CHAPTER TEN

The freighter Dalliance reverted from hyperspace smoothly and began a long arc in toward Bimmiel. Corran Horn liked how easily the freighter handled. It was nothing like an X-wing, but it didn’t feel as if he was driving a planetoid either. “Estimated time of arrival is thirty minutes.”

Ganner barely grunted an acknowledgment of Corran’s comment. He stared intently at a trio of overlapping holographically projected data windows. One showed Bimmiel as a khaki ball with slender stripes of blue radiating out from a large ocean in the southern hemisphere. Ice caps covered either pole, with the one in the south extending out into the ocean. Atmospheric readings and other data filled the space around the world. A second window showed a group of images of flora and fauna native to the world. Third and final—and the window Ganner was studying hardest—was the image of a communications relay satellite that appeared, to Corran, to have lost its antenna array.

“The satellite is damaged. The pulsar would make communications difficult under the best of circumstances. Without the satellite, though, messages aren’t going to get out.”

Corran nodded. “Do we have the codes needed to interrogate the satellite and dump its message cache to us?”

The other Jedi punched a button on the communications console, then shook his head. “Either the codes don’t work, or without the antenna the satellite can’t hear us. We could recover it. I can use the Force to load it into a cargo bay. From there we can run a wire in and make direct contact.”

“Not that important at the moment.” Corran glanced at his navigational data. “The satellite was placed in a geosynchronous orbit over their base camp, wasn’t it?”

“Right. They’re down there, below it, on the northern continent.”

“What does the weather look like down there?”

Ganner frowned. “Tail end of sandgales. The air will be full of dust, but definitely breathable, provided we use filtration.”

“Not like Belkadan?”

“No indication of any atmospheric changes that are out of the ordinary. Bimmiel has an elliptical orbit, and we’re on the outward leg now. The Imp survey came on the inbound leg, so we’re not sure what to expect. The Imps reported very little in the way of life down there, but I can feel a fair amount, can’t you?”

“I can, yes.”

“I get no evidence that the Yuuzhan Vong are down there.” Ganner peered at him ice-eyed through the satellite image. “And, before you ask, no indications if the damage to the satellite was caused by some coralskipper’s plasma blast or just a micrometeorite hitting the antenna.”

Corran took Ganner’s cautionary comment in stride. “I know, not all trouble can be or should be attributed to the Yuuzhan Vong. We don’t know if they are here or not.” Of course, since we can’t feel them through the Force, the only way we’ll know if they are is when we see them. I’m not looking forward to any such encounter. “Our mission is to find the academics and get them out.”

“Simple.”

“Unless we make it complicated.” Corran glanced at the forward viewport. “I’ll take the ship in and try to land as close to their camp as is prudent.”

The freighter, which was a modified Corellian YT-1210, had a flat disk shape that enabled Corran to slide it into the Bimmiel atmosphere without a lot of difficulty. The freighter’s mass meant the dying storms didn’t bounce it around too much. Corran had dialed the inertial compensator down to 90 percent, just to give him a better feel for how the Dalliance flew. The storm did manage to bump and drop the freighter a little, but Corran didn’t mind.

The fact that the turbulence made Ganner a bit gray also worked for Corran. The trip out from Yavin 4 had taken a few days, and his relationship with Ganner had become more cordial as the garnant bites faded from the larger man’s flesh. Even so, it was readily apparent to Corran that Ganner wasn’t going to back away from what he saw as the right method for projecting a powerful Jedi image, and Corran, on the other hand, wasn’t going to embrace using fear as a tool to coerce cooperation from people.

As they got closer to reversion and landing, Ganner had begun to tighten up again. He’d donned his blue and black robes, polished his lightsaber, and been very precise in combing his hair and trimming his beard. Corran did have to admit that the man looked every millimeter a recruiter’s dream and that, physically, the man was very impressive. He’s overconfident, overbearing, and abrasive, but he looks the perfect example of a Jedi.

Corran flicked a switch, lowering the freighter’s landing gear. He glanced at the altimeter and cut in the repulsorlift coils to settle the ship down easily. He got a bump four meters above where he felt the ship should have touched down, then the Dalliance continued to descend. It sank until the bottom hull pressed against the ground.

Wind-whipped sand hissed a tan curtain over the viewport. The sand slid away, providing a brief glimpse of a distant horizon, then another layer coated the transparisteel. Darker shadows loomed nearby, but the shifting sand gave Corran no chance to see what they were.

“Looks like we’ve sunk into the sand, so we’re not going out through the landing ramp.” Corran pointed a finger up toward the ceiling. “Topside hatch.”

Ganner nodded and handed Corran a pair of goggles and a rebreather that had a comlink built into it. “There are sensor readings to the west, about a hundred meters off. Probably their camp.”

“No life?”

“Life, yes. Human, no.” Ganner closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded. “Fairly small life-forms. Nothing to worry about.”

“Thanks.” Corran rolled his eyes as he stepped past Ganner and into the companionway that gave him access to the top hatch tube. He mounted the ladder, disengaged the interlocks, and shoved up on the round hatch.

A brown curtain of sand poured down over him. Corran reflexively ducked his face away and felt a kilo of dirt stream down the back of his tunic, to be trapped at his waist by his belt. Because the rebreather filtered only the airborne sand, he could still smell the dry scent in the air. What surprised him about the wind was how cool it was. Moving away from the sun has this world cooling off, so it won’t be hot like Tatooine, just dirty. So much for Ganner’s wardrobe.

Corran glanced down to see what sort of a mess the sand had made of Ganner, but all he saw was sand around his feet, as if he was standing in a rapidly filling hole. He reached out with the Force and discovered the shield Ganner had erected with the Force to trap the sand in the tube. Oh, very cute.

He scrambled up the ladder, then watched the sand rise behind him and slide off the Force dome that rose to cap the tube. Ganner expanded it as he came up, but did not extend it to cover Corran. As he emerged, the bubble shrank, covering Ganner like a cloak. While Corran admired Ganner’s control with the Force, he found employing it like an umbrella to be almost as bad as what Valin had done to Ganner with the garnants.

Corran walked to the edge of the freighter and looked down at the sand piling up against the craft’s port hull. Beyond it, barely visible, he caught a hint of color—a small reddish pyramid—which he assumed marked the university camp. He crouched and let a handful of sand dribble out through his fingers.

Ganner stood above him. “Not that far down.”

“Be my guest.” Corran tugged his tunic from his trouser waistband and let sand pour out. “Show me how it’s done.”

The younger Jedi leapt from the ship’s hull and immediately sank to his waist in the sand. His fists clenched for a moment, then he leapt up and rose serenely from the sand and returned to the freighter’s hull. His boots and trousers were coated with dust.

“Little further down than it looks, isn’t it?”

Ganner snorted. “Shall we break out the speeder bikes?”

“Nope. Dust is too fine for the engine filters to pull out of the air, so they’ll just stall.”

“Then how do we get over there?”

“We walk.”

“But …”

Corran leapt out from the freighter and landed in a crouch. He sank to ankles and wrists in a trough between two little sand dunes. Rising up a bit, he started walking toward the university camp.

“How did you … You don’t have enough ability in the Force to …”

Corran looked back at Ganner and waved him forward. “Move through the troughs. The lighter particles blow around, the heavier ones sink and are more compact. Still slow going, but it’s going.”

He heard Ganner crunch down behind him, but a gust of wind raised a cloud that obscured the younger man. Corran spread his senses into the Force and found Ganner easily. All around them he found other hot spots of life, ranging from small insects to more complex creatures. Fist-size mammals were most numerous, and something larger lurked at the fringes of his awareness.

He pushed on toward the camp and reached it with relative ease after a several-minute trek. A couple of rocky outcroppings defined the western edge of the camp. Long, dark-gray plinths thrust up through the sand like the fingers on a drowning man’s hand. Below diem were scraps of fabric that had once been part of tents. They flapped, red, blue, and green, from tent structural supports that were almost entirely buried in shifting sand.

Reaching out through the Force, Corran searched for life beneath the sand. Again he found insects and the small mammals—with many of the latter huddled together deep in a crevasse in the rocks. Others were moving through the sand, into one of the tents and back out again. Their course was so regular that Corran assumed they were moving along a tunnel and raiding a food store of some sort.

He looked at Ganner. “Aside from you, I get nothing very big.”

“Same here. The small creatures are shwpi. The Imp survey team found them fairly common. The report says they’re herbivores and indicates they grazed on the abundant vegetation.”

“They’ve overgrazed it, then, very badly.” Corran looked around, then climbed up on one of the rocks. “There is a much larger rock formation to the northwest, maybe half a kilometer off. The openings in it could lead to caves. Fly or walk?”

Ganner frowned. “Even I would tire if I had to float the two of us over there.”

“Not with the Force, with the ship.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Walk, I guess. I’ve seen enough of that ship for a while.”

“Me, too.” Corran climbed down and started off toward the northwest. Because the wind was coming from the west, he was able to cut along a trough for a bit, then had to go over a dune crest and move along another trough. It was easier than trying to wade through an ocean, since the sand waves didn’t pound into him. Still, sand managed to get everywhere and was decidedly more abrasive than water. The exertion also made him sweat, and the dry, cool air sucked as much moisture as it could from him.

As he made his way toward the rocks, he relied on the Force to tell him about his surroundings. He didn’t sense many of the shwpi, and those he did encounter seemed paralyzed with fear. They trembled in deep burrows. And, still, at the very edge of his awareness, other life-forms moved and gathered.

Corran pushed on, then dropped to one knee about a hundred meters from their goal. He swiped a hand across his brow, then wiped his muddy palm off on his trouser leg. “At least it’s not hot like Tatooine.”

Ganner came over the low dune and crouched beside him. “True, that would just compound our misery.”

“I should have thought to bring water, though.” Corran frowned, then his head came up as something tickled his awareness. Something is moving out there. He glanced at Ganner. “Feel it?”

“Yes, coming in along this dune line, coming fast.” Ganner pointed directly north. “The sand is shifting a bit there.”

Corran turned and fingered his lightsaber. Sand moved, ever so slightly, falling from the crest of dunes and down. He sensed a life-form speeding within the lighter, dusty layer of sand near the surface. It burned brightly in the Force, almost blinding in intensity as it raced closer. Corran took a half step back by reflex and tapered down his sense of the Force.

The thing burst from the dune. Nothing more than a gray and white blur, it shot past Corran and dived into the next dune. Its powerful flat tail snapped back and forth, then disappeared within the sand. The beast shot off to the south, and both men watched the sand shift in its wake.

It wasn’t until Ganner turned to look at him that Corran felt the stinging across his left thigh. His dusty black trousers had a neat gash slashed in them, and the pale flesh below was smeared with blood. The wound wasn’t deep and didn’t hurt that much, but if he’d not recoiled, it would have taken a huge chunk from his thigh.

Ganner’s eyes grew wide, and he pointed to Corran’s leg. “Is it bad?”

“No, but it could be.” Corran turned and pointed to the south. “It’s coming back.”

“Two of them, and another starting from the north.” Ganner pulled his lightsaber from his belt and ignited a sulfurous-yellow blade. “We can stop them.”

“Yeah, maybe those three, but there are more out there.” Corran could feel the shwpi burrowing deeper. He rejected that as a plan that he and Ganner could follow, which meant there was only one thing they could do. “Run for the rocks! Now!”

The things—and that was about the best Corran could do in making up any sort of name for the gray blur that had slashed him—came on fast and oriented on the two Jedi as they made their dash for the rocks. Corran threw himself up over a dune and did a shoulder roll down the other side. He saw the sand rippling in a line toward him, so he dropped into a crouch.

The thing burst from the dune and dove straight at him. Corran ignited his lightsaber and brought it up and around in a parry. The sizzling silver blade caught the creature behind the jaw and right in front of its shoulders, at what should have been a neck. Gray fur combusted into acrid smoke, and black blood splashed over the sand. The creature’s head snapped at Corran’s leg, once, then kept snapping and rolling across the ground until life drained from it. The body, stuck halfway into a dune, whipped the tail back in slackening slashes.

The creature’s snout was long and tapered back into a wedge-shaped skull that was entirely covered in chitin or keratin, like fingernails, but much thicker and polished smooth by moving through the sand. Short but powerful limbs sprouted long claws, clearly designed for digging. The creature’s gray fur was little more than down except for a fringe at the back of the skull, and the long flat tail was covered with keratin scales. Its side-to-side undulation obviously helped propel the supple body through the sand.

As striking as the creature’s physical presence was the horrid stink it gave off. It smelled to Corran like vapor from rotting ronto meat mixed with the sourest ale and harshest cigarra he’d ever tasted. He choked back a desire to vomit and didn’t terribly mind the scent of his gorge burning the creature’s odor from his nostrils.

Corran leapt past the thrashing body and sprinted as fast as he could along the dune trough. He could feel two of the things pacing him. They’ll catch me, unless …

He skidded to a stop, then lunged back at one dune. As he did so, he twisted the grip of his lightsaber, cutting in the dual-phase function. His lightsaber blade doubled in length and went from silver to purple. It sparked as he plunged it deep into the sand to skewer one of the things. The sand immediately boiled as the creature writhed out the last of its life.

Old-style Jedi, indeed!

The Corellian Jedi flattened as the second creature burst from the dune to his right and dived at him. Its attack tore a strip of cloth from his tunic, but missed scoring flesh. The creature’s flight took it into the dune where its fellow was dying, and the second creature attacked the wounded one. Its jaws closed hard, cracking bones and making wet popping sounds that inspired Corran to get up and run again without looking back.

He went over another dune, and another, with Ganner pacing him slightly to the south, leaping dunes in prodigious bounds. Some of the creatures seemed to still be following them, but a growing number broke off and oriented toward the rolling bloody balls that were corpses being worried and devoured. The beasts arced from dune crest to dune crest, like fish leaping from the waves, and let loose with undulating little cries that made them sound like feral R2 units on a rampage.

Two men appeared on the rocky outcropping toward which the Jedi ran. Each of them bore a blaster carbine and started triggering off random shots, scattering them across the most direct route to the caves. More of the creatures moved away from the shots, letting Corran and Ganner come in fast.

Chests heaving, they reached the rocks. Corran extinguished his lightsaber and bent over to catch his breath. He glanced sidelong at one of his saviors. “Thanks for the help.”

The young man nodded, then raised the carbine’s muzzle as an older woman emerged from the mouth of a cave. Thickly built, and with dark gray hair pulled back in a tight bun, the woman had a hard look in her cobalt eyes that indicated she brooked no nonsense by those associated with her. For a half second she reminded him of his father-in-law, Booster Terrik, then she scowled and he realized he probably wasn’t going to get along with her even that well.

Posting her fists on her hips, she shook her head. “Jedi. I should have known.”

Ganner gave her a hard stare. “What do you mean?”

She lifted her chin to indicate the dunes. “Only fools or Jedi would cross a slashrat killing field. You’ve got lightsabers. That makes you Jedi.” Her eyes narrowed. “Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re not also fools.”