Vector Prime

by R. A. Salvatore

  But she had jelly on one knee, goo that halted her progress abruptly and nearly sent her sprawling to the floor. That proved fortunate for Mara, though, for Yomin Carr reacted more quickly than she believed possible, straightening and slashing his staff across viciously, a blow that would have taken her across the head or neck if she had continued upward.

  Quick to improvise, she stabbed the warrior, who was as surprised as she by the fact that she was still down low, in the knee. Then, as he howled in pain, she slashed her lightsaber across, taking him out at the knees and dropping him hard on his back. He started to roll toward her, bringing his staff across for her head, but she had the tip of her weapon out in time, pointed at his breast, and his own momentum drove him into it, the lightsaber finding a crease in that magnificent plated armor where the blaster had not, puncturing the coat and Yomin Carr’s chest, poking into his heart.

  He froze in place, staring hard at Mara. “You are worthy,” he said once more, and then he just stared at her, and it seemed again as if he somehow knew her. “Jedi,” he whispered.

  That flicker of recognition went away, all light in Yomin Carr’s eyes faded, and he lay very still.

  The door burst open and Luke came rushing in, a squawking R2-D2 hot on his heels.

  It all hit Mara then, the exertion, the wounds, and something about the very nature of this poisoned planet that tugged at her insides, as if this disease within her fed off the perversion that was Belkadan. “Get me out of here,” she whispered to Luke, trying to rise.

  She needed his help, especially in cutting away the last of the stubborn jelly.

  “Finish the download,” he instructed R2-D2 as he helped Mara into a chair. “Do you know who that was?” he asked her, and he moved to the dead warrior, inspecting the tattoos, the disfiguring wounds, the strange plated armor and weapon.

  “His name is Yomin Carr.” Mara shook her head. “I think he knew me,” she said, and Luke gave her a curious stare, one she could not in any way answer.

  Luke went back to his inspection. “Artoo, bring up images of all the scientists,” he instructed. “Let’s see if this was one of them.”

  The droid whistled and did as instructed, but none of the records showing those stationed on Belkadan bore any resemblance to this barbaric warrior.

  Luke looked back to the body and shook his head. “There must have been another species living on this planet,” he reasoned. “Or they invaded.”

  The droid was finished soon after and the three left the control room, with Luke carrying the heavy warrior over his shoulder, and Mara, unsteady on her feet, carrying his staff and using it for support. They got to the Jade Sabre without incident, and Luke settled the exhausted Mara into place.

  “Will you two be all right for a few minutes?” he asked.

  Mara looked at him, surprised, but then nodded.

  “We’ve got to find out,” Luke explained.

  “He had weapons we don’t know of,” Mara told him. “Living missiles, and the stubborn jelly. And that staff,” she said, indicating the snakelike creature. “There may be other enemies.”

  Luke nodded and started away.

  “And, Luke,” she finished, “I could not use the Force to gain any insights on him. It might be some kind of training against Jedi tactics. If he has allies similarly trained, they’ll be upon you before you expect it if you try to sense them.”

  Luke paused, considering the information. “Get the ship into the air,” he decided. “Run a guard for me over the compound and be ready to blast open holes in the walls if I call to you.”

  “Will the communicators even work?” Mara asked.

  “Let’s see,” Luke said, and he exited the Jade Sabre. Once outside, he called through his comlink, and though the signal was weak and full of static, Mara and R2-D2 could indeed hear him.

  Luke went back into the station cautiously, while R2-D2, with help from the exhausted Mara, put the Jade Sabre into a sentry pattern just above the compound.

  Luke returned a short time later, having completed his search, bearing a sack bulging as if it had two Taikawaka kicking balls inside.

  Mara looked at him curiously. “I found them in room B7,” Luke explained, looking to R2-D2, who ran a quick check on his downloaded schematics and brought the name Yomin Carr up across the viewscreen.

  Luke reached into the bag and pulled out a brown leathery item that looked like a ridged ball.

  “A helmet?” Mara asked.

  Luke shrugged. “I found just these two, on a shelf in the closet,” he explained, and then he looked at his wife hard. “I think they’re alive.”

  Mara, having witnessed a living staff and apparently living jelly, was not overly surprised. “Put them in a safe place,” she replied. “They’re probably bombs.”

  Luke started to chuckle, but realized almost immediately that she wasn’t kidding. He took the bag and its contents to a strong locker at the back of the Jade Sabre’s bridge and closed it up tight.

  The departure from Belkadan was no easier or smoother than the entry, and it quickly became apparent to Luke that his wife was not faring well. Even after they had cleared the clouds and broken out of Belkadan’s turbulent atmosphere, Mara’s face remained blanched, and her head lolled about weakly.

  “Did he hurt you?” Luke asked.

  “No.”

  Luke stared at her, his concern clear on his face.

  “It was just being there,” Mara tried to explain. “I started feeling worse as soon as we neared Belkadan. Down there . . .” She paused and shook her head helplessly. “It was as if this disease within me was somehow bolstered by the plague affecting the planet.”

  “And the beetles?” Luke prompted, nodding toward the two specimen jars Mara had put on a shelf at the side of the control console.

  His wife picked up the one containing the living beetle, bringing it right before her eyes.

  “You believe they somehow caused the damage to Belkadan,” Luke remarked.

  Mara looked at him, having no practical response, no real evidence.

  It was just a feeling, a slight sensation that these creatures were simply too foreign, and it was a feeling that Luke surely shared.

  But could it all—Belkadan, the beetles, the barbaric warrior, Mara’s illness—be somehow connected? And what about Mara’s insistence that this warrior was somehow devoid of, or rather, unconnected to, the Force? Hadn’t she just had a similar experience with another, a troublemaker in a civil war?

  “The man I fought—Yomin Carr,” she began, again shaking her head, at a loss. “I don’t know if it’s me, if this illness has caused some holes in my sensitivity to the Force, or if . . .”

  “Just like you said about the Rhommamoolian rebel, Nom Anor,” Luke prompted, and Mara nodded.

  “I couldn’t sense a thing, with either of them.”

  “But didn’t you say that Jaina and Leia shared your perceptions of Nom Anor?”

  “Or maybe they were just reading my own failings,” Mara reasoned. “Maybe I was projecting something, some kind of a Force shield over the Rhommamoolian even as I was trying to read him.”

  Luke let it go at that, but he didn’t believe the explanation at all, and neither, he could tell, did Mara. Something very strange was going on here, something bigger than Belkadan or than the Rhommamoolian rebel, something that might even have implications for Mara’s illness.

  He could feel it.

  They turned as one, hearing a voice behind them. At first, they thought it was R2-D2, but the droid was in place, still running his analysis on the multitude of downloaded files.

  The voice came again, from the closed locker, and while the first part of the speech was too garbled to decipher, both Luke and Mara thought they heard the name Carr clearly.

  Luke ran to the locker and pulled it open, then brought forth the bag and dumped it onto the floor.

  And then he jumped, and Mara cried out in surprise and horror at the disembodied head that seemed
to have replaced one of the leathery balls.

  “Torug bouke, Yomin Carr,” the head said. Neither Luke nor Mara recognized the language. “Dowin tu gu.”

  “It’s not real,” Mara observed, moving over, even nudging the thing a bit to upright it. While the specific features of the head did not resemble the warrior she had recently battled, the scarring and the tattooing looked similar.

  The head said something else they could not comprehend, lips and eyes moving as if it was indeed the actual speaker. One phrase jumped out at them, the voice inflection seeming to give it great importance: Praetorite Vong.

  As it finished speaking, the leathery bag inverted suddenly, rolling back in on itself and appearing again exactly like the other one.

  “A hologram recording,” Mara remarked, daring to prod the seemingly lifeless thing again.

  “For Yomin Carr,” Luke agreed. “From his superior, is my guess.”

  “These are communication devices, then,” Mara reasoned. “But for whom?”

  “Did you get all of that, Artoo?” Luke asked, and the droid beeped affirmative.

  “Can you translate?” Mara asked.

  “Ooo,” R2-D2 replied sadly.

  “Threepio will figure it out,” Luke insisted. “Once Artoo can transfer the information to him.”

  Mara nodded.

  “The Praetorite Vong?” Luke mused.

  “What’s going on?”

  Luke didn’t have any answers for that one.

  “Artoo, have you got anything on space activity near Belkadan yet?” he asked the droid.

  R2-D2 whistled and clicked something in response.

  “Check the charts of the last few days, for incoming or outgoing ships,” Luke suggested.

  R2-D2 whistled and clicked the same pattern again, and this time Luke understood that the droid was trying to show him something. He and Mara moved over beside R2-D2, and immediately an image came up on the small viewscreen atop the droid’s work pod, a replay of ExGal-4’s tracking of the superspeeding comet streaking in from outside the galaxy.

  Luke blew a sigh and wondered then if they should go back to Belkadan to see if there might be other evidence they had missed.

  “Fast forward it to conclusion,” he instructed R2-D2, and they followed the course of the comet, across the sectors until it was lost from view. R2-D2 brought up ExGal’s determinations about its course: the fourth planet of the Helska system.

  Luke and Mara watched it all in disbelief, with too much to digest, too many possibilities, and none of them adding up in a good way.

  Luke directed R2-D2 on what to search for, then went back to the pilot chairs with Mara and laid in a course for the fourth planet of the Helska system.

  The ice of that fourth planet seemed a tomb to his heart, a cold-encasing eternal torment for the Jedi Knight. Miko sat curled in the lichen-lighted and -heated chamber, head down in his arms, an attempt at meditation that would not come, the road to freeing emptiness blocked by the barrier of horrible recollections.

  He saw that maw, the chewing, pointy teeth, and felt the great power of the yammosk overwhelming him, mocking him and all of his Jedi training.

  Nothing he had ever known in all his life could have prepared Miko for the tactics and devious techniques of the Yuuzhan Vong mind-breaking. In his training, he had faced the dark side of the Force, the specter of his innermost horrors, but even that paled beside the reality of the yammosk.

  How many times had the horrid creature feigned his execution? How many times had he been drawn in to within a hairbreadth of those chewing teeth? And each time, no matter what logic might yell at him, he could not believe other than that this would be the moment of his death.

  That reality did not get any easier with repetition.

  And worse: Each feigned execution replayed in his mind a thousand times, and each of those recollections seemed nearly as vivid as the actual experience. He could not sleep, could barely force down enough food to keep himself alive.

  Across the chamber, Danni watched it all helplessly, knowing that her companion was near to breaking. She had tried everything to comfort him, had held him while he thrashed in his dreams, had offered him her words of comfort and her shoulder to cry on.

  But it didn’t matter, she knew. These Yuuzhan Vong warriors, whoever they were, had clearly decided, for some reason that escaped Danni Quee, that Miko, the Jedi Knight, was not worthy, and so they were going to destroy him utterly, his heart first, then his mind, and finally his body.

  And she could only watch.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Last Pose of Defiance

  The ground rumbled and rolled, and a great wave of splintering rock reared up at them, toppling a building into the street. Anakin banked the landspeeder and throttled up, weaving in and out of falling and bouncing chunks of stone, sweeping past people screaming in terror and pain. A couple of soldiers, Sernpidal City guards, stood by the northern checkpoint exit, waving for Anakin to slow.

  He didn’t.

  Outside the city, the quakes were even more violent. A strong wind was blowing now, and Anakin feared that the atmosphere itself might be compressing under the disturbance of the descending moon. He knew the calculations, knew that they still had a couple of hours before the moon came crashing down, but he had to wonder if the planet would hold together that long, or if the residual disasters, the quakes, the brewing violent winds, the rushing seas, would destroy the place so that by the time the moon arrived, there would be nothing left to kill.

  He pressed the landspeeder on, redlining the drives, and almost felt as if he was in the asteroid belt again, moving on instinct, on anticipation instead of reaction. Beside him, the old mayor sat quietly, apparently comfortable, hardly jumping even on those occasions when a bouncing stone or rolling wave of dirt nearly buried them. Anakin gave him hardly a thought, other than a quick survey, visually and with the Force, an inspection that showed him the old man was truly calm, that it was not a facade, that he had come to accept his doom without despair.

  Somehow Anakin used that calm to keep his own cool head. He checked his coordinates to ensure that he was in the right area.

  But what was he looking for?

  A gigantic machine? An Interdictor cruiser, with its gravity-well projectors? There were none about. A rift in the planet’s surface? Again, nothing, other than the cracks from the tremors.

  He slowed the landspeeder and closed his eyes, feeling the sensations about him, feeling the calm of the old man, the unrest of the planet as it was pulled and twisted by the swiftly passing low moon, the fear of the creatures, reasoning and animal, a palpable terror that the young Jedi could almost taste in his mouth.

  Anakin looked deeper, deeper. Anything exerting the kind of power necessary to grab on to a moon could not be invisible to the Force.

  The moon, now enormous, crested the horizon, rolling up into the sky. The wind roared; the ground swelled and rolled.

  And Anakin felt the tug, not on him, not on anything except for that moon. He opened his eyes, though he kept his mind in that other sensibility, and there before him, he clearly “saw” the tractor beam.

  He throttled up the landspeeder, swerving through a ravine between two unstable peaks, a move that almost cost him dearly as one huge boulder smashed down right behind the small craft as it passed. Speed was their ally, for the rocks on both cliff walls were crumbling fast, but as they neared the end of the narrow valley, they were hit by tremendous head winds, as if all the air was being squeezed. Anakin glanced up at the moon and saw a tail of fire trailing it, the first contact with the atmosphere.

  “We’re barely moving,” the mayor commented calmly.

  Anakin banked to the side, climbing along one narrow trail, trying to get behind a jag in the stone, and nearly getting smashed against the wall by one particularly furious gust. He made it, though, skimming into a narrow channel and running the length of it, and when he came out, he found the wind diminished enough so that h
e could again make forward progress.

  Exiting the pass, they came to a wide and empty field, a barren stretch of stone and dirt, a bowl within the low mountain range. Anakin immediately spotted the crater in the middle of that field and didn’t have to fall back into the Force to know that this was the source. He approached swiftly but cautiously to within a dozen meters, then shut the landspeeder down and hopped out, running low to the ground, not knowing what to expect.

  The crater was not large, barely a couple dozen meters across, nor was it deep, perhaps ten meters, and there in the bottom sat something that resembled a huge, pulsating, dark red heart, with deep blue spikes all about it. Anakin studied it, looking for some controls, or some connection to a power source.

  “What is it?” the old man asked when he joined the boy at the rim of the crater.

  Anakin looked more deeply, using the Force, seeing the thing more distinctly and coming to the unnerving conclusion that not only was this definitely the source of their troubles but that it was a living creature. Gasping for breath, he drew his blaster.

  “That thing’s bringing down Dobido?” the old man asked incredulously.

  “Get back,” Anakin instructed, taking aim. The old man didn’t move, but Anakin, so entranced by this completely alien and undeniably powerful life-form, didn’t notice. He leveled the blaster and fired.

  The energy bolt ripped down into the crater and then . . . disappeared. Just flickered out, like a candle in a strong wind. He fired again and again, but the bolts seemed to have no effect.

  “What is it?” the old man asked again, more emphatically.

  “Get in the landspeeder and go back for my father,” Anakin instructed, pulling the lightsaber from his belt.

  “The ugly one or the big hairy one?” the old man asked.

  Anakin ignored him and moved one foot to the very edge of the crater.

  And then he and the old man went flying away, jolted by a sudden and violent thrust of the ground. The young Jedi scrambled about, to see dirt and stones flying from the crater, a volcanic eruption, it seemed, without the lava.