Star by Star Page 16

  “Kyp, no one’s saying you’re wrong, but it’s time for the Jedi to act in concert,” she said. “The Yuuzhan Vong are smart. If we keep going our own ways, they’ll kill us one by one.”

  Kyp nodded. “I know that better than anyone.” He had already lost an apprentice, Miko Reglia, to the enemy. He looked past Mara to Luke. “When the rest of you are ready to fight, I’ll be there.”

  “And when you are ready to join the rest of us,” Luke replied, “you know how to reach me.”

  Once Kyp passed out of earshot, Saba Sebatyne came to stand in the door and spoke in a raspy voice. “That one is trouble.”

  Mara turned. “So you do speak Basic.” She glanced at C-3PO. “I was beginning to think we would have to ask Threepio to translate.”

  “Forgive this one.” Saba broke into a fit of amused sissing, then struggled to add, “Jedi Eelysa taught her the wisdom of waiting.”

  Eelysa was a native of Coruscant, born soon after Palpatine’s death and untainted by the poisons that had corrupted so many who came before her. Now a grown woman, she was one of Luke’s most resourceful and trusted Jedi Knights, often living for years at a time in the wildest parts of the galaxy in service to the Jedi cause. She had discovered Saba while on a long-term spying mission to Barab I, but the circumstances of her cover had prevented her from sending the Barabel to Yavin 4 to train with other Jedi students. Instead, she had taken Saba as her own apprentice, teaching her what she could of the Force before being chased off the planet by a hunting pack trying to import the human-hating doctrine of Nolaa Tarkona’s Ryloth-based Diversity Alliance.

  When her sissing fit finally passed, Saba rasped something in her own language that C-3PO dutifully translated as, “She also taught this one the wisdom of listening quietly.”

  “Yes, Eelysa has proven herself an expert in that regard many times over.” Luke laughed, joining the pair at the door. “I should have known that any Jedi of hers would be full of surprises.”

  “This one is glad her silence did not offend you,” Saba said.

  “The taste of Kyp Durron was not pleasing to her. How does one like him earn a new squadron of X-wingz?”

  “There are some in the military who admire his courage—misplaced as it is,” Luke said.

  He caught Mara’s eye and directed it to the motley assortment of Y-wings, Headhunters, and Howlrunners resting in a neat line beside Saba’s plasma-scored blastboat. Having fought her way in from the Outer Rim only recently, Saba was not as well known as Kyp Durron or as well equipped, but her habit of keeping a low profile had attracted an entire squadron of like-minded Jedi pilots.

  “The reputation of your squadron is also admired by those in a position to know,” Mara said. “I’m sure the same officers who supply Kyp would happily lose a shipment in your direction.”

  Saba’s slit pupils widened almost into diamonds. “The Wild Knightz would never dishonor the Jedi by taking such a shipment.”

  Mara was taken aback by the disapproval in Saba’s voice, but Luke only smiled and laid a hand—his real one—on her scaly shoulder. C-3PO had warned them that such intimacies with the Barabel had been known to result in the loss of the hand, but somehow Luke’s familiarity drew only an accepting curl of Saba’s thick tail.

  “In your hands, such a gift would do the Jedi no dishonor,” Luke said. “But I’m glad to know you’re concerned. Have you given any thought to Tsavong Lah’s threat against the refugees, and how we will be hurt if the senate believes us insensitive to so many deaths?”

  Saba looked away. “The path is not clear.”

  She opened her mouth as though to continue, but rippled her scales and simply stopped. Luke and Mara waited for her to continue, then shared a moment of bewilderment and reached out around them with the Force. Mara felt nothing unusual, and she could tell by Luke’s puzzled reaction that he did not either.

  “Saba?” Luke asked.

  The Barabel turned back to Luke. “You did not feel that?”

  “No,” Mara said. She could sense that Saba was uneasy with her—especially after she had suggested something the Barabel considered less than honorable—but she also knew that standing quietly by would do nothing to allay that uneasiness. “And neither did Luke.”

  “Strange.” Saba looked around for a moment, then flipped her tail in the reptilian equivalent of a shrug. “Master Skywalker, this one knowz the senate disapproves of us and otherz like us—but when are cowardz not threatened by the brave?” She glanced across the hangar to her pilots, who all stood patiently beside their battle-scarred craft. “The Jedi are few and the Yuuzhan Vong many, yet look at the forcez they direct against us: voxyn, blockades, whole hunting fleetz. We are doing something they fear, and the Force tellz this one she must continue.”

  Mara started to suggest that they would be more effective if they all worked together, but sensed a sudden acceptance in Luke and remained quiet.

  “The Barabel are hunters,” Luke said to Saba. “And hunters work best in small packs.”

  Saba rewarded him with a crooked grin. “Truly, Master Skywalker is as wise as Jedi Eelysa claimz. Perhaps he would honor this one with a great favor?”

  Luke did not hesitate. “Of course.”

  She turned to Mara. “And you? This will be a burden on you, as well, and you have the new hatchling in your nest.”

  Mara thought of Ben and instantly felt him aboard the Shadow with Jaina and Danni, sleeping contentedly in the arms of one of the two young women. Mara would never do anything to jeopardize her baby’s well-being, but she sensed the inherent trust Luke felt for this Jedi they had never met, and Mara’s trust in him was such that there could be no doubt of her answer.

  “Please, we Jedi must do what we can for each other,” Mara said. “And we have plenty of help on Eclipse.”

  “Good. You may have need of it,” Saba said, not smiling. She turned to C-3PO and rasped something in her own language.

  “Oh my.” The droid’s photoreceptors lit in alarm. “Truly?”

  Saba snarled something back.

  “It’s only an expression,” C-3PO said, scurrying toward Saba’s blastboat. “I wasn’t calling you a liar!”

  Luke and Mara exchanged curious glances, and Mara realized they also had a favor to ask of Saba. She was about to suggest this, but Luke, as usual, knew what she was thinking almost before she did.

  “Saba, perhaps the Wild Knights would also do us a great service?” Luke asked. “It would mean carrying a fair amount of equipment into battle.”

  “And a scientist,” Mara added. “It could mean the war, especially if you know where to find a yammosk war coordinator.”

  Mara was not sure Saba heard them. The Barabel was looking somewhere beyond their shoulders, brow folds creased deeper than ever.

  “Master Skywalker, do you know where Eelysa is?”

  Mara felt the growing apprehension that accompanied Luke’s answer. “She’s still monitoring the situation on Corellia for us.”

  Saba’s gaze returned to Luke. “Do you think she could be in danger?”

  And now Mara had a sinking feeling. As much as Luke cared for all of the academy’s former students, it had been impossible to spend enough time with each one to develop the kind of bond that would connect them closely through the Force. But Eelysa had spent years training Saba one on one in a very stressful environment. It was not surprising that their bond would be an especially close one—and strong enough to inform Saba of her Master’s danger.

  “It’s always impossible to say what Thrackan Sal-Solo and his ilk will do next,” Mara said. “But we didn’t expect Eelysa’s mission to be dangerous. The Corellians don’t even know she’s there.”

  “Perhaps they have found out,” Saba said. “Or perhaps it is something else, but Eelysa is frightened.”

  “Frightened?” Luke asked. He looked at Mara. “That doesn’t sound like Eelysa.”

  Saba shook her head. “No, it does not. We will investigate once we h
ave loaded your scientist and the equipment. There will be no trouble finding a yammosk—they come to us.”

  “Thank you,” Luke said. “I’ll have Danni start the transfer.”

  Luke activated his comlink and informed Danni, who sounded happy—perhaps ecstatic was a better word—to be flying with Saba Sebatyne instead of Kyp Durron. The Shadow’s cargo ramp descended, then Danni and the pilots from Saba’s squadron began to transfer equipment.

  In the meantime, C-3PO returned with three burly Barabels. Though a little larger than Saba, all three had the purple-green scales of young adults. There were also lightsabers hanging from their belts.

  “If you please, Master Skywalker, we were on our way to Yavin Four when the war blocked us,” Saba said. “Please take these young Jedi Knightz and show them the true path to becoming a Jedi. There remainz too much of the hunter in this one to teach them well.”

  Luke and Mara exchanged startled looks, then Mara asked, “Are these your children, Saba?”

  “They are hatchmates, but only the male is of me,” Saba said. “The females share a mother. One also shares a father with my own son, but of course it is impossible to say which.”

  The affiliations were horribly lost on the two humans, but Mara suspected they would figure it out in time. “We’ll care for them as though they were our own.”

  Saba’s eyes widened. “They are old enough to find their own food; just give them a territory. Any subbasement or scrub lot will do.”

  Now it was Mara’s turn to be shocked. This is going to be interesting.

  The slight smile that came to Luke’s lips suggested he had perceived the sense of her thoughts, then Saba let out a chain of long hisses. Mara mistook the sound for the Barabel’s sissing laughter—until Saba cried out in grief and dropped into a fighting crouch. Her needlelike teeth folded down into view, and she let out a long mournful growl.

  Mara and Luke stepped away in unison, their hands instinctively dropping toward their lightsabers. C-3PO rasped at her in Barabel. She snarled something in reply, then dropped to all fours and crouched low. The other Barabels reacted to their Master’s distress, also dropping to all fours and adding their own raspy voices to the rumble, and they all began to scratch at the durasteel floor.

  Mara and Luke exchanged startled glances, then the Force grew heavy with anger and disbelief. Mara knelt beside Saba and, ignoring C-3PO’s admonition not to touch a strange Barabel, laid a hand on the Jedi’s back.

  “Saba? What’s wrong?”

  The Barabel’s head turned slowly toward Mara, her reptilian pupils narrowed to slits, her fangs wet with saliva.

  “Eelysa,” she rasped. “Something caught her.”

  “Something?” Luke asked.

  Saba beat her tail against the ground, prompting C-3PO to explain unnecessarily that tail-banging was a typical reptilian expression of rage.

  “This one doesn’t know,” the Barabel said. “But she is gone. Eelysa is no more.”

  Mara and Luke glanced across her back, each knowing without speaking what the other was thinking.

  Voxyn.

  SIX

  With a hologram of the strategic situation lighting the overhead darkness and dozens of tactical displays hovering in the pit below, the New Republic Defense Force Fleet Command room looked more like a galaxarium than a council chamber. The overhead display depicted the barest outlines of the galaxy, a broad ribbon of crimson marking the Yuuzhan Vong invasion route. In just two years, the aliens had cut a swath from the Tingel Arm almost to Bothan space, with three distinct salients punching through the Inner Rim at Fondor and Duro. A third offshoot, the one threatening Bilbringi, had not quite reached the Inner Rim, but Leia knew it soon would. The invaders were destroying ships faster than the New Republic could build them, and even Bilbringi did not warrant a major defense. She wondered how much importance NRMOC—the New Republic Military Oversight Committee—would place on the lives of the Talfaglion refugees. She wondered how much they could afford to.

  Less than happy to find herself once again negotiating Coruscant’s twisted corridors of power, Leia leaned on her son’s arm and advanced along the mezzanine. Though it had been more than a day since she was knocked unconscious by the voxyn’s noxious blood, she still felt the need of support when she moved—and considered herself lucky. The Noghri, who had taken the brunt of the attacks, remained in bacta tanks with severe ear and lung damage.

  “This is encouraging,” Jacen said. He had come to stay with her while Han returned to Eclipse with the voxyn bodies. “If they’ll let us in here, our reputation in the senate can’t be all that bad.”

  “Don’t read too much into this,” Leia said. “There is a reason behind the reason Borsk Fey’lya does anything. Listen with your eyes, Jacen; see with your ears.”

  As they advanced, Leia barely glanced at the tactical displays below the mezzanine. There was a less elaborate situation room on Eclipse—kept up to date by a secret feed from a friendly command officer—so she knew the holograms would show several dozen fleets orbiting on-station, as well as an alarming number of pitched space battles. The situation had been much the same for nearly a year, with the Yuuzhan Vong steadily widening their swath of occupied territory while their main advance remained stalled in the Corellian sector.

  Leia and Jacen passed a hologram depicting the frantic work at the Bilbringi Shipyards, then a large lift rose into view from behind a minor engagement near Vortex. Borsk Fey’lya himself was on the lift, his feral Bothan features twisted into a snarl of greeting, creamy fur rippling with what Leia had long ago learned to recognize as his species’ way of cringing.

  “Princess Leia, you honor us.”

  “You could not find room on the agenda for a former chief of state to address the senate in body?” Leia demanded. With the war going badly, Fey’lya’s support was slipping, and she stood to win more allies than she lost by treating him sharply. “Surely, the war isn’t going that poorly?”

  Fey’lya’s insincere smile remained frozen on his face. “It’s nice to see you recovered so soon from your fray with the Jedi-killers.” He opened the gate himself—a sure sign of how tenuous his power had become. “We can certainly put you on the agenda if you wish, but NRMOC will consider your request more carefully in closed session. Please come aboard.”

  Leia released Jacen’s arm and led the way onto the lift. They descended directly onto the committee’s conferencing balcony, and Leia went straight to the speaker’s rostrum. Several tiers of senators were seated in a semicircle at the opposite end.

  “Thank you for coming,” Fey’lya said, joining her. “And welcome to your Jedi companion, as well.”

  “Jacen is here as my bodyguard,” Leia said, both explaining her son’s presence and sidestepping any question of why the Jedi had not sent a higher-ranking member. “This has nothing to do with the Jedi. It’s entirely a SELCORE matter.”

  “Of course,” Fey’lya said agreeably. “We have studied your report. This is certainly worthy of NRMOC’s attention.”

  Wary of the Bothan’s unexpected support, Leia asked, “And?”

  “And, unfortunately, this does concern the Jedi,” a honeyed female voice said. “Are they not the reason the Yuuzhan Vong are holding Talfaglion hostages at all?”

  Leia turned to see a slender woman with long jet-black hair rising from her seat. A sultry young senator from the shipbuilding world of Kuat, Viqi Shesh had parlayed her world’s importance to the war effort into a position on the Advisory Council and several coveted bottom-tier seats on the senate’s most powerful oversight committees. She had also proven an adept deal maker who traded loyalties with a facility that awed Bothans, and who did not hesitate to use her position for personal gain. Less than a year ago, as the administrating senator of the Senate Select Committee for Refugees—SELCORE—Shesh had not hesitated to strike a deal for her personal gain by diverting vital supplies from the refugee camps on Duro. Leia had been unable to marshal sufficient proof to
have the woman removed from the senate, but she had created enough of a stink to have her rotated off the committee. How the unscrupulous senator had managed to win an influential—and highly secret—posting on NRMOC was a mystery, but the Kuati’s opening salvo made clear that Leia had made a powerful enemy for both herself and the Jedi.

  Drawing on the Force for strength—and patience—Leia met the senator’s gaze evenly. “The Yuuzhan Vong have threatened to destroy the convoy unless the Jedi surrender, yes. Were the Jedi to do so, I have no doubt the Yuuzhan Vong’s next demand would be the surrender of Kuat Drive Yards.”

  “It has never been the New Republic’s policy to yield to coercion,” Fey’lya said, deftly cutting off the argument before it started. “The question is, what can we do without surrendering?”

  “I submit there is nothing we can do.” Shesh looked to Fey’lya. “If we can see the Corellian sector?”

  The Bothan used a remote to send the command, and the holo rotated to display the appropriate sector. The Corellian system was surrounded by a shell of New Republic frigates, the ones on the Duro side glowing slightly brighter to show they were lightly engaged against a wall of enemy probe ships facing them. Talfaglio was encircled by a swarm of Yuuzhan Vong corvette-analog patrol craft, with a single cruiser centrally positioned to provide support. But it was the Jumus system that was most alarming. Just a short hyperspace jump from either Corellia or Talfaglio, it was now home to much of the fleet that had captured Duro.

  “As you can see, the Yuuzhan Vong are hoping we’ll try to break their blockade.” Shesh pointed to the all-too-small cluster of capital ships orbiting Corellia. “The moment we move, they’ll sweep in and grab the prize.”

  “Not if we come the back way,” Jacen said. He pointed above their heads, tracing a route along the edge of the Deep Core into the back of the sector. “If we sneak three Star Destroyers along here, we can wipe out their blockade and be gone with the convoy before they can react.”