Star Wars The New Jedi Order - Vector Prime - Book 1

by R. A. Salvatore

  "What? "Bensin asked.

  Danni throttled up. "Debris?" she asked, and she looked back at her companions, her face beaming. "I think we've got something here."

  "Debris put into orbit from an impact," Cho Badeleg remarked, nodding.

  Again, just ahead of them around the curving line of the planet, they spotted the meteor swarm, but it was fast lost in the suddenly blinding sunlight as they came out of the planet's shadow.

  Danni squinted and groaned.

  "I've still got them," Cho assured her. "Up ahead and moving fast." He paused and crinkled his brow. "Faster," he clarified, and that, of course, made no sense.

  "And something else," Cho continued. "Down to the left. On the surface."

  Following Cho's directions, Danni wheeled the not-so-agile Spacecaster about, angling the screen to show them again the surface of the planet, flat, except for one large mound, somewhat covered by a thin icy layer, but obviously something other than ice. It seemed to be a milky substance, covering a mound of rough-edged, many-colored stone, or bone.

  "There's the source of the readings," Cho Badeleg said excitedly.

  Danni brought them in slowly.

  "Shouldn't we be going after those meteors first?" an obviously uncomfortable Bensin Tomri remarked, and his sudden sense of dread wasn't lost on the other two.

  "If it's a creature, it's still alive," Cho Badeleg warned, staring at his sensors, not quite knowing what to make of the signals emanating from the mound.

  "Let's go catch the meteors," Bensin remarked more firmly.

  Danni looked to him, and then to Cho, and saw both mesmerized, one by the mound, one by his instruments. Then she looked back at the planet, and above the line of the planet.

  "Oh, no," she muttered.

  "Let's go catch the meteors," Bensin said again.

  "The meteors caught us," Danni explained, and when the men looked up, they understood.

  In soared the meteors, but they couldn't be meteors, given the formation, a classic attack wedge.

  "Get us out of here!" Bensin screamed.

  Danni worked furiously, bending the Spacecaster to the side and down. "Setting for the jump to lightspeed!" Danni called.

  "That'll take too long!" Bensin cried, and his point was accentuated when the Spacecaster jolted from some impact.

  "Just fire it!" Cho Badeleg agreed.

  Danni angled up, looking for a clear vector where she could just launch into hyperspace and take their chances with colliding with some other body millions of kilometers away.

  But the screen was full of the meteor-ships, buzzing about like starfighters. One drew very close, and the three looked on in surprise and fear as a small appendage sticking out its front, like a miniature volcano, erupted, spewing forth a burst of fire and a single glob of molten rock that hit the Spacecaster, jolting them hard.

  "It's melting through!" Bensin Tomri cried.

  "Engage the hyperdrive, Danni!" Cho pleaded.

  "I did," she replied, her voice calm, almost subdued. She had engaged the hyperdrive engine - to no effect. She figured that the first jolts had been hits to that very drive, as if these attacking ... things knew exactly where to shoot.

  All three of the scientists jumped back reflexively as a glob of something hit their view shield. They looked on in helpless horror as it seemed to melt, or morph, right through the transparent shield, hanging like a ball of glue inside the window.

  It pulsed and opened a single hole in its membranous form, and the two men cried out, and Danni dived for the weapons locker.

  And then the ball inverted, seemed almost to swallow itself, and what came out of it, or rather, what it now appeared to be, was a humanoid head, disfigured and frightening, and fully tattooed.

  "Good you have come, Danni Quee, Bensin Tomri, and Cho Badeleg," the ball said - or not the ball itself, Danni realized, recognizing this thing, this creature, as some sort of a communicator and not the speaker himself. She didn't recognize his accent at all, and he seemed to be stuttering over every word. "I - Da'Gara," he went on. "Prefect and adviser to yammosk, war coordinator oo-oo-oof Praetorite Vong. Welcome my home."

  The three, too stunned by this Da'Gara creature's recognition of them, of its knowledge of their names, couldn't begin to respond.

  "You see my home, I be-bel-believe," Da'Gara went on politely. "You come me there. I show you splendor Yuuzhan Vong."

  "What?" Bensin Tomri asked, looking to Danni.

  "An invitation, I guess," Danni replied with a shrug.

  "The see villip," Prefect Da'Gara explained. "Pet of Yuuzhan Vong."

  The three deciphered his words enough to understand that he was speaking of the creature that had invaded their Spacecaster.

  "To talk across long," Da'Gara went on.

  "Living communicator," Cho Badeleg remarked, his scientist instincts somewhat overruling his fear.

  "Where are you from?" Danni managed to ask.

  "Place you no know."

  "Why have you come?"

  Da'Gara answered with a laugh.

  "Get us out of here," Bensin Tomri pleaded with Danni. She looked at him, then snarled and turned back to her controls, determined to fly her way through.

  But the meteors, the rocklike starfighters, were all about the Spacecaster, spewing molten globs at exact points to continually cripple the ship. Before Danni could begin to initiate any evasive maneuvers, they were down to one drive, and that at a minimal capacity; every other compartment in the craft had been breached, and the enviro-unit had taken several hits.

  Danni straightened and looked helplessly at her companions.

  "Choice none," the villip of Prefect Da'Gara remarked. "You fol-follow coralskippers in. Now! Or you melt and we take from you honor of gift to Yun-Yammka."

  "Just run," Cho Badeleg pleaded, trembling so violently that he stuttered through the two words.

  "Choice none!" Prefect Da'Gara warned.

  Danni, full of frustration and anger, her scientific dreams shattered by some alien nightmare, tore open the weapons locker, pulled out a blaster, and splattered the villip all over the viewscreen. She scrambled to her feet, diving for the controls.

  And then they got hit, again and again, and soon they were spinning, tumbling, out of control, and the planet seemed to rush up to swallow them.

  And then ... nothing.

  Darkness fell, and still Jerem Cadmir ran on, stumbling in the blackness, and with exhaustion and fright, horrified with what he had seen and terrified of those dangers lurking all about him. The roars of the redcrested cougars traveled with him that night, and at one point he thought he saw one of the great animals eyeing him casually from a branch high above.

  Whether imagination or reality, Jerem would never know, for he had just run on, for all his life, for all the lives of those at the compound. Aside from his locating device, he had only three things with him the beetle, the plant, and a sample of the noxious fumes he had fortunately and unintentionally trapped within one of his sample bags.

  He took little comfort when night turned back to day, for he could hardly think straight at that point. He thought he was traveling in the right direction and in-line, but his locating device was showing some signs of damage - probably from the fumes - and he couldn't be sure.

  "Wonderful for all of us if I run right past the compound," he lamented. He thought he recognized one tangled tree, but in truth, they all looked alike.

  How relieved he was, then, when he scrambled headlong over a thicket, cutting a hundred small scratches on his arm, and found another member of the ExGal team waiting for him.

  "The compound?" Jerem gasped.

  "Right over there," Yomin Carr answered, moving to help Jerem back to his feet. "Where are your companions?"

  "Dead," Jerem said, puffing for breath. "All of them."

  Yomin Carr pulled him up straight and stared at him hard.

  "We found - we found - the storm, but it wasn't a storm," Jerem tried to explain. "
Some kind of plague - a biological disaster. It overran us."

  "But you escaped," Yomin Carr said.

  "They gave me their oxygen," the man replied, and he began to tremble.

  Yomin Carr shook him hard.

  "One of us had to get back," Jerem went on. "To warn the rest of you. We have to fire up the Jolian freighter and get out of here."

  "The Jolian freighter?" Yomin Carr echoed with a laugh. "That ship hasn't been up since the compound was first set up, and half of its components were scavenged for the station operating systems. We will never launch it."

  "We have to!" Jerem cried, grabbing Yomin Carr by the shoulders. "No choice."

  "A plague, you say?" Yomin Carr asked, and Jerem nodded excitedly. "Well, perhaps we will find a way to battle back against it. Or insulate ourselves from its effects."

  "We can insulate," Jerem said, and he started past Yomin Carr, but to his surprise, the bigger man held him in place.

  "But once it's upon us, we'll have no way to call out," Jerem tried to explain, and he tried to pull away. "The fumes ..."

  "Fumes?" Yomin Carr asked calmly.

  "No time to explain," Jerem said. "We have to get out of here."

  Yomin Carr yanked Jerem about and slammed him hard into a tree. Jerem, held there motionless, stared at the larger and suddenly imposing man in sheer disbelief.

  "I could let you go to them," Yomin Carr said. "I could scramble into the compound beside you, yelling frantically that we must get the Jolian freighter up into the air."

  "You don't understand," Jerem said. "The plague advances at a tremendous rate. It will be here in a matter of hours."

  "Within three, to be more precise," Yomin Carr remarked.

  Jerem started to respond, but then the weighty implications of Yomin Carr's last statement hit him fully and stole the words from his mouth.

  "The gases will overwhelm the compound within three hours," Yomin Carr stated. "And all the planet in two days - sooner if favorable weather allows the atmospheric levels to hit critical mass."

  "Favorable weather?" Jerem Cadmir echoed with confusion. "How do you know?"

  Yomin Carr reached a finger up beside his nose and tapped the sensitive area of the ooglith masquer, signaling the creature to peel away.

  Jerem Cadmir tried to retreat, tried to push himself right into the tree at his back when the masquer flaps receded and he saw the disfigured, tattooed face of Yomin Carr.

  The Yuuzhan Vong warrior stood perfectly still, reveling in the exquisite tingles of agony as the masquer pulled away fully and slipped down beneath his loose-fitting clothing.

  "I could take you back there and wait with you and the others for your doom to fall," Yomin Carr explained. "For of course, I've disabled the freighter beyond repair - not that you would have been able to get the rusted thing off the ground in any case. I could let you battle valiantly against the transformation, which you call a plague, and let you die dishonorably, at no warrior's hands, but simply from lack of oxygen."

  Jerem was shaking his head, his lips moving as if he was trying to respond, though no words came out.

  "But I feel that I owe you this, out of respect for your perseverance and resourcefulness in getting all the way back here," Yomin Carr went on.

  Jerem exploded into movement, rushing off to the side, but Yomin Carr, his muscles toned by years of warrior training, caught him easily, one hand clamping under Jerem's chin, the other grabbing the hair at the back of the man's head. With frightening ease, Yomin Carr pushed Jerem low and tilted his head back so that he was looking up into that horrid, disfigured face.

  "Do you understand the honor I offer you now?" Yomin Carr asked in all seriousness.

  Jerem didn't respond.

  "I offer you a warrior's death!" the Yuuzhan Vong cried. "Yun-Yammka!" He gave a sudden twist of his arms and shattered Jerem Cadmir's neck bone.

  Yomin Carr let the limp man fall to the ground. He stood solemnly over Jerem for a long, long while, uttering prayer after prayer for the Slayer to accept this sacrifice. By Yomin Carr's reckoning, he had indeed granted Jerem Cadmir a tremendous amount of respect this day; he even went somewhat against orders by not allowing the scientists to battle the plague unimpeded.

  But Yomin Carr could justify that. Jerem had seen too much of the plague and knew, and said as much, that they could not hope to battle it. Jerem would have prompted only a desperate flight attempt, and no real countering of the plague. The Yuuzhan Vong warrior nodded, agreeing with that reasoning, and reached down to inspect Jerem's body, finding the three valuable items.

  He'd bring them back for inspection, allow the remaining six scientists to try to find some solution. That would satisfy his duties regarding the plague, for one of his goals here was to discern if the scientists could find some way to battle this powerful Yuuzhan Vong biological weapon.

  Completing that duty would justify his showing respect to Jerem Cadmir.

  Satisfied, the Yuuzhan Vong started back for the compound. All his rationales were in place, but he knew the truth in his heart.

  He had killed Jerem Cadmir, not simply out of respect, not simply because the man had deserved a warrior's death, but also because he had wanted to, because he had enjoyed it. For too long, Yomin Carr had lived among the infidels, had spoken their language and accepted their strange and sacrilegious actions. Now the day of glory was almost upon him, the day of the Yuuzhan Vong, and he was eager, so eager.

  At first Danni thought she was dead, but as her consciousness gradually returned, before she even opened her eyes, she not only knew that she was very much alive, though painfully wounded, but also sensed somehow where she was, and that thought - that she was within the living mound she had seen from the Spacecaster's viewscreen - filled her with dread.

  Her right shoulder, dislocated, throbbed; both of her arms were held out straight. She could feel strong hands gripping her wrists, and the light touch of a poncho about her bare shoulders, and a wet stickiness about her feet as if she was standing in a gooey pool of mud.

  She heard a gurgled cry, recognized the voice of Bensin Tomri, and forced open her eyes.

  She saw the multicolored, rough-face walls, the hulking men - no, not men, she instinctively understood, but some other humanoids - disfigured and covered with tattoos, holding her arms out to either side, out straight, and so tightly that she could not move. She saw Bensin off to the side, standing, but with his head pulled back, another hulking humanoid beside him. That tattooed warrior lifted one hand up high, clawed it like a bird's talon, and drove it down into Bensin's throat. The warriors let go, and Bensin fell limp, too limp, and Danni knew that he was dead.

  The hulking warrior, his hand still wet with Bensin's blood, came over toward her slowly, deliberately. Danni tried to struggle, but the two humanoids holding her gave sudden jerks, and waves of pain overwhelmed her, rolling out from her dislocated shoulder as the joint snapped back into place. She nearly swooned and rolled her head, and then he was before her and she saw him clearly, and she recognized him from the impersonating creature that had invaded the Spacecaster.

  "Yomin Carr demand respect for Danni Quee," Prefect Da'Gara stated. "Do you und-under -" He paused and crinkled his face, struggling for the word.

  "Understand," the woman said through clenched teeth.

  Da'Gara nodded and smiled. "You understand the honor?"

  Danni looked at him helplessly.

  Then she felt the tingling pain, and the goo at her feet came alive and began to roll up her naked legs. Danni's eyes widened with horror and pain as the creature began its attachment, rolling higher and higher to cover all of her body beneath the poncho. She struggled and flailed.

  Da'Gara slapped her across the face. "Do not dishonor Yomin Carr request," he growled in her face. "Show courage or I put you out to die in empty air of surface!"

  That sobered Danni. She still squirmed - who could not as the creature attached itself, tendril by tendril into her pores? - but she bit d
own on her lip and stood firm, eyeing Da'Gara sternly.

  The prefect nodded his approval. "Glad I that Danni not dead, as was Cho Badeleg, when we bring you down," Da'Gara said. "I expect to kill you myself and now, but honorably, this day."

  Danni didn't blink.

  "Reconsidered," Da'Gara explained. "Perhaps it better you stand with me to see zhaetor-zhae -" He shook his head, recognizing that he was using the Yuuzhan Vong word. "To see glory of Praetorite Vong."

  Danni shook her head, unable to comprehend what this was all about.

  "You like see galaxy die?" Da'Gara asked bluntly. "That made long ago, for you see us enter, worldship. The begin of end."

  Danni crinkled her face; she was getting the gist of Da'Gara's meaning, and the thought seemed absurd.

  "Yes," the prefect said, and he brought his hand in and gently stroked Danni's cheek, which repulsed her more than if he had clenched his fist and punched her. "You see with me, and you see truth, the zhaelor , the glory of Yuuzhan Vong. Might you come to see and believe, and you join. Might you hold viccae - anger in pride - and you die. No matter. In thinking, I make Yun-Yammka more happy."

  Danni wanted to ask what or who Yun-Yammka might be, but she just shook her head, too overwhelmed by it all.

  Da'Gara turned away from the stunned woman and motioned to another warrior, who approached Danni holding a soft lump of star-shaped flesh. She recoiled instinctively, tried to fight with every ounce of her strength. But they were too strong, and the cry of her protest was muffled as the fleshy creature was put over her mouth. Her horror only intensified as its tendril snaked down her throat, gagging her at first, but then joining with her, becoming a part of her breathing system.

  Eyes wide with shock and pain, Danni was hauled through the chambers of the worldship, to a large room with a circular hole in the floor. The actual opening was larger than that, Danni understood, seeing the ice all about that hole, and she couldn't understand why she wasn't colder, why they weren't all freezing.

  That thought flew away, though, in an instant of sheer terror, when Da'Gara walked up behind her and unceremoniously shoved her headlong into the hole and she fell down a long tubular worm to the watery depths below.