Dark Journey (12 page)

Now that Tenel Ka was safe, Jaina swung around and poured all the energy the ship could muster into an apparent retreat. The Hapan ships gave pursuit for several moments, then abandoned the effort.

“They’re off to spread the word about us,” Alema said somberly.

The Twi’lek pointed to the viewport. Beyond, tumbling slowly amid a drift of metallic debris, was one of the ships Ganner had accidentally destroyed. The Hornet was largely intact—only the rear segment of its insectoid body was missing.

“If we’re going to salvage that ship for parts, we haven’t much time.”

“The comm system! Good thinking,” Jaina agreed.

She turned back toward the battle scene. After a couple of experiments, Tesar managed to calibrate the dovin basal to use just enough gravity to pull in the damaged ship.

The ship was unpiloted—perhaps the pilot had had time to go EV. But the controls looked to be intact, and Lowbacca acted positively cheerful at the prospect of working with circuits and metal.

It didn’t take him long to find what they needed. Bellowing triumphantly, he strode into the cockpit, lugging the disembodied comm unit and an attached power pack. He set the device on the floor, set hailing frequency, and handed the speaking unit to Jaina.

“This is Lieutenant Jaina Solo, a Rogue Squadron pilot, flying a commandeered enemy frigate. Come in.”

She repeated her hail several times before an answering crackle came over the comm. “I never thought that static could sound so good,” she murmured.

“This is Hesha Lovett, captain of the Hapan royal vessel,” a female voice announced. “We’ve had reports of a Yuuzhan Vong ship. Yours, Lieutenant Solo?”

“I don’t like to brag,” Jaina said dryly. “We’re seeking permission to land. The sooner we get out of this thing, the happier we’ll be.”

There was a moment’s silence, then the comm crackled to life again. “By all means, Jaina. All of Tenel Ka’s friends are welcome on Hapes, however they may choose to arrive.”

Jaina jolted with surprise. The resonant, cultured voice with the crisply clipped accent was unmistakably that of Ta’a Chume, Tenel Ka’s grandmother.

She quickly scoured her mental database for the proper way to address Hapan royalty. “Thank you,
Queen Mother. I wasn’t sure we’d find a welcome. We were forced to fire upon Hapan ships.”

“Hornet Interceptors,” the woman said dismissively. “Pirates, most likely. The scouts who witnessed the battle were nearly as displeased by their presence as they were by yours. Is my granddaughter with you?”

Actually, Jaina was hoping that she’d been picked up by the Hapan scouts. “Well, not exactly. She went ahead in an escape pod to prepare the way for us. We didn’t have any other way to communicate until we pulled in one of the Hornets and salvaged its comm.”

“I will alert all patrols to watch for my granddaughter’s arrival. By all means, land at the royal docks and come directly to the palace. I’ll make sure the officials are expecting you, and that they do not try to channel you through the refugee camps.”

“Refugees?”

“Yes,” the former queen said, expressing a considerable amount of distaste with a single word. “You will be my guests, however, you and your friends. I will meet you at the palace.”

It occurred to Jaina that the former queen mother seemed surprisingly, perhaps suspiciously, eager for their arrival.

Her first impulse was to ask why. A childhood spent under the tutelage of a fussy protocol droid, however, was not easily dismissed. Leia Organa Solo’s daughter exchanged a few moments of proper small talk with Ta’a Chume, speaking as carefully and listening as intently as she’d observed her mother do over the years. But Ta’a Chume was no less skilled, and when the communication ended, Jaina had to admit it was a draw.

She slumped back in the pilot chair. “Ta’a Chume is up to something.”

“How do you know?” Ganner asked.

She lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “She always is.”

A joyful Wookiee bellow split the air. Lowbacca came whirling into the cockpit, spinning Tahiri in some sort of exuberant dance. He set her down and swept one paw toward the navibrain in a dramatic gesture.

“We did it,” Tahiri said obligingly, but without spirit.

“You found Tenel Ka?”

Lowbacca grinned and slipped into the navigator’s chair. He yanked the hood down over his head, and his massive shoulders hunched in anticipation. Moments passed, and Jaina could sense his surge of anxiety through the Force.

Using the cognition hood, she switched her focus to navigation. The answers that came to her yielded a faint mental picture, a shadow of what Lowbacca must have been seeing.

“The escape pod is moving away from Hapes!” she said. “Either she’s off course, or someone picked her up.”

The Wookiee moaned an agreement, then began to set course for pursuit.

   Tenel Ka felt the sudden jolt of contact, heard the scrape of grappling hooks finding purchase on the irregular coral hull. The moment of capture unleashed a flood of raw, recent memory. Pain and loss and fury—all the emotions engendered by her days in Yuuzhan Vong captivity—flooded the Jedi in a torrent.

She heard a mechanical whir and realized its meaning. Small drills busily bolted the ship to the grappling arms to ensure retrieval. No Yuuzhan Vong would sully their hands with such machines.

Reassured, she removed the cognition hood and smoothed her warrior’s braids into place as best she could.

Now that the burden of flying the pod was lifted from her, Tenel Ka eased the shields she’d placed between herself and the tiny living ship. Fiercely independent, she
used the Force only when necessary. To her way of thinking, maintaining some distance between herself and the Yuuzhan Vong or any of their creatures was absolutely essential.

Suddenly her unshielded mind flooded with a familiar mixture of warmth and humor, friendship and frustration.

“Jacen,” she said wonderingly, recognizing the presence that meant more to her than any other.

For a moment Tenel Ka knew complete happiness, something she had deemed illusive since the day she’d realized that when Jacen looked upon her, he saw only an old friend. But happiness was a gift as fleeting as it was sweet. The light that was Jacen faltered, then blazed up into an agonizing white heat.

Tenel Ka, despite her stoic courage and superb conditioning, shrieked in rage and pain.

Her reserve shattered, and a lifetime of emotions carefully controlled and shielded erupted like a Dathomir volcano. Mindlessly she thrashed at the walls of her prison, pounding the coral with her one fist, determined to get out, to reach Jacen, to fight and die to free him.

Then the light was gone, and its absence was a blow more devastating than the first.

For a long moment Tenel Ka sat in the sudden darkness, stunned and silent. Her lips moved, shaping words of denial that she could not force past the unfamiliar lump in her throat.

The escape pod jolted heavily against the ship. Cutting tools hummed as they dug through the coral shell. Tenel Ka wearily regarded the discarded cognition hood. If she put it back on, she could open the hull with a thought. Her emotions were so raw that she could not bear the thought of joining with the ship.

A crack fissured through the pod, and a chunk of coral
tumbled into Tenel Ka’s lap. She pushed it aside and un-clipped her lightsaber from her belt.

“Stand aside,” she ordered, marveling at how cool and controlled her voice sounded.

A rich, glowing turquoise light leapt from Tenel Ka’s lightsaber. She made short work of cutting through the hull and then rose quickly, her weapon held unthreateningly low but ready, just in case.

At least a dozen people gathered around the pod, all of them human, all of them recognizably Hapan. Tenel Ka’s long-ago ancestors had been pirates who vied with each other to find and capture the most beautiful mates possible. What started as a peculiar measure of cultural status became a sort of selective breeding. In general, the people of Hapes were taller and more attractive than inhabitants of other worlds in the Hapes Cluster. All of her rescuers were tall and fair, though some looked decidedly the worse for wear.

They stood silent, perhaps from the surprise of finding a Jedi warrior instead of the expected Yuuzhan Vong. Tenel Ka’s cool gray eyes swept over them.

Several of the crew wore crimson, which proclaimed them members of the royal guard. She noted several hard-knock civilians, too, all of them wearing worn or faded red clothing. Even those who sported the white uniform of the Consortium Navy had some bit of red about them, even if just an enameled pendant or a bandanna. This ersatz statement of solidarity set off warning sensors in the back of her mind.

“What is this ship?” she demanded.

One of the men, a tall blond man who bore a faint resemblance to her father, gave her a mocking bow. “Welcome to the
Starsprite
, Princess. You’re aboard a Beta Cruiser, formerly of the Hapan navy.”

Tenel Ka’s eyes narrowed as she took this in. The Beta Cruiser was a small battleship, far more maneuverable
than the much-larger Hapes
Nova
-class cruisers. They’d been employed in large numbers at Fondor. Few had survived. Most likely the crew of this one was a diverse company of survivors: deserters from the Battle of Fondor as well as smugglers who saw their livelihood being swallowed by the Yuuzhan Vong invasion.

She wasn’t surprised at his greeting. Not many Hapans would fail to recognize a one-armed Jedi with redgold hair as their reluctant princess. Since they were pirates and deserters—not exactly men and women of honor—Tenel Ka assumed they planned to ransom her for the best deal they could get. But even as this thought formed, it was pushed aside by the animosity that radiated from them all.

Understanding flooded her in a quick, scalding rush. “You are Ni’Korish,” she snarled, naming the faction inspired by her great-grandmother, a queen mother who hated the Jedi and had done her best to eradicate them. “I heard rumors of an attempted coup, an attack by cowards who lurk in shadows. That would be you?”

Her captor responded with a mocking bow.

“Tell me, how did the Ni’Korish fare? Is my mother yet alive?” she demanded.

“Regrettably, yes,” the leader returned. “But she won’t hold the throne for long.”

Tenel Ka sent him a grim smile. “You do her an injustice if you think she will abdicate in exchange for my return, and you insult me if you suggest I would buy my freedom at that price.”

He returned her smile, but his was even harder and held a reptilian leer. “We would never insult the queen mother or her Jedi daughter. The Yuuzhan Vong, however, are not so concerned with matters of honor and protocol.”

His meaning was clear. Tenel Ka’s lightsaber snapped up to guard position. “I will not be taken.”

“Princess, you wound me!” he protested, placing one
hand over his heart. “We will return you to Hapes unharmed. Although we might be deserters, we are not traitors. All we require is your assistance in hunting down Jacen and Jaina Solo. If you’re a true princess of Hapes, you’ll gladly help us repay those who turned Centerpoint upon the Hapan fleet.”

A surge of wrath boiled through Tenel Ka, but she kept her composure. “Do you know what befell a New Republic ambassador who fell into Yuuzhan Vong hands? He was slain, his bones decorated with gems and gold and sent back to his friends. I would not deliver an enemy to such a fate, and never a friend!”

His expression darkened, and he glanced at a knot of uniformed men. “Then I’m afraid we’ll have to make do with you. If Jaina Solo thinks the same way you do, she might be willing to trade herself for your freedom.”

“She won’t get the chance.”

Before any of the Hapans could draw weapons, Tenel Ka’s turquoise blade leapt toward them like a proton torpedo.

For a moment everyone in the cargo hold scuttled back, intimidated by the wrath in the Jedi’s gray eyes and the blazing weapon in her hand.

Then the Ni’Korish leader pulled a vibroblade from his belt, and others remembered that they, too, held weapons.

They advanced, quickly encircling Tenel Ka.

The stolen Yuuzhan Vong ship careened through space at full power, following the barely perceptible signal emitted by the escape pod. Zekk sat at the helm. Tahiri wore the navigation hood, directing him according to information flowing to her from the navibrain. The small hands gripping the control were white-knuckled, but her voice remained steady and sure.

Jaina and Lowbacca huddled together away from the others. “You and Tahiri did great, but I’ve got another puzzle for you,” Jaina said. “Danni Quee found a way to override the yammosk communications. That’s the only explanation for the Yuuzhan Vong confusion over Coruscant. Any idea how she did it?”

The Wookiee went into a lengthy explanation, most of which went over Jaina’s head with a meter to spare.

She put up a hand to halt the bewildering flow of information. “How do you
know
all this?”

Lowbacca hesitated, then woofed a response.

He had been recruited to work on the research team supervised by Danni Quee and Cilghal. That made sense to Jaina. The Force-sensitive scientist and the Mon Calamari healer had been spearheading one of many attempts to understand Yuuzhan Vong technology. Before coming to the Jedi academy, Lowbacca had had two passions: computer science and the study of Kashyyyk’s complex plant life. It had been the latter that prompted him to
go alone into the dangerous lower levels of his homeworld’s forests during his rite of passage to young adulthood, and to pit himself against the deadly syren plant. The combination of computer skills and biological knowledge—not to mention his desire to take on the impossible—made him well suited to this study.

Lowbacca let loose a few sharp woofs.

“They had you taking apart captured ships? No wonder you knew how to mess with the worldship,” Jaina murmured, remembering a prank he had played with a small neural center. “So you know how Danni Quee scrambled the yammosk.”

The Wookiee shook his head and gave a mournful moan. He hadn’t been there for Danni’s breakthrough.