Conquest: Edge of Victory I (17 page)

His hand went to his useless lightsaber and then fell away.

For three days he had been avoiding the Yuuzhan Vong speeder analogs. It helped that he knew the sounds of the jungle moon; the irritated cries of woolamanders in the distance or a flight of a group of lesser kitehawks had become his best allies, warning him of approaching fliers kilometers before they passed overhead. Still, as he approached the site of the academy, the searchers came with greater regularity. He didn’t think they were random flights, but rather that they were part of some sort of expanding search net spiraling out from the flier he had brought down with his lightsaber.

Well, at least now he knew better than to cut into a dovin basal. From what he could tell, his weapon had passed through or very near the part of the thing that warped gravity; the crystal in his weapon had been subtly warped, then fused by the energy it generated. That was both good news and bad; focusing crystals had been
found on Yavin 4 before, in the old Massassi temples, and they could be used in lightsabers. Unfortunately, Massassi temples had been in short supply lately.

Sighing, he renewed his grip on the makeshift staff he had managed to cut with his utility knife. He doubted very much that it would be of any use whatsoever against Yuuzhan Vong armor, but it was better than nothing. He’d run across some explosive grenade fungi earlier—a local plant that, when dry, could generate a respectable bang. At the moment, however, they weren’t available. He’d stashed them on dry ground before hiding here.

So he sat, waiting for the shadow to return, and tried not to think about what would happen when he finally reached Tahiri and her captors. How many Yuuzhan Vong were there? Why were they still here?

All good questions, all totally moot if Anakin Solo died or was captured on the way.

He would have to face the answers soon enough, of course. By his calculations, he was only about twenty kilometers away from the academy.

He was so busy watching the sky that he didn’t notice ripples of a wake approaching him until it was nearly too late.

Even then he first thought it was a large crawlfish, one of the harmless crustaceans that had been furnishing him with food since he came to ground. He caught a glimpse of mottled chiton as it approached.

But crawlfish got to be only a meter or so long, and he suddenly realized that this creature was more on the order of three meters.

He quickly lowered the sharpened end of his staff, which was promptly yanked from his hands by something very strong. The head surfaced then, a nightmare of mandibles and hooked feelers reaching for him. For an instant, fear and shock got the better of him, then he grabbed its mass with the Force and
pushed
. As it blew
back and up, he got a good view of it: flat, wide, and segmented with thousands of legs.

It splashed down, milled about, and started for him again. Quickly, he clambered out of the water.

Someone called behind him, in a language he didn’t understand. He spun and saw one of the Yuuzhan Vong craft, side extruded open. A Yuuzhan Vong warrior was just stepping out.

The warrior hesitated for a second, then stepped back into the craft. As it rose into the air, Anakin uttered a brief curse and ran. He paused only long enough to grab his pack.

   The flier stayed with him, but kept its distance. Adrenaline hummed in Anakin’s blood, but his mind was curiously calm. He dodged through the undergrowth, looking for a cave, temple ruins, any place to remove him from his observer. His fatigue sloughed from him like dead cells in a bacta tank, and the Force flowed through him like a river, wild, almost frightening in its sheer, joyous strength.

It was not a state he had quite ever achieved before, an utter awareness of everything around him. Yavin 4 was so
alive
. And in that matrix of living, pulsing Force, the fliers were bubbles of nothing. The Jedi had learned to detect the Yuuzhan Vong by not detecting them, but before it had always been a matter of focus. He would look at a suspected Yuuzhan Vong, and if he felt nothing, that was likely what he had.

But this was different. It was like suddenly noticing the spaces between words. It was a fragile thing, probably something he could never have achieved if he had tried for it, something that might go away if he thought too hard about it.

But for the moment he wasn’t doing much thinking. He knew before he should have that the first Yuuzhan Vong he came across on foot was there. The warrior sprang
from behind a tree, long, snakelike amphistaff held in a guard position. He was missing two fingers at the knuckle, and his ear had been cut into fringe. He wore the usual vonduun crab armor and an expression of gratification.

Anakin snapped a heavy tree bough, already rotten and fatigued, and yanked it with more than the force of gravity down upon the warrior. The Yuuzhan Vong was quick and nearly dodged, but nearly wasn’t enough as half a metric ton of tree crushed him into the ground. Anakin didn’t know if the warrior was dead or alive, injured, or merely compromised. He didn’t care, but changed beats, aiming himself away from the bubbles of nothing crawling at the edges of his expanded senses, tightening themselves around him like a vast noose.

The next Yuuzhan Vong caught him by surprise, telescoping his amphistaff across the path so it caught Anakin just below the knees. Pain was a bright line across his shins, but he wrapped himself in the life of the forest and lifted himself up, returning to ground three meters away. The Yuuzhan Vong was charging by then, weapon retracted but ready to flip out once more. Anakin spun to face him, dancing back from the attack, until his enemy whipped the weapon out with a peculiar snap of the wrist. Not entirely limp or stiff, the amphistaff arced over Anakin’s shoulder, poisonous fangs aimed at some spot on his lower back.

Anakin didn’t try to parry; the staff would only wrap around his weapon and find its target anyway. Instead he leapt toward and to the left of the warrior, closing the distance so quickly that the staff slapped painfully against his shoulder. The head, however, snapped short, and by then Anakin was ducking, driving the point of his weapon up into the warrior’s armpit. He pushed his own body and the staff away from the forest floor with the Force, resulting in a blow that sent the warrior hurling almost vertically, three meters in the air.

Again, without waiting to see what the effect was,
Anakin hurried on, opening his pack and tossing out the dried fungi he had gathered earlier. He didn’t let them fall, but held them gently aloft with the Force, spread out around and just ahead of him. Two exploded because his Force grip was too tight, but then he was in the zone again, one with everything but the Yuuzhan Vong.

A pair of warriors hit him next, but he hardly slowed down. Each got two explosive grenade fungi. One of the Yuuzhan Vong managed to block one of the spheroids with his amphistaff, but the resulting explosion broke the warrior’s concentration, and the next hit him in the head. His companion went down as well, venting a hoarse cry of anger.

The net was tightening, but there was a way out. Anakin could feel a hole in their search pattern. He lunged on ahead, lifting a virtual cloud of stones and sticks to join his remaining fungi. He was like a strange, strong wind, rushing through the trees.

Then something thudded dully into his left shoulder, and he stumbled, his legs refusing service. He hit the forest floor, wondering what had happened. The forest resounded with the sounds of his explosive grenade fungi rupturing on the ground.

He tried to sit up, then he saw the blood, spattered on the dead leaves and along the sleeve of his flight suit.

A Yuuzhan Vong stepped from out of the bushes, holding something about the size of a carbine, a tube that swelled into a sort of stock or magazine.

Grunting, Anakin struggled to his feet. The whole left side of his body felt curiously numb. He reached back and found that a hole had been gouged in his shoulder. He felt something hard in the hole and pulled it out.

It was a mass of cracked chiton.

His legs threatened to buckle again. The Yuuzhan Vong was advancing, weapon trained on him. All around him, Anakin could hear more enemies rushing toward him.

Oddly enough, he still didn’t feel frightened or angry. He didn’t feel much of anything, except the Force.

And a familiar presence, something not too far away. Not one presence, really, but one that was legion.

“Two can play that game,” Anakin whispered.

He dropped his weapon and held his hands up. “Nice going,” he told the Yuuzhan Vong. “You shot me in the back with a bug. Very brave.”

He could see three or four of them now, with his peripheral vision.

He hadn’t expected the warrior to answer, but he did, in Basic.

“I am Field Commander Sinan Mat. I salute your bravery,
Jeedai
. I must deny you the embrace of death in battle. For this I apologize.”

A little closer
, Anakin thought.
If they don’t mean to kill me …

“Will you fight me, Sinan Mat? Just you and me?”

“That is my desire. It cannot be. I am to bring you living to the shapers.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. And … well, I’d feel worse about this if you hadn’t shot me in the back, but … forgive me.”

Mat frowned and touched his ear. “The tizowyrm doesn’t know that word,
forgive
. What—” Then his eyes widened. The forest was screaming a song of death.

The piranha-beetles fell upon the Yuuzhan Vong in a cloud. Sinan Mat dropped his weapon and clawed at his face as it disintegrated beneath the fierce mandibles. The piranha-beetles didn’t spare the other Yuuzhan Vong, either, and a chorus of pain and rage rose counterpoint to the strident song of the insects.

Anakin picked up his staff and hobbled away, knowing his legs wouldn’t carry him much farther. He needed to find a place to hide.

Ten minutes later, he leaned heavily against a tree. In the distance the ravenous piranha-beetles had finished
their task, and now, finally, Anakin felt his control of the Force slipping. His shoulder at last understood what had been done to it, and the pain was like burning liquid, dripping down his ribs, drooling across his chest and the side of his head. Each footstep brought a new wave of dizziness and nausea.

He tried to take another step and found he couldn’t. With a sigh, he sank down onto the moss. Just a little rest, and then—

A shadow fell across him. He looked up to find two Yuuzhan Vong warriors looking down at him, obviously not a part of the group he had just killed.

He called on all of his energy, trying to find the piranha-beetles again, but they were a distant presence and gorged now, not as easily attracted to a meal by Anakin’s will.

A third warrior appeared from the forest behind the first two. He looked different, somehow—mutilated like every other Yuuzhan Vong Anakin had seen, but he was more strikingly grotesque. Unlike the other two, this one was empty-handed.

The newcomer snarled something in his language, and the other two turned.

Anakin wondered, then, if he had slipped into a dream. The first two warriors grunted and spat words at the third. Anakin had heard the tone before—when the Yuuzhan Vong spoke of machines, or other things that they considered abominations. It was a tone of pure contempt.

For a moment the newcomer seemed to cringe beneath this abuse, but then he grinned, all needle teeth and malice. Then he slashed one of the warriors in the neck with the edge of his gloved hand. The other warrior gave a hoarse cry of outrage, lowered his amphistaff, and thrust at the attacker. The unarmed warrior caught the shaft, leapt high in the air, kicking with both feet and striking the staff-wielder in the face.

The first warrior down was coming back up, clutching
his throat. The unarmed one grabbed him by the hair and drove stiffened fingers deep into his eyes, lifting him from the ground by the sockets. The warrior went rigid, and when the newcomer let him drop he fell to the forest floor, twitching.

The warrior who had been kicked in the face didn’t get up. Anakin suspected his neck was broken. The unarmed Yuuzhan Vong was the only one still standing. He squatted next to Anakin and peered at him with eyes like algae-infested pools of water.

He looked—sick. The Yuuzhan Vong showed their rank by scarification and the sacrifice of body parts, but this one looked like an example of that gone horribly wrong. His hair hung in dank patches, and his face and neck were covered with scabs and open wounds. His scars looked swollen and unhealthy. Spiky growths that looked like dead or dying implants moldered on his shoulders and elbows. He stank of putrefaction.

After observing Anakin for a long moment, the Yuuzhan Vong rose, approached one of the bodies, and dug into its ear. He pulled out what looked like a worm of some sort and fed it into his own ear—or, rather, the festering hole that might once have been an ear. He shuddered, and his body spasmed as if in great pain. A thin drool of blood leaked from the orifice.

He turned back to Anakin and held out his hand.

“I am Vua Rapuung,
Jeedai
. You will come with me. I will help you.”

The young
Jeedai
fell, her body gripped with convulsions. A strangled cry filled the vivarium.

“Interesting,” Mezhan Kwaad said, watching the reaction. “Do you see, Adept Yim, that—”

“I fail to see what interests you, Master Mezhan Kwaad,” a voice said from behind.

Nen Yim turned and immediately supplicated. Another master had just entered the vivarium, one so incredibly ancient the signs of his domain were entirely obscured. His headdress was a fragile, cloudlike mass, and both hands were those of a master. Both of his eyes had been replaced by yellow maa’its. He was accompanied by an adept aide.

“Master Yal Phaath,” Mezhan Kwaad said. “How good to see you, Ancient.”

“Answer me, Mezhan Kwaad. What so interests you about this creature’s agony? She is an infidel and cannot embrace the pain. There is no surprise in that and nothing interesting in it.”

“It is interesting because the provoker spineray causing her pain has been designed to do so selectively,” Mezhan Kwaad replied, “one nerve array at a time. What we have just seen is a reflex unknown in Yuuzhan Vong. We may now confidently map a part of the human nervous system that has no counterpart in our own.”