“Can’t make it out,” Leia said.
“Well, let’s just outfly it and identify it later.” Han powered up the repulsorlifts and stood the Millennium Falcon on her stern. He heard noises of unhappiness from C-3PO and a wild squeal of dismay from R2-D2. As he accelerated up through the treetops, he grinned over at Leia. “Forgot to tell them we were taking off.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Leia, you have to admit, that was fun.”
“Fun. Getting kidnapped, jailed, threatened with torture, shot at—fun.”
“That’s right.”
Leia felt her face twist into a smile she had no control over. “All right, all right. Despite everything, it was fun.”
“Welcome back, Princess.”
ELEVEN
Borleias
Tam awoke in a hospital ward bed.
Again.
He didn’t like doing that. It was happening too often.
This time, his left shoulder ached, and he remembered how it got that way. The first time a member of the medical staff walked past the foot of his bed, he motioned the man over and said, “Can I get a message to someone?”
“Let me get someone for you first,” the man said.
Minutes later, visitors appeared from beyond the blue curtains to one side. Tarc barged right up to stand beside Tam. Wolam was content to stand at the foot of the bed, smiling. And Intelligence head Iella Wessiri positioned herself between them.
“Which arm hurts?” Tarc asked.
“No, no, no, Tarc. Protocol.” Tam gave him a little mock-glare. “The visitor who is most socially important, or who has the greatest demands on his time, gets to talk first. Which one is that?”
“Me,” Tarc said.
“Try again.”
“Well, her, I guess.”
“That’s better.”
Iella smiled at the boy. “I was available, so I thought I’d stop by in person to give you some news. You did a very important thing last night. You prevented a Yuuzhan Vong spy from getting away with some, well, very significant information.”
“Information you didn’t want them to have. Unlike the stuff I gave them.”
Iella nodded, not contrite.
“What information?”
“I shouldn’t say. You shouldn’t ask.”
“I think I can guess.” When still under Yuuzhan Vong control, he’d stolen records of a project being developed at this base, something about a superweapon involving laser weapons focused through a giant-sized lambent crystal, a living crystal normally bioengineered only by the Yuuzhan Vong. The spy’s torture of the Bothan, asking about such a crystal, suggested that the Bothan’s chamber was where it was being kept or monitored. But there had been no giant lambent crystal there—only the wreckage of some sort of mock-up.
There was no giant crystal. It was a fake. The whole Starlancer project had to be a fake. In a moment of clarity, he understood that the Starlancer project was nothing more than a ring in the nose of the Yuuzhan Vong commander, something to tug him in one direction or another.
“What’s your guess?” Iella asked.
“I shouldn’t say. You shouldn’t ask.”
“Good man.”
“How’s the Bothan?”
“Alive. Which he probably wouldn’t have been, without your intervention. He’s a few beds down; you can talk to him if the doctors say it’s all right. Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and say thanks.”
“Happy to help. Except for the pain part.”
When she’d gone, Tarc said, “They’re talking about you.”
“What are they saying?”
“That you’re crazy as a monkey-lizard, jumping a Vong warrior all by yourself.”
“What do you say?”
“Well … I’ve never seen a monkey-lizard.”
Tam nodded. “Good answer.”
“Come on, boy.” Wolam motioned Tarc over. “We need to give the monkey-lizard here some more time to rest. You can be my holocam operator until he drags himself out of bed.”
“Good,” Tarc said. “I’ll make the recordings he’s scared to.”
“Just don’t record me.” Tam pulled the sheet up over his head.
He heard Tarc snicker, and then he drifted away into sleep once more.
Coruscant
Luke woke in darkness, disoriented for a moment by the lack of familiar sights and smells, but comforted by the knowledge that Mara was beside him. In fact, it was her settling into the broad cot with him that reminded him where and when he was. “Just coming off watch?” he murmured.
“That’s right.” She rested her chin on his shoulder, making him her pillow. “Go back to sleep.”
“I ought to get up.”
“You don’t want to do that. All the news is bad.”
“What news?”
“Ask the scientists.”
“We’ve spent so much time down in the ruins,” Danni explained, “that we haven’t had much of an opportunity to take all the readings we needed to.” Before she could continue, she yawned, then looked embarrassed at the way her exhaustion had betrayed her.
They were in the Complex’s control chamber, Luke and Danni and Baljos. Both scientists looked tired, but now, at least, there was sufficient fresh water to bathe and wash clothes, so they all looked better than they had in some days.
“What readings?” Luke asked. “Every time I look at you two, you’re taking readings.”
“We’ve been taking biological readings, mostly,” Baljos said. “Electromagnetic energy flow readings. Chemical tests of water and food sources. That sort of thing. But not until a few hours ago, when Kell and Face went topside and set up some holocams and other monitoring equipment, have we been able to do any astronomical recordings.”
Luke shrugged. “So what have you found out?”
“Gravitational readings suggest that we’re closer to Coruscant’s sun now,” Danni said. “The planetary orbit has changed.”
“The atmospheric temperature is several degrees higher than it should be at this time of year,” Baljos said. “That was the impression I got with our hand units, but there was no way to tell before now whether it was just a seasonal fluke. No, there’s a lot more moisture in the atmosphere than there should be. Consistently. Laser-based spectroscopic analysis gives similar readings out to a considerable distance. Master Skywalker, I think the polar ice is melting.”
“Luke. It’s just Luke.” Luke sat back, frowning. “Is this their worldshaping?”
Danni nodded. “More like ‘Vongforming.’ It’s a lot faster, more brutally efficient than our equivalent techniques.”
“Is there any good news?”
“A little.” Danni pointed at the first of three computer screens.
This one showed a holocam view of a building roof. It seemed to be shedding; fragments of some leaflike material were being tossed around by winds. “We’re witnessing a die-off of some of the Vongforming plants. The grasses and explosive fungi they used to begin the breakdown of the building surfaces are starting to die. We don’t know whether it means they’re not adapting well to this environment, or just that they’re the first step of the Vongforming process, with more steps to come. Doctor Arnjak suspects the latter.”
“That’s ‘Science Boy’ to you,” Baljos said.
“So that may or may not be good news,” Luke said.
Baljos nodded. “Correct. Here’s some news that’s a little less ambiguous.” He indicated the other two screens, one full of graphical charts and text, the other broken down into eight holocam images—still images of Yuuzhan Vong warriors digging through rubble, engaged in training exercises, lined up in a disciplined row.
Luke peered at the screens. The information on the first one seemed to relate to proportions of gases in the atmosphere. “What’s it mean?”
“The proportion of toxic gases in the atmosphere has pretty much stabilized. Oh, they’re worse at some specific altitudes than others, but they’re not increasing in proportion. I t
hink they relate to the biological actions of the Vongforming plants that are breaking down the duracrete and metals. Meaning that the Vong aren’t trying to make the atmosphere poisonous to us. This increases the chances of survival of, well, the people who are still alive down here.”
“That’s something, I guess.” Luke looked at the scientists. “And the other one?”
Danni said, “You remember that we brought along some little stealth droids. Shaped like fungi, mosses, that sort of thing. We’ve been taking them out and depositing them in areas the Vong seem to patrol heavily. They’re following those paths, very slowly, and transmitting images in very short, hard-to-track comm bursts. These are our first sets of images. They don’t tell us much yet, but we hope they will someday.”
“So, what do you get from the atmospheric data?”
Danni and Baljos exchanged a look, and Luke could read all sorts of things into it. They’d already come to some conclusions. They were just trying to decide which ones to present him, and in which order.
“We’ve kind of been giving the survivors the impression that the New Republic forces are going to come back and seize Coruscant,” Danni said.
Luke nodded. “That’s the objective.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be a Coruscant to come back to. How long will it take? A year? Five years? Ten? By the time our forces get here, it’s going to be something else. A Yuuzhan Vong world.”
“That won’t give the survivors much hope.”
“So,” Baljos said, “we think we should take a different approach to what we were doing. We teach the survivors how to survive on this world—this alien world. Not necessarily so they can come out fighting when the big push comes. Just so they can survive. Maybe escape. We analyze all the new life-forms we run across, the ones introduced by the Yuuzhan Vong, and teach our people which ones are good to eat. Teach them how to find safe water.”
“Maybe how to wall off whole complexes,” Danni said, “so the Vong just never come down into them.”
“If we do all that …” Luke considered the matter for long seconds. “We’re admitting that we’ve lost.”
“That we’ve lost Coruscant, anyway,” Danni said. “Not the war.”
“I can’t accept this.” A flash of anger ignited within Luke, but he calmed himself, willed it away. “You’re suggesting that this entire mission is a failure!”
“Not a failure.” Danni carefully considered her words. “The mission didn’t match the reality we found. It’s like any scientific investigation. You observe evidence, you come up with a theory to explain the evidence, you put the theory to the test … and in most cases, the theory has to be revised. We arrive at truths one faltering step at a time.”
“Just like Jedi training.”
“That’s right.”
Luke sighed. “I have to think about this.”
Luke was still thinking about it two days later when he went on another vehicle hunt with Face and Bhindi.
They weren’t always traveling in Yuuzhan Vong armor anymore; now that they had a base of operations and less need to travel in a large group through unknown territories, Luke and the others often made do with civilian clothing. It was lighter and far more comfortable than the Yuuzhan Vong armor, especially in the increasingly steamy atmosphere of Coruscant’s lower levels. Kell and Face were the exceptions—quite taken with just how horribly dashing they were in the armor, they insisted on wearing it during all missions, evidently a competition to see which one would give up and admit discomfort first.
With initial objectives achieved—the team had a base of operations and its members were interacting with the local non-Yuuzhan Vong population—they could begin implementing the plan for their eventual escape from Coruscant.
Their insertion method had not included a getaway vehicle, for they knew that, given how many millions of vehicles still remained here, in varying conditions of preservation, they would be able to find, salvage, or steal a working vehicle—or, with Tahiri’s help, perhaps even a Yuuzhan Vong vessel.
Logic dictated that there had to be thousands if not millions of vehicles in the wreckage that was Coruscant. The trick was in finding them, since all vehicles visible from the air had been strafed and destroyed by coralskippers. Only those that had been hidden or buried had a chance to be intact.
And so far, though they’d found hundreds of vehicles in their searches, not one was even remotely likely as an escape vehicle. They’d found scores of airtaxis, numerous crashed starfighters, the remains of a hangar with a troop transport—and troops—crushed beneath incalculable tonnage of collapsed building. Luke thought that, with a month to work on it, he could cobble together enough parts from various destroyed starfighters to make one working model … which would get one of them offplanet when the time came.
That was just one more failure to weigh upon him. He sat in a fiftieth-story viewport of what had once been a Starfighter Command recruiting office, staring out into the cavernous street beneath, while Face and Bhindi struggled to get the office’s computer operational, and he wondered why he’d bothered with this mission.
His son Ben was light-years away, hidden out of sight—out of Yuuzhan Vong sight, but also out of his sight—in a secret Jedi base in the Maw, a region of space surrounded and concealed by black holes. Mara had to be questioning his competence. The Jedi, whom he had hoped to inspire and unite in this bold mission into the territory most strongly held by the Yuuzhan Vong, would lose faith in him.
Something attracted his attention, just the merest sensation that there were eyes upon him, and he looked up from the rubble-strewn depths he’d been regarding.
Across the avenue, at about the same altitude, someone stood in a viewport staring at him. At this distance, about a hundred meters, Luke could not be sure, but he thought it was a man. A very pale man. Luke pulled out his macrobinoculars and trained them on that person.
He stared into a face that was half-strange, half-familiar.
This man was pallid, with curly dark hair, sea-blue eyes, and a prominent nose that suggested old aristocracy. He was young, barely twenty, if that old. He wore a pale kiltlike wrap around his midsection and shiny items at various points on his body—fingerless gloves, elbow covers, knee covers; though thick and metallic, these looked like a very inadequate set of armor. His head was held at an angle as though he’d been tilting it one way and another as he watched Luke.
Luke knew his face, but couldn’t place it, couldn’t call up that memory. In fact, it was easier not to think right now.
When Luke’s eyes met his, the man smiled. It was the smile of a child suddenly captivated with the wonders of pulling legs off insects.
Luke found he could sense the man in the Force—could do so without even reaching out for him. The man was a glowing light in the Force, a beacon in the midst of darkness. A beacon of darkness … but that suddenly didn’t matter much.
Luke felt his breath go out of him. It was as though the roof had slowly collapsed and deposited two tons of duracrete on his torso while he was distracted.
He glanced over at Face and Bhindi. They had the terminal running; the glow from its screen colored their faces blue. Bhindi removed a datacard from its slot in the terminal and made a noise of satisfaction. They were both utterly unaware of what Luke was seeing, feeling.
Luke knew that, when he turned his attention back to the distant viewport, the pale man would be gone; it was among the oldest tools in the bag of tricks of the makers of supernatural holodramas. But when he looked through the macrobinoculars again, the man was still there, motionless.
Luke unlatched the viewport’s locks. All he had to do was step out on the walkway that now stretched between this building and the other. He could walk right up to this man and begin asking questions. But some faint stirring of alarm—his pilot’s ability to glimpse and memorize topographical details—shook him out of the fog that had overcome his thinking.
There was no walkway before him.
One step through this viewport and he’d plummet to his death.
The man’s grin grew wider. Then he sidestepped and disappeared from sight.
Luke felt the great weight lift from him. He could breathe again. “Are you two done here?” he asked.
Face looked up, frowning. “Luke, are you all right?”
“No. Trouble’s coming. Let’s go.”
Bhindi rose. “If trouble’s coming, we’re done here.”
Luke, Face, and Bhindi crouched in a crater that had been one corner of a skyscraper—the same skyscraper in which, minutes before, the pale man had stood. They were about twenty stories above the window the figure had occupied, and all three had macrobinoculars trained on the viewport Luke had, minutes before, tried to open.
The room beyond the viewport was filled with people. They wore tatters. Some wore nothing but dried mud and blood. There was a light in their eyes that suggested they were on stimulants and had been for days or weeks. They rampaged through the Starfighter Command office, destroying every piece of furniture, smashing every wall, a riot whose violence was directed at everything and nothing.
“What are they?” Bhindi asked. “They’re not your run-of-the-mill survivors.”
“Some of Yassat’s cannibals, I expect,” Face said. “You felt them coming, Luke?”
“Something like that,” Luke said. “C’mon, let’s go down.”
They found the chamber in which Luke had seen the pale man. It had once been the main chamber of a hotel suite, and possibly not occupied since Coruscant fell. The beds were still made. Floor-to-ceiling viewports offered a good view of Coruscant’s sky—if one looked high enough, anyway.
Luke could feel it here, a twinge in the Force, the same one he’d been pursuing ever since he came to Coruscant. But that was not what held his attention.
It was the viewports. He was sure from their dimensions that one of these was the viewport in front of which the pale man had been standing.
He’d filled it, from floor to the top of the viewport frame. And these viewports were three meters tall.
Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II Page 17
