Reunion (40 page)

“It’s not a ruse,” Tahiri said.

“How can you be so sure?”

Her gaze dropped to Eniknar, seeming to stare into him rather than at him. After a long moment, she looked back at Jag.

“I just am.”

“Well, that still doesn’t mean he has to be the one who sacrifices—”

“Jag,” she interrupted sternly. “We don’t have time
for this. From the look of him, I doubt that he’s going to survive very long anyway.”

Jag sighed. She was right; they
were
running out of time. He leaned back down to Eniknar.

“Are you sure?” he said, offering one last resistance to the plan. “We could try—”

The security chief was already shaking his head before he’d finished. “This way … at least … I die … with honor.”

Jag knew it made no sense to argue. The Noghri’s strength was ebbing; if he left his decision too long, the situation might be taken out of their hands.

He placed the control unit against Eniknar’s chest, and Tahiri taped it in place.

“Twenty seconds,” she said through their visors. “Wait twenty seconds, then input the code, okay? That’ll give us time to get clear.”

Eniknar’s eyes were shut as he nodded. “I can wait … that long.”

They left him there, propped up against a reinforced girder. As Jag gunned the speeder bike off into the darkness, scattering a pack of reptoid ground troops in their wake, he heard Tahiri’s voice in his helmet speakers.

“
Rrush’hok ichnar vinim’hok
,” she muttered softly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Yuuzhan Vong blessing,” she said. “It means, ‘die well, brave warrior.’ ”

Jag acknowledged the sentiment with a nod of his head, although her ease with the Yuuzhan Vong culture continued to unsettle him. “I guess the others owe him an apology.”

“I’ll make sure he gets one, when things quiet down.”

“A little late, don’t you think?”

“Not for those of us who will remember him.” Eniknar’s sacrifice didn’t sit well with Jag for so many
reasons he had difficulty identifying them all. Chiss culture had a strong aversion to suicide, regarding it wasteful and unjustifiable. Although Eniknar’s gesture would save many more lives, it still rankled.

But there was something else that bothered him more. If Eniknar wasn’t the traitor as everyone had believed him to be, then who was?

Behind them, the sky lit with a bright, white light, as though an impossible dawn had come to this cold and sunless world.

“Your uncle asks after you,” the image with Vergere’s face said to Jacen. Saba observed the exchange with senses desensitized to surprise. That Sekot could be in two places at once didn’t seem as unreasonable as it would have just a day ago. “I have told him that you are all well, and that no harm will come to you now that the testing is complete.”

“Did you test the Ferroanz, too?” Saba asked. She was still smarting at the way she and Jacen had been deceived. The supposed mastermind of the kidnappers, Senshi, smiled serenely at her from where he rested with the Magister against one side of the seeding ground.

Sekot’s beaked visage turned to face her. “When I awoke, they were already here. In fact, I suspect it was their arrival that precipitated my awakening—or at least hastened it along. Whatever process I was undergoing to reach full awareness, it needed only their presence to be complete.”

“That doesn’t explain where you came from,” Danni said. The human scientist seemed none the worse for her time spent unconscious at the whim of Sekot. She sat cross-legged on the stretcher, listening intently to Sekot’s story. “If you weren’t a chance combination of elements requiring just an intelligent, peaceful civilization to jumpstart
your evolution to consciousness, then what were you? How did you come to
be
?”

“I have asked myself that many times,” Sekot said, “and never been able to satisfactorily answer it. Jabitha’s father’s understanding of the Force was flawed. I know that now. He thought that everything was one in the Potentium, a teaching that has survived among the Ferroans to this day. But the Jedi showed me that evil does exist, and I know that the Far Outsiders stand outside the Force. Where does that leave me now? Did I spring from the Force or somewhere else?”

“We have speculated on this,” Danni said. “There are a number of possibilities.”

“And I would be interested to discuss them with you another time.” Vergere’s fringe shivered as she turned to face the human scientist. “It remains, though, that a sample size of one is not enough for either of us to reach a conclusion. The simple fact is that I do not know where I came from. I have not come across any others of my kind anywhere else in the galaxy, and that makes me wonder. Perhaps I did wake once, or many times before, but without the Ferroans I retreated into unconsciousness and forgot those dark periods of my development. I only came into the light when there was someone here to welcome my birth, someone to know me. For without that, could I ever be considered alive?”

Saba was struck by the image of world-minds like orphaned hatchlings, scattered across the stars. What would it be like to grow up alone, never knowing who had spawned you, or who your siblings might be? She couldn’t imagine it. Neither could she decide if it would be worse or better than knowing your family and then losing them.

Vergere’s alien eyes regarded Jacen coolly, waiting for him to comment.

He did so eventually with a nod. “You’re right. It’s how we treat others that matters, not where we came from.”

“Exactly, young Jedi. I stand by everything I’ve done since I became alive. I trust and obey my own imperatives.”

“Thoze being?” Saba asked.

“The same as any intelligent entity: to live in peace, to grow in knowledge and wisdom, to love and be loved in return.” Vergere’s smiled was broad and peaceful, belying the words that followed. “And if any tries to rob me of my right to follow those imperatives, I have the same choices as anyone: I can run or I can fight. I have experienced both.”

Leia tried Ashpidar for the fourth time, now more worried than before.

“Commander? Are you there?”

“Perhaps Commander Ashpidar is attending business elsewhere,” C-3PO suggested.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “It’s been far too long. A good commander wouldn’t leave her post like this at a time of crisis.” She stood after a moment’s consideration. “I’m going to see what’s wrong.”

“Oh, dear.” The golden droid’s arms flapped like those of a flightless bird. “Do you think that’s a good idea, Princess? Perhaps a call to base security—”

“I’d rather check it out myself.” She retrieved her lightsaber and a blaster from the passenger area. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

“As you wish, Princess,” the droid said.

Meewalh and Cakhmain, her two Noghri bodyguards, preceded her down the umbilical connecting the
Falcon
to the base.

“Stay here,” she said to C-3PO. “Call me on my comlink if you hear anything. If I’m not back in half an hour, or I haven’t called you, shut the air lock and wait for Han to come back. Don’t let anyone else in, whatever you do.”

Leia left him dithering and flustered, reassuring her profusely that he’d do as instructed. She slotted between Meewalh and Cakhmain and walked along the umbilical into the relay base.

The corridors were quiet as she headed to Ashpidar’s quarters. The base was on alert, so most of the crew were at their stations, ready in case of an emergency. She passed two of the Ugnaughts and a Sullustan supervisor performing maintenance work on a power router, but apart from that, the base seemed utterly deserted.

Leia took the curving corridor leading to Ashpidar’s office at a slower pace, wary of surprises. She didn’t know what was making her so edgy, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

The door to Ashpidar’s office was, not surprisingly, locked. “Go back and get that engineer,” she ordered Meewalh. “Perhaps she can get us in.”

While she waited for Meewalh to return with the Sullustan, she tried in vain to listen for anything through the bulkhead. The room on the other side was either empty, or—

She stopped herself short. There was no point heading for such pessimistic conclusions until she had cause to do so. There were a thousand reasons that might explain Ashpidar’s silence. Just because she couldn’t think of one that held up to close examination at this time didn’t necessarily mean there
wasn’t
one …

“What’s the problem here?” the Sullustan asked, striding confidently up to Leia.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your work—” Leia read the engineer’s name tag. “—Gantree, but I need to get into this room.”

Gantree’s response was instantly suspicious. “Why?”

“Commander Ashpidar isn’t answering my calls.”

“She could be resting.”

“At a time like this?” Leia shook her head.

“Then perhaps she’s busy elsewhere on the base.”

“Have you seen her in the last couple of hours?”

The engineer sighed, her large eyes blinking. “You must understand that privacy on a base such as this is respected by everyone. I can’t just—”

“I do understand that,” Leia said. “But this is important. I have a terrible feeling that something has happened to the commander. So please, open this door. If my suspicions prove to be unfounded, then I’ll take full responsibility.”

The Sullustan slowly nodded. “Very well,” she muttered, approaching the door and examining its keypad. “But if she asks what—” Gantree stopped, frowning down at the lock. “That’s strange.”

“What is it?” Leia asked.

“The door,” the engineer said. “It’s been locked from the outside.”

Leia’s stomach began to turn over uneasily as the engineer tapped in a long string of codes until the lock finally beeped and the door slid open.

Meewalh went first. Leia followed close behind, her lightsaber drawn but not lit. The first thing she noticed was a smell of ozone in the air. The second was a pair of large feet protruding from behind the desk.

She hurried over to where Ashpidar lay facedown, a web of fine wires wrapped around her horns. The engineer pushed past to examine the body of her commander.

“They tortured her!” the Sullustan exclaimed, tugging at the wires to remove them. “Gotals can’t stand intense magnetic fields anywhere near them.”

“Will she be all right?” Leia asked, crouching down beside the Sullustan. Gotal physiology wasn’t one of her strong points.

“They just knocked her out.” Gantree’s big eyes looked up imploringly at Leia. “Why would anyone do this?”

“Lady Vader,” Cakhmain whispered. “I think you should see this.”

She looked up. The Noghri female was examining the safe in the wall of Ashpidar’s office. It should have been tightly sealed, but the door was ajar. When Cakhmain swung it fully open, the inside was empty.

Cold rushed through her as she realized what had happened.

“Someone stole the villip.”

The Sullustan engineer looked confused. “A
villip
?”

“Eniknar and Ashpidar found one hidden in a maintenance recess a couple of days ago,” she explained. “They were trying to find out whom it belonged to when the Yuuzhan Vong attacked. Someone must have used it to lure them here.”

“A traitor?
Here
?”

A discomfiting thought struck her. “We thought it was Eniknar because he smelled wrong.”

The Sullustan frowned. “What does smell have to do with it?”

“To a Noghri, everything. Usually.” She glanced at her bodyguards, but they didn’t have the capacity to look sheepish. “The real traitor has been here all along,” she went on. “And now he or she has the villip.”

Alarm showed on the engineer’s expressive face. “They could call the Yuuzhan Vong down upon us!”

Leia nodded gravely. “We have to find a way to stop that from happening.”

“Wouldn’t they have done it already?

“Unlikely,” she said. “They’d need to be able to get away from here first. They wouldn’t want to go down with the ship.”

“Then they must be heading out on foot, because there are no speeder bikes left.”

“And it takes time to put on an enviro-suit.” A sense of urgency gripped her; they might have arrived too late
to prevent Ashpidar from being tortured for the codes for the safe, but they might yet stop the traitor finishing the job. “Come on.”

Gantree hurried from the room close behind Leia. “A roll call would tell us who was missing,” she began, flustered by Leia’s sudden haste.

“That would only alert them that we’re onto them. No, we have to get to them
before
they escape. Which air lock would they use?”

“There’s only one designed for suited EVA.”

“Take me there.”

The Sullustan’s short legs propelled her rapidly along the base’s corridor, urged on by Leia’s certainty that this was the only way to stop the traitor. There wasn’t time to move the base to safety—or the
Falcon
, for that matter. If they failed, it would all end here.

The extravehicular air lock was locked when they arrived. Through a thick transparisteel observation window, they saw a diminutive figure working the final seals on an enviro-suit. Leia couldn’t make out who it was from the back, but the Sullustan beside her seemed to know automatically. Her hand punched at an intercom.

“Tegg! What are you
doing
?”

The Ugnaught on the other side of the glass didn’t respond, except to hasten his efforts. There was a small, vacuum-sealed box beside him, just large enough to contain a villip.

“Why are you doing this?” the engineer went on. “Don’t you know they’ll kill us all?”

Still the Ugnaught didn’t speak, but the look of hatred in the tiny traitor’s eyes said it all: Peace Brigade. They were everywhere, their once vague and amorphous resentment and anger finally given shape by the Yuuzhan Vong.

“Can we open the door?” Leia asked.

The Sullustan tapped at a keypad, then threw her hands up in frustration. “He’s frozen the controls!”

“Then we have to stop him getting
out.
” Leia’s palms itched at the closeness of disaster. “Does this lock meet standard safety requirements?”