28

Iella drew her knees up to her chest and settled her arms around them, then sighed. Diric would have found this place fascinating. Softly muted moonlight glowed green through the room’s skylight. It managed to make the spare room seem warmer and more inviting, despite the lack of amenities.

Human amenities, she corrected herself. To the Vratix this would be next to luxury.

The Vratix who still lived in harvester tribes were scattered over the face of Thyferra, living in villages much akin to the one in which Iella and the Ashern rebels had sought refuge. The buildings themselves were created out of an air-dried mud and saliva mixture that the Vratix slathered on a twig and branch lattice. While not as strong or durable as ferrocrete, the towers and tunnel houses, if unmaintained, could still last as long as five years.

In the past, before the Vratix became civilized, the elemental dissolution of their dwellings would force a migration to a new area, carefully allowing their previous territory to recover from their habitation. Likewise, in the past, the Vratix themselves had provided the saliva and had done the mixing to prepare the mud. Now they used a domesticated branch of a similar species, the knytix, to create the mud for Vratix masons. The knytix, which resembled the Vratix—though smaller, blockier, and less elegant in form—were kept as pets, as work animals, and Iella had heard, as food for special occasions. When she had said she could never eat a pet, a Vratix had explained that pets were offered as a gift to those the family wished to honor, it became apparent that the level of their sacrifice showed the depth of their respect for the individual to whom the offer was made. That certainly made the practice more understandable, but she still couldn’t imagine eating a creature a young Vratix once called Fluffy or its Vratix equivalent.

Though eating knytix could have easily been seen as a primitive practice by a barbaric society, the Vratix clearly were anything but. The Vratix village consisted of several towers that rose up into the middle reaches of the gloan trees. Concentric circular terraces with little walls at the lip gave each tower the look of a stepped pyramid, though the rounded foundation made it more elegant. Huge arching bridges connected one tower to another and were all but hidden by the thick forest foliage.

Vratix artistry was not limited to the architecture. The green skylight had been made by a Vratix artisan who chewed various rain forest leaves into paste, then fashioned it into a film thin enough to allow light to pass through. It appeared delicate in the extreme, yet was strong enough to ward off rain and survive other climatic conditions.

The stems and veins of the leaves formed a complex and chaotic network that looked visually attractive, but Iella knew that was not its primary purpose. Because both light and sound took time to travel to the eye and ear, respectively, the Vratix considered them secondary and deceptive senses. What one saw or heard was always something that had happened in the past, but what one could feel with the sense of touch, that was immediate and present in real time.

Reaching out she let her fingers play across the inside of the circular skylight. Her gentle touch conveyed a legion of different textures, some soft, some smooth, and others rough or sharp. She likened the progression to that of the music in a symphony, except that in choosing which way to stroke the surface, she could determine what she felt and in what order. If I were worried, soft and smooth would soothe me, whereas if I were manic, sharp might caution me.

Similarly, a whole variety of textures had been worked by the mason who had created the room she had been given. The walls had gentle ridges that swelled like waves on an ocean. They swirled into spirals and opened on smooth voids that encouraged placid tranquillity. The raised platform on which she slept had been cupped like a crater to hold her in, yet the sides and walls nearby were sleek and almost slippery to the touch. Near the doorhole, raised bumps warned of potential harm and the need for caution.

“They’ve thought of everything.”

“Not quite.” A hand reached up and grabbed the sill at the bottom of the door, then the tendons and muscles tensed in the arm attached to it and Elscol pulled herself into view. “The Vratix were nice enough to give us some footholds for climbing up here, but I’d still prefer a rope ladder.”

Iella laughed and helped pull the smaller woman into the room. Because the Vratix’s hind legs were so powerful, leaping up to the doorholes of rooms set well above the ground was simple. The need for stairs never developed, so Vratix architecture never included them. Visiting humans were normally housed in public areas, but advertising the presence of Ashern agents was not a good idea, so they were secreted away in rooms that were difficult for humans to move into and out of.

“Sixtus isn’t with you?”

“No. He’s out wandering through the rain forest.” Elscol shrugged and adjusted the blaster on her right hip. “I’ve known him for years now, and there are just times he has to drift away. I suspect the Imps did some nasty stuff to him and his people when they trained him to be Special Ops and occasionally he has to fight it.”

“Never had anyone exactly like him in CorSec, but I understand the need to get away. What’s going on? Change of plans?”

Elscol shook her head. “Nope, we’ll leave here after dark, as planned, and move to the next haven. Just seeing us here seems to be good for Vratix morale. I don’t really have any sense of how good the Vratix will be in combat, but they’re fighters at heart.”

“You mean at pulmonary arch.”

“Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”

Iella shook her head. “No, not really.”

Elscol smiled and seated herself on the foot of Iella’s bed. “Well, doesn’t matter. Armed with vibroblades, force pikes, or blasters, we can get enough Vratix that we can overwhelm humans in Xucphra City. Some of the Ashern indicate their training cadres are swelling in our wake. We come through, they get more volunteers. Sixtus has specified benchmarks for training, and it looks like we’ll have our force in a couple of months.”

“I’d feel better about them if we ever got to see their warriors in action.”

Elscol nodded. “Agreed. From what Sixtus has said, though, because bacta and healing is so much a part of Vratix society, for a Vratix to become a warrior and cause harm is a very solemn decision. The Ashern, as you know, sharpen their forearm claws and paint themselves black. The former is for fighting, but they paint themselves black so they can remain in the shadows, hidden away to protect the other Vratix from what they can and will do to win freedom.”

“Well, their reluctance to be violent explains why they haven’t just risen up and slaughtered all the humans on the planet.” Iella sighed. “It’s too bad they have to resort to war to win the freedom they never should have lost in the first place. I hope we can remain free long enough for the Ashern to be ready to fight. How long do you figure we have until Isard storms us?”

“Good question. Me, I’d have done it in a heartbeat before we embarrassed General Dlarit, but she’s trying to keep the populace happy. If the Xucphra folks see white armor in bulk on their world, they’re going to figure she’s got no more use for them, and I suspect they can cause a fair amount of trouble for her.” Elscol sat back, leaning against the wall. “Of course, Isard has more trouble than just us. That’s what I came to tell you. News from the front.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And good news, too.”

Iella dropped to the circular chamber’s floor and sat cross-legged. Twisting her blaster belt around so she was more comfortable, she smiled up at Elscol. “What did you hear?”

“The Corrupter is no more.”

Iella’s jaw dropped. “What? How?”

“Isard tried to ambush Wedge and the others. Apparently, Wedge had a surprise waiting for them. A steady diet of proton torpedoes put the Corrupter down. No word of squadron losses—at least none that are reliable. Data came from a tap on Xucphra corp news, so it all has an Imp spin.”

“Still, if they’re saying the Corrupter was destroyed, that means its loss was the least of the problems Isard has.” Iella clapped her hands. “Maybe this mission isn’t going to be suicidal.”

Elscol’s face closed down. “We’re a long way from getting out, Iella, but getting shot up isn’t going to get you and your husband reunited.”

“What?” Iella tried to cover her surprise at Elscol’s comment because when she heard the words she knew part of her had been considering the mission in exactly that light. “I never …”

Elscol leaned forward and rested her elbows on her knees. “Hey, do I look like some Xucphra clerk who’s going to believe everything you say? No. I’ve been where you are. I lost my husband to the Imps back on Cilpar, and part of me wanted to die with him there. I took off after the Imps for revenge, but always in the back of my mind was the feeling that when I died we’d be together again. Wedge saw that in me and saw the urge for self-destruction grow in me. When he kicked me out of Rogue Squadron, well, that woke me up; and I began to see a lot of things.”

Iella’s head came up. “Are you saying there’s no life after death?”

“I’m saying it doesn’t matter.” Elscol held her two hands out, palms toward the ceiling. “On one hand, if there isn’t an afterlife, you’ll be remembered for the things you did while you were alive. On the other, if there is an afterlife, you’ll be able to share all you did with those who died before you. Either way, living as long as possible and doing the most you can is the only way to go. I decided I didn’t want to be known here or in the afterlife for having quit. I don’t think you do, either.”

Iella frowned. “You’re right, but sometimes the pain …” She clutched her hands against her breastbone. “Sometimes it hurts too much to live.”

“Nonsense.” Elscol’s dark eyes sharpened. “Pain’s the only way we know we’re alive.”

“What?”

“If the afterlife is supposed to be special and wonderful and blissful—and there aren’t many theologies that suggest otherwise—then it follows that pain’s the only way you know you’re alive. Not letting the pain get to you, not surrendering to it, that’s the way you continue living.” Elscol brought her hands together, then glanced down at the floor. “It still hurts me, too, at certain times of the year, but I don’t let it overwhelm me.”

“I haven’t let it overwhelm me, either.”

“No, you haven’t. You’re strong, Iella, real strong.” Elscol gave her a half-grin. “It’s just that as things get going tougher, in the moments when stress is off, you’ll start to feel the pain. Fight it.”

Iella slowly nodded. What Elscol had said made perfect sense to her. While involved in an operation, the stresses of the operation would push everything else into the background. When the stress slackened, she tried to recover a sense of well-being, and would invariably harken back to her time with Diric. The joy would melt into melancholy, then that would congeal into sorrow and pain. I’d come to a point where surrendering to the pain would be more simple than fighting the Imps and everything else.

She realized that she’d not faced this problem before because when Diric had been taken by the Imps there was always a chance that he would be released and they would be able to continue their lives together. Hope had shielded her against despair and the pain of her loss. Circumstances are different now, but I’m also a different person than I was. I will survive and fight the pain.

She looked up and was about to tell Elscol the same thing, when a howling shriek filled the air and sent a tremor through her tower room. No mistaking that for anything else—TIE fighters are coming in. She dove for the doorhole and lying there on her belly stared out at the Vratix village. Other brown-gray towers were all but invisible in the thick foliage of the rain forest until green laser bolts illuminated them and began setting trees on fire. The bolts hissed through the air, igniting a rain of flaming branches and leaves falling on buildings and the forest floor.

Elscol hunkered down beside her with blaster in hand as the TIEs made another pass. Trees split as if they had been struck by lightning. Their boles exploded, spraying the rain forest with fiery hardwood splinters. Impaled Vratix and knytix twitched on the ground or limped along, black blood streaming from their wounds. In other spots, heavy bits of tree fell, crushing Vratix and pulverizing the walls of houses.

“Sithspawn!” Elscol bounced a fist off the floor. “We’ve got nothing that can stop them. They’re just slaughtering Vratix for the fun of it.”

“It’s not fun for the Vratix.” Iella watched as the Vratix began to flee. The whole tableau took on an unreal air. Part of it came from the Vratix leaping high into the branches of trees surrounding the village to escape. If Iella had allowed herself to forget how sophisticated the Vratix could be and just see them as insects, then she was watching a whole swarm of Corellian gluttonbugs clear-chew a forest. They moved in a mass, leaping away as bolts rained down on them, exploding and pitching body parts in every direction.

The most surreal element in the whole scene was the lack of wailing from the victims. The Vratix vocalized no sounds as they fled. They grasped each other and remained close, clearly taking security in the sense they trusted the most. But that’s what’s getting them killed. Massed together like this makes them terribly vulnerable to the strafing runs.

“Elscol, we have to do something.”

“What? These blasters aren’t going to bring down a starfighter, even if they don’t have shields.” Elscol coughed as the breeze wafted smoke toward them. “The only thing we can do is try to get out of here.”

“Agreed.” Iella looked out again, bracing to duck away from more aerial fire, but as the echoes of the last TIE’s shriek died, no new one rose to take its place. Instead the whine of blaster fire started at the north end of the village. She looked in that direction and saw figures in white moving into the burning village. “Stormies.”

Elscol laughed and checked the power pack on her pistol. “Not hardly. Look at the armor and how they wear it. Most of them are too small for it. They’re Home Defense troops all dressed up for this operation.”

“How can you be sure?”

“You think real stormies would raid a jungle village wearing white?”

Iella hesitated. “But on Endor, in the forest there, reports I heard …”

“Trust me, Iella, they learned from that mistake. Getting drubbed by a Wookiee and a bunch of Ewoks convinced them to institute some reforms.” Elscol pulled herself into the door-hole and leaped out. “C’mon.”

Iella followed, making the three-meter drop without injury. Running forward, she caught up with Elscol at the wall that edged the rooftop where they stood. As Elscol swung her legs over the top of the wall, Iella raised her blaster pistol and sighted in on one of the advancing troopers.

Elscol gently slapped her thigh. “Save it, you’ll never hit from here. Too far.”

Iella glanced down and grimly closed one eye. “Too far for you, maybe.” Her head came up and she sighted in on a group of three troopers. She centered the gun on the middle one, fired, then snapped a shot off at the other two. The first shot hit the target square on the left breast, then glanced up off the armor and burned through his throat. The second shot pierced the left eyepiece on the second trooper, spinning him around like a top before he went down. The last shot missed its intended target, passing over the trooper’s head by a couple of centimeters, but only did so because the first trooper’s body had knocked him off balance and he was falling.

Elscol looked up with wide-eyed amazement at her. “A head shot at this range?”

Iella shrugged, then tapped the rear sight. “Shoots high.” She sat on the edge of the wall, then leaped down to the next level and remained crouched at the foot of the wall. Elscol landed beside her. A few red blaster bolts bloodied the smoke in their direction, but none came even close to getting them. “They don’t know where we are or where those shots came from.”

“And because they aren’t Vratix, they’ll have a hard time jumping up here to find us.” Elscol smiled and crept forward toward the edge of the terrace wall. “I can hit from this range.”

Iella came forward carefully, ducking as a fleeing Vratix leaped past. At the edge of the terrace, she saw the troopers moving into the village, shooting into the doorholes on the ground level. Scarlet backlighting sometimes silhouetted a Vratix form. More often than not it seemed as if the blaster-fire started the tower’s lower rooms burning. There is no searching, this is just a mission to destroy this place.

Angered beyond the point of caring about anything, Iella rose from her crouch and began shooting at targets. Elscol rose up beside her, laying down a pattern of fire that sent the troopers scurrying for cover. Iella looked over at her, and they both knew seasoned troops—real stormtroopers—never would have shied from blaster pistol fire. A few of the troopers were down and still, and yet more thrashed in pain on the ground. Iella wanted to feel compassion for them, but their cries for help were her greatest ally. If the wounded infect the rest with a desire to avoid death, they’ll break and run. At the same time she acknowledged that the troopers’ running was her only chance at survival.

Iella ducked down as scattered return fire headed in her direction. She popped a fresh power pack into her blaster pistol and pressed her back against the wall. Though the wall itself was smooth, Iella felt anything but placid at the moment. “Well, we’ve gotten their attention so the Vratix can flee.”

Elscol ducked back beneath the edge of the wall. “You realize it’s just a matter of time before they call for one of the starfighters to come back, don’t you?”

Iella slid further along the wall, then nodded. “I guess we finish them quickly, then.”

Elscol raised an eyebrow. “Your suggestion for Dlarit made me think you might not have the stomach for this kind of fight. I’m glad to be wrong.”

Iella came up and triggered off two more shots before the troopers shifted their aim to shoot back at her. She dropped back down, uncertain if she’d hit anything and disturbed by what she saw. “Bad news. They’ve got a squad moving to flank us.”

The smaller woman shrugged as if Iella had reported she felt a light drizzle starting to fall. Elscol checked her power pack and smiled in the near silence that reigned in the village. “We can give up, or we can fight our way through them.”

“I don’t see surrender as an option.”

“Nor me.” Elscol tucked a lock of brown hair behind her left ear. “On three we’re over the wall to the last terrace. We go forward, take some shots, then over again and at them.”

“Frontal assault?” Iella shook her head. “I may be dead and not know it, but I’m not crazy.”

“They’re scared. We sprint to their line of cover, then we start vaping them close in. CorSec had to train you for that sort of fight and I’ve gotten used to it, too.”

Iella thought for a moment. From the base of the wall to the trees and rubble the troopers were using was only twenty-five meters. Shooting like mad to make them keep their heads down, it might just work. “I’m game.”

“Let’s do it.” Elscol rose into a crouch. “One, two, three!”

With her left hand on top of the terrace wall, Iella came up and over, then dropped the eight feet to the next terrace. She hit, rolled, and sprinted to the next edge. She vaulted it in tandem with Elscol and landed solidly. She shoved off the wall with her right hand, then brought the blaster around to spray shots at the troopers crouching twenty-five meters away. Her hastily snapped shots didn’t hit any of them, but they dove for the ground as if she were a Star Destroyer commencing a planetary bombardment.

As she raced forward, cutting right and left, she waited for a target to show himself so she could drop him with a clean shot to the head or belly. Belly would be better. He’ll scream. She waited for the screams, waited to hear the troopers she was approaching start to scream in terror. She started to scream herself, hoping to spark her foes into panic.

Suddenly one of the troopers did stand. She brought her pistol around, but he leveled his blaster carbine at her and triggered a burst before she could shoot him. She saw a trio of sizzling scarlet energy darts fly at her and for a second considered it nothing short of miraculous that they had missed. Then she felt the tug on her left thigh. Her world whirled, and her chin dug into the moist loam at the base of a gloan tree. She snorted dirt from her nostrils and wondered what had happened, then the first wave of pain hit her.

Iella rolled onto her back and glanced down at her left thigh. Crusted black flesh surrounded a hole oozing blood. Biting back a scream, she unbuckled her blaster belt and pulled it off. She pressed the holster against the wound, then wrapped the belt around her leg and refastened it. Pulling it tight almost made her faint, but she struggled against the darkness nibbling at the edges of her sight.

She didn’t think she’d blacked out, but as the world lightened again she found herself looking up at a trooper standing over her. He was saying something, but she couldn’t focus on the words. All she could notice was that the armor seemed over-large on him, with the breastplate covering half his stomach and the helmet resting firmly on the armor’s collar.

The trooper gestured with his blaster carbine, but Iella still wasn’t able to understand him. She tried, but an odd whirring sound eclipsed his words. An angular shadow dropped down behind him. Iella heard a horrid snapping and crunching as the trooper began to telescope down toward the ground. He twisted around, his legs going limp, allowing Iella to see the ragged parallel wounds slashed down through the back of his armor.

Standing behind him, with claws dripping blood, a black Vratix warrior drew his arms in toward his thorax. His head bobbed once, then his powerful hind legs straightened, propelling him up and out of her sight. If not for the ravaged corpse of the soldier at her feet, she would have had no proof of his intervention.

Her mouth hung open as she looked at the trooper’s body. Those claws sliced through that armor with the ease of a wampa filleting a tauntaun. No way all the bacta on this world could close those wounds. She leaned back against the trunk of the gloan tree, somehow finding comfort in the roughness of its bark. She heard screams that sounded far distant, more whirring, and other crisper sounds she never wanted to identify.

“Iella!”

She looked up. “Sixtus! Have you found Elscol?”

The large man nodded, then bent and scooped her up in his arms. “She twisted her ankle and got pinned down. How are you?”

“Hurt, but I should live.”

“Good. I’ll get you clear.”

Iella tried to point back toward the troopers. “But they’re out there. Another group, flanking us.”

Sixtus shook his head. “The Black-claws got them all. It won’t make up for the Vratix dead here, but it should start making the Xucphrans scared.” His eyes narrowed. “When they find their people dead, they’ll have a hard time sleeping.”

Iella winced against the pain. “Wait.”

“No, the Ashern have a base camp with some makeshift bacta tanks.”

“No, not that.” She shook her head to clear it. “Look, don’t leave the bodies here. Take them away, far away. Just have the troopers disappear. Not knowing will be worse than knowing. Take our bodies, too, hide them. Don’t let Isard know how badly we were hurt.”

Sixtus smiled. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“Your lips are moving, but I’m hearing the kind of things Elscol would say.” He stepped over a thick gloan branch and continued down a narrow jungle trail. “I’d not have thought you capable of thinking that kind of thing.”

“One thing I know, Sixtus, is that a high body count doesn’t mean victory, it just means a lot of folks died.” Iella tipped her head back toward the village. “A lot of people died there, but not knowing the true story will give our enemies something to think about. If they decide they don’t want to fight because of it, we win.”