ELEVEN
Borleias
Tam awoke in a hospital ward bed.
Again.
He didn’t like doing that. It was happening too often.
This time, his left shoulder ached, and he remembered how it got that way. The first time a member of the medical staff walked past the foot of his bed, he motioned the man over and said, “Can I get a message to someone?”
“Let me get someone for you first,” the man said.
Minutes later, visitors appeared from beyond the blue curtains to one side. Tarc barged right up to stand beside Tam. Wolam was content to stand at the foot of the bed, smiling. And Intelligence head Iella Wessiri positioned herself between them.
“Which arm hurts?” Tarc asked.
“No, no, no, Tarc. Protocol.” Tam gave him a little mock-glare. “The visitor who is most socially important, or who has the greatest demands on his time, gets to talk first. Which one is that?”
“Me,” Tarc said.
“Well, her, I guess.”
“That’s better.”
Iella smiled at the boy. “I was available, so I thought I’d stop by in person to give you some news. You did a very important thing last night. You prevented a Yuuzhan Vong spy from getting away with some, well, very significant information.”
“Information you didn’t want them to have. Unlike the stuff I gave them.”
Iella nodded, not contrite.
“What information?”
“I shouldn’t say. You shouldn’t ask.”
“I think I can guess.” When still under Yuuzhan Vong control, he’d stolen records of a project being developed at this base, something about a superweapon involving laser weapons focused through a giant-sized lambent crystal, a living crystal normally bioengineered only by the Yuuzhan Vong. The spy’s torture of the Bothan, asking about such a crystal, suggested that the Bothan’s chamber was where it was being kept or monitored. But there had been no giant lambent crystal there—only the wreckage of some sort of mock-up.
There was no giant crystal. It was a fake. The whole Starlancer project had to be a fake. In a moment of clarity, he understood that the Starlancer project was nothing more than a ring in the nose of the Yuuzhan Vong commander, something to tug him in one direction or another.
“What’s your guess?” Iella asked.
“I shouldn’t say. You shouldn’t ask.”
“Good man.”
“Alive. Which he probably wouldn’t have been, without your intervention. He’s a few beds down; you can talk to him if the doctors say it’s all right. Anyway, I just wanted to stop by and say thanks.”
“Happy to help. Except for the pain part.”
When she’d gone, Tarc said, “They’re talking about you.”
“What are they saying?”
“That you’re crazy as a monkey-lizard, jumping a Vong warrior all by yourself.”
“What do you say?”
“Well … I’ve never seen a monkey-lizard.”
Tam nodded. “Good answer.”
“Come on, boy.” Wolam motioned Tarc over. “We need to give the monkey-lizard here some more time to rest. You can be my holocam operator until he drags himself out of bed.”
“Good,” Tarc said. “I’ll make the recordings he’s scared to.”
“Just don’t record me.” Tam pulled the sheet up over his head.
He heard Tarc snicker, and then he drifted away into sleep once more.
Coruscant
Luke woke in darkness, disoriented for a moment by the lack of familiar sights and smells, but comforted by the knowledge that Mara was beside him. In fact, it was her settling into the broad cot with him that reminded him where and when he was. “Just coming off watch?” he murmured.
“That’s right.” She rested her chin on his shoulder, making him her pillow. “Go back to sleep.”
“I ought to get up.”
“You don’t want to do that. All the news is bad.”
“What news?”
“Ask the scientists.”
“We’ve spent so much time down in the ruins,” Danni explained, “that we haven’t had much of an opportunity to take all the readings we needed to.” Before she could continue, she yawned, then looked embarrassed at the way her exhaustion had betrayed her.
They were in the Complex’s control chamber, Luke and Danni and Baljos. Both scientists looked tired, but now, at least, there was sufficient fresh water to bathe and wash clothes, so they all looked better than they had in some days.
“What readings?” Luke asked. “Every time I look at you two, you’re taking readings.”
“We’ve been taking biological readings, mostly,” Baljos said. “Electromagnetic energy flow readings. Chemical tests of water and food sources. That sort of thing. But not until a few hours ago, when Kell and Face went topside and set up some holocams and other monitoring equipment, have we been able to do any astronomical recordings.”
Luke shrugged. “So what have you found out?”
“Gravitational readings suggest that we’re closer to Coruscant’s sun now,” Danni said. “The planetary orbit has changed.”
“The atmospheric temperature is several degrees higher than it should be at this time of year,” Baljos said. “That was the impression I got with our hand units, but there was no way to tell before now whether it was just a seasonal fluke. No, there’s a lot more moisture in the atmosphere than there should be. Consistently. Laser-based spectroscopic analysis gives similar readings out to a considerable distance. Master Skywalker, I think the polar ice is melting.”
“Luke. It’s just Luke.” Luke sat back, frowning. “Is this their worldshaping?”
Danni nodded. “More like ‘Vongforming.’ It’s a lot faster, more brutally efficient than our equivalent techniques.”
“Is there any good news?”
“A little.” Danni pointed at the first of three computer screens.
This one showed a holocam view of a building roof. It seemed to be shedding; fragments of some leaflike material were being tossed around by winds. “We’re witnessing a die-off of some of the Vongforming plants. The grasses and explosive fungi they used to begin the breakdown of the building surfaces are starting to die. We don’t know whether it means they’re not adapting well to this environment, or just that they’re the first step of the Vongforming process, with more steps to come. Doctor Arnjak suspects the latter.”
“That’s ‘Science Boy’ to you,” Baljos said.
“So that may or may not be good news,” Luke said.
Baljos nodded. “Correct. Here’s some news that’s a little less ambiguous.” He indicated the other two screens, one full of graphical charts and text, the other broken down into eight holocam images—still images of Yuuzhan Vong warriors digging through rubble, engaged in training exercises, lined up in a disciplined row.
Luke peered at the screens. The information on the first one seemed to relate to proportions of gases in the atmosphere. “What’s it mean?”
“The proportion of toxic gases in the atmosphere has pretty much stabilized. Oh, they’re worse at some specific altitudes than others, but they’re not increasing in proportion. I think they relate to the biological actions of the Vongforming plants that are breaking down the duracrete and metals. Meaning that the Vong aren’t trying to make the atmosphere poisonous to us. This increases the chances of survival of, well, the people who are still alive down here.”
“That’s something, I guess.” Luke looked at the scientists. “And the other one?”
Danni said, “You remember that we brought along some little stealth droids. Shaped like fungi, mosses, that sort of thing. We’ve been taking them out and depositing them in areas the Vong seem to patrol heavily. They’re following those paths, very slowly, and transmitting images in very short, hard-to-track comm bursts. These are our first sets of images. They don’t tell us much yet, but we hope they will someday.”
“So, what do you get from the atmospheric data?”
Danni and Baljos exchanged a look, and Luke could read all sorts of things into it. They’d already come to some conclusions. They were just trying to decide which ones to present him, and in which order.
“We’ve kind of been giving the survivors the impression that the New Republic forces are going to come back and seize Coruscant,” Danni said.
Luke nodded. “That’s the objective.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be a Coruscant to come back to. How long will it take? A year? Five years? Ten? By the time our forces get here, it’s going to be something else. A Yuuzhan Vong world.”
“That won’t give the survivors much hope.”
“So,” Baljos said, “we think we should take a different approach to what we were doing. We teach the survivors how to survive on this world—this alien world. Not necessarily so they can come out fighting when the big push comes. Just so they can survive. Maybe escape. We analyze all the new life-forms we run across, the ones introduced by the Yuuzhan Vong, and teach our people which ones are good to eat. Teach them how to find safe water.”
“Maybe how to wall off whole complexes,” Danni said, “so the Vong just never come down into them.”
“If we do all that …” Luke considered the matter for long seconds. “We’re admitting that we’ve lost.”
“That we’ve lost Coruscant, anyway,” Danni said. “Not the war.”
“I can’t accept this.” A flash of anger ignited within Luke, but he calmed himself, willed it away. “You’re suggesting that this entire mission is a failure!”
“Not a failure.” Danni carefully considered her words. “The mission didn’t match the reality we found. It’s like any scientific investigation. You observe evidence, you come up with a theory to explain the evidence, you put the theory to the test … and in most cases, the theory has to be revised. We arrive at truths one faltering step at a time.”
“Just like Jedi training.”
Luke sighed. “I have to think about this.”
Luke was still thinking about it two days later when he went on another vehicle hunt with Face and Bhindi.
They weren’t always traveling in Yuuzhan Vong armor anymore; now that they had a base of operations and less need to travel in a large group through unknown territories, Luke and the others often made do with civilian clothing. It was lighter and far more comfortable than the Yuuzhan Vong armor, especially in the increasingly steamy atmosphere of Coruscant’s lower levels. Kell and Face were the exceptions—quite taken with just how horribly dashing they were in the armor, they insisted on wearing it during all missions, evidently a competition to see which one would give up and admit discomfort first.
With initial objectives achieved—the team had a base of operations and its members were interacting with the local non-Yuuzhan Vong population—they could begin implementing the plan for their eventual escape from Coruscant.
Their insertion method had not included a getaway vehicle, for they knew that, given how many millions of vehicles still remained here, in varying conditions of preservation, they would be able to find, salvage, or steal a working vehicle—or, with Tahiri’s help, perhaps even a Yuuzhan Vong vessel.
Logic dictated that there had to be thousands if not millions of vehicles in the wreckage that was Coruscant. The trick was in finding them, since all vehicles visible from the air had been strafed and destroyed by coralskippers. Only those that had been hidden or buried had a chance to be intact.
And so far, though they’d found hundreds of vehicles in their searches, not one was even remotely likely as an escape vehicle. They’d found scores of airtaxis, numerous crashed starfighters, the remains of a hangar with a troop transport—and troops—crushed beneath incalculable tonnage of collapsed building. Luke thought that, with a month to work on it, he could cobble together enough parts from various destroyed starfighters to make one working model … which would get one of them offplanet when the time came.
That was just one more failure to weigh upon him. He sat in a fiftieth-story viewport of what had once been a Starfighter Command recruiting office, staring out into the cavernous street beneath, while Face and Bhindi struggled to get the office’s computer operational, and he wondered why he’d bothered with this mission.
His son Ben was light-years away, hidden out of sight—out of Yuuzhan Vong sight, but also out of his sight—in a secret Jedi base in the Maw, a region of space surrounded and concealed by black holes. Mara had to be questioning his competence. The Jedi, whom he had hoped to inspire and unite in this bold mission into the territory most strongly held by the Yuuzhan Vong, would lose faith in him.
Something attracted his attention, just the merest sensation that there were eyes upon him, and he looked up from the rubble-strewn depths he’d been regarding.
Across the avenue, at about the same altitude, someone stood in a viewport staring at him. At this distance, about a hundred meters, Luke could not be sure, but he thought it was a man. A very pale man. Luke pulled out his macrobinoculars and trained them on that person.
He stared into a face that was half-strange, half-familiar.
This man was pallid, with curly dark hair, sea-blue eyes, and a prominent nose that suggested old aristocracy. He was young, barely twenty, if that old. He wore a pale kiltlike wrap around his midsection and shiny items at various points on his body—fingerless gloves, elbow covers, knee covers; though thick and metallic, these looked like a very inadequate set of armor. His head was held at an angle as though he’d been tilting it one way and another as he watched Luke.
Luke knew his face, but couldn’t place it, couldn’t call up that memory. In fact, it was easier not to think right now.
When Luke’s eyes met his, the man smiled. It was the smile of a child suddenly captivated with the wonders of pulling legs off insects.
Luke found he could sense the man in the Force—could do so without even reaching out for him. The man was a glowing light in the Force, a beacon in the midst of darkness. A beacon of darkness … but that suddenly didn’t matter much.
Luke felt his breath go out of him. It was as though the roof had slowly collapsed and deposited two tons of duracrete on his torso while he was distracted.
He glanced over at Face and Bhindi. They had the terminal running; the glow from its screen colored their faces blue. Bhindi removed a datacard from its slot in the terminal and made a noise of satisfaction. They were both utterly unaware of what Luke was seeing, feeling.
Luke knew that, when he turned his attention back to the distant viewport, the pale man would be gone; it was among the oldest tools in the bag of tricks of the makers of supernatural holodramas. But when he looked through the macrobinoculars again, the man was still there, motionless.
Luke unlatched the viewport’s locks. All he had to do was step out on the walkway that now stretched between this building and the other. He could walk right up to this man and begin asking questions. But some faint stirring of alarm—his pilot’s ability to glimpse and memorize topographical details—shook him out of the fog that had overcome his thinking.
There was no walkway before him. One step through this viewport and he’d plummet to his death.
The man’s grin grew wider. Then he sidestepped and disappeared from sight.
Luke felt the great weight lift from him. He could breathe again. “Are you two done here?” he asked.
Face looked up, frowning. “Luke, are you all right?”
“No. Trouble’s coming. Let’s go.”
Bhindi rose. “If trouble’s coming, we’re done here.”
Luke, Face, and Bhindi crouched in a crater that had been one corner of a skyscraper—the same skyscraper in which, minutes before, the pale man had stood. They were about twenty stories above the window the figure had occupied, and all three had macrobinoculars trained on the viewport Luke had, minutes before, tried to open.
The room beyond the viewport was filled with people. They wore tatters. Some wore nothing but dried mud and blood. There was a light in their eyes that suggested they were on stimulants and had been for days or weeks. They rampaged through the Starfighter Command office, destroying every piece of furniture, smashing every wall, a riot whose violence was directed at everything and nothing.
“What are they?” Bhindi asked. “They’re not your run-of-the-mill survivors.”
“Some of Yassat’s cannibals, I expect,” Face said. “You felt them coming, Luke?”
“Something like that,” Luke said. “C’mon, let’s go down.”
They found the chamber in which Luke had seen the pale man. It had once been the main chamber of a hotel suite, and possibly not occupied since Coruscant fell. The beds were still made. Floor-to-ceiling viewports offered a good view of Coruscant’s sky—if one looked high enough, anyway.
Luke could feel it here, a twinge in the Force, the same one he’d been pursuing ever since he came to Coruscant. But that was not what held his attention.
It was the viewports. He was sure from their dimensions that one of these was the viewport in front of which the pale man had been standing.
He’d filled it, from floor to the top of the viewport frame. And these viewports were three meters tall.
“You’re tired,” Mara said. “And this makes you more susceptible to Force powers. He meddled with you, certainly … but once you get some sleep you’ll be more fit to face him.”
Mara knew little, other than from observation and studies in psychology, about comforting those who were hurt. Most of what she knew she had learned since Ben had been born. Luke so seldom needed comforting—his wisdom and his humor had always provided him with a durable armor against life’s cuts and blows. But sometimes events got past that armor—Ben’s kidnapping, Anakin Solo’s death. Now it was this eerie visitation by someone who’d come within a centimeter of tricking him into taking a fatal plunge. And at such times Mara could do little but stay close, act as an anchor for him to hold onto.
“I don’t think so,” Luke said. “I’m certain being tired made it easier for him to transmit all that despair and the mental compulsion through the Force, yes. But I also have a sense that he’s powerful. And I know I’ve seen his face somewhere. I—” Luke’s next words were cut off as he yawned.
Mara gave him a stern look.
“I know, I know. I need sleep. I’m tired.” He stretched out on the cot. “Tired, and I have to admit it, scared of something that could sneak up on me and plant a Force-based suggestion in my mind. As though I were some spice addict with no resistance, no training.”
“Tired and wounded in pride.”
He grinned. “Well, maybe.”
“Get some sleep, farmboy. You’ll feel better—and think better—once your power cells are recharged.”
“True.”
In minutes, Luke was asleep, his breathing regular. But Mara lay awake long after that, her own Force senses extended in an alert screen, attuned to detect any flicker of hatred or despair that might drift their way from the thing that wanted to take her husband’s life.
Borleias
The sun named Pyria was just a tiny bright dot in the forward viewport, no more a draw to the naked eye than one well-illuminated planet usually is from the surface of another. It certainly was not sufficient to distract Han and Leia from their tasks.
“Got it, thanks.” Leia leaned back from the comm board. “Borleias Control has given us the map of known locations of dovin basal mines. They’re not too confident about the extent of their knowledge.”
Han looked at her and cracked his knuckles. “So, they think there’s a fair chance we’ll be dragged out of hyperspace before we quite reach Borleias’s mass shadow. Well, you tell ’em that it’s not going to happen.”
“And it’s not going to happen because …?”
“Because I’m going to fly around them. What did you think?”
“I think we’d better have weapons on-line and ready.” Leia trotted aft and climbed into the topside laser turret while Han activated the concussion missile launcher. Once she had her comlink activated, she heard her husband’s complaint, “You have no faith in my abilities.”
“Of course I have faith in your abilities.” She took the turret for a practice spin and began the self-test of its computer targeting system. “I also have experience with theirs.”
Space twisted before them and then almost instantly snapped back to normal. But Borleias did not dominate the viewport as it should have. The sun was somewhat larger, a bright globe.
Then they were in a loop, centrifugal force crushing Leia down into her gunner’s chair before she could shout to Han about the coralskippers she saw closing on the Falcon from astern. She watched the universe to either side rotate as they went upside-down to their original arrival orientation, and overhead she could see the two distant gleams of the oncoming skips.
Leia began firing the topside lasers as fast as they could charge, and the skips sent streams of plasma at the Falcon. They gained relative elevation in what was probably originally an attempt to follow the Falcon’s loop, but the maneuver ended up putting them on a collision course with the Falcon.
Han’s words came over the comm, muffled as if uttered through clenched teeth: “Going starboard.”
Leia chose a starboard target and concentrated all her laser fire on that skip. Its voids did well against her barrage, intercepting every bolt, but her concentration of fire on the area of the pilot’s canopy doomed the coralskipper—Han’s concussion missile, fired a moment later, detonated against the skip’s hull, vaporizing the smaller craft.
Han sent the Falcon into a mad spin along its long axis. A shower of plasma projectiles flashed harmlessly by—mostly harmlessly; a clank and the sudden sound of damage alarms was proof that at least one of them had managed a graze.
Then the second coralskipper was past, behind them, and beginning a long loop around.
Han did not follow; he turned back toward Borleias and put on a burst of speed.
Leia felt her jaw drop in surprise. She keyed the comlink. “Hey, you,” she said. “What have you done with my husband? The one who laughs in the face of death, then takes it out for drinks and dinner?”
Han sounded pained. “That pilot is just trying to lure us back to his pals. Do I look that dumb?”
She frowned, considering.
“Am I that dumb?” he asked.
“Well, no, certainly not.”
Grinning, Leia returned her attention to the sensors. They showed the remaining coralskipper tightening its turn as its pilot realized that the Falcon was not pursuing; it would be coming up behind them soon. Distortions in the wire-frame image showed the locations of dovin basal mines, the gravitic organisms capable of yanking ships out of hyperspace.
That wire-frame was continuing to update, continuing to distort, and she frowned at it, trying to comprehend what she was seeing. “Straight down,” she shouted, “relative to our current orientation. Move it, flyboy!”
He moved it, pointing the Falcon’s nose straight “down.” The hard maneuver hauled Leia up out of her seat, and she could hear the restraining straps creaking against her slight mass.
“All right, we’re pointed down,” Han said. “You are one crabby, grumpy wife. What’s that all about? Why not straight for Borleias?”
“More mines that way. And we’re being followed by one.”
“Followed by a mine?” Han spared a glance for the sensor board, for the distortion Leia had seen, the distortion that was closing on the Falcon’s position. “Not fair. Leia, how’s our pursuer?”
“Rotate, please, he’s coming in under us.”
Han obligingly spun the Falcon again on its long axis, and Leia began firing on the second coralskipper.
Now that the Falcon was no longer maneuvering, except for the juking and jinking Han performed to keep enemy projectiles from hitting it, the transport was outdistancing the dovin basal mine pursuing it. And they were coming up on the outer fringes of the gravitic effects of the closest dovin basal mines.
Leia sprayed the skip with fire and noted that its protective void tended to recenter itself over the pilot’s compartment each time the craft maneuvered to match one of the Falcon’s twitches. She concentrated her fire there, waited until the Falcon made another sideslip, then jerked her aim toward the coralskipper’s bow. The audio interpreters built into the Falcon’s sensor system gave out the sound of an explosion and the coralskipper’s blip disappeared from the screen.
“Good shot,” Han said over the comlink. “How about coming back up here and plotting us a course back to Borleias?”
“Give me a second. You are one crabby, grumpy husband.”
Wedge frowned throughout Han’s and Leia’s account of their return to Borleias. “I don’t like this notion of dovin basal mines that pursue you.”
“Me, either,” Han said. “I’m going to draft a strongly worded letter to the Yuuzhan Vong high commander and insist he stop using them.”
Tycho, on the other side of the conference table, offered up a rare smile. Leia merely gave her husband an arch look.
“Actually, we know his name now,” Wedge said. “Their local commander. Czulkang Lah. We got the information from some of the reptoids that were involved in their big push on us, after we freed them from their control seeds.”
“Lah,” Leia said. “From the same domain as Tsavong Lah?”
Tycho nodded. “Even better. He’s Tsavong Lah’s father. An old, fierce, terrifying warrior and teacher of warriors. He’s like the Garm bel Iblis of the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“And if we can beat him,” Wedge said, “really beat him, it may suggest to the Vong that their gods aren’t really as anxious for them to win as they supposed.”
“Back to the mobile mines,” Tycho said. “It does beg the question of how long they’ve had them, and why this is the first instance we’ve run into of them being used.”
“Right.” Wedge considered. “Han, Leia, when you were making the insertion into Hapes a few weeks ago, you became convinced that the dovin basal mines didn’t just drag things out of hyperspace. You said you thought they registered every ship’s unique mass characteristics and communicated that information to the Vong leaders. Let them build up a sort of Vong database of our ship movements.”
Leia nodded. “That’s right. And Jaina used their reliance on those mass characteristics against the Yuuzhan Vong while she was there.”
“My guess,” Wedge said, “is that this mobile dovin basal mine came after you because it recognized you, specifically the Millennium Falcon. Another ship, they might devote fewer resources to capturing or destroying, but loss of the Falcon and the Solos would be a big morale hit for our side.”
Han and Leia exchanged a glance. Han’s expression was cocky, but Leia could see that he recognized the danger if Wedge’s theory was correct.
“Meaning,” Leia said, “that any ship belonging to one of our side’s, well, celebrities might be detected as such at any time, wherever it goes.”
“Something to keep in mind.” Wedge turned to Tycho. “Call Cilghal in for a meeting later today or tomorrow. And Jaina and her psychological warfare advisers. Maybe we can use this to our advantage.”
“Are we done here?” Han asked. “We have some important things to do. Like running down Jaina before you monopolize her. We’d sort of like to spend some time with her. It’s why we keep coming back here. Not to look at your face.”
Wedge gave him a toothy grin. “Watch that insolence. I might just have to call you up to active service, General Solo.”
Leia lay in her bed. Yes, it was too hard, too lumpy, and light-years away from the quarters that had been her home for years, but this was her bed, and just knowing that it was a place she could return to again and again gave her pleasure out of proportion to its characteristics. She’d flopped onto it, fully dressed, luxuriating in possession if not in comfort, the instant they’d entered their quarters.
Someone knocked on the door. Leia lifted her head and looked at Han on the other side. He stared at her, expectant.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Why mine?”
“Because I said it first.”
“Can’t argue with that logic.” Han rolled to his feet and pressed the access panel beside the door. The door slid aside, revealing a tall, awkward-looking man; the man’s left arm was in a sling.
“Ah, hello,” their visitor said. “I’m Tam Elgrin.”
“I know who you are.” Han shook his hand. “You spied around for a while, and then decided to quit. Headaches ever since.”
“Something like that.”
“Come on in.”
Leia rose. The quarters she shared with Han were not large or well-furnished, but the two of them could make a pretense at civilization. “Can I get you something to drink, Tam?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m, uh, here to talk to you about Tarc.”
“We saw him just a few minutes ago,” Leia said. “He mostly talked about you.”
Han waved him toward a chair. “So talk.”
A rap at his door awakened Kyp. Still clothed—he’d settled in only to rest, and was surprised to find that he’d nodded off—the Jedi Master rose and activated the door. It slid out of the way to reveal Piggy. The Gamorrean pilot leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, a tough-guy posture.
“It’s the Great One,” Piggy said.
Kyp rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “What about her?”
“She wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Where?”
“On the roof.”
Kyp gave the Gamorrean a closer look. Piggy wasn’t normally so taciturn. In fact, he sounded more like a bar bouncer than himself. Kyp reached out with a whisper of his control over the Force and reassured himself that he could sense the pilot, that this Piggy wasn’t a Yuuzhan Vong warrior in an unusually distinctive ooglith masquer disguise. “I’m on my way up.”
Kyp emerged onto the biotics facility’s roof, an uneven surface of external equipment housings and rough textures. It was now dark, a glow in the west attesting to how recently the sun had set.
“Over here.” That was Jaina’s voice, and when Kyp turned he could see both her and Jag Fel sitting atop a condenser-unit housing. He could barely identify them by sight; they were nothing but silhouettes. There were more, smaller, silhouettes where they sat—something that looked like a basket, something that looked like a bottle.
Kyp snorted. “You’re having a picnic?”
“That’s right.” There was amusement in Jaina’s voice. “And the Goddess commands you to attend.”
“You’re getting strange, Goddess.” Kyp sprang up to the unit housing top, landing directly into a cross-legged sitting position to match Jag’s. Jaina was stretched out on her side, facing the two of them.
“It’s not just a picnic.” Jaina took the bottle and poured some of its contents into a glass, one of three mismatched glasses beside the basket. She handed the glass to Kyp. “We need to talk. The three of us.” She poured two more glasses and handed one to Jag.
Kyp sniffed dubiously at his glass. “Paint thinner?”
“We’re not that lucky,” Jag said. “While we’ve been waiting, I’ve been determining its effects on local insects. One hundred percent deadly.”
“Hush,” Jaina said. “This is the finest example of the Borleias distiller’s art. It’s dereliction of duty to be drinking it when another Vong barrage might start at any minute. That means it’s going to taste wonderful.” She took an experimental sip.
To her credit, she did keep her reactions from her face. But through the Force Kyp could feel her physiological reaction as nerve endings in her throat protested the intrusion of the homemade brew.
Though blind to the Force, Jag had to be familiar enough with Jaina to sense what she was experiencing. His shoulders shook with silent laughter.
“Anyway,” Jaina said. Her voice sounded as though she’d suddenly transformed into an elderly mechanic. “We’ve got a problem, Kyp. You and me and Jag.”
“I wasn’t aware of any problems.”
“Then why do you yank yourself out of our Force connection the instant it’s not absolutely vital to our current task? It’s like dancing with a partner who jumps back past arm’s length and brushes himself off at the end of every dance.”
“That’s … an interesting comparison.” Kyp glanced at Jag, but the younger man hadn’t reacted to Jaina’s phrasing, and Kyp couldn’t see his face. “Maybe you and I should talk about this some time. Privately.”
“And maybe not. Jag’s part of this situation. He was the one who suggested this talk.”
Kyp felt himself grow annoyed, and became even more annoyed with himself for indulging in such a predictable reaction. “He did, huh? Direct confrontation. That is the Fel family approach, isn’t it?”
Jag took a sip of the homebrew and made a noise that suggested he’d just been punched. After a moment, he said, “I come from more than one family line, Kyp. Some of them are sneakier than others.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means … that whatever you expect this meeting to be, it probably isn’t.”
“A nice enigmatic reply.” Kyp sipped from his glass. Whatever the fluid was, it seemed to be part alcohol, part pepper, part rotted fruit. His eyes watered. “Wait a second. You two took the antidote before I came up here, didn’t you?”
Jaina snorted. “Would you mind if I cut straight to the power cable?”
“Go right ahead.”
“A while back, you manipulated me. I didn’t like it. On Hapes, I dragged you into some situations you didn’t care for. I gave you plenty of trouble. We both lied to each other about what we intended and what we meant. Well, I thought, when you decided you wanted to join my squadron, that it meant you’d forgiven me. When I accepted, it meant I’d forgiven you. Did it mean that, or didn’t it?”
“So are we partners, or aren’t we?”
“Well, we are. At least so long as Twin Suns Squadron holds out.”
“No, don’t do that.” Jaina let some exasperation creep into her voice. “Every time we link through the Force, I can feel you preparing yourself for the day you have to cut loose and run. Believe me, I understand that. I was doing the same thing until just a few weeks back. For reasons equally as dumb. And you break the link fast so that I won’t know what you’re doing, not that it’s done you any good. I want you to quit doing that. I want you to quit thinking about going off and being by yourself. I know your brother’s dead, your family’s dead, your last squadron is dead, and I’m sorry. But you don’t have to leave, and you don’t have to be alone.”
“Uhh …” Kyp struggled to come up with an answer, the right answer. “I also don’t want to be in the way. In your way. Between you and, you know.”
Jag extended a hand. “Colonel Jagged Fel. Glad to meet you.”
“Shut up, you. Jaina, it’s uncomfortable.”
“Yeah, I know. Jag and I are partners, too, and something more besides, and you’re here, and you were sort of chasing after me for a while, and it’s got to be confusing. It is to me as well. Is it going to make you leave?”
“It should.”
“Then you should leave now and stop wavering.”
Kyp stood. “You’re right. I’m sorry I—”
“Sit down!”
Surprised at the strength in her voice, Kyp sat before he realized it. He gaped at her.
“That’s better,” Jaina said. “Jag, why are males so stupid?”
“Biological predisposition. Here’s an example.” Jag took another sip. Even in the darkness, the ripple of anguish that moved from his neck to his feet was clearly visible.
Jaina sat up, her pose a mirror of Jag’s. “Kyp, it’s uncomfortable because partnerships are uncomfortable. Families are uncomfortable. I know mine is. You have to put up with the discomfort because the only alternative is to lose everything.
“Once upon a time, you were kind of a kid brother to my father. I don’t care about that. That relationship didn’t make you my uncle. You have a relationship with me. It’s not boyfriend-girlfriend. It’s no longer Master-apprentice. I think we both know that neither of these is right. It’s partners, whatever that means. Whatever we figure out for it to mean. If we’re partners, it’s something that lasts until one or the other of us is dead. And whether that pains Jag or not, he’s keeping it to himself, because he’s smart enough to know that he can’t control my relationships for me.
“So—once again—are we partners, or do you go off to die alone?”
Kyp sighed. “I see you inherited your father’s considerable powers of negotiation.”
She ignored the jibe at Han’s style, so very different from her famous mother’s.
“That’s right. So?”
“So we’re partners.”
“Good.” She hoisted her glass. “Drink to it.”
“We have to.”
Jag chuckled. “It’s a drink that makes death-duels with Vong pilots pale in comparison.”