Dark Tide: Onslaught Page 11

  Mara walked to him and threw an arm over his shoulders. “That’s very good, Anakin. We have to be responsible for ourselves, our actions, and responsible to society. Usurping someone else’s personal responsibility, though, denies them their sentience. It’s right and good to help someone who cannot help himself, but forcefully shielding them from the consequences of their actions, no matter how foolish, is wrong.”

  “But if someone is drunk and pulls a blaster—” Anakin stopped. “Wait, I know! No matter what, he’s still going to have to be responsible for his action, but stopping him would be helping those who are helpless: his potential targets.”

  “That would be my read on it, yes.”

  Anakin sighed. “It’s not easy to see that fine line there.”

  “No, it isn’t, but the fact that you’re willing to look is a very good sign.” She pointed off to the north. “Now, I’ve decided I’m strong enough to go help you lug back firewood. We’ll actually be carrying it, right?”

  “Right.” If you think you’re strong enough, Mara, I’ll go with you. If I need to help you, though . . .

  She smiled down at him. “I think the idea of coming here to Dantooine is good, for the both of us. I’ll learn my limitations, you’ll learn yours, and when we’re done, we’ll both come out of this stronger than anyone could have expected.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Corran straightened up, then brushed dust from the shoulders of his green Jedi overrobe. “I’m Corran Horn. My aide here is Ganner Rhysode. We’ve come to—”

  The woman cut him off, and the two young men with her leveled their blaster carbines at the Jedi. “I know why you’re here, and I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

  Ganner laughed. “You think they could stop us?” Illustrating his point, he flicked a finger upward, and the two young men suddenly pointed their blasters at the sky. They struggled to bring them back down on target, then clung to the weapons as Ganner lifted the youths off the ground and left them with their feet dangling in the air.

  Corran flicked a sharp glance in his direction. “Put them down, now, and gently.” He turned to the woman, noting that her expression had gone from sour to incendiary. “I apologize for his enthusiasm, but I have to tell you that I don’t have any clue as to why you think we’re here.”

  The woman laughed. “I may have been here for three months with my students, but I’m not entirely off the net. I hear things.” She narrowed her eyes behind her goggles. “You said your name was Horn, right? You were with Rogue Squadron?”

  Corran nodded. “Only became a Jedi Knight after peace with the Empire.”

  “You weren’t at Mrlsst, were you?”

  “Before my time. I served with a lot of the people who were: Wedge Antilles, Hobbie Klivian, Wes Janson, Tycho Celchu . . . They’re retired now.” Corran got mixed signals coming off her as he recited the names. She certainly recognized some of them, but pretty much anyone in the New Republic could be expected to know some names from Rogue Squadron. “You were there, at the university?”

  “I was. I was working on my doctorate.” The trace of a smile softened her expression. “I didn’t know the Rogues, but I had friends who met them. One went on to work for the squadron.”

  “Koyi Komad? I’ve met her.” Corran kept his voice even. Annoyance and frustration were boiling off Ganner, but the woman was letting her anger settle down. “She got married, must be fourteen or fifteen years ago. She married a Quarren from the squadron, as a matter of fact.”

  “I know, I was there at the wedding.”

  Corran smiled. “Really? I was an usher. Didn’t have a beard then.”

  “I remember a lot of men in uniform.” She offered him her hand. “I’m Anki Pace. I’m running this archaeological survey of Bimmiel for the University of Agamar.”

  Corran noted stiffness in her grip and tension in her voice. “Why is it you think we’re here, Dr. Pace?”

  “Various sites, archaeologically significant sites, have suffered thefts. The items, though they’ve not been studied enough for us to be certain, have been suggested to be related to the Jedi Knights, before the purge. They’re priceless, of course, since the Empire tried to destroy as much of that material as they could. More importantly, though, they can tell us much of how the Jedi used to be.”

  “And you think Jedi Knights have been coming to these sites and taking these things?”

  One of the young men snarled. “I have a friend who was on a dig. They left another student at the site to watch over it at night. When they came back, stuff was gone, and she couldn’t remember anything.”

  Corran’s head came up. “The thief had induced amnesia so she couldn’t remember who had taken the items that were missing?”

  “No,” the man spat, “she couldn’t remember anything. All she’d learned that year and the year before was all gone. It was as if she’d missed two years of life. The Jedi can do that. They can blank your memories or make you remember things you didn’t see.”

  Corran shivered. He had no talent for telekinesis, but he was adept at projecting thoughts and images into the minds of others. He’d even used that ability to dump people’s short-term memories—the last ten seconds of what they had seen—to blind them to covert entries and escapes. And I know Kyp used that ability to wipe the memory of Qwi Xux, the architect of the Death Star and the Sun Crusher. He broke her, left her shattered. It was years before she was able to put her life back together and move on after that tragedy.

  He glanced over at Ganner. “What do you know of this sort of thing?”

  Ganner reacted as if Corran had spit in his face. “Nothing. I’ve no knowledge of thefts, and I would not stoop to same.”

  “Still, you are aware that certain artifacts have shown up on Yavin 4 that are being studied for their significance concerning the old order.” Corran looked back at Dr. Pace. “Some of these items, I know, have come from collectors. My wife has brokered the deals for many of them, and if the provenance was at all suspicious, I would know.”

  Pace snorted. “All well and good for you to say. Just the sort of thing a Jedi would plant in my mind so I couldn’t suspect you of stealing what we’ve found.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” Ganner folded his arms across his chest. “How dare you accuse us of being thieves?”

  The other young man barked a quick laugh. “My parents came from Carida. There are other things I could call Jedi Knights.”

  Corran held his hands up. “Stop. This isn’t going to get us anywhere. Now me, I’m getting cold and I’d like to get inside your cave there, but you aren’t going to let us in until I can convince you that we’re not here to poach your find. I think I can assure you that we aren’t, if you’ll answer one question.”

  Dr. Pace cocked her head to the side. “And that is?”

  “Have you sent out any messages about this find?”

  She frowned for a moment, then shook her head. “No. We drafted the messages, but couldn’t raise the satellite. No way you could have known what we found.”

  The first youth shook his head. “That’s not right, Dr. Pace. The Jedi have visions. They can see into the future. That’s how they knew we’d found it.”

  Corran glanced at Ganner. “You want to take it?”

  “If I must.” The taller Jedi shrugged, spilling dust from his shoulders. “That ability is rare, and one we have little control over. Logically, if we could peer into the future, don’t you think we would have come here before you found whatever you found and would have removed it?”

  The young man frowned. “Well, I don’t know.”

  Corran winked at the kid. “Don’t think too long on it, or you’ll figure we’ve planted the memory of this conversation. You’ll end up going around and around in your mind and drive yourself to distraction.”

  Dr. Pace patted the youth on the shoulder. “Vil, you and Denna go back to your posts. I think the slashrats are all tied up in a killball, but they might come for us, s
o you’ll discourage them.”

  “Yes, Dr. Pace.”

  Pace looked at Corran. “So, why are you here?”

  “We’ve had reports of some raiding along the Rim. The university hadn’t heard from you and asked if we could check in on you. We were afraid you’d been raided, so we came out.”

  Dr. Pace frowned. “What sort of raiding? Humans?”

  Ganner shifted his shoulders. “Nonhuman, we think.”

  “Interesting.” She turned toward the cave, then waved Corran and Ganner in her wake. “Come with me.”

  They followed and passed between tarps that had been hung to seal the mouth of the cave. Beyond the first set Corran saw another about five meters deeper into the cave. The area between them had been set with a number of buckets filled with a dark, frothy liquid that reminded Corran of engine coolant. It stank horribly. The cloying scent wafted easily through the rebreather’s dust filters and coated the back of his throat.

  Pace unsealed the second tarp wall, then closed it behind them. She pulled off her rebreather and took a deep breath. Corran did the same, and even though he could still smell some of the liquid, the air tasted much sweeter.

  He jerked a thumb at the tarps. “What is that stuff in the buckets?”

  Pace looked over at a knot of students deeper in the caves. “Trista, come here, please.”

  A slender, black-haired woman that Corran judged to be half his age came walking over. She had a pert nose and just a touch of dirt on her face that somehow enhanced her beauty rather than detracted from it. “Yes, Dr. Pace?”

  “These . . . Jedi are interested in your theories about the ecology of Bimmiel.” Pace waved her forward. “This is Trista Orlanis, one of my graduate students.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” The young woman smiled, letting her smile linger more in Ganner’s direction than Corran’s, which Corran found a minor annoyance. “Are you familiar with the Imperial survey?”

  Ganner nodded. “I read it and briefed Corran.”

  Trista’s smile broadened. “Well, then, you know that the Imperial team came here as Bimmiel was inbound in its elliptical orbit. As the planet nears the sun, it warms up, naturally, and the ice caps begin to melt. The resulting moisture triggers an abundance of plant growth. The heat also brings the shwpi out of hibernation. They are herbivores, so they eat, multiply, and eat more. They don’t digest most of the seeds, so they excrete them, sheathing the seeds with organic fertilizer.

  “Certain other animals cannot tolerate the heat, so they retreat toward the polar regions while the shwpi population explodes. Then, as the planet begins to move away from the sun, the planet cools, which frees these creatures from their ranges to sweep into the equatorial areas. The shwpi have overgrazed the world, allowing the storms to pick up and redistribute a lot of soil through wind erosion. Moisture collects in ice caps at the poles as the world cools, which is why it is so dry now. The predators, most notably the slashrats, are adept at moving through the resulting dunes. They hunt the shwpi that have not found burrows in which to hibernate.”

  Ganner nodded sagely. “The Imperial survey never saw the slashrats since they were not in the survey area.”

  “True. They postulated the existence of such creatures, but didn’t have enough time here to confirm that theory.” Trista pointed toward the tarps. “What we have back there is the essence of rendered slashrats. That’s what they smell like after being several days dead. The slashrats move through the sand, tracing the scent that shwpi leave behind as they move through or over the sand. The death scent keeps slashrats back; most creatures consider the rotting scent of their own kind to be a sign of danger. We’re safe enough in here because they can’t come up through the bedrock that makes up these caves.”

  Corran slipped his goggles up on his forehead and let his rebreather hang at his throat. “I’m glad to know you’re safe, but you didn’t bring us in here for a lesson in Bimmiellian ecology, Dr. Pace. You reacted to the fact that the raiders weren’t human.”

  “Perhaps you’re not a total fool, Jedi.” Dr. Pace waved Corran deeper into the cave. Ganner started to follow, but she held a hand up. “No, you wait here. Him, I trust. You, I’m not sure.”

  Ganner snorted, but said nothing.

  Corran tossed him a wink, then headed deeper into the cave. The passage began to shrink, so Corran stooped as he descended into the planet’s flesh. The passageway also began to narrow, then broadened out abruptly and provided access to a large, round chamber. Lights had been set up in it, and a half-dozen students were working with brushes and small trowels to shift sand around. Two other students were at a table running a digitizer over artifacts and monitoring the data coming up on their datapads.

  Dr. Pace stopped beside Corran. “Until the storm trapped us in these caverns, we’d not looked much into them. We cleared sand from the passage and discovered this chamber. The sand in here was washed in with the rains, so it was laid down in even layers over the years at a fairly constant rate. We don’t have a solid chronology, but as we began poking around we discovered something that we think has been here for forty years, maybe fifty.”

  She led him over to the computer table. “Jens, call up scan AR-312.”

  As the young woman punched up a request for that data, Dr. Pace faced Corran. “We’ve recovered a body, the mummified remains of some creature. As nearly as we can make out, it retreated here and was felled by slashrats. The teeth marks on the long bones and ragged edges of dried flesh were consistent with . . .”

  Corran stopped listening as the holographic image of a skull appeared above a holoprojector plate. It had a low cranial ridge, but was longer than a human skull. The features appeared sharper, and the computer enhanced the fracture lines and deformities on the face. The cheekbones had been broken and set oddly, so the face had a slope from right to left, and the nose bones had clearly been shattered.

  “Emperor’s black bones!”

  Dr. Pace nodded. “Not very pretty. Bony, with hooks and claws on the hands, elbows, shoulders, toes, heels, and knees. It killed at least two slashrats. It also had some artifacts that we recovered—armor, some weapons. It’s a major find. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “That’s the problem, Doc, I have.” Corran shuddered, remembering the images of the Yuuzhan Vong corpses he’d seen in Luke Skywalker’s report. “I think you’ve got one of the raiders there, and if they’ve been here once, there’s little reason to think they won’t be back.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A quick examination of the ExGal facility proved the efficacy of the Yuuzhan Vong warning at the door. Luke found no signs of life in there, but there was a lot of evidence of the sheer virulence with which the Yuuzhan Vong hated technology. Machinery had been smashed into bits, and enough dark fluid formed footprints or was sprayed over the walls to suggest that the Yuuzhan Vong had been heedless of personal injuries during their orgy of destruction.

  That realization, which crystallized itself in his mind as he bent to trace a bloody footprint with a finger, sent a shiver down his spine. His inability to detect the Yuuzhan Vong through the Force had disturbed him, but he’d counted on their invisibility to be the only odd thing about them. Their apparent fanaticism, as evidenced by the willingness to hurt themselves while pursuing their beliefs, took them well outside the ranges for normal behavior as he knew it. Luke did know of species that valued stoicism in the face of pain, but the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to go beyond even that.

  He also knew that his impression of their fury had probably grown beyond all reasonable measure because it was devoid of the input he normally found through the Force. In the past, at other sites of such destruction, he had been able to pick up background traces of the anger. It allowed him to gauge the depth of the perpetrator’s emotions, reinforcing or discounting the destruction he saw. Corran had once pointed out how the difference between that sort of impression and the physical evidence of violence could indicate if a crime scene had been dressed
up to make a simple murder look like a botched robbery.

  This was more than dressing up a site, though. The Jedi Master slowly stood, then glanced over at Jacen. “Find anything useful?”

  His nephew held up a headless doll. “This is one of those toys that has circuitry inside it to make it respond to phrases and things. It’s harmless, but they smashed it just as bad as any of the computers.”

  R2-D2, rooting through a pile of smashed circuit boards, played a nervous twitter softly.

  “The Yuuzhan Vong clearly didn’t see the toy as harmless.” Luke shook his head. “From their point of view, it might be more of an abomination than any of the other equipment here.”

  Jacen’s brows arrowed together for a second, then his expression eased and he nodded. “If they think of machines as evil, then this would be something designed to corrupt the very young. Instead, now, it’s just a broken toy meant for a child who will never enjoy it.” The doll’s crushed body fell from his fingers and landed amid a pile of debris.

  Luke stroked a hand over his jaw. “What I don’t see here is anything in the way of changes resulting from the environmental holocaust the Yuuzhan Vong triggered. That green plant hasn’t made it inside here . . .”

  “May not have had enough time.” Jacen toed more broken debris. “There seemed to be an enclave of the diseased, frayed life-forms to the south and west. It would put this facility between them and our ship.”

  Luke thought for a moment and suppressed a smile as he did so. The nonchalant way Jacen had referred to the blastboat as “our ship” casually included him in on any scouting mission. Luke would have preferred to leave him behind with R2-D2, but, he realized, he had no way of knowing if the Yuuzhan Vong were close and, therefore, couldn’t guarantee Jacen would be any safer at the station than he would be on the mission.

  “Okay, but we take a precaution first. We’ll check the communications tower and see if it can transmit data. If it can, we’ll link it to the ship and use our comlinks to be able to make a running report on what we see. The ship will cache the data. Artoo will transmit everything if we’re cut off or we utter some code words.”