offering. Karrde wouldn't let them do that. I pleaded with
Fey'lya to send New Republic military. He wouldn't. So,
yes I sanctioned his effort and sent what help I could. What
do you think I should have done?"
Hamner's long face nodded thoughtfully. "I don't blame you. I only wish
you had contacted me."
"You weren't around at the time. I talked to Wedge, but it was out of
his hands."
"But their witness is a liar," Mara interjected. "We can
prove that."
"And become liars ourselves?" Luke replied. "He's lying about who he is
and what he saw, maybe, but most of his accusations are true, if a bit
distorted."
Hamner knotted his fingers together. "There's more, anyway. Internal
security went back over the records of star-ship comings and goings in that
period. Of course, they already knew Anakin Solo had faked a clearance, but
they also discovered you had had a visit from Shada D'ukal, one of Karrde's
top people. The transponder ID she used to land on Coruscant was a forgery.
Finally, it's clear Jacen and Jaina Solo also left for parts unknown, also
circumventing planetary security-in your ship, Mara."
"Again, Kenth, what would you have done?" Mara asked accusingly. "We
couldn't leave our students to the Yuuzhan Vong just because the New
Republic was too cowardly to act."
"And again, Mara, I'm not arguing with you. I'm just
telling you what they have."
"I knew this was going to come out eventually," Luke murmured. "I had
thought it might be overlooked."
"The days when Fey'lya might have overlooked Jedi activities are long
gone," Kenth said. "It's hard enough for him to hold back the tide of
representatives who demand he acquiesce to Tsavong Lah's conditions,"
"You aren't saying Fey'lya is on our side," Mara said
incredulously.
"Mara, whatever else you might think of him, Fey'lya
isn't ready to throw all of the Jedi to the rancors. That's part of the
reason he's taking this tack-damage control. By appearing to act against
Luke, he can maintain a moderate position regarding more extreme anti-Jedi
sentiment."
Luke nodded as if to himself, then directed his gaze at Hamner, "What's
your opinion here?"
"Luke, I don't think you'll be brought to trial, or any such thing. The
arrest will be a house arrest. You'll be expected to make a general
statement to the Jedi to stop any unsanctioned activity. Other than that,
you won't suffer any hardship."
"The Jedi are being hunted all over the ga
laxy. I'm expected to tell
them not to fight back?"
"I'm telling you how it is."
Luke locked his hands behind his back. "Kenth, I'm sorry," he said. "I
can't do that. I'll try to keep my people out the way of the military, but
other than that-well, the Jedi have a mission older than the New Republic."
Something snapped into place in Luke's mind as he said that, solidified
a thought as only a spoken word can. He suddenly realized that he meant what
he had said with all of his heart and being. What had kept him from
admitting it earlier? When had he confused the Jedi ethic with government at
large? Why had he been apologizing for so long? Because he feared
estrangement from the republic he had helped to build? But they were the
ones doing the pushing, not him. Not the Jedi-not even Kyp and the other
renegades. Luke might disagree with them in philosophical particulars, but
not in the broad strokes-the Jedi were supposed to be helping people,
working to bring justice and balance.
"That's why I wanted you to know in time to do something about it if
you want to," Hamner replied. He paused, as if considering his next words
very carefully. "I don't think Fey'lya imagines you will stand for it,
either."
"You mean he thinks we'll run and further implicate ourselves."
"Not exactly. He wants to be able to say you're out of his
reach and no longer his responsibility. To 'pick you out of "is fur' as
the Bothans say."
"Oh," Mara said. "He wants us out there, all right, in case he needs us
one day, but until then he's perfectly willing to turn his back on us."
"Something like that," Hamner replied. "No move has yet been made to
impound your ships." "He wants me in exile," Luke concluded.
"Yes."
Luke sighed. "I was afraid this time would come. I had hoped it
wouldn't. But here we are."
"Yes, here we are," Mara snarled. "Fey'lya had better pray I don't-"
Her impassioned diatribe halted in its birth, and a look of profound fear
moved across her face. Luke had never seen anything like it on her features
before. It was more terrible than he could ever imagine at that moment.
"Ah!" Mara said, in a tiny voice.
"Mara?"
"Something's wrong," she said weakly, her face draining of color.
"Something is really wrong." She wrapped her arms around her belly and
