Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I

by Aaron Allston

  “I brought in a fighter squadron from Hapes,” Jag said. “But the notion of learning tactics involving Force coordination—and playing with the minds of our enemies—is an intriguing one. I think I’d like to join your Twin Suns Squadron.”

  “I would, too.” That was Kyp Durron. Han saw a momentary flash of surprise in Luke’s eyes.

  Wedge didn’t bother to conceal his own surprise. “You’re both sure? About taking orders from a squadron leader with a lot less command experience than you have?”

  “Yes,” Jag said. “I know how to take orders as well as give them. And my second-in-command, Shawnkyr Nuruodo, is certainly qualified to lead the squadron I brought.”

  Kyp nodded. “I suspect I’d benefit from analyzing and advising for a while instead of leading. If I start to chafe, I can always transfer out.”

  Han felt Leia’s breath on his ear, heard her whisper, “It looks like Jaina’s not the only one who went through changes.”

  “Obviously a fake Kyp,” he whispered back. “You distract him. I’ll shoot him under the table.”

  Wedge turned a smile, tinged just slightly with amused malice, on Jaina. “There you go. An instant squadron for you to reconfigure as the honor guard of the manifestation of a Yuuzhan Vong goddess. This means that the very first thing you get is bureaucratic personnel matters to deal with. I’ll see if I can round up an Ewok pilot candidate to throw your way just to make things more difficult. You’ll be my age in no time.”

  Yuuzhan Vong Worldship, Coruscant Orbit

  Nen Yim stood over the warmaster as he lay on the table. She was uneasy, for her life hung in the balance, and everything, including the simple fact that she stood while Tsavong Lah lay before her, was wrong.

  She was a woman of the Yuuzhan Vong. A member of the shaper caste, she wore the living headdress of the shapers, and among her living decorations and mutilations was her right hand, not the one she was born with. It was an eight-fingered shaper’s hand, each of the digits acting as a tool useful to her profession. Her teacher, Mezhan Kwaad, had been a heretic, disobedient to the rulers of the Yuuzhan Vong, contemptuous of the gods, but Nen Yim had learned many secrets of the shapers’ craft. She was soon called by Supreme Overlord Shimrra himself, as his personal shaper, who had temporarily released her to the warlord.

  Under a curved lens—a living creature that adjusted its shape and therefore magnification at its operator’s touch—was Tsavong Lah’s left arm. Nen Yim carefully studied it, noting the appearance of the flesh at the join of Yuuzhan Vong arm and radank claw, observing the behavior of the carrion-eaters upon it. They were huge in this view, the size of a thumbnail, possessed of spiky hairs, sharp angular legs, and pincers adept at digging through flesh.

  “Well?” the warmaster said.

  Nen Yim considered her reply, but she had little to lose by presenting him with the naked truth, so her delay was not long. “There is little I can tell you after one brief examination. But I can give you these facts.

  “First, what is happening here is not like any implant rejection I have ever seen.”

  “Why?”

  “These creatures are bred to consume dead flesh. They are useful for cleansing wounds. They are attacking the necrotic flesh of your join. But there should be little or no necrotic flesh there, because both your natural arm and the radank claw are regenerating. In a normal rejection, such as we see with the Shamed Ones, one part or the other begins to fail to regenerate, and carrion-eaters spread through that portion of the unfortunate’s body until the connection between original flesh and new flesh is gone.”

  The warmaster did not interrupt, so Nen Yim felt safe in continuing. “Second, because your Yuuzhan Vong flesh is regenerating at a slower rate than the radank flesh, and because only your Yuuzhan Vong flesh is becoming necrotic at the join, the effect is that the radank claw is increasing in size, occupying a greater portion of your arm as your original flesh diminishes.”

  “I can see that.”

  “But it is unnatural. It is especially unnatural because, third, the radank claw, as it grows, appears to be developing characteristics of a radank as it would appear farther up the leg, as if someone were slowly re-creating the entire creature through the absorption of your body. It is an odd pathology.”

  “If it were deliberate on the part of a shaper, why would it be done this way?”

  Nen Yim lifted the optical device away from Tsavong Lah and positioned it over a surface littered with tissue samples she had taken from him. “If I were to guess, I would say that the presence of the carrion-eaters is required to convince casual onlookers and those who are not expert in shaper techniques that rejection is imminent; this requires the sacrifice of flesh to the parasites. But your arm is essentially sound, meaning that if the process can be stopped, it will be as functional as if it were transplanted without difficulty.”

  “In other words, it promises rejection without harming me extensively.”

  “That’s correct, Warmaster.”

  “Could you do this? Could you cause an implant to act this way?”

  “I believe so. I’ve never turned my mind to such a task … but out of different techniques, techniques designed to accomplish other ends, I believe I could find a way to do this.”

  “What would you have to do to your victim?” Tsavong Lah sat up, wrapping his cloak about himself, and once again towered over the lowly shaper.

  “I would have to engineer the attachment point of the implant to react to certain substances. Then, after the implant was successfully attached, I would have to maintain a supply of those substances into the join.”

  Tsavong Lah shook his head. “There is no way I could be fed such poisons. The measures I take to keep my food pure are too extreme.”

  “Does he touch you?” The words left her before she could contain them, before she could remind herself that one at her lowly level did not put a direct question to the warmaster without first performing a complex series of ritual statements. She swallowed against sudden fear, but persisted. “I apologize for my lack of manners. But it occurs to me that if I were to examine such an injury routinely, I could introduce these substances through direct handling. Or perhaps through use of specialized creatures resembling the carrion-eaters, bred to carry these substances and die rather than consume dead flesh.”

  The warmaster ignored her breach of protocol. “He does touch my flesh and that of the implant in his examinations. Can you counteract his efforts?”

  “I do not know. I do not even know for certain that these are the actions of a shaper. This could be the signs of a god’s displeasure.” Nen Yim sensed the warmaster’s impatience with her answer, and pressed on. “But assuming that this is the work of a shaper, I would first need to examine your arm immediately after the shaper’s next visit, so that I might detect any new substances or parasites that he might have introduced.”

  “It will be done as you say.” Tsavong Lah gestured for her to take up the voluminous cloak she had hidden her features within when being brought to this chamber. “You will be taken to quarters. Assemble a list of what you will need. If anyone asks why you are here, tell them that you will be preparing my infidel servant, Viqi Shesh, for certain experiments.” As if divining Nen Yim’s thoughts, the warmaster added, “No, you will not be experimenting with her. But this deception should placate the curious.”

  “As you wish it, Warmaster.” She bowed and retrieved her cloak.

  Borleias Occupation, Day 37

  “What am I supposed to be seeing?” Iella asked. She was in Danni’s office, and a little annoyed because Danni was taking up time she needed for Intelligence matters.

  Danni tapped a key on Iella’s datapad. The image began again—a view of Yuuzhan Vong warriors in a dimly lit corridor. They charged toward whoever was carrying the holocam, their war cries terrifying, their movements just slightly alien. “This is Tam Elgrin’s recording. He was with a group of people in a Coruscant building when a Yuuzhan Vong patro
l saw and pursued them. He was at the rear of his group when he recorded this. Then he switched off the holocam so he could concentrate on running, and he got away. Most of the other people didn’t.”

  “So?”

  “There’s something wrong with the recording, and with Tam himself. Tam behaves kind of oddly, more than is normal for someone who is just socially maladjusted, I think, so I’ve been trying to figure him out. I’ve played this recording over and over again, first looking for little bits of information about Yuuzhan Vong hunting tactics, then about Tam … and I finally realized that this feeling of wrongness I had didn’t have anything to do with the Yuuzhan Vong.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “I kind of went behind your back and asked the Wraiths to look into it for me. To do analysis on the recording in their spare time.”

  “They have spare time? I don’t remember issuing them any spare time. So what did they find out?”

  “There are nine sets of footsteps echoing in that hallway. You can count eight Yuuzhan Vong visible in the recording, so the other one has to be Tam.”

  “Eight Yuuzhan Vong and one human.” Iella looked at the recording again. It played on continuous loop. “Meaning that Tam wasn’t with a group.”

  “Right.”

  “Why would he lie?” The answer was in place before Iella finished the question. “Because if he admitted he was alone, he’d have to have a really good explanation of how he got away from those warriors.”

  “Right again.”

  “Meaning he didn’t get away.”

  Danni shrugged. “That’s my guess. But I’m not in Intelligence.”

  “You want to transfer?”

  Danni smiled. “I don’t think they’d let me.”

  Iella extracted the data card from her datapad. “Mind if I take this?”

  “Go ahead. I’ve copied the recording. Multiply.”

  “That’s good work, Danni.” Iella rose and moved to the door. “You let me know if you ever want to get into the Intelligence analysis business.”

  “Twin Suns Leader ready,” Jaina said. “Four lit and in the green.” The vibration from her X-wing’s engines, the whine of engines from all over the special operations docking bay, cut into her, a familiar and welcome sensation.

  “Twins Two, ready.” That was Kyp. “Going to shield me a goddess.”

  “Twins Three, ready.” That was Jag, and, as Jaina predicted, he omitted any quip or irrelevant remark.

  “Record Time, ready to lift.”

  Moments later, they lifted off, two X-wings and Jag’s clawcraft comprising a shield trio, with the Record Time, the troop transport damaged during the taking of Borleias and subsequently patched back together, lumbering after them. They moved easily out of the docking bay and lifted toward the starry sky, just starting to blur with dawn, above them.

  Jaina spared a look out the starboard side of her canopy at Jag’s clawcraft. This variant form of TIE starfighter had the basic cockpit sphere and twin ion engine pods of classic TIE fighters and interceptors, but from the point the engines met the cockpit emerged four forward-sweeping, talon-shaped solar array wings. Jaina didn’t know whether to be pleased or irritated at the artistic incongruity of that style of vehicle being included in her mostly X-wing squadron, and tried to think as a Yuuzhan Vong goddess would.

  After a few minutes, long after they’d cleared Borleias’s atmosphere and were headed to a patch of Pyrian space well away from any naval activities, she keyed her comlink. “Kyp, remind me to issue an order that all starfighters in this squadron are to be individually decorated by their pilots. No uniformity. Their astromechs, too.”

  “Will do, Goddess.”

  Jag said, “Coming up on practice zone in ten, nine, eight …”

  Moments later the starfighters slowed to a stop, relative to distant Borleias, and hung drifting in space as Record Time caught up to them.

  Jaina asked, “How are you going to decorate your fighter, Jag?”

  “Black ball,” he answered immediately. “The claws the color of silver metal, with bloodred splashes on them. As though the whole thing were some sort of claw weapon. The metal, of course, is to annoy the Vong; otherwise I might use a more naturalistic claw color.”

  “You came up with that just in the time since I decided everyone should decorate their starfighter?”

  “No. I decided on this design days ago, when I calculated that you’d be issuing that directive.”

  Days ago? Jaina felt a flash of surprise and irritation. How dare he attempt to predict her this way?

  How dare he do it successfully?

  But she tamped down on the feeling. Jedi Knights needed to be serene. Squadron leaders shouldn’t let their pilots get to them. She needed not to be caught off guard, even when caught off guard. She just smiled. “Well, it’s a good design. I approve.”

  “Thank you.” There was the slightest touch of mockery to his reply, and Jaina felt her mood sour slightly. It wasn’t true, as some of the New Republic pilots thought, that Jag Fel always acted as though he were superior. What was true was that he always seemed to see through deceptions, always seemed to know the truth behind what was being said to him. No one liked to have their falsehoods ignored, their images pierced.

  On the other hand, this meant Jag would have a harder time behaving as though he were serving a goddess made flesh. Jaina smiled to herself. She’d be able to find some way to make him uncomfortable, to penetrate his unflappable manner.

  “Record Time coming on-station.” The announcement blaring through her comlink jolted Jaina out of her reverie.

  “Deploy targets,” Jaina said. “All right, Kyp, let’s show Jag how Force-users do it.”

  From one of Record Time’s bays streamed a series of cargo containers. They were the most-damaged of the containers that had been used to bring garrison supplies into the Pyria system, too badly crushed or corroded to stand up to further use. Now each had two red target zones painted on each long side; sensors were attached to the targets. They tumbled through space at Record Time’s arrival velocity.

  Jaina led her flight in a loop that would bring them up at a ninety-degree course to the containers’ path.

  “I’m open, Goddess.”

  Jaina suppressed a grimace. She should have known that Kyp would be ready for the Force link they were trying. She should have felt it.

  But she had been keeping herself a little closed off. It was better that way. She didn’t want to be so closely tied to Kyp that he would feel it through the Force, be tortured by it, when and if she followed her brothers into death.

  When, not if.

  So, though she let him help her back from the dark side path she had recently followed, though she even acknowledged him as a second Jedi Master—though no one would ever replace Mara as her true Master—it was best to keep him at a certain distance.

  But she couldn’t do so all the time, so, feeling a touch of unease, she extended her Force perceptions toward Kyp, found him, merged with him in a sense.

  It was neither as close nor as effective a bond as the one between Luke and Mara. But then, she didn’t want it to be. That sort of closeness led to no good.

  She frowned at that thought, wondering where it had come from, wondering if Kyp had picked it up. But there had been no flicker of emotion from him. Doubtless he hadn’t. “All right, Jag. Kyp and I are going to pick and hit a target. The sensors will tell us how close together our strikes are, how well we’re coordinating through the Force. For fun, I want you to see how long it takes you to punch a hole in the target directly between our two strikes.”

  “Consider it done.”

  They angled in toward one target, Jaina and Kyp moving together with a precision possible only through the Force. Jag stayed with them, tucked between and slightly behind them, his maneuvers as fast and precise as it was possible for them to be without Force coordination.

  Jaina picked her target—a container both tumbling and spinning o
n its long axis, two containers starboard of the one they were heading toward—and fired. Her quad-linked lasers and Kyp’s burned off at what looked like exactly the same instant, hitting the red target zones of the container simultaneously, reducing the container’s two ends to molten slag. A fraction of a second later, Jag’s blast hit the center of the spinning mess, cleaving it in two.

  “Not bad.” Jaina consulted her comm board. “Four one-hundredths of a second between our shots, Kyp; yours hit second. We need to get those numbers down. Jag, you were twenty-six one-hundredths of a second behind Kyp. Pretty good, considering you didn’t know which container was going to be our target.”

  “Actually, I did. I knew it wasn’t going to be the one our course was aimed at. Given a fifty-fifty directional choice, you go starboard more than half the time. I figured you wouldn’t choose the first target of opportunity in that direction, so I centered on the second. Of course, if I’d been wrong, it would have taken me a much bigger fraction of a second to hit the target you’d chosen.”

  Jaina heaved a sigh. Jag was determined to annoy her with his efforts to predict her. But she schooled her emotions once more into something like serenity and merely clicked her comlink in acknowledgment. “Let’s go around again,” she said.

  The second run was much like the first. Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots remained separated by a few hundredths of a second. Jag’s follow-up shot was, if anything, faster than it had been on the first target.

  “You guessed I’d go left of our course, one target out,” Jaina said.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s do it again.”

  As Luke finished packing his bag for the day’s activities, Mara entered their quarters. Ben was awake in her arms, grasping at her hair, pulling it into his mouth, but all of Mara’s attention was on Luke. “I’m going to Coruscant with you.”

  That stopped Luke cold. “What changed your mind?”