Rebirth: Edge of Victory II

by Greg Keyes

  “You knew,” she said. “You knew, and you lied, and you made me a part of it.”

  The other pilots, in the middle of postbattle jubilation, were starting to stare.

  “What are you talking about?” Lensi asked. Jaina had seen the Duros coming from the corner of her vision.

  “Tell him, Kyp. Tell him what his friends died for. Tell them that thing we just paid so dearly to blow up wasn’t a superweapon. That it wasn’t a weapon at all.”

  Kyp straightened and folded his arms. “Everything the Vong possess is a weapon,” he said.

  “B-but the footage we saw in briefing,” Lensi stammered. “I saw what it did. It pulled fire out of Sernpidal’s sun.”

  “No,” Jaina said. “That’s what it looked like, but that’s not what happened. The Yuuzhan Vong set up a relay system of hundreds of dovin basals, hung in a long corridor all the way to the sun. It was just a big, unwieldy linear accelerator, a way to get hydrogen and helium to use in their shipbuilding, or something. But a giant gravitic weapon? No. Kyp made that up, to get us here.”

  While talking to Lensi, she hadn’t taken her gaze off Kyp’s face. Nor did she now.

  “What was it, Kyp? What did we just blow up? Or do you even know?”

  “I know,” Kyp said. “It was a worldship, a new one. If it’s any comfort, it wasn’t finished, and there probably weren’t many Vong aboard.”

  “Then why did you want it blown up? Why did you lie?” Lensi asked.

  Kyp’s face hardened. “The Yuuzhan Vong have destroyed, conquered, and raped our planets. They enslave civilian populations, and they sacrifice our citizens by the thousands. But until today, the only Vong we’ve hurt are those who come against us—the warriors. I wanted to hit them where they live, to let them know their civilians aren’t sacrosanct if ours aren’t.”

  “Then why an empty worldship?” Jaina asked. “Why not just pick a full one and blow it up, Kyp? You can’t tell me you would be squeamish about that.”

  “You’re wrong about that, Jaina, and I think you know it,” Kyp said. “But sure, from what I’ve managed to find out we could have probably blasted one of their older ships. But that wouldn’t have really hurt them. This does. Their worldships are dying, and a lot of them aren’t in good enough shape to make it anywhere they can let people off. This one would have been hyperdrive capable, and it could have housed the populations of many of their smaller worldships. Now they have to choose between letting their children die in space or expending military resources to move them to conquered planets. Either way, it only helps us fight them—and it sends a message.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jaina snapped. “It sends the message that we’re not any better than they are.”

  “We were here first. It’s our galaxy. If they had come peacefully, we would have given them the space they needed.” He lifted his chin and raised his voice to address everyone in the room. “You should all be proud of what you did today. You fought against terrible odds and you won. You struck a blow against the Vong, and a good one. This was for Sernpidal, for Ithor, for Duro, for Dubrillion, for Garqi—for every planet the Vong have despoiled.”

  To Jaina’s utter astonishment, he got cheers. Not from everyone—she saw Gavin and Wedge across the room, their faces tight and angry. But nearly everyone.

  “Ask them, Jaina. You don’t really have a homeworld. You were raised all over the galaxy. Most of these people know what it’s like to have had a home, and too many of them know what it’s like to lose one, thanks to the Yuuzhan Vong. You think they mind evening the score a little?”

  “I think you owed us the truth. Maybe we would have decided to help you if you had been straight with us.”

  “And maybe you wouldn’t have. As long as you thought it was a superweapon, you were ready to go. But we’ve set them back here more than the destruction of any weapon. By the time they grow another one—”

  “—their children start dying. Right. I get that. Bravo, Kyp. Well done. Except you used me. You made me tell your lie, and now the blood of every Yuuzhan Vong child who suffocates in space is on my hands, too.”

  “There’s more to this universe than Jaina Solo, believe it or not,” Kyp said, very quietly. “I’m sorry you feel used, and I wish I hadn’t had to lie to you. But I did have to. You wouldn’t have helped me otherwise.”

  “And I’ll never help you again,” Jaina said. “You can count on it. If you were dying of thirst on Tatooine, I wouldn’t even spit on you.” And with that she left, found the stateroom she had been assigned, turned out the lights, and wept.

  The next day, with Gavin Darklighter’s permission, she left to find the Errant Venture.

  FORTY-SIX

  “It’s a weird thing,” Corran said, as the Errant Venture grew larger through the transparisteel lozenge of the Givin ship.

  “What’s that?” Anakin asked.

  “Being happy to see my father-in-law’s ship.”

  “Ah.” Anakin tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He’d been searching for Aunt Mara in the Force. The results were ambiguous—at times he thought he had her, but at other times it didn’t seem like her at all. The feeling that she was dying had scarred his mind, and deep in his gut he feared she was already dead and his occasional sense of contact was merely a residual imprint of her living self.

  He turned to go back and wake Tahiri and found her standing only a meter or so away. She gave him a brief smile.

  “Uh … hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” Tahiri replied. Her eyes refused to settle on his for long, but he could feel her uncertainty matching his own. “Looks like we’re almost there,” she pointed out unnecessarily.

  “Yeah.” Why did his fingers feel like hammers and his legs like spongy pillars? This was Tahiri.

  “And we can finally get out of these things for good,” Tahiri went on. “I never want to wear a vac suit again as long as I live.”

  “Right. Me either.” The suits had made a recurrence of what had happened in the locker on Yag’Dhul Station impossible. What would happen when they were in shirtsleeves again?

  It was a nearly terrifying thought.

  “You think Mara’s okay?”

  Anakin shook his head. “No.”

  “She will be. She has to be.”

  “Yeah.” A long, awkward silence followed as they drew near the Errant Venture. Corran was busily trying to prove they were who he said they were—despite the fact that they weren’t in the same ship they’d left in—so he could get clearance to enter the docking bay.

  “Hey, Anakin?” Tahiri asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s going on? You’ve hardly said two words to me since we left Yag’Dhul.”

  “We were kind of busy, and I … I’m worried about Aunt Mara.”

  “Uh-huh. Look, have you changed your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “About … you know. Are you sorry now? I mean, we were about to die and everything. It’s perfectly understandable, because we’ve been best friends for so long, but maybe now you’re thinking I’m too young, and remembering all the trouble I’ve gotten you into, and, well, maybe we ought to just forget …” Her green eyes did meet his then, with a sort of ionic jolt.

  “Tahiri …”

  “Right. I get it. No harm done.”

  “Tahiri, I haven’t changed my mind. I’m not sorry at all. I don’t know exactly what it all means, and we are young, both of us. But I don’t regret kissing you. And, um … it wasn’t just because I thought we were dying.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  He was trying to decide what to say next without totally messing up the situation, when a staggering pain suddenly jolted through him.

  “Aunt Mara!” he gasped. “Aunt Mara!” Another blinding wave of agony made his knees buckle.

  * * *

  The instant they were docked, Anakin bolted from the ship, pushing past the Jedi students who had
come out to greet them, running as fast as he could toward the medical lab. In the turbolift, the worst agony yet ripped through him so powerfully that he was forced to block himself off from it before he fainted.

  Outside the medical facility he found Mirax, Booster, Valin, Jysella, and half a dozen other people jittering around. When Anakin burst onto the scene, all eyes turned toward him.

  “Aunt Mara!” he gasped. “What’s wrong with Aunt Mara?”

  Mirax embraced him. “Mara is fine,” she said. “Where in space have you been? Is Corran with you?”

  Anakin brushed off the question. “But the pain …” he began.

  “It’s normal,” Mirax replied. “Corran?”

  “Corran’s fine,” Anakin said. “He’ll be right here. Mirax, I felt her dying.”

  “She was. Now she’s not. Somehow, in the Force, she and Luke … We don’t know how. But the Yuuzhan Vong disease is gone. Completely.”

  “Then the pain—”

  “Natural. Hideous, overwhelming, but natural. Believe me, I’ve experienced it twice.”

  “You mean …?”

  A few moments later the door sighed open. Cilghal stood there, looking very, very tired.

  “You can come in now,” she said. “A few at a time, please.”

  Anakin and Mirax went in first.

  Mara still looked sick. Her face was sallow, and sweat sheened her brow. But she was smiling, her jade eyes filled with an unfamiliar sort of happiness. Luke knelt at the bedside, holding her hand.

  “Luke, Mara,” Mirax said. “Look who I’ve brought.”

  “Anakin!” Luke said. “You’re okay! Are Corran and Tahiri with you?”

  “Yeah,” Anakin said absently, his attention fixed on the small bundle in the crook of Mara’s arm. He stepped closer. Small dark eyes glanced vaguely in his direction, passing over him as if he didn’t exist.

  “Wow,” he breathed.

  “Hello, Anakin,” Mara said weakly. “I knew you’d be here.”

  “I thought you were … Can I come closer?”

  “Sure.”

  Anakin stared down at the newborn. “Are they all that ugly?” he blurted.

  “You’ll want to rephrase that,” Mara said, “after what I just went through. Think in the general direction of antonyms.”

  “I mean, he’s—”

  “His name is Ben,” Luke said.

  “He’s beautiful. In the Force, and … But he’s all sort of squinched and wrinkly.”

  “Just like you were,” Mara said.

  “And you’re really okay?”

  “I’ve never, ever been better,” Mara told him. “Everything is perfect.” She looked down at her child. “Perfect.” As weary as it was, her smile had enough wattage to light all of Coruscant.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Nen Yim walked with bowed head through the labyrinthine corridors of the great ship. Sculpted pylons of ancient but living bone raised the vast ceilings, and choirs of rainbow qaana hummed hymns to the gods through their chitinous mandibles. Rare paaloc incense—forbidden to all but the highest of the high—remembered the ancient homeworld of the Yuuzhan Vong to the hindmost recesses of her brain.

  Kae Kwaad slunk beside her, strangely subdued.

  In the center of the vast chamber, they came to a raised dais of pulsing, fibrous hau polyps, and atop it, shrouded in darkness and translucent lamina, reclined an enormous figure. Only his eyes were clearly visible, glowing maa’it implants that shifted through the colors of the spectrum. Other than that was only an irregular shadow that sent shivers of worship aching through her body. For a terrible moment she believed she had been brought into the very presence of Yun-Yuuzhan himself.

  Kae Kwaad prostrated himself. “I have brought her, Dread Shimrra.”

  The eyes burned into her, but it was long, tremulous heartbeats before the figure spoke.

  “Would you look upon me, Adept?” he said, his whispered voice surely as majestic and terrible as that of the god he resembled. “Would you look upon me and die?”

  Nen Yim supplicated. “I would if you wish it, Dread Lord.”

  “You are a heretic, Nen Yim. Bred of heretics.”

  “I have done what I thought I must for the Yuuzhan Vong. I am prepared to die for my transgressions.”

  Shimrra made a noise, then—a rustling, vaporous noise that she only gradually recognized as laughter.

  “You have seen the eighth cortex.”

  “I have gazed within it, Lord.”

  “And what did you see there? Speak.”

  “I saw … the end. The end of the protocols. The end of the secrets. Besides those few marvels the gods have gifted us with since our arrival at the infidel galaxy, the store of our knowledge is nearly exhausted.”

  “So it is,” Shimrra acknowledged. “You alone of all shapers know this.” Something that was not a natural hand gestured at Kae Kwaad from the shadows. “Onimi. Reveal yourself.”

  “Yes, Dread Lord.” Kae Kwaad—no, Onimi—capered, then. With a twist, the dead shaper hands dropped from his wrists, revealing ordinary Yuuzhan Vong digits. He stripped off the masquer that hid his face, and bile rose in Nen Yim’s throat at what she saw there.

  The man she had thought a master shaper was deformed. Not scarred or modified as sacrifice to the gods, but misshapen as one born cursed by them. One eye lolled lower on his face than the other, and part of his skull was oddly distended. His mouth was a twisted slash. His long, lean limbs twitched with a sort of mad delight.

  “Onimi is my jester,” Shimrra murmured. “He amuses me. Sometimes he is useful. I sent him to watch you and fetch you.”

  “You see, my sweet Nen Tsup?” Onimi crowed. “You see?”

  But Nen Yim did not see. She did not see at all.

  “Silence, Onimi. Prostrate yourself and be silent.”

  The jester flattened himself against the coral deck and whimpered like a fearful beast.

  “Yun-Yuuzhan shaped the universe from his own body,” Shimrra intoned, his voice now modulated like a sacred chant. “In the days following his great shaping, he was weak, and in that time Yun-Harla tricked him into giving her some of those secrets. These she passed to her handmaiden, Yun-Ne’Shel, and thence to me. I am the gateway of that knowledge. But Yun-Yuuzhan never gave up all of his secrets. Many he still holds for us, free of Yun-Harla’s deceptions. They await us. I have seen it in a vision.”

  “I still do not understand, Dread Lord. The eighth cortex—”

  “Silence!” The voice raised suddenly to a mind-numbing rumble, and Nen Yim found herself as prostrate as Onimi. She prepared herself for death.

  But surprisingly, when he resumed, Shimrra’s voice was again mild. “In my vision, Nen Yim, you were raised to the rank of master. In my vision, you quested for the knowledge that Yun-Yuuzhan holds out. He offers it, but he demands sacrifice and labor to obtain it. He requires that you pursue your heresy.”

  Nen Yim, afraid to speak, lay quiet, slowly understanding that she was not to die after all.

  “The other shapers are the dupes of Yun-Harla,” Shimrra went on. “They shall not know of this. You will labor here, with me. You will have the resources and assistants my household provides. Together with me, you will bring the deepest secrets of shaping forth from the waking mind of Yun-Yuuzhan, and before that unleashed knowledge, the infidels will fall.” He paused. “Now, you may speak.”

  Nen Yim composed herself. “Dread Lord, the inhabitants of the worldship Baanu Miir—”

  “They are nothing. They are dead. They might have been spared but for the infidels, who desecrated our shipwomb and destroyed the new worldship there. It is nothing. They were the old. The shapers are the old. You are on the new path, the most sacred of all, Master Nen Yim. Forget what has gone before.”

  They are nothing. The infidels had killed them, everyone on Baanu Miir, on every worldship too old and worn to achieve faster than lightspeed. In her heart, at that moment, Nen Yim felt a hard rage and made a sole
mn vow. Up until now, the infidels had been an interesting problem to her, almost an abstraction. Now they were her enemies in the deepest sense. Now she would work to bring about their annihilation.

  And behind that quiet rage, quickly overwhelming it, overwhelming even the godlike presence of Shimrra, rose a strange, dark glee.

  Now my shaping truly begins, she thought. And the universe shall tremble at what I create.

  EPILOGUE

  Luke warily regarded the holographic image of Borsk Fey’lya, chief of the New Republic.

  “So you’re saying I’m free to return to Coruscant?” the Jedi Master asked the cream-colored Bothan’s diminutive image.

  “If you wish,” Fey’lya replied. “I want you to understand that the original order for your arrest came from the senate, not from me. It took some time, but I have exerted the pressure necessary to have it rescinded.”

  “I appreciate that, Chief. But I seem to remember that it was you who threatened me with arrest a few months ago. How can I be certain that this isn’t just a trick to lure me back?”

  “In point of fact,” Fey’lya said, “I hope you don’t come back.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Don’t take me for a fool, Master Skywalker. I am aware of at least some of your activities. It is perhaps possible that some of them are … useful. However, there are still elements in the senate—powerful elements—who cite you and your Jedi as the cause behind the Yuuzhan Vong breaking their truce. Now, you and I know—whatever I may have said before of political necessity—that the truce was broken because the Yuuzhan Vong very simply want every world in our galaxy. But, though I’ve made the arrest go away, I still am not in a position to actually sanction your rogue activities.”

  “In other words, you want deniability.”

  “I have deniability, Master Skywalker. I want to keep it that way, for the time being.” He paused. “In time, things may change.”

  “I think I understand you, Chief,” Luke said. In time we Jedi may be your only hope.

  “Good. In that case, I’ll bid you good day—or night, whichever it is, wherever you are. And, Master Skywalker?”