by James Luceno
The Force mounted within Jaina, a tangible pressure growing from second to second. It was all an incomprehensible blur, seemingly unguided movements that brought her within a hairbreadth of some asteroids, into wild turns and stoops, straight climbs and clever angles cutting the one open line between rocks.
On and on it went, though time seemed irrelevant, a concept lost in the deepest trance.
But the pressure built, surely, tangibly, and as Jaina became aware of it, that only stemmed her concentration further.
Her eyes popped open wide as she came around one spinning boulder to nick a tiny one, hardly a hit, but enough to push her out so that she clipped another, larger asteroid.
Around and around she careened, and she tensed coming out of one spin, to see a wall of stone looming before her.
Then she was spinning too fast to even register the movement, too fast to make any sense of the myriad images flashing before her. She collided with another asteroid—she felt that impact clearly—and then …
She was clear of the belt, and as her rattled senses settled, she worked the controls feverishly to stop the spin. She didn’t know how much time had elapsed, hardly remembered her run at all.
In the control room, there was … silence.
Stunned silence. The timer clock had stopped the moment Jaina’s TIE had exited the belt.
Twenty-seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds.
“The kid can fly,” Han said again.
Only six enemies remained, four men and two women, to oppose Yomin Carr. One of them was up on the tower now, wearing a full enviro-suit and trying to reattach the disconnected junction box.
It wouldn’t matter, Yomin Carr knew. The molecular plague had swept by ExGal-4, had rolled over nearly all of Belkadan, and the toxic gases and swirling yellow and green clouds were too thick now, and too tumultuous, for them to get any message off planet. When the truth of the devastation had become evident, the remaining scientists had scrambled to ready the small freighter for liftoff. How easy it had been for Yomin Carr to sabotage the already dilapidated craft, rubbing wires together so that their rotted insulation disintegrated, causing shorts, or pulling connector plates right over rusted bolts.
The scientists had quickly abandoned any hope of fleeing, and instead focused on getting out a distress signal. But they were too late; the death of Garth Breise and their trust in Yomin Carr had sealed their fate.
Now the clouds and poisoned gases had caught them, and though the buttoned-up ExGal station could be self-sustaining in the oxygen-depleted air, they were trapped, Mon Calamari jugger-head fish in a barrel, for Yomin Carr’s harpoons.
The Yuuzhan Vong warrior casually walked out of the compound, wearing his starfish breathing adaptor, for he could not bring himself to trust the mechanical breathing apparatus of the enviro-suits. Quite comfortable in the devastation his beetle friends had wrought, he moved to the base of the tower and looked up, barely able to see the worker through the thick haze.
“How are the repairs going?” he yelled, his voice watery-sounding because of the mask.
“I got it!” came the cry from above, a woman’s voice. “One more connection …”
Yomin Carr pulled the small ax from his belt and chopped down hard on the exposed piece of cable at the base of the tower, severing it cleanly. Then he replaced the ax and waited calmly, basking in the noxious haze of his glory.
A few minutes later, Lysire Donabelle, one of only two females left alive on Belkadan, came down the tower.
“It’ll work now,” she explained as she reached the bottom and began extracting herself from the safety harness and lengths of cord. “Just a connector,” she started to explain, and then she turned about and froze, eyes wide behind her visor as she regarded Yomin Carr and his living aerator.
Yomin Carr held his hand out, motioning toward the new break in the line.
Lysire stared at it for a long moment; her visor fogged with her heavy breathing. She looked back at Yomin Carr, shaking her head in disbelief.
And then she bolted, rushing right past the alien.
He kicked her trailing foot behind her lead ankle as she passed, and in the same fluid movement, grabbed the air line at the back of her helmet and tore it free. Lysire sprawled facedown on the ground. Yomin Carr’s foot stepped down on her back, holding her firmly in place.
Lysire wriggled frantically, gasping for breath as the yellow fumes slipped under her protective gear. Somehow in her desperation, she broke free, crawling, up to her knees, then regaining her footing. Yomin Carr could have caught her, and easily, but he did not, recognizing from her stagger that he had already won.
Lysire wobbled and swayed; her line to the compound door was far from straight. She staggered the last few steps and fell forward, crashing against the portal. Her hands moved, a feeble attempt to find the door’s release, for her senses were almost completely gone by then.
Yomin Carr didn’t make a move, didn’t have to. He watched her slump against the door.
Then he stood beside her, off to the side, just looking out at the roiling clouds and thickening fumes.
A half hour slipped by. The seven scientists had buddied up for safety, two, two, and three, and while Yomin Carr’s two partners thought he was sleeping in his private chambers, Lysire’s partner knew that she had gone outside. It came as no surprise to Yomin Carr, then, when the compound door started to open.
Lysire Donabelle slipped down to the side.
“Lysire!” came her partner’s cry, the woman falling to one knee beside her.
She glanced up then, apparently noting the movement, and her eyes went wide at the specter of Yomin Carr, at the horror of watching Yomin Carr’s swiftly descending ax.
There was something symbolic about killing the last female on Belkadan, the Yuuzhan Vong warrior recognized. The seal of victory, the symbol that the humans and other intelligent species of this galaxy had lost their first encounter with the Yuuzhan Vong.
Yomin Carr tore the ax head out of the woman’s chest, let her fall right over Lysire, then moved through the door, back into the compound.
Only four enemies remained, and two of them, Yomin Carr knew, were probably asleep.
* * *
Nom Anor wasn’t comfortable at all, strapped in his seat and with tons of unstable liquid explosives burning bright behind him. The Yuuzhan Vong executor, who had come in from another galaxy, had never feared space flight—far from it—but this primitive two-stage rocket from Rhommamool made even the ion drives of the more conventional craft look superb, and those, Nom Anor considered far beneath the glory and sophistication of his own species’s living worldships and coralskippers.
Beside him, Shok Tinoktin seemed only marginally more at ease, gritting his teeth against the g forces as the rocket zoomed into orbit.
Finally, though, they leveled off, the first burn completed, and Shok went to work piloting the large, ungainly craft toward the waiting Mediator.
“They’re hailing us,” Shok explained to his leader a moment later.
Nom Anor held his hand up and shook his head. “Finish the course setting,” he explained. Any delay in responding he could brush away with the difficulties of aligning such a bulky and unwieldy ship as this. The discussion with the Mediator would come later, after he and Shok were safely tucked into their concealed A-wing.
“She’ll fly right by them,” Shok assured him a moment later.
Nom Anor unbuckled from his uncomfortable chair, Shok did likewise, and the two crouched and crept through the cramped capsule, Nom Anor pausing only to set the decoy in place in the pilot chair, utter a quick prayer to Yun-Harla, the Cloaked Goddess, the Trickster, and kiss one of his pet villips good-bye.
The Rhommamoolian rocket broke orbit, streaking out toward the Mediator, and blasting its second-stage booster away. That booster rocket had never actually fired, though, for it wasn’t needed, and wasn’t really a rocket, but was, rather, an empty shell with an A-wing cleverly tucked i
nside.
From the enlarged cockpit of that A-wing, which had been modified to hold two pilots, Nom Anor and Shok Tinoktin watched the continuing plumes of the missile exchange between Osarian and Rhommamool. Starfighters from the Mediator buzzed the atmospheres of both planets, particularly Osarian, trying to knock down as many missiles as possible. Some of those bombs were getting through, the executor noted as the shell rolled about, giving him a view of Osarian and the large red bruises that were the thermonuclear blast clouds.
No wonder, then, that his offer to Commander Ackdool to come to the Mediator and negotiate fairly with the Osarians had been eagerly received.
The booster shell rotated some more and the great battle cruiser came into sight, dwarfing the Rhommamoolian capsule speeding for it, despite the fact that it was much farther away.
“Hold this line,” Nom Anor ordered. Shok tapped his thrust-vector control jets, breaking the momentum of the roll and gently stabilizing the view on the Mediator.
“Open the channel.”
Shok nodded and remotely opened the comm channel on the distant capsule. The relay couldn’t send the picture, the image of Commander Ackdool, to the A-wing, for that would have given the pair away, but Nom Anor could picture the Mon Calamarian’s face vividly, a phony smile of greeting stamped upon it as he issued all the expected diplomatic platitudes.
“My greetings, Commander Ackdool,” Nom Anor said through his villip. The little creature, an exact likeness of Nom Anor, sat atop the decapitated body that had been placed in the capsule’s pilot seat, and relayed Nom Anor’s words with perfect inflection.
Ackdool had barely begun his insincerely warm greeting when a group of craft swooped out from dark space, closing fast on the capsule.
Ackdool cursed and ordered his fighters out, and Nom Anor and Shok Tinoktin heard a yelp of glee from somewhere in the commander’s background.
“The Jedi Knight,” Shok Tinoktin remarked.
Nom Anor nodded, thinking it perfectly ironic that the Mediator’s own starfighters would clear the way for the fake capsule.
Shok Tinoktin worked hard to keep both the Mediator and the capsule in sight so that they could enjoy the spectacle of the Mediator’s starfighters intercepting and chasing away the Osarian Z-95 Headhunters.
“Your friends from Osarian do not seem interested in talk, Commander Ackdool,” Nom Anor said calmly.
“Osa-Prime is in flames,” Ackdool came back, a slight crack showing in his cool diplomatic shell.
“We agreed to cease fire,” Nom Anor said.
“You will be protected, all the way in to the Mediator, and escorted back to Rhommamool after our discussion,” Commander Ackdool assured him, and from his formal tone alone, Nom Anor could guess that he had snapped to attention as he spoke. “On my word.”
“As you will,” Nom Anor said, cognizant of the fact that his villip couldn’t nod. “Break up the screen,” he quietly bade Shok Tinoktin, and the man complied, rolling the channel back and forth so that the communications’ visual break seemed like a malfunction.
“Commander Ackdool?” Nom Anor’s villip asked on cue, its tone full of trepidation.
“I hear you,” Ackdool’s crackling voice replied. “We’ve lost screen.”
“The malfunction is here, I fear,” Nom Anor said. “I see nothing but Osarian ships. And I am without controls. I cannot evade them!”
“Be calm, Nom Anor,” Ackdool replied. “My starfighters will protect you.”
Indeed, watching from the shell, Nom Anor and Shok Tinoktin couldn’t help but smile as the Mediator’s superior starfighters intercepted the Osarians and easily chased them away. One got a torpedo away, though, and only a brilliant maneuver by one X-wing, breaking from the pack and intercepting the torpedo with a line of laser fire, saved the undefended capsule from incineration. Still, the shock of the torpedo blast sent the capsule off course and into a continuing roll.
“I never doubted you,” Nom Anor said calmly.
Ackdool’s ensuing pause was telling, confirmation that his apparent cool in the face of death had just elevated the commander’s respect for him. Nom Anor almost wished at that moment that he actually was in the capsule, that he would be meeting with Ackdool and the Osarians.
Almost.
“Without controls,” Nom Anor growled, “I cannot even shut down my engines, and cannot change course. To the tar pits of Alurion with you, Ackdool. You promised sanctuary.”
“We’ll get you,” Commander Ackdool assured him.
A moment later, the capsule abruptly halted its roll, and despite the fact that its engines were still firing and it was pointed at an angle that ought to have taken it far from the Mediator, it began drifting in toward the great ship.
“Tractor beam,” Shok Tinoktin explained. “Those engines on the capsule will do nothing to hinder it. They’ll pull her in and hold her until they can shut her down.”
Nom Anor smiled and watched, not even bothering to answer Ackdool’s continuing calls to him, as the capsule, flanked by starfighters, approached the Mediator.
The A-wing jolted, and the shell started to turn.
“We’re bouncing along the atmosphere,” Shok Tinoktin explained.
Nom Anor glanced at him, and poor Shok worked doubly hard to keep the Mediator in view, fearing the consequences if the executor did not witness this moment of glory.
The capsule disappeared into the Mediator’s lower docking bay. Shok Tinoktin reopened the visual channel.
“Boom,” Nom Anor said, smiling at Shok.
“Boom,” Nom Anor’s villip echoed to Commander Ackdool.
The nuclear fission explosives packed into the shuttle detonated, vaporizing the entire section of docking bays, blowing out a huge section of the lower floor of the great battle cruiser, issuing a shock wave and a rain of white-glowing metal shards that folded many of the nearest buzzing starfighters in on themselves and lifted the tail of the battle cruiser, uprighting it ninety degrees before any stabilizing jets could halt the roll.
Nom Anor and Shok Tinoktin drifted away in their shell, caught by Rhommamool’s gravity and pulled along the planet’s rim. When they were far enough from the Mediator so that they wouldn’t be detected, Shok blew the shell apart with laser cannons, and off they streaked in the modified A-wing, around the other side of the planet, confident that Commander Ackdool and his crew had too much to handle in just securing the rest of their ship to even notice their departure.
They made the jump to lightspeed soon after, leaving Rhommamool far behind. Nom Anor had pushed the conflict past the breaking point, beyond any hopes of peaceful resolution, and so his duty there was finished. Let them think he had died in the explosion on the Mediator, a martyr to the cause. Let the roused rabble he had left behind on Rhommamool die eagerly.
He was still considering the beauty of his plan and his faked ending when the A-wing came back to sublight hours later. Shok Tinoktin was fast asleep in the pilot chair in front of, and just below, Nom Anor, breathing rhythmically, contentedly. The coordinates had already been entered, and the A-wing was flying itself to the next destination, the next spot where Nom Anor could stir up the passions of the oppressed, could cause havoc to the New Republic and keep the fools so consumed by the civil wars and unrest among their own that they would not turn their eyes outward to the fringes of the galaxy, where far more dangerous trouble was beginning to stew.
The Osarian-Rhommamool conflict would explode fully now, he knew, and the New Republic Advisory Council would send in half the fleet to intervene and keep the warring planets at bay, while the councilors spent countless hours fretting over petty details, with half of them, no doubt, trying to find some way in which they might personally profit from the disaster.
Nom Amor worked hard to keep his personal disdain for the New Republic government from clouding his vision and allowing him to grow too optimistic. The Praetorite Vong, the Yuuzhan Vong war force that had come in to assist in the conquest of the galax
y, was not overwhelmingly large, by any means, and they couldn’t afford to underestimate their opponents at any turn.
He looked to Shok for a moment, making sure that the man was asleep, then reached into a case at the side of his cramped seat and produced Da’Gara’s sympathetic villip. In mere moments, the creature inverted to show the head of the prefect, complete with his starfish breather.
“How goes Yomin Carr’s operation?” Nom Anor asked after the polite and formal greetings, and he was glad to be speaking again in the more comfortable Yuuzhan Vong tongue.
“Belkadan is dead to our enemies,” Da’Gara assured him. “Yomin Carr remains there, my newest eyes in this region of the galaxy.”
“He has turned the station’s satellite scopes to our advantage then?” Nom Anor asked.
“Indeed, Executor,” Da’Gara said. “Or he will, as soon as the storms pass. We are far from blind, though, for the war coordinator scans the nearby sectors.”
“And are you pleased by what the war coordinator sees?” Nom Anor asked.
“This region is sparsely populated,” Da’Gara answered, a twinge of regret in his voice. “The war coordinator’s observations, along with the previous reports, prove that there will be little resistance while we gain a foothold.”
Nom Anor nodded his approval—and relief. The Praetorite Vong would be vulnerable for a while, with only the one frozen planet as a true base. There was great advantage in using a war coordinator, a yammosk, for the attack. In addition to its own powerful energies, and true to its title as war coordinator, the creature could bring the forces of the three expeditionary worldships into tight focus and purpose, could allow the coralskippers to fly in perfect unison, thus making them many times more efficient. But there was a downside to such an endeavor, for if the New Republic somehow managed to bring all of their considerable firepower to bear on that frozen base planet and, impossible as it seemed, managed to destroy the yammosk, the resulting chaos among the Praetorite Vong could bring about complete disaster. The Praetorite Vong had to move slowly at first, allowing the yammosk to put all the base defenses in place, and to allow for the arrival of the next two fighter-packed worldships.
