by James Luceno
Roa smiled broadly. “It’s amazing that you and I never met, considering all the mutual friends we had on Etti IV and other haunts in the Corporate Sector. A pleasure after all these years.” He gestured to Fasgo and introduced him.
Bunji regarded the red-haired spacer. “Yes, Fasgo’s petty scams aboard the Wheel have not escaped our notice.”
Fasgo swallowed hard, but said nothing.
Han was still shaking his head in incredulity. “I figure I must be dying, because I keep seeing my life flashing before my eyes.” He grinned at Bunji. “If Ploovo Two-For-One shows up right about now, I’m folding my hand.”
“Were Ploovo to show up, Han, I can assure you he would be less than courteous. Even after extensive reconstruction surgery, he never quite got over the damage done to his proboscis by the dinko you so cleverly sicced on him in the Free Flight Dance Dome. For a time, in fact, he paid well for anyone who brought him a dinko—dead or alive. Taxidermied specimens of the vicious things were everywhere on display in his homes, his offices, aboard his ships. He even took to wearing a charm bracelet composed entirely of dinko fangs and the serrated spurs of their hind legs. I do believe he brought the species to the edge of extinction.”
Han frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that, but I never cared much for people who tried to cheat me out of what was mine.”
Bunji guffawed once more, all but rattling the bulkheads with his laugh. “As I myself learned.”
“You’re not still sore about my strafing your pressure dome on that asteroid—”
“Not at all,” Bunji said. “I deserved it for trying to get the better of you on those chak-root runs to Gaurick.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Han laughed. “You fix up the Falcon for what happened to her on Gaurick, then you go and deduct the costs from what you owe me. That’s what sent me to Ploovo for a loan to begin with.”
Bunji’s sigh was a warm wind. “We live and learn, Han, we live and learn. But surely you knew I’d forgiven you. The fact is, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for what you accomplished on Tatooine.” He gestured broadly. “You could say that much of this station owes to your efforts.”
Han jabbed himself in the chest. “What I did on Tatooine?”
Bunji puffed on his cigarra and grinned. “To be more precise, what your wife did. You see, Han, I had attempted to relocate my business enterprise to Tatooine, only to be run off by Jabba. Not content to have done that, the Hutt all but crippled my cash flow for the next few years. His death, however, presented me with an opportunity to rebuild my power base, though I had to contend with the likes of Lady Valarian and a few others. Nevertheless, a few shrewd deals made during the Thrawn years and I was back on my feet. Then, just a year ago, I had the Wheel assembled in a nearby system and towed here, to Ord Mantell.”
“This is yours?” Han said.
“Most of it. Borga the Hutt has a small stake in it. Now, if the New Republic would only do something about the Yuuzhan Vong.”
Han’s smile straightened. “Some of us are trying to do just that, Bunji.”
“Is that what has brought you here—under a false identity, no less?”
“Han and I are trying to hunt down a former associate,” Roa answered.
Bunji inclined his head in interest. “Hunt down?”
“Or just locate,” Han said. “That all depends on what he says when we find him.”
“Which former associate?”
“His name’s Reck Desh.”
Bunji fell silent for a long moment. He inhaled on the cigarra and launched a jumbo smoke ring toward the ceiling. “What do you want with him?”
“It’s a long story,” Han said, “even longer than yours.”
Bunji nodded. “If I were you, Han, I wouldn’t be so quick to catch up with Reck Desh.”
Han leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Why’s that?”
“Things have changed since the old days. Folks are engaged in activities now that wouldn’t have been tolerated then—even by riffraff like Bossk.”
“What sort of activities?”
“Such as providing information about planetary defenses, or pirating shiploads of refugees and delivering them into Yuuzhan Vong hands for sacrifices.”
The muscles in Han’s jaw bunched. Bunji continued. “Reck and the gang he runs with—they call themselves the Peace Brigade—have been colluding with Yuuzhan Vong operatives by helping to spread anti-Jedi sentiment and destabilize planetary systems in advance of invasion. In some cases, they’ve persuaded worlds to capitulate to the Yuuzhan Vong beforehand.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know where Reck is currently?” Roa asked judiciously.
“At last report, the Peace Brigade was operating in Hutt space,” Bunji said, “much to Borga’s dismay. If you’d like, I could make a few inquiries.”
Han showed him a skeptical look. “Why would you be willing to do that for us?”
Bunji shrugged. “As I say, I owe you. If that isn’t reason enough, then I’m doing it for the Wook. It near broke my hearts to hear that he had died. I’d have given anything to have had a partner like Chewbacca.”
Before Han could respond, sirens began to blare and the illumination in Bunji’s well-appointed enclave flickered. Without warning, the Jubilee Wheel shuddered as if it had been poked by the finger of a colossal hand. One of Bunji’s henchmen rushed to a nearby terminal and called up data on a display screen.
“Yuuzhan Vong attack!” he blurted.
Humans and others leapt to their feet, running every which way for exits, shelter, and the antique sideboard that held the Whyren’s Reserve and similarly exceptional libations. Directly in the path of a panicked Whiphid, Han and Fasgo were knocked to the floor.
Roa wedged his hands under Han’s arms and yanked him upright. Bunji and the more important members of his coterie were already disappearing through a gaping hatchway in the cabin’s rear wall. Han threw his pack over his shoulder and stumbled forward, only to hear the hatch lock solidly as he reached it.
“To the Happy Dagger,” Roa said from the anteroom. “I’ve no intention of being on this wheel when the Yuuzhan Vong decide to roll it downhill!”
FIFTEEN
Ord Mantell’s yellow star at its back, the New Republic task force emerged from behind the system’s fifth planet with weapons blazing. Simultaneously from around the jagged edges of the planet’s large moon, fighter squadrons raced forward to engage the invaders, the radiance of their ion drives dwindling in the night.
Batteries on the Mon Calamari battle cruiser and the escort frigates ranged toward distant targets and fired. Laser beams slashed outward, visible in vacuum as wrathful hyphens of energy. Strikes registered in the remote blackness. Overlapping spheres of brilliance flared in darkness, blossoming thicker than a meadow of wildflowers.
The Yuuzhan Vong vessels—pitted yorik coral and facet-hulled—withstood the initial barrage. Fashioned by dovin basals, defensive singularities formed around the enemy ships, guzzling countless ergs of energy. Answering bursts from fearsomely powerful arrays streaked toward the task force as spiraling golden projectiles, grotesquely beautiful against the starfield.
Diverting energy to their shields, the New Republic ships held their own, then returned fire. Laser light and nova-bright missiles gridded the night as the two flotillas continued to trade volleys.
X-wings, B-wings, E-wings, and TIE interceptors arrived from the defenders’ precinct and began to distract, harass, and sting the vanguard Yuuzhan Vong vessels with narrow-beam fire. Dazed by the battle cruiser’s initial volley, a corvette-size pyramid of yorik coral dropped its guard momentarily. Slipping through vulnerable spots in the ship’s defenses, carefully placed proton torpedoes from a quartet of B-wings detonated against the carbon-black hull. Chunks of scabrous flesh large as starfighters blazed fiery trails through local space.
Centerpiece of the task force, the battle cruiser altered course, intent on steering the b
attle away from Ord Mantell and the many civilian vessels anchored there and in close proximity to the Jubilee Wheel. Turbolaser batteries and ion cannons swiveled and traversed. Light tore from already superheated alloy barrels, and blinding flashes strobed in the distance.
A second Yuuzhan Vong corvette tried unsuccessfully to evade the barrage. Sieved by laser spears, it disappeared in an effulgent globe of fire.
Asteroid-like coralskippers, varying in size, shape, and color, advanced in an unstoppable cloud, forging through the intense hail and swarming into the midst of the starfighter groups. Well-maintained formations broke apart as crafts peeled away to all sides, barrel—and snap-rolling into furious engagements with their quarries. In a bloodbath of swirling combat, coralskipper preyed on starfighter and starfighter on coralskipper.
Wingmates fought to remain together, but were more often separated by furious blasts and forced into one-on-one contests. Dovin basals pillaged the New Republic fighters of their shields and assailed them with streams of molten rock gushed from cone-shaped weapons emplacements. Rendered defenseless, X-wings and E-wings were slaughtered by the dozen. Locked into fierce, pitched battles, opponents jinked and looped through evasive maneuvers.
Counterfire from the Yuuzhan Vong’s largest ship silenced the battle cruiser temporarily. Retreating behind its shields, the Mon Calamari vessel endured storm after storm of projectile and plasma barrage, as frenzied electricity danced and coruscated at the boundaries of the great ship’s invisible barriers.
Biding its time, the cruiser waited until the Yuuzhan Vong warship paused to repower, then it opened fire with all guns. Still stronger laser beams sliced through the night, some to be swallowed by gravitic anomalies, while others chipped away at the enemy ship’s yorik coral hull. Two Ranger-class gunships moved in, determined to outflank the warship. Pounding discharges from their main batteries vaporized dozens of coralskippers and escort craft at a burst. Desperate ploys saved some of the Yuuzhan Vong fighters, but most were outwitted, disintegrated, or transformed into short-lived comets.
The flotillas began to close ranks, saturating space with flaming missiles and harnessed light. Caught up in friendly fire, a trio of TIEs vanished without a trace.
Laser beams from a New Republic escort frigate skewered another Yuuzhan Vong corvette through its long axis, coral, weapons, and the rest disappearing in a cloud of fire. As if in riposte, a pack of coralskippers isolated and surrounded a lone gunship, leaching it of its shields, then battering it with projectiles, kindling a deadly inferno that quickly engulfed the ship.
Elsewhere, juking through whirling hunks of debris, a squadron of E-wings converged on a maimed Yuuzhan Vong ship and began to nip at it mercilessly. Proton torpedoes punched through its imperiled defenses and slammed into the bow. Stratified layers began to peel away from the ship, rubble exploding outward, rocketing from sight. A second, smaller craft, similarly lanced by laser fire, also blew to pieces, showering nearby space with briefly glowing motes.
Close to Ord Mantell’s outermost moon, a chaotic melee raged as coralskippers, X-wings, and TIEs mixed it up, ferociously and with grim resolve. The starfighters came out of smooth rolls, inverted dives, and predatory banks to go to guns with their prey, riding them until they were annihilated. Other ships revectored, racing through fragment clouds to escape the carnage or form up for reengagement, sometimes slewing wildly out of control.
In midsystem the battle cruiser and warship advanced on each other, now trading fusillades and broadsides. Localized storms of blue lightning enveloped both ships as their extended energy defenses made contact. The Yuuzhan Vong vessel poured its most lethal fire into the larger ship, and the cruiser replied with volley after volley of directed light. Caught between the two, an escort took a direct hit, sending scorched and misshapen pieces of wreckage spinning off into space.
As if angered by the loss, the cruiser upped the ante with escalating fire. Boulder-size blocks of mirror-finish coral flew from the warship, but it was not about to be humbled. Plasma streamed from the tips of the enemy ship’s forward arms, raising blistering explosions along the cruiser’s port armor plate.
Weapons blazed and flared. Fire fountaining from the cruiser’s aft hull, the ship began to founder, tipping to one side with main guns still discharging and sensor arrays in flames. Projectiles continued to penetrate her armor until the hull surrendered integrity and precious atmosphere began to stream outward. With artificial gravity disabled, hatches and seals, turrets, and sensor pods blew. Then vacuum played its hole card, tugging crew and contents into the polar night.
X-wings and E-wings rushed dauntlessly to the cruiser’s support. Proton torpedoes found soft spots in the warship’s tattered defenses, bursting against the superstructural arms and command ridge, and loosing geysers of spindrift coral.
But the starfighters’ efforts came too late.
A hellish explosion pushed outward from a rift in the hull of the Mon Calamari vessel, splitting it in half. Escape pods launched, vectoring toward Ord Mantell like drops of radioactive rain, while the battle cruiser became a ballooning sphere of roiling incandescence, then exploded brilliantly.
The Star Destroyer emerged from between Ord Mantell’s moons with main and auxiliary thrust nozzles flaring. Throwing itself headlong into the fray, it fired repeatedly as its pointed bow swung in the direction of the warship. Thread-fine against its enormous bulk, blue lines of energy from aft turbolasers and ion cannons stabbed unrelentingly at the black ship.
The Erinnic braced for return fire, but the plasma and projectiles never arrived.
Abruptly the warship changed course, accelerated, and began to unleash its fury on Ord Mantell, cutting loose with all forward guns. Blinding missiles streaked toward the planet’s surface, burning seething tunnels through the atmosphere. Detonations on the ground lighted the undersides of ragged clouds.
Then, from a dark orifice in the bow, the warship extruded an enormous hose that was more living monstrosity than machine. The blunt nose of the stipple-skinned gargantuan caught the scent of the nearby Jubilee Wheel and, elongating, began to close on the small orbital station, weaving its way through the Wheel’s flock of freighters, barges, and passenger ships.
A trailing wedge of X-wings and TIEs launched from the cruiser-carrier Thurse attacked the herpetoid terror weapon like ravenous birds of prey, but to no avail. Still attached to the warship and shielded by dovin basals, the outsize creature struck at the Wheel like a venomous serpent. As if intent on yanking it from orbit, the creature recoiled and struck again, this time sinking its maw-like mouth into the rim, clamping down on the Wheel as if it were a piece of ring pastry, and shaking it back and forth.
In the florid haze of emergency illumination, and with blaring warning sirens making it almost impossible to hear one another, Han, Roa, and Fasgo raced down a curving stretch of corridor, hoping to reach the Happy Dagger before whatever had the Wheel in its grip decided to shake it apart.
Concussions from the battle raging outside the space station heaved them to and fro as they ran, sometimes into sections of padded bulkhead, but too often into unyielding objects wrenched loose by the intense paroxysms.
Most of the panicked tide was going against them, but Roa maintained that he was following the shortest route to the docking bay. Each violent tremor sent crowds of people slipping, sliding, or hurtling through the passageways, many to be slammed into bulkheads or crushed under the weight of bodies massed in alcoves and junctions. Folk in repulsor cabs fared no better, as vehicles careened into walls or one another, frequently overturning and spilling riders across the deck.
With Han and Fasgo on his heels, Roa jinked left into one of the Wheel’s spokes, hurrying down a frozen stairway into a narrow, twisting corridor whose walls were in places caved in or crumpled. Sparks rained down from ruptured power ducts and exploded energy mains.
They weren’t ten meters into the corridor when the station suffered another powerful jolt that temporarily
disabled the artificial gravity generators. One moment Han and the others were snaking through the damage and the next they were airborne, drifting toward the partially collapsed ceiling like divers swimming for the surface of the sea. Then, just as suddenly, the gravity system reenabled, and they were jerked facefirst to the hard deck.
“Not much future in this,” Roa shouted as he picked himself up and began to stagger forward once more.
“The future’s what you make it,” Han hollered back, somehow managing to hold on to his pack and keep his balance through a violent quake that brought down what remained of overhead tiles and ducting.
Ahead of them a heavy metal curtain dropped, sealing off the way and forcing them to detour back to the station’s outer rim. Reaching a central passageway, they were immediately swept up in a mixed-species mob that was fighting its way toward the launch bays.
All at once the station sustained a strike of unprecedented force. Earsplitting, nerve-grating sounds of rending alloy filled the corridor as a huge arc of exterior bulkhead was simply ripped away.
And toward that dark breach the crowd was inexorably pulled.
Screams overwhelmed the metallic stridency. Waging a losing battle, people clawed at walls, deck plating, and one another in an effort to keep from being sucked into the maw.
Pressed to the inner wall of the curve, Han, Fasgo, and Roa managed to grab hold of the twisted remains of a hand railing. But even as they struggled to secure themselves—bodies lifted parallel to the deck by the vacuuming force—the railing tore away from the bulkhead.
The three of them were sucked forward several meters before the railing snagged on a section of floor grating wedged into a stairwell, but the force of the sudden stop dislodged them. Flags snapping in an incessant wind, they latched on to whatever handholds they could find, as people and droids flew past them into the breach and atmosphere roared out like an angry river.
An airborne, shoebox-size MSE-6 droid caught Fasgo square in the head and carried him shrieking into the current. Han watched him sail toward the breach, arms outstretched and flailing, as if plummeting from a great height.
