Part 13 (1/2)
”Thirty, with more on the way; at least two capital vessels so far.
It looks like a fleet.”
”Have they contacted Bakura?”
”They're being hailed now. I'll patch you into the defense fleet net.”
”Copy that.” Jag flicked back to the secure channel. ”I'm sorry, Leia, Han, but I have to go.”
”We just got the call, too,” Leia responded crisply. ”We'll let you know if anything changes.”
”Flights A and B,” Jag said on the Twin Sun frequencies, ”stay here and mind the big bird. C, you're with me.” He peeled out of formation and was followed by two X-wings and a clawcraft. On the scanner before him, the s.h.i.+ps emerging from hypers.p.a.ce stood out like a nebula in the deep void. The number of contacts now stood at forty, with still more coming.
”This is Bakuran Defense Fleet,” called the local traffic control.
”Please identify yourself and state your intentions.” The response came in the form of a warbling, dissonant fluting.
REFUGEE 159 Jag had been briefed; he knew enough to recognize the language. The fleet had originated from Lwhekk-but who was commanding it?
The Ssi-ruuk or the P'w'eck?
The voice of C-3PO came over the comm. ”The message says: 'I come in peace, people of Bakura, to consecrate this world and bond our two cultures in alliance.' ” Another voice spoke from Bakura in response to this. Jag recognized it as belonging to Prime Minister Cundertol.
”We welcome the Keeramak to Bakura in the hope that this new friends.h.i.+p will bring prosperity and enlightenment to all.” The sickly sentiment made Jag roll his eyes. Luckily the speeches didn't last any longer than that.
”Keeramak Entourage, please a.s.sume the following orbits,” the first voice from Bakura said. There followed a long list of requests designed to minimize the disruption caused by the many new arrivals, at the end of which there came a brief burst of alien song, which C-3PO interpreted to mean, simply, ” 'Understood.' ” Jag turned his interception flight into a sweeping, exploratory cruise, examining the alien vessels with a critical eye. The Chiss had fought the Ssi-ruuk on several occasions, contributing behind the scenes to the Imperium's retreat at the advance of the New Republic. He himself, though, had never seen one outside of a simulation.
While their battle droids consisted of simple, angular pyramids with weapon and sensor arrays at each corner, the larger s.h.i.+ps possessed a smoothly organic appearance. Great sweeping hulls with relatively few breaks formed bulbous, sh.e.l.l-like structures that bulged in odd but beautiful ways. He spotted two ovoid Sh'ner-cla.s.s planetary a.s.sault carriers, accompanied by numerous Fw'Sen-cla.s.s picket s.h.i.+ps. The a.s.sault carriers were crewed by more than five hundred P'w'eck-plus over three hundred en-teched droids, if they were still used-and were nearly 750 meters long. Overall, given their structure, they displaced a greater volume than a Victory-cla.s.s Star Destroyer.
It seemed an awful lot of hardware to accompany a diplomatic mission. But then, he supposed, the P'w'eck were probably just as nervous of the Bakurans as the Bakurans were of them. With their freedom only recently attained, they wouldn't be keen to send their leader into the middle of a potentially difficult situation without sufficient backup.
At least they weren't shy about sharing their battle data, though.
On the screen before him, names rapidly appeared next to all the major P'w'eck vessels. The cruiser in the middle of the formation was called the Firrinree, while the one lagging slightly behind was designated the Errinung'ka. He didn't even bother to attempt to remember the names of the picket s.h.i.+ps.
As he watched, the last of the stragglers arrived and the formation broke in three to a.s.sume the orbits given them by the Bakuran Defense Fleet. The maneuver was accomplished smoothly and without fuss-and that spoke loudly of the discipline and flexibility of the P'w'eck fleet. One thing was for certain: they might be new to the idea of being in charge of their own destiny, but the P'w'eck had been exhaustively trained by their Ssi-ruuvi masters to fly battles.h.i.+ps. It showed.
He hung around the main chunk of the fleet long enough to follow security negotiations with the reception team on the ground, and to witness the launch of seven heavily armed D'kee-cla.s.s landing s.h.i.+ps. The Keera-mak was on its way.
Jag only hoped that Bakura was ready for it.
PART THREE
AGGRESSION.
The warm, dry air of the library was making Saba's scales itchy, and she scratched absently at them while skimming through one of the many books suggested by Tris. She barely noticed the discomfort, however; her thoughts were too focused on the information she was reading. It surprised her how effortlessly she had taken to this form of research.
When they'd first started, she had thought she'd never get used to the turning of pages-it seemed so time-consuming! And yet now she was skimming through the books with an ease and confidence similar to that with which skotcarp lizards back home would skate down the shaley slopes of Mount Ste'vshuulsz.
”Found anything yet?” Saba looked up to see Mara peering at her from the end of an aisle of towering bookcases. She shook her head with some apology as she closed the book she'd been browsing through. She'd been reading up on a world on the outer edge of the Unknown Regions where a species of stilt-legged insects lived in a densely oxygenated atmosphere. Their legends spoke of a fire G.o.d who burst out of the planet's core every three years to burn large swaths of their world to the ground, initiating a new cycle of death and rebirth. But as interesting as it was, it didn't help their search. There was nothing about mysterious planets appearing in the sky anywhere in the text.
”This one has found nothing,” she replied.
Mara nodded. ”None of us has, unfortunately. I guess we're all still trying to come to grips with these books. It's frustratingly slow.”
”It would be slower still if not in Basic. Our persistence will pay off,” Saba told her. ”It alwayz does.” Mara smiled, then moved off in the direction of Danni; probably, Saba thought, to check on the young scientist's progress also.
Saba pushed the book she'd been reading to one side and took another from the stack that Tris had supplied. Another species, another dead end. She didn't mind, though. She was reveling in the diversity of life in the Unknown Regions. The search was a far cry from any of her previous duties as a Jedi, and in many ways she knew it could turn out to be one of the most difficult, given the amount of material they had to work through. But she also knew that finding the data itself would probably turn out to be the easiest part; examining it and determining if it was relevant or not would undoubtedly take a lot longer.
Two books later, it was time to get up and stretch. Her eyes were starting to ache from reading, and her back was stiff and sore. Seeking a new list, she loped through the narrow aisles to the center of the vast room, from where the voices of Jacen and the others came. Luke and Mara looked up from three ma.s.sive piles of books as she approached. They had conscripted a ma.s.sive snow-wood table for their use; broad and square, it was easily large enough to seat twenty people. Datapads lay scattered before them, into which fragmentary notes had been entered. Lieutenant Stalgis emerged from one of the aisles, staggering under yet another stack of books. No one could be spared from the effort. The only person missing was, ironically, the one who would have been the most fascinated by it all: Soron Hegerty. Worn out from the episode on Munlali Mafir, the doctor had elected to wait out this mission to the Chiss from orbit. But she was still there in spirit, and her voice could often be heard issuing from comlinks, requesting more data in annoyed tones.
”Look at this,” Luke announced, holding up a book before him for the others to see. Saba leaned over Jacen's and Mara's shoulders. While the bulk of the text had been translated into Basic, there were still porti6ns in the native Cheunh that demanded a.s.sistance from the librarian. Saba concentrated to make sense of the words before her.
The pages Luke had opened to showed the location and history of a world called Yashuvhu. It had been settled by humans some three thousand standard years earlier, but had only recently encountered the Chiss. A quick scan of the pages revealed no reference to any wandering planets, although there was a description of an ancient woman called the Prophetess who oversaw the spiritual development of the colony. This woman taught that there was a living energy field pervading and connecting all things, which, when tapped into in the correct way...
”She's talking about the Force,” Mara said. ”I think so,” Luke said.
”Look.” He opened to a page containing pictures of the Prophetess, whose real name, it turned out, was Valara Saar. It showed a woman of advanced years in a state of excellent preservation. The Chiss contact team had attempted to visit her home in the Yashaka Mountains, but they'd been repelled. No one, it seemed, came to the Prophetess's retreat uninvited.
The images were sketchily drawn and portrayed the chaos of a hasty retreat, but one thing was plain to see. ”She's wielding a lightsaber!”
Jacen exclaimed. ”It looks very much like it,” Luke agreed, displaying a bit more calm than his excited nephew. ”How long haz she been there?”
Saba asked.
”The records don't say,” Mara said. ”But if she was trained as a child, it could be decades.”
”Either that or she found a Holocron,” Jacen suggested.
”Let's not jump to any hasty conclusions,” Luke said. ”Strictly speaking, this isn't what we're here to look for.” Nevertheless, he had dived deep into the information on Yashuvhu and the Prophetess. Saba noted other books open around him, all tracing the same topic. The woman herself had not deigned to speak to the Chiss landing party, but many of her acolytes had. The records contained a list of her primary teachings: patience, humility, compa.s.sion, clarity of thought, balance between physical and mental prowess, strict observance of diet, and, lastly, a solitary lifestyle. In all the years that Valara Saar had been teaching the people of Yashuvhu, they had never known her to take a mate, so she never had any children. In fact, her only constant companion was a creature called a duuvhal, which she had raised from a pup.
”Hey, I think I've found something!” All attention s.h.i.+fted to Danni, who emerged from an aisle clutching a very large book. Beneath the overhang of her unkempt hair, there was excitement in her eyes as she placed the book heavily on the table and flicked through some pages.
”See: here, and here...” Saba and the others looked to where she was pointing. The young scientist had found a reference to an asteroid belt that had been perturbed by recent tidal forces. Millions of chunks of rock ranging in size from grains of dust to giant boulders had been knocked out of orbit by something very large within the last three decades. That in itself wasn't so unusual; solar systems were frequently unstable, with planets drifting in from interstellar s.p.a.ce, wandering across...o...b..ts, or leaving at the whim of chaotic perturbations. What made this one unique was a record made by the civilization on an inner world before their atmosphere clouded. More than a dozen large rocks had impacted on the planet, rendering it uninhabitable.
The ruins contained murals depicting a new star in the sky-a blue-green star that had appeared one summer as though out of nowhere, then disappeared half a year later. Its appearance had triggered a terrible religious war that had seen one entire nation subjugated and another reduced to rubble. The victors had celebrated the star's visit. But their celebrations had quickly turned to mourning as first fire rained from the sky, and then the new sun vanished. Within two generations, they'd been reduced to savagery.
”Another fleeting visit, another violent culture,” Mara said, cutting through the silence. ”The correlation gets stronger.”
”I see no evidence that Zonama Sekot is deliberately trying to harm the people it comes across,” Luke said thoughtfully.
”Nevertheless,” Mara said, ”this is what it's doing.”
”Inadvertently, perhaps,” Luke said. ”Not deliberately.”
”Maybe it just isn't thinking straight,” Stalgis suggested.