by Greg Keyes
have the luxury of taxation. We do not."
"I know your type," Leia replied, her voice climbing several degrees
with each word. "Profit is one thing. You people gouge until there's nothing
left, then abandon your charges when they can no longer pay."
"Not true. We underwrite charity cases with monies we make from those
who can afford our services. If we could operate on an entirely altruistic
level, we would."
'Til bet. What were your bosses before the invasion? Racketeers?
Pirates?"
A slight line appeared on Mors's forehead. "I came here in good faith."
"Let's all just calm down," Jacen said, reprising the role
of mediator he had performed during the crisis at Duro. "Why don't we
just get the preliminaries out of the way?"
"I've all but begged to move this along," Bana said.
"Mom?" Jacen said.
Leia was politic enough to know that her son was right. She nodded,
sat, and folded her hands together.
"After the fall of Duro, Tsavong Lah, the Yuuzhan Vong warmaster,
promised that if all of the Jedi in the galaxy were turned over to him, he
would invade no more of-our planets. A lot of people have taken him at his
word."
"What concern is this of mine?" Bana asked. -
"The Jedi protect even your kind, Hutt," Numa snarled suddenly.
"But if I see clearly where our friend is going with this, it's the
Jedi who now need protecting."
"Not this Jedi," the Twi'lek replied. "I do not ask for rescue, only
for help in my struggle."
"If you would let me continue?" Leia said mildly.
"Go on, please," Numa said, though she did not seem in the least
chastened.
"Yes, we're trying to establish a network to get Jedi off worlds that
are hostile to them to places where they can be safe. But Luke Skywalker's
plan is much more comprehensive than that. We also want to be able to get
Jedi into occupied systems-systems like yours, Bana."
"For what purpose?" Opeli Mors asked.
"To help where they are most needed. To connect with underground and
intelligence networks. What we are after here is not a Jedi rescue network,
merely one that lets Jedi move about in relative safety."
"And these Jedi-they would fight with my people against the Yuuzhan
Vong?" Bana asked.
Leia and Jacen exchanged glances. Jacen cleared his throat.
"Aggression, as such, is not the Jedi way. We would help, yes."
"Yes? You will run weapons to us? Supplies?"
"The network could be used for that, too," Han said. "As I see it,
anyway."
"I should hope so," Bana replied. "The fortunes of our
family are not what they once were. When we spend money, we want a
return."
Numa spoke again, dismissing the Hutt with a flick of her lekku. "I
have heard, Jacen Solo, that you yourself attacked and humiliated the
warmaster. Is this not aggression? Does not Kyp Durron even now take the
fight to the enemy?"
"He did it to save my life," Leia said.
Jacen squared up his shoulders. "I don't agree with Kyp's tactics, nor
does Master Skywalker."
"Then you would not agree with mine," Numa said. "Perhaps it was a
mistake for me to come here."
Jacen studied her for a moment. "Your Master must have warned you of
the dark side."
"Fear of the dark side is a luxury the people of New Plympto cannot
afford. Will you help us or not?"
Anakin would agree with her, Jacen thought glumly.
"We will do what we can," he told her. "We will bring medical aid and
food, help evacuate those who must leave. We will not come in as guerrillas.
And avoiding the dark side is not a luxury. It is a necessity."
She did not reply to that, but in the Force Jacen felt her unrepentant.
"Mors?"
The woman stared at the table for a moment, then her gaze found Han's.
"Personally, I would like to help," she said. "But my superiors-well. We
could supply troops and ships, of course, of the sort experienced at the
kind of activity you're planning, but-"
"But we'll have to pay," Leia said.
"Something, yes."
"Look," Han said. "The New Republic isn't in on this. They won't fund
it."
"You built this station."
"Out of our own pockets," Lando said. "Even the Hutts contributed."
"Ah, but they stand to gain. Whatever our friend there may say, he
knows your Jedi network is one of the slim hopes his people have for
survival."
"You're in the same escape pod," Leia snapped. "You
think the Yuuzhan Vong will tolerate your business when they've
conquered the entire galaxy?"
Mors shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. That's why I have been authorized to
offer you the loan of one ship, at no charge. We'll consider it an
investment."
Han nodded. "Well, that's something." He glanced around the table. "Why
don't we see if we can find some more common ground?"
Han slouched into the kneading chair in the quarters Lando had
provided. Though not as opulent as Lando's, they were more than comfortable.
"This isn't going to work," he muttered.
"Don't be defeatist," Leia said.
"I'm not. I'm being realistic. Somebody has to be, because your brother
sure isn't."
"Don't start in on Luke again."
"Look, I'm glad he finally decided to do something," Han said, "but he
could have chosen something doable. 'Make me a great river, Han, a stream to
carry the endangered, the wounded, the weary to safety.' Very poetic. But
how do we pay for it? Everyone in the room wants to take and take, but they
don't want to give."
Leia's expression softened and she stroked her fingers on his cheek. He
closed them in his own hand and kissed them.
He started to embrace her, but before he could complete it, she drew
back from him a little, though gently.
"We will find the money, Han." And her eyes held a fire brighter even
than that day on the Death Star when they first met. It burned through him
like a blaster bolt. He nodded, and tugged her again, and this time she did
not resist.
TEN
Nen Yim contemplated the mass of cells through an external maa'it, at a
magnification of several hundred times their actual size, and for the first
time in many cycles felt a minute amount of hope. She could not be certain,
but she thought there were signs of regeneration; the mass had grown large
and infinitesimally more massive. If so, her new protocol seemed to be
working. Unfortunately, it would be some time before she could be sure, and
though she was short of every resource imaginable, time was the commodity
she had in least supply.
She noted the results in her portable memory-qahsa, then moved on to
the next batch of trials, Before she could get a good start, however, her
door burred softly, indicating a request for admittance to the shaping
quarters. She moved to the villip on the wall and stroked it to life.
The face that appeared was the prefect Ona Shai, commander of the
worldship. Her eyebrows had been cut into a series of vertical ridges, and
one of her ears had been sacrificed to the gods.
"Prefect Shai," Nen Yim said. "What can I do for you?"
"I desire admittance, Adept."
Nen Yim dithered, inwardly. There was no time to hide her work, but
then, no one else on the Baanu Miir was likely to comprehend what she was
doing, much less recognize it as heresy.
"Please enter, Prefect."
A moment later the door burred a different tone, and Nen Yim opened it
by exposing her wrist to its chemical sensor.
In person, the prefect was not particularly intimidating. Younger even
than Nen Yim, she had been born with a slight stoop to her spine. Another
degree of angle, and she would have been sent back to the gods at birth. She
was habitually excitable and ill controlled, as was evident now.
"Adept," Onasaid.
"Prefect."
For a moment the prefect stood there blankly, as if she had forgotten
why she came. She passed a hand across her face, and her eyes wandered. She
seemed almost in shock.
"Something has happened," she said at last: "It requires your
attention."
"What, Prefect? What has occurred?"
"One-fourth of the population of the Baanu Miir is dead," the prefect
said.
As Nen Yim stepped through the emergency membrane, she felt the
vacuum-hardened ooglith cloaker tighten against her body, maintaining the
pressure that kept her blood from boiling away into the airless chamber
beyond.
The frozen bodies piled three and four deep on the floor hadn't been
wearing cloakers. Nen Yim felt a tightness in her throat that had nothing to
do with the hard-shelled variety of gnullith she had inserted there to pass
the air from the lungworm coiled on her back.
They had time, she thought. The air went out slowly, at first. They had
time to reach this place, where the ship finally thought to seal itself off.
Here they died, beating against a membrane they did not have the authority
to permeate.
"This is no way to die," she heard the prefect murmur over the tiny
villips that pressed at their throats and ears.
"Death is always to be embraced," Sakanga, the warrior who completed
their triad, reminded her. He was an ancient, almost mummylike man. Like the
prefect, he was of the disgraced Domain Shai.
"Of course that is true," Onasaid. "Of course."
"What happened here, Shaper?" the warrior asked, turn-
ing his attention to Nen Yim. "Meteor impact? Infidel attack?" He
paused. "Sabotage?"
"It was not possible to tell," Nen Yim answered. "The rikyam's
understanding was hazy. It is why I wished to come here, to seek evidence.
The breach is at the end of this arm, that is all I know. Perhaps when I see
it, I can say more."
"We should have a master on this ship," the prefect grumbled. "I do not
demean you, Adept, but a worldship should have a master shaper on board."
"I quite agree," Nen Yim said. "A master is needed." A master like my
own, Mezhan Kwaad, not one of the mumbling dodderers who pass for them, she
finished silently.
They moved soundlessly through the carnage. Most of the bodies were
slaves and Shamed Ones; in death, vacuum had mutilated them as they could
not have been in life. Perhaps the gods would accept their final sacrifice,
perhaps not. They were, at least, beyond caring.
The capillary platforms that would normally have taken them down the
arm were as dead and frozen as the people who had once used them. The three
were forced to descend by the bony spine with its intentionally runglike
vertebrae. As they descended, their bodies grew gradually heavier with the
illusion of gravity created by the ship's spin. Coming back up would be more
onerous than descending. She wondered if the decrepit warrior would be able
to manage it at all.
The chambers were jeweled with ice crystals, frozen in the act of
boiling from and rupturing the soft inner walls. The once-pliant floor was
as rigid as the yorik coral on the exterior of the ship, but much more dead.
They continued down, through progressively smaller chambers. They saw
fewer dead down here, too, reinforcing Nen Yim's guess. The rupture had
ended catastrophically, emptying the arm of air and life in a few tens of
heartbeats, but it must have begun small.
Why had the rikyam given no alarm? Why hadn't the seals between each
and every layer closed and hardened?
Eventually, they came to stars.
The arm curved toward the end, and "down" followed the anterior edge.
Here objects weighed the most; the area had been reserved for the training
of warriors originally, but since most able-bodied warriors had moved ahead
of the slower worldships to the glory of battle, the tip had been
transformed into a creche, so that the children of the next generation would
mature with thicker bones and more powerful muscles.
A futile hope for these children. Those who. hadn't been hurled out
into space regarded the stars they might have conquered with frozen eyes
through a fifty-meter-long tear in the fabric of the hull.
Nen Yim shivered. The stars were decidedly down. If she were to fall,
the spin of the ship would sling her irrevocably into trackless parsecs of
nothing.
And yet it was glorious. As she watched, the disk of the galaxy spun
into view, too enormous for even such a large gash to fully frame. The Core
blazed, a white mass tinged blue, spreading into arms that gradually faded
toward cooler stars. Technically, the Baanu Miir was already within the
boundaries of that great lens, but even the nearest world was unreachably
far from the Baanu Miir.
That became even more apparent as she examined the rupture. The edges
of it were curled outward, revealing the tripartite nature of the hull. The
outer shell was yorik coral, rigid metal-bearing nacelles wrapped around the
hardy, energetic organisms that created and tended them. Below that were the
sheared and frozen capillaries that carried nutrients and oxygen out to the
arms and pumped waste products back for the maw luur to cycle and recycle,
supplemented by the hydrogen atoms that the dovin basals pulled from
surrounding space. There also were the muscles and tendons that could flex
the great arm, contract it if need be, and here something had failed. When
the rift occurred, the medial hull should have drawn together and been
sealed by its own freezing. The outer hull would have replicated and closed
the gap, and over time the dead, frozen cells should have been replaced by
vibrant new ones. The soft, pliable inner hull would have healed as well,
even-
tually leaving nothing more than a faint scar to remind of the
disaster.
"What happened?" the warrior asked. "I don't understand this."
Nen Yim pointed to the rent mass of striated muscle.
"It tore itself," she said.
"What do you mean, it tore itself}" the prefect asked. "How can that
be?"
"The muscles spasmed, as the muscles of your leg might after much
exertion. They contracted and split the hull, then kept contracting, tearing<
br />
it wider."
"That's impossible," the warrior grunted.
"No, only undesirable," Nen Yim replied. "The rikyam is supposed to
monitor such fluctuations and moderate them."
"Then why didn't it?"
"My deduction? Because the rikyam's senses in this arm are dead. It is
unaware that anything here exists. Very likely the impulse that ripped the
hull was one of the few random impulses to enter here from the brain in many
cycles."
"You're saying the rikyam itself did this?" Ona asked.
"Only indirectly. What you behold is the result of a ship-brain so far
gone in senility that it is losing control of its motor functions."
"Then there is no hope," the prefect murmured.
The warrior glanced at the prefect in irritation. "What is this babble
of hope? The Yuuzhan Vong were born to conquer and die. This is an obstacle,
nothing more."
"Can you heal it?" Ona Shai asked Nen Yim.
"We can seal the rupture. The damage is crippling; the entire inner
hull is dead. The medial hull will take many cycles to regenerate, assuming
the maw luur still nourishes it. We can perhaps grow a ganglion to control
the functions of this arm, but it will remain disconnected from the brain.
Furthermore, it is probable that the rikyam is losing control of the other
arms as well, if it hasn't already."
"You're saying we must abandon Baanu Miir.'''' The prefect's voice was
flat.
"Unless the rikyam can be regenerated. I am giving this all of my
attention."
"See that you do. Meanwhile, a new worldship is being grown. I will
petition that our people be transferred there. Yet many of the ships are
failing; our chances are slim."
"Whatever our fate, we will meet it as befits the children of
Yun-Yuuzhan." Sakanga gestured at the rim of the galaxy slipping from view,
"Already we have warriors poised near that bright center. All of those
worlds beneath us will be ours. Our sacrifices here will not be forgotten.
It is not our place to complain."
"No," Nen Yim agreed. "But we will do what we must to ensure Baanu Miir
provides another generation for that conquest. I will do what I must."
Though it will only earn me dishonor and death, I will do what I must.
ELEVEN
Luke watched the blockade grow larger.
"Oh, boy," Mara said.
"No," Luke murmured, placing his hand on her shoulder. "Don't you see?
