Rebirth: Edge of Victory II Page 9

  “I don’t know,” Anakin said. “I don’t want to think about it.” It had been hard enough to see the Great Temple where so much of his childhood had been spent destroyed. To imagine that the verdant jungle and all of its creatures were also gone was more than he was willing to put himself through without proof.

  Tahiri’s face stayed long.

  “What?” Anakin asked, when she didn’t say anything for a while.

  “I lied a minute ago.”

  “Really? About what?”

  She nodded at the cityscape. “I said it wasn’t ugly. But part of me thinks it is.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s all that attractive,” Anakin replied.

  “No,” Tahiri said, her voice suddenly husky. “It’s not like that. It’s just that part of me sees this and thinks abomination.”

  “Oh.”

  The Yuuzhan Vong had done more to Tahiri than cut her face. They had implanted memories in her—of their language, of a childhood in a crèche, of growing up on a worldship.

  “If you hadn’t rescued me, Anakin, I would be one of them now. I wouldn’t remember any other life.”

  “Part of you would have always known,” Anakin disagreed. “There’s something in you, Tahiri, that no one could ever change.”

  She shot him a startled frown. “You keep saying things like that. What do you mean? Is it good or bad? You mean I’m too stubborn, or what?”

  “I mean you’re too Tahiri,” he said.

  “Oh.” She attempted a smile and half succeeded. “I guess I’ll take that as a compliment, since you never give me any obvious ones.”

  Anakin felt his face warm. He and Tahiri had been best friends for a long time. Now that she was fourteen and he was sixteen, things were getting very confusing. It was like her eyes had changed colors, but they hadn’t. They were just more interesting somehow.

  She had cut her hair, right before they left for Eriadu—that had been a shock. She now wore it in a kind of bob, with wispy little bangs that tickled at her eyebrows.

  She noticed his regard. “What? You don’t like my hair?”

  “It’s fine. It’s a nice cut. About the same length as my mom’s is now.”

  “Anakin Solo—” Something inside her cut her sentence off short.

  “Did you feel that?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  And at the moment, he did. Something in the Force. Fear, panic, resolution, resignation, all bound up together.

  “It’s a Jedi,” he murmured.

  “A Jedi in trouble. Bad trouble.” She uncoiled like a released spring. “Where are those shoes?”

  “Tahiri, no. I’ll go. Someone has to stay with the ship.”

  “You do it then. I’m going.” She stood up and went into the ship. Anakin followed. She found a pair of walking slippers in her locker and put them on.

  “Just wait a second. Let me figure this out.”

  “I don’t need you to figure anything out for me. One of us is in trouble. I’m going to help.”

  She was already on her way out and down the landing ramp.

  Repeating some of his father’s more inventive expletives, Anakin hurriedly sealed the ship and ran after her.

  He caught up with her at the customs-and-immigration line. She breezed past everyone else, but was stopped at the force gate, where a gray-haired official frowned down at her.

  “You have to go to the back of the line.”

  “No, I don’t,” Tahiri said, passing her hand impatiently.

  “You don’t,” the woman agreed. “But I need to see your identification.”

  “You don’t care about that,” Tahiri insisted.

  “Never mind; don’t bother,” the official replied. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Eriadu?”

  “Nothing that would interest you. I have to get through, now!”

  The woman shrugged. “Okay. Go on through.” She dropped the force barrier, and Tahiri dashed past.

  “Next.”

  “I’m with her,” Anakin informed her. “You need to let me through, right now,” he added.

  “You need to be with her,” the official said, dropping the force gate again, long enough for Anakin to get through.

  Behind him, he heard the next person in line say, “Why don’t you just let me through, as well?”

  “Why would I do that?” the official wondered caustically.

  Naturally, he’d lost sight of Tahiri, but he knew where she was going. The Jedi they were both feeling was in more distress than ever.

  Anakin pushed his way through the rain-slickered portround crowd, through vendors and street performers, past long rows of cantinas and tapcafs and souvenir shops full of mostly fake lacy shellwork and grossly caricatured statuettes of Grand Moff Tarkin.

  Three streets in, the crowd seemed to dissipate, and the grubby lanes were almost empty, except for the occasional six-legged rodent. Here the scent of hot metal was overpowering, though the streets were relatively cold and the rain had increased. And ahead of him somewhere, a Jedi’s feet were slowing.

  Anakin turned into a long cul-de-sac formed on the left by a chrome-facade skyscraper and on the right by the ribbed-steel wall of a ten-story-high heat sink, steaming in the rain. The end of the alley was the back of another building faced in blackened duraplast. A crowd of vagabonds was gathered, watching a murder about to happen.

  The victim was a Jedi, a Rodian. He stood against the heat sink, trying to keep his lightsaber up. Five beings faced him—two with blasters, three with stun batons. All had just turned to face Tahiri, who was about six meters from them, arriving at a dead run, her lightsaber swirling bright patterns over her head.

  Anakin saw all of this from a distance of fifty meters or so. He tried to coax his feet to lightspeed.

  Taking advantage of Tahiri’s distraction, the Rodian lurched forward. One of the men with a blaster shot him, and the descending screech of the bolt reverberated in the alley.

  Tahiri’s blade sheared through a stun baton, nearly taking the hand of the thickset woman wielding it. Anakin winced; Kam had been working with Tahiri on her lightsaber technique, and she was a quick learner, but still a novice.

  Novice or not, the thugs with the stun batons backpedaled, drawing blasters instead of taking up the fight hand to hand. Tahiri pressed on, catching one of them and snipping the end of his weapon off. The next man back fired at her and missed. They started to encircle her.

  Finally, Anakin arrived. He recognized the Rodian Jedi as Kelbis Nu. The man who had shot the Rodian saw him coming, took careful aim, and fired twice. Two bolts winged into the alley walls, courtesy of Anakin’s lightsaber. He was running past the man, deftly slicing the blaster in half as he went, when he felt a gun pointing at him. He dropped and rolled as the bolt screamed over his head.

  A person screamed, too—the man who had shot Kelbis Nu. The blast meant for Anakin had struck him high in the chest, and he fell, legs kicking.

  Anakin came back to his feet and found Tahiri facing two men still armed with blasters and two unarmed. They looked uncertain.

  It was only then that Anakin realized, by their patches and uniforms, that they were Peace Brigade.

  The thugs started backing out of the alley in a small knot, blasters pointed defensively. Anakin stood about a meter to Tahiri’s right and a little in front of her.

  “Let’s take ’em,” she said. Her voice had a furious, cold quality to it that Anakin had heard twice; once when she was under the heaviest influence of her Yuuzhan Vong conditioning; once in a vision he’d had of her as a dark Jedi, her face mutilated by the scars and tattoos of a Yuuzhan Vong warmaster.

  “No,” Anakin said. “Let them go.”

  His generosity didn’t stop the Peace Brigaders from taking a parting shot as they ducked around the corner.

  “Jedi brats!” one of the men shouted. “Your days are numbered!”

  When he was sure they weren’t just hiding around the corner, waiting for his guard to drop, An
akin turned to survey the damage.

  The Peace Brigader had stopped moving. Kelbis Nu was still alive—barely. His glassy eyes were looking beyond Anakin, but he reached up a hand.

  “Ya …,” he said weakly.

  “Tahiri, use your wrist comm. Try to find the local emergency channel.” He took Nu’s hand and pulsed strength from the Force into him. “Hold on for me,” he said. “Help will be here soon.”

  “Ya—ya—ya …,” the Rodian gasped.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Anakin told him. “Waste of strength.”

  Suddenly Kelbis Nu went still, his trembling ceased, and for the first time he seemed to actually see Anakin.

  “Yag’Dhul,” he whispered, and behind that whisper was a stormwind of danger.

  That was all. The Jedi’s life left him with his last breath.

  Tahiri was shouting at someone over her wrist comm.

  “Never mind, Tahiri,” Anakin said. “He’s gone.” Tears started in his eyes, but he battled them down.

  “He can’t be,” Tahiri said. “I was going to save him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anakin said. “We got here too late.”

  Tahiri’s shoulders began to twitch, and she made a sound like hiccuping as she fought to control her tears. Anakin watched her, wishing he could help, that he could make the grief go away, but there was nothing he could do. People died. You got used to it.

  It still hurt.

  “He said something at the end,” Anakin told her, hoping to distract her.

  “What?”

  “The name of a planet, Yag’Dhul. It’s not far from here, right where the Corellian Trade Spine and the Rimma Trade Route meet. And I felt … danger. Like he was trying to tell me something bad is happening there.” He glanced down at the bodies. “C’mon. We’d better go.”

  “We have to do something,” Tahiri said. “We can’t just let those guys get away with it.”

  “We can’t hunt them,” Anakin said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because we’re Jedi, not assassins.”

  “We could at least tell security or whoever enforces the law around here.”

  “We’re supposed to be here anonymously, remember? If we draw attention to ourselves, we endanger the mission.”

  “Some mission. Getting supplies. This is more important. Anyway, we’ve already drawn attention to ourselves.” She nodded at the crowd of vagrants drifting toward them, the curiosity of two dead bodies overcoming their fear of two live Jedi.

  And as if to highlight her point, a trio of groundcars arrived at the end of the alley and disgorged armed, uniformed people.

  “I guess we’ll be talking to security after all.” Anakin clipped his lightsaber to his belt and held up his hands to show they were empty.

  The officers approached warily, led by a lanky, craggy-faced man with the fading remnants of a black eye. He looked down at the two bodies and back up at them. Then his eyes focused on their lightsabers—Tahiri still had hers in her hand.

  He raised his gun. “Place your weapons on the ground,” he said.

  “We didn’t do this,” Tahiri exploded. “We were trying to help.”

  “Put it down, now, girlie.”

  “Girlie?”

  “Do as he says, Tahiri,” Anakin said, carefully detaching his weapon and placing it near his feet.

  “Why?”

  “Do it.”

  “It’s good advice, kid,” the officer said.

  Radiating anger, Tahiri placed her lightsaber on the duracrete.

  “Good. As officers of the judicials, it is now my duty to inform you that we are detaining you for questioning and possible prosecution.”

  “What? You’re arresting us?” Tahiri said.

  “Until we sort this out, yes.”

  “Ask the crowd. They saw what happened.”

  “We will; don’t worry. There will be a thorough investigation. Make this easy on yourselves.”

  But words are only the shadows of thoughts, and behind the officer’s words, Anakin felt something that suggested that this was going to be anything but easy.

  THIRTEEN

  By the time Jaina reached the vicinity of the Sernpidal system, her X-wing felt like a suit of clothes she’d been wearing for way too long.

  In fact, her clothes felt that way, too, but more so.

  Jedi meditation techniques and isometrics made the long hyperspace jumps bearable, but nothing could hide the fact that there was no room on an X-wing for a shower. Or room to stand up, to walk, to run.

  That’s not likely going to happen anytime soon, she chided herself. So concentrate!

  She was near her goal now. Somewhere down there—or so the tracer told her—was Kyp Durron. Or his X-wing, at least.

  Or merely the tracer beacon, if Kyp was more clever than Uncle Luke imagined. Jaina started sweeping with longrange sensors.

  Kyp wasn’t at Sernpidal anymore, but a system several very strange jumps away. The star at the bottom of the gravity pit was old, a white dwarf that at this distance was barely brighter than its much more distant, hotter cousins. It was wreathed with a lazy torus of nebulas ejected when the star collapsed into its present pale form. Jaina had appeared in the inner fringe of the gas cloud.

  She punched up the stellar survey and found a brief entry more than two hundred years old. The star had a number but not a name. Six planets. The nearest to the sun was a lifeless rock; the next three were sheathed in frozen carbon dioxide and water ice. On the outer planets, the ice got more exotic: methane, ammonia, chlorine in various compounds. The largest planet, a gas giant, had picked up its own nebula from the outbound gases expelled from the parent star.

  No known intelligent life in the system, no known life at all. No resources that couldn’t be found more easily elsewhere, and no reason to come back.

  But Kyp Durron had come here.

  She followed the beacon in, dropping from above the plane of the elliptic. It took her to the fourth planet, a rock half the size of Coruscant that made Hoth seem like a hothouse. She tried not to fidget.

  She hadn’t expected to come in unnoticed, and she didn’t. As she was making orbit a pair of X-wings rose up to meet her. One had the beacon in it.

  A few moments later, she answered what turned out to be Kyp’s hail.

  “Amazing,” he said. “Simply amazing. Jaina Solo, you continue to find ways to surprise me.”

  “Hello, Kyp.”

  “I’d ask you what could have possibly brought you to this place, but I almost don’t want to know. If the Force guided you, it’s almost too frightening.”

  “How so?”

  “Because I was just about to come looking for you and Rogue Squadron,” Kyp answered, sounding sardonic.

  “Really.”

  “Yep. I’ve found something, Jaina—something I can’t handle with my Dozen. Something that could strike a death blow to the New Republic if we don’t deal with it now, while we can.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jaina asked.

  “I’d rather tell you in person. Follow me in—we don’t have much down there, but it’s better than the cockpit of an X-wing.”

  Kyp and his followers had melted tunnels and caves through the water ice and sealed it, then sifted an oxygen-nitrogen mix from higher up, where the planet’s atmosphere had condensed when its primary went cold.

  “We keep it right at freezing in here,” Kyp explained, “so our humble home doesn’t melt.” He handed her a parka. “You’ll want that.”

  “To tell you the truth,” Jaina said, “the cold feels good. Almost as good as it feels to stand up.” Her legs were having a little trouble finding their stride in the lower gravity.

  “Well, like I said, it’s not much, but we like it,” Kyp said.

  “Kyp, what are you doing all the way out here? This whole sector must be crawling with Yuuzhan Vong.”

  “Oh, they aren’t far, though you’d be surprised by their numbers, I think—but they aren’t
here. No worlds to colonize, no slaves to be had, no machines to be destroyed.”

  “Except you, your people, and your ships.”

  “Good point. But there are a lot of these played-out star systems near the Rim. This one isn’t even particularly rich in ore because the star died with a whimper—no supernova to spew heavy metals all over the place. I don’t see them looking here when all of their efforts are focused on the Core.”

  “You think they’ll push toward the Core?”

  Kyp rolled his eyes. “You’re smarter than that, Jaina. The Yuuzhan Vong are taking a breath, that’s all, hoping their collaborators will do some of the work for them. But they’re building up everywhere. And what I’ve found out here—”

  “Yes, you mentioned that.”

  “First things first, Jaina. Do you mind telling my why you’re here? And, in all seriousness, give me a little hint as to how?”

  “Master Skywalker sent me to talk to you.”

  “Really? He has something new to say?”

  “He and Mara fled Coruscant after Borsk Fey’lya ordered their arrest.”

  Kyp blinked, and his brow creased.

  “Come in here and sit down,” he said. He ushered her into what was obviously his war room—a portable sensor sweep, a tactical display, and star charts were its furnishings. He pulled up a collapsible chair for Jaina and one for himself.

  “That was uncommonly stupid,” he murmured. “Even for Fey’lya. Do you think our chief of state is working with the Peace Brigade?”

  “Master Skywalker doesn’t think so. Neither do I.”

  “Huh,” Kyp said dubiously. “So what is Master Skywalker doing now?”

  “Aunt Mara’s pregnant, you know. It’s not long before her time comes. Uncle Luke’s hiding out with Booster Terrik. He intends to find a planet to build a Jedi base on.”

  Kyp’s eyes narrowed. “A base for what?”

  “To operate from. A place where endangered Jedi can go, a place for them to strike from.”

  “Jaina,” Kyp said, “choose your words carefully. What do you mean by ‘strike’? Don’t put words in the Master’s mouth just because you think I want to hear them.”