Reunion (11 page)

The guard expressed dissatisfaction with the authorization, much to Nom Anor’s surprise. It was the one thing about the entourage that was unquestionably genuine. An argument broke out between the underling and the guard, and Nom Anor craned to overhear what was being said. Had the guards somehow learned of the Prophet’s imminent arrival and stepped up their vigilance?

Nom Anor caught the eye of Kunra, in the disguise of the caravan’s junior vrrip handler. He was unrecognizable beneath a mask of blasted tissue, heavily scarred as though from extensive, nonritual burns. The ex-warrior nodded and tightened his grip on the long, rigid whip that all vrrip handlers carried.

Before Nom Anor could edge closer, a mailed, thorny hand struck him across the face. “This does not concern you, worker,” snarled the second guard, whom Nom Anor had not noticed circling the caravan. “Do not interfere in the matters of your superiors!”

Nom Anor kept his head low, partly as an act of obeisance, but also to hide any damage that might have occurred to the masquer hiding his real face. He also didn’t want the guards to see the anger he could feel burning in his chest—an anger and loathing that would have surely given him away as something other than a lackey from the worker caste.

He had to contain his emotions. For all intents and purposes, he
was
a lackey, and given that station he could expect to be kicked and beaten at the whim of those above him.

He gritted his teeth and mumbled something suitably obsequious. The warrior guard grunted and walked away.

“Are you all right?” Kunra whispered when the guards were out of earshot.

Nom Anor straightened and checked his features. His masquer was intact. “I’ve had worse,” he said, staring balefully after the guards.

That was true enough. Working up the ranks of executors had been a long and painful process; he had received as many beatings as he’d given. Working closely with the pain-loving Shimrra and his coterie of sadomasochistic warlords had kept him treading a tightrope between influence and agony, never knowing when he might find himself tipping onto the wrong side.

The thought warmed him that he would one day return every single one of those indignities on those who had administered them. None would be spared. Every slight along that path to revenge only fueled his determination, from the lowliest guard to the high prefect himself …

Finally the guards called out for the gates to be opened, pacified by their brief exercise of authority. Massive muscles strained under the effort of opening the way ahead of Ngaaluh. The once artificial door had long since been replaced by a swarbrik, a sturdy organism that, if attacked, could excrete a highly toxic gas and regenerate its tissues at a heightened rate. It groaned as its keepers poked and prodded it into activity, slowly obeying their commands and allowing the caravan through.

Nom Anor cracked his long whip, and the vrrips grumbled into life. Their giant haunches rocked from side to side, and Nom Anor forced himself to concentrate on his hefty charges. He didn’t have time to appreciate the moment as the giant arch crept over him, and the road’s dusty scent subtly changed to give way to more exotic spices. For a minute or more, his concerns were focused solely upon the vrrips and his job. It was important, he knew, not to arouse any further suspicions. To those observing him, he was a worker, nothing more; no one should suspect for a second that he was anything more than a lowly vrrip handler, shamed into submission.

Ngaaluh’s expression didn’t change once, not even as they passed a wide, dark pool where it seemed the swarbrik itself was bleeding. The creature was sick, weeping from a dozen breaches in its thickened hide. Nom Anor could see no obvious cause of the illness. It was just another of the many small ways in which the World Brain was still malfunctioning on the surface of Yuuzhan’tar.

His smile returned beneath the masquer. Perhaps, he
thought, there were advantages to living underground after all.

Jag didn’t waste time questioning his orders; he was just glad to be out of hyperspace. While Pellaeon forced a wedge between the planet and the Yuuzhan Vong to prevent further bombardment, Jag drove the squadron he shared with Jaina like an arrow at the warship
Kur-hashan
.

“Twin Two, take Six and Eight around the left flank. Three, take the right with Five and Seven. The rest of you, with me.”

Twins Four and Nine pirouetted neatly to create a V-shape with Jag in the middle, moving in perfect synchronicity. He was beginning to forget which pilots were Chiss and which were Galactic Alliance in origin; they’d spent enough time fighting together to have become one. To a casual observer, the clawcraft and X-wings may have looked different, but the ships in their crosshairs were the same.

The Yuuzhan Vong were just waking up to the fact they were under attack from two sides.
Kur-hashan
’s coral arms seemed to erupt, dispensing coralskippers like seeds to the galactic winds. The flat ovoid yorik-vec assault cruisers—fast but low in firepower—swept around the grotesquely organic capital vessel to engage the attackers.
Pride of Selonia
powered in to meet them, laser cannons blazing.

The normally dark environment of Esfandia was soon shattered by the almost stroboscopic effect of all the ships’ weapons firing, while screaming engines cast cometlike sprays of energy across the starscape, bringing a false dawn to all sides of the planet. Faster, furious specks darted by the thousands between the artificial and organic behemoths turning to battle. With his sensors turned to maximum just to enable him to see the planet, the light flashing
around him soon overwhelmed Jag. It was as if he were seeing the universe from a completely different scale, with the larger ships appearing as quasars and the smaller vessels swirling around them taking the role of galactic clusters—all sped up so that trillions of years of motion was compressed into seconds.

A skip erupted into fire off to Jag’s starboard, dragging him from his reverie. He silently chided himself; idle thoughts like that were dangerous in combat.

“You want to watch yourself there, boss.”

The voice belonged to the Y-wing pilot whom Twin Suns Squadron had recruited from Bakura. She’d proven more than capable in combat in the fight against the Ssiruuk, and had volunteered to help fill some of the empty spots created since the mission had begun. The pilot had jumped at the opportunity—and with the skip that had been about to attack him now a boiling mass in his wake, Jag was glad she had.

“Thanks, Nine,” he said, swinging his reticle around to target another coralskipper. “That one must have crept up on me.”

“There’s another on your tail, One,” said Four, retroing heavily to pass under the Yuuzhan Vong fighter that Jag hadn’t noticed coming in from behind. He pulled himself into a tight spiral and came out on a completely different heading, seeing spots from acceleration. He ramped his inertial dampener up a notch and fired at a skip that flashed by with alarming suddenness. His shot was casually soaked up by a dovin basal. The coralskipper tailing him, however, wasn’t so fortunate; it disappeared in a stuttering flash from his rear screen. He felt his clawcraft shudder slightly from the shock wave of the nearby explosion.

“Much appreciated, Four.”

“You’d do the same for me,” the Chiss pilot returned.

“Count on it,” he said.

Ordinarily, Jag would never have permitted such casual banter among his pilots. The Chiss were taught discipline before they could crawl. But he’d found that, in this instance, with the squadron’s mix of Galactic Alliance and Chiss pilots, a small amount of informality helped everyone come together and function effectively as a team in the most trying of circumstances—such as now, at three-quarters strength, and grossly outnumbered besides.

“Don’t take any chances,” he ordered his pilots. “We’re here to protect the
Selonia
. Besides the
Falcon
, we’re all that stands between it and
Kur-hashan.
”

“Copy, One,” came back Three, currently harassing a blastboat analog many times its size. “Where
is
the
Falcon
, anyway?”

Jag scanned the displays before him, looking for the distinctive disk-shaped freighter. It wasn’t immediately visible, and he didn’t have time to look for it, as the Yuuzhan Vong resistance suddenly stiffened and he found himself in the middle of what seemed like three firefights at once. A grin formed on his face as he put aside thoughts of the squadron in favor of his own survival. To Jag, there was nothing quite as satisfying as confronting a worthy adversary. Until now, the Yuuzhan Vong fleet had seemed disorganized, almost dispirited, and his pilots had managed to pick them out of the sky with relative ease. But there seemed to be some spirit returning to their attack. The advantage of surprise was well and truly gone.

His mind instinctively probed at his enemy’s weaknesses as he flew, juking and firing whenever a target appeared before him. If Pellaeon had been following the Yuuzhan Vong force before them, then that suggested it was the remains of the fleet that attacked Bastion and Borosk in Imperial Space. Partial or total, it didn’t matter: the Yuuzhan Vong had suffered heavy losses and, if
Jag had learned anything from watching the Galactic Alliance fight, there would have been a significant reduction in the yammosk-per-fighter ratio. Alliance pilots seemed to have an instinct instilled in them: to go for the head whenever possible. Destroy the decision-making part of an organism, and victory will soon follow.

Well, he thought, wherever the head was in this particular battle, it had obviously decided to fight back. Coralskippers flew in sheets like rain upon the attacking forces, delivering through sheer numbers what tactics alone could not. Galactic Alliance versatility beat Yuuzhan Vong methods most times in a one-to-one fight, and Esfandia was no different. The longer it stayed ten-to-one, though, the less confident Jag was inclined to feel.

Yet the shift in emphasis on behalf of the yammosks had one beneficial side effect: while the focus of the Yuuzhan Vong was on the skies above Esfandia, little or no attention was paid to what was happening below. And it was only then, as Jag turned his attention briefly downward to note that the Yuuzhan Vong bombardment of the planet had ceased, that he located
Millennium Falcon
. She was slipping unnoticed into the turgid, roiled-up mess that was Esfandia’s atmosphere.

Jag had just enough time to wonder what Han and Leia were doing before the warship
Kur-hashan
cut off his view of the planet, blinding him with violent splashes of energy.

Whatever they’re up to
, he thought as he rolled his craft away from the incoming fire,
I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough …

When Ngaaluh was settled in her rooms, Nom Anor and his entourage slipped away. Their places were taken by three Shamed Ones who served the Prophet, so their absence would not be noticed. That their appearances differed
from Nom Anor and his advisers didn’t matter—Shamed Ones were rarely looked upon with any scrutiny.

Deep under the priestess’s quarters, accessible only by a secret passageway and passwords, were a series of basements that had been transformed from the infidels’ boxy tastes to something more organic; not even the Jedi philosophy could convince a Yuuzhan Vong to live in a lifeless coffin. Nom Anor inspected the new audience chambers and found them satisfactory. They were austere and secure, the only ostentatious element being the chair he insisted upon, placed on a podium so that during his sermons he would be visible to all. The Prophet’s role at the center of the heresy was crucial, and it was important to play it convincingly. Or so he told Shoon-mi. His enjoyment of the sense of power it gave him he kept carefully hidden.

After a hasty meal of raw hawk-bat, Nom Anor retired to a private chamber to work on the heresy. The Jedi philosophy spreading among his minions was an evolving thing, requiring constant fine-tuning—especially with the Jedi Knights’ continued resistance to Shimrra’s attempts to have them purged from the galaxy. But it was important that the faithful be restrained from acting too precipitously when things appeared to be going well, just as it was for them to be given encouragement following any setback. There was a constant need to balance conflicting factions and agendas, needs and objectives.

The minions he left in his wake played a key role in translating his will into action. Some had been chosen by Shoon-mi for their fanatical dedication to the Prophet, others by Kunra for their clearheadedness. Others Nom Anor himself had selected, seeing in them a keen understanding of the philosophy itself. These subordinate Prophets served as direct substitutes for the Prophet Yu’shaa, for it simply wasn’t possible to be everywhere at once, and there were so many questions, so many things the heretics
wanted to know. What were the movement’s goals, beyond obtaining freedom for the Shamed Ones? Was displacing Shimrra atop the Supreme Overlord’s throne a goal of the movement if Shimrra refused to accept their demands? Would the Jedi Heresy replace the Great Doctrine as blueprint for the destiny of the Yuuzhan Vong? Where did the old gods and ways fit in?

Nom Anor was wearying of such questions, but he knew that in them lay his only chance of survival, let alone advancement. Spurned by Shimrra, he had no other way to attain power than through the tenets of the Jedi Heresy. That he didn’t believe in them himself didn’t matter in the slightest. That those below him did—with the assistance of the subordinate Prophets—was all that mattered, wherever those beliefs took them.

He wasn’t certain if the work he ordered would result in freedom for the Shamed Ones, even as a sideline. He was simply using the movement to hurt those who had hurt him, via terrorism, political assassination, theft, and other means. He had been trained in covert activism; although his skills had mainly been used to attack the infidels, they could just as easily be turned against those of his own kind.

Sometimes, late at night, he wondered what the future held for him. What lay in store for the skulking yet all-pervasive figure of Nom Anor? Would the Jedi Heresy succeed in returning him to an honored place in society, along with the Shamed Ones? Would he become lost behind the mask of Yu’shaa the Prophet, trapped by the very robes he had adopted as a means of escape?