Reunion (37 page)

“
That’s
what Darth Vader looked like?” Hegerty’s was voice thick with amazement.

“He was a boy once,” Mara said softly.

“Master Skywalker,” came Captain Yage’s voice over the comlink, interrupting the surreal reunion. “The unidentified vessel is still approaching Zonama Sekot, and is refusing to respond to our hails. We’re on full alert and ready to intercept. You just have to give the order.”

Luke stood, pulling himself away from the vision of his father to address the captain of the
Widowmaker
. “Stand down, Arien,” he said. He was acutely conscious
of everything around him: the humid air; the scent of waterlogged undergrowth; the breathless ring of Ferroans waiting to see what happened next. “That ship isn’t about to attack us.”

The image of his father moved to the center of the room. Luke faced him, feeling the pressure of the planet’s attention upon him. He shook his head, wondering why he hadn’t realized sooner what was going on.

“So, tell me,” he said. “Have we performed to your satisfaction?”

Sekot looked at him with the wisdom of ages from the eyes of innocence. “If I were to say that you hadn’t, what would you do then?”

Luke shrugged. “That would depend on the choices I had available to me.”

“You don’t have any.” The innocent face broke into a smile. “That’s what’s so wizard about it.”

“Then your question is meaningless,” Luke said.

“Perhaps,” Sekot said. “But the exercise wasn’t. Since your arrival I have learned more about why you are here than you probably ever intended to tell me. Maybe even more than you know yourself.”

“Then you know we came in search of an answer.”

“I do. But I have no easy answer to offer you.”

“Any answer at this point would be appreciated,” Mara said.

The image of the boy looked in silence at all of those standing around expectantly, then finally nodded. “Very well,” he said, gesturing for them all to be seated.

Luke did so gratefully. Ever since laying eyes upon the boy he had felt the tug of emotions that he hadn’t accessed in a long time—emotions that were leaving him weak at the knees, even though he knew it wasn’t his father before him.

When everyone was seated, Sekot began to speak.

*  *  *

Jag ducked as a tsik seru skimmed narrowly over his head, the tug of its dovin basal lifting him slightly from his seat. He dropped the power on his speeder as a large stone formation loomed out of the haze ahead, swinging around to give chase to the Yuuzhan Vong that had just buzzed him, only to find the tsik seru already coming back for another pass. Its pilot’s face was all snarl and scars, partly obscured by a fleshy gnullith. Not obscured enough as far as Jag was concerned, though. He strafed laserfire in the small craft’s path, making the Yuuzhan Vong pilot bank sharply as he fired a cloud of netting beetles in retaliation. The tsik seru had almost matched speed and vector with Jag’s flier when something caught the pilot’s attention and he swept away, disappearing into the murky atmosphere.

Left in the turbulent wake, Jag wondered what had torn the Yuuzhan Vong from his prey. Something important must have come up.

Jag came around and set off after the flier. What his speeder lacked in full-body coverage, it certainly made up for in velocity. He caught up with the tsik seru just as it crested a sharp rise and dipped down the far side. He saw its plasma launchers flex in readiness, then suddenly explode in a ball of green flame. With a pained shriek, the living craft curved away and crashed into one of the stony “stalagmites” that littered the planet’s surface. With a loud
whump
, it exploded into a million red-hot fragments.

Only then did Jag realize what lay below.

Huddled against a boulder were three small, humanoid figures. They stood with their backs to the boulder, two of them firing repeating blasters or using lightsabers to keep two more tsik seru and a swarm of reptoids at bay. The third slumped against the stone and appeared to be having difficulty remaining upright.

Jag stitched a line of fire across the contracting line of alien foot soldiers. At least a dozen went down screaming.

“Jag, back here!”

The comm message was from Tahiri. She was warding off four reptoids, two of them armed with coufees. The other two were throwing thud bugs whenever they saw an opening. Jag swept in low across the fight and dropped a thermal mine in the middle of the reptoids, shooting at the two with coufees on his way out.

When the thermal mine went off, bits of reptoids were sent flying every which way. Something thumped against the side of his helmet, and he ducked in case more pieces were following. Guiding his bucking speeder around in a circle, he came back to check on Tahiri and the others.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Jaina took a fall,” Tahiri explained, getting up from where she’d dropped. She lent Jaina a hand as she climbed to her feet.

Jag brought his speeder to a halt and jumped off to see if he could help. When Jaina spoke, her voice was thick and groggy. She was blinking her eyes too rapidly, as though trying to focus.

“My feet are cold.”

“Her suit is failing,” Tahiri said. “We have to get her out of here.”

Jag tried to get her attention. “Jaina? Can you hear me?”

“Jag?” Her gaze caught him and held on. She nodded in a delayed response to his question. “I’ll be all right. Just give me a second.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Droma said, pointing over Jag’s shoulder, “but …”

Jag turned and saw the reptoids getting up and regrouping.

He went back to his speeder and collected his charric blaster.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Where’s Jaina’s speeder?”

“Over there,” Tahiri said.

Jag looked and saw the tangled wreck.

“Okay, then, she can take mine and head back to the relay base,” he said. “It’s the only shelter we’ve got down here. I’ll hitch a lift with Droma.”

“No, I’ll take her,” Droma said. “She shouldn’t fly alone. And besides which, I know the way.”

Reluctant though he was to lose another fighter, Jag nodded in agreement. It made sense to have someone with her, to help her if she blacked out or got lost.

“Get going,” he said. “We’ll cover your backs.”

Droma helped Jaina to Jag’s speeder. She protested vaguely, but was unable to put up much of a fight. When she was safely on the saddle, the nimble Ryn climbed up in front of her and activated the engine.

“Keep an eye on Eniknar,” he said.

“We will,” Tahiri said.

With a brisk wave, Droma sped off into the gloom.

“So where are
our
speeders?” Jag said, firing his blaster at a knot of reptoids who looked about ready to charge.

Tahiri pointed at a crater behind the line of reptoids. “A tsik seru took them out before I could take
it
out. We tried calling for help, but our line of sight is shot down here. We were lucky you came along.”

He felt strangely like laughing, but doubted the approaching line of snarling reptoids would see the joke. “You’re back where you started!”

“Not at all.” Tahiri’s grin was fleeting and joyful. “Now Jaina’s safe, I don’t have to watch my back.” She tensed. “Try and keep up, Colonel. We’re getting out of here.”

With a powerful, Force-augmented spring, she somersaulted up onto the boulder they’d been sheltering in front of and began blasting the reptoids from above.

*  *  *

Leia paced nervously across the
Falcon
’s passenger bay, wishing there were something she could do. She’d felt the shock of Jaina’s sudden plunge into unconsciousness, and had endured an anxious ten minutes until she felt her daughter recover. The relief had been enormous, but did little to assuage the underlying frustration. Somewhere out there a desperate fight was going on, and she was too far away to be of any use.

A bleeping from the cockpit came as a thankful distraction to her thoughts. She ran to find out what the instruments were reporting, and found new telemetry scrolling down the screens, courtesy of Pellaeon. The surface scans showed furious activity around the transponder site. At least five mines had blown, turning the normally frigid cloud patterns into relatively hot hurricanes. She only hoped the Cold Ones were keeping well away, as instructed.

In orbit, things were beginning to change. Responding to the lack of rapid progress on the ground, Vorrik was moving ships into strike range for a bombing run. Pellaeon had responded to the threat by boosting his presence along that orbit. Leia had witnessed enough muscle flexing in the past to know that the situation was at flashpoint. Unless the ground troops delivered—or appeared to deliver, anyway—a decisive victory to the Yuuzhan Vong, things in orbit would soon get very ugly once again.

At least the relay base was safe, though. That was a small comfort in the middle of such chaos and confusion. And she supposed she shouldn’t complain too much. She’d been hiding only a matter of hours, whereas Ashpidar and her crew had been evading the Yuuzhan Vong for days.

Thinking of the base commander, she clicked open the comm to Ashpidar’s office.

“Commander Ashpidar?” she said. “If you’re interested, I have new telemetry from Pellaeon.”

There was no response.

“Sekot!”

Jabitha’s startled cry brought Jacen out of his stunned daze. He was gaping at the image of Vergere where she stood opposite Senshi, her diminutive figure commanding everyone’s attention. She was dressed in a brown robe, and her large, almost hypnotic eyes were fixed on him. The fringe of feathers and whiskers around her face were, despite the rain, completely dry.

“You’re not Vergere, are you?” After so long, there was no way his teacher could have returned from the dead—and he could tell from the image’s presence in the Force that this was something much more than just a projection or an echo of someone who had once lived.

“I come to you in this guise as someone we have both known,” the image said. “Someone who was close to you, someone you found trustworthy.”

“Sekot does this,” Jabitha explained. “It appears as my father sometimes, or as your grandfather. Sometimes it appears as me, and that is the most disconcerting of all.”

Jacen remembered something the real Vergere had told him. She had been present at the birth of the living planet’s consciousness, when Sekot had assumed the personality of its dead Magister and communicated with her and the Yuuzhan Vong. He had known about this all along and not realized …

“Why now?” Saba asked, her voice a growl of puzzlement. “Why not before?”

“It
did
before,” Jacen said, “when we arrived. That wasn’t the Magister Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara spoke to. It was Sekot in Jabitha’s form.”

“That still does not tell uz why.”

Jacen looked around: at Saba staring uncertainly back at him, at Danni still unconscious on the stretcher, at Senshi with his weapon pressed against Jabitha’s head … The image of Vergere watched him closely, waiting for him to answer the question for himself.

“You’re testing us, aren’t you?” he said.

Sekot shook its fringed head, smiling. “I’m testing you, Jacen Solo.”

“And did I pass?”

Instead of answering his question, Sekot faced Senshi. The elderly Ferroan immediately removed the lightning rod from Jabitha’s temple and climbed to his feet. The Magister sat up, rubbing at her neck where the kidnapper had been holding her. Sekot then glanced over the Danni on the other stretcher, and the young scientist stirred with a soft moan. Jacen went over to her, kneeling beside her in the mud.

“Danni?” He could barely contain his relief.

Danni opened her eyes slowly, blinking into the light rain falling across her face. She propped herself up onto her elbows, looking up at Jacen with confusion etched across her brow.

“Where am I?” Her eyes widened as she looked around. “The last thing I remember is the roof coming down—”

“It’s all right, Danni,” Jacen reassured her. “You’re safe now.”

Her gaze fell upon the Ferroans standing around her, some with their weapons held loosely at their sides.

“This would be the Solo definition of ‘safe,’ I’m taking it?”

“You will not be harmed,” Vergere said, stepping up alongside Jacen.

Danni’s eyes widened in surprise even more at the sight of Vergere. “But—I thought—”

“It’s not Vergere,” Jacen said.

“It iz Sekot.” Saba finally extinguished her lightsaber. Jacen couldn’t tell if she’d decided that Sekot meant no harm, or that there was nothing she could do about it even if Sekot did.

Danni turned back to Jacen, shaking her head as though the questions it carried were too heavy. “I don’t understand.”

“I think I’m beginning to,” he said. “This whole thing was a setup designed to see how I react under threat. Do I fight or flee? Do I defend my loved ones, or do I use them as shields?”

“Or do you attempt to take the middle ground,” Sekot said, “and allow both sides to win?”

“I’m sorry,” Jabitha said. “I knew Sekot was going to test you, but I didn’t know how. I convinced it that it should, rather than trust you implicitly. I had no idea that your lives were going to be put in any danger.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Jacen said, standing again to face Vergere’s image. “It was Sekot who kept Danni unconscious, and who used Senshi to execute the kidnapping. Just as it used the boras here to threaten us.”

“Actually, the boras were acting of their own will. They could not be controlled—only provoked or soothed. You had to solve that problem on your own. But the rest is true, yes. Does that fact make you angry?”

Vergere was the perfect form for Sekot to take, Jacen thought. This was exactly the sort of mind-expanding trick she might have played on him during his brief apprenticeship to her.

“No,” he said. “I just want to know why.”

“I had to know what manner of warrior I was dealing with before responding to your request.”

“I’m uncomfortable with the term
warrior
,” he said. “A Jedi stands for peace, not war.”

“You do not believe in fighting for peace, for freedom?” Sekot spoke in a way that made Jacen feel he was being mocked.