Refugee: Force Heretic II (39 page)

And what if the treaty with the P’w’eck did turn out to be legitimate? she asked herself. What then? What evil might that reap farther down the track for the planet?

They clambered out into the daylight and saw the small knot of people gathered around the Prime Minister’s body, looking down in shock and horror. The large man lay sprawled out on a repulsor gurney, the scorched remains of his ceremonial robes torn down the center, where a meditech had struggled unsuccessfully to revive him. Leia’s attention was fixed on the Prime Minister’s body and the activities taking place around it, but she looked up to acknowledge Jaina. She was pale beneath sooty smudges that covered her face. Her expression was one of abhorrence, and her eyes were filled with tears and pain.

Reports were garbled from below, but the sense of disaster was all too vivid for Jag’s liking. Relayed from commentators and unofficial sources through
Selonia
to him, there was a lot of room for misinformation. There had been some sort of explosion during the consecration ceremony. Something had muffled the blast, though, according to commentators on the ground, and thankfully the damage to the intended target wasn’t as extensive as it could have been.

Nevertheless, two Senators were dead, along with half a dozen guards and a couple of guests. Forty more had incurred wounds, with injuries ranging from hearing loss to loss of limbs. And, of course, there was Cundertol himself.

“Ktah,”
he spat. The Chiss rarely expressed emotions vocally, but they did have words for it when the occasion arrived. Assassination was an ugly tactic, no matter who employed it, and if this turned out to be the work of terrorists
hoping to disrupt the consecration ceremony, he was sure that retaliation would be swift and brutal.

It hadn’t been terrorists
, some of the uglier rumors said,
but the Deputy Prime Minister himself …

Jaina’s reappearance had brought some comfort, briefly. She had only confirmed everyone’s worst fears: Blaine Harris had set the bomb, hoping to incriminate the Galactic Alliance and make a martyr out of Malinza Thanas as well as getting Cundertol out of the way.

The implications of this stunned Jag, and he shook his head at the thought. With Cundertol dead and Harris likely to face any number of charges, Bakura had effectively been stripped of its highest levels of command …

On the heels of that thought came an announcement from
Pride of Selonia:

“We’ve just had word from
Sentinel,”
Captain Mayn said. “General Panib has declared martial law. He’s requested that, no matter what happens, we don’t take any direct action. Word is filtering down the chains of command on both sides. He’s not exactly sure what the Keeramak will make of this yet, but we’re picking up activity on the Salis D’aar spaceport where the P’w’eck ships are parked. My guess is they’re not going to sit around and do nothing while bombs go off around their precious leader.”

Jag agreed. It made sense that they would pull out and try again later. There had been no mention that the ceremony had to be performed at a specific time, so presumably there’d be no problem with picking up and carrying on from where they left off later.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked Mayn.

“Just back off a little. This is a touchy time. Whatever this ‘honor guard’ is really about, we’re just going to have to leave them to it for a while.”

“Understood.” He relayed the order to his pilots and changed the vector of his own wing, letting the trio
they’d been following drift slowly away. Now more than ever, he wanted to ask for permission to land—not only to help out with things on the surface of the planet, but also, and more importantly, so that he could be with Jaina.

As soon as Tahiri was strapped safely onto a repulsor gurney, Goure joined the rescue effort. Han raised an eyebrow at the sight of the Ryn, but was too grateful for the extra set of hands to question his presence. Two people had been caught under the rubble and, with the help of hastily improvised repulsorsleds, their rescue was only slowly unfolding. Jaina lent her efforts where she could—using the Force to search the rubble pile for weak points, applying pressure where those on the outside couldn’t reach, and shoring up the healing energies of the victims who couldn’t be treated immediately—but it didn’t feel enough. In the first minutes after the explosion, as panic prompted a mass evacuation of the area, chaos and confusion kept emergency services at a distance. The few who did get through, some of them dropping down from aircars with medpacs on their backs, worked harder than they probably had in their entire lives.

Beneath a foreboding sky, darkened further by a thick pall of smoke hanging over the stadium, the P’w’eck bodyguards had tightened their ranks around the Keeramak. The multicolored Ssi-ruuvi mutant watched on from the safety of this vantage point, its expression unreadable as it surveyed the carnage.

Jaina had barely had the chance to do more than hug her mother and father in relief at seeing them again. It was only later, when medical reinforcements arrived, that she had time to actually step back and take a proper look at the world around her. Everyone was covered in dust and splattered with blood; where the two met, they
made a dirty red paste. The survivors had a shocked look in their eyes, even those who helped in the rescue. Senators and security guards were suddenly on the same level, united by the terrible tragedy that had taken place around them. No one paid any mind to the thunderstorm that was brewing overhead; it seemed almost irrelevant in the face of what had happened.

But there was something else that wasn’t as easy to ignore—a sound that nagged at her from below the rumbling of the crowd. It was a strange and haunting wail, an ululation that seemed in search of a note of despair but couldn’t quite find it.

Her father looked up, frowning. “You hear that, Leia?”

Leia turned in disbelief. “They’ve started again!”

Jaina followed her gaze to the heart of the stadium. Sure enough, the ceremony had recommenced. She could see lithe reptilian aliens dancing in a circle, and one multicolored shape prowling the center, uttering noises that sounded like the angry song of some mighty bird.

“What is this?” she asked.

“They’re going to finish the job,” Han said, the stubble on his chin flecked with dust. “You’ve got to admire their persistence, don’t you?”

Admire them?
Jaina thought.
Hardly
. If anything, it was incredibly insensitive. Even over the sound of rubble shifting and the moans of those in pain, the strange sounds coming from the P’w’eck set her teeth on edge.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would the Keeramak finish it now when it would obviously be safer later?”

“They’re aliens,” a nearby meditech said. “Who’s to say what goes on in their heads?”

“Threepio,” Leia said, “translate for me, will you?”

The protocol droid stood up from where he’d been lifting chunks of rock and placing them into a hamper. He tilted his head to listen properly to the growing cacophony.

“ ‘The gulfs of space are not home to us,’ ” he translated, “ ‘and neither are the barren worlds. The worlds of fire and the worlds of ice are not home to us. Where oxygen burns and water flows, where carbon bonds and ozone protects—there we plant our roots. The seed of our species is fertile; all we require is the soil in which to plant it.’ ”

“More of the same, in other words,” Han said. “But I still don’t understand their urgency to get the ceremony finished with all this chaos around them!”

Jaina remembered what Harris had said earlier about the similarities between the Ssi-ruuk and the Yuuzhan Vong. The warriors of the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t consider going into battle without making appropriate sacrifices to Yun-Yammka. The Ssi-ruuk in turn were loath to risk their souls on a world that hadn’t been consecrated. Perhaps the sudden carnage around them made them want to get the ceremony finished as quickly as possible, just in case more attacks were to follow.

She found it hard to understand the logic that drove such notions. The Force didn’t demand sacrifice, nor favor one location over another. It simply was, in and surrounding all things.

Jaina’s thoughts came back to Malinza’s words on the swinging of cosmic scales. She had to bring her parents up to speed on what had happened to the young activist, and she also wanted to ask Goure where he fit into everything. There were other, more pressing matters to consider, too—not the least of them being what the Bakuran government would do once things settled down. Would they put Malinza Thanas back behind bars? Or Jaina herself for having helped the girl escape? Without objective witnesses to Harris’s treachery, an investigation could drag on for ages. And then there was Tahiri …

Good works lead to evil results
.

Tahiri’s brainwashing at the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong
shaper Mezhan Kwaad had been a terrible thing, but her rescue and apparent recovery had balanced that out. Anakin’s growing love for her had been canceled out by his death. Where did that leave her now? The reemergence of the Riina Kwaad personality was only going to make things worse, surely. If there was balance in the galaxy, when was it going to swing again in Tahiri’s favor?

Jaina’s thoughts were distracted when the sound of engines whining joined the chanting. It was growing steadily louder. Jaina looked around, then up. Emerging smoothly from the clouds were three
D’kee
-class P’w’eck troopships. Bulbous around the middle and tapering to a fine point at the stern, they slowly descended toward the stadium. The huge canopy flag ripped beneath the landing struts of one of the ships. Its tattered remnants flapped chaotically in the wind.

“Reinforcements?” Han asked of no one in particular. Some of the stadium crowd had defied security after the explosion and spilled into the center space, waving placards angrily. Jaina wondered if they thought the P’w’eck were behind the crisis. The P’w’eck, armed with paddle beamers, were more than capable of keeping the crowd back, but they must have been aware that the crowd could easily grow larger and more hostile if provoked.

“A quick getaway, perhaps,” Jaina suggested. “They might be keen enough to consecrate in the middle of all this, but I doubt that they’d want to stick around afterward.”

“You could be right, honey,” her father said. Jaina was struck by conflicting impressions of him: how old he was getting, and how much more alive he looked when the going got tough. He might sweat and fidget through diplomatic negotiations, but when things took a turn for the physical, he was often the first into the fray.

The alien vessels rotated in midair when they were over the stadium and descended at a safe distance from
the ring of P’w’eck guards. The sound of engines had risen to an almost painful level, and the Bakurans below quickly scattered, shaking fists into the air as they ran. The noise drowned out any protest they made.
D’kee-
class ships were small as far as spacecraft went, but still four stories high from base to tip.

“Excuse me, Mistress,” C-3PO said.

“Look,” Han said, shouting over the growing din. “Three more!”

She shaded her eyes and looked where he was pointing. Another trio of ships was descending beyond the stadium walls, the same type of troopship as those that had just landed.

“What are they doing?” Leia asked. Jaina recognized the edge to her mother’s tone. She, too, was starting to have misgivings about all this.

“If I might interrupt, Mistress,” 3PO tried again, gesticulating off to one side. He was desperately trying to make himself heard, but the racket was smothering most of what he was saying.

Suddenly the engines from all three of the ships in the stadium below cut out, allowing a relative quiet to settle around the area. The chanting had ceased also, and the Keeramak was now standing in the middle of his enormous entourage, glinting as though wearing rainbow-tinted armor. The guards stood with their tails flat to the ground, paddle beamers held at the ready across their chests.

For a moment, everything was still. Then, with one eye on what was taking place with the P’w’eck, Jaina leaned toward C-3PO and muttered, “What was that you just said, Threepio?”

“The ceremony is complete, Mistress,” the golden droid said.

“Thanks, Goldenrod,” Han said. “But that seems pretty obvious from where I’m standing.”

“But, sir, I’ve been trying to explain that the ceremony required the Keeramak to give Bakura a new name—Xwhee.”

Leia faced him fully now. “Did he happen to mention this fact to the Bakurans before he did it?”

“I doubt that very much, Mistress,” C-3PO said. “You see, the Keeramak has also dedicated Xwhee to the Ssi-ruuvi Imperium.”

Han and Jaina also turned to look at C-3PO now. As if in response to the droid’s words, a peal of thunder rumbled from the tropical sky. Fat raindrops began to splatter his metal cranium, turning what dust was there to a reddish mud.

“Threepio, are you sure about this?” Leia asked.

“Oh, quite certain. In fact, it was stated several times and in different ways: as the ‘glorious Ssi-ruuvi Imperium,’ the ‘majestic Ssi-ruuvi Imperium,’ the ‘boundless and incomparable Ssi-ruuvi Imperium’—”

Han turned to Leia, speaking over the top of C-3PO. “Couldn’t this just be part of the ceremony? Something carried over from the old ways? I mean, we still talk about the New Republic instead of the Galactic Alliance. Maybe their new Ssi-ruuvi Imperium has nothing at all to do with the old one.”

“I don’t think so,” Leia said. “Look at the ships.”

Rain began to fall in great sheets across the stadium as the sides of the troopships opened, issuing ramps. Jaina squinted to see through the rain, trying to make out what lay inside.

Dull brown paint was falling away in the rain, revealing golden scales, the sign of the Ssi-ruuvi priest caste. Relieved of the need for concealment, the priests’ postures straightened, shrugging off the hunch of years of supposed servility and adopting the cold, straight-backed pride Jaina remembered from holos.

Realization struck her like a physical blow. Of course!