TWENTY-SIX

As near as anyone had been able to determine, coralskippers didn’t dock inside their carriers. Instead they were launched from and recovered by the carriers’ elongated and branchlike projections. These facts passed briefly through Kyp Durron’s mind as his X-wing loosed two proton torpedoes straight at the sphere the Millennium Falcon’s quad lasers had perforated and collapsed. The torpedoes did little more than blow a hole in what remained of the deflated globe, but one large and gaping enough to accommodate any of the disparate fighters that made up the Dozen.

“Eleven and Twelve, you have rear guard,” Kyp said over the tactical net. “The rest of you form up on me. We’re going inside.”

Kyp urged his craft on, ignoring the strident protests of its astromech droid, which was clearly baffled by whatever readings the enemy ship was giving off. The Yuuzhan Vong were oxygen breathers, he reminded himself, which meant that their ships somehow manufactured atmosphere. He was less certain about gravity, though he surmised that the same dovin basals responsible for propulsion and protection provided gravity. As for places to land, he was willing to make do with any parcel of level deck, even if he had to pilot the X-wing to the heart of the ship to find that.

Ganner’s modified Y-wing and seven other starfighters followed him through the breach opened by the torpedoes. The pair left behind would have to deal with anything that flew to the cluster ship’s aid, at least until the Falcon and the remaining two fighters returned.

Kyp’s determination took a quantum leap as soon as the X-wing entered the ruined sphere. Vacuum had bled the module of atmosphere, but gravity was close to human standard and there was ample room for all nine fighters to settle down on a deck that wasn’t much different from the pitted hulls of the enemy warships. The Falcon’s powerful guns had made a mess of things, but even without the damage it would have been difficult to discern just what they were looking at. Kyp suspected that the hivelike structure at the rear of the space was a neuroengine of some sort, and that if he popped it open, he might find a couple of stunned dovin basals curled up inside.

“Breathers and blasters,” he said over the net as the X-wing’s canopy was opening.

Recalling his first contact with the Yuuzhan Vong in the Outer Rim, and the grotesque creature whose secretions had burned through the transparisteel of his XJ, Kyp had expected to find similar monstrosities waiting, but in fact, the hold was deserted. Ganner had obviously been thinking the same thing. Jumping agilely from the cockpit of the Y-wing, he said over the rebreather comm, “They’ve probably withdrawn to protect the yammosk.”

“Then they’ve already simplified our mission,” Kyp told him.

They unhooked their lightsabers from the belts of their flightsuits and thumbed them on, the sibilant hiss of the energy blades loud in the deserted chamber. Everyone else carried either a sidearm or a blaster rifle.

“Watch your step,” Kyp advised. “The Yuuzhan Vong have been known to make use of an immobilizing living jelly.”

Warily they advanced on the wall of the adjacent sphere, ignorant as to whether they were moving forward or aft. Like the walls of the collapsed module, the curving bulkhead had an organic, membranous appearance. They searched futilely for anything analogous to a hatch release.

“There has to be a way of opening a portal from one sphere to the next,” Deak said. “Maybe they’re separated by hydrostatic fields.” But while resilient, the bulkhead did not admit him when he pressed himself to it.

“Maybe it recognizes only Yuuzhan Vong,” Ganner suggested.

“Now isn’t the time to debate it,” Kyp said. “We’re not on a scientific survey.”

He thrust his lightsaber straight into the curve. When the tip had sizzled through, Kyp rolled his wrists, gradually opening a circular hole large enough for them to step through. The hold on the far side of the bulkhead was no different from the one they had left.

“No oxygen,” Ganner reported after glancing at an indicator strapped to his wrist.

They moved in single file into a passageway that might have been the gullet of an outsize creature. Colonies of microorganisms attached to the walls and ceiling provided a faint green bioluminescence. Eventually they came to another curving bulkhead, but this was equipped with an iris portal that admitted them into a sealed antechamber. The fact that the chamber served as an airlock didn’t become evident until they stepped from it into a spacious hold that held breathable air.

There also were the Yuuzhan Vong warriors Kyp and Ganner had expected to encounter earlier on.

They were thirty strong, some sporting chitinous armor, some without, but all of them armed with double-edged blades or the living staffs Kyp knew were capable of being employed as whips, clubs, swords, or spears. For a moment the two groups stood still, studying each other, then one warrior stepped forward and bellowed a phrase in his own language.

He made it sound like a statement, but the charge that immediately followed confirmed it as a war cry. Deak and the other non-Jedi opened fire with their blasters, dropping ten or more of the unarmored warriors before they had made it halfway across the hold. Kyp and Ganner glided into the press of survivors, their feet barely leaving the deck, telekinetically disarming some of their opponents even in the midst of parrying blows from stiffened amphistaffs or crosscuts by coufee blades and deflecting spears. One by one the Yuuzhan Vong succumbed to vertical slashes to the head or horizontal thrusts that found the only vulnerable places in the living armor, just below the armpits.

The two Jedi worked as a team whenever possible, back to back, or alongside each other, refusing to surrender any gained ground and minimizing the movements of their blades. Their relatively easy victories told them that the warriors were a different breed than the seasoned fighters they had battled on the Ithorian herd ship Tafanda Bay. Even so, some of the non-Jedi weren’t faring as well. Two of Kyp’s Dozen died—one beheaded by a coufee, the other pierced by a thrown amphistaff.

When Kyp and Ganner had thinned the throng, they separated to engage the last of the warriors one on one, Kyp entering into a savage battle with an opponent a head taller than him and as deft with his staff as Kyp was with his lightsaber; Ganner using a Force-summoned telekinetic burst to hurl his adversary into a trio of Yuuzhan Vong who had ganged up on Deak. Two of the three dropped to the deck, giving Deak the time he needed to raise his blaster rifle and kill the third, along with the one Ganner had thrown.

Kyp perceived the events peripherally. With his feet planted right foot forward, he held the lightsaber at waist level, its blade elevated acutely, gyrating his wrists to answer and divert the sweeping slashes and overhead blows of the Yuuzhan Vong’s stiffened amphistaff. That Kyp remained rooted in place provoked the warrior to greater ferocity. Lunging, he thrust the vital weapon at Kyp’s midsection, at once ordering it to lengthen and strike with its fangs. The amphistaff’s abrupt transformation from sword to serpent caught Kyp by surprise, but only for a moment. Twisting the lightsaber around the pliable staff, he suddenly snapped the energy blade upward, flinging the staff from the warrior’s grip and severing the Yuuzhan Vong’s hand, just at the gap where his forearm guards met his gauntlets.

The dismembered fist fell to the deck, dark blood oozing from the warrior’s truncated limb. The Yuuzhan Vong looked at Kyp in startled disbelief, then lowered his head and rushed forward, intent on ramming Kyp off his feet. A side step sabotaged the effort. As the weakened warrior stumbled past him, Kyp brought the lightsaber to shoulder height, then drove it into his foe’s armpit, killing him instantly.

He stood over the fallen Yuuzhan Vong for a moment, then glanced around the hold at the carnage he and the others had wrought. Ganner and Deak were kneeling by their dead comrades.

“We’ll remember them later,” Kyp said, motioning everyone onward with the ignited lightsaber.

They moved deeper into the ship, crossing the threshold into yet another sphere without encountering any opposition. Since entering the vessel, Kyp had been struck by the fact that the Force was mute: not stifled, but silent. His Jedi skills hadn’t been affected or compromised in any way, but it was as if he had entered a blank space on a map. All at once, though, he felt something through the Force, and a bit farther along they came to a sealed portal, similar to many they had passed, save for the feelings it roused.

Kyp turned to Ganner, who nodded in affirmation, then he thrust the blade of his lightsaber into the center of the portal. When he retracted the blade, air rushed noisily through the hole into the space beyond, and the portal irised open. Inside, scattered across a pliant floor fouled by sweat and more, sprawled a mixed-species mob of captives. Dressed in ragged robes and tunics, they were a gaunt lot, but alive. Gradually they began to stir as the hold filled with oxygen.

Kyp approached one of them—a gray-haired human who had probably started with a good deal more weight than some of the others. Near him lay two Ryn males and a female.

The man’s rheumy eyes blinked open and played across Kyp’s face, focusing finally on the deactivated lightsaber in his right hand.

“They’re holding him on the deck below this one,” the human said weakly. “Next module aft. But be careful, Jedi. He may not be the Wurth Skidder you remember.”

Several of the more technically minded of the hoodwinked and now marooned Ruan refugees had succeeded in getting some of the orbital facility’s systems on-line, so anyone who wished was able to watch the fall of Fondor in full color.

Most of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet was still dispersed in a broad arc out past Fondor’s outermost moons, but a dozen or so carriers, heavily reinforced by escort craft, had moved Coreward. Like siege weapons of old, the carriers had flung their coralskippers against any targets that presented themselves, destroying New Republic warships and construction barges alike. But having thrown the First Fleet into disarray, they were now being more systematic about attacking the shipyards and pounding distant Fondor with flaming projectiles and streams of plasma.

Gazing at the chaos through an observation blister, Melisma decided that the Yuuzhan Vong weren’t likely to spare even an empty shipyard, which—at the present rate of destruction—meant that the Ruan group had less than an hour to get their affairs in order. Most of the refugees had already come to grips with this and were off by themselves, crying quietly or praying to whatever gods they worshipped. But others were shrieking in fear and anger, insisting that efforts be made to alert Fondor command to their plight or, failing that, surrendering to the Yuuzhan Vong, even though that would mean sacrifice or captivity.

True to the fatalism they embraced as a creed, the Ryn were singing. The fact that they were capable of going to their deaths with grace and dignity had actually managed to impart a sense of calm to some of the distraught.

Melisma turned from the viewport to listen to the melodious lament R’vanna was leading. “If these folks realized that our forgeries are what got them into this situation, we’d be dead already,” she told Gaph.

Her uncle only shrugged. “Even without the documents we provided, the pirates would have found some way. Remember, child, these people paid to leave Ruan.”

“Is that your way of absolving us of guilt?”

“We’re guilty of getting ourselves into this mess. But that, too, is the Ryn way. If it’s not others abusing us, we’re abusing ourselves.”

Melisma sighed. “Do we deserve this then—for not accepting Ruan’s offer to work in the fields?”

“No one deserves to die this way, no matter what they have done. But listen, child, we’re not dead yet, and until we are, we should enjoy the moment.”

Melisma glanced out the viewport. “I don’t know that I have any song left in me, Uncle.”

He laughed. “Of course you do. There’s song even in a final breath.”

She forced a smile. “You begin.”

Gaph smoothed his mustachios in thought. His right foot began to tap, and he had his mouth open to sing when a Sullustan stationed at one of the data consoles shouted for everyone’s attention.

“The Trevee is returning!”

The singing and crying ceased, and groups of folks began to crowd around the console and into the observation blister. Someone off to Melisma’s left pointed to a sleek shape, weaving its way toward the abandoned facility between missiles and plasma discharges.

“It’s definitely the Trevee!” the Sullustan confirmed.

Hopeful exclamations gushed from all sides.

“Maybe they had a change of heart.”

“Impossible. They got caught up in the battle and are looking for a place to hide.”

“Someone learned what they did to us.”

“That is the probable explanation,” Gaph said in an authoritative voice. He gestured in the direction of the approaching transport. “I can’t imagine where that YT-1300 freighter joined the Trevee, but I’m certain that the other two ships are New Republic starfighters.”

* * *

Anakin’s enabling the Centerpoint Station’s interdiction field and starbuster capabilities was momentarily forgotten in the wake of the devastating news the New Republic colonel brought to the control room.

The Yuuzhan Vong had launched a sneak attack on Fondor.

Real-time images of the battle received over military channels and HoloNet feeds had fomented panic among the Mrlssi, whose home system bordered Fondor in the Tapani sector. For everyone else in the control room the images prompted a curious mix of relief and desperation. Here was Centerpoint, all dressed up and nowhere to go.

Thrackan Sal-Solo broke the mood.

“There is something we can do.” He whirled on Anakin, a wild look in his eye. “We have the time-space coordinates of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet.” He hurried to a console and called up a star chart. “Their warships are clustered Rimward of Fondor’s fifth and sixth moons. We can target them by focusing Centerpoint’s repulsor beam.”

“We have no authority to take such actions,” a technician said, loud enough to be heard over a dozen separate conversations that broke out. “We could miss and hit Fondor or even its primary. We can’t assume the risk.”

“We must assume the risk,” a Mrlssi argued. “Fondor is lost if we do nothing.”

The New Republic colonel glanced at Sal-Solo, who shook his head. “I can’t promise that we’ll hit our target.”

Everyone turned to Anakin.

And Anakin looked at Jacen and Ebrihim, who had his hand clamped over Q9’s vocoder grille.

Jacen wanted to say something, but all words fled him. He had a sudden memory of Anakin from months earlier, practicing lightsaber technique in the hold of the Falcon.

“You keep thinking of it as a tool, a weapon in your war against everything you see as bad,” Jacen had told him at the time.

“It’s an instrument of law,” Anakin had maintained.

“The Force isn’t about waging war,” Jacen had said. “It’s about finding peace, and your place in the galaxy.”

He set himself boldly between Sal-Solo and the console at which Anakin sat. “We can’t be a part of this,” he announced.

Thrackan peered around him at Anakin. “The First Fleet is being decimated, Anakin. The task force launched from Bothawui can’t possibly arrive in time to help.”

“The Tapani is our home sector,” a Mrlssi said. “You must take the risk for our sake—as a Jedi must.”

“It’s our only chance to score a decisive victory,” the colonel urged. He cut his eyes to the joystick Anakin had conjured. “It bears your imprint, Anakin. It answers to you and no one else.”

“Anakin, you can’t,” Jacen said, wide-eyed. “Step away from it. Step away from it now.”

Anakin glanced from his brother to the controls before him. Not through the Force but through Centerpoint itself, he could sense his distant targets. He felt as wedded to the repulsor as he often felt to his lightsaber, and he knew with the same conviction precisely when and how to strike.