Kell Tainer turned and ran. Luke caught a glimpse of Tahiri’s eyes, startled and betrayed, through her helmet faceplate before she ducked beneath the swing of her next opponent. Before she could straighten, a burst of blasterfire filled the air above her. Most of it was absorbed or deflected by her opponent’s vonduun crab armor, but one shot caught the warrior in the throat. He fell back, his throat smoking, and Luke could see Face standing directly behind Tahiri, blaster rifle in hand. Even as Tahiri rose, Face let off the trigger and took a half step left, out of Luke’s peripheral vision, waiting for another target.
Luke kicked the severed arm and its amphistaff up into the face of his opponent, then followed with a simple thrust to the head. That warrior was too canny or experienced for such a ploy; unflinching, he let the arm bounce from his helmet and deflected the thrust with his amphistaff.
Then the next wave of warriors reached them, and suddenly there were too many amphistaffs, thud bugs, razor bugs, and knifelike coufees to stand firm against. Luke found himself forced backward step after step even as he parried a blow, incinerated a razor bug, plunged his lightsaber blade into a warrior’s throat. “Fighting retreat!” he shouted.
Something arced between Luke and Mara from behind. It looked like a flat black box, about the size of human hand, with glowing letters or numbers on one side. And Kell was once again in Luke’s peripheral vision, this time with a blaster, holding it high over the head of the Jedi, pouring fire down into the Yuuzhan Vong. “Suggest we retreat fast,” he shouted. “Ten.”
“What was that?” Luke asked. Instead of blocking the next amphistaff blow to come his way, he leaned forward before the blow began and whipped his lightsaber across his new opponent’s wrist, severing the holding hand.
“You know what it was. Seven. Six.”
Luke began to back away fast. Mara and Tahiri kept pace with him, and Face and Kell kept up the blasterfire, joined by an occasional single-shot blast from their allies behind.
They’d almost backed into the opening to the building when Kell’s explosive charge detonated. Suddenly the walkway in the midst of the Yuuzhan Vong force was a wall of fire rushing toward them.
Luke exerted himself, hurling himself backward with use of the Force, yanking Mara and Tahiri with him. They landed several meters back in the building corridor, still deflecting thrown thud bugs and razor bugs. Then the fiery flash from the explosion roared across the intervening Yuuzhan Vong and past the Jedi, momentarily blinding Luke, hammering him backward. Sure in his sense of where the other Jedi and Wraiths were, he whirled his lightsaber in a defensive motion he seldom used outside of practice, felt it hit something hard and unyielding.
Then the heat and brightness were past. He found he was locked, lightsaber against amphistaff, with a warrior whose back was smoking. Three other warriors stood among him and his allies, though two were now dancing in concentrated fire from the Wraiths and Danni Quee. The last, in the middle of a quite elegant snap-kick against Mara, was receiving her lightsaber thrust up and under his skirt plates.
Luke kicked out, catching his opponent in the center of the torso, sending him hurtling. The warrior staggered back to the walkway aperture … then dropped out of sight with a shout of surprise.
The walkway was gone. Only smoke and the jagged edges where it had once joined the building suggested it had ever been there. Even with his ears ringing from the explosion, Luke could hear the smashing, grinding noise as its wreckage descended three or four hundred meters to the boulevard below.
They stood panting for a moment, Jedi, Wraiths, and scientist, staring at one another. Finally Luke said, “Anyone hurt?”
“I got grazed by a thud bug,” Danni said. “But it hit the armor. It only knocked me down.”
“Something of a disastrous encounter,” Luke decided. “But at least we don’t have any injuries.”
“It was a very successful encounter,” Face said. “Very promising.”
Luke frowned. “How so? Now they know we’re here. That Jedi are here.”
“No. First, I think they were all on the walkway. So no one alive knows that Jedi are here.”
“Until they find the bodies,” Mara pointed out. “With distinctive lightsaber burns on them.”
Face shrugged. “You have me on that one. But second, more important, until those lightsabers came out, they believed we were Vong. The disguises, and my extraordinary diligence in learning some conversational Yuuzan Vong during the last couple of years, are working. We can expect them to work again.”
“Good point.”
Face’s tone became professionally worried. “So, does that count as my turn, or do I have to check out the next walkway?”
Luke grinned. “It counts as your turn.”
“The next one,” Kell said, “will be twenty or thirty flights down. We’d better get to it.”
Bhindi slapped the back of Kell’s helmet. “That one is going to have been hit by debris from this one, Explosion Boy. We go up.”
His tone subdued, Kell said, “I knew that.”
Borleias, Pyria System
Han Solo, upside down and up to his waist in machinery beneath the deck plating of the Millennium Falcon, heard and felt footsteps approaching. They were light, precise—Leia. That meant there would be a second set, the footsteps of Meewalh, Leia’s Noghri bodyguard, but Han had never actually heard them.
A desire to finish patching the coupling he was working on kept him inverted and incurious—that, and the fact that he knew that if Leia had a problem, her walking pace wouldn’t be normal. “Artoo, you want to hand me the electrical flow meter?” He extended a hand up into the air.
R2-D2, Luke’s astromech droid, responded with a series of cheerful whistles and bleats. Han heard the whine of a manipulator arm being extended, felt the meter being pressed into his hand. Then he heard his wife’s voice: “Do you think if I poked him, he’d bang his head into the flooring?”
R2-D2’s blatted response sounded definitely affirmative.
“You better hope she doesn’t, Artoo,” Han said. “I can’t take revenge on my wife, so I’ll have to take it on the nearest droid at hand.”
R2-D2 replied with a distinctly sour set of notes, then Han heard the droid whir away. “What did he say?” Han asked.
Leia laughed. “I don’t know. But if I were him, it would be, I’ll go fetch See-Threepio, then.”
“Good point.” Han clipped the flow meter to the wires he’d just installed. “You want to power up the holocomm for me?”
“Are you down there with your head in the holocomm power cables?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“I can’t tell if the power flow is right if you don’t.”
“Come on up out of there and leave the meter where you can see the readout.”
Han growled. He knew, deep in his heart, that nothing could go wrong, that the Falcon would never hurt him while he was working on her. He knew this in spite of innumerable minor abrasions, contusions, and electrocutions he’d suffered over the years. But Leia remained stubbornly unconvinced.
He also knew, from long experience, that Leia was not going to leave until she was sure he wasn’t going to do something she considered foolish. He could either wait here upside down forever, or do it her way.
So he situated the meter where he could see the readout from above. He shoved his way up and out of the access and turned an artificially cheerful smile on Leia. “Happy?”
“Happy. You’re very red.”
“That’s what happens when you stay upside down for too long. Could I get you some caf? Something to read? For while you’re here managing this repair operation, that is.” Ignoring sudden dizziness brought on by the flow of blood back out of his head, he stood.
Leia smiled, not at all put off by his snide comments. “Actually, I just came here to remind you that we need to see Tarc before we take off.”
“Yeah, I know. I just hate good-byes. Never could figure out h
ow to make them happy.”
Leia lowered her voice to a whisper. “Speaking of which, do you have any advice on how we’re going to tell Meewalh she can’t come along on this mission? That hovering around me to do bodyguard duties will compromise any disguises that we try to use?”
Han matched her whisper for whisper. “How about persuading her to take a vacation?”
“Han.”
“How about, just before takeoff, we send her out to pick up a bottle of brandy, and then leave while she’s running the errand?”
“You’re not helping.”
He smiled and pulled her to him. “You’re not fooling anybody. You know exactly what you’re going to tell her. You just want me to be there when you do it. To back you up. Right?”
She offered him an expression of mock outrage. “No fair peeking into my mind like that.”
“Right?”
Leia sighed and settled against him. “Right.”
But her expression, though merry, wasn’t entirely without worry, and he knew why. She couldn’t be entirely free from concern with one of their sons recently lost to war, the other missing and presumed by most to be dead, and their only daughter elsewhere in the Pyria solar system on a mission with her squadron. Han wondered if there would ever be a time when Leia’s expression was completely at peace.
Pyria System
Well within the dovin basal minefield, Jaina and her Twin Suns Squadron caught up with Mon Mothma, which was executing a turn back toward Borleias while, in the distance, a Gallofree cargo ship, as pudgy and unlovely as a Hutt in the middle of diving into a pool, edged toward them. Tiny lights winking around the freighter hinted at the battle that still went on, but they were few in number—and ever fewer, as the sensor blips representing coralskippers gradually disappeared from the screen.
“Twin Suns, this is Rebel Dream. Sensors show more skip squadrons incoming, but we think our payload will be out of the minefield and through with its last microjump before they arrive. It’s going to be close, though, so please stand by.”
Jaina grinned at the please. Because of the game she was playing with the Yuuzhan Vong, the deception in which she increasingly identified herself with their Trickster goddess, Yun-Harla, she was a step or two outside Borleias’s command structure, and all commanders had been privately instructed to treat her with the deference due a foreign dignitary. She sometimes wondered which of them were amused at playing along and which were irritated. This controller’s voice held no evidence of annoyance. “Twin Suns Leader to Rebel Dream, copy.”
Jaina brought her squadron around to cruise alongside Rebel Dream and waited. As the cargo vessel’s lines finally came into sharp focus with the naked eye, her name finally blipped onto her sensor board, Reckless Abandon, and she could see the nature of the starfighters protecting her—they were now organized into escort wings, all the fighting done. Most wore the white-and-dark-gray color scheme of Rebel Dream support craft, but one squadron, mixed A-wings and E-wings, was painted in glaring yellow with menacingly angular black stripes.
“What the Sith spawn are those?” Jaina asked.
“Twin Suns One, you have the Taanab Yellow Aces, Ace-One speaking.” The voice was male, amused. “We’re here to show the defenders of Borleias what flying is all about.”
Jaina winced. She’d forgotten that she had switched over to the general New Republic military frequency to respond to Rebel Dream. But despite the fact that the mistake was hers, she couldn’t let a jibe like that go by. “So you’re the masters at flying out of an engagement zone?”
“Ooh,” Ace-One said. “Don’t say engagement. Unless you’re volunteering, that is.”
“Ace-One, Reckless Abandon. Do you suppose you could confine your courtship rituals to groundside?”
“Copy, Reckless. Twins Leader, look me up when we’re on the ground. Ace-One out.”
Jaina switched back to send out only over squadron frequency. “Arrogant little monkey-lizard.”
“I agree.” That was the mechanical voice of Piggy, Jaina’s Gamorrean pilot and tactics expert. “I know him.”
Borleias
Creatures moved within Tam Elgrin’s field of vision. He couldn’t seem to hold his eyes open enough for visual clarity, so most of the time they were mere blobs of white or orange, walking back and forth before him, speaking in muted tones.
He was content with that for a while, even content to understand that he wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t remembering, but eventually curiosity got the better of him and he forced his eyes open wider, forced himself to focus.
He could see now that the traffic was beyond the bed he lay on. A clean sheet in a soothing blue covered his large, ungainly frame. Beyond his feet was the metal footboard of a bed, and beyond that was some sort of pedestrian traffic lane; the blobs of color he had seen were people, humans and the occasional Twi’lek or Rodian or Devaronian, most in medical whites, some in pilot jumpsuit orange, moving past his field of vision, paying him no mind.
To either side of his bed were hung opaque curtains of that same offensively inoffensive blue, so patently obvious a measure to provide him with privacy from two directions and suggest calm that he finally understood that he was in a hospital.
That realization was enough for now. He didn’t need to know why he was here. The fact that his brain worked well enough to process information again was sufficient.
But a moment later, a figure left the traffic lane and moved into his curtained cubicle. It was a Mon Calamari; Tam’s long experience with nonhumans suggested that it was a female. She wore medical whites, and her skin was a deep, appealing pink. “You are awake,” she said, her tone suggesting that it was a minor achievement, something for which everyone should be at least slightly pleased.
“Um,” he said. It was supposed to have been yes, but it came out um.
“Do you know what has happened? Where you are, and why?”
He shook his head. “Um.”
“You’ve been rather badly used by the Yuuzhan Vong, conditioned by them to do their bidding. But you resisted your conditioning and probably prevented a tragedy. Resisting it did you a certain amount of physical harm, which is why you’re here now.”
It was as though he had been facing a dam between him and his memories … then the dam crumbled and memories washed down over him, hammering him, sweeping him away. He remembered being on the world of Coruscant as it fell to the Yuuzhan Vong, remembered hiding and running from them afterward, remembered being captured by them. Then there were days—how many? Only two, though it seemed like a lifetime—of lying on a table that twitched, of listening while one of the Yuuzhan Vong told him to do things, of feeling agonizing pain whenever he worked up the nerve to refute their words, refuse their orders. The pain came even when his refusal was deep in his heart, even when it was made without him speaking or glaring or shaking his head to let them know of his rebellion. The table always knew, the table always hurt him, until the words of the Yuuzhan Vong came and he could no longer resist them, no longer offer even the most secret of refusals.
Then he had been allowed to “escape,” reunite with his employer, historian Wolam Tser, and escape Coruscant to Borleias, a temporary stronghold of the reeling New Republic military. There he had spied upon the New Republic operations, the scientist Danni Quee and the pilot Jaina Solo.
Only when he knew that he would have to kidnap one of them and kill the other had he found the strength to withstand the pain that came whenever he did not leap to the bidding of the Yuuzhan Vong. And he’d fallen, certain that the pain would kill him.
“Are you still with us, Master Elgrin?”
“Um,” he said. “Yes.” He opened his eyes; the Mon Cal female was bending over him, her mouth slightly open, her eyes moving independently as she looked him over. He knew from experience that her expression suggested slight distress, though it would not have been obvious to someone who knew only human expressions. “It’s not ‘Master’ Elgrin. Just … Elgrin.
Or Tam.”
“Tam, I am Cilghal. I will be working with you to overcome the lingering effects of what was done to you.” She cocked her head, a human mannerism, perhaps one she had learned from being among humans. “I am sad to have to tell you that your courage in resisting your conditioning was not a cure for you. You still suffer the effects of that conditioning. We will work together to erode those effects, to return you to normal.”
“If I’m still—why isn’t my head killing me right now?”
Cilghal took one of his hands in hers—a smooth, webbed hand much larger than his, but not cold, as he’d expected—and moved his hand up to his brow. There, he felt the device, helmetlike, covering the top of his head. “This apparatus,” she said, “senses the onset of your headaches. It interferes electronically with your pain receptors, reducing or eliminating the pain. Later, we can fit you with an implant to do the same thing without being noticeable. The implant will also allow you to reward yourself by initiating the release of endorphins whenever you do something you know to be in defiance of the will of the Yuuzhan Vong. It will, we think, gradually counter the conditioning you have received.”
“But what’s the point? I’m going to be tried. And executed. For treason.”
“I think not. This base is under military law, and General Wedge Antilles has said that you are to be commended, not punished. There will be no trial for you.”
Tam felt his eyes burn, then tears came. Whether they were tears of relief or shame for the forgiveness he’d received but had not earned, he could not say. He turned away from Cilghal so she would not see them.
“I will go now,” she said. “We will talk later. And you will get better.”
THE OLD REPUBLIC
(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 29
