Remnant: Force Heretic I

by Sean Williams

  Soon they came to an impossibly large vertical tunnel that plunged into depths of darkness that Nom Anor hadn’t imagined possible. They spiraled down the interior of this tunnel for what felt like an eternity, walking upon metal steps that constantly creaked and groaned under their weight. It was so large that it could have easily held an entire transport carrier, except that it was almost totally filled with a mysterious silvery column. The thing stretched up high into the darkness above them, taking up so much of the space that there seemed only enough room for the stairs on which they descended. What purpose the column served, exactly, Nom Anor couldn’t tell. Perhaps it was the outside of another pipe built within the old one. It, too, was probably abandoned, like everything else in the empty spaces—dead metal left to die, left to rust.

  Rust. Now that was a concept the Yuuzhan Vong knew about. The reaction between the elements iron and oxygen was an important one in biology. But the abhorrence with which the process was held by these machine builders had been unexpected. Sometimes Nom Anor thought it a good metaphor for how the Yuuzhan Vong invasion should have been conducted: slowly, insidiously, the machine builders could have been eroded from beneath until all their glittering, unnatural towers fell and crumbled to dust. But here, underground, he could see the fallacy of the plan. Rust took time, and the Yuuzhan Vong were not known for their patience. The worldships were dying; their people needed homes. If the basements of Yuuzhan’tar could still stand, even after being so long untended, then invasion by rust would simply be too slow.

  Still, there was something in the concept, he was sure. It nagged at him as he followed I’pan farther down into the depths of this abominable planet—so deep, in fact, that the coolness of the upper levels eventually became replaced by a stifling heat and smell not dissimilar to a coralskipper backwash.

  Is this to be my tomb? he wondered. The bowels of a planet whose very nature is blasphemous?

  No! He quickly reined in his thoughts. He would not die here like some worthless vermin, in some hole where even the gods could not find him, if they had ever existed. No matter how deep I’pan went, he would live. He had to. That he currently had no plan and no resources beyond his mind didn’t bother him: any goal at all was better than just giving in—and the power of his mind wasn’t to be scoffed at.

  He didn’t know how long they’d been moving, but eventually they emerged into the huge cavern that he knew instantly to be the refuge of the renegade Shamed Ones. He could smell them, their fear and their desperation. I’pan stopped a few paces ahead of him, facing Nom Anor with a newfound confidence—as well as relief, it seemed. He must have felt that here, at least, he had the support of his companions, and that Nom Anor was less likely to attack him than he had been earlier.

  “This is it,” I’pan said unnecessarily, his arm sweeping around the dusty area. Even with this newfound confidence, his voice still carried a habitual obsequious tone. “We have arrived, Master.”

  The area was wide and circular, with a high, domed ceiling arcing overhead. Across the ground were scattered numerous blisterlike structures that Nom Anor recognized as minshals, grown for temporary accommodation. The entire place was lit by bubbling, bioluminescent globes hanging from the ceiling high above.

  Off to one side, a slanting airshaft led even farther down into the seemingly endless city basement. Issuing from its wide throat were deep and rhythmic vibrations that made Nom Anor’s calves vibrate. Moving over to the shaft he saw a chuk’a waste processor deep inside, its muscular segments busily ingesting rubble as it worked its way downward into the vent, turning it into the walls, ceilings, and floors of the new homes for the Shamed Ones, filling the empty spaces in much the same way that some insects built their nests.

  “We found the chuk’a some levels above,” I’pan said. “Mislaid for dead, we think, it has since come in handy for our needs.”

  In the strange, greenish light from the bioluminescent globes, Nom Anor could see I’pan’s disfigurement much more clearly. Rejected by coral implants, the Shamed One’s face lacked the brutal beauty of a true scarring. His skin was unnaturally smooth, and, apart from his nose, there was a symmetry to his features that offended Nom Anor’s refined sense of aesthetic. No wonder I’pan had been outcast. The gods’ shaming of him was visible for all to see.

  “We?” Nom Anor asked, wasting no energy on sympathy. “I see no one other than yourself here, I’pan. Where are these others of whom you speak, and why do they hide?”

  “We hide for the same reasons you do,” said I’pan. There was no accusation in his tone, so Nom Anor felt no cause to lash out at him. “We have learned to do it out of necessity—for self-preservation.” Then, ringing a bell that dangled from a tripod by the entrance to the shaft, he suddenly called out: “Ekma! Sh’roth! Niiriit! We have a visitor.”

  Muffled voices responded to I’pan’s call and the sound of the chuk’a ebbed. Nom Anor straightened as footsteps sounded seemingly from all around him. The fear of capture returned to him. With the minshals and the chuk’a the Shamed Ones no longer seemed so helpless or liable to obey his will. Down here, in their world, he was just one individual among many.

  Still, he thought, any number of Shamed Ones should be as nothing to one who defied the Supreme Overlord himself. He held himself as proudly as he could while awaiting his fate, his wounded hand hanging freely, still oozing blood.

  A dozen figures appeared from the shadows around them; three more emerged from the entrance to the airshaft. The Shamed Ones surrounded him, studying him. All were ragged and misshapen, although few as severely as I’pan. Two, in fact, seemed perfectly healthy, tall and ritually scarred like warriors. Nom Anor had never seen warriors so filthy before, however, and their rags were a far cry from vonduun crab armor.

  One of these two stepped forward. Her face was narrow and angular; scars traced deep crosshatched lines across her cheeks and temples.

  “I know you,” she said, barely a pace away from him. She displayed no fear whatsoever, only confidence, for which Nom Anor felt nothing but admiration. For a while he had thought they would all be like I’pan.

  “Well, I don’t know you,” he responded evenly. Underneath his calm, he was tense, readying himself for attack. One dart from his plaeryin bol and she would suffer a quick and painful death.

  “Does it matter who I am?” she snapped. “You have failed our warmaster many times, Executor, but I doubt you’ve ever noticed the ones who fell with you. There are many like me who suffered for your ineptitude. Not all of them found honor in death.”

  “You still might,” Nom Anor said, on the verge of using the plaeryin bol. But he held himself back. Killing her would set the rest against him. Until he was certain he was about to be betrayed, he would exercise restraint—uncharacteristic as it was for him.

  “True,” she said, the blue sacks beneath her eyes pulsing slightly from suppressed emotions that he could only guess at. “I still might.”

  She turned her back on him, and he bit down on his anger at the deliberately insulting gesture. After a few seconds, with those around silent in anticipation of Nom Anor’s response, the female faced him again, her dirty teeth smiling at him.

  “I am Niiriit,” she said, “former warrior of Domain Esh. And you are the once-great Nom Anor.” She looked him up and down briefly with a dismissive snort. “I presume you must have failed the warmaster once again. Why else would you be seen down here among the likes of us?”

  She paced around him, putting on a show of superiority for her compatriots in Shame. Her garb was little more than tattered rags, but her bearing was strong and muscular. Nom Anor couldn’t help his admiration for her—even as he contemplated her death.

  “I have not failed.” He answered the accusation leveled at him by Niiriit, but his good eye was directed at those huddled around him. It was these whom he needed to impress his authority upon.

  “You measure success, then, differently from what I would’ve expected.”

 
; He showed her his teeth, then. “If you wish to mock me, do so openly, not as a coward.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, returning to stand in front of him again. “It wasn’t my intention to mock, just to point out the reality of your situation. It must be faced. We have faced it in our own way, and as a result are doing well enough down here. We live, we are safe, and we are building a home for ourselves.” She indicated the airshaft. “Our lacks include reliable food supplies and adequate clothing, but what we cannot steal we will soon be able to grow. Sh’roth here used to be a shaper.” Her hand fell upon the shoulder of one of the older ones in the group. “Many of us have worked in the fields in the past. Among us we have the knowledge to create a self-sustaining community that has no need of the dhuryam. What happens on the surface will be irrelevant here. We just want to be alone—to be left in peace to find our own sort of honor.”

  Niiriit’s defiance struck a chord within Nom Anor. She was Shamed, but she was clearly not defeated.

  “I’m impressed,” he said, his own survival instincts rising to the fore. If they could survive down there, unnoticed by the cleanup crews and occasional security sweep, then it wasn’t impossible that he could, too.

  “We’re not doing it to impress you,” Niiriit said. “Nor did we seek your admiration.”

  “Nonetheless.” Once he would have died rather than utter the words he was about to say, but he knew he had little choice in the matter. “I would stay with you a while, given your leave.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “Why?”

  “You need able bodies, and I am willing to work.”

  Again she asked, “Why?”

  That was harder to answer. “The sun has not yet set on the fortune of Nom Anor,” he said. “It will rise again, given time.”

  “And will we rise with it?” called out one of the Shamed Ones off to his left.

  “Yes,” he said, looking vaguely in their direction. “I give you my word that, should I return to my former position, I will restore your honor.”

  There was a murmur of consent that quickly rippled through the Shamed Ones. They were obviously taken with his offer.

  “How can you listen to this?” The male ex-warrior standing just behind Niiriit stepped forward. “We have no reason to trust him!”

  “I know that, Kunra,” Niiriit said, her attention remaining fixed upon Nom Anor before her. “But he’s one of us, now. If he betrays us, then he betrays himself. Isn’t that right, Nom Anor?”

  The former executor swallowed his pride, and it tasted of bile. Everything Niiriit said was true. They could trust him, because here in the depths of this offensive world, these Shamed Ones were all he had left. Yes, he had told them he would give them back their status if he were returned to his former position, and it was an offer he would happily keep his word on. For the chance to restore his own honor, Nom Anor would make any sacrifice necessary.

  “We are allies, Niiriit Esh,” he said, giving her full name in return. “I shall not betray you.”

  He raised his gashed fingers and steeled himself to reopen the wound in order to demonstrate by sacrifice that they could take him at his mercy. It was an instinctive gesture, drummed into him after years in Shimrra’s court.

  Niiriit stepped forward and stopped him. “That is not necessary down here,” she said. “We recognize a different sort of honor, a different sort of gods.”

  “Different gods?” he repeated.

  Niiriit nodded, grinning. “And I just know you’ll like them,” she said, her dark eyes glinting in the greenish light from the globes overhead. “In fact, you’ve met some of them in person. Spoken to them, even.”

  “You are talking about the Jeedai?” he asked, finding it impossible to contain his astonishment.

  “That appalls you, Nom Anor?” She shook her head, as if disappointed in him. “Live and learn, my friend, or die with the others when their time comes. The choice is yours.”

  “And I make it freely,” he said, bowing low to cover his surprise. The cult of the Jeedai? Here on Yuuzhan’tar? He’d heard whispers of it from his spies in the worldships, but for it to have infiltrated so close to Shimrra was unthinkable. No, more than that. He would have thought it impossible.

  And yet, impossibly, it was so. What was going on down in these dungeons of Yuuzhan’tar was more than just survival. It was heresy.

  Live and learn, he told himself, repeating Niiriit’s words as though they were a mantra. Perhaps there is a way, after all.

  “Tell me about the Jedi,” he said. “I am keen to know more …”

  This is going to change everything, Jacen Solo thought as he stood beneath Jade Shadow’s tapered nose, watching from off to one side as his friends and family made their farewells to one another. This is the beginning of something new.

  It was a very different kind of premonition that rolled through him as he stood there on the landing bay, pretending to busy himself with last-minute checks to the ship. It wasn’t necessarily a sense of foreboding, but rather something deeper, more profound. It was as though he could vaguely make out the future, and it was a strange and alien place—somehow a consequence of this moment.

  Then again, perhaps it wasn’t a premonition at all. Perhaps the feeling was a direct result of all the stimcaf he’d been drinking, coupled with the fact that he hadn’t been sleeping well of late. For the last few nights he’d been sitting in his room for hours on end, worrying—not just about the mission, either, but about leaving half the people he loved behind, as well.

  He watched them now, hugging, shaking hands, kissing, laughing. For all the levity, one would think Jade Shadow and her crew were off on nothing more than a jaunt to the sunbaked moons of Calfa-5 rather than on a mission to the Unknown Regions. But he didn’t need the Force to tell him that beneath the casual facade there simmered a somberness that would have been difficult for any of them to shake …

  Just about everyone was there to see off Jade Shadow. His mother had come, shadowed once again by her Noghri bodyguards, Cakhmaim and Meewalh. Han clapped Luke on the shoulder and advised him to keep out of trouble. The well-meant hypocrisy provoked a light smile from the Jedi Master, who nodded and wrapped his old friend’s hand in both of his and shook firmly.

  To one side stood C-3PO, gleaming bronze in the arc lights illuminating the side of the armored transport looming over them, with R2-D2 beside him, whistling cheerfully to reassure his metal companion.

  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” C-3PO returned. “It’s me!”

  R2’s domed top turned as it issued another string of beeps and whistles.

  “Well, at least you don’t know what awaits you in the Unknown Regions,” C-3PO said. “I know far too much about the place Mistress Leia intends to take me.”

  Jag Fel helped load the last of the supplies into the transport. Danni Quee was running late and had sent some equipment down ahead of her on a repulsor platform. When it was empty, it beeped to no one in particular and trundled away. Cilghal’s apprentice, Tekli, had already loaded supplies the healer had insisted they might need on their long journey. Luckily the giant reptilian Jedi, Saba Sebatyne, had brought less than half her allocation, creating extra space. Like Jacen, the stoic Barabel stood away from the others, her small eyes blinking while her tail twitched restlessly about her feet.

  Perhaps she senses it, too, he thought. After all, those of us leaving on Jade Shadow could be gone for months. Who knows what we’ll be returning to, or what we’ll even be bringing back with us? Communications with the Unknown Regions were notoriously unreliable, routed through just one long-distance transceiver on the edge of known space. After Anakin’s death, he wasn’t so naive as to assume that he would ever again see any of these people he was now saying good-bye to.

  But I have no choice. Like everyone else, I must do what I must. The war with the Yuuzhan Vong might be won without us, but there are many different kinds of war.

  Jaina noticed him standing to one side an
d came to join him.

  “What’s wrong, brother? Having second thoughts about going?”

  He turned to face her and was surprised by how grownup she looked. Although the age difference between them was barely five standard minutes, she seemed so much wiser and more mature than he pictured her in his mind. Where was the child with whom he’d tormented C-3PO on Coruscant? Or the teenager who had single-handedly repaired a crashed TIE fighter on Yavin 4? The girl was gone, replaced by this young woman standing now before him. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t recall exactly when the transition had occurred.

  “Not at all,” he replied, forcing a smile. “Just a little overwhelmed, I guess.”

  He looked at her again, still somewhat amazed by the confident woman standing before him. They weren’t kids anymore. The universe had taught them the hard way that the responsibilities of being an adult weren’t always easy. But the Force connection between them was still strong, and this fact alone brought him great comfort.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Jaina said, intruding upon his thoughts.

  “I’m sure we will,” Jacen said. “All available data suggest that the Unknown Regions are where—”

  “I meant in your heart, brother.”

  His smile came easier this time. “I won’t come back until I do.”

  “Is that a promise, Jacen?” she asked. “Or a prophecy?”

  “Perhaps it’s a little of both.”

  She embraced him, then, tightly and warmly. “Just make sure you do come back, okay?” she whispered close to his ear.

  She winked at him as she pulled away, and before he could say anything more, the space she had just vacated was suddenly filled with other people wishing him well and bidding him good-bye.

  Jag Fel shook his hand with a definite air of reassurance. Jacen forestalled his father’s usual gruff attempts at farewells by cutting off whatever he’d been about to say and simply giving him a hug. His mother hugged Jacen, too. She didn’t offer any words, though. She didn’t need to; the emotion in her eyes spoke volumes.