Reunion (32 page)

“Besides,” she’d said as she watched the motley bunch ready themselves for the mission, “somebody needs to stay behind to mind the ship.”

He couldn’t argue that point. As much as he would have loved for Leia to be with him, he was practical enough to know the importance of keeping an eye on his freighter.

She had kissed his visor and wished him luck. Once outside the base and beyond the confines of the nesting plain tunnels, the five speeder bikes were under strict comm silence. The slightest transmission would alert the Yuuzhan Vong ground teams to their whereabouts. If they maintained the ban on emissions and kept low to the surface, it was unlikely they would be discovered—unless, of course, they were unlucky enough to run into one of those ground teams along the way.

Commander Ashpidar had offered Leia a refreshment in her office, and she had accepted. They had talked for perhaps half an hour about anything other than their situation, and she couldn’t help wonder if the mood-sensitive Gotal was trying to distract Leia from her concerns. Ashpidar talked about life on Antar 4, where she’d met a commercial interpreter and planned to raise a family. Her mate had died in a mining accident, however, and Ashpidar, stricken with grief, had left her home to explore the larger galaxy. That was twenty standard years ago, she said, and she’d never looked back.

“Tell me about the Cold Ones,” Leia said, using the commander’s own term for the species of intelligent life indigenous to Esfandia—a term considerably easier to pronounce than
Brrbrlpp
. “When were they taught to speak trinary? And by whom?”

“That was the previous base commander,” Ashpidar replied. “Before my time. Communications traffic was
less, then, and the full-time crew correspondingly smaller. Commander Si was an exiled Gran, and lonely with it. In his off-duty hours he studied the Cold Ones and deciphered their calls, noting what no one else had: despite the lack of physical evidence such as tools, it was clear that the creatures had a culture. As proof of this, he taught them to speak trinary, which is much easier to understand than their native tongue. They communicate exclusively with us in that language now, keeping us informed of their movements so we’re aware at all times of their whereabouts.”

Leia nodded solemnly. “That way you avoid accidental deaths like the ones we were responsible for.”

“Exactly.”

“Do they communicate with you often?”

Ashpidar came as close to smiling as Leia had seen, but her tone remained dull and lifeless. “The Cold Ones love to talk. Their calls can travel great distances. Sometimes the whole planet seems alive with their chatter.”

“Are there many of them?” Leia asked.

“They’re not a bountiful species, and never have been. We estimate their numbers to be in the thousands.”

“That’s not a lot.”

“No, but then Esfandia isn’t the sort of world that can support a large and varied ecosystem. As the core temperature winds down, the available niches are contracting. The fact that there are no tides or seasons tends to mean that the same species have propagated across the entire planet. What Esfandia has at the moment is a sort of equilibrium. Relatively speaking, the Cold Ones are like rancors, at the top of the food chain, eating anything they can get their mouths around farther down. They tend vast gardens that stretch for kilometers, and herd flocks of flying insects that they trade for trace minerals filtered from the air. It’s a complex system that’s
very gradually devolving, but it serves them well for the moment.”

“And now the Yuuzhan Vong have come along and disrupted everything.”

Ashpidar nodded her great horned head. “Explosions and vehicular wakes have a profound effect on the biosphere. That’s why this base’s design was structured on that of an All Terrain Armored Transport. In time, perhaps, the energy input to the system will actually increase growth in some areas, but initially it causes nothing but widespread destruction. I have suggested that the Cold Ones take shelter in the nesting plains until the crisis is over, but they are a curious species. Many of them, particularly the younger ones, would happily risk death for just a little excitement in their lives.”

Later, back in the
Falcon
, it was these words that Leia found herself pondering. Some things, it seemed, were universal. Her own children were no different from those of the Cold Ones—and they were no different from how she had been at their age, either. What was it about youth, she wondered, that sent them on such extreme quests for selfhood and experience? What was the point of finding out who you were if it meant dying in the process?

“I must be getting old, Threepio,” she said to the golden droid.

“We all are, Mistress,” he chirped mournfully in reply.

The atmosphere was gloomy and close when they reached the floor of the valley. Jacen looked warily around him, sensing hostility but not able to identify its source. Hanging vines and ropelike roots, sliding in and out of cracks in the rock like snakes, hid the steep V of the valley below. High above, the dense canopy formed a distant ceiling from which rain fell steadily. He felt as though they’d entered a vast underground chamber.

Their destination wasn’t far away. A narrow river
flowing noisily along the bottom of the valley had been blocked by a rockfall, forming a dam around which a stand of boras grew. These trees clawed their way through the stone walls and floor of the valley, their trunks coiling around each other, knotted in a dense and sinister-looking mat. Jacen sensed a furious struggle caught in the posture of the trees, as though the boras had been frozen in the act of trying to devour one another. The strangely motile limbs of the giant trees swayed and snapped between the trunks, unnervingly like the tentacles of a sarlacc, seeking prey.

“We’re going in there?” he asked the Ferroan ahead of them.

“Yes,” she replied, as curtly as she had to every other question he’d asked.

“Mind telling me why?”

“You’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

The carapod bearing Danni plodded along behind them. Jacen felt a strange excitement brewing in the creature’s mind—as though it recognized this place—but he could get nothing more from it than that. Its hide was as thick as a bantha’s, and oddly rich in metals, glinting occasionally in the poor light.

At the edge of the stand of boras, Senshi stopped the party. The Ferroans riding carapods quickly dismounted. Danni’s and Jabitha’s stretchers were unloaded.

“We walk the rest of the way,” Senshi said.

“Wait a minute.” Jacen shouldered his way through the knot of kidnappers to the Ferroan leader. “I don’t like the look of that place.”

Senshi shrugged. “That’s not my concern. You chose to accompany us, and this is where we are going. You can either come with us or leave. The choice remains yours.”

“There iz a third choice,” Saba hissed menacingly. Jacen put a hand on her arm to stay any hostile actions.
He could feel her muscles vibrating like overtightened wires beneath her scales. “We’ll come with you,” he said. “But if you make any attempt to harm—”

“What?” Senshi interjected sharply. “What will you do, Jedi? All I hear are empty words. Make good with your threats or stay out of my way!”

Without another word, the kidnappers continued into the stand of boras. Their silent compliance unnerved him as much as their destination. Senshi seemed to have them all hypnotized.

They circled the muddy lake and came to the natural dam that was its genesis. It rose like a scar across the bottom of the valley, ten meters high, blocking off the river. Waterfalls trickled down the far side of the dam, creating a series of smaller rivers that joined up farther down the valley. The stand of boras was densest there, towering above them. Their trunks merged and joined in one particular space, isolating a blackened pit with a stone floor. Charred tentacles rose from its edges like frozen smoke.

Jacen looked nervously around him as the party continued their descent. He and Saba kept to the rear, stepping carefully from root to root down the steep slope. The air around them smelled of damp charcoal, as though countless fires had been kindled and quashed here over the years.

At the bottom of the pit, the kidnappers came to a halt again. Senshi ordered the stretcher bearing the Magister to be placed on the buckled stone floor, Danni’s beside her.

“This one iz concerned,” Saba muttered to Jacen, her eyes searching the gloom. “The life energies here are … 
tangled
. We are all in danger.”

Jacen wasn’t about to argue with that; he had exactly the same reservations. He confronted Senshi with his concerns. “What is this place, Senshi? Why are we here?”

“Boras have a complex life cycle,” the head kidnapper said. “They are a magnificent species in all respects. Their seeds are more like animals than plants. They channel lightning to fuel complex organic processes, deep within their trunks. Their roots link and merge in a communications network that spans the globe. We cohabit the surface of Sekot, the boras and us, and we respect each other’s differences.”

The ground seemed to tremble beneath their feet. “Just like all organic systems,” Senshi went on, “there can be injuries, diseases, cancers. This is one such place, where the natural patterns of Sekot have been stunted, twisted. There are malignant boras, just as there can be malignant people. On the whole, such boras are perfectly safe—unless you disturb their seeding grounds, of course, in which case you are in great danger.”

Jacen felt compelled to ask, even though part of him already knew the answer: “Where are they, these seeding grounds?”

A sudden swirling of antipathy swept around them, radiating from the boras.

Senshi smiled. “We’re standing on them.”

Saba had had enough. She snatched her lightsaber from her side and ignited it with a touch of its activation stud. Everyone around the pit turned to her, their faces painted by the bright red glow from her blade.

The action seemed to whip the malignant boras to a new level of excitement. Saba felt subsonic rumblings pass through her claws to the pads of her feet as the tentacles of the trees flailed over their heads, snapping and crackling like an angry brushfire.

“Saba, wait!” Jacen called out.

“We cannot stay here.” She kept her stare fixed on Senshi as she spoke. “It’z not safe. And Danni needz attention!
This one iz telling you to take us out of here
now.
”

She flexed her muscles to add her considerable Barabel weight to the request.

“No,” Senshi returned, unmoved by either her words or her posturing.

“It’s okay, Saba,” Jacen said, stepping up to her and motioning for her to lower her weapon.

She stared at him, confused. Couldn’t he see the danger they were in? Couldn’t he sense through the Force that something wasn’t right here?

“Please,” he urged. “Trust me.”

Despite her reservations, she deactivated her lightsaber and lowered it as he requested. He nodded his appreciation, then faced Senshi.

“Please, before someone gets hurt, can’t you explain to us what is going on? What is it you hope to achieve by bringing us here?”

“That all depends on what you intend to do about it.”

“What does that mean?” Jacen said in obvious exasperation. “I don’t understand.”

“You will, soon enough.”

“Great is the Potentium …” A low chant came from the combined voices of those around them. “Great is the life of Sekot.”

Saba felt the energies of the boras gathering together. The trunks shuddered and stretched, as though reaching for the sky. She felt a gathering potential in the air, building with every second. Whatever was going to happen, it was coming fast.

“All serve and are served,” the crowd chanted. “All join the Potentium!”

Jabitha moaned. Before Saba had chance to react, Senshi was on the ground beside the Magister, one hand across her throat and the other pressing one of the organic lightning rods against her temple.

“Move and I’ll kill her,” he said to the stunned Jedi Knights.

Saba froze, her thumb hesitating over her lightsaber’s activation stud.

“This isn’t what I expected,” the Magister said, her eyes flickering open to look at those gathered around her.

“That was the idea,” Senshi hissed, dragging her and the stretcher closer to the edge of the pit. “Now what, Jedi?” he asked Jacen. “Now what?”

“Now we’ll see,” Mara whispered as Darak hurried back into the habitat—armed, Luke hoped, with the results of the analysis of the anomalous gravity readings from Mobus’s third moon.

Darak whispered to Rowel in a language that Luke couldn’t understand. Then, as one, both the Ferroans turned to face him.

“Our sensors detect no gravitic anomaly,” Rowel said.

“
What
?” Mara said. “You’re saying you detect
nothing
?”

Rowel nodded. “Your comrades must have been mistaken with their readings.”

“Either that,” Darak put in, “or you have been attempting to mislead us.”

“Or
you
could be wrong,” Mara said angrily.

“We have studied this system for decades,” Rowel said, rearing back defensively. “We know its moons intimately. We are not wrong.”

“Perhaps you are being lied to,” Luke said, trying to ease the growing tensions. “Tell me, who did your information come from?”

“From Sekot, of course, via the boras network,” Rowel replied in a tone that suggested Luke had to be a fool for even asking. “Everything on Zonama begins and ends with Sekot.”

Luke nodded his understanding, raising the comlink
to his lips. “Captain Yage, I want you to send a flight of TIEs to investigate that anomaly.”

“I have a flight on standby now, sir,” Yage responded immediately, clearly picking up on the more formal tone in Luke’s voice. “They’ll break formation in ten seconds.”

“What—?” Darak stepped forward, her face pinched in alarm.

Luke ignored her, speaking to Yage again via his comlink. “Good work, Captain. You may authorize them to use destructive force if necessary.”

“You can’t do this!” Darak protested heatedly. “You don’t have the authorization to maneuver in our vicinity—let alone take aggressive measures!”