Star by Star Page 10

  “There’s Viqi—and too many like her,” Luke agreed. “The Appeasement Vote failed by a two-to-one margin—”

  “But that means a third of the Senate voted against us,” Mara finished. “The next time, a corruption panel isn’t going to save us.”

  “That’s right,” Luke said. “The Jedi are going to need a quiet way to move around the galaxy, a great river that can carry them wherever they need to go.”

  Leia saw where this was going. “And you’re thinking Han and I would be a good team to set up this great river?”

  “You do have the skills,” Luke said. “A smuggler and a diplomat.”

  Han did not even hesitate. He simply took one glance at their children, got a hard look in his eye, then set his jaw and turned to Leia. “What do you think, partner? Want to wander around the galaxy together?”

  “Sure.” Leia pulled him onto the bed and twined her fingers into his. “But I’m navigating.”

  STAR BY STAR

  They appeared without warning from beyond the edge of galactic space: a warrior race called the Yuuzhan Vong, armed with surprise, treachery, and a bizarre organic technology that proved a match—too often more than a match—for the New Republic and its allies. Even the Jedi, under the leadership of Luke Skywalker, found themselves thrown on the defensive, deprived of their greatest strength. For somehow, inexplicably, the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to be utterly devoid of the Force.

  The alien assault caught the New Republic unawares. Before they could rally and strike back, several worlds were destroyed and countless beings killed—among them the Wookiee Chewbacca, loyal friend and partner of Han Solo.

  The New Republic won the day—the first of a series of costly victories. Behind that alien advance fleet came a seemingly endless stream of ships and warriors. The planet Ithor fell to Yuuzhan Vong treachery—a devastating loss for the New Republic and a personal one for Jedi Corran Horn, who took the blame.

  The New Republic government unraveled a little more with each setback. Even the Jedi Knights began to splinter under the strain. And while Luke Skywalker struggled with the dilemma of how to handle the Jedi, he struggled with a private crisis, as well: His beloved wife, Mara, was ill and possibly dying from a debilitating and utterly mystifying disease, and it was taking much of her energy simply to stay alive. Lacking strong leadership, some of the Jedi fell under the sway of Kyp Durron, who advocated using every available resource to defeat the Yuuzhan Vong—including unbridled aggression, which could lead only to the dark side. Even the Solo children—Jedi Knights all—found themselves on different sides of the argument.

  Consumed with grief and guilt for Chewbacca’s death, Han Solo turned away from his family, seeking expiation in action—and foiled a Yuuzhan Vong plot to eliminate the Jedi. He returned with what seemed to be an antidote to Mara Jade Skywalker’s illness, but not even that victory could erase the loss of his dearest friend—or mend his marriage to Leia.

  Leia, too, was beset by guilt. She had disregarded a vision of the future, and now she blamed herself for the devastation of the Hapan fleet at Fondor—a mass destruction caused by the uncontrollable power of Centerpoint Station, a weapon armed by her younger son, Anakin.

  The elder Solo son, Jacen, also had a vision, one in which he saw the galaxy moving toward darkness. Afraid of tipping the balance farther, the young Jedi temporarily abandoned the use of the Force altogether. Only the near-loss of his mother, Leia, compelled him to return to the Force.

  But in saving Leia’s life Jacen had bested none other than the great Yuuzhan Vong warmaster Tsavong Lah. In retaliation, the warmaster declared a temporary truce on the condition that all Jedi—and Jacen in particular—be handed over to the Yuuzhan Vong.

  Now the Jedi were being hunted. When the youngsters at the Jedi academy were threatened, Anakin Solo raced off to help, going undercover among the Yuuzhan Vong lower castes to rescue his friend Tahiri Veila. He ended up a hero—but the Jedi Temple on Yavin 4 was destroyed.

  Luke and Mara found themselves declared traitors by the New Republic. As a pregnant Mara struggled with the recurrence of her disease, Luke began to assert his leadership over the Jedi. With Jaina Solo’s help, Kyp Durron convinced Luke and the military to let him lead a mission to destroy a Yuuzhan Vong superweapon. The mission was successful … but Jaina learned, too late, that what they had destroyed was not a weapon but a worldship in the making—one filled with civilians and intended for Yuuzhan Vong young. Once again the balance seemed to be tipping toward darkness. The only ray of light was the birth of Luke and Mara’s son, Ben Skywalker.

  Their new worldship destroyed and their attempts to capture the Jedi frustrated, the Yuuzhan Vong have declared the truce broken. Once again worlds will fall, as the alien forces push inexorably Coreward. And the Jedi may be the last hope in a galaxy that no longer wants them …

  ONE

  The dark sliver of a distant starliner crept into view, a blue needle of ion efflux pushing it across the immense sweep of a brilliant orange sun. Like a million such suns in the Core region alone, this one lacked any world with a civilization or even a sapient species, and it was too inconsequential for any name except an obsolete Imperial survey number. With so much emptiness, so many planets untouched, it seemed to Jaina Solo that there should have been no need for fighting, that there should have been room for all. But comfort was always easier to steal than to earn, peace easier to break than to keep—as her mother so often said—and so the Yuuzhan Vong had invaded a galaxy that might have welcomed them with open arms. It was a mistake the aliens had yet to understand, but one day, Jaina knew … one day the Jedi would teach them.

  R2-D2 chirped an inquiry from the droid station at the rear of the Jade Shadow’s flight deck.

  “Stay connected, Artoo.” Jaina did not turn around. “They still haven’t sent the signal, and Mara needs her rest.”

  The droid whistled a lengthy objection.

  Jaina glanced at the interface readout, then threw her hands into the air. “Fine. If that’s what she said, go wake her up.”

  R2-D2 unplugged and whirred off toward the passenger cabin, leaving Jaina alone on the flight deck of the Jade Shadow. Even in a standby orbit, with all systems powered down and the ion drives resting cold and quiet, the vessel felt more like a suit of formfitted battle armor than a seventy-ton starship. The flow-form seat, drop-deck helm, and full-view canopy gave her the sense of floating in open space, while a new retinal tracker kept the heads-up status holos centered just below her plane of vision.

  Communications and countermeasures could be controlled from an array of glide switches on the throttle; a similar set on the stick managed sensors, weapons, and shields. Even the life-support system could be regulated by voice with an astromech unit plugged into the flight deck droid station. It was the perfect cockpit, and when the time came to have her own ship, Jaina intended to duplicate every detail—especially the seating arrangement, with the pilot alone down low in the front and the navigator and copilot seated side by side behind her. She liked that part the best.

  Jaina’s reverie was interrupted by a sudden sense of deep disquiet, an unexpected stirring in the Force that soon built to a strange feeling of frenzy. She opened herself to it further and experienced an instant of terrible longings and ravenous hunger, not quite evil, but dark and feral—and brutal enough to make her gasp and withdraw from its touch.

  A cold sweat running down her brow, Jaina slid the throttle comm switch to intercom and called Mara to the flight deck. While she waited, she studied the sensors. There was nothing unexpected, but Jaina knew better than to place too much faith in the instruments. They had put the Shadow into orbit around the orange sun’s closest planet, a rubble-ringed magma ball little more than twenty million kilometers from its star. Without R2-D2 at his station making constant resolution adjustments, all she could see was electromagnetic blast.

  Catching a glimmer of movement in the canopy reflections, Jaina glanced at an activation reticl
e in the front of the cockpit. A small section of plexalloy opaqued into a mirror, and she saw the willowy form of Mara Jade Skywalker slipping onto the flight deck. Mara’s cascade of red-gold hair was a tangle of sleep snarls, but her complexion was no longer quite so ashen nor her green eyes quite so sunken. Jaina stood and, feeling a little like a child caught with her hand under the candy dropper, turned to vacate the pilot’s station.

  Mara waved her down. “Sit. You’re entitled.” She dropped into the navigator’s chair, sweetening the filter-scrubbed air with a hint of talc and stericlean that seemed to cling to her even with her new baby thousands of light-years away. She lifted her chin toward the distant starliner. “That our two troublemakers?”

  “The transponder identifies it as the Nebula Chaser,” Jaina said. R2-D2 plugged back into the droid station and confirmed the identity with a chirp. “But there’s been no rendezvous signal, and a moment ago I felt something, uh, strange in the Force.”

  Mara nodded. “It’s still there. But I don’t think it’s our passengers. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Nothing feels right about this,” Jaina said. A thousand-meter Corellian cruiser with a customized Hoersch-Kessel sublight drive, the Nebula Chaser had already traversed half the face of the orange sun. It was now the size of Jaina’s finger, with a blue efflux tail three times that long. “They still haven’t signaled. Maybe we should give them one more orbit, then duck behind the planet and blow ions.”

  Mara shook her head. “Luke’s right about these two; they’re getting people killed with their saber-flashing. We’d better snag them while they need the ride.” She pulled her crash webbing over her shoulders and clipped the buckle. “But let’s be ready. Power up.”

  “Me?” Though Jaina had piloted the Shadow before, her aunt had done all the flying on the way out—perhaps because it had been Mara’s first real chance to fly her beloved vessel since giving birth to Ben, or perhaps because she had simply needed to keep her mind occupied on her first trip away from her new son. “It’s your ship.”

  “I want to sleep some more anyway. You won’t believe what a luxury that is until you have a baby.” Mara was silent for a moment, then added sternly, “And that’s not a suggestion.”

  “Check!” Jaina’s laugh was a little wistful. At nineteen, she had certainly been on dates, but the war had kept her too busy to pursue any serious relationships. Even now, she was only on temporary leave from Rogue Squadron—until the anti-Jedi sentiment in the senate faded. “Like I’d have time.”

  Jaina reached over to toggle the ion drives active, but stopped when R2-D2 whistled an alarm. The heads-up display holo contorted through a maddening array of colors and shapes, then settled on the image of a tiny, tube-shaped craft swinging toward them well beneath the luminous haze of the sun’s orange corona.

  “That explains their silence,” Mara said. Though the navigator’s station lacked a heads-up holo, the seat was surrounded by a complete set of conventional displays. “Can we can take it, Artoo?”

  A message appeared on both displays, sternly informing Jaina and Mara that the representation was not to scale. A series of sensor readouts began to relate the craft’s true size, velocity, and probable hull composition. Jaina whistled softly and glanced through the tinted canopy, where the new arrival’s speckish silhouette was streaking up behind the Nebula Chaser.

  “Looks like a frigate analog,” Jaina said. “What do you want to do?”

  “The only thing we can.” There was a note of caution in Mara’s voice that would have seemed foreign to her before Ben’s arrival. “Damp down all systems and wait.”

  In Captain Pollux’s private quarters aboard the Nebula Chaser, the Rar sisters stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the offbridge vidconsole, their long head-tails—lekku—writhing nervously as they watched a large piece of yorik coral detach from the frigate and start toward the Nebula Chaser. Pocked and lumpy, the smaller craft looked more like a mined-out asteroid than a boarding skiff, but the sensor displays showed the heat signatures of at least a hundred warriors inside. There was also some other creature, larger and colder, but the sisters needed no sensor readings to know this. When they reached out with the Force, they could feel the same hungry presence that had touched them as the frigate appeared from behind the sun. Whatever the Yuuzhan Vong were bringing across, it was attuned to their galaxy in a way its masters would never be.

  Alema isolated the creature’s heat signature and asked the computer to find a match, then turned to see Numa already at the captain’s bunk laying out their disguises: a pair of diaphanous dancing shifts, some face paint, and not much else. Having spent the last year leading a fierce resistance movement on the occupied world of New Plympto, the sisters were certainly the object of the boarding party’s search. Fortunately, their enemy would be searching for a single human woman instead of two Twi’lek dancing girls; in their role as the resistance leader, they had taken the precaution of never appearing together and always in disguise, with their lekku hidden beneath the cowl of a Jedi robe.

  By the time the sisters changed out of their jumpsuits and returned to the vidconsole, the Yuuzhan Vong were disembarking in the docking bay. With bald sloping brows and saggy eyes rimmed underneath by drooping blue membranes, they were half a head taller than a typical human and much heavier. Their brutal faces had been reshaped into leathery masks of disjoined cartilage and torn flesh, and their powerful bodies were adorned with religious tattoos and ritual disfigurements. Most wore shells of living vonduun crab armor, and all carried the ubiquitous Yuuzhan Vong amphistaff, a serpent that could change on command into a cudgel, razor-sharp polearm, or poison-fanged whip. The most hideous of the warriors, a stoop-shouldered brute with only dark cavities where there should have been a nose, pushed arrogantly past the guards surrounding Captain Pollux.

  “You have Jeedai aboard?”

  “No,” Pollux lied smoothly. “Is that why you stopped us?”

  The warrior ignored the captain’s question. “You come from Talfaglio … or Sacorria?”

  “You can’t believe I would tell you that,” Pollux said. “The last I heard, our whole galaxy was at war with you.”

  The retort drew a grudging sneer of respect. “We are only a picket ship, Captain, and you are carrying refugees. You have nothing to fear from us … provided you tell me now if you have Jeedai among your passengers.”

  “We have none.” Pollux did not look away when he answered, and his voice did not crack. Even civilian starship captains knew the Yuuzhan Vong were blind to the Force. “Feel free to search.”

  The warrior cracked a smile. “But I do, Captain. I do.” He glanced toward his boarding skiff and, in his own language, ordered, “Duwin tur voxyn.”

  A seam appeared near the back of the craft and began to open, the yorik coral puckering outward like a set of pursed lips. A pair of yellow oval eyes appeared in the darkness, and Alema felt the hunger in the Force grow more distinct. Then, when the aperture had opened a half meter, an ebony streak shot from the portal and clattered to the deck in a ripple of darkness.

  “Clouds of fire!” Numa gasped.

  The creature—the voxyn, Alema guessed from what she had learned of the Yuuzhan Vong language—began to pad around the deck on eight bandy legs. Though it stood no higher than a human waist, it was more than four meters long, with a flattish head and an undulating body covered in black scales. A line of coarse sensory bristles ran down its spine, and a white barb protruded from its flickering whip of a tail. The beast circled the captain and his wary guards only once, then went off toward the rear of the docking bay.

  In the vidscreen, Pollux fixed his gaze on the Yuuzhan Vong warrior. “Why have you brought that … that thing on my ship?”

  The warrior knocked Pollux to the deck with a backhand slap. “You can’t believe I would tell you that,” he laughed.

  Though Pollux’s guards did not appear in danger of attacking, the captain signaled them to stand down and returned to
his feet with as much dignity as possible.

  Alema rotated an idle narrow-beam antenna toward the dark planet where their rendezvous craft would be waiting, then keyed in a secret Jedi comm channel and began to broadcast what they were seeing. The proximity of the orange sun would interfere with the signal, but signals could be enhanced—and it would be better than nothing if she and Numa failed to escape.

  The voxyn circled away from the shuttles and wandered the docking bay for a few minutes more, then exited into an adjoining passage. The sisters lost sight of it until Alema found the right scanner, and by then it was padding down the main boulevard as though it had been riding slidewalks all its life. Along one side of the passage raced a company of Yuuzhan Vong, their distrust of lifeless technology keeping them on the stationary band at the edge of the broad corridor. Eventually, they gave up trying to keep pace and spread through the ship in small groups.

  Alema activated a surveillance lock on the voxyn, and for the next hour she and Numa watched it roam the Nebula Chaser’s primary activities deck, occasionally circling a petrified refugee or cocking its head at some eruption of machine noise. Finally, it leapt into a decorative water fountain and began to circle the statue of a Calamarian star-urchin, its sensory bristles on end and its yellow eyes fixed on the ceiling. With a drooping feeling, Alema turned to the holopad and called up a three-dimensional schematic of the Nebula Chaser. After a few adjustments, it grew clear that Captain Pollux’s cabin was directly over the creature, ten levels above.

  “Unpleasant,” Numa said. The tips of her lekku flicked sharply. “It seems to have an idea of our location.”

  “That makes no sense.” Alema reached out with the Force and felt the same hungry stirring as before, but now much stronger and distinctly below. “Unless it’s using the Force to track us.”