Balance Point (26 page)

R2-D2’s interface slid back into place and rotated. He made contented chuckling noises. Then he peeped a short, cheerful signal.

“Five,” Luke told Anakin.

Anakin straightened his tunic. “We can do that.”

“Without making enemies,” Luke emphasized. “We’re going to be civilized.”

“In other words,” Anakin said, “we’re going to act like Jedi Knights.”

Durgard Brarun embraced his wife, then handed her the controls to their hovercart and said, “I’ll join you as soon as I can.” He hated to lie, but she never would’ve left Bburru for Urrdorf without that comforting falsehood.

She followed their son and daughter-in-law up the ramp, onto the regularly scheduled shuttle.

Now everything was in place. When Brarun had heard SELCORE was looking for a place to locate millions of refugees, he’d had the same reaction as most Duros: Not on my planet! A second reaction formed slowly. If the Yuuzhan Vong ever started looking in this direction for an advance base—and he’d never doubted that day would come—then thousands or millions of refugee lives would make excellent bargaining material.

To his mind, they were doomed anyway. They’d just managed to delay their fate for a month, maybe a year.

So he grabbed the SELCORE contract and bought off a few votes in the Duros High House. He encouraged Ducilla’s theatrics, knowing other Duros didn’t want the refugees here. Someday, his people would thank him. His Peace Brigade connections assured him that the Yuuzhan Vong admiral, or warmaster, probably would spare all twenty orbital cities in exchange for those refugee lives.

Just in case, though, he’d arranged a family vacation on Urrdorf.

The servant who brought Jacen’s next meal wore a CorDuro uniform, but his flattened skull was a brilliant
shade of turquoise. Silvery brow ridges tapered into prominent bulges on both sides of his forehead.

A Sunesi?

“Just set it there.” Jacen turned away from the round window and motioned toward a long table alongside his bed. “Who are you? Do you want something?”

The Sunesi set down the covered meal pouch. “My name is Gnosos, though I don’t expect you to remember that. More important, I have a gift.” He held out a turquoise hand.

Jacen gingerly took a data card from the brightly colored alien. “And this is—?” he asked.

“It contains my voiceprint, which will key a hoverpod in slip thirty, in the second-floor garage. I think it likely you will need to leave Vice-Director Brarun’s hospitality in a hurry.”

Startled, Jacen touched his lips with one finger and gestured toward the listening devices he’d found—but hadn’t deactivated.

The Sunesi spread his hands. “My people can overlay our speech or another’s with ultrahigh-frequency noise. That disrupts such devices as the ones that concern you.”

Intrigued, Jacen slipped the data card into a pocket. He tried, without using the Force, to get a read on … Gnosos. The Sunesi carried an air of serenity Jacen hadn’t seen in anyone, even his uncle, since the first reports of Yuuzhan Vong intruders.

“Why?” he asked. As he spoke, Gnosos’s mouth opened slightly, but Jacen picked up no sound in his own range of hearing. “I mean, thank you,” Jacen continued, “but—”

“As the Maker gave me, I give to you.”

“Maker?” Now Jacen remembered. The monotheistic Sunesi went through a dangerous metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages. Supposedly, surviving
that change predisposed them to believe in life after death.

“Maker and Giver.” The Sunesi spread his hands. “To my people, the universe’s endless variety implies a master Maker, one with a fine and glorious creativity and affection. And a sense of humor, as well.”

Lumpheads, the Imperials had called the Sunesi, for those prominent cranial bulges. Jacen patted the data card in his breast pocket. “Maybe this time, the joke will be on CorDuro Shipping.”

His visitor spread long, smooth hands. “An excellent thought.” He hurried out.

And what eerie timing, Jacen reflected. If his guest’s theology had anything to do with reality, then the Force not only refused to be abandoned, but something or someone was taking a firm hand in showing Jacen the next logical step.

“Thank you,” Jacen mouthed the words silently.

Luke swiped his ID past a reader at the hoverbike stall just outside the hostel, rented two units, and straddled one. Driving conservatively, he and Anakin stepped off at Duggan Station ten minutes later. For the moment, people ignored them. Workers of several species, followed by droids in all states of repair, crowded the dock area and its rideways.

So many worlds were endangered. He had just a few months to find a safe place for one small child—and, wishfully thinking, her mother. He knew better than to go beyond wishing to hoping, though. Mara wouldn’t take their child into danger, but she wouldn’t avoid an enemy that must be fought, especially now that she’d seen the enemy’s face.

He strode beside Anakin. Tresina had come back here once, after Thrynni vanished. By then, their contact had
vanished, too. As Luke and Anakin approached the area R2-D2 had targeted, Luke noticed less foot traffic. A few heavy loaders passed by, motors laboring, cargo-bay doors shut.

Around the second bend in this corridor, his danger sense started its odd, subtle vibration at the back of his mind. Just ahead, a chest-high barricade blocked the corridor. Patrolling the narrow gap, three hulking Gamorreans and a Rodian stood in CorDuro-brown flight suits. The Gamorreans’ uniforms bulged on them like overloaded shipping sacks. The Rodian’s looked half-empty.

Five
, R2-D2 had told him. The security team’s supervisor was keeping out of sight.

Softly, Luke reminded Anakin, “Don’t antagonize. But cover me.” Then he picked up his pace, to arrive several meters ahead of his apprentice.

The Rodian moved forward—a thin one, who looked as if he’d always been ill. “Restricted area,” he wheezed. “Unless you got authorization, this isn’t your street.”

Luke reached into a breast pocket. Simultaneously, he stretched out with the Force, gently brushing up against the guard’s memory. “I’m looking for a missing person. My group on Coruscant would appreciate your help.” He handed the guard a small holocube.

It was too easy, really. Like Gamorreans, Rodians were notoriously weak minded, their reactions simple and violent. As the guard clenched the cube, the image of the Jedi apprentice’s bloodied body, dumped out a side airlock, hit Luke like a blast of pain. From her wounds, he knew her death hadn’t come easily.

May the Force be with you, Thrynni Vae!
He struggled momentarily to regain his own balance. In reviving the Jedi, he’d put out the call that Thrynni followed—to die for someone else’s freedom.

He didn’t look forward to telling Tresina Lobi.

He made himself concentrate on the refugee crisis, and the possibility of imminent attack. “Thank you for helping. I’m sure you’d like me to leave, now.” Luke backstepped, then started to walk away.

Anakin hung back about four meters, balancing his weight on both feet, keeping his hands loose at his sides. A good covering stance, if a little obvious.

“Just a minute,” a deep voice gargled behind Luke.

Luke turned slowly.

The security team’s fifth member had arrived: a male Duros, unusually tall, dressed in red-trimmed brown coveralls with the triangular CorDuro Shipping insignia on his right breast. Luke heard more foot-shuffling behind his back—even behind Anakin, judging from faint echoes. Several more minds suddenly nudged his awareness.

Luke kept his hands limp at his sides, but he reached out in all directions, getting a grip on the Force between himself, the deck, the bulkheads—and the CorDuro employees. Ten of them, now. He took a split instant to make sure none of them was a masqued Yuuzhan Vong.

Then he made the slightest bow to the supervisor. “One of my people went missing several weeks ago. I’ve been inquiring into her whereabouts. We’ve spoken with Vice-Director Brarun about this.” Literally true, but his conscience twinged at implying Brarun authorized this investigation. Even after all these years, he despised shielding a lie behind “a certain point of view.”

“Would you care to come with me while I check that?” The security super phrased it like a question, but his body language offered no quarter.

“No, I would not,” Luke said softly. “I am sorry to have inconvenienced your staff.”

He turned away a second time. He took two steps toward Anakin.

His left foot was touching down when Anakin’s lightsaber cleared the pocket where he’d hidden it. It ignited with a
snap-hiss
recognizable anywhere in the New Republic. Beyond Anakin, a startled Rodian in CorDuro brown-and-red backed away.

Displaying his empty hands, Luke kept walking.

“Take them,” the supervisor growled.

Luke spun around, activating his lightsaber. Two Gamorreans headed toward him, two toward Anakin. The rest of the CorDuro people hung back. Anakin’s eyes gleamed, his chin set with satisfaction. The guards brandished local-made blasters, offering the Jedi little challenge.

But Luke didn’t want to make enemies. Now he would see how well he’d trained Anakin. He calculated the oncoming guards’ angle and then reached out with one hand, beckoning subtly. All four converged on him.

He somersaulted out of their midst, leaving them to pile up together, while he landed lightly between Anakin and the supervisor.

“We’re not going to hurt them,” Luke said, “but you can’t hold us.”

To his satisfaction, Anakin held his ground, ready to strike—but only if necessary.

“Skywalker,” the supervisor muttered, “so it is you. A word of advice, then.”

Luke raised his head.

“Get out of Bburru. Your kind isn’t wanted here.”

Luke spread his hands. “We will, as soon as we finish our business. One of your employees, there, remembers the woman I’m looking for.”

“So you want to talk with him?”

“He remembers seeing her dead.”

The supervisor’s lips pulled back in a humorless smile. “Then kill him. Fair’s fair.”

Luke shook his head. “I expect you to discipline your own staff. I will check back.”

Again he turned on one heel and walked away. He felt Anakin follow, disappointed but alert.

Anakin was young. He wanted to make a stand, just as Jacen wanted to make a difference.

The image of Thrynni Vae’s bloodied body thrust itself back into his mind, and for one moment, Luke wondered how he ever would face his sister if any of her Jedi children met that fate.

Leia had barely stopped moving, or giving orders, since Mara had transmitted the information that Dassid Cree’Ar was actually Nom Anor, the unmasked firebrand from Rhommamool—and a Yuuzhan Vong. Breathless from running to the research building and back, she sank into a chair in her communication center, near the main gate and quarantine area. C-3PO stood at another terminal, running duplicate analyses of every lab result Cree’Ar had ever reported. How much of the reclamation had he sabotaged? she wondered. All that work, that sense of accomplishment—a future for exiled refugees! Had he planted destructive organisms out there? And—

“There’s the source for our white-eyes,” Han’s voice said over the comlink. He’d hidden the
Millennium Falcon
in plain sight, on a nearby bluff. SELCORE had left a pile of anthracite out there for emergency fuel, and the
Falcon
—now matte black—all but vanished from view. According to the best current reports, the Yuuzhan Vong did not seem to have sensors that would detect it.

“And we’ve still got over a thousand people in quarantine. You know,” she said, “the simple fact that Nom Anor’s
here
makes this world look more like a target than a haven.”

“Don’t get excited yet, sweetheart—”

“The Yuuzhan Vong didn’t invade Rhommamool,” Randa insisted.

The Hutt pressed himself against a wall, cringing and flexing his little hands. She’d thought about locking him up permanently. It didn’t feel right, though. The Hutts were also refugees. She would never trust him again, but she wanted him where she could watch him. She was determined to accord him the same sympathy and respect she’d give, say, a Ranat. So she allowed him limited freedom, and an escort: Basbakhan.

Han must’ve overheard. “They didn’t have to. They just stood back and watched the locals burn it to a cinder. And look how far he’s gotten with the Duros.”

C-3PO bent over his console, silent—as ordered. He’d recited the odds of annihilation until she finally threatened to shut him down.

“Going to talk to the Duros High House?” Han asked.

“Soon as I can get a clear transmission to Coruscant. And after I make sure our people down
here
haven’t been talked into murdering each other. Last night I had three reports of Ryn out skulking.”

“What kind of reports?”

“Conflicting. I put out that they’re probably just rumors, somebody trying to start trouble.” She hesitated. “Where is Droma, anyway?”

“He’s around.”

Skulking
, Leia concluded, and this time she was glad. “Han, we do need contingency plans for evacuation. We’re warehousing half a dozen ships that SELCORE didn’t want to risk taking up again. I don’t think Jaina finished checking them out. Tell Droma—”

“If SELCORE mothballed ships here, they’re ours now.”

C-3PO’s head swiveled. He pantomimed frantically with both hands.

“It’s all right,” Leia told him sternly. “Good, Han. We’re down to saving as many lives as possible … already. Start putting people on board. Especially the Vors.”

“And all the droids we can find,” he said. “If the Vong get here, they’re scrap. That includes Goldenrod. Get him over here. In pieces, if you have to.”

Leia turned down the comlink. “Go on, Threepio,” she said gently. “Get shipboard before the Yuuzhan Vong show up. We need you.”

He was already shuffling out the door.

“So Admiral Wuht has a soft spot for injured military personnel?” Mara asked softly.

“Seems to.”

Jaina sounded fully awake again, lying on one of the hostel’s other cots. The moment Luke and Anakin had gone out on their reconnoiter, Jaina had fallen instantly and blissfully asleep. Fighter pilot’s habit.