Chapter 49

Even before Jaina peered into the sunken compound, she feared they might be too late. An oily column of pyre smoke was rising out of the pit, gathering beneath in a blackened valve that periodically cracked open to puff the fumes out into the vacuum. The air reeked of charred flesh and scorched bone, but also of slower kinds of decomposition that made clear why the place lay so far from anything else. Whatever the Yuuzhan Vong did with their dead, it did not involve preserving them.

Despite the guidance of her comlink's signal finder, Jaina did not see Lowbacca until a powdery arm rose out of the ash and waved them onto the observation balcony outside the tunnel mouth. She dropped to her belly and, trying not to think about the fact that she was crawling through the incinerated remains of untold thousands of Yuuzhan Vong, advanced to the edge of the pit.

What lay below struck her as more of a processing center than a mortuary. About a tenth the size of the spaceport, the five-sided facility lay at the hub of a dozen large travelways, most of them emerging from the worldship's murky interior. Many of the subterranean passages had been permanently sealed with yorik coral plugs. The rest were choked with Yuuzhan Vong mourners, their numbers no doubt swollen by the strike team's efficiency - a thought in which Jaina found herself taking some solace. The Yuuzhan Vong had finally shattered the emotional armor that had been accumulating around her since Anni Capstan, her first regular Rogue Squadron wingmate, perished over Ithor. They had made the war hurt again, and now she wanted to hurt them back.

As in the spaceport, long colonnades at the bottom of the five outer walls opened into a network of utility warrens whose purpose Jaina could only guess at and cared little about. The five grottoes that stood in the facility's five corners were more interesting. The effigy of a major Yuuzhan Vong god sat in each recess, gazing out at a deep pit directly in front of his - or her - eyes. Beside each pit stood a priest and several assistants, chanting prayers to the gods and inviting the mourners, one group at a time, to step forward and throw a piece of their loved one into the pit. Which piece seemed to depend on the particular effigy. Into one pit, they lowered the skins; into another, they tossed the major bones of the body; into Yun-Yammka's pit - the only god Jaina recognized - they poured the blood.

The actual preparation of the corpse was performed at one of any number of stations of varying opulence scattered around the interior of the compound. Selection of a preparer seemed to involve a fair amount of barter, as Jaina could see mourners arguing - sometimes violently - with the aproned body-dressers who performed the work. After the work was done, the first stop was always a blazing pyre in the center of the compound, where the skull and hands were thrown.

Jaina grew cold inside. "If they did that to Anakin -"

Lowbacca groaned softly and pointed over the rim. Being careful not to push any ash over the edge, Jaina eased herself forward and saw, twenty meters below, a handful of Yuuzhan Vong warriors playing some game that involved kicking a snarling spike-creature into the opponent's bare chest hard enough to make it stick. Standing off to one side, weaving Anakin's lightsaber through a surprisingly smooth practice routine, was Vergere.

"So where's Anakin?" Tahiri hissed.

Lowbacca gestured at the warren beside the warriors, then to a nearby air lock, explaining in a soft rumble that the lock opened into a small docking pit where Vergere and her companions had a shuttle waiting. Jaina and the others donned their vac suits, then camouflaged themselves with a coat of ash and spent the next hour watching the gruesome rites below. Had they not seen a pair of Yuuzhan Vong emerge from the warren with the husk-encased body of a comrade and depart in one of the small yorik coral transports the Yuuzhan Vong sometimes used inside the worldship, the wait would have been interminable. As it was, it merely gave Jaina a chance to watch the ghastly spectacle and hope the warriors who had killed Anakin were among those being offered to their gods.

At last, a Yuuzhan Vong subaltern emerged from the warren and summoned two of the crew inside. The others quickly began to dress, pulling thin tunics over their heads and coaxing their living armor open so they could don it again. Jaina cautiously lifted her power blaster out of the ash, clearing the emitter nozzle and targeting sensors with a quick breath and rub of her tunic.

"Blast them when Anakin's out where we can see him," Jaina said over the comlink. She missed the intimacy of the battle meld, but it was probably a good thing that Jacen was not here to link them all together; as angry as she was feeling, she did not want to open her emotions to the others. "We'll jump down and get him, then commandeer the shuttle, go find Jacen, and finish this thing."

"Check," Zekk said, acknowledging the order.

By the time the others had checked off, as well, the subaltern was walking into view. Behind him came the two crew members, an Anakin-sized husk suspended between.

"May I have the officer?" Alema asked, setting the longblaster's sight on the subaltern.

"Take him," Jaina said.

The others named their targets, as well, Tahiri taking the front husk-carrier and Zekk the back. Lowbacca set his sights on the pilot, and Jaina aimed her power blaster at Vergere.

"I've got Featherbag," she said. "Fire at -"

Four blaster bolts lanced down into the mortuary pit, but Zekk's hand crashed down across Jaina's barrel and her shot went wide, burning into the ground next to Vergere's feet. The creature was already jumping to one side, Anakin's lightsaber coming around smoothly, as though she actually knew how to use it - a notion that was dispelled when she let it slip from her hand and clatter bladeless to the ground.

Jaina whirled on Zekk. "What'd you do that for? I had her!"

"And we don't know you should have," Zekk retorted almost as hotly. "She's done us no harm, and she's had the chance."

"The company she keeps is harm enough!" Jaina peered back into the pit, but her target had already snatched Anakin's lightsaber up and ducked out of sight - as had the spared husk-carrier, taking with him her brother's body. "Zekk, don't do that again. Don't you dare stand in my way!"

By now, an astonished murmur was rolling across the compound as the crowd below began to realize they were under attack. Jaina shouldered her blaster, then snapped her lightsaber off her belt and hurled herself headlong into the pit. Using the Force to slow her descent, she performed a twisting flip and landed facing into the warren, midway between Tahiri and Lowbacca. Alema was on the other side of Tahiri, her longblaster rising to her shoulder. The warrior whose life Zekk had spared was backing under the wall, using Anakin's body to shield himself from the Twi'lek's weapon and drawing his coufee.

"You two secure the shuttle," Jaina ordered Lowie and Tahiri. "Alema and I will get Anakin."

As they scrambled to obey, the Yuuzhan Vong plunged his coufee into the husk and cut it open near the head. "You want your Jeedai?" He thrust the blade through a layer of clear gelatinous slime and placed the tip on Anakin's cheek. "Stay back, or I give him to you in pieces!"

The longblaster roared, missing the Yuuzhan Vong but demolishing the keystone of the arch behind him. He flinched and looked over his shoulder at the tons of rubble crashing down behind him, then turned back toward Jaina and moved his knife toward Anakin's eye.

Rage boiling inside her like magma, Jaina reached out with the Force and shoved Anakin's body hard. The Yuuzhan Vong yelled in surprise and stumbled back into the collapsing arch, his coufee sliding away from the eye. Jaina jerked her brother free of the warrior's grasp and sent him floating in Alema's direction.

"Take Anakin," she said.

As Jaina spoke, she was opening herself to her anger, using the power of its emotion to draw the Force into her as the Dark Masters Brakiss and Tamith Kai had tried to force her to do so long ago, when she and Jacen had been imprisoned at the Shadow Academy with Lowbacca. The power came surging into her in cold waves, feeding on her hatred of the Yuuzhan Vong and pouring it back to her twofold.

In a motion so fast Jaina barely saw it, the warrior sat up and flicked his coufee at her throat. She could have dodged or blocked with her lightsaber, but she did not. Instead, with the fierce energy crackling inside her, she used her free hand to bat the weapon aside, then raised her hand toward her attacker and released the dark power inside. A fork of lightning crackled into existence a few centimeters beyond her glove tips, then blasted a hole through the Yuuzhan Vong's chest and hurled him onto the rubble pile smoking and motionless.

Jaina felt someone watching and turned to find Vergere staring at her from the shelter of a nearby archway, Anakin's lightsaber dangling from one hand and her narrow eyes angled in what seemed a peculiar expression of dismay. Jaina sneered at the creature, then raised her hand and loosed another bolt of Force lightning.

Anakin's lightsaber snapped to life in Vergere's hand and rose to intercept the attack. Then, eyes going wide, she turned and fled into the warren, the lit blade wagging behind her like a tail.

Alema came to Jaina's side and, somewhat tentatively, took her by the arm. "We'd better go."

Jaina grew aware of a roar building on the other side of the vessel and realized that the outraged priests were exhorting their mourners to attack. "The shuttle?"

"Secure," Alema reported. "Everyone's aboard but us."

"Good." Jaina took Anakin from the Twi'lek, then entered the air lock. As the outer valve opened, she thumbed the fuse of her last thermal detonator to ten seconds and dropped it on the middle of the lock. "The vac breach that leaves ought to burst a few scarhead lungs."

 

Chapter 50

Like some insectoid model of a Coruscant skyline, the hives had over countless years of habitation climbed entirely out of the bug pit, their serpentine spires now scratching at the vaulted ceiling from atop a thirty-meter mound of carapace detritus and discarded chrysalides. Though the colony was as deserted as much of the worldship, the long-neglected glow lichen still shined just brightly enough to reveal the legs of a dead Yuuzhan Vong protruding from an acid hole in the base of the innermost tower, jerking and jiggling as the body was devoured by a voxyn.

The voxyn, Jacen hoped. With leaden arms and shaking legs, he felt like they had tracked the thing through the entire diameter of the worldship - though it was impossible to know for sure without Alema's sense of subterranean direction.

"The reading is good," Tekli whispered. She used both hands to raise the cell analyzer and show the numbers to Jacen. "Do we want to test a second sample? I see some droppings up there."

"Not necessary," Jacen replied. They were studying the colony from the mouth of a dark passageway, and it would have been impossible to retrieve the droppings without either leaving their cover or using the Force - both of which would have exposed their presence to the voxyn. "Tesar has already said the trail is the queen's. Let's just kill it."

"Too bad we don't have the longblaster," Ganner said softly. "I can guess where she is, and we could burn a hole right through that nest."

"This one thinkz it is better for him to sneak around to her blind side," Tesar hissed. "If she flees, you will be here to attack and pursue."

When Jacen nodded, the Barabel leapt onto the wall and climbed silently to the ceiling, where he seemed to melt into the shadows. A faint tingle crept down the back of Jacen's neck - a tingle that continued to grow as Tesar neared the tunnel mouth. There was something wrong here, something they were not seeing. Tenel Ka touched Jacen's arm, and he knew she felt it, too.

"Tesar!" Jacen hissed. He did not want to reach out with the Force; they had already learned that doing so would alert the queen to their presence. "Wait!"

"Wait?" Ganner asked, disbelieving. "What for?"

"Be quiet," Tekli whispered. Ganner had the danger sense of a mynock; he had nearly walked into Yuuzhan Vong search parties twice. "It feels wrong."

When the Barabel did not immediately return, Jacen began to have visions of losing Saba's last student. Taking care to remain in the shadows, he slipped along the wall, then nearly cried out when a deep thump shook the passage. Tesar hissed in shock and retracted his claws, almost taking Jacen's head off as he dropped along the wall. They retreated deeper into the tunnel, their eyes on the dimly shining colony ceiling.

"Something landing?" Ganner asked.

Tesar nodded. "Something big."

"Ah. Aha. They were trying to lure us into a trap." Tenel Ka bumped her shoulder into Jacen's. "Perhaps the time has come to withdraw, my friend."

"Perhaps." Jacen did not turn back. There was still something wrong here, something yet to be revealed. "But if it's a trap, why give themselves away?"

Another thump, this one smaller, rumbled down through the yorik coral.

"This one could go look," Tesar suggested.

Jacen passed over the electrobinoculars, and the Barabel bounded up the passage on all fours. This area of the worldship seemed devoted to producing foodstuffs and other necessities, and every kilometer or so, there were large air locks opening onto the surface access routes. Jacen had traveled enough of the worldship to know that the surface network would be a more efficient system for moving freight than the sometimes cramped, always meandering passages inside.

A minute later, Tesar reported, "Frigate analog - perhapz the one that brought Nom Anor. Its shuttle is missing."

Despite the extra weaponry and personnel such a vessel carried, Jacen was no more worried than before. Frigates of this size were known to carry only three assault companies, and by his count, they had already destroyed one and cut up the other two pretty badly. If Nom Anor intended to launch an attack from this ship, it would either be with worldship personnel or the vessel crew - neither of which was likely to be experienced enough to keep them from escaping.

"Any sign of an assault company?" Jacen asked.

"The boarding ramp is down," Tesar replied. "But the ones who used it are already gone."

"Then there couldn't be many." Tekli's voice sounded more hopeful than confident.

"Okay, Tesar," Jacen said. "Keep an eye on things while we decide what to do here."

"We could telekinese a thermal detonator at the voxyn and hope for the best," Ganner suggested. "Or I could carry it up."

"And that would work better than the other times why?" Tenel Ka asked. "We have only two detonators left. We must conserve."

Ganner acknowledged her point with a shrug, and the Jedi fell to contemplating the situation in silence. No one felt any compulsion to flee - at least not until they knew what was happening. They had been dodging Yuuzhan Vong search parties since their escape from the cloning grashal, and the frigate's arrival was the first hint that the enemy had guessed their location.

A few minutes later, Tenel Ka said, "Perhaps the Force brought the frigate to us, after all."

She pointed into the hive colony, where several dozen Yuuzhan Vong silhouettes had emerged from hiding places near the voxyn. The unarmored leader appeared from inside a spire and stomped down the detritus mound, circling toward a passage about seventy meters around the pit from that of the Jedi. He was met just inside the colony by an eight-fingered shaper whose cage of glow bugs revealed the leader's face to be that of Nom Anor.

The two immediately began to speak and gesture harshly. A moment later, Vergere came waddling out of the tunnel, Anakin's equipment belt strapped around her body like a bandolier, lightsaber and utility pouches still hanging in place, his comlink set dangling in the empty blaster holster.

The sight of his brother's captured equipment filled Jacen with sorrow and self-reproach. Jaina's angry accusations had compelled him to rethink nearly everything he had done since his blunder aboard the Exquisite Death, and he could not help believing that had he been less worried about making amends and more concerned with tempering his brother's rashness, Anakin might still be alive. Jacen was troubled, as well, by the refuge he had taken in Anakin's calm response to the theft of the Tachyon Flier. If Jaina, who remained collected under even the most heated attack, could not bear their brother's death, how could he still be worrying about the mission? How come his grief was not driving him mad?

Vergere glanced in the direction of the Jedi. Her hand brushed Anakin's comlink, and suddenly two angry Yuuzhan Vong voices were coming over the comm net.

Jacen barely noticed. His gaze remained fixed on Vergere. As much as it hurt to see her wearing Anakin's gear as a war trophy, he felt no urge to attack her, nor even Nom Anor. Truth be told, though he was determined to destroy the queen, he really did not want to kill her either. None of it was going to bring Anakin back.

Tenel Ka squeezed the back of his arm, then quietly reached over and killed his comlink mike. "I do not know what game she is playing at, but it would be better if they could not hear us, as well."

"Thanks," Jacen said.

Though he could not understand the conversation coming over his comlink, he did hear two familiar words - Jeedai and Anakin. Nom Anor gestured angrily toward the voxyn's hiding place. Vergere spread her hands, then pointed up the passage from which she and the shaper had come. She rattled off something that included the word Jaina, which prompted the eight-fingered shaper to turn and gesture into the hives, repeating the word voxyn time and again.

Nom Anor snapped at him, then he and Vergere began to yell at Nom Anor, and soon all three were shouting at once.

"Looks like Jaina has been busy," Gamier observed.

"Why am I not surprised?" Tenel Ka asked. "But it is going to be difficult to destroy the queen now. That frigate will complicate matters."

"Not for long," Jacen said. He could feel something in the Jaina-place inside him, something angry and dark coming their way. "Not if I know my sister."

 

Relying heavily on both lightsaber technology and several borrowed focusing crystals to help control the enormous power it would need to jam yammosk waves, Cilghal's new gravitic amplitude modulator was part gravity generator and part plasteel rectenna. It was also even larger than the one that had been destroyed when the skips from the Yuuzhan Vong tracking vessel had attacked her lab, so when she and Kyp started across the hangar with the unwieldy apparatus in tow, Booster Terrik did not look happy. He came striding down the Jade Shadow's boarding ramp to meet them, shaking his head and wagging his ringer.

"Your orders are to evacuate, not relocate," he growled. "The Venture's already packed bilge to bridge with Reecee refugees. We've no room for Jedi sculptures."

"This is no sculpture," Kyp said. "This is a GAM, and it just might win the war for us."

Booster rolled his eyes. "And a Gamorrean might be the next chief of state - but it won't happen today."

Kyp's face reddened with temper. "Listen, you old -"

"That's enough, Kyp," Cilghal said, cutting him off. She passed him the hoversled controls, then turned to Booster and raised her hand toward him. "I'm sure that when Captain Terrik sees this instrument in action, he will be happy to find a place for it aboard the Errant Venture."

Booster scowled and started to reiterate his denial - then cried out in surprise as his feet rose off the ground and Cilghal floated him out of the way.

"Okay, okay," he growled. "If it means that much to you, I'll take a look at this gizmo in action."

"A wise idea," Cilghal said. She disliked using the Force on a friend in this manner, but Booster was stubborn and time was short. "I am sure that you'll be impressed - so impressed that you'll let us run a power feed off one of your fusion reactors."

Booster's scowl returned to its most stubborn. "Don't push it, Cilghal. We'll talk about that after you show me what this thing can do."

 

As weary as Jacen was of watching Vergere and the shaper argue with Nom Anor, he could think of no way to reach the voxyn. With a frigate full of Yuuzhan Vong in the area, sneaking up on it was out of the question. So was floating a detonator or incendiary at it; the creature had proved many times that it would flee as soon as it felt them using the Force. That left only waiting, but wait he would - until he was fifty, if that was what it took to destroy the queen. He had promised Anakin.

Vergere and the others were still arguing when a series of frantic clicks came over the comm net. Jacen reached out to Tesar and felt the Barabel still waiting at his station on the surface, concerned but not nearly excited enough to be fighting someone. A single click confirmed that Tesar had felt his touch, then the boom of an exploding missile reverberated through the yorik coral. Vergere turned and bounded away around the detritus mound. Nom Anor and the shaper remained where they were, barking questions at her vanishing back.

"Jaina?" Ganner gasped.

"Who else?" Tenel Ka replied.

Jacen reached out to his sister through the Force, found only the same cold anger that he had felt since Anakin's death, and tried to break through to some vestige of the Jaina he had known all his life. He touched only swirling darkness, stormy and unreasoning and full of hate. Afraid to use the comlink - he could not be sure what channels Vergere had open - Jacen opened his emotions to the others, drawing them into a battle meld and reaching out to Tesar with the same question on their minds: Was this Jaina's doing?

They were answered with a confirming click.

"An excellent plan, catching the frigate off guard," Tenel Ka said. "It will greatly aid our final escape."

Another blast shook the passage, this one closer than the first, then a second eruption even louder. Flakes of glow lichen began to snow from the ceiling. High in the colony interior, the legs of the dead Yuuzhan Vong vanished from sight as the startled voxyn dragged him out the back side of the hive and disappeared, never presenting a shot to the Jedi below. A third explosion shocked the dust off the walls, and loose chunks of ceiling began to bombard the insect city.

Tesar's desperate voice came over the comlink. "Stickz, not there - stop!"

Even as Tesar yelled, a fourth explosion dropped an avalanche of vault ribbing on the colony. An entire borough of the insect city collapsed into rubble around Nom Anor and the shaper, and then the whole bug pit was filled with an impenetrable cloud of dust.

When a sporadic rain of yorik coral continued to fall from the weakened ceiling, Jacen backed deeper into the tunnel and pulled his equipment harness off his back.

"We'd better get into our vac suits," he whispered.

 

After failing to destroy the frigate on the first two passes, Tesar thought the assault shuttle would turn and flee. That would have been the tactic of a wise hunter striking at such dangerous prey. But Jaina was in a killing frenzy and unable to resist the temptation of a 150-meter Yuuzhan Vong frigate sitting motionless on the surface, its debarking ramp still hanging open like the mouth of a winded dewback. She wheeled around, coming in close for a point-blank shot, and loosed a pair of plasma balls that vanished almost instantly into shielding singularities.

The assault shuttle flashed over its target and pulled up sharply, preparing to wheel around for yet another attack.

The frigate finally answered, launching a flurry of magma missiles and plasma balls from its port-side weapons bank. At such short range, the missiles lacked time to fix on their target and streaked past harmlessly, but two plasma balls exploded into the shuttle's rear quarter, blasting through the firewall and sending it spinning into the sky.

Tesar feared for a moment that the shuttle would explode or spin itself into pieces, but then Jaina - at least he assumed she was the pilot - somehow brought it under control and banked away. The craft climbed five hundred meters, then belched flame and began a long, wobbling descent toward the horizon.

Tesar snapped his tongue against his faceplate in anger, then thought for a moment and finally decided to risk a message over Jacen's personal comm channel. Even if the Yuuzhan Vong were eavesdropping, this was not something he wanted to try relaying through clicks and Force sensations.

 

"No!" Jacen gasped.

He had felt something wrong even before Tesar commed, but had not known what. Forgetting about Anakin's captured comlink, he opened a general channel and would have started calling for a report, had Tenel Ka not ripped the mike off his throat.

"You will not help anyone by getting us killed," she said. "Jaina will bring them down softly. You know that."

"No, I don't. Not anymore." Jacen took a deep breath, using a meditative calming technique to bring himself back under control. "But you're right about the rest."

Jacen reached out to his sister and spent the next minute or so struggling to stay in contact with the dark emotions that now filled her. She did not seem frightened, only angry and focused on the effort at hand. Then, as he sensed her efforts growing even more intense, her anger abruptly deepened to a level that Jacen could not bear, and he lost her.

"She's gone," he gasped.

"Dead?" Ganner asked.

"I don't know." Jacen looked up. "I didn't feel that. I just don't feel her at all."

Tenel Ka enfolded him in her one arm and pulled him close. "Jacen, I am so sorry."

Out in the bug pit, the dust had settled enough to see the Yuuzhan Vong clearing rubble. Although pieces of ceiling continued to fall at increasing frequency, it soon grew apparent that the collapse had so far caused few casualties. Nom Anor was already standing at the edge of a fallen hive, glaring down with a sour expression as a pair of assistants pulled the shaper from beneath the debris.

Once the shaper regained his feet and a little of his dignity, he brushed himself off and began to speak sharply to Nom Anor. Jacen thought for a moment they would continue their argument, but after a while Nom Anor only nodded and pointed up the tunnel leading to the surface and their frigate. The shaper nodded back, then took the warriors and started across the colony in pursuit of the voxyn queen. The executor shook his head wearily and started up the tunnel toward the frigate.

He had barely departed before a squeaky voice came over their comlinks. "It is safe to come out now, young Jedi. You have nothing to fear from me."

Jacen motioned the others to ready their weapons, then activated his comlink microphone. "Who is this?"

"There is no time to explain that now." As she spoke, Vergere came around the colony on the side opposite the one she had departed, then pointed in the direction the voxyn queen had fled. "Your quarry is escaping."

 

Chapter 51

The Solo entourage was halfway across the last pedestrian bridge outside the Eastport Docking Facility when a deafening crackle roared out of the sky and shook the surrounding skyscrapers. Reflexes conditioned to instant reaction by far too many brushes with death, Han dropped to his haunches and looked for the source of the trouble. He found it in the form of a million orange fireballs reflecting off the transparisteel panes of a million tower viewports, silhouetting the dazed figure of his wife with Ben cradled in her arms.

Like almost everyone else on the bridge, Leia was still standing upright, craning her neck to see what was making all the noise. Han grasped her elbow and pulled her down beside him.

"Get down, sweetheart."

The smell of ozone and ash wafted down on a hot wind. A corvette-sized fireball roared overhead and impacted half a kilometer up the durasteel canyon, vaporizing forty floors of a residential tower and blasting the walls out of three adjacent buildings. The shock wave cleared the hoverlane of traffic, then hit the bridge and turned the air as hot as a Tatooine drought. Adarakh and Meewalh dropped the luggage and used their own bodies to cover Han and Leia, C-3PO skidded three steps across the walkway before both he and the potted ladalum he was carrying were caught by the YVH war droid Lando had given them, and Ben's TDL nanny was swept off the bridge along with a hundred screaming pedestrians.

"How dreadful!" C-3PO peered over the safety rail. "She'll be smashed beyond components!"

"And so will we if we don't get off this bridge," Han said, rising.

Still holding Leia's arm, he started to push forward through the crowd. With the battle for Coruscant now being fought in an orbit so low the weapon discharges looked like a colossal skydazzle show, the planet was being bombarded with a steady rain of flaming spacecraft. The kilometer-long walk from the apartment had been one long smoke-stroll, and twice they had been forced to detour around impact craters where the bridge came to an abrupt end a hundred meters above the stump of a truncated building.

The closer they came to the docking facility, the slower the crowd seemed to move. Han finally saw why as they drew to within a few meters of the building. A pair of burly Defense Force soldiers in full biosuits and headgear flanked the half-closed access gate, carefully scanning identichips and waving pedestrians through one at a time. It seemed a ludicrous endeavor given the circumstances.

One of the guards turned his dark-visored gaze on Han and held out his scanner. "Identichip."

"You don't know?" Han asked, presenting the group's chips. Not being in disguise, he and Leia had been the subject of countless whispers and pointed fingers along the way; at times, only the menacing presence of Lando's YVH war droid had kept frightened citizens from besieging them with questions they could not answer and bringing their progress to a halt. "Where'd they recruit you guys, Pzob?"

"Procedure ..." The soldier looked at the datareader on the back of his scanner. "Solo. I read only four chips. There are five of you."

"Give me a break," Han said. He felt the YVH war droid easing up behind him and quietly signaled him to stay back. "The baby's only four months old."

The soldier continued to stare out from behind his visor.

"It takes six months to get the chip," Han bluffed. If this guy didn't recognize him and Leia, chances were he wouldn't know Coruscant documentation law either. "Until then, the kid travels on a parent's chip."

"Of course." The soldier lowered his scanner, then pointed down an exterior walkway to a large balcony packed with droids. "You may enter, but your mechanicals must remain. There is no room to evacuate them."

"Remain?" C-3PO echoed. "But my place is with -"

Han waved the protocol droid silent. "They won't be taking a public berth. We have our own vessel."

"Which you should use to evacuate living beings," the second guard said, stepping over. "Not these lifeless -"

"Please remain calm," the YVH war droid said, pushing an arm between Han and Leia. "This is a military emergency."

Han started to turn. "What -"

A pair of blaster bolts streaked past his face, burning holes through the chests of both soldiers. Leia shrieked and Ben wailed, and an astonished murmur rustled through the crowd. C-3PO, still holding the pot with Leia's blast-stripped ladalum, began to distance himself from the larger droid.

"Really, One-dash-Five-Oh-Seven, that was uncalled for! Your primary programming must be garbled."

The war droid squealed something in machine language that made C-3PO take a step back, then turned to Han. "I apologize for the identification delay. The biosuits were obscuring the criteria."

"Criteria?" Han broke the seal on one of the helmets and found an ooglith masquer already peeling away from the face of its host. "And I thought you just didn't want to be left behind."

 

Bureaucrats, businessbeings, and bankers, the people pouring through Gate 3700 of the Eastport Docking Facility were not the ordinary sort of refugee. They swirled into the terminal area escorted by droids, sentient assistants, and hoversleds loaded with art treasures and portable gem vaults. Most were protected by hastily armed servants, bodyguards of various intimidating species, and even Ulban Arms S-EP1 security droids. But only one family had Noghri luggage porters, a protocol droid carrying a heat-blasted ladalum, and a fully operational YVH 1 war droid providing crowd control. As ever, the Solos were the most conspicuous of the conspicuous.

Pores still raging against the ooglith masquer she had been wearing since the failed kidnapping at their apartment, Viqi Shesh turned to the child standing with her at the observation deck safety rail. With a mop of unruly brown hair and big blue eyes as round as Old Republic valor medals, he could have been a twin to the twelve-year-old Anakin Solo portrayed in newsvid archives. He ought to have been; it had cost Viqi a small fortune in cosmisurgeon and bacta tank fees to make him look that way.

"You see them, Dab? The ones with the big war droid?"

"How could I miss them?" the boy answered. "Everybody in the galaxy knows the Solos. You didn't say they were the ones."

"I didn't say a lot of things," Viqi said. Thanks to a thumb-sized Yuuzhan Vong leech-creature lodged in her throat, Viqi's once-silky voice was now almost reedy and quavery. "But if you and your family want passage off Coruscant with me, I won't need to."

The boy looked away. "I understand."

His mother and two sisters were already aboard Viqi's yacht, which was berthed under a false name on the other side of the Falcon, just beyond a public starferry named the Byrt. She studied the boy, wondering if she had perhaps misjudged the urchin's character when she spotted him in the underlevels rifling the pockets of a salted Arcona. If the child turned out to have a sense of honor - or even the shadow of a conscience - she was as doomed as Coruscant itself. After the HoloNet had reported her failure at the Solos' apartment, Tsavong Lah's villip had everted just long enough to say as much.

"I hope you do understand, Dab," Viqi said. "I will not suffer failure lightly ... I will not suffer it at all."

 

Leave it to the Eastport docking master to squeeze a ronto into a rabac hole. By keeping the dome irised open and landing the Byrt nacelles-down inside a magnolock hull-hoist, the remarkable Shev Watsn had squeezed a two-hundred-meter starferry into a berthing bay designed for yachts and light transports.

Leia could have slapped him with a lightsaber.

Ten thousand terrified people stood waiting to board a vessel that would hold five thousand at best, most standing in front of Docking Bay 3733 where the Falcon was kept under an assumed name. As much as Leia wanted to board their ship and get off Coruscant with Ben, she knew they would be mobbed by desperate refugees the instant they tried to push through the throng. For now, the best thing to do was wait at the edge until the Byrt began to board, then work their way over to their berth as the crowd pressed forward.

Leia hoped they would have enough time. Through the narrow crescent of sky visible above the Byrt's nose, she could see a steady stream of government yachts rising out of Imperial City - the New Republic's dedicated senators and loyal government officials abandoning their posts. So far, the Yuuzhan Vong were still too busy with the New Republic military to harass fleeing civilians, but that would change soon. She had even heard of senators asking admirals from their own sectors to escort them home, and in far too many cases those requests were being honored. She found it difficult to believe this was the same New Republic she had helped found - and for which Anakin had given his life.

"General?" The voice that asked this was reedy and quavering. "General, is that you?"

Leia turned with Han, the Noghri, and the droids to see a luggage-burdened woman with a large nose and tired eyes pushing through the crowd toward them. Trailing along at her side was a sandy-haired boy of about twelve, also struggling beneath a mound of baggage.

"General!" As the woman said this, she suddenly found her path blocked by Adarakh and Meewalh. "It is you!"

"I haven't been a general for a long time." Han spoke quietly and tried not to be too obvious as he glanced around to see who might be eavesdropping. "Do we know each other?"

"You don't remember?"

The woman used a bag to sweep her son forward, and Leia was struck by just how much he looked like Anakin at that age. It was more than just the upturned nose and the ice-blue eyes; his whole face was shaped the same, and he even had the same round little chin. Her heart went out to this boy and his mother.

Han studied the woman and her son, then said, "No, I don't remember."

The woman did not seem offended. "Well, of course, I'm sure it was more important to me than to you. After all, you were the general, and Ran was only a flight officer in Rogue Squadron."

"Ran?" Han asked. "Ran Kether?"

"Yes," the woman said. "I was only his girlfriend then, but I met you twice on Chandrila -"

"Okay," Han said, warming instantly. He motioned the Noghri aside. "I'm sorry I don't remember you. How is Ran?"

The woman's expression fell. "You didn't hear?"

Han shook his head. "I've been, uh, out of touch."

"He was flying refugee transports for SELCORE. We lost him at Kalarba." The woman glanced at Leia for the first time. "I understand your daughter was injured there, too."

"She recovered quickly." Balancing Ben on a hip, Leia reached out to squeeze the woman's hand. It was the first time since Anakin's death that she had felt sorry for someone other than herself, and in a self-centered sort of way it was almost a relief. "I'm so sorry about Ran. There's too much of that these days."

"Thank you, Princess."

"Leia, please." Leia touched the shoulder of the boy who looked so much like Anakin. "I'm sorry about your father, young man."

The boy nodded and looked uncomfortable. "Thanks."

"This is Tare, I'm Welda." The woman smiled at the child in Leia's arms. "The gossip vids haven't said anything about you being pregnant, so I assume this beautiful boy is Ben Skywalker?"

"Actually, we're trying to keep that quiet," Leia said. She cast a meaningful look around the crowd. "You understand."

"I'm sorry." Welda's tone was abashed, but she did not blush. "How foolish of me."

A loud clunk sounded from five meters up the Byrt, and a cloud of vapor shot into the air as the boarding hatch broke its seal and opened. Although the boarding ramp had not yet been lowered, the crowd immediately began to compress forward.

"It looks like they've worked out the artificial gravity alignment problems." Welda looked at the still-growing crowd, which now had to be closer to twelve thousand than ten. "I hope there'll be room for us all."

Han looked behind the woman's head and raised his brow at Leia. She nodded. They would be taking as many refugees with them as the Falcon could carry anyway, and she had no intention of leaving this pair behind.

Han smiled crookedly and leaned close to Welda's ear. "Actually, that won't be a problem."

The boarding ramp came down. The crowd started to ascend rapidly, each group being detained at the hatch long enough for an epidermal scan to ensure they were not Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators.

The Noghri took advantage of the movement to start easing the group toward the Falcon's berth. There were a few angry glares and muttered comments about pushy Solos, but the presence of a war droid and the fact that the group was not cutting forward limited the objections to the nonphysical kind. Leia was careful to keep Tare and Welda close at hand, and the group reached the entrance to Docking Bay 3733 intact. Now came the tricky part - getting inside without being trampled by desperate refugees. Han quietly stationed YVH 1-507A in front of the durasteel door and reached for the security pad.

"If you're trying to slice the security, save yourself the bother," a gravelly voice said. Leia turned to find a horn-headed Gotal in a gaudy scintathread tunic speaking to them from within the crowd. "Whoever owns that junk heap couldn't afford the berthing fees. The umbilicals are all disconnected."

"What?" Han cupped his hands to the viewing panel and peered inside. "You've got to be kidding! There's containment fluid all over the floor."

Even after sitting idle for several days, the Falcon could be cold-started in only a few minutes - but not without a fully charged fusion containment unit. Too devastated to ask the helpful Gotal what he had been doing looking at the Falcon - she had no doubt he had considered trying to slice the security panel himself - Leia turned to apologize to Welda.

The woman was no longer beside her.

Something metallic hit the floor a couple of meters away, and Leia glimpsed Tare pushing through the crowd. She switched Ben to the other hip so her weapon hand would be free, then YVH 1-507A clanged past toward the sound, his powerful arms batting people aside as gently as possible.

"Remain calm and please seek shelter," he intoned. "There is an active thermal detonator in the area."

Of course, the crowd did anything but stay calm. Determined to board the Byrt at any cost, someone kicked the detonator and sent it skittering across the floor, and the mob began to push toward the boarding ramp even more urgently.

"Do not kick the detonator," YVH 1-507A ordered. "Remain calm and step away."

Someone booted it back at the original kicker, and the droid skidded over a family of Aqualish trying to change direction. Incredibly, the crowd continued to shove forward, between the Solos and to both sides of them. Determined to avoid becoming separated from Han, Leia snapped her lightsaber from beneath her jacket and turned back toward the berth. She found Welda blocking the way, raising a small hold-out blaster and pointing it at Leia's chest.

The weapon remained there for about half a second before Adarakh, still holding the luggage he had been carrying, sank his teeth into the woman's arm. There was a sickening crunch, and Welda's hand fell open and let the blaster fall. The Noghri used a bag to knock her feet out from beneath her, and then he was on her, tearing at her head with both hands. Even this did not stop the desperate mob from pressing forward around the fight.

Far too accustomed to assassins and kidnappers to waste time wondering who had sent them or why, Leia positioned her body between Ben and Welda and started to push her way around the fight. Han was two steps away from her, holding his blaster in one hand and using the other to punch the admittance code into the security panel.

"See-Threepio, where's Meewalh?" Leia asked.

"She went after Tare, mistress." Still holding her blast-scorched ladalum, the droid was following Leia around the fight. "I do hope the boy set a long fuse on that thermal detonator! One-dash-Five-Oh-Seven is so terribly clumsy."

The soft drone of a vibroblade sounded behind Leia. Surprised that Adarakh had not finished the fight already, she turned to find a powershiv rising in Welda's good hand. The Noghri blocked easily, then countered with a slash that caught the woman beside the ear and lifted her entire face off. The woman's scream was nowhere near as ghastly as it should have been. Her face squirmed in Adarakh's hand like a thing alive, and neither Leia nor the Noghri understood for an instant what they were looking at.

That was all the time Welda needed to drive the powershiv into Adarakh's ribs. The Noghri's eyes grew wide with shock and his mouth fell open, then Leia felt the life leave his body. All of the disappointment and sadness she had been feeling since Anakin's death turned instantly to anger. She thumbed her lightsaber active and, still holding Ben, stepped forward to attack.

Welda hurled Adarakh's body into Leia's knees, knocking her legs from beneath her and rolling away. Leia was barely quick enough to catch herself with the Force and avoid landing on Ben. A pair of blaster bolts zinged overhead from Han's direction, forcing her attacker back and eliciting an even louder uproar from the panicked crowd. Leia gathered her feet beneath her in a fighting crouch and found the assassin mirroring her position from two meters away, a wide-eyed Ho'Din family squeezing past behind her.

Even with every pore still oozing blood where the ooglith masquer had been forcibly ripped away, the slender face across from her was unmistakable.

"Viqi Shesh," Leia said. Ben finally had enough and began to cry, but Leia was too outraged to pay attention. "I would've thought you'd be down in the grotto levels waiting for your masters with the rest of the granite slugs."

"Leia - always the proper word for every occasion."

Shesh flicked her wrist, hurling the powershiv at Ben. Leia blocked easily with her lightsaber, then cursed inwardly as Han chased the traitor off by zinging another pair of" blaster bolts over her head.

"You're a better shot than that, Han!" Leia snarled, although she knew he had only been trying to avoid hitting innocent bystanders. She thrust Ben at C-3PO. "Put that tree down and hold him."

"Me?" The droid dropped the pot and cupped his metallic hands under the child. "But, Mistress Leia, you had my child-care module wiped after that time -"

"Wait on the Falcon," Leia ordered.

"Of course, Princess, but I must remind you ..."

The droid's objection was lost to the general din as Leia pursued Shesh into the crowd. She heard Han call her name, but did not turn back for him either. The traitor would not escape, not after betraying the New Republic, selling out SELCORE, and no doubt arranging the deaths of a great many Jedi. Perhaps she had even had a hand in Anakin's.

The whine of a pair of repulsor-enhanced legs echoed through the docking facility girders and YVH 1-507A bounded over the crowd toward Gate 3700.

"Make a hole! Thermal detonator coming through!" The droid crashed down on a hoversled loaded with priceless sculptures and immediately bounded into the air again. "Remain calm and -"

The command ended in a deafening crackle as the detonator ignited, taking with it five hundred cubic meters of docking facility, sentient biomass, and durasteel substructure. As the sizzling sphere contracted on itself, a long metallic groan reverberated through the docking facility, then a large section of floor suddenly began to sink toward the now-nonexistent Gate 3700.

The crowd roared and somehow began to run at the Byrt, half pushing, half carrying those in front up the boarding ramp. Leia found herself being carried backward by the crowd and had to use the Force to stay in place. Her quarry was nowhere to be seen, but she did spy a blood-smeared Rodian rushing in her direction. She pushed through the crowd and planted herself in his path, raising her inactive lightsaber to stop him.

He buzzed an objection at her in Huttese.

"Everyone is trying to board that ship." As she spoke, Leia gestured at him with an open palm. "And I'm sure you'll make it that much sooner, if you just take the time now to tell me where the woman who smeared this on you went."

The Rodian repeated her suggestion, then pointed to Docking Bay 3732 - the next one after the Falcon's. Leia let him go and fought her way fifty meters up the corridor, her fury growing with every step. The damage Viqi Shesh had done to the New Republic was immeasurable, the pain she had caused the Solos unforgivable. Leia owed it to Anakin - and to all of the millions of others who had given their life defending an ideal - to repay her in kind.

Leia reached the bay to find it already secured. Not bothering to try the control button, she ignited her lightsaber and jammed the blade into the seam, slicing through the durasteel locking bolt as though it were so much tin. The security alarm that began to blare both inside the berth and outside did little to add to the general commotion in the docking facility. Following close behind to shield herself from attack, she used the Force to push the durasteel door open - and was surprised to find blaster bolts already ricocheting around the launch bay's dreary interior.

In the center of the bay sat a sleek KDY staryacht, the pilot peering through the cockpit viewing panel as he powered up the repulsor drives. Viqi Shesh was about a third of the way around the circle, holding her mangled arm and dodging for the boarding ramp while Han fired at her through a hole that someone had recently cut through the durasteel wall separating Docking Bay 3732 from Bay 3733. He was being fired on, in turn, by a pair of crew members trying to cover their employer from the well of the boarding ramp.

Leia started across the bay after her quarry, only to hear the ominous whir of the yacht's roof-mounted weapons turret revolving in her direction. She barely had time to hurl herself to the floor before the weapon depressed and fired, burning a fifty-centimeter hole into the durasteel beside her head.

Leia rolled and came up with her blade ignited.

"Leia, are you crazy?" Han yelled, forgetting himself and rising up in front of the hole. "You're not that good with that thing!"

The crew members poured a flurry of blaster bolts through the hole, forcing Han to dive for the floor and giving Shesh a clear path to the boarding ramp. The turret laser fired again, but Leia was already dodging across the floor - if a bit awkwardly, at least fast enough to keep from getting hit. She stumbled and nearly fell, then heard a blaster rifle off to one side. She turned toward the sound and found Viqi Shesh rushing under the yacht toward its boarding ramp.

Trying to ignore the blaster bolts pinging off the durasteel all around her, Leia locked her lightsaber on and hurled the weapon at the traitor, using the Force to keep it spinning toward its target. The turret laser fired again, as did the crew members at the top of the boarding ramp. Leia gave her body over to her instincts and continued to focus her mind on the attack, trusting to the Force to move her arms and legs in the correct manner.

Shesh hurled herself down on the boarding ramp. Instead of cutting her in half, the blade slipped along her back, burning away her clothing and a thick layer of skin and bone. She screamed and collapsed, then reached up with her arms and began to pull herself toward the interior of the ship. The ramp rose, and the last thing Leia saw of the traitor was a pair of male hands pulling her aboard.

Leia did not even realize she was also being dragged out of harm's way until she heard Meewalh say, "Lady Vader, you must get down!"

Leia allowed the Noghri to pull her to the floor just as another cannon bolt tore through the wall above her. When the yacht's repulsor engines whirred to life and a second bolt did not follow, she reluctantly raised her head, her heart already bursting with the news she would have to give Meewalh.

But instead of the Noghri, she found herself staring at Anakin's twelve-year-old face.

"Do whatever you want to me," Tare said. He was sitting with his back to the wall and his hands bound by a pair of Meewalh's plasteel restraining cuffs. "At least my mom and sisters are safe."

"Safe?" Leia could only shake her head. "Is that what you think?"

"It's what I know." The boy tipped his head back and looked up at the ceiling, where Shesh's yacht was being forced to wait until the docking master cleared it for departure by opening the dome. "They're on the Wicked Pleasure right now."

Leia was already reaching for her comlink when Han came running up.

"Forget it," he said, displaying his own comlink. "I tried. Shev's not holding vessels for anyone."

Leia nodded. It hardly mattered what Shev said; with its big laser cannon, the yacht could blast out of the bay anyway.

Han held out her deactivated lightsaber. "Feel any better?"

"Not really," Leia admitted. She stood and took the lightsaber, hanging it inside her jacket again. "How about you?"

"Worse," Han said. He pointed at Tare. "What are we going to do about him?"

The last thing Leia wanted to do was take this particular child along on the Falcon, but she was certainly not going to abandon a twelve-year-old boy on Coruscant. She grabbed him by the wrist restraints and pulled him to his feet.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Han frowned, then looked expectantly toward the door. "What'd you do with See-Threepio and Ben?"

"They're supposed to be with the Falcon."

Han's face fell. "Not likely. When you ran off, I secured the door to keep the mob out."

A low rumble shook the berth as the dome irised open, and they looked up to see the Byrt rising on a pillar of ion efflux. The Wicked Pleasure slipped out of the bay and followed it skyward, then C-3PO's voice came over the comlink.

"Master Han? Mistress Leia?"

Leia and Han activated their comlinks together. "Where are you?"

"This isn't my doing!" the droid said. "The berth was locked, and I was helpless to defend us."

"See-Threepio!" Leia said. "Are you telling me you're aboard the Byrt?"

"I'm afraid so, Mistress Leia," he said. "And they're threatening to put a restraining bolt on me!"

 

Chapter 52

The skips were stacked like the stones in an ancient Massassi wall, each craft hovering above the gap between the two below, every gap covered by interlocking fire from an inner ring of corvettes. Behind the corvettes waited frigates, and somewhere behind the frigates was the cruiser bearing the yammosk. Luke and his shield mates launched another volley of shadow bombs and watched the weapons veer into shielding singularities. The three Jedi continued on vector long enough to taunt the Yuuzhan Vong pilots with a fusillade of cannonfire, then broke oft" amid a storm of hot plasma and angry grutchins. Though all three were careful to present inviting attack angles as they turned, none of the enemy coralskippers abandoned station to pursue. The warmaster had finally learned how to protect his yammosk, and woe to the warrior who broke formation.

Luke opened a channel to Orbital Defense Headquarters, to whom they had been passed off as the battle drifted closer in to Coruscant. "Zero on the chasers, Gambler. That yammosk is in the battle for good."

"Copy, Farmboy. No reason to be disappointed," Lando replied. "You've forced them to take half a fleet out of the fight."

"That's something." Luke had no idea how Lando had come to be General Ba'tra's special operations commander, but he was glad to have someone of such composure serving as their battle coordinator. Judging by the static and booming on the channel, the ODH itself was under heavy attack. "Let's try a wave attack. Maybe we can just punch through."

"Negative," Lando said. "Stand by for a planetside comm patch."

Luke felt Mara grow instantly apprehensive. Han and Leia should have been off Coruscant an hour ago, but it could not be anyone else.

Han came on the channel. "Can you break free up there?"

"You know we can," Mara answered.

"You need to catch the starferry Byrt." As Han spoke, the tactical display shifted scales. A targeting square appeared a quarter of the way around the planet, on a 200-meter transport rising into space. "C-3PO is aboard with your package."

"It's my fault." Leia's voice was as brittle as a glitterstim web. "Viqi Shesh ambushed us in the docking bay, and I was so furious -"

"Leia, don't worry," Mara said. There was only resolve in her voice, no blame or worry. "We'll get him back."

"Okay." Han sounded relieved. "We're stuck planetside until we find some containment fluid. The senator did a job on our feed lines and umbilicals."

Now Mara was worried, Luke sensed. Charging an empty containment unit could take hours. Coruscant didn't have hours. Given the number of coralskippers and airskiffs already dropping out of orbit, it might not have one hour.

Luke was about to send Saba Sebatyne down in her blastboat when Lando came on the channel. "Old buddy, the scarheads will blast this bucket of bolts out from under me any minute. I could drop down in the Luck and give you a lift."

"And leave the bird behind? Never!" Han commed. "You guys take care of things up there."

"Will do," Luke said. "And may the Force be with you."

"Yeah, kid - you, too," Han said. "Solo out."

Luke's thoughts turned to his son. Mara had already plotted an atmosphere-skimming vector that would intercept the Byrt and a thousand other vessels streaming up from the Eastport/Imperial City area. But they would have to hurry. The tactical display showed a Yuuzhan Vong frigate group moving to intercept the fleeing starships.

"Gambler -"

"Go," Lando commed. "A couple of Jedi won't make a difference here."

Luke peeled off after Mara, who was already diving away. Noticing that Tam was following, he commed, "Quiet, stay with the wing. Hisser, you're in charge. Make it look good until things fall apart, then comet for the rendezvous."

"You do not want help, Master Farmboy?"

"I want it." Luke pushed the stick forward and followed Mara under the flaming belly of a kilometer-long KDY New Republic battle cruiser. "But every minute you hold that task force here saves ten thousand New Republic lives."

"Copy," Saba said. "Count on us to save a million."

The comm speaker gave a sharp crackle, then Luke came up on the other side of the cruiser to find a rolling fireball where the tactical display showed Mara's X-wing.

Jinking around the explosion, he commed, "Mara?"

No answer, but she reached out through the Force, urging him not to worry. Get Ben.

R2-D2 tweedled a warning. Luke swung left and narrowly avoided a barrage from the enemy vessel - also a cruiser - that had set the KDY aflame. He designated it a high-priority watch for R2-D2 and automatically fell into a random jink-and-juke evasive pattern. He found Mara silhouetted against the lights of Coruscant's night side, her number three engine trailing yellow flame, her astromech droid domeless, her S-foils stuck half open - no good for firing or speed.

Has she been anyone else, or their task any but retrieving Ben, Luke would have ordered her to a safe base. With Mara, that was out of the question until their son was safe. He pulled his X-wing alongside hers and pointed at her shield generator.

Mara shook her head. No shields.

Finally frightened, Luke reached out with the Force, consciously reinforcing their bond. Mara reached back and slid into place beneath his X-wing - before he could gesture her over.

They skimmed through the upper atmosphere, giving wide berth to a small battle raging around a skyhook residential platform tethered in low orbit, then began to take incidental fire dodging through an airskiff insertion zone. As they drew nearer the Byrt, R2-D2 kept changing the tactical display's scale to show more detail. It soon grew apparent that the Yuuzhan Vong frigate group was moving to intercept the same starferry they were.

They left the atmosphere again and found themselves surrounded by a dozen small battles as Yuuzhan Vong assault groups struggled through the interlocking fire zones of Coruscant's orbital defense platforms. The invaders were succeeding, but slowly and only by weight of superior numbers. In view of the naked, eye alone, there were a dozen enemy cruisers venting their entrails into space and hundreds of smaller craft drifting about in aimless, decaying orbits.

Luke started to detour around the combat cluster - and drew an admonishing whistle from R2-D2. A pair of time estimates appeared on the main display, showing that the frigate would beat them to the Byrt as it was. Luke adjusted the threat alarms to their most sensitive and set the X-wing on a straight vector.

Something bumped his starfighter's belly. Luke's first thought was of Mara, that maybe she'd been hit again; then he felt her apprehension and knew she was there. His X-wing jumped again. He looked over and saw her flying down to one side. She pulled back on her stick and banged her S-foils into his undercarriage, hard.

When she bounced away, they were closed. A new time estimate appeared on Luke's display. They would intercept the Byrt within a few seconds of the Yuuzhan Vong.

"Artoo, is Mara seeing this?"

The droid chirped impatiently, then an explanation appeared on the primary display. R2-D2 was using his transceiver to feed data directly onto her vid displays.

"You could have told me," Luke said. "Ask how many shadow bombs she has available."

Mara held up three fingers.

Luke nodded, then flashed three fingers twice and closed his S-foils. "Give us a two-second count."

The count appeared, and two seconds later they were flying through the combat area at two-thirds an X-wing's top speed - the best Mara could manage on three engines without drifting into overload ranges. Luke lost his own shields when an enemy corvette used half a dozen dovin basals to rip them in swift succession, drawing down the grab-safety and overloading the generator as it tried to bring up new protection too quickly. But then they were above the defense platforms and out of those battles, streaking after the Byrt.

Luke opened a channel to the liner. "Starferry Byrt, please alter vector toward incoming X-wings. We'll eliminate your pursuit."

There was a short pause, then a deep voice came over the channel. "You gone vac-brain? There are only two of you!" A second New Republic vessel, a sleek KDY staryacht flying with its transponder off, appeared on the tactical display behind the Byrt. "We'll take our chances. No particular reason they'd be after us."

"There is," Luke said. On the display, the frigate group - a frigate analog and two corvettes - was gaining on the starferry. "This is Luke Skywalker. You have my son aboard."

"What?" the captain cried. "This is no time for jokes."

"No joke," Luke said. "Alter your vector now."

Though he doubted it would carry over comm waves, Luke put the weight of the Force behind his words.

The Byrt's vector started to bend.

Mara's relief washed up from below. Luke checked the tactical display and found the KDY staryacht continuing along its original vector - one less factor to worry about. The Byrt came into visible range, a finger-length needle of ion efflux illuminating the yorik coral noses of the three pursuing vessels.

Luke touched the symbol of the rearmost corvette. "Artoo, designate that one for Mara ... and tell her to be careful."

R2-D2 bleeped an acknowledgment. The Jedi split, streaking toward their targets in wild corkscrews. The frigate group dropped skips and began to spray plasma. Lacking shields, Luke and Mara poured on speed and gave their stick hands over to the Force. The enemy vessels swelled into stony monoliths, scabrous and black and half hidden behind whirling curtains of flame. Mara broke toward her corvette, barrel-rolled past half a dozen skips, and launched her shadow bombs.

Luke swung after her. The skips took the bait and rushed to intercept him. He broke back toward the frigate and dodged past a magma missile, slashed a grutchin apart on his closed S-foils, and made an oblique run down the vessel's flank.

A shielding crew snared his first shadow bomb twenty meters from target. The other two blossomed against the hull. One breached at midships, the other behind the bow. The frigate fell silent and began to vent flotsam. Luke dodged over the top and began a tight turn toward the last corvette.

Her first target already reduced to rubble, Mara was also swinging toward the corvette. Luke could feel her resolve as clearly as his own, but with her shadow bombs gone and her S-foils stuck closed, that was all she had.

"Artoo, tell her to dock with the Byrt."

The droid whistled negatively. They were too far apart to project data directly onto her screens.

"Great."

Luke finished his turn, found skips swarming over the corvette to cut him off. The Byrt's two laser cannons began to spray red bolts at the vessel's nose. The corvette held its fire and extruded capture tentacles.

Luke deployed his S-foils and began to trade fire with the skips. With Corran's new targeting system, he quickly destroyed the first pair and forced the rest to spread out. A notice alarm beeped on the tactical display. The unidentified staryacht had changed vector, was coming in behind Mara.

"What now?" Luke grumbled. "Get this onto Mara's display."

R2-D2 whistled doubtfully.

"Try." Luke juked past a plasma ball and poured cannon bolts into the skip that had launched it. "And open a channel to that yacht."

A half-dozen skips swung toward Mara. He started after them, then heard her voice in his mind.

No!

The image of the corvette flashed in Luke's mind, and he knew that Mara wanted him to concentrate on saving Ben.

Behind you, Luke returned. He sent a flurry of bolts streaming at the skips, then rolled back toward the corvette. "How about that channel, Artoo?"

An explanation appeared on the primary display.

"They won't?"

The reason for the staryacht's silence grew clear when it fired on Mara from behind. Luke twisted around and saw bolts streaming into her starfighter, then the bright flash of a hit. A piece of wing spun off flaming.

Go! Mara urged. The panic in her thought was for Ben, not herself.

A single word more, eject, came to Luke's mind. Mara wheeled toward the planet, using the Force to hold her X-wing level so it would not go into a tumble when she hit the atmosphere. Luke reached out to envelop her with his love, then looked to his tactical display and found her craft already marked for tracking. There was now a transponder identification below the staryacht: the Wicked Pleasure, registered to Senator Viqi Shesh. Luke took a breath and let it out, let his fury go with it. Then he marked the vessel as a target of opportunity.

A plasma ball skipped across his nose cone, and the tactical display went dead beneath his fingers. R2-D2 shrieked with static, then fell into an electronic babble as melted comm components and burning sensor packages spilled into space.

Luke soared in among the skips, dodging and rolling and pivoting, targeting by the Force alone and still scoring hits. He blasted one skip into pebbles and suddenly found a clear hole to the corvette. He closed his S-foils and accelerated. The skips whirled after him, pouring fire from behind. The X-wing bucked. Alarm screeches filled the cockpit. The engines lost power, and he decelerated.

Luke launched his shadow bombs anyway. The first veered into a skip's shielding singularity and detonated barely a hundred meters away. The other two vanished against the corvette's black silhouette. He kept pushing until their proximity fuses detected the pull of a dovin basal and blasted a pair of deep hollows in the vessel's hull.

Close, but no breach.

R2-D2 wailed for Luke's attention. He glanced back and found two engines, possibly all four, burning. He slapped the emergency shutdown, wheeled toward Coruscant, and reached out with the Force, pulling himself toward Mara and her plummeting X-wing.

I couldn't get to him, he told her. I just couldn't make it.

 

Jaina woke to the sound of laughter, with a bright light shining in her eye and a stink in her nose like a Gamorrean refresher station. The laugh was just the sort of mad cackle one would expect in a Kala'uun ryll den, but she knew better than to think her throbbing head and aching shoulder were the by-products of a spice dream. This nightmare was real. Nom Anor's frigate had shot down her stolen shuttle, Jacen and the rest were stranded on an enemy worldship, Anakin was dead.

The longblaster roared, and another mad cackle sounded somewhere forward of Jaina.

"Did you see that one?" Alema Rar chortled. "I cut him in two."

"Good," Jaina rasped. The effort filled her head with pain, but she welcomed it, drew strength from it. "Kill some more."

"Be quiet, Jaina," Zekk said, his voice condemning. The light shifted to her other eye. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"And you do?" Jaina slapped the glow stick aside, and the foul-smelling stinksalts, as well. "You don't even have a brother."

"But I do know the dark side," he said. "It isn't the answer."

"Who said I was turning to the dark side?" Jaina asked.

"You used the Force to kill."

Zekk did not say more.

Jaina looked away from Zekk's dark eyes. "He had it coming." Her numbness had been replaced with raw fury, and she was glad. "You saw what he did to Anakin."

"Anakin is beyond insults," Zekk said evenly. "And what about Vergere? You attacked her, too."

"I was angry."

Gritting her teeth against the pain, Jaina sat up and looked around. The inside of the shuttle was a listing mass of clutter, with a long crack running the length of the hull and a fluid-smeared tangle of cognition hoods and burst villips strewn across the flight deck. Jaina flashed on a garbled memory of struggling with those controls to keep the nose up, of skimming a crater rim and coming down like the rock the shuttle was, of skipping across the basin floor and rolling sideways and decelerating sharply as the nose caught ... then there was nothing, only a vague feeling of pitching forward and the sound of screaming voices and a sudden darkness.

Across from Jaina, Tahiri lay on a litter next to Anakin, one obviously broken arm resting across the husk in which his body was encased. Barely half lucid, she was still talking to him, describing how they had tracked him down in the Yuuzhan Vong mortuary.

In the back of the vessel, Lowbacca let out low groan as he moved something heavy into place. He rumbled softly to himself in the half-slurred voice of a Wookiee with a concussion, then let what sounded like a rock plop into a pool of viscous liquid. A sodden bang followed, and an instant after that, the distant crackle of an erupting plasma ball.

"A little short," Alema called from the forward door. "Raise it one degree, and you'll burn them crisp."

"I take it we're under attack," Jaina said to Zekk.

"Not exactly under attack, but they're coming," Zekk confirmed. "Nom Anor is trying to capture us alive."

A sneer came to Jaina's lips. "Let him try." She swung her legs off her makeshift litter and reached for her power blaster. "I'm going to enjoy this."

 

In all his decades of kicking around the galaxy, Han had never heard anything quite as eerie as the ululation of an anguished Noghri female. It reminded him of the sound of crumpling dura-steel, or of the comm shriek a star gives off just before going nova. Even shielded from the noise by the flight deck door and half the length of the Falcon, it sent a shiver down his spine - and drew tears from his eyes. After eighteen years with the Noghri, he still could not say he understood them - but he knew how much he owed them, and it always hurt when one fell defending his family.

Han wiped his eyes, then looked away from the rain of burning ships outside the Falcon's cockpit long enough to check the temperature in the fusion power unit. "We have about ninety seconds before we become just another fireball crashing down on a tower. Think we still have enough pull to recharge at Imperial City? Or should we try Calocour Heights?" He waited one second, five, then ten. "Leia?"

When there was still no answer, he glanced over at her. She was sitting stiffly upright in the oversized copilot's seat, her hands folded in her lap and her blank gaze fixed on her feet. For the first time, Han noticed that Chewbacca's old seat was so large that it left her toes dangling ten centimeters above the floor.

Han shook her arm. "Leia, wake up. I need you here."

Leia looked up, but stared out the cockpit at the distant smoke plume of a crashing Star Destroyer. "Why would you need me, Han? I'll only let you down."

"Let me down?" Han echoed. "That's crazy. You've never let me down."

Finally, Leia looked at him. "Yes, Han, I have. I went after Viqi Shesh -"

"So did I."

"But you didn't lose Ben and get Adarakh killed."

"Really?" Han sneaked a glance at the temperature of the fusion unit, then glanced around the cockpit theatrically. "Funny, I don't see them here."

"Han." Leia sighed the word, then looked out over Coruscant's smoking, broken-toothed skyline. "You know what I mean."

"I suppose I do," Han said. "I just didn't think you'd go away like I did. I thought you were stronger than that."

Leia faced him and, for the first time, really seemed to be looking. "How can you say that?" Though her voice remained even, her very calmness betrayed the depth of her anger. "This must hurt you, too - or do you care only for Wookiees?"

"I care." Han managed to hold his anger in check by reminding himself that her bitterness was a good sign; any emotional reaction was. "And that's why I'm not giving up this time - not ever again. Anakin and Chewbacca may be gone, and Adarakh and maybe even Ben and Luke and Mara - but we still have each other."

"That's about all." Leia looked back out the window.

"And we have hope," Han insisted. "As long as we have each other, there's still hope for us, for Jacen and Jaina - wherever they are - even for the New Republic."

"The New Republic?" Leia's voice rose so sharply it rivaled Meewalh's ululation. "Are you blind? There is no New Republic! It died before the Yuuzhan Vong came!"

"It didn't!" Han yelled back, no longer able to contain his anger. "Because if it did, then Anakin died for nothing!"

He glanced down at the temperature of the fusion unit again and saw that they were about thirty seconds from becoming a crater. Han said nothing; if his wife had really given up, he did not care to keep fighting himself.

Leia's mouth opened as though she were going to yell back, then she saw where he was looking, and all of the emotion left her face. Han felt her watching him watch the gauge. He said nothing. The gauge ticked up another bar.

"You're bluffing," Leia said.

"I'm betting," Han said. Jaina and Jacen were still alive, and she would not let her grief make her give up on them.

Leia watched the temperature rise another bar, then said, "Imperial City."

Han let out his breath. "Calocour's closer."

"Han!"

Han swung the Falcon around and began a silent countdown.

"Go to the chief of state's landing pad," Leia said. "We need to see Borsk."

"You think Borsk is still on Coruscant?" Han gasped.

"Where else? He certainly won't be going to Bothawui." Leia pulled a datapad out of the stowage slot on her seat and, with the ease of a practiced statesperson, began to make speech notes. "There's something I need to do for him."

 

Chapter 53

With the Orbital Defense Headquarters burning like a second sun as it plummeted across Coruscant's opalescent sky, the tapered spires and delicate towers of the Imperial Palace were bathed in scintillating orange light. As they descended toward the chief of state's private landing pad, Leia felt like they were dropping into a forest ablaze. Han brought them down less than a meter behind the tailfins of Fey'lya's garish Kothlis Systems Luxuflier and shut down the fusion unit even before the Falcon settled onto its struts. Leaving Anakin's look-alike - his true name was Dab Hantaq - aboard under Meewalh's care, they lowered the boarding ramp and found themselves looking down the barrel of a tripod-mounted G-40 portable cannon.

"Something wrong with the Falcon's transponder, Garv?" Leia asked, not all that surprised by the cautious reception. "We tried to comm, but couldn't get through."

"Just being careful, Princess." A thin man in the uniform of a New Republic general stepped into view. "Sorry about the comm problem. The Yuuzhan Vong are starting to take out the satellite web, so Chief of State Fey'lya has ordered a blackout on all nonmilitary communications."

"That's sure to help the evacuation," Han said.

Garv - General Tomas to everyone except his superiors and former superiors - responded with an enigmatic half nod. Leia had personally named Garv the commander of palace security, and in all the time she had known him, that was as close to a comment on a superior as she had ever seen from him.

"Garv, we ran into a little sabotage problem with Viqi Shesh," Leia explained. "Would it be too much to have someone recharge our containment fluid? And I'd like to speak with Chief of State Fey'lya."

"We can arrange both." Garv sent a furry-cheeked Bothan aide off to fetch the maintenance crew, then turned back to Leia looking uncharacteristically doubtful. "Forgive me if I'm intruding, but I've heard rumors about Anakin. I can't tell you how sorry I am."

"Thank you," Leia said. Knowing she would need to accustom herself to people offering condolences, she laid a hand on Garv's arm. "That means a great deal to us."

Han nodded. "We're going to miss him."

"As will the New Republic," Garv said.

"And speaking of the New Republic," Leia said, glad for an excuse to change the subject, "I noticed the data towers are still intact. Shouldn't someone be destroying those records?"

"Someone should be," Garv said. "But Fey'lya refuses to give the order."

"He thinks he can hold the planet?" Han asked, disbelieving. "The idiot! If the scarheads capture those survey abstracts, there won't be a safe place in the galaxy to put a base."

Garv's expression turned sour. "I have mentioned as much."

"I'm sure the chief of state will give the order when the time comes," Leia said. With shafts of turbolaser fire starting to strike at hostile vessels from rooftops all across Coruscant, she felt certain the time had come already - but Garv Tomas was too good an officer to exceed his authority even under these circumstances. "Still, it wouldn't be improper to arm the charges now, would it, General?"

Garv smiled. "Not improper at all."

He keyed the order into a datapad and dispatched an officer to see it carried through, then led the way through the hangar to the chief of state's towertop office suite. After a brief dispute with an agenda droid, which Garv won by virtue of a security override command, the general admitted them to the restricted chambers and withdrew to continue his duties. They found Fey'lya bereft of his usual gaggle of advisers and sycophants, standing alone in the heart of his opulent office, studying a holographic display of Coruscant's crumbling defenses.

The situation was hopeless. What remained of the New Republic fleets were surrounded or cut off from the planet, sometimes both. Half of the defense platforms were falling out of orbit, the rest blinking with critical damage indicators. The atmospheric security force was fighting fiercely in their V-wings and Howlrunners, but the superiority of their air-dedicated craft could not overcome the enemy's sheer numbers. Yuuzhan Vong drop ships were already forming up to make their runs, and Leia knew this battle would soon be moving to the rooftops.

It took Fey'lya a minute to notice he had guests. "Come to gloat, Princess?"

Leia forced a warm tone. "Not at all, Chief." Hoping Han's face would not betray the opinion of Fey'lya he had expressed earlier, she extended her hands and crossed to the Bothan. "I came to apologize."

Fey'lya's ears flattened. "Apologize?"

"For not helping with the military," she explained. "I'm afraid I was too consumed with grief."

Fey'lya's attitude changed instantly, and he took her hands between his paws. "Not at all. I am the one who should apologize - to call upon you at such a time!"

"It must have been important, or you wouldn't have intruded." Confident that Fey'lya was already considering how he might use her to bolster his evaporated support, Leia shifted her gaze to the display and let the comment hang. "Our position certainly looks tenuous. Can we hold?"

"We must," Fey'lya answered. "If Coruscant falls, so does my government."

"Yeah, wouldn't that be a shame?" Han said.

Resisting the urge to stomp on his foot, Leia smiled and pretended not to notice the sarcasm. "What my husband means to say, Chief Fey'lya, is that you have our support." She pulled Han to her side. "Isn't that right, dear?"

"Of course, dear." Han sounded sincere - or close enough to draw an accepting nod from Fey'lya. "Chief Fey'lya can count on us."

Leia put on an earnest look. "If you thought a few words from me would do any good ..."

Fey'lya's smile looked more relieved than appreciative. "What could it hurt? If the military knows you're with me, they'll stand firm behind my government. That's been the problem, you see - all these senators running for home and grabbing a piece of any fleet they can."

"I know," Leia said. "I've seen the newsvids. Is the comm center still over by the window?"

"That was such an easy place for Baldavian lip-readers to watch." Fey'lya took her arm and guided her toward what had been, when she occupied the office, a coat closet.

 

"One body of open water on the whole planet, and you drop our X-wings in it?" Mara said, wrapping an airsplint around her broken ankle. "The only one? What were you thinking, Skywalker?"

"Mara, I really didn't have a choice," Luke said. The heat of his engine fires had fused the fibers on the back of his flight suit, and he would need a close cut before his singed hair looked human again. "It was put them here or crash them into a tower."

Mara and Luke were staring across the firelit waters of the Western Sea, a vast artificial lake and multispecies recreation area spread across thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of rooftops. A dozen whirlpools marked where crashes less controlled than their own had punctured the durasteel bed and freed the contents to rain down on Coruscant's underlevels. All in all, it had not been a bad place to push the X-wings after they ejected, but the bottom was so strewn with discarded droids and junked airspeeders that locating their cherished R2 unit was proving difficult even for Luke.

She pulled the airsplint's inflation tab and did not allow herself to wince as it compressed her broken bones, then took an injector out of the ejection medpac and gave herself a shot of bacta numb. Mara would normally have avoided any kind of painkiller, but they would be moving fast over the next few hours, and she did not want her injury slowing her down. The Yuuzhan Vong were starting to bring their big vessels down to suppress the rooftop turbolasers, and she could sense that the Byrt had not escaped into hyperspace with Ben. They had to find a way back into orbit, and fast.

Luke finally stretched a hand over the water. A distant speck broke the surface and swelled into the shape of a scorched X-wing. A pair of Yuuzhan Vong airskiffs promptly dropped out of the sun to attack, in turn drawing fire from a nearby turbolaser battery. For a few short seconds, the sky above the lake erupted into a gridwork of streaking plasma balls and flashing energy bolts, then one skiff burst into rubble and the other pulled up, vanishing into the sun with a stream of laser shafts chasing its tail.

Mara waved their thanks up to the battery crew, which was so well camouflaged on a nearby rooftop that she had difficulty finding it until she used the Force. Luke brought the X-wing to shore and lifted a wildly chirping R2-D2 from the astromech socket. Other than heat scarring, the droid looked sound, and the fuss he was making confirmed that his hermetic seals remained intact after both fire and submersion.

Something big exploded high above, momentarily outshining the sun and spraying long tongues of white flame across the sky. Mara and Luke watched until the brilliance dimmed enough to reveal individual pieces of debris fluttering planetward, but there was no way to know whether the vessel had been New Republic or Yuuzhan Vong. Suddenly overcome by the desperation of their situation, she looped her arm through Luke's elbow and allowed him to take the weight off her broken ankle.

"Luke, how are we going to do this?" They had seen from the air that the hoverlanes were either jammed with traffic or blocked by debris, and they both knew that even if they did reach a spaceport, any spacecraft worthy of the name would be long gone. "We'll be lucky to get ourselves offplanet, much less rescue Ben."

Luke took her in his arm. "Trust in the Force, Mara."

"Is that the best you can do?" Mara asked bitterly. "Did trusting the Force save Anakin?"

"Perhaps Anakin was meant to save us," Luke said gently. He knelt in front of R2-D2 and used his sleeve cuff to dry the droid's auditory sensors. "We're not in this alone, Mara. If Artoo can get through on a military channel, maybe someone else can help."

"Maybe." Mara looked away and tried to keep the dark emotions from rising inside her. She did not want to blame Han and Leia for their son's peril, but it had been "help" that had endangered Ben in the first place. "Will you hurry, Skywalker?"

"Got it," Luke said. "Artoo -"

The droid whistled in excitement.

"You're sure?" Luke began to dry R2-D2's speaker grille. "You found Leia?"

 

"This is not the end," Leia said. "Two years ago, the Yuuzhan Vong entered our galaxy. They came not as friends and equals, though we would gladly have welcomed them as such, but as thieves and conquerors. They saw a galaxy at peace and mistook the strength of our convictions for frailty of arms, the wisdom of compromise for the timidity of cowards. They attacked without provocation or mercy, slaying billions of our citizens, enslaving entire worlds, and sacrificing millions of beings to appease the bloodlust of their imaginary gods. They believed we would be easily defeated, because they believed we would yield without a fight.

"They were wrong. We have fought at Dubrillion, Ithor, the Black Bantha, Borleias, and Corellia - we have fought them every leg of the way from the Outer Rim into the Core. We have lost untold numbers of loved ones, my own son Anakin and my husband's dear friend Chewbacca among them, and now we are battling in the skies over Coruscant itself. We are still fighting.

"Soon, the enemy will be on our rooftops, in our homes, roaming the dark underlayers of our city. To those able to evacuate and to those trapped behind, I say the same thing I would tell my twins - were I able to reach them behind enemy lines: Keep fighting.

"This is not the end. Twice already, Jedi-led forces have decimated Yuuzhan Vong fleets, and we enter each battle with new weapons and better tactics. We have prevailed against ruthless enemies before, against Palpatine, against Thrawn, against the Ssi-ruuk. This is a war we know how to win. Keep fighting until you can fight no longer, then exhaust the enemy chasing you, and turn and fight some more. Keep fighting. I promise you, we will prevail."

 

The Lady Luck's flight deck fell as silent as a Noghri with a vibroblade. Lando pretended to adjust the shield power until he knew his eyes would remain dry, then heard an odd half growl from the copilot's seat. He looked over to find General Ba'tra drying his cheek fur.

"That woman could talk a Hutt onto a diet." The Bothan spent the next few seconds looking out the forward viewport, where the Byrt's, finger-sized profile was rapidly swelling to arm-sized. A smaller lozenge, black and scabrous, was tentacled to its belly, and Viqi Shesh's sleek KDY staryacht hovered nearby. Finally, Ba'tra grunted, "General Calrissian, none of those vessels looks like the Errant Venture."

"They're not," Lando said, offering no other explanation. As far as he was concerned, his reactivation had ended with the fall of the Orbital Defense Headquarters. Now, Ba'tra and his soldiers were just evacuees hitching a ride. He opened a ship-to-ship channel to his wife. "Has -"

"Where are you?" Tendra demanded. "I've been worried sick."

"Everything's fine. I was, uh, delayed at the ODH." As Lando spoke, he was sending her coordinates on a separate data band. "When Booster arrives, ask him to swing by this location. I'm doing a favor for some mutual friends, and it would be good to have a Star Destroyer standing by."

"What kind of favor?"

"It's important." Though the channel was encrypted, Lando hesitated to say more for fear of Peace Brigade slicers. "Just tell Booster. I'll see you soon."

"You'd better."

"Bet on it."

Not wishing to alarm Tendra, Lando signed off without telling her he loved her. Ba'tra studied him out of the corner of his eye.

"Didn't figure you for a hero, Calrissian."

"Me? Not at all." Lando flashed his salesman's smile. "But I couldn't pass on a chance to demonstrate my droids to a captive audience."

Ba'tra snorted, then half smiled and glanced at the primary display. Even this high in orbit, space was crowded with vehicles. For the most part, the Yuuzhan Vong were too busy with Coruscant's still-formidable defenses to molest civilian ships, but a dozen skips patrolled the area around the Byrt, chasing off any vessel that came near.

Ba'tra tapped a claw on the display. "Wouldn't hurt to bring some escort. We could call the Jedi wing off that yammosk."

"And draw attention to ourselves?" Lando cocked his brow mischievously, then activated the Luck's intercom. "Tighten your crash webbing back there. One-One-A, is your company ready to go?"

"Affirmative, General."

"I'm not a general. The reactivation was temporary."

"A general is always a general, General."

Lando rolled his eyes and opened a panel on the arm of his pilot's seat. He pressed a safety-locked button, and a valve in the starboard engine pod began spraying nonsealed Tibanna gas into the ion drives. The Luck sprouted a kilometer-long tail of what looked like white flame, but was actually a harmless fulgurous discharge caused by the ionization of Tibanna gas. Lando put the yacht into a corkscrew spin and set an oblique course for the Byrt, maintaining enough angle to clear the starferry by a safe margin. The skips scattered, but held their fire. A hit might change the "damaged" yacht's course and send it careening into the vessels they were guarding.

"Compliments, General." Ba'tra squeezed his eyes shut against the nauseating star spin outside. "Haven't seen a Bothan runaway gambit this tight in years."

Lando continued on a vector that would miss by half a kilometer. The skips wheeled around behind him, but stayed wrell back from the Tibanna tail. The Byrt swelled to the size of a building, and Lando nosed down toward it and decelerated hard, and then there was nothing but durasteel hull in the forward viewport, and the two ships kissed particle shields hard enough to push the starferry into the Yuuzhan Vong tether ship. Lando swung his stern around and tractored the Luck alongside the Byrt.

The first two coralskippers arrived, belching plasma balls into the Luck's energy shields. Lando shut down the sublight fuel feed and closed the efflux nacelles. Tibanna gas billowed out through the cooling vents, becoming trapped under the shields and engulfing the Luck in fused-photon "flames."

The next two skips pulled up without firing, and Lando lowered the shields on the Byrt's side of the yacht. "One-One-A, go!"

 

When General Calrissian's attack authorization came, YVH 1-1A was already magnoclamped to the Byrt, affixing a bead of elastic detonite to the hull. Still troubled by his failure at the Coruscant proving trial, he had dedicated a processing band to weapon-circuitry tests. All systems checked full power and ammunition - but so they had on Coruscant. YVH 1-1A's self-preservation routines kept accessing the memory of his blaster bolts dancing off the armored Yuuzhan Vong, kept reporting an undetected flaw in his power-selection module. His logic center knew the assertion to be groundless, but if it was only a ghost loop, why did it persist even after he degaussed his circuits?

In 1.2 seconds after General Calrissian issued the "go" order, two subordinate units secured the Lady Luck's cofferdam around him. YVH 1-1A withdrew to the air lock and activated the detonite. A door-sized section of hull popped free and clanged off 1-1A's chest armor as the pressures equalized.

Scanning ahead with both optical and acoustic sensors, 1-1A rushed through the breach into a small power-relay control station. Three crew members lay on the floor, holding their ears, groaning from the pressure shift. YVH 1-1A ignored them and crossed the cabin, then stopped when his see-through sensors detected a squad of Yuuzhan Vong in the main corridor outside.

Ambush? 1-24A asked.

Affirmative.

YVH 1-1A projected red dots onto the wall to show the location of each individual. He was about to outline an attack strategy when 1-24A clunked through the hatch and started firing. The results left no doubt that his weapon systems were functional.

Corridor secure, 1-24A reported.

Maximum efficiency, 1-1A complimented.

Circuits chilling at his own hesitation, 1-1A assigned firing teams to sever the enemy tether, to secure the Byrt's drive units, and to begin a Yuuzhan Vong search-and-destroy sweep. The most important task he reserved for himself. Leaving two squads to secure the breach until General Calrissian arrived with the biotics, 1-1A set his auditory sensors to their most sensitive and stepped through the hatch.

Though only 4.5 seconds had passed, the corridor walls were pocked with spent thud bugs, the floor strewn with Yuuzhan Vong bodies. Droid squads were advancing in both directions, their blaster arms filling the passage with flashes of color. As his processing unit began to interpret auditory data, 1-1A realized he had underestimated the difficulty of his own mission. Within current sensor range alone, he detected fifty-two vocalizing infants. Loudly vocalizing infants.

Starting with the nearest, 1-1A stepped over a still-smoking Yuuzhan Vong corpse and followed the wailing through a short maze of corridors to the first-class berthings. An enemy search party was pulling refugees out of their sleeping cabins, shoving them to the floor. The leader was dangling a crying infant by one leg, shaking it at a sobbing human female, and demanding, "Tell me! Is this the Jeedai baby?"

YVH 1-1A raised his blaster arm, and the whir of his servomotors caused the Yuuzhan Vong to whirl around. Some pushed their captives back into the cabins, others dragged them out to use as shields. YVH 1-1A sprang forward, firing. There was no question of faulty selection modules or dampened power outputs. He dropped five foes in five shots. When the leader attempted to dash the baby against the wall, he even felt confident enough to shoot the warrior's hand off at the wrist.

The astonished mother caught the child in her arms, then turned to 1-1A babbling incomprehensible words of gratitude.

"Remain calm," 1-1A replied. "Seek shelter immediately."

 

Viqi Shesh looked like something resurrected by a Krath death witch. Her cheeks were hollow, her pupils dilated, her skin as gray as a Noghri's, and her gait suggested the influence of some powerful painkiller. But she held her head high and seemed most determined to impress the Yuuzhan Vong following her down the corridor. Fearful that the glow of his photoreceptors would betray his presence, C-3PO stepped to one side of the evacuation bay hatch and continued to peer through the viewport at an oblique angle.

"And then the nasty Senator Shesh came looking for Ben Skywalker," he said quietly. In a futile attempt to calm the distressed infant, he was using his agile TranLang III vocabulator to replicate Mara's breathy voice. The imitation was flawless, but there was nothing he could do about the coldness of his metallic flesh - or about what the child sensed through the Force. "So brave Ben grew very quiet."

Ben whimpered loudly.

Out in the corridor, Viqi Shesh cocked her head to one side.

"I told Mistress Leia I was the wrong droid for this," C-3PO whined in Mara's voice. He opened the emergency medpac he had taken from the escape pod and removed the safetranq. "Please be quiet, Master Ben. I am quite certain your mother wouldn't want me administering sedatives."

Viqi Shesh spoke to her escorts, and they began to open hatches and search escape bays. C-3PO had primed their own pod for launch, but he was not eager to take another escape pod ride. Besides, they would only find themselves back on Coruscant.

The searchers were three hatches away when a hulking YVH war droid appeared behind them.

"Thank the maker!" C-3PO said.

He thought it was a 1-1 series, but that hardly mattered. The whole YVH line was top quality, and the mere fact that there was one aboard was a positive sign. C-3PO sent a burst transmission identifying himself and his charge and requesting aid. He received a terse reply informing him that rescuing him and Ben was the mission. Then the droid loosed a flurry of minicannon fire, taking out four of Shesh's escorts in half as many seconds.

Ben erupted into a fit of wailing. Given the roar in the corridor, C-3PO thought that three centimeters of durasteel wall might prevent the baby from being heard. He was disabused of that notion when he peered through the viewport and found Viqi Shesh crouching behind a bulkhead opposite him, staring through the viewport directly at him.

"Ben! Now look what you've done!"

 

It was just the sort of tactical problem suited to a deceptive Bothan mind: one narrow doorway defended by a dozen well - armed foes in possession of an undetermined number of hostages. Ba'tra would normally have sent a team through an air duct, or tried to lure the enemy out by feigning withdrawal. This time, he turned to a YVH war droid and pointed at the door.

"One-Thirty-two, secure the bridge."

"Yes, General."

YVH 1-32A waded forward into a bug swarm so thick Ba'tra lost sight of him. The droid countered with a lightning storm of blasterfire. Three seconds later, he stood in the doorway, both blaster arms smoking, laminanium armor pitted to the circuit casing.

"Bridge secure, General."

"Well done." Ba'tra raised his comlink and spoke to a subordinate waiting in Lando's yacht. "You may send the Lady Luck on her way, Captain - and give it some speed. I'm sure General Calrissian would appreciate the vessel still being intact when he activates his recall unit."

The general clicked off without awaiting an acknowledgment, then followed a dozen soldiers onto the bridge. Though there were no signs that the Byrt's crew had put up a fight, two had been tortured to death, the rest bloodied to various degrees. Ba'tra looked around until he found a Rodian with a captain's epaulet hanging off one shoulder.

"This ship is being commandeered." Ba'tra handed him a piece of flimsiplast with a set of coordinates. "Take us here."

"You're not commandeering us, General, you're rescuing us." The Rodian studied the flimsiplast, then looked out the viewport as the uncrewed Lady Luck streaked past with an entire squadron of coralskippers in pursuit. The funnels atop his head twisted outward in confusion, then he said, "But I don't understand. This is barely beyond the battle. We won't be safe there."

Ba'tra smiled. "We will when the Venture arrives."

 

Lando was halfway down the service ladder when a shock wave slammed the Byrt so hard there was no need to finish the descent. He lost his grip and simply found himself squatting on the starferry's lowest deck, listening to the roar of a pitched battle around the corner.

"Thermal detonator ignition, General," 1-1A reported, already standing on the deck. "Tether ship destroyed."

"Thanks for the warning."

Lando stood, then heard a familiar drone and dropped back to his haunches as a stray razor bug streaked around the corner. The thing dived at his throat, but 1-1A zinged a low-power bolt past his ear and zapped it out of the air. Lando managed a weak smile, trying not to show his fright, but knowing the war droid had already detected his increased heart rate and the slight rise in skin temperature. He drew his blaster and peered around the corner.

Viqi Shesh and two dozen Yuuzhan Vong were withdrawing into Escape Bay 14, leaving the floor behind them strewn with tiny black seedpods. Though Lando had never seen this particular weapon, he felt sure the husks contained some unpleasant surprise.

"Analysis?" he asked.

"Unknown caltrop device," 1-1A replied. "High potential for biotoxin attack."

"Thanks for nothing."

The Byrt lurched slightly as the sublight drives kicked in, and Lando knew they were on their way to the Venture. He removed his breath mask from his combat belt.

"You're sure it's the right baby this time?" Lando asked. "We're not going after some Squib trapped in a locker?"

"The sound signature was identical," 1-1A said defensively. "And the confidence level here is high. YVH One-Twenty-five received a burst transmission from a 3PO protocol droid claiming to have the correct child."

"That's them." Lando covered his face with the breath mask. "Send in a droid, One-One-A."

Lando had barely finished before 1-25A rushed forward, deftly dancing through husks. He made it two steps, then the pods began to roll toward him. Another two steps, and his foot came down on one. Nothing happened.

Then he moved his foot, and a heart-shaped kernel shot into the air behind him. The droid went motionless, then drained into the nugget.

"Singularity mines." Lando pulled his breath mask down. "Nasty."

"Analysis predicts obstacle impassable," 1-1A reported. "All techniques for bypassing or clearing minefields will fail."

Lando shook his head in disappointment. "Remind me to speak with the brain department about your ingenuity routines." He took out his comlink and opened a channel to the bridge. "Calrissian here. Request two-second suspension of artificial gravity and inertial compensation."

"Copy."

Lando grabbed a bulkhead and had the droids magnoclamp themselves to the floor. A moment later, his stomach fluttered, and the singularity mines floated into the air. They drifted toward the stern and filled the corridor with eerie grating sounds as they brushed the walls and ripped two-meter holes in the durasteel. When gravity was restored, the remaining husks dropped to the floor and destroyed a five-meter section of service corridor.

Lando released the bulkhead and sprinted toward Escape Bay 14. He had intended to lead the charge himself, but the droids were already there, pouring blasterfire through the hatchway.

"Careful!" Lando ordered. "Watch the baby - and Threepio!"

He peered around the corner. The last Yuuzhan Vong were squeezing into the crowded escape pod, flinging thud bugs at the bay hatch. Viqi Shesh was nowhere to be seen, and the muffled wailing of a terrified infant could just be heard from inside the pod.

"Go!" Lando screamed. "Don't let it launch!"

YVH 1-1A was already charging. The bug swarm trailed off, then C-3PO's golden form tumbled out.

"Don't shoot!" C-3PO screamed. He picked himself up and raised his hands. "I'm one of you!"

The war droids continued to pour fire past C-3PO as they rushed across the launch bay. The pod hatch started to close. YVH 1-1A sprang forward, reached for the gap, arrived a millisecond too late to prevent it from sealing.

C-3PO palmed the automatic launch button.

"See-Threepio!"

Lando rushed for the control panel and hit the cancel pad. There was a soft clunk ... then the rockets pounded the blast shielding with efflux.

"What a relief!" C-3PO started across the bay. "I thought they would take me along."

Lando followed close behind. "See-Threepio, who was that crying in the escape pod?"

"Oh, that was me, General Calrissian," C-3PO answered in an infant's voice. He stopped next to an emergency breath-mask locker and withdrew a medpac pouch containing a soundly sleeping infant. "Ben won't be crying for several more hours, I am quite certain."

 

Chapter 54

With both valves of the distant air lock drawn open, a bright crescent of blue sun could be seen blazing out from behind Myrkr's rising disk, illuminating the million pillars of the serpent hall in gloomy streaks of sapphire. The shaper and his escorts were little more than stick silhouettes filing toward the exit in a single line. The voxyn queen was not visible at all, though Jacen knew she was there, in the gap two figures from the front.

"This is not right," Tesar rasped quietly. "That air lock can't be open."

"It is better to seek an explanation than to deny what we all see clearly," Tenel Ka replied. "There is an atmosphere outside that lock."

"Yes, but what else?" Vergere asked. "That is the question, is it not?"

"How about you answer it for us?" Ganner replied.

When Vergere spread her arms and gave a feathery shrug, Jacen looked back to the line of Yuuzhan Vong. He filled his mind with thoughts of fear and suspicion and reached out to the queen for the eighth time since leaving the hive colony.

The voxyn reacted even more quickly than she had the last time, whirling on the warriors behind her. She must already have struck the first Yuuzhan Vong with her poison tail barb, for she ignored him and belched acid at the second in line, then leapt past both to slash at the next one. All three warriors went down, and she was attacking a fourth before the shaper and two of his remaining assistants got hold of her leashes and restrained her.

Jacen withdrew his presence. The queen slowly calmed to the point where the shaper felt confident in approaching her, stroking her muzzle and no doubt speaking to her in soothing tones. It would not be long before that act of bravery turned into a deadly mistake, but Jacen did not want the beast to kill the handler yet. As wary as the warriors were already, the death of the shaper would cause them to send for reinforcements.

The shaper finally backed away and signaled his assistants to release the tethers. They had learned the hard way that the queen would not move with someone holding the other end of a leash - the result of another uneasy feeling planted by Jacen. When the voxyn showed its willingness to resume travel by not killing anyone, the Yuuzhan Vong turned and - leaving their dead and wounded where they lay - vanished through the open air lock.

"Only four left," Vergere said, rising from the group's hiding place. "Well done, Jacen Solo."

Jacen did not thank the strange little creature. He disliked killing, and he disliked even more tricking an animal into doing it for him. But he had his promise to Anakin to keep and his sister to track down - he still could not feel Jaina through the Force - and encouraging the voxyn to follow its nature was his only hope of doing either. He nodded to Tesar, who rose and set off. The Barabel kept them concealed in a fungus-lined rift, for the area was strewn with Yuuzhan Vong workers scavenging the exhausted serpent yards for a usable amphistaff or tsaisi baton.

As they traveled, Ganner remained a step behind Vergere, his repeating blaster pointed at her feathery back. Though she had been of considerable use in tracking the Yuuzhan Vong, the Jedi still did not trust her. Not only had she declined to identify her species - claiming they would not recognize it anyway - she had also refused to explain her presence during Elan's attempt on the Jedi, or her reason for providing the tears that had saved Mara's life. While unsure that she was an enemy, Jacen hardly considered her a friend, either. Needless to say, he now had Anakin's lightsaber clipped to a spare hook on his equipment harness, and Ganner had pointedly confirmed that he would blast her into a feathercloud at the first sign of treachery. Vergere had indulged them with a shudder, undoubtedly insincere.

The fissure and fungus both dwindled away as the group neared the air lock. To avoid drawing attention, the Jedi activated their holoshrouds and, keeping Vergere screened from view, marched through the air lock disguised as Yuuzhan Vong.

They found themselves standing on the inside rim of what looked like an enormous impact crater, save that the slope was surprisingly featureless and the crest unnaturally even. There was no covering overhead, but the atmosphere was as thick and warm as inside the worldship. In the bottom of the basin lay what resembled a giant honeycomb, save that each cell was a meter across and held a single dovin basal.

Jacen could not sense the emotions of the dovin basals - creatures with no connection to the Force remained as unreadable to him as the Yuuzhan Vong themselves - but he could see by their labored pulsing and flaking hides that the things were in distress. There were even large tracts where the cells contained nothing but shriveled husks. Whether this stemmed from old age, exhaustion, or disease he did not know, but it did suggest another reason the Yuuzhan Vong were deserting the dilapidated worldship.

The shaper and his escorts were already on the floor of the basin, moving along the edge of the basal-comb toward Nom Anor's frigate, which lay about a fifth of the way around the circle. The executor himself and perhaps fifty Yuuzhan Vong were half a kilometer out on the structure itself, crawling along the narrow walls between the cells and being careful to avoid the dovin basals themselves. From the group's different dress - many of them wore armor only over their torsos - it was apparent the executor had stripped the ship's crew to supplement his company.

Nom Anor and his followers were making their way toward the center of the basal-comb, where a huge sweep of cells contained either shriveled husks or nothing at all. In the heart of this dead area rested Jaina's stolen shuttle, cracked and overturned, but still in one piece. The sporadic stream of blaster bolts and magma missiles arcing out of the wreckage suggested that at least a few Jedi had survived the crash.

Vergere hunched beside Jacen, her gaze running from the queen over to Nom Anor's frigate, where four warriors stood watch at the base of the boarding ramp. "Interesting ... Will you destroy the voxyn, Jacen Solo, or save your sister?"

Jacen ignored the question and continued to study the situation. The longblaster roared and split open a warrior in front of Nom Anor. The executor shuddered, but lowered his head and continued forward.

"I don't understand," Tekli said. "The shuttle is helpless. The frigate should be attacking."

"Yes," Tenel Ka agreed. "Why crawl so far under fire?"

"Why, indeed?" Vergere said. "Perhaps there is something aboard they want alive?"

"Jaina," Jacen said.

Vergere spread her hands. "And you. Tsavong Lah promised Yun-Yammka a pair of Jedi twins for the fall of Coruscant. Matters will go badly for Nom Anor if she is already dead." She stopped there and studied Jacen a moment, then said, "But you could save him the trouble of looking, could you not? I understand that Jedi twins have a special ... sense of each other."

Jacen studied her from the corner of his eye. "I wouldn't place too much trust in cantina tales, were I you."

"No?" Vergere smirked. "Are you just cautious, I wonder, or do you have a suspicious nature?"

"Both are the same around you, this one thinkz," Tesar said. He checked the power level of his minicannon, then braced it on the crest of the slope and trained it on the voxyn. "Jacen, this one has two shots, maybe three. We must destroy the queen."

Jacen nodded. "And save -" He almost said Jaina, then caught himself. "- our friends on the shuttle."

"You cannot do both," Vergere warned. "The Yuuzhan Vong have a saying: 'The fleet that fights two battles loses twice.'"

"Do we look like Yuuzhan Vong?" Ganner demanded, pointing at his eyes. "We're Jedi."

"So you are," Vergere said mildly. "But the Yuuzhan Vong have their strengths, as well. Do not dismiss those strengths because the Force is blind to them."

"I don't," Jacen said. "But we are going to win two battles - and here's how."

He explained his plan to the others, then watched as a plasma ball arced over Nom Anor and crashed twenty paces away. The strike vaporized a ten-meter circle of basal-comb, but as the superheated gas spread over the adjacent cells, it condensed into nothingness and vanished in a sheet of flashing color.

"What about her?" Ganner motioned at Vergere with his blaster.

"Once you're on the frigate, she's free to stay or leave with us as she likes," Jacen said. "Until then, if she makes a false move -"

"Blast her," Vergere finished. She gave a flip of her four-fingered hands, then turned to Tesar. "On the bridge of the Ksstarr you will find a pilot, a copilot, and a communications subaltern. The master keeper will also be aboard somewhere. They are not permitted to leave while the vessel is in action."

"This one shall keep the information in mind," Tesar said. "And also where it came from."

Tesar passed his minicannon to Ganner, then removed his jumpsuit and slipped over the rim of the basin on all fours. His rough scales camouflaged him against the yorik coral's dark background, and he moved with such slow reptilian grace that it immediately grew difficult to pick him out.

Jacen filled his mind with an image of his cramped cell in the Shadow Academy and allowed himself to feel again the terror of the kidnapping, his fear and confusion when he realized he no longer controlled his own destiny. Never far from the surface even this many years after the event - and perhaps made more accessible by his anguish over Anakin's loss - the emotions returned easily. When a cold sweat began to bead on his forehead, he reached out to the voxyn, infusing her with his own feelings, urging her to flee.

The voxyn screeched and sent two escorts reeling despite the protective membranes in their ears, then turned to run and found a third warrior blocking her way. She snatched him up and bit him cleanly in two. The shaper raced after her, calling out commands, trying to calm her. Jacen urged the beast not to trust her "tormentor." She whirled and spat acid, but the shaper was quick enough to dodge and let one of his escorts be hit instead.

Jacen undipped his lightsaber. "I'll need to concentrate on the voxyn, so we have to do this without the battle meld. May the Force be with you, my friends."

Taking her own lightsaber in hand, Tenel Ka stepped over to kiss him - and was cut off by Vergere.

"And with you, Jacen Solo." The little creature shooed him down the slope. "Now go, before your quarry escapes."

Jacen looked over her to Tenel Ka and rolled his eyes, then flashed the Dathomiri a lopsided grin and pushed up his breath mask. Using the Force to descend the basin's inner rim in two bounds, he landed undetected behind the last stunned escort. Thinking he could knock the lurching warrior unconscious rather than kill him, he reached out to pull off the Yuuzhan Vong's helmet - and saw his mistake when the fellow spun on him.

Jacen thumbed his activation switch. The weapon sprang to life in front of the approaching arm and severed it at the elbow, but losing a limb would never stop a Yuuzhan Vong. Jacen turned his weapon ninety degrees and drew the blade across his foe's neck. The warrior collapsed in a heap.

"Jacen?" The voice on the comlink belonged not to Jaina, but to Zekk. "That you?"

"Who else?" Jacen continued forward, tried not to be disappointed that he wasn't talking to Jaina. "What's your condition?"

"A few injuries, but everybody's stable," Zekk reported. "We have Lowbacca - and Anakin's body."

"And Jaina?" Jacen asked, concerned by what Zekk left unsaid.

Zekk paused, no doubt surprised Jacen would need to ask. "She's here, Jacen."

Something in Zekk's tone hinted at the cold darkness Jacen found whenever he reached out to his sister, but he was happy enough for now to hear she was still alive. "Good. Wait there - somebody's coming for you."

Jacen risked a glance at the frigate. Whether or not the ramp guards realized who he was, the sudden appearance of a single Jedi had proved too much of a temptation. Leaving one warrior on-station, the other three were racing after him, amphistaffs in hand. Behind them, Tesar Sebatyne's dark figure was creeping into the shadows beneath the frigate's nose, gathering himself to pounce on the last sentry.

Jacen raced after the shaper and fleeing voxyn. The minicannon roared once, then twice, and two of his pursuers fell. The third dropped under a torrent of T-21 bolts. Jacen did not even look back. By now, Tesar would be boarding the frigate, the others rushing to join him.

The voxyn pulled away fast, the shaper less so. Jacen reached out with the Force, this time to soothe the voxyn. Not a chance. With plasma balls bursting and lasers flashing just a few hundred meters away, the queen continued to run. He tried to call her hunting instincts into play. No good either. Where her clones were trained to stalk Jedi, she was trained only to preserve her own life. Jacen pulled one of two thermal detonators from his belt, thumbed the fuse to the first click, and used the Force to hurl it into her path.

The queen whirled away from the silver ball, found her handler in the way, and slapped him aside. Jacen saw an arm fly in one direction and the rest of the shaper tumble in another, then the voxyn was racing toward him, head rising to belch acid. He activated his lightsaber and charged to meet her.

She disgorged her acid at three paces. Jacen launched into an airborne round-off, and the brown spray shot past below. Then the detonator crackled behind him, and he found himself swinging at empty air. He landed lightly and sprang into a half twist that brought him around facing the same direction as before, and his heart rose into his throat. No voxyn, only the brilliant flash of the detonator shrinking in on itself. Blinded, Jacen brought his lightsaber around in a block-and-slash and reached out to locate his quarry.

She was off to the side, moving away slowly. He blinked the dazzle from his eyes and found her crawling out onto the basal-comb, angling away from the battle, angling away from Jacen, her body so broad she had to straddle the wall between the cells. He left his T-21 slung on his shoulder and started after her. He had only a handful of shots remaining, and the bolts would not penetrate her thick scales anyway.

Tenel Ka's voice crackled over the comlink. "Frigate secured. We have a way home, but also a complication."

Lowbacca rumbled a question.

"How does not matter," Tenel Ka replied. "When we found the communications officer, he was in contact with the spaceport."

Jacen groaned inwardly, then asked, "Vergere?"

"She said she had no wish to be atomized, then departed," Tenel Ka said. "She seems to be following you."

"Check. You hurry." Jacen reached the basal-comb and had to slow. The walls between cells were a half meter wide, but so steeply crowned that running over them was like running on a board's edge. "Shuttle first."

"Us?" Zekk complained. "You do know the Yuuzhan Vong are chasing you?"

Jacen had no time to look. He was gaining on the queen. "Shuttle first," he repeated. "I have to finish here."

The voxyn stopped at the next cell convergence, where the walls met to form a sort of island, then whirled. Jacen leapt across the dovin basal and landed at her rear flank, tottering and activating his lightsaber. The voxyn screeched, but could not bring her head around far enough to assault Jacen. He danced forward and brought his blade down behind her forward leg.

Internal organs began to slip from the gap, leaking blood into the air and filling it with toxic fumes. Jacen slashed sideways, taking the second leg off at the joint, then thrust deep and brought the blade up. The voxyn pulled away, retreating onto the adjacent wall so she could turn on him. He leapt across to stay behind her - then heard a razor bug droning in his direction.

Jacen dropped into a squat and brought his weapon up to block, and the bug crackled out of existence. The voxyn continued to retreat until she could face him again. Jacen launched himself into a back flip and came down on the cramped convergence behind him, dared to glance away from the queen.

The stolen frigate was already sweeping across the basin toward the crashed shuttle, the forward ramp hanging open for quick boarding. Nom Anor and his warriors were within a hundred meters now, some staring up at the stolen frigate with gaping jaws, others still crawling toward Jacen, but all too distant to have thrown the razor bug.

A shiver of danger sense drew Jacen's attention in the opposite direction. He turned and saw a large Yuuzhan Vong flying at him across the cell.

"No, Jeedai!" The figure extended a single arm.

Jacen swept his lightsaber up and cut the fellow through at the waist and did not even recognize him as the shaper until an eight-fingered hand caught hold of his breath mask and nearly jerked him over. He lowered his head, and the breath mask came off. The Yuuzhan Vong's torso tumbled into the cell beside him, angry eyes glaring up, and barely touched the dovin basal before the creature reacted with its only defense. A tiny gravitic singularity sprang into existence, then the shaper's corpse collapsed in on itself and disappeared in a flash of dancing color.

The acrid smell of toxic blood reminded Jacen of the peril he faced without a breath mask. He looked up to find the queen staring at him from two meters away, eyes expressionless and black, the Force heavy with her grim resolve. The creature knew why he was here. She was not angry, not hateful - only determined to save herself. Jacen did not want to kill her - he had never wanted to kill any animal. Perhaps she sensed that in him.

Jacen's head started to spin. He had to finish this. Flicking his lightsaber to hold the creature's attention, he dropped his free hand toward his last thermal detonator. The queen came bounding. He pulled the detonator off his harness. She stretched forward to snap at his head, then surprised him with a claw to the shoulder.

The talons bit deep, launched him off his perch. The detonator flew, inactivated, from his hand, and the dovin basal appeared beneath him, rising fast. He whipped his legs over his head, flinging himself to the opposite side of the cell. Landing dizzy and off balance, Jacen continued in the same direction, this time flipping higher to buy more time.

He came down on his heels, vision closing, nostrils burning. He fell backward onto a convergence. His shoulder was throbbing already, but at least it still supported the weight of an arm.

A trio of coralskippers streaked past overhead, their noses pouring plasma balls toward the center of the basin. Coughing, fighting to stay conscious, Jacen sat up and saw the stolen frigate lumbering skyward beneath the bombardment. It launched a magma missile, which vanished into a shielding singularity the instant it neared a skip. With a large-enough crew, the frigate would overwhelm the smaller craft easily. With a handful of Jedi, it would be torn apart piecemeal.

Jacen activated his comlink, but was interrupted by a familiar burping sound. He rolled over his good shoulder and came unsteadily to his feet. A fan of brown mucus landed where he had been lying, then the voxyn began to advance. The acrid stench of her blood staggered him, made his lungs burn and his head spin, and nearly sent him tumbling down onto a dovin basal.

The queen reached the convergence and stopped. They were separated now by a sizzling pool of her acid. Jacen brought his lightsaber to middle guard, tip angled forward, his wounded arm hanging limp. Behind the voxyn, the hundred-meter bulk of a yorik coral corvette swept in and cut him off from the rest of the strike team. They were battling now, his friends and a whole flotilla of arriving Yuuzhan Vong.

A wave of nausea dropped Jacen to a knee. Eager to press the advantage, the voxyn gathered herself to spring.

A thermal detonator splashed into the pool of acid. The fuse had not been activated, but that was all Jacen saw before the silver casing sank into the sludge.

"Could that be important?" Vergere called. She was coming toward him, thin arms extended for balance. "I saw you drop it."

Jacen's jaw fell. "How did you -"

"No time."

Vergere pointed. The voxyn was scrambling along the edge of the convergence, fleeing the silver sphere. The detonator could never ignite without a properly set fuse, but what did the queen know about detonators? All spheres of shiny silver were spheres to be feared.

Jacen sprang feet-first, caught the queen dead center, heels driving high into her ribs, forcing her over the edge. She dug her claws deep into the yorik coral and saved herself. Jacen landed beside her, hard, and the breath left his burning lungs. The darkness began to rise inside him.

No, tried to rise. He stabbed his lightsaber into the yorik coral and began to cut it from beneath the queen's claws. Still intent on escaping the detonator, she released her front leg and reached for the adjacent wall, then her support began to crumble, and her front quarters slipped into the cell. She brought her tail around, the poisonous barb driving for Jacen's neck. He ducked behind his wounded shoulder, took the tip in an open gash, felt venom pulsing into his torn flesh. Hot. Stinging.

Too weak to kick, Jacen pushed with the Force. Another leg came free. The queen, also weakened by injury, slipped deeper. A foot grazed the dovin basal, then she was plummeting over the edge, collapsing in on herself, shrinking out of sight.

Jacen did not see the final flash of color. The barb tore free of his shoulder, and he was overwhelmed by dizziness, collapsing backward onto the convergence. Something began to sizzle, and his hand began to burn, then someone lifted his arm and propped him up.

There came a terrible thunder overhead, a firestorm so bright it lit the darkness behind Jacen's closed eyelids. He heard a voice calling - a voice he had known all his life, yet one that now seemed as alien as that of any Yuuzhan Vong.

"Jacen?" A pause, cold and demanding. "Jacen, answer me!"

A delicate hand brushed back Jacen's hair, took the comlink from his head. "You can do nothing for Jacen now," a second voice said - also familiar. "Save yourselves."

"Vergere?" the first voice demanded. "Is that you? I want to talk to my brother -"

The demand was clicked silent. Jacen opened his eyes and saw a delicate, four-fingered hand flinging his headset into the air. In the sky far above raged a battle, a Yuuzhan Vong frigate trying to blast through a screen of Yuuzhan Vong corvettes.

Jacen was confused, but only for a moment. The frigate was Nom Anor's, stolen by his friends, now trying to reach him. He struggled upright and saw a one-eyed Yuuzhan Vong leading several dozen warriors through a rain of plasma balls and magma missiles. Toward him. He tried to roll, found himself restrained by a four-fingered hand.

"No." Despite the apparent frailty of the hand, its strength was irresistible - at least in Jacen's condition. It took his lightsaber from his grasp, then undipped Anakin's from his equipment harness and took that one as well. "You have won your battles. Now you pay."

Jacen recalled the tortures he and the others had endured aboard the Exquisite Death. His stomach grew queasy. His hands trembled. He opened himself to the Force and smiled at his body's fear. The Jedi were safe. Compared to that, his pain meant nothing.

"It will, Jacen," Vergere said, surprising him. He did not recall speaking his thoughts aloud. "That I promise you - it will."

A warm drop struck his face, then another and another. Jacen craned his neck and found Vergere wiping tears from her cheeks. Her face was turned so Nom Anor and the others could not see.

"Vergere, were you -"

"Yes, Jacen." She pressed a finger to his lips. "I was crying for you."

 

Chapter 55

The drop fleets hit like an Nkllonian meteor storm, slanting across the sky in fiery armadas a hundred kilometers across, crackling and hissing like S-thread static and trailing anvil-shaped towers of night-black smoke. Standing in the open cannon turret atop Fey'lya's office, Leia allowed herself two seconds to be awed by the spectacle of it all and let the thunder reverberate through her body. There was something primal and beautiful in the power of the drop, something that stirred in her a passion of purpose that, until Anakin's death, she had thought lost with her youth.

Han came to her side and handed her a comlinked artillery helmet. "The end of the world," he said. "Who'd've thought we'd live to see it?"

"There'll be other worlds, Han." She put the helmet on and buckled the chin strap. "There was after Alderaan."

The smile Han gave her was as crooked as usual, but now more wistful than cocky. "Then let's hope this one lasts until they finish charging our containment fluid."

Shafts of color rose from distant rooftops to stab at the descending drop fleets, and vessels almost invisible to the naked eye showed damage in the form of white starbursts and flickering disks of orange. The turbolaser fire was answered by a torrent of plasma balls. Towers melted into liquid pillars of durasteel slag. In some cases, building shields endured the first strike, only to fall to the second, or the third. Dark swarms of coralskippers and airskiffs boiled down ahead of the drop fleets, taking advantage of the steady barrage to locate and attack the turbolasers. These attack craft were met by a far smaller number of New Republic atmospheric fighters, and a steady drizzle of smaller craft began to rain down on Coruscant.

General Rieekan's voice came over the helmet comlink. "Light artillery, take your stations. Hold fire."

Han slipped into the gunner's seat on one side of the laser cannon, and Leia took the spotter's station on the other. She would actually have the more difficult of the two jobs, finding and prioritizing threats on the weapon's display. All Han would have to do was shoot them down. Leia activated the sensor feed and began to plot trajectories, assigning precedence based on which drop ships would be approaching nearest to their position.

Over the next ten seconds, the number of turbolasers firing decreased steadily, but they punched so many holes in the drop fleets that Leia had to update her targeting priorities twice. By the time the ships themselves began swelling from fingertip-sized circles of friction flame into glossy black wedge-wings, the turbolasers had opened holes the size of lakes in the great armadas.

"Open fire," Rieekan commanded.

Han squeezed the trigger, and the air filled with the deafening screech of discharging actuators. Their attack took the first drop ship by surprise, burning away a wing and sending the wedge-shaped vessel tumbling in two different directions. Subsequent targets proved more difficult. Han had to pulse the trigger and stitch bolts across the hull to defeat the shielding crews, but it was easier to fire from a stationary turret than to defend aboard a wildly gyrating craft, and he and Leia sent two more drop ships crashing into the towers. They paid no attention to the skips and airskiffs diving on their position from all sides. Those were the responsibility of even lighter blaster cannons firing from adjacent towers, and their expert crews never let an attacker get close.

Finally, Leia could find no more targets on the tacscreen. She looked up into a dark miasma of smoke, fed by flaming ruins and fuming wrecks all across Coruscant. For a moment, all was quiet, then Rieekan's voice came over the comlink again.

"Look sharp out there. They're sending in the hunter-killers."

Leia studied the tactical display and saw a line of blastboat analogs - she and Han called them blast boulders - streaking toward their position. Large enough to take a hit or two from a light blaster cannon, yet nimble enough to dodge the slower laser cannons, these craft posed a more serious threat than anything that had come before. Leia began to designate priorities and feed Han targets.

Borsk Fey'lya chose that moment to appear on the access lift, flanked by a pair of tall Orbital Defense soldiers with sandy hair and square chins. Their other features were also so similar they had to be brothers. In Leia's time, relatives would never have been permitted to serve in the same unit, but those rules had changed under Fey'lya. Bothans had a different view of family.

"Leia, you have a comm message in my office," Fey'lya said. His brisk tone suggested he had lifted himself out of the torpor into which he had sunk when her speech failed to bring the deserting senators and their pilfered flotillas back to Coruscant. "You can take it at my desk."

"We're kind of busy right now," Han growled, pouring fire into the first blast boulder. "You might have noticed?"

"It's Luke Skywalker," Fey'lya said. "He seems to be trapped."

Han stopped firing. "On the planet?"

"Over at the Western Sea, if I heard him correctly," Fey'lya said. "The channel was scratchy."

Han looked over the cannon at Leia, and she knew he was thinking the same thing. If Luke was on Coruscant, there was no telling where Ben was.

"These guards will take your station," Fey'lya said, motioning to the brothers.

Leia slipped out of her seat and moved toward the lift. Instead of stepping out of her way as most soldiers would for a former chief of state, this pair stared down at her blank-faced. She knew instantly something was wrong, and confirmed it when she reached out with the Force and felt nothing from them.

"Forgive me, soldier."

Turning to hide her lightsaber from view, Leia stepped aside to let the infiltrator by, then caught her husband's eye as he did the same thing. Han furrowed his brow. She glanced pointedly at his blaster and snapped the lightsaber off her belt. An alarmed light came to his eye, and he reached for his blaster pistol.

His Yuuzhan Vong spun on him, knocking him into the back wall. Han slumped to the floor and, never taking his weapon from its swing-free holster, blasted the infiltrator.

Leia was already pressing her lightsaber against her own foe's ribs.

"Surren -"

He whirled, elbow driving at her head. She ducked, thumbed the activation switch, then stepped away as the impostor collapsed at her feet.

Fey'lya stared at the corpses, jaw snapping as the ooglith masquers peeled away from their faces. "In my own office!"

"Perhaps the time has come to destroy the data towers, Chief," Leia suggested mildly.

Fey'lya's eyes flashed, but any reply was cut off by a blaring attack alarm. One glance at the display told Leia the infiltrators had succeeded at least in part; with three blast boulders lining up for approach, they had no chance of saving their weapon.

"Go!"

She pushed Han and Fey'lya onto the service lift, then followed. They commed a report to General Tomas's aide, then emerged ten meters below in the chief of state's office. An instant later, a series of explosions shook the blast-hardened ceiling, and the cannon turret was gone. Leia saw Garv Tomas coming through the far door, but she removed her artillery helmet and went straight to Fey'lya's comm center.

"Luke ... Luke, this is your sister ... Luke?"

There might have been an answer; it was difficult to tell over the battle roar in the background. She stretched out and sensed her brother's presence somewhere beyond the horizon. Though she was not sensitive enough to guess his condition or situation, Leia could feel that he was alive.

"Luke, if you hear me, we'll be there as soon as the Falcon's, containment fluid is recharged."

"Actually, it's recharged now."

Leia glanced over her shoulder to find Garv Tomas glowering at Fey'lya.

"I asked Chief Fey'lya to relay that news some time ago."

Fey'lya shrugged. "They were needed in the cannon turret."

"Check that, Luke." Leia was not even angry. Being upset at the Bothan's selfishness would have been like being angry at a Wookiee's shedding - and they had been needed in the turret. "The Falcon is ready now. We'll be coming soon, Luke."

Again, there was no answer - only a small surge in her sense of her brother. Though Leia hoped it meant Luke had heard her, there was no way to be sure. It could have meant he was trying to find her, thinking about her, going to miss her - anything. Leia stood and turned to find Han already describing the infiltrators to Garv. The general was shaking his head angrily.

"The door guards have epidermal scanners and orders to use them, but disordered troops are pouring in by the tens of thousands, and no one wants to turn away a fellow soldier." Garv ran his fingers through his hair. "For all I know, they're all infiltrators."

"It was bound to happen, Garv." Leia turned to Fey'lya. "The time has come to destroy the data towers, Chief. To delay longer is to give the enemy his most precious advantage."

Fey'lya's eyes flashed angrily, almost madly, and Leia thought he would refuse. He spun away and went to stare at the carnage outside.

"You're deserting me, aren't you?" he asked. "Just like the senators."

Han rolled his eyes, then hefted his blaster like a club and cocked his brow at the others.

Leia pushed his hand down, then went to stand behind Fey'lya. "Not like the senators. It's time."

Fey'lya stared over the smoking city for another moment and finally let his chin sink. "I suppose it is." He took a moment to gather his strength, then turned to Garv. "General Tomas, give the order to destroy the data towers - if you haven't already."

"Very good, Chief Fey'lya." The fact that Garv did not reach for his comlink suggested the order had indeed been issued. "I'll have First Citizen prepared for departure."

Fey'lya nodded wearily. "Evacuate as many as you can - and be sure you are aboard. That's an order, General."

"Yes, sir, as long as my duties here are completed."

"They are," Fey'lya said. "Don't make me dismiss you."

Garv reluctantly inclined his head. "Very well, then."

"Good." Fey'lya turned back to the transparisteel. "And tell Captain Durm not to wait. I won't be joining you."

"What?" Han asked. "If you think you can make some kind of deal -"

"Han, that's not what the chief is thinking." Leia held a finger to her lips, then said, "Chief Fey'lya, you can't accomplish anything here."

"And what could I accomplish anywhere else? Who would follow me after this?" He waved a hand outside. "History will blame me for what happened today. Don't try to tell me otherwise."

Leia did not. Even if she had wanted to lie, Fey'lya was too smart. "There are other ways of serving."

Fey'lya snorted. "Perhaps for you, Princess." He turned his back and walked to his desk. "But not for me. Not for Borsk Fey'lya."

 

"Snap to, people!" The captain had to yell to make himself heard inside the turbolaser's cavernous turret; the battery intercom had gone with the rest of the communications. "Here comes the second wave."

Luke hardly needed the officer's warning. He had only to crane his neck to look through a ten-meter hole in the ceiling and see a sheet of orange friction flames crackling down from above. If anything, this assault looked larger and faster than the first, and the first had reduced Coruscant's turbolaser capacity by two-thirds.

"They're coming through this time," Mara said, not quite reading Luke's thoughts. She was sitting on a bench in the observation bay, her bacta-casted ankle propped on a spare blast helmet. "That first wave was just to soften us up."

Luke took her hand. "Han and Leia will get here," he said. "I told Borsk where we were."

"But did he tell them?"

Luke knew better than to offer hollow reassurance. The fear they had been sensing in Ben all morning had become a strange disconnectedness, and Mara - always more of a realist than an optimist - assumed the worst. Never one who liked counting on others, she blamed herself for leaving the baby with Han and Leia after Anakin's death - which only made her all the more determined not to count on anyone else for his rescue. Luke chose to place his trust in the Force, though he knew that an unhappy outcome would certainly lead to a profound crisis of belief.

The twin turbolasers began to hurl blue streaks skyward, each discharge shaking the huge turret so hard that Luke's knees felt like they would buckle. This time, far fewer starbursts and orange flares appeared in the heart of the drop fleet. A steady stream of white pinpoints swelled into crackling orbs of white plasma and burst against the battery's hastily repaired shields. Each time, the internal lighting dimmed a little more, and a few more pieces of equipment sparked out.

In the middle of it all, R2-D2 started to tweet and whistle so fiercely that he was audible even two bays away. Luke looked toward the number two targeting bay, where the little droid was filling in for a damaged R7 unit, and saw a scowling fire control officer waving him over.

"I'll be right back," Luke said to Mara.

A plasma ball finally crashed through the shield and burned a second hole through the armored ceiling. In the next instant, two more fiery balls roared into the turret itself and erupted against the back wall, filling the chamber with smoke and screams. One of the big turbolasers fell silent, and the evacuation alarms blared.

"Hold on, Skywalker." Mara stood and limped after him. "You're not going anywhere without me."

Computer operators began to pour out of both targeting bays, but the officer who had waved at Luke stayed long enough to shake a finger at a vid display.

"Your droid frizzed out and said you had to see this." He turned to depart with the others, calling over his shoulder, "He picked it out of a teletargeter data stream - it was in one of the old flash codes."

The display showed a string of times and orbital coordinates, then a four-word message: "Byrt bet covered - Calrissian."

"Lando!" Mara exclaimed. "I could kiss him."

Luke tapped the console keys, ordering a flimsiplast printout. "And I could let you."

 

Instead of continuing down into the teeth of Coruscant's still-plentiful light artillery, the second wave of drop fleets pulled up at two thousand meters and began to disgorge spiraling lines of dark flecks. As they came closer, the flecks resolved into V-shaped wings over tiny dark rectangles, then into Yuuzhan Vong warriors suspended in the grasp of huge, mynocklike creatures. Watching from the privacy of his office balcony, Borsk found himself admiring the way Tsavong Lah built one attack off another, lulling the enemy into believing he was trying one thing while actually doing something else. It was classic cutthroat dejarik strategy, and the warmaster was executing it like one of the old Bothan masters.

Borsk hated him for it. The Yuuzhan Vong were robbing him of all he had spent a lifetime seeking, and they were ensuring that he would be forever remembered as the Bothan who lost Coruscant. For that, Borsk would have liked to teach the kintan strider death gambit to Tsavong Lah; such a coup would certainly have changed how New Republic historians remembered Chief of State Fey'lya.

When the descending warriors began to fling firejellies down on the palace, Borsk took a last gulp from the snifter of Endorian port in his hand, then stood and went to his desk. Not allowing himself to hesitate or tremble, he reached down to his bottom drawer and keyed a code he had never expected to use. He removed a small medkit scanner/transmitter, then depressed the activation switch and held the device next to his heart. When the function light began to beep in time with his pulse, he placed it in the center of the desk and reached down again, this time arming a fuse attached to the proton bomb that filled most of the drawer. The bomb was not huge, but it was large enough to destroy this wing of the palace - and all the secrets within it.

By the time he finished, the enemy drop troopers were circling the palace's burning data towers and fighting their way onto its bitterly defended balconies. Finding no guards outside the chief of state's office, a squad dropped onto the balcony where he had been sitting. Borsk waited behind his desk and watched as the warriors kicked in a door they could have opened with the touch of a button. The first two raced to his side and thrust amphistaffs toward his throat, but stopped short of killing him when they saw his furred paws resting in plain sight. Several more rushed through the room to secure the doors and equipment, then a heavily tattooed officer came to his desk.

Before the Yuuzhan Vong could ask, Borsk said, "I am Borsk Fey'lya, chief of state of the New Republic. Harm me at your own peril."

This drew a derisive snort. "It does not look like I have much to fear from you or your New Republic, Borsk Fey'lya."

"Then from your own warmaster," Borsk said evenly. "Tsavong Lah will certainly wish to speak with me. You may tell him I will receive him here."

"You will see the warmaster when and where it pleases him." The officer glanced at the heart-rate scanner on Borsk's desk. "What is this abomination?"

"A communications device," Borsk lied. "I can use it to communicate with all New Republic troops on Coruscant."

Quicker to see the obvious than the chief of state had dared hope, the officer thrust it at Borsk's face. "Tell your troops to lay down their arms, and they will be spared."

"After I have worked out terms with Tsavong Lah."

The officer slapped his amphistaff across Borsk's hand. Something sharp penetrated his furry flesh, then the Bothan felt a fiery tide of venom rolling up his veins and noticed the frantic blinking of his heart-rate scanner. Quickly regaining his composure, he reached over with his free hand and pinched the pressure point inside his armpit, then looked up at the officer and shrugged.

"Pump me full of all the poison you wish. It makes no difference to me if you offer your gods a spoiled sacrifice."

"You assume much in thinking yourself worthy, Fey'lya."

Despite his words, the officer turned and spoke into the air. One of the villips on his shoulder said something in reply. He nodded curtly and, saying nothing else to his prisoner, stationed his squad at various points around the tower suite. Borsk wished he had thought to bring in the port from the balcony. He felt sure he would die the instant he released the pressure point, but the pain was not bad enough to prevent him from holding the snifter in the poisoned hand - and, judging by his success so far, he could probably have bluffed the officer into letting him finish it.

Outside, Yuuzhan Vong drop troopers continued to swirl around Coruscant's aeries, trading fire with light artillery emplacements and slowly claiming control of the towertop strongholds. As the cannonfire dwindled, the blast boulders started to venture down again, melting stubborn pockets of resistance into naked skeletons of durasteel. Finally, the drop ships descended, landing whole brigades of reptoid slave-soldiers on captured rooftops. The Yuuzhan Vong might claim to be great warriors, but Borsk knew who would be doing the hard fighting down in the underlevels.

Despite the pains shooting up his arm, Borsk called upon his long experience as a diplomat to keep an impassive face. At last, a large blast boulder stopped outside his balcony and disembarked a company of much-tattooed warriors.

An earless individual wearing a cape of colorful scales over armor entered the office and came to Borsk's side. He had fringed lips and a face so mutilated it was difficult to tell the tattoos from the scars, but Borsk knew this was not Tsavong Lah. Like nearly everyone else in the New Republic, the chief had watched the warmaster's broadcast after the fall of Duro, when he had demanded the surrender of the Jedi, and even this grisly face could not compare to Tsavong Lah's.

"You may stand," the newcomer said.

"When I see Tsavong Lah."

The Yuuzhan Vong held his hand out and received an amphistaff from one of his subordinates. He brought the butt of the weapon down on Borsk's poisoned hand. The Bothan bit his tongue to keep from screaming and grew immediately dizzy.

"Tell the warmaster to hurry," Borsk said, fighting to stay upright. "I will be dying soon."

"I am Romm Zqar, commander of the drop," the Yuuzhan Vong said. "You must surrender to me."

Borsk shook his head. "Then there will be no surrender."

Instead of striking again, Zqar pressed the amphistaff s fanged head to the hand holding the pressure point. "Why must you speak with the warmaster personally?"

"Honor." Borsk had been expecting this question and had long ago thought of a suitable answer. "If I am to surrender, I must do it to someone of equal station."

Zqar surprised him by speaking into the air in Yuuzhan Vong. There were a few minutes of silence. Borsk continued to grow dizzy, and the light on his heart-rate scanner began to blink, more slowly. Finally, one of the commander's shoulder villips answered. Zqar nodded and uttered a single Yuuzhan Vong word, then ordered the others to evacuate the office.

When his subordinates filed onto the waiting blast boulder, Zqar said, "You are not Tsavong Lah's equal, but he sends his compliments." He flicked the amphistaff, and the head sank its poisoned fangs deep into the hand holding the pressure point. "He believes the kintan strider death gambit to be the only worthy move in your infidel dejarik game."

 

The detonation flash would have been visible from orbit even without the magnification of the Kratak's great eye, but through the lens Tsavong Lah saw the white sphere of Borsk Fey'lya's death bomb flash into existence across a full kilometer. It hung there for many seconds, its heat melting the faces of the surrounding towers and shattering every yorik coral vessel within two hundred meters. In addition to Zqar's departing command vessel, the blast destroyed two drop ships and at least twenty airskiffs, and the warriors inside a good portion of the Imperial Palace, as well - in all, perhaps twenty-five thousand Yuuzhan Vong.

"I should have had Zqar let him bleed to death," Tsavong Lah said. "Our losses today are already too heavy."

"I am glad you are not among them, Warmaster." Seef was standing next to him at the edge of the great eye, staring down on the world they were conquering. In her hands, she held the villip of the priest Harrar, whom the warmaster had dispatched to Myrkr to consecrate the capture and return of the Solo twins. "Eminence Harrar was wise to advise you not to go."

Tsavong Lah considered this, then addressed the villip. "Seef praises your wisdom, my friend. She does not think me ready to stand before Yun-Yammka either."

"It is not a matter of your readiness, Warmaster," Harrar's villip said. "It is a matter of what the gods desire. If it was not their wish to take you when the Sunulok was destroyed, it would have been a blasphemy to let the infidel leader slay you."

The warmaster looked back to the Imperial Palace and watched the fiery sphere contract into its own vacuum, drawing clouds of smoke and rubble and tumbling bodies after it. The blast had annihilated most of what Viqi Shesh's diagrams identified as the executive and administrative wings of the Imperial Palace. Only the Grand Convocation Chamber and senatorial offices remained more or less intact, and there was no reason to believe they would contain many of the vital records the readers had hoped to capture.

"I am not so certain the gods will be all that pleased with my survival, Eminence Harrar." Tsavong Lah glanced down at the scales and spines protruding from the still-rotting flesh at his shoulder, then said, "It is better to die in the service of a victorious end than suffer the disgrace of a Shamed One."

"Then the corruption is advancing again?" Harrar asked.

"It has not abated," Tsavong Lah corrected. "The gods have given me Coruscant. Now I must give them their Jeedai twins."

"You will, Mighty One." It was a mark of their friendship that Harrar addressed him so, for priests rarely afforded warriors such respect. "Vergere's ruse was successful. She reports that Jacen Solo is her prisoner even now."

"And Jaina Solo?"

"When last we spoke, Nom Anor assured me she was within his reach."

Seef exhaled in relief, but the warmaster's stomach grew queasy. Yal Phaath had already contacted him to complain about the destruction of the cloning grashal and the loss of the voxyn primary, so he knew just how short Nom Anor's reach truly was. He folded his hand and radank claw together before his chest and bowed to Harrar's villip.

"Glory to the gods, Eminence. All Coruscant awaits your return."

 

They brought the Ksstarr around again. The targeting mask on Jaina's face showed three yorik coral corvettes coming straight at them. Behind the trio, the worldship was silhouetted against Myrkr, a huge gray disk overlapping an even larger green disk. The basin where she had last seen Jacen was smaller than the last time they had come around, about the size of a fefze's compound eye.

"Zekk!" she yelled into the targeting mask. "We're farther away!"

"Because they keep getting closer," Zekk growled back. "We won't save him by getting blasted ourselves. Clear me a lane!"

"Done!"

Cursing Zekk for a Sith-spawned coward, Jaina raised her left thumb. The control glove on her hand activated the mask's targeting reticle, basically a set of increasingly blurry rings. She fixed her gaze on the rightmost blur and - working through trial and error, with no idea what the strange flashes in the viewfinder might mean - ran her right hand through an awkward finger dance that brought each concentric ring into focus. When the center disk showed a clear image of her target, she made a fist with her left hand.

From the other side of the blastule came the loud plop of the plasma gun's automatic loader, then the deafening bang of the actuator charge ionizing the medium. Jaina's mask went dark, and the blazing sphere streaked away.

The viewfinder cleared two seconds later. Her plasma ball was arcing toward her target - and a long line of enemy rounds was streaking back toward her.

"Incoming!" she yelled.

Zekk put the frigate into a tight rising turn, and they swung away from the worldship.

"Zekk!"

Lowbacca cut her off with an urgent bellow.

"A fleet?" Jaina cried.

She craned her neck around, and a dozen oblong flecks appeared in her targeting mask, streaking in from the edge of the system. Her heart fell. It wasn't a fleet - not exactly - but if they tried to return to the worldship, they would be trapped.

A flurry of plasma balls blazed past under the Ksstarr's belly, then one slipped past Tesar at the stern shielding station and impacted the hull. The frigate shuddered.

Zekk's voice came through the mask. "Jaina, what do you want to do?"

Jaina could not answer. There was only one thing to do. But how could she abandon Jacen? After rebuking him for leaving Anakin, how? The Ksstarr shuddered again. A wet pop sounded somewhere aft, a door valve sealing against a vacuum breach.

"Jaina!" Zekk yelled.

"I -"

The words caught in her throat, like she was choking. She closed her fist and sent a plasma ball streaking into space.

"Better for Jacen if we flee," Tenel Ka said. "With only one twin, perhaps they will delay the sacrifice until we can organize a rescue."

What rescue? Jaina thought. They had lost so many Jedi already. Even Luke would risk no more to rescue Jacen. But he would not stop Jaina. Nobody would.

"That's what we do," Ganner said. "Best thing for Jacen."

"Jaina?" Zekk asked. "Your brother."

Just do it, Jaina thought. Don't make me say it.

"All right." Zekk turned the ship away. "I think I understand."

"This one thinkz you do," Tesar said. "We all do."

Not possible. Mask filling with tears, Jaina craned her head around, and the worldship came into view, no larger than a fist. She closed her eyes, concentrated on that place in her chest that had always belonged to Jacen. She felt him there, just a flicker for just an instant, and then she lost him, then she could feel nothing except her own anger and hatred and despair.

"We'll be back, Jacen," she said, finding the strength to speak. "You hold on. We'll come for you."

 

Generally speaking, it was not good to skim a planetary surface with a ship's artificial gravity fully activated. The conflicting perceptions of up and down played havoc with most species' sense of balance, and Leia could feel the effects in her own queasy stomach and spinning head. She could also hear over the intercom, and smell in the circulation system, the effect it was having on the passengers.

There was nothing to be done about it. With the holds packed full of unrestrained passengers and the Falcon dodging and swinging through Coruscant's hoverlanes and a skip squadron nosing their tail, they needed some way to hold everyone on the floor. If that meant Leia had to sanisteam the entire ship later, she would consider it a privilege to be alive to do it.

Han rolled the Falcon upside down and bobbed over a bridge, then found two skips coming head-on and had to dive for the dark underlevels. Both laser turrets chuffed as Meewalh and a gunner from the palace poured fire over the stern. One of them hit, and a deafening rumble shook the towers. Their success had no effect on the number of magma balls streaking down all around.

Leia pulled herself back to the center of the oversized copilot's chair, checked the map on her vid display, and cursed. "Missed our turn."

"I knew that."

"Of course, dear."

Han leveled the Falcon out and headed back. The upper quad cannons chuffed constantly as Meewalh ripped into the bellies of half a dozen surprised skips, then Han stood the Falcon on its side and banked into the narrow side lane, and Leia had to grab the arm of her chair to hold herself up where she could see the map display.

"Left in three, two -"

"Got it."

Han flipped the Falcon over on its other side, then they were shooting through the dank catacombs beneath the Great Western Sea. Meewalh and the palace gunner took out another pair of skips. Han splashed the Falcon through a swirling waterfall, made three quick turns, and the skips were gone.

"Not bad for an old man." Leia centered herself in her chair. "Maybe Corran can teach you to fly an X-wing when we get out of this."

"If Eclipse has any left," Han said.

They picked their way through the dark maze of mildewed buildings and mossy pillars that supported the lake bed, then poked the Falcon's nose out from under the ferrocrete beach and hovered on their repulsor engines. Directly ahead lay the smoking ruins of a planetary turbolaser battery. The weapons themselves were melted to slag. The massive support structure looked more like a meteor crater than a building.

"This the one?" Han's voice was full of disbelief.

Leia checked the display. "This is it."

Han cursed.

Leia could tell what he was thinking, that he was afraid they were too late, but knowing she had other resources, he waited and said nothing. He was the same Han, certainly, but somehow attuned to her in a way the old Han could never have been. She was beginning to like this - really like it.

Leia closed her eyes and reached for her brother, trying to let her sense of his presence lead her to him, as it had that time on Bespin when Darth Vader took his hand. After a moment, she raised her arm and, without looking, pointed in the direction she felt him.

"There," she said.

"You mean right over there?" Han asked. "Where that drop ship is coming down?"

Leia opened her eyes and saw the small mountain of a Yuuzhan Vong drop ship descending toward the towertop she was pointing at. "Yes," she said. "That would be about right."

 

Pirouetting on her good foot, Mara raised her bacta cast and hook-kicked a Yuuzhan Vong in the temple. He dropped, and she continued her spin and slashed her lightsaber across the one behind him, then ducked an amphistaff striking from the right and saw Luke leave himself open to run her attacker through. She brought her blaster under her arm and fired twice, once to either side of Luke's head, and burned holes between the eyes of two Yuuzhan Vong rushing to attack him.

Luke smiled and swept the feet from beneath a fresh warrior as he skipped in to attack. For each warrior they killed, a dozen more rushed forward to die. They launched themselves into side-by-side backflips and came down in the middle of the turbolaser crew's firing line and began to bat swarm and lay bolt. The Yuuzhan Vong charge faltered, then dribbled to an end as the crew members opened up with their blaster rifles.

A junior officer - one of two remaining to the battery - stepped to their side. "We're out of here - going under."

"No!" Mara told him. "The Falcon can't find us inside a building."

"Won't much matter." The officer pointed into the sky, where a thousand-meter drop ship was moving into position over the building. "Like the lady said, 'Fight until you can fight no longer.' Your friends aren't coming. We'll do more damage below."

The drop ship started to rain firejellies, melting hand-sized holes into the durasteel roof. One landed too close and drew an alarmed whistle from R2-D2, and Mara and Luke began to use the Force to redirect those coming in their direction.

"What do you think?" Mara asked Luke. She knew he still felt Leia searching for them. "Maybe we're just drawing them into a world of hurt."

The drop ship's belly hatches opened and began to dangle lines, reptoid slave-soldiers already sliding down. A dozen ropes landed on their building alone.

Luke raised his blaster and opened fire. "We have to stay. Han and Leia won't leave until they know one way or another."

Mara nodded. "Fine. Ben is safe. I'll trust the Force for the rest."

 

"Hey, where's everybody going?" Han demanded of nobody in particular - least of all Leia. "Wouldn't you think they could stay in one place for five minutes?"

The tower was one of those mirrsteel jobs with a stepped roof, and of course the lightsabers and blaster flashes had been on the wrong side when Leia finally spotted Luke and Mara and the battery crew. It had taken five minutes of wild flying to circle the area and approach from Luke's side of the roof, and now the New Republic crew members were running for the stairwell.

"Tighten your crash webbing," Han said. "And arm the concussion missiles."

"The concussion missiles?" Leia gasped. "Han -"

Han took his eye off the rooftops and glanced over. "Yeah?"

Leia swallowed, then reached for the arming switches. "How many?"

Han smiled crookedly. "How many do you think?"

"All of them." Leia started flipping toggles.

Han brought them in fast and low, streaking under the drop ship barely three meters above roof level. Too slow to react, the big vessel released a volley of firejellies that did more harm to the reptoids on its drop lines than to the well-shielded Falcon. Han slammed the decelerators and - hoping he wouldn't ion-scorch Luke or Mara - brought the ship up on its tail.

"Launch!"

Leia hit the launcher. The first pair of missiles flashed away and slammed into the drop ship's belly before the shielding crews could react. The shock wave banged the Falcon down on its tail, and she launched the second and third volleys. By the time she hit the fourth wave, the massive vessel was belching fire from its drop hatches and raining shards of yorik coral from its hull.

The New Republic troops reversed course, racing for the Falcon. Han could not see Luke and Mara, but felt sure they were already running up behind.

"Get the boarding ramp." Han set the Falcon down on its struts. "And make it -"

Leia was already rushing down the outrigger access tunnel. Meewalh and the palace gunner opened up on the reptoids with the quad cannons. Han lowered the retractable repeating blaster for good measure. He kept expecting the drop ship to lay down a suppression barrage, but soon realized the real danger was being crushed beneath the flaming boulders that kept crashing down around the Falcon. Maybe there was such a thing as overkill.

Han withdrew the retractable blaster. As soon as the status light indicated the ramp was rising, he lifted off and streaked out from under the drop ship, diving into the hoverlanes and shooting under the Great Western Sea, navigating more by sensor and display map than by what he could see. They were about halfway across when Luke entered the cockpit with Mara, Leia, and R2-D2.

"Thanks for the lift." Luke clasped Han's shoulder and slipped into the copilot's seat. "We were beginning to think you wouldn't make it."

"The hoverlanes were murder." Han glanced at the map on Leia's display and started to ask Luke to find a good place to break for orbit - then thought better of it and hitched his thumb toward the back of the cockpit. "Sorry, kid, that seat belongs to Leia."

Luke's face fell. "I'm sorry." He stood and fished a piece of flimsiplast from his pocket. "I just needed to give this to you."

An uneasy silence fell over the cockpit. Luke started to hand the flimsiplast to Han, then caught himself and turned to Leia instead.

Han rolled his eyes. "Look, I didn't mean anything. I just need my copilot in her own seat and you on the belly gun. That's all."

The relief in the cockpit was thick enough to taste, and Han was content to leave it that way. The last thing he wanted was someone apologizing for Anakin's death. That would have cheapened it, implied that Anakin had died for nothing.

"Will you guys get to it?" Han demanded. "Mara, maybe you can see about reloading the missile launchers. We've got a lot of people on this tub who'd like to get out of here."

"Sure."

Mara and Luke stepped aside so Leia could slip into her chair, then Luke handed her the flimsiplast and explained where it had come from. By the time he finished, the Falcon was streaking out from beneath the far side of the Western Sea. Han took it down deep in the hoverlanes and began to bob and weave through broken-down bridges. Leaving R2-D2 to plug into the droid socket, Luke and Mara retreated to their combat posts.

Leia looked over. "My seat, huh?"

"You've been doing all right." Han eyed the huge copilot's chair - Chewbacca's old chair - then added, "If we get out of here alive, we'll make it official and get you a seat that fits."

Leia raised her brow. "Now that would be something." She studied the flimsiplast, checked the chronometer, then punched in a set of coordinates. "Take us up, flyboy."

Han laid on the power and pulled the yoke, and the Falcon streaked out of the tower canyons into the opalescent sky.

They were past the drop ships and assault ships before the Yuuzhan Vong had time to react, but as they left the upper atmosphere, a cruiser analog tagged as the Kratak dropped skips and moved to cut them off. Luke and Meewalh sounded off with the quad cannons. R2-D2 chirped and whistled, searching the comm channels for a friendly voice.

Han activated the intercom. "Mara, how are those -"

"Three loaded."

"That'll do." Han tried to sound confident. "Stand -"

R2-D2 trilled wildly, then Danni Quee's familiar voice broke in. "Falcon, break to ten degrees. Continue with all due speed - and don't fire those concussion missiles."

Han obeyed instinctively - then looked at his tactical display. Nothing but skips ahead.

"Uh, ten degrees doesn't look good."

"It will." This from Lando.

Mara was instantly on the channel. "Calrissian? What are you doing? I don't want -"

"Your package is safe with Tendra," Lando replied. "Aboard the Venture."

Han looked over. Leia could only shrug and wave the flimsiplast Luke had given her.

"Trust me," Danni said.

R2-D2 tweedled, then the Jedi wing appeared on the tactical display streaking in the skips' flank.

"Copy." Han continued toward the converging coralskippers. "What have we got to lose?"

The enemy closed another few seconds and began to fire. Luke and Meewalh answered, and the Kratak rushed to join the battle. The first plasma balls blossomed against the forward shields.

Then the Jedi wing reached range and opened fire, and half the skips vanished.

The cruiser suddenly had other concerns and veered away from the battle, and the skips fell into chaos. Four wheeled around to meet this new challenge, all moving in different directions with no hope of concentrating their fire. Another pair collided. The six skips in the lead continued forward, oblivious to the danger behind. The Jedi wing loosed another volley, then nothing lay between the Falcon and freedom.

"Think you can put the bird through there, you old pirate?" Lando commed. "Even you ought to be able to handle that."

Han was speechless. A disciplined skip squadron did not dissolve into a mess that would have embarrassed a swoop gang - yet that was what he had seen. He piloted the Falcon past the few remaining skips. The Venture appeared on the tactical display, and he veered toward it.

Finally, he asked, "Did that really happen back there?"

"I think so," Luke said over the intercom. "A yammosk has just been jammed." He switched to the general comm channel, then added, "Danni, Cilghal, congratulations. Your success came too late for Coruscant, but it gives me hope for the future."

"It gives us all hope," Leia said. "Thank you."

The rest of Eclipse's forces added their congratulations, then Luke came on the channel again.

"Let's form up on the Venture and proceed to the rendezvous," he said. "And be careful. With Coruscant captured, the responsibility for keeping the New Republic alive will fall to the Jedi."

Han swung the Falcon into line with the rest of the convoy, then started to calculate whether they could make even the short jump to the rendezvous site with so many passengers aboard. "Leia, how many troopers did we pick up on the roof?"

When there was no answer, Han looked over to find Leia lost in meditation, her face weary and full of sorrow. His heart rose into his throat, for it was a look he had seen on her face only once before. He reached over and shook her arm.

"What?" he asked. "Not the twins?"

Leia's face remained weary and sad, but also grew fearfully calm. "They're alive, but in trouble. Terrible trouble."

"Artoo, give me a line to the Venture" Han ordered. "We'll dump this bunch and go after them, Leia. Just you and me."

Leia placed her hand on his and shook her head. "No, Han. Even if we knew where to look - and could reach there alive - it doesn't feel like that kind of trouble. They must rescue themselves."

Han scowled. It sounded like Jedi trouble, and that was the worst kind. "And if they don't?"

"They will." Leia closed her eyes and held his hand. "They will."