The Unifying Force Read online

  "Make room for the major and the captain at the front of the line," the same human who had announced them ordered.

  The officers deferred. "We'll eat after the rest of you have had your share," Page said for the two of them.

  "Please, sirs," several of those on line insisted.

  Page and Cracken exchanged resigned looks and nodded. Cracken accepted a wooden bowl that had been fashioned by one of the prisoners, and moved to the head of the food line, where the Ryn was stirring the gruelish contents of a large yorik coral container.

  "We appreciate your bringing this," Cracken said. His eyes were pale green, and his flame-red hair was shot through with gray, adding a measure of distinction to his aristocratic features.

  The Ryn smiled slyly. Plunging a ladle deep into the gruel, he bent over the pot, encouraging Cracken to do the same in order to get his bowl filled. When Cracken's left ear was within whisper distance of the Ryn's mouth, the being said, "Ryn one-one-five, out of Vortex."

  Cracken hid his surprise. He had learned about the Ryn syndicate only two months earlier, during a briefing on Mon Calamari, which had become Galactic Alliance headquarters following the fall of Cor-

  uscant. An extensive spy network, comprised of not only Ryn but also members of other, equally displaced species, the syndicate made use of secret space routes and hyperlanes blazed by the Jedi, to provide safe passage for individuals and covert intelligence.

  "You have something for us?" Cracken asked quietly while the Ryn was ladling gruel into the wooden bowl.

  The Ryn's forward-facing eyes darted between the container and Cracken's lined face. "Chew carefully, Major," he said, just loud enough to be heard. "Expect the unexpected."

  Cracken straightened, whispering the message to Page, who in turn whispered it to the Bith behind him in line. Surreptitiously, the message was relayed again and again, until it had reached the last of the one hundred or so prisoners.

  By then Cracken, Page, and some of the others had carried their bowls to a crude table, around which they squatted and began to finger the gruel carefully into their mouths, glancing at one another in understated anticipation.

  At the same time, three prisoners moved to the doorway to keep an eye out for guards. The Yuuzhan Vong hadn't installed villips or other listening devices in the huts, but warriors like S'yito, who displayed obvious curiosity about the enemy, had made it a habit to barge in without warning, and conduct sweeps and searches.

  A Devaronian hunkered down across the table from Page made a gagging sound. Faking a cough, he gingerly removed an object from his slash of dangerous mouth, and glanced at it in secret. Everyone stared at him in expectation.

  "Gristle," he said, lifting beady, disappointed eyes. "At least I think that's what it is."

  The prisoners went back to eating, the tension mounting as their fingers began to scrape the bottoms of their bowls.

  Then Cracken bit down on something that made his molars ache. He brought his left hand to his mouth, and used his tongue to push the object into his cupped hand. The center of attention, he opened his hand briefly, recognizing the object at once. Keeping the thing palmed, he set it on the table and slid it to his left, where, in the blink of an eye, it disappeared under the right hand of Page.

  "Holowafer," the captain said softly, without taking a second look. "It'll display only once. We're going to have to be quick about it."

  Cracken nodded his chin to the horned Devaronian. "Find Clak'dor, Garban, and the rest of that crew, and bring them here quickest."

  The Devaronian stood up and hurried out the doorway.

  Page ran his hand over his bearded face. "We're going to need a place to display the data. We can't risk doing it in the open."

  Cracken thought for a moment, then turned to the long-bearded Bothan to his right. "Who's the one with the sabacc deck?"

  The alien's fur rippled slightly. "That'd be Coruscant."

  "Tell him we need him."

  The Bothan nodded and made for the doorway. As word spread through the hut, the prisoners began to converse loudly, as cover for what was being said by those who remained at the table. The Ryn banged his ladle against the side of the pot, and several of the prisoners distributed fruits to the others by tossing them through the air, as if in a game of catch.

  "How are things in the yard?" Page asked the lookouts at the doorway.

  "Coruscant's coming, sir. Also Clak'dor's bunch."

  "The guards?"

  "No one's paying any mind."

  Coruscant, a tall, blond-haired human, entered grinning and fanning a deck of sabacc cards he'd fashioned from squares of leather. "Did I hear right that someone's interested in a game?"

  Page motioned for everyone to form a circle in the center of the hut, and to raise the noise level. The guards had grown accustomed to the boisterous activity that would sometimes erupt during card games, and Page was determined to provide a dose of the real thing. A dozen prisoners broke out in song. The rest conversed jocularly, giving odds and making bets.

  The human gambler, three Bith, and a Jenet were passed through the falsely jubilant crowd to the center of the circle, where Page and Cracken were waiting with the holowafer.

  Coruscant began to dole out cards.

  Highly evolved humanoids, Bith were deep thinkers and skillful artists with an ability to store and sift through immense amounts of data. The Jenet, in contrast, was short and rodentlike, but possessed of an eidetic memory.

  When Page was satisfied that the inner circle was effectively sealed off, he crouched down, as if to join in the game. "We'll get only one chance at this. You sure you can do it?"

  The Jenet's muzzle twitched in amusement, and he fixed his red eyes on Page. "That's why you chose us, isn't it?"

  Page nodded. "Then let's get to it."

  Deftly, Page set the small wafer on the plank floor and activated it with the pressure of his right forefinger. An inverted cone of blue light projected upward, within which flared a complex mathematical equation Page couldn't begin to comprehend, much less solve or memorize. As quickly as the numbers and symbols appeared, they disappeared.

  Then the wafer itself issued a sibilant sound, and liquefied.

  He had his mouth open to ask the Bith and the Jenet if they had been successful in committing the equation to memory, when S'yito and three Yuuzhan Vong guards stormed into the hut and shouldered their way to the center of the circle, their coufee daggers unsheathed and their serpentine amphistaffs on high alert, ready to strike or spit venom as needed.

  "Cease your activities at once," the subaltern bellowed.

  The crowd fanned out slowly and began to quiet down. Coruscant and the ostensible card players moved warily out of striking range of the amphistaffs.

  "What's the problem, Subaltern?" Page asked in Yuuzhan Vong.

  "Since when you do engage in games of chance at nourishment hour?"

  "We're wagering for second helpings."

  S'yito glared at him. "You trifle with me, human."

  Page shrugged elaborately. "It's my job, S'yito."

  The subaltern took a menacing step forward. "Put an end to your game—and your singing ... or we'll remove the parts of you that are responsible for it."

  The four Yuuzhan Vong turned and marched from the hut.

  "That guy has absolutely no sense of humor," Coruscant said when he felt he could.

  Everyone in the vicinity of Page and Cracken looked to the two officers.

  "The data has to reach Alliance command," Cracken said.

  Page nodded in agreement. "When do we send them out?"

  Cracken compressed his lips. "Prayer hour."

  Shortly before its public immolation in a fire pit located just outside the prison gates, a silver protocol droid that had belonged briefly to Major Cracken had put the odds of escaping from Selvaris at roughly a million to one. But the droid hadn't known about the Ryn syndicate, or about what the clandestine group had set in motion on the planet, even befor
e the first chunks of yorik coral had been sown.

  Cracken, Page, and the others knew something else, as well: that hope flourished in the darkest of places, and that while the Yuuzhan Vong could imprison or kill them, there wasn't a soldier in the camp who wouldn't have risked his or her life to see even one of their number survive to fight another day.

  First sunrise was an hour away, and Cracken, Page, the three Bith, and the Jenet were crouched at the entrance to a tunnel the prisoners had excavated with hands, claws, and whatever tools they had been able to fabricate or steal during the excavation of the fire pit, in which several dozen droids had been ritually slagged by the camp's resident priests.

  Every prisoner in the hut was awake, and many hadn't slept a wink all night. They watched silently from the flattened fronds and grasses that were their beds, wishing they could voice a personal good luck to

  15

  the four who were about to embark on what seemed a hopeless enterprise. Lookouts had been posted at the doorway. The light was gauzy, and the air was blessedly cool. Outside the hut, the chitterings and stridulations of jungle life were reaching a fevered crescendo.

  "You want to go over any of it?" Cracken asked in a whisper.

  "No, sir," the four answered in unison.

  Cracken nodded soberly.

  "Then may the Force be with all of you," Page said for everyone in the hut.

  The cramped entrance to the tunnel was concealed by Cracken's own bed of insect-ridden palm fronds. Below a removable grate, the hand-hewn shaft fell into utter darkness. The secret passageway had been started by the first captives to be imprisoned on Selvaris, and had been enlarged and lengthened over the long months by successive groups of new arrivals. Progress had often been measured in centimeters, as when the diggers had struck a mass of yorik coral that had taken root in the sandy soil. But now the tunnel extended beneath the prison wall and the senalak grasses beyond, to just inside the distant tree line.

  His facial fur blackened with charcoal, the gaunt Jenet was the first to worm his way into the hole. When the three Bith had bellied in behind him, the entrance was closed and covered over.

  What little light there had been disappeared.

  The nominal leader of the would-be escapees, the Jenet had been captured on Bilbringi, during a raid on an enemy installation. His fellow captives knew him as Thorsh, although on his homeworld of Garban a list of his accomplishments and transgressions would have been affixed to the name. Reconnaissance was his specialty, so he was no stranger to darkness or tight spots, having infiltrated many a Yuuzhan Vong warren and grashal on Duro, Gyndine, and other worlds. The Selvaris tunnel felt comfortably familiar. The Bith had it harder because of their size, but they were a well-coordinated species, with memory and olfactory abilities that rivaled Thorsh's own.

  Indeterminate minutes of muted crawling brought them to the first of a series of confined right-angle turns, where the tunnelers had been forced to detour around an amorphous mass of yorik coral. To Thorsh the detour meant that the team was directly under the prison

  all itself. Now it was just a matter of negotiating the long stretch beneath the senalaks the Yuuzhan Vong had cultivated outside the

  perimeter.

  Thorsh knew better than to relax, but his continued vigilance

  hardly mattered.

  In the space of a local week, senalak roots had penetrated the roof of the poorly braced tunnel, and the convoluted roots were every bit as barbed as the strands released by the knee-high stalks themselves.

  For meters at a stretch there was simply no avoiding them.

  The barbs shredded the thin garments the four had been wearing when captured, and left deep, bleeding furrows in the flesh of their

  backs.

  Thorsh muttered a curse at each encounter, but the Bith—ever careful about displaying emotion—endured the pain in silence.

  The brutal crawl ended where the tunnel sloped upward at the far edge of the senalak field. Shortly the team emerged inside the buttressed base of an enormous hardwood. The thick-trunked tree bore a striking resemblance to the gnarltrees native to Dagobah, but was in fact a different species altogether. One hundred meters away, the prison wall glowed softly green with bioluminescence. Two sleepy guards occupied the closest watchtower, their amphistaffs stiff as spears, and a third could be glimpsed in the adjacent tower. Those warriors who weren't elsewhere within the walls of the compound were attending prayer services at the temple.

  The bold incantations of the latter wafted through the jungle, counterpoint to the riotous calls of birds and insects. Strands of mist meandered through the treetops like apparitions.

  One of the Bith elbowed his way alongside Thorsh, and aimed his slender forefinger to the west. "There."

  Thorsh sniffed repeatedly and nodded. "There."

  Deeper into the trees, ankle-high mud gave way to swamp, and it wasn't long before the four were wading waist-deep through black water. They made scarcely half a kilometer before an alarm sounded. Neither the howling of a siren nor the raucous bleating of a starship's klaxon, the alarm took the form of a prolonged and intensifying drone that arrived from all directions.

  swoop, but his doubts disappeared when the coralskipper grazed the treetops, searching for signs of the escapees.

  Thorsh waited for the wedge-shaped assault craft to pass before saying, "We're better off splitting up. We'll rendezvous at the rally point."

  "Last one there . . . ," his passenger started to say, only to let his words trail off.

  The Bith pilot revved the swoop's engine. "Let's hope for a tie."

  "The game is effectively over," C-3PO told Han Solo. "I suggest that you surrender the rest of your players now, rather than risk further humiliation."

  "Surrender?" Han jerked his thumb at the golden protocol droid. "Who's he think he's talking to?"

  Leia Organa Solo raised her brown eyes from the game table to glance at her husband. "I have to admit, things do look pretty bad."

  C-3PO agreed. "I'm afraid you can't win, Captain Solo."

  Han scratched his head absently, and continued to study the playing field. "That's not the first time someone's told me that."

  The three of them were seated at the circular dejarik table in the forward hold of Millennium Falcon. The table was in fact a hologram projector, with a checkered surface etched in concentric circles of green and gold. At the moment it was displaying six holomonster pieces, some legendary, some modeled after actual creatures, with names that sounded more like sneezes than words.

  Squatting on the grated portion of the compartment deck sat Cakhmaim and Meewalh, Leia's Noghri protectors. Agile bipeds with hairless gray skin and pronounced cranial ridges, they were unnervingly predatory in appearance, but their loyalty to Leia knew no bounds. In the long war against the Yuuzhan Vong, several Noghri had already given their lives to safeguard the woman they still sometimes referred to as "Lady Vader."

  "Don't tell me that you are actually contemplating a move?" C-3PO said.

  Han looked at him askance. "What do I look like I'm doing— stargazing?"

  "But, Captain Solo—"

  "Quit rushing me, I tell you."

  "Really, Threepio," Leia intervened in false sincerity. "You have to give him time to think."

  "But Princess Leia, the game timer is nearing the end of its cycle."

  Leia shrugged. "You know how he is."

  "Yes, Princess, I know how he is."

  Han glared at the two of them. "What is this, some kind of tag-team match?"

  C-3PO started. "Certainly not. I'm merely—

  "Remember," Han said, thrusting his finger out, "it's not over till

  the Hutt squeals."

  C-3PO looked to Leia for explanation. "The Hutt squeals?"

  Han cupped his scarred chin in his hand and took in the board. Early on he had lost a broad-shouldered Kintan strider to C-3PO's venomous, corrugated k'lor'slug; then a pincer-handed ng'ok to the droid's lance-wielding Soco
rran monnok.

  Han's quadrant of the board still showed a hunchbacked, knuckle-dragging, green-hided Mantellian savrip, and a bulbous-bodied ghhhk. But his alloy opponent had not only a claw-handed, trumpet-snouted grimtassh and a four-legged, sharp-toothed houjix, but also two rainbow-skinned Alderaanian molators waiting in the wings. Unless Han could do something to prevent it, C-3PO was going to send the grimtassh to the board's center space and win the game.

  Then it hit him.

  A sinister laughed escaped his closed lips and his eyes sparkled.

  Leia regarded him for a moment. "Uh-oh, Threepio. I don't like the sound of that laugh."

  Han shot her a look. "Since when?"

  "I understand completely, Princess," C-3PO said, on alert. "But, really, I don't see that there's anything he can do at this point."

  Han's fingers activated a series of control buttons built into the rim of the table. With Leia and C-3PO gazing intently at the board, the hulking Mantellian savrip sidestepped to the left, took hold of the ghhhk—Han's other remaining piece—and held the suddenly screeching creature high overhead.

  C-3PO might have blinked if he had eyes in place of photoreceptors. "But . . . but you've attacked your own piece." He turned to Han. "Captain Solo, if this is some kind of trick to distract me, or some attempt to instill compassion—"

  "Save your compassion for someone who needs it," Han cut in. "Like it or not, that's my move."

  C-3PO watched the squealing, seemingly betrayed ghhhk struggle in the savrip's viselike grip. "Most infuriating creature," he said. "Still, a victory is a victory."

  The droid lowered his hands to the control panel and commanded the grimtassh to advance to the center. But no sooner did the snouted creature take a step than Han's savrip tightened his hold on the ghhhk, squeezing the hapless thing so hard that holodrops of the ghhhk's much-prized skin oil began to drip onto the playing field, creating a virtual puddle. Tasked, C-3PO's grimtassh continued to move forward, only to slip on the ghhhk's skin oil and fall hard onto its back, cracking its triangular-shaped head on the checkered board and deresolving.