CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Anakin sped over what might have been the billows and curls, thunderstorms and circlestorms of a vast sea of green clouds. The illusion was nearly perfect as the sun reddened, puddled, and shrank against the horizon like a fusion explosion going in slow reverse, condensing back into the bomb that had released it. The real clouds were orange-and-umber lace, and the gas giant was just slipping under the horizon as well. A rare true night was settling, the first in the three standard days since he’d left the crash site.

But the green clouds were an illusion, a potentially deadly one. They were really treetops, and if he passed through one at this speed, he wouldn’t experience the slight dampness and negligible turbulence that flying through a cloud produced; he would shatter his makeshift speeder and possibly his own bones against them.

And so he closed his eyes and used the Force, feeling the life below him, watching for it thrusting too high.

It was exhilarating to be flying again, so much so that for moments at a time Anakin nearly forgot what he was doing and where he was going. He kept reaching for the throttle, to really open her up, to feel the wind in his face turn into a fluid, cheek-biting sheet of speed.

But the throttle was already open; the “speeder” quite simply wasn’t. He’d tinkered with it as much as he could, but no amount of jury-rigging could transform a cannibalized A-wing repulsorlift welded to an awkward strut-work chassis into a fleet steed of the winds. The pilot seat from his X-wing perched atop the improbable cagelike thing, and before him were exactly four controls—an on-off switch, a throttle and lift control circuited to the repulsor, and a tiller that wagged a large aluminum rudder behind him. Not the most wieldy craft he’d ever flown, and his maximum speed was a poky ninety klicks an hour. Still, it would get him there faster than walking or waiting for the repairs on the transport.

He stretched out farther in the Force, touching Tahiri again. She was in a dark place and he felt pain, or the fading of pain. He couldn’t tell where.

Anakin.

That startled him. His name rang like an H’kig chime, nothing fuzzy about it.

“I’m coming, Tahiri,” he whispered.

Anakin … But the sense of words dissolved into emotion. Fear, grief, hope. Wordlessly, he reached for her, to give her the equivalent of a squeeze on the hand, and found himself instead in a tight, desperate embrace.

I’ll find you, he projected to her. Just hang on.

No! He couldn’t tell if she was warning him away or responding to the blade of pain that suddenly cut between them, tore her away from him, leaving him once more alone with the treetops.

He searched for her again, but found nothing, not even a faint presence.

“You’re okay, Tahiri,” he mumbled. “I know you are.”

He did sense someone else, however. It was like seeing a faint star, the faintest star in the sky.

“Jaina,” Anakin said. “Hello, Jaina.”

But he couldn’t tell if she felt him back.

   Days passed, blurred and monotonous. The forest broke into narrow savannas and sparkling stretches of marsh and then ocean that shimmered like planished copper beneath Yavin and liquid gold by sunlight. He watched the crawling, V-shaped wakes of behemoths he had no names for and could make out only as shadows in the deep. He flew day and night, sleeping only in tiny naps, drawing on the Force to replenish himself. He ate the last of his rations after ten days, but even two days later did not feel hungry. He felt light and humming, like a flash of lightning given human form.

Water he did need, and stopped to distill it when his body required more. But mostly he flew, and lost himself in the life around him. He searched for Tahiri, trying to understand what was happening to her, trying to give her hope.

   Yavin eclipsed the sun and then rolled under the sky, and once more Anakin found himself in full darkness. He was slipping into the arms of fatigue, considering a short nap, when he heard an odd noise. At first he thought he was imagining it, for he felt nothing in the Force, but as it grew louder, he opened his eyes, turning carefully to see what it might be.

Pacing him, perhaps fifty meters away, was something large and dark. Something that did not exist in the Force at all.

“Oh, Sithspawn,” he muttered under his breath. Otherwise he froze, watching the thing. It was flying perfectly parallel to him, which couldn’t be an accident. It wasn’t as big as a coralskipper, but not much smaller, either. A speeder analog, maybe? Something better designed for atmospheric flight than the ships he had thus far seen? He couldn’t make out a silhouette, only a tactile impression of size. And there, again, he could be wrong.

Did they think he hadn’t seen them yet, or were they still trying to figure out what he was?

He got his answer a few moments later, when the craft subtly changed course and their flight paths began to converge.

“This is no good,” Anakin muttered.

He turned the lift control down two-thirds and dropped through what felt like a small gap in the treetops. A branch caught under one corner of the speeder and flipped it over, and with no gyro to correct, Anakin found himself hurling toward the ground. Desperately, he wrenched at the craft with the Force, flipping it back over with a very raw, unsubtle use of strength, exactly the kind of thing his brother was always berating him for. “The Force isn’t a torch for you to weld plating with,” Jacen might say.

Of course, without that macrofuser, Anakin would be a bag of broken bones on the forest floor right now. The Force was about everything, wasn’t it?

Stabilizing in the midlevel canopy of the forest, Anakin was in more complete darkness than before, deprived even of starlight. He dropped his speed a little; his rudder was too crude to allow him the kind of hot flying that might take him between the great boles at full throttle. He let the Force guide his hands on the rudder and used his gaze to track the dark for any sign of his pursuer.

But it was his ears, again, that alerted him. Something crashed through the treetops behind him, and all of the hairs on his neck stood up. What was he facing? A living ship? A beast?

He dropped and cut a sharp turn, slipping between two trees, scraping one of them. For an instant, he thought it had worked, but then he heard the whirring turn to follow him.

How does it see? he wondered. Infrared? Or, given that the Yuuzhan Vong used only living technology, maybe it smelled him. Whatever the case, it certainly had a lock on him. It was faster, too, though less maneuverable in the trees due to its greater size.

He thought he was evading it pretty well until something hissed past his ear—not a branch, not anything he could feel in the Force. Desperately he increased his evasive tactics, spinning and rolling, coming as near the trees as he dared, slipping through the narrowest spaces he was able to.

Dark things licked past him, hissing in the leaves, and then something caught the speeder in a grip that stopped it dead in the air.

Anakin didn’t stop, however. With all of the forward momentum that had just been stolen from his craft, he was hurled into the night, a rocket of blood and bone. He tucked and spun, slowing himself with the Force, and dropped onto a branch bigger around than he was.

He turned and found himself facing a hole in the night.

A thin tendril whipped out from the thing and wrapped around his waist, cinching painfully tight. With a hoarse cry, he snapped on his lightsaber and cut, just as the strand started to tighten further, as if reeling him in. Incredibly, the strand—it seemed no thicker than his thumb—resisted the first cut, though it yielded to the second.

By then he had been jerked off the branch, and once again he was falling. Closing his eyes, he nudged his course to another branch and used it as a springboard to propel himself toward the next unseen landing place. He never made it. Another of the strands caught him in midair. He managed to twist himself and chop it, but by that time another had fastened on him. He managed to cut it, too, but noticed the severed pieces weren’t dropping off, but retained their grip on him. If this kept up …

He saw pretty clearly what he had to do. The next time his feet hit a branch, he hurled himself up and out, feeling the breath of several strands passing beneath and by him. He aimed himself at the hole in the Force.

The problem with that, of course, was that he couldn’t sense a landing place. He came down on top of the craft, but the surface was uneven, and he slipped, bounced once on the rear of the thing, and slid off. He caught a projection as he fell, and for a brief moment felt an odd disorientation, as his inner ear suddenly told him that down was in two different directions, as if he stood on the dividing line between two different gravities.

In a flash, he knew what that must mean. Whatever this thing was, it was, like other Yuuzhan Vong craft, propelled by a dovin basal, the creatures that somehow generated gravitic anomalies. He was hanging next to the craft’s lifts.

The craft jerked and spun over. Anakin lost his grip, but he had a fix on the gravity source now. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creatures might not exist in the Force, but gravity did.

As he fell, he hurled his lightsaber up, guiding it with the Force. It struck at the heart of the gravitic anomaly, and sparks showered the canopy below. As Anakin fell through the first layer of leaves he saw his lightsaber rupture into a bright purple flare.

Concentrating on the weapon, Anakin glanced off a branch, falling like a rag doll. Trying to focus through the pain, he found the forest floor, pushed against it, pushed …

Until it pushed him back. All of his breath coughed out in a rush, and he folded around his gut, sucking for wind that would not come.

   The morning sun found Anakin turning blue and black over much of his body, but still functional. In the dim light, he cautiously climbed from his hiding place in the hollow of a tree and looked around.

The Yuuzhan Vong craft was down, perhaps eighty meters away. It reminded Anakin of some sort of flat, winged sea creature, though it looked as if it were grown from the same stuff as the coralskippers. It was fetched up against a tree. The cockpit was a transparent bubble extruding from the top. The pilot inside looked quite dead.

Anakin found he’d been right about the dovin basal. It looked roughly the same as the larger ones he’d seen, except it had a huge, oozing gash in it. His lightsaber lay nearby. When he picked it up and tried to activate it, his fears were confirmed—nothing happened.

“Perfect,” he murmured aloud. “No weapons at all. Perfect.”

He found the remains of his speeder, still attached to the cable snaking from the Yuuzhan Vong craft. It didn’t take much of an inspection to tell him that this time he wouldn’t be salvaging anything.

From here on out, he was walking.