The Final Prophecy (11 page)

“Makes sense. So if this is a big maw luur, we’re—” His eyes widened. “Get us out,
now
.”

Tahiri gave the command, and the dovin basals quivered to life. They began moving back toward the entrance.

“New plan,” Corran said. “I’ve no intention of going up a world-sized digestive tract.”

“I hate to say this,” Tahiri said, “but that revelation—”

Something slammed into the ship, hard.

“—may have come a little late.”

“What is it?” Corran said.

“Something big,” Tahiri said. “We’re inside it.”

“Well get us
outside
it!”

“I’m trying, but it must have ten times our mass.”

Her skin suddenly began burning. “Uh-oh,” she muttered. “It can digest yorik coral, whatever it is.”

“Part of the maw luur?”

“There are symbiotic organisms in a maw luur that help break down larger things. Nothing this big, though.”

“But this is a really
big
maw luur,” Corran said. “Digesting really big things.”

“True,” Tahiri replied. “Anyway, if you’ve got any suggestions on what to do here—”

“Fire the plasma cannon.”

“In an enclosed space?” Was Corran crazy? “That could be bad.”

“So could being digested.”

“Right.”

She bit back a shriek as plasma ejected into the water and brought it instantly to boiling, scalding and compressing her hull. The pressure and heat mounted, peaked—and then they were tumbling free. When they finally stabilized, the water in the eyelamps had gone dark blackish red, and nasty chunks of pulverized meat floated all around them.

“Well, that was disgusting,” Corran said.

“Yes,” Tahiri informed him. “And this tube is sucking.”

“I agree. So let’s get out of it.”

“No,” she said, trying to remain calm. “I mean it’s sucking us up it—capillary action, probably, like the roots of a succession pool.”

“Surely not too hard to counteract with the dovin basals?”

“Not at all,” Tahiri replied. “If, that is, the dovin basals were working.”

“The dovin basal is dead?” Corran asked.

“Not dead,” Tahiri said. “But it’s badly damaged. I’m trying to coax something out of it, but it’s sort of in shock right now.”
Of course, it could also be dying
, but she kept that thought to herself.

“We’re going faster,” she said, instead. “Whatever’s pulling at the other end of this tube is increasing its draw.”

“How fast?” Corran asked. His voice was maddeningly calm now. Did he think this was
her
fault?

“Only about sixty klicks a minute,” she said.

“That’s
fast
, when you don’t have anything to damp inertia, which I’m guessing we don’t right now. If we hit something at this speed …”

“Like another predator?”

“I’m thinking more along the lines of a
full
stop,” Corran said, punching at the datapad. “This tunnel is going to split eventually, and again, and again—little rivers flowing into the big one, streams into the rivers, sewers into the streams—eventually we’re going to hit tubes too small to go through.”

“That was going to happen anyway,” she pointed out. “You must have had some plan for us to exit this thing in the first place.”

“That sort of assumed we were going to be under power,” Corran said wryly.

“We may have some power. I’m starting to feel something in the dovin basal.”

“It’s coming back on-line?”

“It’s a living thing. It can’t go on- and off-line.”

“Fine. It’s coming around?”

“Somewhat. I might be able to nudge it into responding, but it won’t be able to keep it up for long, so I’ll need to pick my moment. Or moments—I think short bursts of power would be okay.”

Corran frowned down at his chart. “Originally, there was a nexus up here where six smaller tubes branch off. It’s probably coming up fast. If you can take the third from your left, do it.”

Almost as he said it, they burst into a flattened sphere full of water. Something black with a lot of tentacles went whipping by them, furiously fighting the current. Tahiri bit her lip, trying to interpret the ship’s failing senses through the murk.

“One, two, three—it might be four,” she muttered. “There’s not time for a better count.”

She sent a gentle command to the dovin basal, which quivered and then reached out. It didn’t take much—just enough to divert them into the right stream.

“I think I did it,” she said.

“Good,” Corran said, “now—”

“No!” Tahiri yelped. The rim of the tube loomed.

A sudden shock nearly tore them from their crash couches, and an unholy shriek of impact filled the cabin. A series of lesser shocks followed as the ship rattled down the smaller tube, turning end over end.

Tahiri’s stomach churned, and her last meal made a good try at escaping its intended fate.

“Sorry about that,” she managed.

“Can you get this tumble under control?” Corran asked.

“I could,” she said, “but I really like tumbling.” Didn’t he think she was trying? “What’s our next turn?” she asked.

“The next node, we take the second from the right.”

The dovin basal was starting to come out of its funk, though Tahiri could tell it was very weak. They couldn’t fight the current, but her control of their forward motion improved. They made the next turn without clipping anything, and the next. The tube had narrowed so much that they had only a few meters’ clearance.

“This is almost it,” Corran said. “The next intersection used to be a cooling tower. We should be able to go up into the water jacket. We can park the ship there and go the rest of the way on foot.”

“Let’s just hope they haven’t replaced the cooling tower with, I don’t know, a lorqh membrane,” Tahiri said.

“Don’t tell me what that is, okay?” Corran said.

A few moments later, the ship bobbed to the surface in a large, open area. Tahiri made out a flat, sturdy-looking surface a tier above, and gently coaxed the ship up to it.

“Well done,” Corran said.

“Thank you. Are we where you thought we were?”

Corran studied the chart. “Yep. From here, we can find access tunnels to the place we were supposed to meet this Prophet. All we have to do now is find him, bring him back here, and do all that in reverse.”

Tahiri sighed. “And find another ship. I don’t think we can even make orbit in this one, much less a hyperspace jump.”

Corran’s jaw clamped, then he shrugged. “Well, we’ve stolen ships before. We can do it again.”

But she could tell he was worried. The quipping was to set
her
at ease, because he still thought she was a kid.

“Fight what’s in front of you,” she said. “Let’s go find out more about this Prophet.”

* * *

“Can’t say the Vong have improved much on this,” Corran remarked, as they wound their way through the dark caverns that had once been Coruscant’s underworld. Now it was a mass of corroding metal, strange, pale growths, and luminescent lichen. It looked as if it had been abandoned for centuries rather than months. Despite the setbacks Jacen had engineered with the dhuryam—the World Brain—the Yuuzhan Vong shapers seemed to be making headway.

“Of course, it was never exactly homey down here,” he added.

“
Yuuzhan
Vong,” Tahiri corrected. “Did people live here back in the old days?”

“Lots,” Corran said. “The vast majority of people who lived on Coruscant weren’t what you would exactly call comfortable.”

Tahiri shivered. “I can’t imagine living like this, below-ground, surrounded by metal, no sky, no stars.”

“Is that Tahiri or Riina talking?”

There was something subtly testing in his voice. “Neither one of them would have liked this,” she said. “Tahiri grew up in the desert and in the jungles of Yavin Four. Riina grew up in a worldship. Both were surrounded by life.”

“Riina didn’t grow up anywhere,” Corran said. “Riina was created in a laboratory.”

“You think that makes a difference?” she asked, stung. “How do you know all your memories are real? If you found out your memories of Mirax were implanted, that there was no such person, would she be any less real to you?”

“Unh-unh,” Corran said. “Not buying the sophomoric philosophy. Part of you was once a real person. Part of you was created, like a computer program.”

“You think Threepio isn’t real?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Tahiri said. She’d pretty much had enough of this, because she didn’t know whether to cry
or hit him. “And I’ll bet I’ve thought about it a lot more than you have. What I
don’t
know is why you’re pushing this, here, now. I thought we covered this before leaving Mon Calamari.”

Corran stopped, regarded her in the light of their lamps.

“No, we didn’t. Or, rather, none of my worries were really resolved. You asked if I trusted you. It’s not that I don’t trust you, Tahiri—I don’t know who you
are
. I don’t know what might be sleeping in you, waiting to wake up when the right stimulus comes along. And I can’t believe that you can be sure about that either.”

That was a
tu’q
, a solid hit. “No, of course I can’t,” she finally managed. “But I’m not part Tahiri and part Riina. There aren’t two voices in my head. Those two fought, and joined, and I was born. They were sort of like my parents. Nothing about either one of them is perfect in me. Even if I inherited something nasty from Riina, it will be flawed. I’ll be able to fight it.”

“Unless you don’t want to. Unless it’s something that would have appealed to both Tahiri and Riina.”

She conceded that with a nod. “You’ve already taken the risk, Corran. Why didn’t we have this conversation days ago?”

“Because I wanted to see something of who you’ve become.”

“And who have I become?”

“You’re bright and talented and far too confident. I’m not sure you’re afraid of anything, and that’s bad.”

“I’m afraid,” she said.

“Of what?”

“Fear. Anger.”

“The dark side.”

“Anakin saw me as a Dark Jedi with Yuuzhan Vong markings. He was strong in the Force.” She shook her head. “It’s not some hidden Yuuzhan Vong part of me that should
worry you, Corran. It’s the Jedi part. Tahiri was trained as a Jedi from childhood. I—the person I’ve become—was not.”

His eyebrows beetled up. “That’s an interesting thing to say. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Most people haven’t.”

“Okay,” Corran said. “We’ll take this up later, when we aren’t skulking.”

“Are we skulking now?”

“Yes, because we’re almost at our destination. If there’s anyone waiting for us, I’d rather they didn’t interrupt an interesting conversation.”

A few moments later they passed an immense shaft of some sort. Faint daylight illuminated it, so she could guess that it was perhaps two kilometers in diameter. Looking up, she could see a faint circle of rose-colored light.

“How deep is this shaft?” she wondered aloud.

“About three klicks.”

“What in the galaxy
was
this?”

“A garbage pit,” he said. “They used to shoot dangerous garbage into orbit from here, with magnetic accelerators.”

“That’s a lot of garbage,” Tahiri said. “This is where we’re meeting him?”

“Yes. In about fifteen minutes, if he’s on time.”

While they waited, Tahiri looked around a bit. A lot of Yuuzhan Vong life had crept into the pit.

“What are those called?” Corran asked her. He was pointing at a plant with thick, reedlike stalks that glowed a vivid blue color.

“I’ve no idea,” she admitted. “I’ve never seen one before. There are a lot of things like that down here—things from the homeworld that weren’t needed or wanted on the worldships. Or maybe they’re new, engineered to live on metal.”

She touched the glowing cylinders. They were cool, and the fine hairs on the back of her hand stood up.

Ten minutes later, they heard the faint echoes of footsteps. Tahiri put her hand on the grip of her lightsaber. It might be the Prophet, but it might be anything.

A faint green luminescence appeared, carried by a tall, well-formed warrior.

“It’s a trick!” Tahiri whispered. She ignited her lightsaber. Corran’s blazed on an instant later.

The warrior stopped, now fully illuminated.

“Jeedai!”

“Look at him,” Tahiri said. “He’s not malformed. He’s not Shamed!”

But the warrior had dropped to his knees.
“Jeedai,”
he said in Basic. “Welcome. But you are not correct. I am indeed Shamed.”

After the initial shock, Tahiri had begun to notice other details—like the fact that the warrior wore no armor, and that some of his scars and tattoos were incomplete.

“You speak Basic,” Corran noticed.

“For your convenience I am equipped with a tizowyrm.”

“Are you the Prophet?” Corran asked.

“I am not. I arrive before him, to make certain all is safe. My name is Kunra.”

“And is it?” Corran asked. “Safe?”

“You are
Jeedai
. I have no choice but to trust you. My fear was that our communications had somehow been intercepted, and that I would find warriors here.”

Tahiri switched to Yuuzhan Vong. “Why were you Shamed?” she asked.

The warrior’s eyes widened. “One-who-was-shaped!” Then his eyes switched back to Corran, and he returned to Basic. “The slayer of Shedao Shai! We expected
Jeedai
, but not the most august of them.”

“Ah, there are still a few higher on the ladder than us,” Corran said. “Luke Skywalker, for instance.”

“But he does not figure in our sacred tales!”

Tahiri was in no mood to let the warrior become distracted. “I asked you a question,” she snapped.

The warrior bowed his head. “I was a coward,” he said.

A cowardly warrior
? Tahiri thought.
No wonder
.

“You seem to have some courage,” Corran said. “You came down here, not knowing if you would find us or an ambush.”

“I serve the Truth now. It gives me courage, though I am still unworthy.”

“And yet the most worthy of my disciples,” a new voice said.