Remnant: Force Heretic I (28 page)

“Be on your guard for when we arrive,” she said. “I’m bringing us in at the edge of the system, but you never know what might be waiting for us. Even if the Yevetha have embraced the idea of peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, they’re not likely to welcome someone barging in through their shipping lanes.”

“Understood,” Jocell said.

“Discretion is my middle name,” Miza added.

“Ready, Cappie?” Jaina asked. Her R2 unit whistled cheerfully as her forward view swung around to face the bright cloud of the Koornacht Cluster. “Then into the Multitude we go.”

Stars suddenly extended into streaks of light as she and her wingmates blasted into hyperspace. From there on it would be up to her navicomputer and R2 unit to ensure that the three vessels reached their destination safely, leaving her with nothing more to do in the cramped cockpit than sit and wait and think …

Tahiri’s frailty worried her more than she was prepared to admit—at least to others. Back on Mon Calamari, the girl had called her that one time before collapsing, but since then she’d barely said a word to her when Jaina had visited her in Master Cilghal’s infirmary. Tahiri had been glad to see her, there was no question about that, but she had been uneasy and troubled at the same time—and maybe even a little embarrassed.

Tahiri had always been so fiery and independent, defying
conventional sensibilities in numerous ways, from insisting on bare feet to disobeying direct orders. Showing off for Anakin had been part of the latter, Jaina was sure, but if the impulse hadn’t been there in the first place, then her little brother would never have had such a willing sidekick.

No
, Jaina thought.
Not sidekick.
She really had to dispel the image of Anakin and Tahiri as perfectly matched pals getting into harmless scrapes. Those “scrapes” they’d been involved in could hardly be regarded as harmless. If anything, some of them, such as their adventure with Corran Horn at Yag’Dhul, had been outright dangerous. And their last one together had been fatal, culminating in Anakin’s death …

No, Anakin and Tahiri had definitely been more than just kids, and their relationship had been advancing toward something more than just friends near the end, too. The grief that Tahiri had been suffering was not for the loss of a friend, but for the loss of a loved one. Even if that love never had a chance to fully blossom, it didn’t diminish Tahiri’s pain. The
potential
for a relationship had been there, and it was for this that Tahiri grieved—a love not fully realized. Jaina imagined that the grief Tahiri suffered was on a par with her own, but at least she had the benefit of being able to focus her grief on what had been lost; Tahiri’s grief was for something that could never be. It was, and might forever be, completely intangible.

Jaina wondered if her mother’s decision to invite Tahiri along on the mission had been entirely sensible. Yes, the girl would do better kept busy rather than lying around in an infirmary, alone and dwelling on her grief. But was being surrounded by the Solo family the right thing for her? If Jag died, Jaina was certain she wouldn’t
want to be stuck in the company of General Baron Soontir Fel and Syal Antilles for too long. They would only serve as reminders of what she’d lost.

The image of Tahiri unconscious on Galantos, as pale and thin as she’d been on Mon Calamari, made Jaina’s heart ache. After several awkward visits to the infirmary and a number of silences during the mission so far, Jaina still had no idea what it was Tahiri had wanted when she’d called her that day after Uncle Luke’s meeting of the Jedi. To say she was sorry? To blame Jaina for letting Anakin die? She didn’t know. The black tide of grief made people do crazy things. She knew that firsthand, and so did her parents. But if there was anything she could do to make life easier for Tahiri, she would do it in an instant. The problem was that she doubted even Tahiri herself knew what that might be. All they could do was hope that they could work it out before something else happened …

Too many hours, two system checks, a detailed scan of her R2’s files regarding the N’zoth system, and a halfhearted attempt to learn some words in the fiendishly difficult Chiss native tongue later, her navicomputer bleeped to warn her that they were about to emerge from hyperspace.

“Heads up,” she said to her wingmates. “We’re there. And remember, this is just a surveillance sweep, so don’t provoke anything unless you absolutely have to. Is that clear?”

“Understood, Colonel,” Jocell said. “Preparing to disengage navigational lock.”

“I don’t know about you,” Miza said, “but I’m becoming a little sluggish from all this rest we’re supposed to be enjoying. I’ll almost be
glad
if we could find something to shoot at.”

“I know what you mean,” Jaina said. “But I don’t want you using so much as a hard stare without my direct authority, Miza. Clear?”

Miza chuckled. “I’ll keep my hands safely in my lap.”

“You do that.” Her R2 unit bleeped again; Jaina glanced at the translator to learn they had five seconds before arrival. “Okay, guys, here we go.”

The first thing that struck her as her X-wing rattled back into realspace was the brightness of the sky. She’d been in close clusters before, but it was easy to forget just how much of a difference it made when a large number of hot, young stars clustered so closely together—especially after spending so much time at the edges of the galaxy, avoiding the Yuuzhan Vong. Because she had brought them in at the outskirts of the system, N’zoth’s primary was hidden in the radiance from the many other suns, and it took her some moments to actually locate it. Bright and blue-tinged, it burned at her with an almost forbidding glare.

Her wingmates dropped out of hyperspace beside her, and immediately peeled away into formation. Sensors swept the space around them; astromech droids chattered via comlinks; intrasystem landmarks were confirmed. According to New Republic records, no one had been to N’zoth since the Yevethan crisis, twelve years earlier. Then, the Yevethan Black Fleet had been routed by New Republic forces after it attempted a genocidal cleansing of the area around the Koornacht Cluster. Jaina agreed with her father that the silence since was probably an indication of frantic retooling rather than peaceful reconsideration. This would be the first opportunity anyone had to find out one way or the other.

“I’m picking up extensive mass readings,” Miza said. “Judging by the uneven distribution, I’d say we have at
least three fleets massed in orbit around worlds two and five.”

“Which one’s N’zoth?” Jocell asked.

“Two,” Jaina supplied. “I’m not picking up signatures consistent with old Imperial designs, but that’s not unexpected. The Yevetha were quick to learn, and they would have had to start again from scratch. Why not redesign at the same time?”

“No capital ships that I can see,” Miza said. “Just plenty of small ones, easy pickings.”

Jaina didn’t caution him again; she knew it was just his sense of humor. Still, she would have preferred it if he remained serious like Jocell.

“There are no thrustship exhaust traces, either,” Jocell said. “Rad and IR readings are—odd.” After a brief pause, she added, “Jaina, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Jaina studied her screen. The mass shadows were exactly where Miza had said: clumped in broad orbital corridors around the rocky second planet and a bloated gas giant on the far side of the system. It made sense, she thought, to keep your fleets close to both home and a refueling base. You wouldn’t put them all in one spot. That would be tactically unsound. Just because you weren’t expecting trouble didn’t mean it wouldn’t come to find you.

The probing triangle of ships continued their surveillance of the system. From the Yevetha’s point of view, she supposed,
they
were trouble, and she didn’t doubt that the xenophobes would have monitoring stations all around the system, ready to spot just such an intrusion as theirs. But where were the flashes of engine exhausts as interceptors launched? Where were the echoes of hyperspace distortions as squadrons of updated thrustships rushed to confront them? Why was there nothing but
diffuse mass and heat appearing on the scanners, nothing concentrated in any particular place?

N’zoth was radiating heat like a small sun. Not surprising for a desert world, perhaps, but why wasn’t the heat concentrated around the cities?

Sithspawn
, she silently cursed. If her father had been here, she knew just what he would have said.

“We’re going in closer,” she said. “And I have a feeling I know what we’re going to find.”

Neither of the Chiss pilots asked her to elaborate, suggesting that perhaps they had had the same feeling. Instead they silently slaved their clawcraft to her X-wing as she laid in a course for N’zoth.

The hyperspace jump was mercifully short. When they arrived where the two fleets had been in orbit around the Yevethan homeworld, Jaina found the reality of the situation much worse than she had imagined. There was nothing but wreckage. Thousands of thrustships, dozens of capital vessels, and one battle station capable of maintaining the entire lot floated in pieces around the planet below. The wreckage was still hot—it could take months for excess heat to radiate through vacuum—and it was this that had shown up on the scopes. Jaina took her small contingent on a wide parabola around the deathly silent wreckage, moving them in closer to the planet itself.

She didn’t need to look, but she had to. N’zoth had been pounded from orbit, possibly by chunks torn from the wreckage of the fleet above. Lava and sulfuric clouds belched from the bottom of a score of new craters around the globe, and the atmosphere was filled with ash. Where there had once been cities, there were now only great holes in the crust. Every trace of the Yevethan civilization had been reduced to atoms.

For once, Miza didn’t have any smart comments; he was as quiet as the others as they swung around N’zoth’s equator. Jaina turned her sensors toward the distant gas giant, not doubting what she would find there. Someone had attacked the Yevetha, taking them unawares and totally decimating a fleet of considerable size. The Fia stood to benefit most from the destruction of the Yevetha—and it would certainly explain why they no longer seemed to care about the xenophobes in their backyard—but there was no way they could have come by this sort of firepower. No, this could have only been the work of the Yuuzhan Vong.

A cold and uncomfortable feeling spread through Jaina’s stomach as she thought of her parents and Jag back on Galantos—little knowing what she’d found. She reached out with the Force to find her mother, but the distance was too great. And with communications down in the sector, there was no other way to warn them.

She was about to order their immediate return to Galantos when Miza messaged her. “Jaina, I’m picking up a transmission from that small moon we passed a moment ago.”

“Put it on the air,” she ordered.

There was a pause followed by some cold static. Jaina tried to boost the signal, but no amount of switches flicked would clean up the noise.

“Miza? Jocell? Either of you getting anything?”

“Nothing,” Jocell replied.

“Likewise,” Miza said. “It’s like they’re trying to open a line, but for some reason they’re not saying anything.”

“Maybe they can’t,” Jocell suggested. “They might be too badly injured.”

Jaina nodded thoughtfully to herself. It was a possibility, she supposed. Flicking her own comm unit, she
said, “Whoever you are, if you can hear this, click your mike twice.”

There was a slight delay, followed by a distinct double click.

“Okay. Now, if you’re injured, click twice again.”

Another delay, followed by two clicks.

“I’m picking up a weak power reading from the bottom of a crater,” Miza said. “It’s consistent with that of a small vessel. I guess he’s been hiding there in the ruins of his thrustship. He probably survived by laying low until whoever did this had passed on.”

Jaina considered this, but quickly dismissed it. It didn’t ring true, somehow. “No, that’s not the Yevethan way. They don’t hide from fights. My guess is he crashed there and was knocked unconscious, awakening only when the battle was over.”

“That’s if he
is
a Yevetha,” Jocell said.

“What else would he be?” Jaina asked. “You’re not suggesting he might be one of the Yuuzhan Vong, are you?”

“I don’t know. But without a visual, we have no way of knowing.”

“Miza? What do you think?”

“My gut instinct tells me it’s a Yevetha—and an injured one at that. Like you said, Jaina, it’s not in their nature to hide, so why else would he be down there? And it makes no sense for it to be a Vong, either. Whatever caused this was a big fleet. They came in, hit hard, and moved on. What would it serve them to leave a single small ship behind?”

“I agree,” Jaina said. “But I also agree with Jocell that we’re going to need a visual—especially if we’re to rescue the pilot.”

Miza’s clawcraft was veering off before she could give
the order. “Already on my way. This shouldn’t take too long.”

“Jocell, keep an eye out for anything unusual. If we have to get out of here in a hurry, then I want plenty of warning.”

“Understood, Colonel.”

Jaina watched Miza’s ship shrink to a tiny speck of light shooting across the face of the moon. She felt uneasy having her wingmate so far away, even though there seemed to be no overt threat anywhere in the system right now. Or maybe she was nervous
because
there was no overt threat around. It was too quiet for her liking.

To take her mind off everything, she opened a line with the Yevethan pilot.

“We’re going to try to get you out of there. Do you copy?”

Two clicks.

“Hang in there. One of my pilots is on the way down now. He’ll be passing over your head in a matter of seconds. Then we’ll—”

This time a low, malevolent chuckle came over the comm unit, followed by a raspy, fluidy cough.

“Your optimism is as shallow as your compassion,” said the voice—definitely Yevethan, and male. “You care no more for me than I do for you.”