CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Corran Horn knelt on one knee in the brush near the rendezvous site he’d worked out with his local contact. He wore a padded combat suit that had been supplemented with some duraplast panels encasing his arms and legs. They, like the padded suit, were a motley pattern of red, gray, and purple, matching them to the vegetation on Garqi. Sunk as he was back in the brush, his suit made him all but invisible to the naked eye.

His contact was late, and while Corran sensed nothing out of the ordinary through the Force, it didn’t lessen his apprehension at all. Of course, had the Yuuzhan Vong been closing in to ambush him, he’d have felt nothing through the Force. As a hedge against that possibility, Jacen, Ganner, and the Noghri had set up a perimeter. Corran was certain that if anything happened to them and somehow they were not able to use their comlinks to get him a message, he’d pick up their distress through the Force and be alerted.

Having an alarm because I’m losing someone, though—that’s nothing I want. The mission to Garqi had, so far, passed a week without incident. The Best Chance had gotten well away from the crash site, and the Yuuzhan Vong seemed unable or uninterested in following up the little bits and pieces of the trail they’d left behind in making their escape. They’d brought the ship to ground at an agri-combine facility about forty kilometers north of Pesktda, the world’s capital, and secreted it away in buildings that had once housed the large harvester droids.

Going in, they’d expected the Yuuzhan Vong to wreak havoc with the droids that were used to do all the farming on the world. The harvester droids of various shapes and sizes had been uniformly reduced to amorphous blobs of melted durasteel that stained the ferrocrete thoroughfares around the facilities. The crops themselves were close to time for harvest, but without the huge machines, there would be no way to get it all in. This worked to the team’s advantage, since it made living off the land much easier.

Corran found it in himself to grudgingly admire the Yuuzhan Vong’s stand on machines. The world of Garqi was not terribly important in the overall scheme of things, but it did manage to produce a lot more food than the local population could use. Assuming the Yuuzhan Vong could actually eat the same food as the people of the galaxy they were invading, Garqi was one huge welcoming fruit basket waiting to be devoured. If I were the commander here, I would have harvested the food, then destroyed the machines because, barring machines of my own, there is no way all this can be gotten in. But he obviously decided it was better to let the food rot than to use hated machines to harvest it. Interesting stand on principle.

This left open the question of what the Yuuzhan Vong were doing on Garqi. The survey team had seen no people as they slowly made their way in toward the capital. At the appropriate local times, they set their comlinks for the frequencies and scramble codes the New Republic had set up in the event an attack from the Remnant had overrun Garqi. For the first several nights they heard nothing, and then, four days in, they caught a quick burst of sound that, when fed into a datapad and decompressed, became a long text message to anyone who had survived the crash down south of Pesktda. The message included a list of times and places to meet, with several of the sites within easy range for the team.

Ganner and Jacen had both argued that the message was a trap, but Corran had disagreed. “If the Vong aren’t going to use machines to harvest crops, which have obvious value, they aren’t going to use one on a task with little chance of return. Besides, the Vong haven’t shown a skill for guile. We stake out one site, watch it, see what happens, then make a meeting at the next site.”

The Noghri offered no opinion one way or another about whether or not they were going to be walking into a trap. Corran suspected that because a Noghri had been killed by a Yuuzhan Vong who was trying to murder Leia Organa Solo, all Noghri saw themselves honor-bound to avenge that death. The reputation of the Noghri as being very lethal was quite well known, and Corran was more than happy to have them angry with the Yuuzhan Vong.

At least I know they’re not going to let themselves get out of control. He had no similar assurances concerning Jacen and Ganner. Ganner’s enmity toward the Yuuzhan Vong stemmed from acts he’d witnessed on Bimmiel. While Corran didn’t think Ganner would be stupid and precipitate trouble, he did figure him for doing his utmost to take the fight to the Yuuzhan Vong. That desire to engage the Yuuzhan Vong could get Ganner in a lot of trouble.

Jacen was another case altogether. On Belkadan he’d been defeated and captured by a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. While he had engaged and defeated warriors on Dantooine, and killed a lot of Yuuzhan Vong slave soldiers there, as well, he still hadn’t the distinction his younger brother did of having fought and possibly slain upwards of a dozen of the warriors on Dantooine. Corran didn’t think Jacen would go on a killing spree just to even up the score, but that put him a long way from being able to predict the younger man’s actions.

A sense of determination tinged with apprehension came to Corran through the Force. He looked to the south where a solitary young man ambled up the trail through the rain forest. Because of the Force, Corran had no trouble spotting him, yet the way the man moved through the forest would have made tracking him tough for anyone else. Clearly the man had lived on Garqi long enough to learn how to avoid detection in its forests.

Corran gathered the Force and projected the image of someone moving swiftly through the brush off to the man’s left. The man turned quickly, bringing a blaster carbine around to cover the movement. Corran slipped from his hiding place and closed with the youth. The young man’s hand came up to press against his right ear—Corran assumed he was comlinked to someone else who’d seen the Jedi move—then the man spun and leveled the blaster at him.

A jolt of fear rolled out of the man, but he quickly shut it down. “Green.”

Corran nodded. “Yellow.”

The youth smiled, straightened up, and lowered his blaster. The agreed-upon challenge had been a color in the visible light spectrum, and the countersign the color immediately contiguous with it. “I’m Rade Dromath.”

Drawing closer, Corran found something familiar in the man’s face. The name likewise tickled at his memory. “Dromath, the name’s familiar.”

“My father was with the New Republic. He died during the Thrawn war.”

Things slowly trickled back into Corran’s brain. “Your mother, she was from Garqi.”

The tall, blond man nodded. “Dynba Tesc. She fled the Empire, met my father, and married him. She came back after he died.”

A shiver ran down Corran’s spine. “I met her once, here. How is she?”

The young man shook his head. “She’s dead. The Yuuzhan Vong got her in the first wave. Because of the stories she told of the old days here, of fighting against the Empire, and being so close to the Remnant, she’d prepared things. Wasn’t like she was a nut about it, but just hid some things away. Her foresight is why we’re alive—the Resistance, that is.”

“Sorry to hear she died.” Corran sighed. He remembered Dynba Tesc as a naive but enthusiastic woman who’d been brave enough to oppose the Empire on a world where no rebellion was really necessary. Her stand on principle, though it made trouble for her, had enabled him to escape the same world and eventually join Rogue Squadron. “She was very special, your mother.”

Rade squinted his blue eyes and nodded. “Okay, now I know you. Horn, the one who got her off Garqi.”

“She got herself away. I was just along for the ride.”

Rade smiled. “My father was her hero and the love of her life, but she remembered you fondly and was proud of your successes.”

A pang of regret arced through Corran. I should have gotten in touch with her, should have known to do something when her husband died. He shook his head. “If we have time, you’ll have to tell me more about her. This isn’t the time or place, I suspect. I’ll call my people in, you call yours. You have a safe place nearby?”

“Right, a klick east of here. The Yuuzhan Vong haven’t been anywhere near it.”

Corran quickly contacted his team. Jacen and Ganner arrived first, followed by three of the Noghri. Corran didn’t mention that three more Noghri were out there, knowing they would act as a rear guard. Rade brought in four people: two women, another man, and a female Trandoshan. Together they headed east and found a half-buried, overgrown bunker that appeared to predate even the Empire.

Once inside, Rade explained. “In the early days of the colony they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. They’d clear whole areas, overplant, exhaust the land, then move on and allow the forest to reclaim everything. This bunker once housed the agridroids working this area.”

Jacen Solo leaned against a rusted girder that curved up to support the arched ferrocrete structure. “We saw what the Yuuzhan Vong did to the current crop of droids. We’ve not seen any signs of their setting up villip paddies or anything else I saw on Belkadan.”

Ganner nodded. “This is such a fertile planet, I assumed they would be growing things here.”

“They are.” Rade shivered. “Tomorrow, we’ll show you. They’re growing an army.”

Before dawn they set off on a long trek west and then south, to the outskirts of the capital. There, just west of the Pesktda Xenobotanical Garden, Rade led them to a hillside from which they could study a complex of buildings that had been part of Garqi Agricultural University. Several blocky buildings ringed a central rectangular grassy redsward. Pouring out of the dormitories came file upon file of tall and fit men and women. They lined up in ranks facing the rising sun, with little reptilian creatures bustling about, snapping orders.

Jacen lowered his macrobinoculars. “The little reptoids are like the troops used against us at Dantooine.”

Ganner leaned forward, peering intently at the cadres. “The people down there have growths like the ones we saw on the slaves at Bimmiel.”

“And like the slaves on Belkadan, but these growths are more regular.”

Corran studied the humans and agreed with both assessments. Coral growths—generally white and smoother than he’d seen before—had come up through the humans’ flesh. The browridges and cheekbones had thickened, presumably to protect the eyes, and little horns curved up through the scalp. Bony buttons capped knuckles, while short, sharp spikes grew from elbows, wrists, and knees. From cadre to cadre these growths varied in size and location, and a couple of cadres even had bony armor plates growing on chest and back, arms and legs. The fourth cadre actually had humans who were encased in the stuff, looking almost like stormtroopers carved of ivory.

Rade sighed. “These are the latest. The Yuuzhan Vong have been here for a month and produced two earlier cadres. They train them, then release them into sections of Pesktda that have been cleared of life. The little reptoids and some of the Yuuzhan Vong warriors are released to hunt them. Not all of the machines have been destroyed here, so we can tap into surveillance holocams and get images of the fighting there. We’ve seen some Yuuzhan Vong casualties and the cadres are getting better, which is why we think they are growing an army here. These are prototypes, and once they find one that works well, I guess they can transform anyone into a soldier.”

Corran ran a hand over his chin, then lowered his macrobinoculars. “This answers the question of why they were content to let some of the farms go untended. They’ve herded the others together at a combine, I assume, picking produce by hand, which is more than enough to keep everyone fed and healthy. They harvest the best of the people, transform them, and work from there.”

“That’s it. My people and I are in contact with some other resistance groups. We can stage a raid and liberate the prisoners, but we can’t stop those who have been transformed, and frankly, we can’t stop the Yuuzhan Vong from reestablishing control.”

The frustration and weariness filling Rade’s comments tightened Corran’s chest. He glanced at the other two Jedi. “Suggestions on what we can do?”

Jacen scratched idly at the flesh below his right eye. “I know we should do something, but our mission here is to scout out Yuuzhan Vong operations. We could attack their experimental station and destroy everything, but we don’t know if that would be a crippling blow or just a minor setback. The repercussions could be horrible, though, if the Yuuzhan Vong decide to punish the locals for something we did.”

Ganner squatted on his haunches. Despite being dressed in a garish combat suit, he managed to keep an air of dignity about himself. “A strike at the experimental facility is a key. We ruin their work and maybe take away some samples so we can have our people working up a way to counter what the Yuuzhan Vong are doing to people here. I mean, we’re here to collect data, and samples would be hard data, and data we need.”

Corran nodded slowly. “I think you’re both on the right track, but hitting the experimental facility isn’t going to do it. If we do that, what will the Vong know?”

Jacen frowned. “That we were here, that we know what they’ve been up to.”

“Right. Now, on Bimmiel we used genetic manipulation to counter the threat of their insects, so we have to assume they know we not only use machines but can manipulate the machinery of life.” Corran pointed back at the cadres. “I think it is safe to assume that the modifications done to each successive cadre builds on the work done to earlier generations. This means their experimental line will continue, unless they know we have enough data to be able to counter it. If we can obtain samples without their knowing it, we might be able to work up some sort of inoculation against what they’re doing. I mean, if these implants function like, say, warts, then preparing a body’s defenses to fight them at the first will prevent the growths from sprouting.”

Ganner scratched at the back of his neck. “You want a covert run to kidnap a couple of cadre members from their beds?”

“No, that will give them evidence that we’ve been here. I have another idea.” Corran smiled. “The next time they’re out there running a cadre through a war game, we’ll be there, too. We snag some of the cadre and get out, letting the warfare cover our escape and the fact that a couple of bodies are missing.”

“Are you just choosing to ignore the fact that we’ll be on the same killing ground with Yuuzhan Vong warriors and their little surrogates?” Jacen shook his head. “Kind of heightens our chance of discovery, doesn’t it?”

Ganner straightened up and rested a hand on Jacen’s shoulder. “He knows that, Jacen, but those chances are high no matter where we are on this rock. We know they’re there, but they won’t know we’re there until too late.”

“And if they figure it out, Ganner? What then?”

The handsome Jedi smiled coldly. “They’ll learn that as deadly as their experimental troops may seem, they’re nothing compared to a trio of Jedi.”