The Unifying Force (17 page)

Harrar lowered his gaze and shook his head. “Having appointed ourselves Yun-Yuuzhan’s instrument, assuming the license to purge, to punish, and to sanctify, to kill by the millions those who do not share our worldview, we have become blasphemers against our own religion. We have become a weak species, desperate to prove our strength to our gods.”

Luke leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “If Shimrra understood this, could he be persuaded to end the war?”

“Shimrra hates the sound of reasoned words. Nor would any of the elite be persuaded—save, perhaps, those who have secretly remained faithful to Quoreal, and whose goal it has been to bring evidence of this world to Yuuzhan’tar, and expose Shimrra—to demonstrate that he violated the taboo and invaded, and that his actions may have damned all of us.”

The priest fell silent for a long moment, then said, “Answer one question for me: can Zonama Sekot help you defeat us? Is it indeed a weapon?”

Luke touched his jaw. “It has that capability.”

Harrar exhaled slowly and sadly. “Then no wonder Shimrra fears it so. It is as prophesied.” He looked questioningly at Luke. “Will you kill me now—sacrifice me to the Force?”

“That’s not our way,” Luke said.

Harrar’s initial confusion gave way to resolution. “Then if you would allow me, I wish to help bring about a resolution between your varied species and mine. Or do I begin to sound like Elan, promising one thing but determined to deliver another?”

Mara, Jacen, and the others were still trading looks of dumbfounded disbelief when Luke said, “Perhaps you carry something even more deadly than bo’tous, Harrar—in the form of ideas.”

Harrar pressed his few fingertips together and bounced
them against his disfigured lower lip. “Yun-Harla is said to reserve her most cunning tricks for those most devoted to her. But we find ourselves here, together, for reasons beyond my comprehension. From here, then, we must at least attempt to mark a new beginning.”

“We’re going to come out of this in one piece, right?” Judder Page asked as Han was returning to the cockpit.

In the adjacent chair, Pash Cracken repressed a smile.

Millennium Falcon
had been in hyperspace for just under five standard hours, most of which Han had spent elsewhere in the freighter, evaluating the extent of the damage and checking on the passengers, who were crammed into every available cabin space.

Han looked from Page to Cracken to Leia, who had remained in the copilot’s chair throughout the lightspeed transit. “Didn’t you tell them everything would be fine?”

She shrugged. “Maybe they don’t trust me.”

Han strapped into the pilot’s chair and swiveled to the two Alliance officers. “You can trust whatever she says.”

Page grinned. “Well, that’s just it, Han. She told us to ask you.”

Han frowned at Leia. “Maybe it’s time we reviewed our roles aboard this ship. I do the piloting. You reassure the passengers that the pilot always knows what he’s doing.”

“Of course, Captain,” Leia said. “Might I tell the passengers exactly where we’re headed?”

Han swung to the navicomputer display. “Unless we took a wrong turn at the last nebula, we should be coming up on Caluula any minute now.”

Leia stared at him. “Caluula? In the Tion Hegemony? Could you have picked a more out-of-the-way planet?”

“Hey, I got us away from those Vong skips, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“I had to make a judgment call.” Han continued to make adjustments on the console and overhead instrument panels.

Leia eyed the lubricant smears on his hands, and a small bump that was forming on his right temple. “Everything go all right in the back?” she asked quietly while Cracken and Page were engaged in a separate conversation. “I thought I heard some cursing.”

“That must have been Threepio,” Han mumbled.

“He never was good with tools—”

“Coming out of hyperspace,” Han interrupted, reaching forward to prime the sublight drives and ready the subspace transceiver.

The starlines sharpened to points of light, and the starfield rotated slightly. The ion drives flared to life with a deafening
whoomp!
and the ship began to lurch and hiccup. From aft came the sound of stressed alloy, then an indistinct severing as if some component had been torn away.

“What was that?” Leia asked.

“Just another piece of us,” Han said flatly. “Nothing important … I hope.”

A distant object grew larger in the viewport, slowly defining itself as a linear array of geometric modules, linked by girderlike structural members and transparent tubular passageways. Docking berths extended from each module, many of them housing ion cannons and turbolasers in place of ships. Sprouting like a faceted mushroom cap from the center of the array was an enormous shield generator.

Han relaxed into his chair. “A thing of beauty if I ever saw one.”

“Looks awfully beat up,” Leia said dubiously.

Han straightened somewhat. “Yeah, now that you mention it. But the last time I passed through here the station was stocked with aftermarket parts from Lianna.”

“How long ago was that?”

Han thought for a moment. “A couple of years, I guess. But—”

A blast rocked the
Falcon
from behind, snapping everyone back in their chairs.

“Another piece of us?” Leia asked, leaning in to check the sensor displays.

“Worse.”

Leia’s eyes were big when she glanced back at him. “What was that you said about outrunning those skips?”

Cracken raised his eyes to the overhead viewport. “They couldn’t have followed us through hyperspace! It can’t be the same vessels!”

Han veered the
Falcon
hard to port, a second before two magma missiles raced past the ship’s mandibles. “Somebody’s changed the rules!” He leaned toward the intercom and called the two Noghri by name, then fell silent for a moment, listening to their reply.

“I don’t care if the targeting computers aren’t responding! You’ve got eyes, haven’t you?” He growled to himself. “Have to do everything myself around here—”

A molten projectile hit the
Falcon
broadside, and a wire-filled module dropped, sparking, from the cockpit ceiling. Han barrel-rolled the ship, then dived abruptly. Alarms were screeching even before he pulled out of the maneuver, and the authenticators began painting dozens of yellow bezels on the tactical display screens.

Han and Leia looked up at the same time to find themselves squared off with a Yuuzhan Vong battle group of capital vessels, gunboat analogs, tenders, and what was certainly a yammosk-bearing clustership, similar to the one Han had helped cripple at Fondor. Sentry coralskippers were already streaking for the
Falcon
.

“You know, you have a real knack for this!” Leia said while she called for a status readout on the shields.

“It’s not me,” Han protested. “The navicomputer has itself convinced that trouble is the
Falcon
’s default preference!”

“A likely story.”

Han didn’t alter course. “Grab a holo of that clustership. Download any drive signatures you can pick up and paste everything into the battle analysis computer. Then hold on to your stomach!”

He waited for Leia to carry out the tasks, then threw the
Falcon
into a near-vertical climb, continuing up and over in a loop that sent them racing back toward Caluula’s orbital station. The quartet of curve-tailed, six-legged skips that had apparently chased the
Falcon
from Selvaris were directly below, spewing plasma missiles, even as they jinked and
juked to evade incessant laser bursts from the dorsal and belly AG-2Gs.

Leia swiveled to the commboard. “Caluula Station, come in!”

“Transmit our identification code,” Han said.

“Caluula Station, this is
Millennium Falcon
. Please acknowledge.”

“Say something,” Han muttered. “Call us a name—anything!”

The closer they came to the station, the worse it appeared. Many of the modules had been holed and scorched by fire. A pitched battle must have raged for weeks, unknown to Galactic Alliance command because of the disabled HoloNet. Han wondered briefly how many other planets or orbital stations were in similar straits.

“Millennium Falcon
, this is Caluula Station,” a female voice said at last. “Someone should have told us you were coming.”

Han clamped his right hand on Leia’s left in relief. “Caluula Station, even we didn’t know we were coming,” he said into the mike. “We’ve got drive trouble, and a couple of coralskippers are hounding us. Any chance you could lower your shields long enough to take us in?”

“Can do,
Millennium Falcon
—so long as you can guarantee that your ship’s as fast as she’s rumored to be.”

“Pull in the welcome mat while we’re making our approach,” Han said, “and the
Falcon
’ll still get us inside with time to spare.”

“We won’t hold you to that,
Millennium Falcon
, but come on in.”

“First we’ve got to lose these rock spitters.”

Routing additional power to the main thrusters, Han fire-walled the throttle and began to take the
Falcon
through a repertoire of stomach-churning evasive maneuvers. The tandem-piloted skips did their best to keep up, singeing the
Falcon
’s, stern with gouts of plasma. But as the
Falcon
neared the station, the enemy vessels had to contend also with laser beams and the sting of ion cannons.

“Don’t worry,” Leia assured Page and Cracken as Han
continued to rocket for the small window Caluula Station had opened. “Han does this all the time.”

The moment the
Falcon
soared into the station’s embrace, the shield repowered. Repulsed by heavy fire, three of the skips peeled off and jagged for the protection of the battle group. The fourth kept coming, only to be stunned by the shimmering energy field, then fell prey to the station’s powerful batteries.

Leia swiveled to face Cracken and Page. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”

Color slowly returned to their faces, and they nodded.

Steadying his shaking hand, Han cut power to the thrusters and allowed a tractor beam to convey the
Falcon
safely into a docking bay.

Seat of the galactic government since the fall of Coruscant, the water world of Mon Calamari was nimbused with ships of all category and classification, from twenty-year-old scallop-hulled Mon Cal cruisers to gleaming Star Destroyers fresh from the yards of Bothawui and distant Tallaan. The star system’s inner worlds were similarly encircled, ever on alert that the Yuuzhan Vong might one day decide to fold their myriad battle groups into a single armada and strike at Mon Calamari from the heart of the galaxy.

Inbound from the hyperspace reversion point well beyond Mon Calamari’s single moon, Jaina weaved her X-wing to
Ralroost
, one of the largest and whitest of the ships in orbital dock, and was the last pilot of Twin Suns Squadron to drift into the fleet flagship’s spacious though welcoming hold.

A Bothan Assault Cruiser originally commissioned for the defense of Bothawui at the conclusion of the Galactic Civil War,
Ralroost
was under the command of Admiral Traest Kre’fey, who had emerged from relative obscurity at the start of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion to the position of second in command of the entire Alliance fleet.

The transports had been the first to arrive from Kashyyyk, and many were already docked and disgorging their cargoes of freed prisoners. Despite devastating losses to the star-fighter squadrons, the mission had been deemed a success.
Dozens of former New Republic officials and scores of commanders had been rescued, and most of Alliance Intelligence’s double agents had been extracted. The operation might have gone far worse had the stingcrawler coralskippers arrived sooner than they did, or had the deadly skips pursued the transports to Mon Calamari. But instead they had remained at Selvaris to safeguard the Peace Brigade freighters that had yet to be unloaded, and to escort those prisoner ships to Coruscant.

Seizing the opportunity, Chief of State Cal Omas’s media team had spun the mission into a public relations event meant to send a message to the governments of threatened worlds to hold out; that unlike the fallen New Republic, the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances was not about to allow any more star systems to fall to enemy rule. As a result, several hundred military personnel, civilians, and media representatives were on hand to greet the rescued. Booming applause erupted for each one to emerge from a transport. Weeping spouses rushed to embrace their returned partners. Children, clearly confused by all the commotion, wrapped their arms tightly around the legs or waists of their liberated mothers or fathers.

Medics and droids worked side by side to move the injured onto repulsor gurneys and hurry them off for bacta treatment. Most of the rescued, of whatever species, needed little more than minor attention and a couple of hearty meals. Others were in critical condition. The fact that none had been implanted with surge-coral was a constant reminder that they were to have gone to their deaths as sacrificial victims.

Few civilians and no one from the media took notice of the battered starfighters that entered
Ralroost
’s, hold in the wake of the transports. Jaina didn’t mind, but she had to laugh. Not all that long ago she had been a media darling, because of her capture of a Yuuzhan Vong ship and the brief role she had played as “the Trickster Goddess”—a weapon unto herself. Now she was just another weary pilot returning from a mission that had nearly gone completely wrong.

Five Twin Suns pilots had died. But that was breaking news only to those who had survived.

A human crew chief rolled a ladder up to Jaina’s X-wing while the canopy was rising. Two crash-team techs rushed in to effect repairs and check on carbon-scored Cappie.

“Welcome back, Colonel,” the young woman said.

Jaina descended the ladder, took off her helmet, and shook out her brown hair. Loosening the tabs of her flight suit, she put the helmet under her arm and began to circle the X-wing, her eyes scanning the hold for signs of
Millennium Falcon
. Not too far away, Lowbacca, Kyp, and Alema Rar were emerging from their craft.