Star Wars - New Jedi Order - Force Heretic II - Refugee - Book 18

by Sean Williams

  Jag listened intently as Han and Leia detailed the incident with Tahiri over the secure subspace channel. The two sounded exhausted, which was hardly surprising given what they'd just been throughand the fact that it was still the middle of the night where they were probably wasn't helping, either.

  "She didn't hurt anyone, did she?" Jag asked.

  "No," Leia said. "And I don't believe she would have, either."

  "What about the Riina personality?"

  There was some hesitation from the other end. "We're more concerned about what she'll do to herself than what she might do to others," Leia said firmly.

  "So where is she now?"

  "She ran off," Leia said.

  "And we haven't heard from her since," Han put in wearily. "Poor kid was in quite a state when she left."

  Jag acknowledged his frustration at being too far away to be of any direct help with a sigh. "Have you notified security on the ground?"

  "And tell them what?" Han asked. "That there's a

  lone Jedi on the loose who's possibly under the control of a Yuuzhan Vong mind? That'll really go down well with the authorities."

  "They'd probably lock the lot of us up," Leia said. "Anyway, it's not an option. But she does need to be foundand soon. I don't like the idea of her being alone while she's trying to deal with this. She needs our help right now."

  Jag shook his head. "I just don't understand how this could have happened. From what I understood, she was over her experiences on Yavin Four."

  "So we all thought," Leia said. "But her conditioning went deep. She could speak the Yuuzhan Vong language and fly their ships; and there were moments when Anakin himself said that she acted strangely. But outwardly she seemed okay; she appeared to be holding herself together."

  "But then Anakin died," Han said, "and that must have changed everything." Jag could hear the echoes of the still-painful grief in Han's words. He seemed to steel himself against the emotion as he carried on with "And if this Riina personality is still with the kid, then we have to do something about it."

  Jag agreed, but he knew it wasn't going to be easy. Tahiri could have been anywhere by now, and if she was as panicked as Han and Leia said she was, then she probably wasn't going to want to be found in a hurry. While Leia was probably right in that Tahiri wouldn't hurt anyone, Tahiri might see things differently. Without any control over when the Riina personality emerges, she may see herself as being a threat to her friends and want to keep away for fear of causing them any harm . . .

  "What bothers me, though, Jag," Leia went on, "is that you and Jaina suspected something was wrong and yet you kept it to yourselves."

  Jag swallowed, wishing it were Jaina, not him, fielding the question.

  Leia had every right to be upset, of course. After he had shown Jaina the pendant that Tahiri had found back on Galantos, the tw o of them had discussed what they should do about the young girl. Clearly she was finely attuned to anything Yuuzhan Vong; and just as clearly there were moments when the alien personality rose up and tried to take over. However, the girl was a trained Jedi, and they felt she should be given the chance to solve the problem on her own. It had never been their intention to keep Han and Leia out of the loop indefinitely, and neither had imagined that anything could go wrong as long as one of them was close at hand to keep an eye on her.

  "I'm sorry," he said shortly. "But we really didn't expect anything like this to happen."

  "Well, it did," Han said. "And if Leia hadn't suspected that something was up, things could have gotten quite ugly down here."

  "Well, again, I'm sorry," Jag said. "Where is Jaina? She was supposed to be looking out for Tahiri while you were all down on Bakura."

  "Jaina hasn't returned yet from interviewing Malinza Thanas," Leia replied. If there was any concern for her daughter, the Princess was hiding it well.

  "She still hasn't reported in?" Jag had been apprised of Jaina's mission when he'd first come on duty. "But it's hours past midnight down there. She should have been back by now."

  "We know, "Han said.

  Jag felt his fists clench at this news. He wished again that he were down on the surface where he could do more good. "Maybe I should ask Captain Mayn to send a shuttle with backup and"

  "No," Leia interrupted. "I have faith in Jaina; if she needs assistance, then she'll be in touch. Wherever she is, I'm sure"

  An alarm sounded from the console, cutting off the last part of her sentence.

  "Hang on a second," Jag said. "I have another call coming through on a separate channel." He flipped a switch to hear the incoming message. "Go ahead."

  "Colonel Fel, we have contacts emerging from hyper-space in Sector Eleven." The voice belonged to Selwin Markota, Pride of Selonia's second in command.

  Jag forced the problems on Bakura to the back of his mind. His duty as squadron leader took precedence for the moment over his concerns for Jaina and Tahiri. "How many?"

  "Thirty, with more on the way; at least two capital vessels so far. It looks like a fleet." "Have they contacted Bakura?" "They're being hailed now. I'll patch you into the defense fleet net."

  "Copy that." Jag flicked back to the secure channel. "I'm sorry, Leia, Han, but I have to go."

  "We just got the call, too," Leia responded crisply. "We'll let you know if anything changes."

  "Flights A and B," Jag said on the Twin Sun frequencies, "stay here and mind the big bird. C, you're with me." He peeled out of formation and was followed by two X-wings and a clawcraft. On the scanner before him, the ships emerging from hyperspace stood out like a nebula in the deep void. The number of contacts now stood at forty, with still more coming.

  "This is Bakuran Defense Fleet," called the local traffic control. "Please identify yourself and state your intentions."

  The response came in the form of a warbling, dissonant fluting.

  REFUGEE

  159

  Jag had been briefed; he knew enough to recognize the language. The fleet had originated from Lwhekkbut who was commanding it? The Ssi-ruuk or the P'w'eck?

  The voice of C-3PO came over the comm. "The message says 'I come in peace, people of Bakura, to consecrate this world and bond our two cultures in alliance.' "

  Another voice spoke from Bakura in response to this. Jag recognized it as belonging to Prime Minister Cundertol.

  "We welcome the Keeramak to Bakura in the hope that this new friendship will bring prosperity and enlightenment to all."

  The sickly sentiment made Jag roll his eyes. Luckily the speeches didn't last any longer than that.

  "Keeramak Entourage, please assume the following orbits," the first voice from Bakura said. There followed a long list of requests designed to minimize the disruption caused by the many new arrivals, at the end of which there came a brief burst of alien song, which C-3PO interpreted to mean, simply, " 'Understood.' "

  Jag turned his interception flight into a sweeping, exploratory cruise, examining the alien vessels with a critical eye. The Chiss had fought the Ssi-ruuk on several occasions, contributing behind the scenes to the Imperium's retreat at the advance of the New Republic. He himself, though, had never seen one outside of a simulation. While their battle droids consisted of simple, angular pyramids with weapon and sensor arrays at each corner, the larger ships possessed a smoothly organic appearance. Great sweeping hulls with relatively few breaks formed bulbous, shell-like structures that bulged in odd but beautiful ways. He spotted two ovoid Sh'ner-class planetary assault carriers, accompanied by numerous Fw'Sen-class picket ships. The assault carriers were crewed by more than five hundred P'w'eckplus over three hundred en-teched droids, if they were still usedand were nearly

  750 meters long. Overall, given their structure, they displaced a greater volume than a Victory-class Star Destroyer.

  It seemed an awful lot of hardware to accompany a diplomatic mission. But then, he supposed, the P'w'eck were probably just as nervous of the Bakurans as the Bakurans were of them. With their freedom only recent
ly attained, they wouldn't be keen to send their leader into the middle of a potentially difficult situation without sufficient backup.

  At least they weren't shy about sharing their battle data, though. On the screen before him, names rapidly appeared next to all the major P'w'eck vessels. The cruiser in the middle of the formation was called the Firrinree, while the one lagging slightly behind was designated the Errinung'ka. He didn't even bother to attempt to remember the names of the picket ships.

  As he watched, the last of the stragglers arrived and the formation broke in three to assume the orbits given them by the Bakuran Defense Fleet. The maneuver was accomplished smoothly and without fussand that spoke loudly of the discipline and flexibility of the P'w'eck fleet. One thing was for certain they might be new to the idea of being in charge of their own destiny, but the P'w'eck had been exhaustively trained by their Ssi-ruuvi masters to fly battleships. It showed.

  He hung around the main chunk of the fleet long enough to follow security negotiations with the reception team on the ground, and to witness the launch of seven heavily armed D'kee-class landing ships. The Keera-mak was on its way.

  Jag only hoped that Bakura was ready for it.

  PART THREE

  AGGRESSION

  The warm, dry air of the library was making Saba's scales itchy, and she scratched absently at them while skimming through one of the many books suggested by Tris. She barely noticed the discomfort, however; her thoughts were too focused on the information she was reading. It surprised her how effortlessly she had taken to this form of research. When they'd first started, she had thought she'd never get used to the turning of pagesit seemed so time-consuming! And yet now she was skimming through the books with an ease and confidence similar to that with which skotcarp lizards back home would skate down the shaley slopes of Mount Ste'vshuulsz.

  "Found anything yet?"

  Saba looked up to see Mara peering at her from the end of an aisle of towering bookcases. She shook her head with some apology as she closed the book she'd been browsing through. She'd been reading up on a world on the outer edge of the Unknown Regions where a species of stilt-legged insects lived in a densely oxygenated atmosphere. Their legends spoke of a fire god who burst out of the planet's core every three years to burn large swaths of their world to the ground, initiating a new cycle of death and rebirth. But as interesting as it was, it didn't help their search. There was nothing about mysterious planets appearing in the sky anywhere in the text.

  "This one has found nothing," she replied.

  Mara nodded. "None of us has, unfortunately. I guess we're all still trying to come to grips with these books. It's frustratingly slow."

  "It would be slower still if not in Basic. Our persistence will pay off," Saba told her. "It alwayz does."

  Mara smiled, then moved off in the direction of Danni; probably, Saba thought, to check on the young scientist's progress also.

  Saba pushed the book she'd been reading to one side and took another from the stack that Tris had supplied. Another species, another dead end. She didn't mind, though. She was reveling in the diversity of life in the Unknown Regions. The search was a far cry from any of her previous duties as a Jedi, and in many ways she knew it could turn out to be one of the most difficult, given the amount of material they had to work through. But she also knew that finding the data itself would probably turn out to be the easiest part; examining it and determining if it was relevant or not would undoubtedly take a lot longer.

  Two books later, it was time to get up and stretch. Her eyes were starting to ache from reading, and her back was stiff and sore. Seeking a new list, she loped through the narrow aisles to the center of the vast room, from where the voices of Jacen and the others came. Luke and Mara looked up from three massive piles of books as she approached. They had conscripted a massive snow-wood table for their use; broad and square, it was easily large enough to seat twenty people. Datapads lay scattered before them, into which fragmentary notes had been entered. Lieutenant Stalgis emerged from one of the aisles, staggering under yet another stack of books. No one could be spared from the effort. The only person missing was, ironically, the one who would have been the most fascinated by it all Soron Hegerty. Worn out from the episode on Munlali Mafir, the doctor had elected to wait out this mission to the Chiss from orbit. But she was still there in spirit, and her voice could often be heard issuing from comlinks, requesting more data in annoyed tones.

  "Look at this," Luke announced, holding up a book before him for the others to see. Saba leaned over Jacen's and Mara's shoulders. While the bulk of the text had been translated into Basic, there were still porti6ns in the native Cheunh that demanded assistance from the librarian. Saba concentrated to make sense of the words before her.

  The pages Luke had opened to showed the location and history of a world called Yashuvhu. It had been settled by humans some three thousand standard years earlier, but had only recently encountered the Chiss. A quick scan of the pages revealed no reference to any wandering planets, although there was a description of an ancient woman called the Prophetess who oversaw the spiritual development of the colony. This woman taught that there was a living energy field pervading and connecting all things, which, when tapped into in the correct way. . . "She's talking about the Force," Mara said. "I think so," Luke said. "Look." He opened to a page containing pictures of the Prophetess, whose real name, it turned out, was Valara Saar. It showed a woman of advanced years in a state of excellent preservation. The Chiss contact team had attempted to visit her home in the Yashaka Mountains, but they'd been repelled. No one, it seemed, came to the Prophetess's retreat uninvited.

  The images were sketchily drawn and portrayed the chaos of a hasty retreat, but one thing was plain to see. "She's wielding a lightsaber!" Jacen exclaimed. "It looks very much like it," Luke agreed, displaying a bit more calm than his excited nephew. "How long haz she been there?" Saba asked.

  "The records don't say," Mara said. "But if she was trained as a child, it could be decades."

  "Either that or she found a Holocron," Jacen suggested.

  "Let's not jump to any hasty conclusions," Luke said. "Strictly speaking, this isn't what we're here to look for."

  Nevertheless, he had dived deep into the information on Yashuvhu and the Prophetess. Saba noted other books open around him, all tracing the same topic. The woman herself had not deigned to speak to the Chiss landing party, but many of her acolytes had. The records contained a list of her primary teachings patience, humility, compassion, clarity of thought, balance between physical and mental prowess, strict observance of diet, and, lastly, a solitary lifestyle. In all the years that Valara Saar had been teaching the people of Yashuvhu, they had never known her to take a mate, so she never had any children. In fact, her only constant companion was a creature called a duuvhal, which she had raised from a pup.

  "Hey, I think I've found something!"

  All attention shifted to Danni, who emerged from an aisle clutching a very large book. Beneath the overhang of her unkempt hair, there was excitement in her eyes as she placed the book heavily on the table and flicked through some pages.

  "See here, and here . . ."

  Saba and the others looked to where she was pointing. The young scientist had found a reference to an asteroid belt that had been perturbed by recent tidal forces. Millions of chunks of rock ranging in size from grains of dust to giant boulders had been knocked out of orbit by something very large within the last three decades. That in itself wasn't so unusual; solar systems were frequently unstable, with planets drifting in from interstellar space, wandering across orbits, or leaving at the whim of chaotic perturbations. What made this one unique was a record made by the civilization on an inner world before their

  atmosphere clouded. More than a dozen large rocks had impacted on the planet, rendering it uninhabitable.

  The ruins contained murals depicting a new star in the skya blue-green star that had appeared one summer as though out of nowhe
re, then disappeared half a year later. Its appearance had triggered a terrible religious war that had seen one entire nation subjugated and another reduced to rubble. The victors had celebrated the star's visit. But their celebrations had quickly turned to mourning as first fire rained from the sky, and then the new sun vanished. Within two generations, they'd been reduced to savagery.

  "Another fleeting visit, another violent culture," Mara said, cutting through the silence. "The correlation gets stronger."

  "I see no evidence that Zonama Sekot is deliberately trying to harm the people it comes across," Luke said thoughtfully.

  "Nevertheless," Mara said, "this is what it's doing."

  "Inadvertently, perhaps," Luke said. "Not deliberately."

  "Maybe it just isn't thinking straight," Stalgis suggested.

  "Or wasn't thinking straight," Jacen added. "This is an old reference, after all."

  "True," Luke said. "And until we see something more recent, I don't think we can judge it."

  Saba realized only then that Luke was warring within himself over Zonama Sekot. Something as powerful as an intelligent planet might just as easily be influenced to do evil as it could to do good. So even if they did find it, the Galactic Alliance would still have to decide whether or not to trust it. Any evidence to suggest that it had been responsible for destroying a civilizationinadvertently or notwould be viewed unfavorably.

  "Good work, Danni," Luke said. "And that goes for everyone. It may be slow, but we are making progress."

  Obtaining another list from Tris, Saba followed Danni back into the maze of books.

  "You know, Saba," the young human scientist said, "I think we've got the easiest job here. Have you ever tried to extrapolate star maps from the sort of old sketches we're finding here? It's almost impossible!"

  "This one suspectz that'z the idea," Saba responded, sissing deep in her throat.

  Danni pulled out a book on a new system near the one Saba was exploring. It was a long way from any of the other known contact regions. If they found something there, that would suggest that Zonama Sekot's search for a hiding place had ranged extensively across the Unknown Regions. If it had followed a random search pattern, then a clear trail might not even exist, which meant that no amount of searching here would help them find it. She had to assume that this wasn't the caseotherwise there was no real point in even trying.