Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse Page 8

  “Yeah, we actually do have some others,” the first guard was saying. “Thirty-two, at last count.” He sneered down at Gaph. “Sec 465, Ryn. Behind the communal refreshers.”

  Gaph heard Melisma’s sharp intake of breath and turned to her. “All right, so forget what I said about fresh air. We’ll still have food and drink to slack our appetites and a roof over our heads.”

  “We could have all that in jail,” Melisma groused.

  Gaph wagged his forefinger. “Trust me, child, jail is no place for the Ryn. Here, at least, we’ll be able to sing and dance and revel in our good fortune.”

  “Follow the droid,” the guard barked. “And no lingering or wandering off, or you’ll have me to answer to.”

  “Ah, good fortune,” Melisma said sarcastically. “Let’s just hope for a roof, Gaph.”

  The droid, a squeaking, limping protocol model, ushered them into a warren of ramshackle dwellings slapped together from aged harvester and spaceship parts—bulkhead hatchways, harvester blades, foils, and the like. Elsewhere were prefabricated duraplast huts anchored to slabs of ferrocrete, tents and A-frames, primitive lean-tos, self-standing blister shelters, elliptical huts sided with animal hide, and conical ones wrapped in lubricant-stained tarpaulins.

  “Facility 17 was built on the site of a former junkyard,” the droid said proudly. “Everyone has been very inventive in the use of obsolete equipment.”

  In unlighted interiors or on muddy ground or patches of lifeless trampled grass sat species native to sectors as remote as the Imperial Remnant and as close as the Koornacht Cluster, all uprooted from the worlds they had called home, some of which the Yuuzhan Vong had rendered uninhabitable or destroyed outright. In a half-circle scan, Melisma’s eye fell on Ruurians, Gands, Sa-heelindeeli, Bimms, Weequays, Myneyrshi, Tammarians, Gotals, and Wookiees. Absent, though, was any indication of fellowship; in its place a sense of impending riot tainted the air. Beings glowered at one another or stood sullenly with jaws clenched and hands balled into fists.

  As if reading her concerns, the protocol droid provided commentary, in Basic.

  “With everyone crammed together without regard to differences and distinctions, some suppressed prejudices and hostilities have on occasion boiled to the fore, resulting in contentious seizures of territory or sustenance, or melees that have spread throughout the facility. But, of course, those incidents were quickly quelled by Sal-liche Ag’s well-trained staff, who employ physical force only when absolutely necessary.”

  As had happened on the transport, the Ryn met with looks of suspicion and repugnance from all sides. Fathers safeguarded family valuables, and mothers gathered children within arm’s reach. Some made religious gestures of self-protection, and others voiced outrage that Ryn had even been allowed into the camp.

  Melisma stared straight ahead. She was accustomed to such treatment, and she understood that the Ryn’s penchant for wanderlust and secrecy was at least partly responsible for the fictions that had grown up around them. Ostracized by many societies, the Ryn had grown only more transient, secretive, and self-sufficient over time, and as outsiders they had become keen observers of the behaviors of other species—second-guessers of what many beings, humans especially, often had in mind to say. And so their fondness for song, dance, and spicy foods, and their adeptness at forgery and fortune-telling—lacking any true psychic abilities. The gambling game that had come to be known as sabacc had its roots in a deck of cards the Ryn had invented as a means of disguising their mystical doctrines.

  “We’re now approaching the distribution center,” the droid announced.

  “I wondered what that smell was,” Melisma said to Gaph, who chided her for being overly critical, only to change his tune when they got a good look at the situation.

  Queued sinuously at makeshift stalls, hundreds of beings were waiting to receive squirts of an off-color, pastelike synthfood squeezed by droids from enormous, pliant containers. Other lines snaked to the patched-up hulls of vintage riverboats filled to the gunnels with foam-covered water.

  “For paltry sums,” the droid remarked, “many ofSalliche Ag’s well-trained staff will gladly provide foodstuffs to please the most discriminating palates. Superior housing can also be secured for reasonable fees, as evidenced atop Noob Hill.”

  Melisma followed the droid’s metal finger to a parcel of high ground surrounded by stun fencing. Isolated from the rest of the facility, twenty or so Ithorians could be seen going about their business in open-sided, thatch-roofed pavilions. To one side deep drainage ditches separated them from a waddle of Gamorreans, who were living in bungalows made of sun-baked bricks. To the other side, beyond a wall of thorned shrubs, a rumpus of Wookiees had constructed a log tree house.

  Deeper in the camp things were even worse. The mud that had been a nuisance earlier on became ankle-deep for long stretches, and the shelters—a ghetto of unroofed sheds and slat-sided shanties—clustered at the base of a hill that saw scant sunlight and funneled runoff rainwater directly into the food distribution area. In place of prefab tents and blister huts stood hovels more suitable for livestock than sentients. Here a trove of resourceful hollow-boned Vors had made use of starship maneuvering vanes to construct a kind of stilted bower for themselves; and there a nest of batrachian Rybet had fashioned a spacious hutch from empty cargo crates and support pylons off Y-wing engine nacelles.

  Nearly everyone else was living in filth.

  A new stench in the air told Melisma that they were nearing the communal refreshers. “Maybe it’s only when there’s no wind,” Gaph remarked.

  “Then maybe we should petition climate supervision to whip up a hurricane,” Melisma said from behind the hand she’d clamped over her mouth.

  As promised, just past the refreshers was Section 465,announced by a sign, to which someone had added the words Ryn City.

  More than half the thirty-two were on hand to greet Gaph and Melisma’s quintet as they trudged into a courtyard that might have struck some as uncommonly sanitary but was in fact normal for the Ryn, who were by nature almost ritualistic about order and cleanliness.

  The leader among the ensconced group, a tall male named R’vanna, welcomed them with bowls of tasty Ryn food and a slew of questions about the circumstances that had brought them to Ruan. Gaph started at the very beginning, explaining how they had just fled the Corporate Sector when their caravan of ships had been set upon by a Yuuzhan Vong patrol. Scattered far and wide as a result of emergency hyperspace jumps, many had ended up at Ord Mantell’s Jubilee Wheel, where they had been caught up in another Yuuzhan Vong attack. Refugees by then, some had found transport to Bil-bringi, others to Rhinnal, and still others to Gyndine.

  Then R’vanna told his story, which, while it began in the Tion Hegemony, had much in common with Gaph’s tale of woe.

  One of the women showed Melisma and her cousins to a dormitory. Leaving the infant in the care of her cousins, Melisma rejoined Gaph and R’vanna, who was in the midst of painting a vivid picture of life in Facility 17.

  “Though water is rarely a problem—our overseers simply create rainstorms as needed—food shortages have begun to occur on a regular basis and disease is rampant. The diseases could easily be eradicated, of course, and Ruan is capable of supplying all the food needed just from what the labor droids allow to rot in or on the ground, but it’s to Salliche Ag’s advantage that everyone in camp remain as miserable as possible.”

  “How is that to Salliche’s advantage?” Melisma asked. “And why would Princess Leia praise the company for its unconditional generosity if we’re a burden to everyone?”

  “Salliche is desirous of refugees, child, but not for the camps. They want us in the fields.”

  “As workers?”

  “Of a sort.” R’vanna paused to tap a wad of charred t’bac from the bowl of a hand-carved pipe. “The New Republic is genuinely committed to relocating everyone to populous worlds, but with the war and all, the chances of relocation are slim—even
though you won’t hear mention of this in the familiarization classes.”

  “Familiarization?” Melisma said. “For what?”

  “Why, to prepare us for our new lives among the civilized peoples of the Core. You’ll soon see for yourself. But as I say, chances are slim. Some of those living on Noob Hill can afford to purchase forward passage with private transport companies, but not everyone is so fortunate. In any event, no one wants to be here any longer than necessary, so many have accepted offers by Salliche Ag to work their way off Ruan.”

  “In the fields,” Gaph said.

  R’vanna nodded. “Except that very few manage to earn enough to purchase onward passage. Most of the camp’s earliest arrivals have been forced into indentured servitude, here on Ruan or on other Salliche-administered worlds, and rumors persist that those who refuse Salliche’s benevolence often disappear.”

  “But it makes no sense,” Melisma said. “Sentients will never replace droids as workers. Sentients need more than the occasional oil bath and data upgrades. Not to mention that production would be drastically reduced.”

  R’vanna showed her a patient smile. “I said as much to a Salliche representative who visited Ryn City only lastweek. And do you know what he told me? That the hiring of sentients not only eases the refugee problem but allows the company to advertise its products as retaining ‘handpicked freshness.’ “

  Gaph mulled it over for a moment. “So our options, for the moment, are either to go to work for Salliche Ag or remain mired here.”

  Melisma glanced around the courtyard, and at the masterfully built dormitories and kitchens. “How have you managed to do so well? Walking through the camp, I was afraid we were going to be attacked and killed. If folks could find a way, I’m sure they’d hold us accountable for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion.”

  R’vanna smiled sadly. “Life has always been thus for the Ryn. But not everyone fears or distrusts us. It’s thanks to those few that we’ve done so well.”

  “Charity?”

  “Bite your tongue, child,” Gaph said theatrically. “The Ryn do not accept charity. We work for all we get.”

  Melisma looked at R’vanna. “What sort of work can we do here?”

  “The sort we’re best at: apprising people of their options, allowing them to see the error of their ways, providing them with helpful tips to see them through the complexities of daily life.”

  “Telling fortunes,” Melisma said, mildly disdainful. “Reading sabacc cards.”

  Gaph was grinning broadly. “Singing, dancing, the rewards that come to those who dispense good advice . . . Life could be worse, child. Life could be much worse.”

  “Aren’t you the one who said that help had arrived?” the red-maned Ryn named Sapha asked Wurth Skidder aboard the slave ship Creche.

  “I might have said something to that effect,” the Jediwas willing to concede. “Heat of the moment, and all that.”

  Roa regarded Skidder with interest, then glanced past him at Sapha. “When was this?”

  “On Gyndine,” she told him, “when he rushed to be captured by the multilegged creature that was herding us together. He said, ‘Take heart, help has arrived.’”

  Roa looked at Skidder once more. “He rushed?”

  Sapha shrugged. “It looked that way from where I stood.”

  Side by side, the three of them were standing to their waists in the viscous sorrel-colored nutrient in which the young yammosk marinated, like an excised brain in an autopsy pan. The cloying odor—like garlic roses bathed in nlora perfume—had taken some getting used to, but by now almost all the captives were beyond the retching stage, though a male Sullustan had fainted moments earlier and had had to be carried out.

  One of the more gracile of the creature’s manifold tentacles floated in front of Skidder and his comrades, and their hands were busy massaging and caressing it, the way the Bimms did with certain breeds of nerf to assure steaks of extraordinary tenderness. Roa’s worrisomely wan pal, Fasgo, and two Ryn were doing the same to the other side of the tentacle. The arrangement of six to a tentacle was repeated throughout the circular basin, except at the yammosk’s shorter, thicker members, where two or three captives sufficed.

  “He rushed,” Roa said, more to himself this time; then he fixed Skidder with a gimlet stare. “Sapha almost makes it sound like you wanted to be captured, Keyn.”

  “To wind up here?” Skidder said. “A guy would have to be either deranged or dauntless.”

  Smile lines formed at the corners of Roa’s eyes. “I’veknown a few in my day who were both. I can’t put my finger on it, but something tells me you fit the bill.”

  Two hose-thick, pulsating ducts projected from the yammosk’s bulbous head to disappear into the arching, membranous ceiling of the hold. Skidder assumed that at least one of them furnished the creature with a required mix of respiratory gases, though Chine-kal assured that yammosks became oxygen breathers as they matured into actual war coordinators.

  At the moment the clustership’s commander was completing a circle on the grated walkway that ran around the lip of the yorik-coral basin. Concentric to the basin stood a company of lightly armed guards.

  “For all the revulsion it seems to invoke in some of you, the yammosk is an extremely sensitive creature,” he was saying. “One effect of its powerful desire to bond is empathy of a high order, which later culminates as telepathy, of a sort. As part of its early training, the yammosk is conditioned to regard select dovin basals as its children, its brood—the same dovin basals that provide thrust for our starships and the single-pilot craft the New Republic military refers to as coralskippers. When, then, we enter into engagements with the forces of your worlds, the yammosk sees its children as threatened and attempts to coordinate their activities to minimize loss.”

  Chine-kal came to a halt close to where Skidder and the others stood, and gestured to the ceiling. “The darker blue of the throbbing arteries that enter the yammosk just above the eyes is linked even now to the drive of this ship, because the yammosk is still in the process of familiarizing itself with the dovin basal. The kinder you are to the yammosk, the more affection you show for it, the better you make it feel, the better its link with the dovin basal, and the better the ship performs.”

  The commander pivoted to face one of the membranous walls. In a blister visible to all the captives sat a pulsing, heart-shaped organism.

  “Here you see a small dovin basal, approximate in size to the ones housed in the noses of the coralskippers. Its color indicates how well you are succeeding at your task, and its current pale red tells me that you are doing reasonably well, but not as well as you might. So what we’re going to do is increase the pace of our strokings in time with the count provided by the dovin basal. If we’re successful, the ship will respond in turn. So let us begin ...”

  Skidder braced himself. It wasn’t so much that the handwork itself was fatiguing, but intense and constant tactile contact with the tentacles quickly left everyone exhausted, almost as if the yammosk was feeding off the captives’ expended energy to somehow enhance itself. It was easy enough to refuse participation, but holding back led only to someone being singled out and punished.

  As the dovin basal began to pulse more rapidly, the captives increased the speed and force of the strokings and kneadings, struggling to find a rhythm. The pulses grew even more rapid; the manipulations grew more urgent and frantic. The count quickened once more. Many of the captives were breathing hard, some of them wheezing. Rills of sweat coursed down faces and arms. Those who couldn’t sustain the pace collapsed, doubled over atop their assigned tentacles, or slid down into the gluey nutrient. But the rest had found a collective beat the yammosk responded to by sending ripples down its tentacles.

  Skidder could almost feel the clustership surge.

  Then the dovin basal slowed and gradually returned to a gentle pulsing.

  “Good,” Commander Chine-kal said at last. “Very good.”

  Skidder swallo
wed hard and calmed himself. Sapha and Roa were panting, and Fasgo looked delirious.

  Chine-kal began another circuit on the organic walkway. “As some of you have already learned, battle coordination is only one of the yammosk’s talents. When I told you earlier that its empathy bordered on telepathy, I was not overstating things. Also as part of its training, the young yammosk is conditioned to establish a cognitive rapport with the commander in whose custody the yammosk will serve. In fact, this yammosk and myself are already on familiar terms. But we’re going to attempt something that has never been done—the truly ‘extraordinary’ part of this joint endeavor. We wish the yammosk to become familiar with you—with all of you—so that we might bring this invasion to a speedy and relatively painless conclusion.”

  Skidder glanced at Roa. “Did you know about this?”

  The old man returned a grim nod.

  “As the yammosk becomes more accustomed to your touch,” Chine-kal was saying, “it may wish to touch you back, especially on the chest, upper back, neck, and face. You will allow it to do so. It may take no interest in some of you; with others it may find a deep affinity. In either case, I caution you not to resist its telepathic probes, for you risk injuring yourself as much as the yammosk. Resistance could very well result in madness or death. Laugh, cry, scream if you must, but do not resist.”

  “He’s not kidding,” Roa said with sudden solemnity. He looked intently at Sapha, then Skidder. “Try to keep your mind blank, otherwise it will pursue your thoughts like a predator chasing the first meal of the day. That’swhere you can lose your way. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen more than once.”

  Skidder had been doing his best to hide his Jediness, his strength in the Force, the events that had motivated him to be captured, his wish to avenge his fallen comrades. Faced with Chine-kal’s revelation, however, he suddenly couldn’t help but recall what Danni Quee had told him of the way the Yuuzhan Vong had used a yam-mosk to break Miko. Nor could he suppress his urgency to make contact with his fellow Jedi and apprise them of the enemy’s latest plan.