Remnant: Force Heretic I

by Sean Williams

  Jacen noted that the map became patchier as the battle progressed. Great empty spaces appeared in the intelligence as ship after ship was destroyed, along with observational satellites and beacons. Soon it was like trying to watch stars through storm clouds: apart from the area around the gas giant where Pellaeon had made his last stand, the rest of the system was visible only through infrequent, incomplete glimpses.

  When she reached the point in the analysis she was looking for, Yage froze the image and zoomed in close on one of Bastion’s poles. There, designated by a ringed dot, was a single ship.

  “We don’t know where this came from,” she said. “The last survivors only caught a glimpse of it. Its vector suggests that it came in late into the battle, when the planet was all but taken. That didn’t seem to make sense, since it’s so big.”

  She called up some sketchy schematics. The vessel was shaped like a flattened sphere with five trailing stalks of various lengths. It was large enough to hold several of the Yuuzhan Vong carrier analogs Jacen was all too familiar with.

  “If it was a military vessel,” Yage concluded, “then why did they wait until the end of the battle to utilize it? But if it wasn’t a military vessel, then what’s it doing there at all?”

  “It has to be a slave carrier,” Pellaeon said. “They wiped out the fleets in orbit around Bastion, and that gave them an entire population ripe for capture. Those who couldn’t get away in time are probably already on their way to the nearest processing plant to be turned into mindless drones willing to sacrifice themselves for the warmaster. I saw creatures similar to them at work on Duro.”

  “They have been used in many other places since,” Luke said. “In fact, I’m sure that this was the same kind of ship that Saba encountered a few months back at Barab One.”

  Pellaeon nodded grimly. “Citizens of the Empire—all people—deserve better than this. Had we known that this was what they were after …” He trailed off, the thought as obviously disturbing for him as it was for everyone else in the room.

  “You were outgunned, Admiral,” Jacen offered. “There was nothing else you could have done.”

  “Outgunned and poorly organized,” Pellaeon agreed. “Wherever that ship came from, the chances are it’s probably hundreds of light-years away from us by now. The only thing we can think about now is how to stop it from happening again. At Borosk, or anywhere. To anyone.”

  As far as Jag Fel was concerned, very little was going right on Galantos. Councilor Jobath was still tied up somewhere on the other side of the planet, Tahiri remained unconscious, and he and C-3PO had yet to determine precisely why communications with Galantos had been disrupted. On top of that, Jaina, the one person he would have liked to have with him right now, was on her way to N’zoth, while he was still stuck on the planet. All in all, Jag felt he’d seen better days—and been on more successful missions.

  Finally, after an hour pacing the common room of their diplomatic quarters, he decided that enough was enough. He had to do something. He couldn’t delay rejoining Twin Suns Squadron any longer.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said brusquely.

  Thrum stood in alarm from the table at which he was showing Leia plans of recent additions to the planet’s infrastructure. “I don’t think that would—”

  “It’s okay,” he cut off the nervous Fia. “I won’t be that long. And I don’t mind if I’m shadowed, either.”

  A guard, recently assigned to their door, accompanied him as he strolled through the wide, luxurious corridors, trying to remember the way to where Tahiri had collapsed. There was something about the recording of that moment that had been bothering him. Just before she’d drawn her lightsaber she had looked down. At first he had thought she might have been dizzy and had brought up her hand in the typical response people had to such spells. But then he realized that she’d been holding something, and it was possibly this that had triggered her reaction. No one else had mentioned it, which surprised him, but he had to check for his own peace of mind.

  There had been nothing on the holo to indicate what it might have been, though, which meant he had no real idea what he would even be looking for. He still had to try. He’d already checked the pockets of Tahiri’s robes, which had been empty, and he certainly couldn’t ask her directly; so the only chance of finding out just what it might have been was to examine where it had all happened.

  He reached the right corridor and strode along it to roughly where he thought the incident had occurred. Sweeping his gaze along the ground, he began a methodical search of the area while his guard watched on curiously.

  “My friend lost something,” Jag explained when he saw the deep furrows in the Fia’s brow press down upon his melancholy eyes. “I just wanted to see if she dropped it here when she fell. It could have been overlooked in all the excitement.”

  The guard nodded his understanding, but the expression of confusion remained.

  After a couple more minutes scouring the corridor, Jag said, “I don’t suppose you could help me look, could you? It might help things along a little.”

  “What does it look like?” the guard asked.

  That stumped him for a second. The Fia would probably want a detailed description, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what it was.

  “You’ll know when you see it,” he said elusively, adding under his breath, “I hope.”

  Their search was hampered by the thick weave of the carpet, along with the fact that the ambient light of the corridor wasn’t particularly bright. His back soon ached, and he found himself wondering if he might not have imagined the whole thing. If there was anything there, it was proving harder to find than a flea on a bantha.

  “Is this it?” the guard asked after a while. He held out a small piece of transparent plastic for Jag to examine.

  Jag climbed to his feet and stepped over to the guard. As he took the proffered object and examined it, he tried not to look as though he had no more of a clue than the guard himself. The object, it turned out, was nothing more than a scrap of packaging missed by the cleaning droids. He didn’t see how it could have provoked such an extreme reaction from Tahiri.

  “No, that’s not it,” he said, hoping he was right. Nevertheless, he slipped it into his pocket just in case. “Let’s keep looking.”

  Even as he said this, already bending over again to continue his search, he caught a glint of something silver in the carpet farther along the corridor. Cautiously, so as not to lose sight of it, he walked toward it. There, at the edge of the corridor fully four meters from where they’d been looking, was a small object poking out of the carpet. If it was the thing that Tahiri had been holding, then she must have flung it when spinning around defensively with her lightsaber; then, he imagined, it had been pushed deeper into the pile by the large feet of one of the Fia. Otherwise it would have surely been spotted before now.

  He reached down and plucked it from the carpet. It was small, about half the size of his thumb joint, and looked to him to be a pendant or charm of some kind. It was metallic in nature, but with a grown texture, rather than forged. There was a hole through which a chain or thong might have been threaded, and on the face were carvings in an unknown language. It was surprisingly heavy.

  The creature it portrayed was hideous and completely unfamiliar, but that wasn’t so surprising, Jag thought. There were many different types of creature in the Galactic Alliance, and most of them were unfamiliar to him—just as the various cultures of the Unknown Regions would be unfamiliar to them. One thing about the creature portrayed did trouble him, though: It seemed to be covered in scars.

  “Is that it?” the guard asked, peering over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” Jag said, quickly tucking the object into one of his flight suit’s pockets. “I’m sure my friend will be glad to see it again. She thought she’d lost it.”

  Thanking the guard for his help, Jag let himself be led back to the diplomatic quarters. Nothing had changed: Tahiri was still unconsci
ous, and C-3PO couldn’t give an estimate as to how long she might remain like this.

  He sighed wearily. He really couldn’t delay any longer. Jaina was long gone, and he had to get back to his squadron. Being accused of dereliction of duty was, at the moment, more of a concern to him than any of the uneasy feelings he had about the small, silvery object in his pocket and its relevance to the mission.

  His clawcraft had been refueled by Al’solib’minet’ri City’s landing field technicians. As he ran through the craft’s maintenance records to double-check what exactly had been done in his absence, a brief note appeared on the computer screen:

  YOU MUST LEAVE HERE IMMEDIATELY.

  Jag stared at it for a long moment, startled. He quickly surveyed the bay for signs of someone watching him, but saw no one suspicious lurking about. Then, when he looked back at the screen, the message had disappeared. He tried to access it again, but the maintenance logs showed no record of it ever having existed in the first place. Whoever had left the message for him had made sure it would be erased as soon it had been read.

  But why? And if the sender had been so keen to have him leave, then why put the message in such an inaccessible spot? Placing it in the flight systems, where he wasn’t likely to see it until he was already leaving anyway, seemed redundant. Unless, maybe, the person responsible for the message had no choice but to use this means. Or perhaps the message was intended for him alone, and this was the only way to ensure that no one else saw or heard it.

  He fought a growing sense of unease. Tahiri, the pendant, this message … There were too many questions without answers, and none of them sat easily with him. He fleetingly considered staying behind to help Leia and Han, but quickly dismissed the idea. There was no actual evidence that anything was up; there were just a couple of hints and warnings, as well as the workings of his suspicious mind. Besides, Han and Leia could look after themselves; they had had plenty of practice at it, after all.

  “This is Twin Suns Leader, Al’solib’minet’ri Control,” he said into the comm unit. “Preparing for ascent to orbit. Do you have a preferred corridor?”

  “Not so fast, Twin Suns Leader,” came the patient Fian voice from the other end. “There are still some questions we need to ask before—”

  Jag rolled his eyes and activated the clawcraft’s engines. Confident he could avoid any Fian vessels that might get in his way, he ignored the squawking of Al’solib’minet’ri City Control and roared up into the atmosphere.

  As he matched orbits with Pride of Selonia, he contacted the two pilots Jaina had left on patrol when she left.

  “Nice move, Jag,” Seven said. “Captain Mayn’s been itching to thumb her nose at all of these Fian formalities since we arrived. They’ve been hailing her every time our orbit drifts by so much as a meter.”

  There was amusement in Seven’s tone, but Jag remained serious.

  “Has there been anything more than that?” he asked. “Anything unusual at all?”

  “Are you kidding?” she shot back. “Apart from all the chatter, it’s been quiet. No incoming; no outgoing; nothing. The communications blackout is still in place. Beats me what people do around here.”

  Jag focused on that problem instead of the many others batting at him. He had initially assumed that the communications fault would be easily fixed, so they could move on to their second port of call. But when he and C-3PO had analyzed the records automatically kept by the planetary transceiver serving Galantos and the rest of the system, he had found that there was no fault at all. From there they had contacted the nearest intersector network and ascertained that communications between Galantos and the rest of the galaxy could be easily reestablished, once a small routing correction was made. The fact that it hadn’t been made was suggestive, but Jag hadn’t decided of exactly what, yet. It was almost as though the Fia had deliberately cut themselves off.

  But why would they do that? With the Yevetha at their back door, along with a wealth of minerals the rest of the galaxy would surely be interested in, contact with the outside would be exactly what they’d want. Except, Jag thought, that the Fia claimed that the Yevetha were no longer a threat, and they seemed to be turning a tidy profit from someone, anyway.

  There was something afoot on Galantos, and he’d work it out sooner or later. All he needed was another couple of those puzzle segments …

  An urgent bleeping issued from his instrument panel. “Twin Suns,” came the voice of Selonia’s duty officer. “We’re picking up hyperspace disturbances in sector twelve. It looks like we have company. Want to check them out?”

  “Twin Seven, on my way.”

  “What sort of company?” Jag asked the duty officer as he watched Seven’s X-wing sweep out of formation and accelerate away from the planet.

  “It’s hard to tell,” the duty officer returned after a moment’s consideration. “They’re still a long way out. But there appears to be a number of smaller vessels accompanying two much larger ones.”

  “Can you at least determine the type of vessel they are?” Jag pressed.

  “No can do, I’m afraid,” came the reply. “They could be—”

  Another bleeping cut him off.

  “Hang on, Twin Leader,” the duty officer said. “More ships. Sector six this time, on the other side of the system. Two small vessels only, and one of them’s an X-wing. The other could be a clawcraft, but its emissions are strange. It’s almost as though—”

  “Emergency!” came Jaina’s voice suddenly over the subspace link. “I have an emergency situation. I’ve lost Twin Eight, and Nine isn’t going to last much longer. I need immediate assistance. I repeat, immediate assistance!”

  Jag’s mind worked overtime. Eight was Miza, a Chiss Squadron pilot.

  “What happened, Jaina? Did the Yevetha attack you?”

  “Not quite,” she said, sounding weary. “They were all dead when we arrived, bar one. He chose to blow his drive rather than talk to us, and that’s what did all the damage. I only just managed to patch things together enough to get back here. But this will have to wait, Jag. You’d better watch your back to make sure what happened to N’zoth doesn’t happen here, too.”

  “This is Seven,” came the voice of the pilot scouting the far side of the system. “I have a positive ID on those incoming vessels. They’re Yuuzhan Vong—two squadrons of skips and a blastboat analog escorting two larger types I’ve never seen before. They’ve spotted me and have started in pursuit. I need help out here, guys!”

  Jag urged his clawcraft up and away from Selonia. “All right, Twin Suns Squadron,” he broadcast to the rest of his pilots. “Let’s scramble!”

  PART THREE

  INTERVENTION

  She stood on the rise of a dune staring into the swirling white dust, trying to make out the object in the distance. Behind her, not far away, the thing with her face continued to come after her. She knew she should keep moving, but she simply didn’t have the energy to do so anymore. It felt hopeless. Sooner or later the thing would catch up with her. It was inevitable, so why even bother trying to run? She may as well just stop here and accept it.

  She silently chided herself for the defeatist attitude. She knew she shouldn’t be so fatalistic, but she couldn’t help it. It was just that there was never going to be a time when this thing wasn’t going to be after her; it would never rest until it had taken her. The only question was, would it get to her before the reptile got to it?

  She peered again into the dust and found her eyes stinging from the effort. She blinked away some of the particles, straining to see the something in the distance, something that towered high above the ground. She was almost relieved when the dust cleared enough for her to see that the object was in fact an immobile AT-AT looming over the tops of the dunes.

  Around the base of the vehicle she could make out several standing figures, their identities obscured by dust and distance. She knew them; that much she was sure of, even if she didn’t know exactly who they were.
r />   “Lowbacca?” she called. “Jacen?”

  No one responded. It was as if they couldn’t see her waving at them, and everything she yelled was carried away from their ears by the wind.

  Suddenly she saw the head of the AT-AT swivel around to face her, the rusted metal groaning with the effort. It stopped with a resounding clank, its guns now trained upon her.

  “No, wait!” she called. “It’s me! Please!”

  It fired once, loudly, but there was no resulting explosion. Instead, from the weapons emerged a black ball that came toward her with slow precision, its edges shimmering. She watched helplessly as it approached, wondering what it might be that her friends had fired at her. There was nothing to do: she couldn’t turn back, and she obviously couldn’t go forward. This created in her a sense of hopelessness that made her cry. The tears fell from her cheeks into the dust, creating a sticky paste that collected about the soles of her feet.

  “They think you are me,” said a voice close to her ear.

  She held her breath, afraid to look back to see who was standing behind her. But in her heart she knew it to be the thing with her own face. And it was close, too; she could feel its breath on her neck.

  She lifted a hand to touch her forehead, feeling the scars there. Then she looked down to see the fresh ones on her arms. She pressed her fingertips into the suppurating wounds, and was surprised at how soft and wet they were. When she raised her hand to look at what came away from the deep cuts, she saw blood dripping from her fingers like tiny, perfect tears. In each one was a reflection—although whether the scarred face she saw in it belonged to herself or the thing behind her, she couldn’t tell.

  “You do remember me, don’t you?” said the voice at her shoulder. “You can’t have forgotten me so soon. You left me just as you did him, didn’t you?”

  A recently scarred arm reached past her face, pointing in the direction of the AT-AT. She forced back the tears to look, and saw the figures still standing around the vehicle, in exactly the same position as they had been before—except now one of them was lying on the ground.