The Unifying Force (3 page)

“Holowafer,” the captain said softly, without taking a second look. “It’ll display only once. We’re going to have to be quick about it.”

Cracken nodded his chin to the horned Devaronian. “Find Clak’dor, Garban, and the rest of that crew, and bring them here quickest.”

The Devaronian stood up and hurried out the doorway.

Page ran his hand over his bearded face. “We’re going to need a place to display the data. We can’t risk doing it in the open.”

Cracken thought for a moment, then turned to the long-bearded Bothan to his right. “Who’s the one with the sabacc deck?”

The alien’s fur rippled slightly. “That’d be Coruscant.”

“Tell him we need him.”

The Bothan nodded and made for the doorway. As word spread through the hut, the prisoners began to converse loudly, as cover for what was being said by those who remained at the table. The Ryn banged his ladle against the side of the pot, and several of the prisoners distributed fruits to the others by tossing them through the air, as if in a game of catch.

“How are things in the yard?” Page asked the lookouts at the doorway.

“Coruscant’s coming, sir. Also Clak’dor’s bunch.”

“The guards?”

“No one’s paying any mind.”

Coruscant, a tall, blond-haired human, entered grinning and fanning a deck of sabacc cards he’d fashioned from squares of leather. “Did I hear right that someone’s interested in a game?”

Page motioned for everyone to form a circle in the center of the hut, and to raise the noise level. The guards had grown accustomed to the boisterous activity that would sometimes erupt during card games, and Page was determined to provide a dose of the real thing. A dozen prisoners broke out in song. The rest conversed jocularly, giving odds and making bets.

The human gambler, three Bith, and a Jenet were passed
through the falsely jubilant crowd to the center of the circle, where Page and Cracken were waiting with the holowafer.

Coruscant began to dole out cards.

Highly evolved humanoids, Bith were deep thinkers and skillful artists, with an ability to store and sift through immense amounts of data. The Jenet, in contrast, was short and rodentlike, but possessed of an eidetic memory.

When Page was satisfied that the inner circle was effectively sealed off, he crouched down, as if to join in the game. “We’ll get only one chance at this. You sure you can do it?”

The Jenet’s muzzle twitched in amusement, and he fixed his red eyes on Page. “That’s why you chose us, isn’t it?”

Page nodded. “Then let’s get to it.”

Deftly, Page set the small wafer on the plank floor and activated it with the pressure of his right forefinger. An inverted cone of blue light projected upward, within which flared a complex mathematical equation Page couldn’t begin to comprehend, much less solve or memorize. As quickly as the numbers and symbols appeared, they disappeared.

Then the wafer itself issued a sibilant sound, and liquefied.

He had his mouth open to ask the Bith and the Jenet if they had been successful in committing the equation to memory, when S’yito and three Yuuzhan Vong guards stormed into the hut and shouldered their way to the center of the circle, their coufee daggers unsheathed and their serpentine amphistaffs on high alert, ready to strike or spit venom as needed.

“Cease your activities at once,” the subaltern bellowed.

The crowd fanned out slowly and began to quiet down. Coruscant and the ostensible card players moved warily out of striking range of the amphistaffs.

“What’s the problem, Subaltern?” Page asked in Yuuzhan Vong.

“Since when do you engage in games of chance at nourishment hour?”

“We’re wagering for second helpings.”

S’yito glared at him. “You trifle with me, human.”

Page shrugged elaborately. “It’s my job, S’yito.”

The subaltern took a menacing step forward. “Put an end
to your game—and your singing … or we’ll remove the parts of you that are responsible for it.”

The four Yuuzhan Vong turned and marched from the hut.

“That guy has absolutely no sense of humor,” Coruscant said when he felt he could.

Everyone in the vicinity of Page and Cracken looked to the two officers.

“The data has to reach Alliance command,” Cracken said.

Page nodded in agreement. “When do we send them out?”

Cracken compressed his lips. “Prayer hour.”

Shortly before its public immolation in a fire pit located just outside the prison gates, a silver protocol droid that had belonged briefly to Major Cracken had put the odds of escaping from Selvaris at roughly a million to one. But the droid hadn’t known about the Ryn syndicate, or about what the clandestine group had set in motion on the planet, even before the first chunks of yorik coral had been sown.

Cracken, Page, and the others knew something else, as well: that hope flourished in the darkest of places, and that while the Yuuzhan Vong could imprison or kill them, there wasn’t a soldier in the camp who wouldn’t have risked his or her life to see even one of their number survive to fight another day.

First sunrise was an hour away, and Cracken, Page, the three Bith, and the Jenet were crouched at the entrance to a tunnel the prisoners had excavated with hands, claws, and whatever tools they had been able to fabricate or steal during the excavation of the fire pit, in which several dozen droids had been ritually slagged by the camp’s resident priests.

Every prisoner in the hut was awake, and many hadn’t slept a wink all night. They watched silently from the flattened fronds and grasses that were their beds, wishing they could voice a personal
good luck
to the four who were about to embark on what seemed a hopeless enterprise. Lookouts had been posted at the doorway. The light was gauzy, and the air was blessedly cool. Outside the hut, the chitterings and stridulations of jungle life were reaching a fevered crescendo.

“You want to go over any of it?” Cracken asked in a whisper.

“No, sir,” the four answered in unison.

Cracken nodded soberly.

“Then may the Force be with all of you,” Page said for everyone in the hut.

The cramped entrance to the tunnel was concealed by Cracken’s own bed of insect-ridden palm fronds. Below a removable grate, the hand-hewn shaft fell into utter darkness. The secret passageway had been started by the first captives to be imprisoned on Selvaris, and had been enlarged and lengthened over the long months by successive groups of new arrivals. Progress had often been measured in centimeters, as when the diggers had struck a mass of yorik coral that had taken root in the sandy soil. But now the tunnel extended beneath the prison wall and the senalak grasses beyond, to just inside the distant tree line.

His facial fur blackened with charcoal, the gaunt Jenet was the first to worm his way into the hole. When the three Bith had bellied in behind him, the entrance was closed and covered over.

What little light there had been disappeared.

The nominal leader of the would-be escapees, the Jenet had been captured on Bilbringi, during a raid on an enemy installation. His fellow captives knew him as Thorsh, although on his homeworld of Garban a list of his accomplishments and transgressions would have been affixed to the name. Reconnaissance was his specialty, so he was no stranger to darkness or tight spots, having infiltrated many a Yuuzhan Vong warren and grashal on Duro, Gyndine, and other worlds. The Selvaris tunnel felt comfortably familiar. The Bith had it harder because of their size, but they were a well-coordinated species, with memory and olfactory abilities that rivaled Thorsh’s own.

Indeterminate minutes of muted crawling brought them to the first of a series of confined right-angle turns, where the tunnelers had been forced to detour around an amorphous mass of yorik coral. To Thorsh the detour meant that the team was directly under the prison wall itself. Now it was just a matter of negotiating the long stretch beneath the senalaks the Yuuzhan Vong had cultivated outside the perimeter.

Thorsh knew better than to relax, but his continued vigilance hardly mattered.

In the space of a local week, senalak roots had penetrated the roof of the poorly braced tunnel, and the convoluted roots were every bit as barbed as the strands released by the knee-high stalks themselves.

For meters at a stretch there was simply no avoiding them.

The barbs shredded the thin garments the four had been wearing when captured, and left deep, bleeding furrows in the flesh of their backs.

Thorsh muttered a curse at each encounter, but the Bith—ever careful about displaying emotion—endured the pain in silence.

The brutal crawl ended where the tunnel sloped upward at the far edge of the senalak field. Shortly the team emerged inside the buttressed base of an enormous hardwood. The thick-trunked tree bore a striking resemblance to the gnarl-trees native to Dagobah, but was in fact a different species altogether. One hundred meters away, the prison wall glowed softly green with bioluminescence. Two sleepy guards occupied the closest watchtower, their amphistaffs stiff as spears, and a third could be glimpsed in the adjacent tower. Those warriors who weren’t elsewhere within the walls of the compound were attending prayer services at the temple.

The bold incantations of the latter wafted through the jungle, counterpoint to the riotous calls of birds and insects. Strands of mist meandered through the treetops like apparitions.

One of the Bith elbowed his way alongside Thorsh, and aimed his slender forefinger to the west. “There.”

Thorsh sniffed repeatedly and nodded. “There.”

Deeper into the trees, ankle-high mud gave way to swamp, and it wasn’t long before the four were wading waist-deep through black water. They made scarcely half a kilometer before an alarm sounded. Neither the howling of a siren nor the raucous bleating of a starship’s klaxon, the alarm took the form of a prolonged and intensifying drone that arrived from all directions.

“Sentinel beetles,” one of the Bith said in a grating voice.

Small creatures that resembled turfhoppers, sentinels reacted to intruders or danger with rapid beating of their serrated wings. The species was not native to Selvaris, or indeed to any other world in the galaxy.

Thorsh’s clawed feet dug into the thick organic muck, and he quickened his pace, waving for the Bith to follow him.

“Hurry!”

The need for caution was behind them. They flailed through the dark, scum-covered water, stumbling forward, slamming into stilt roots, their uniforms snagging on quilled branches and sinuous, coarse-barked lianas. The droning of the sentinel beetles modulated to a deafening buzz, and the harnessed beams of lambent crystal illuminators played and crisscrossed overhead.

From the direction of the prison came the ferocious barking of bissops, the Yuuzhan Vong lizard-hounds. And something had taken to the air: a coralskipper gunship, or one of the seabirdlike fliers known as a tsik vai.

A loud whining split the sky, and the four escapees submerged themselves in the filmy water to avoid detection. Thorsh surfaced a long moment later, dripping water and gasping for air. The baying of the bissops was louder, and now the sound of nimble footfalls and angry voices cut through the humid air.

The temple was emptying; search parties were being organized.

Thorsh stood to his full height, spurring everyone into motion once more.

They slipped and slid, and otherwise fought their way through dense vegetation to the eastern bank of the wide estuary. By then Selvaris’s primary was cresting the horizon. Long, horizontal rays of rose-tinted sunlight streaked through the trees, saturating the evanescing mist with color. Making haste for the water, one of the Bith sank to his waist in the liquid sand.

It took the combined strength of all three of his teammates to yank him free, and more time than they had to spare.

The coralskipper reappeared, rocketing out over the estuary and loosing molten projectiles into the jungle. Fireballs
mushroomed above the treetops, sending thousands of nesting creatures into frantic flight.

“Captain Page never promised this was going to be easy,” Thorsh said.

“Or dry,” the quicksand-covered Bith added.

Thorsh’s long nose twitched, and his keen eyes scanned the opposite shoreline. “We’re not far now.” He indicated a bird island in the middle of the estuary. “There.”

They plunged into the brackish water and began to swim for their lives. The morning sky was black with frightened birds. The coralskipper made another pass, forging through the airborne chaos. Bird bodies plummeted, slapping the surface of the calm water and tinting it red.

Thorsh and the others scrambled onto the island’s narrow beach. They picked themselves up and sprinted for cover, squirming into the island’s snarl of skeletal trees and thorny bushes. They stopped frequently to get their bearings. The Bith’s olfactory organs were located in the parallel skinfolds of their cheeks, but it was Thorsh’s long nose that directed them straight to what the Ryn had hidden months earlier: two aged swoops, camouflaged by a mimetic tarpaulin.

The repulsorlift swoopbikes were more engine than chassis, with sloping front ends and high handgrips. These two lacked safety harnesses, and their fairings were incomplete. Both were built for single pilots, but the saddlelike seats were long enough to accommodate passengers—assuming one was crazy enough to climb aboard.

Or assuming that one had a choice.

Thorsh straddled the rustier of the pair, and began to throw priming and ignition switches. Reluctantly, the swoop’s engine shuddered to life, idling erratically at first, but gradually smoothing out.

“We’re juiced!” he said.

One of the Bith perched behind Thorsh on the long seat. The shorter of his two comrades was appraising the saddle of the other swoop.

“Coordinates for the extraction point should be loaded in the navicomputer,” Thorsh said, shouting to be heard above the throb of the repulsorlift engines.

“Coming up on the display now,” the Bith pilot said.

Clearly, the third Bith had grave misgivings about mounting the swoop, but his doubts disappeared when the coral-skipper grazed the treetops, searching for signs of the escapees.