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  “You could have warned us earlier, Control,” Mara observed.

  “Hey—do I look like a Jedi mind reader?”

  The rubble wave reached them then, tumbling past in lightninglike streaks of gray, occasionally shattering a nearby asteroid with the flash of a detonating proton torpedo. Their own mountainous shield took several hits that jolted the whole rock noticeably and pelted their particle shields with sprays of loosened pebbles, and finally the storm was past, slowly dissipating as the debris spray dispersed and gave up so much momentum to collisions that the individual shards no longer had the energy to explode on impact.

  When they poked their noses out from behind their shield, Mara was astonished to find the Venture on her tactical display where there had been only the asteroid cluster before. There were a few blank spots on the array where clouds of dust or frozen vapor confused the sensors, but most alarming were the squadrons of A-wing and Y-wing starfighters spilling from the Star Destroyer’s launching bays. The tactical display marked them all as New Republic craft, but … the Star Destroyer reduced the number of cruiser analogs to five with a devastating turbolaser volley, and the A-wings reduced it to four with a highspeed concussion missile-proton torpedo combination pass.

  “Farmboy, the Errant Venture doesn’t have a fighter squadron,” Mara commed. “Let alone six.”

  “Try ten, Jedi,” an unfamiliar voice said over the tactical net. “And we’re just hitching a ride on the Venture. We’re Reecee fleet—all that remains of it.”

  A piece fell into place in Mara’s mind, and she saw the tenuous connection she had sensed earlier between the Shadow’s, presence at Borleias and the Venture’s unexpected arrival at Eclipse.

  “A surprise attack?” she asked. “At the same time as Borleias?”

  “On its heels,” the voice corrected. “And they meant to keep it that way. The first thing they did was, well, jam our communications. All we’ve got are our fighter comms—and only when we’re outside the Star Destroyer.”

  “Jam how?” Luke asked.

  “Some sort of dovin basal, we think,” the pilot answered. “The first Reecee knew of the attack was when they swarmed the base shields. We thought they were some sort of mynock at first, but when we tried to transmit, they pulled the signal in like a black hole.”

  “No one was able to send a message?” Mara asked.

  “No one. The Venture caught a dose when she came to get us,” he said. “We were trying to clean them off when this task force jumped us at the edge of the Deep Core.”

  “So the New Republic doesn’t know that Reecee has fallen,” Luke said.

  “Or that the Bilbringi Shipyards have been cut off,” Han added. “But they will soon. I’ll have a message sent now.”

  The Star Destroyer’s form grew visible ahead, its nose coming up before the Sabers as it wheeled around to bring its turbolasers to bear on a cruiser trying to attack from above. Mara could just see something that looked like tiny, heart-shaped freckles dotting the white hull—no doubt the signal-devouring dovin basals that the pilot had described. Another cruiser analog was following behind the Venture, pouring plasma balls and magma missiles into its vulnerable exhaust ports.

  “Sabers and Shockers, take that cruiser on the tail,” Han ordered. “Knights and Dozen, remove the one trying to cut him off.”

  “You hear that, Reecee?” Luke asked. A flurry of comm clicks acknowledged. “Good, see if you can clear us a path. We’re coming in hard.”

  The Reecee squadrons first engaged the coralskippers in the Jedi’s way, then tried to draw them off by turning to flee. The skips started to fall for the ploy—then abruptly reversed course and began to gather in front of the intended targets.

  “They have a yammosk!” Danni actually sounded happy about it. “In that port cruiser. If we can—”

  “Check,” a Reecee voice replied. “Thanks for the tip, Jedi.”

  Two squadrons of A-wings wheeled on the cruiser instantly, discharging concussion missiles as they dropped. Taking a cue from the fighters, the Errant Venture concentrated a whole bank of turbolasers on the vessel, and the hull began to vomit yorik coral immediately.

  “Wait!” Danni commed. “I meant capture it! We need it alive!”

  The vessel went dead in space and began to drift, bodies and atmosphere streaming from its hull breaches. The coralskippers continued to cluster in the Jedi’s path, their volcano cannons now belching plasma.

  “Master Skywalker, it’s still communicating with the skip,” Danni commed. “If we can board it quick enough—”

  “Let’s finish this run first, Danni,” Luke replied. “Sabers and Knights, ease off. Shockers and Dozen, you’ll have to clear the way.”

  Rigard simply took his squadron and shot ahead toward their target. Kyp, however, did not seem to have fully grasped his assignment.

  “Let’s go, Dozen,” he commed, peeling off. “We have first shot!”

  The Shockers rocketed into the enemy coralskippers a kilometer ahead of the Sabers and commenced fire, clearing a path to the cruiser as much by forcing the skips to dodge as by blasting them out of the way. Mara saw one Shocker go EV and slam into a chunk of asteroid when a volcano cannon sheered his S-foils, then watched another vanish in a ball of flame as his starfighter smashed headlong into a magma missile.

  She and Tam began to weave shields with Luke, each sensing the other’s intentions through the Force, juking and jinking in perfect unison. Mara kept up a constant barrage of laserfire, using the Force more to avoid hitting her own ships than to target the enemy’s. Two skips deteriorated into rubble as she rocketed past behind Luke.

  The darkness ahead suddenly grew bright as the Shockers launched their proton torpedoes, then it grew brighter still as the decoy flares deployed. The cruiser retaliated with a barrage of grutchins and magma missiles. Rigard’s squadron was already diving down and away, leaving the weapons to come streaking toward the Sabers.

  “Launch!” Luke ordered.

  Mara’s shadow bombs were already gone, following Luke’s toward the cruiser. Without really thinking about it, she nosed her X-wing over behind his, one eye on her target as she used the Force to guide the weapon home. Tam’s laser cannon flashed, blasting a grutchin away from her cockpit before it could attach, and then the brilliant flash of the first proton detonation caused her canopy’s blast tinting to darken. More explosions followed in quick succession, and by the time Luke swung the Sabers around, the ship was coming apart.

  The inert cruiser lay ahead, surrounded by a cloud of floating bodies and equipment. The rifts in its hull hung dark and ominous, some large enough for an X-wing to enter. Mara checked her tactical display and saw that Luke could be thinking what she feared. The Venture, now turned on its side next to the Sabers, was already hammering the last cruiser, and the Reecee squadrons were herding the surviving skips into an ever-tightening sphere, picking them off now by the twos and threes.

  “Skywalker,” Mara commed. “A dead yammosk is one thing—”

  “They need a live one—and when is it going to be easier?” Luke eased his X-wing toward the largest breach. “Danni’s already shown how valuable it is just to know when there’s a yammosk present—imagine what we’ll be able to do when we can intercept its messages.”

  “How are you going to carry it back?” Mara asked. “Under your seat?”

  “Han, send us the Jolly Man.”

  “Wait a minute,” Danni said. “Something’s wrong. The yammosk has gone completely silent, and now the skips look confused.”

  “That’s enough, Luke,” Mara said. Close to home or not, this felt too easy to be safe. “The Force was with us at Talfaglio. Today, it’s not.”

  Luke was already swinging his X-wing around as the flash of an exploding magma magazine tore the vessel apart, bouncing yorik coral off his particle shields and licking his exhaust ports with hundred-meter flames.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Though the skyway balcony was always th
e grandest entrance to any society apartment, Viqi Shesh had long believed that the interior approach revealed more about the occupants’ station in life. The Solo apartment sat in a sanibuffed cul-de-sac as wide as a speeder avenue, with a floor of milky larmalstone—a costly nonfabricant available only from the Roche asteroid field—and rare red ladalums blooming in rounded wall niches between pillars of white marde. A barrel-vaulted ceiling of custom-made glow panels infused the area with cloudy light, and a smiling Serv-O-Droid greeter—no doubt with the full tattletale security package—stood patiently outside the crystasteel door.

  The Solos had certainly come down in the world since Leia’s days as chief of state. Upon learning that they had quietly traded their prestigious Orowood hideaway for something in the more affordable Eastport administrative district, Viqi had at first been inclined to doubt her informer. One did not expect to find two of the Rebellion’s most acclaimed heroes and power brokers living among the bureaucrats—much less at an address nearly three hundred meters down from the top of a not-very-tall tower—but the ladalums convinced her. Unique to Alderaan, the shrubs yielded red blossoms only if their line remained pure to their planet of origin. Given the vicissitudes of disease and cross-pollination, they were, like so many things Alderaanian these days, gradually dying out.

  That was what happened to those who lost power, Viqi supposed. They withered slowly away, until one day they were just gone. Like Mon Mothma, like Admiral Ackbar, like Leia Organa Solo—like Viqi herself, after being undone in the senate by Luke Skywalker and his Jedi tricks.

  Not wishing to draw attention to herself by staring too long at the Solos’ apartment, Viqi looked casually away and continued past, just another Eastport bureaucrat heading home on personal business in the middle of the day. Dressed in a fashionable high-collared overcloak and swank slouch hat, she certainly looked the part—well enough to have fooled the young Jedi trailing her when she and an assistant exchanged clothes in the refresher station of a crowded transit hub. She followed the corridor around the corner to a lift bank and stepped into a tube, removing her hat and overcloak as she rose to the rooftop.

  Now garbed in the conservative business tabard of a money watcher, she stepped out onto the sky-shuttle landing pad, deposited the clothing in a disintegrator chute, and crossed to another lift bank. After giving the proper visitor authorization for an apartment on the same level, she descended to the Solos’ floor and started back toward the apartment, trying to think of how she could insert the sensislug without being observed. Entering the cul-de-sac, even on the pretext of examining the beautiful ladalums, was out of the question. The greeter droid would be very polite and solicitous, but it would also be scanning her image and voiceprint for a data match.

  Viqi approached the entry head-on this time, strolling along and peering over the top of a sheaf of flimsiplast documents she had brought as a prop. There was simply no way to enter the cul-de-sac without being seen by the greeter droid, which meant she would have to find some other way to insert the sensislug. Her contact had assured her that the creatures were capable of finding their own way inside once they had been targeted, but the Yuuzhan Vong understood even less about cleaning droids than she did about sensislugs. Having already lost half a dozen of the insects trying to slip just one into the NRMOC committee room, she felt reasonably certain that the instant the sensislug came within twenty meters of a ladalum, some little pest hunter would zip out to destroy it.

  Viqi was starting to consider other options—food deliveries or using a third party—when she heard the solution marching up the corridor behind her.

  “… is hardly the time to go sight-seeing, dear,” Han Solo was saying.

  “It’s exactly the time,” Leia countered. “They had a reason for trying to keep the capture of Reecee quiet, and that reason will be all the more pressing now that we know about it.”

  Still pretending to be absorbed in her documents, Viqi quietly slipped one hand into her pocket and palmed what felt like a thumb-sized leech in her fingers. In place of a head, it had a huge compound eye. She turned the eye toward the Solos’ crystasteel door and squeezed the creature until she felt its body grow warm with understanding. Han and Leia veered toward the center of the corridor as they came up behind her. Some creature in their party gurgled softly as they passed, and two pairs of metallic feet clanked on the floor behind them.

  “Besides, we know the reason,” Han argued. “Bilbringi.”

  “That’s the obvious reason,” Leia countered. “When have you ever known the Yuuzhan Vong to be obvious?”

  The Solos swept past Viqi without a second glance, both dressed in rumpled flight suits. Han cradled an infant in one arm. Viqi was hardly an authority on babies—when the time came to bear one, she intended to have a staff and a telbun to care for the thing—but she did know the Solos’ offspring to be adults now—or nearly so. This had to be the Skywalker heir.

  The couple’s famous golden droid came clumping after them, a four-armed TDL nanny droid traveling smoothly at its side. Viqi turned a little more toward the wall. The two humans would not see through her disguise, she knew, because this was the last place they expected to find her. The droids were a different matter. Droids scanned and analyzed and did not let their expectations lead them astray, and she felt fairly certain that the protocol droid, at least, would have her face committed to its memory banks.

  The droid seemed more concerned with the discussion between its owners than who she might be. When Han did not answer his wife’s objection, it said, “Forgive me for intruding, but I am quite certain that when Master Luke and Mistress Mara said Ben would be safer on Coruscant, they anticipated that we would be staying longer than fifty-seven minutes.”

  Leia shot a look over her shoulder that would have melted lesser droids. “You let me worry about that, Threepio.”

  “Yes, Princess.”

  Viqi guessed from the presence of the Skywalker baby that they had to be coming from the secret Jedi base. Tsavong Lah was still trying to discover its location—that was one of the reasons he had assigned her this task—and, given what Skywalker had done to her in the senate, she was eager to see the warmaster pleased. She waited a moment longer to make certain there was no one else in the Solos’ party. Then, as they approached the intersection in front of the apartment, she flicked the sensislug at the protocol droid’s back.

  The worm hit in absolute silence and slithered down toward the waist coupling, but the droid suddenly paused at the corner and swiveled its head around to look behind it. Viqi hid her face behind her documents and turned the corner—then ran into something barely as high as her chest and cried out in surprise, flinging her flimsiplast props in all directions.

  A wispy voice below her rasped, “I beg your forgiveness.”

  She looked down to see a little bug-eyed alien with gray skin and a mouthful of sharp teeth, gathering her documents in his long-taloned fingers.

  The Noghri passed the documents back to her. “I apologize.”

  Viqi allowed the alien to place the props in her hand, then sensed the Solos watching her. She had taken care to disguise her appearance by coloring her hair drab ash and making liberal use of an NRI disguise kit, but at the moment, she could not help wishing that she had accepted her contact’s offer to give her an ooglith masquer. Unable to resist looking, she glanced over at the Solos and found them both staring.

  Han’s expression grew concerned. “You okay? Would you like to come inside for a minute?”

  Viqi’s heart jumped into her throat. She mumbled something indecipherable, then scurried off shaking her head.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Anakin could feel nothing through the battle meld except doubt and resentment, so he was as surprised as anyone when the crack-crackle of a thermal detonator reverberated through the street behind him. Raising his lightsaber to high guard and thumbing the activation switch, he pivoted around to discover a ball of blue-white light contracting between Raynar and Eryl,
obliterating everything in a five-meter radius and opening a deep crater in the street. Subsurface service ducts began to spew water and sewer gas, filling the hole with steam and flame.

  Over the course of several dozen attempts to reach the cloning facility, the Jedi had crossed replications of nearly every environment where voxyn might be sent to hunt them—replications of agritracts, robofactories, swamp farms, even an automated cloud mine. Now they were pushing through the slave city itself. With tiers of windows and balconies built directly into the walls, the metropolis reminded Anakin of the pictures his mother had shown him of Crevasse City on lost Alderaan. In addition to a dozen different species of slave residents, the artificial city contained turbolifts, slidewalks, even droid-operated hovercars.

  Anakin stepped past Tahiri and Tekli and peered over Raynar’s shoulder into the flaming crater. Nothing remained of whatever had prompted the attack.

  “Voxyn?” he asked. Since their retreat from the walker, the voxyn attacks had been coming with increasing frequency.

  Raynar shrugged. “I didn’t see.”

  “It came out of the street hatch,” Eryl explained from the other side. Her green eyes flickered briefly in Raynar’s direction, then she added, “There was no time to do anything but toss a detonator down its throat. Sorry for the waste.”

  Anakin thumbed his lightsaber off. “I don’t know that I’d call it a waste.” The team was down to a dozen thermal detonators—now eleven—and perhaps twice that many grenades, but at least they had not lost anyone since Ulaha. “Raynar is probably worth the price of a detonator.”

  “Probably?” Raynar objected. “If there’s any question, the House of Thul will gladly reimburse the Jedi for all detonators used on my behalf.”

  “You’re sure?” Eryl asked doubtfully.

  She circled around the burning crater, then pinched Raynar on the cheek and laughed. Behind her came Zekk and Jaina—like Anakin and Lomi, now completely recovered from their encounter with the flitnats. Even Lowbacca and Jovan had nothing worse to show than a bad rash, thanks to Tekli’s quick realization that the insects had been engineered to promote a debilitating allergic reaction.