political strategist whose skills are of no use here. One Yuuzhan Vong robeskin,
a living garment whose sole virtue is that it's better than running around
naked, and matching footwraps. That's about it.
That wasn't quite it. She'd been given something a million years ago,
shortly before starting her run. She dug around under the robeskin neckline and
held the object that pretty, doomed boy had handed her. It fit her palm so that
a button fell under her thumb; there were two others on the reverse side. She
pressed the first button. A tiny red screen lit up on the remote, illuminating
her surroundings-a sheet-metal duct, layered with dust, a meter wide by half a
meter high. The screen showed a wireframe sphere with one bright red dot at its
center and another at one point on its circumference. She slowly rotated her
hand and saw the second dot move around, always staying at the circumference,
always pointed in the same cardinal direction.
It was a location finder of some sort. A distant object transmitted a
regular signal, and this device always pointed in the direction of that object.
She pressed one of the buttons on the reverse side. The wire-frame image
disappeared, replaced by the words
OUT OF RANGE.
She pressed the last button. The device spoke with the voice of a woman:
"Remember, pick up a new charge for the speeder, and we're having dinner with
the Tussins tonight."
Viqi supposed that the recording would have depressed someone of less
personal strength. She didn't even bother to wonder how dinner had gone. The
woman who'd recorded the message was gone, either crushed or vaporized or in
some slavering idiot's stew-pot, and her sole virtue was that one of her
possessions was now going to benefit Viqi Shesh. Whatever it might lead to, it
was, for now, a light source.
She rolled over onto her stomach, shining the light in front of her, and
began crawling.
Viqi stood at the center of what had once been a large living chamber,
centerpiece of the apartment of some wealthy business family. There were
numerous doors and hallways off this chamber, all leading to bedchambers,
refreshers, recreation areas-all now wrecked by looters and invasive plant life.
To Viqi's right, a few meters away, was a huge hole in the wall that had
once been a viewport half again the height of a man, and twice as broad as it
was high. Now creepers growing on the building's face hung over the gap, and
pieces of shattered transparisteel littered what had once been heated flex-
carpet.
Fungus was everywhere, grayish mushroomlike growths that were larger toward
the hole. She'd stepped on one of the tiny ones and it had detonated beneath her
foot, making her instep very sore and damaging the living footwrap she wore. She
was careful not to touch any more, and it was clear that much of the damage to
the chamber had come about because of the fungi-obviously, many of them had
exploded over the last several weeks. Perhaps vibrations in the crumbling
buildings set them off, perhaps they simply detonated when they reached a
certain size.
The wall in front of Viqi was ferrocrete that had once been decorated, its
utilitarian strength disguised, by a thick layer of flexible sheeting decorated
in a starfield pattern. Attached to building power, the sheet's stars and nebula
would glow. Now the sheeting hung in strips. She'd torn most of it away and
could find nothing beyond but ferrocrete.
On the other side of it was another crumbling skyscraper. In her
explorations, she'd managed to get onto the corresponding floor of that
building, but on its far side; collapsed hallways and walls had prevented her
from getting closer.
The tracking device had led her here, and this was the point that was
closest to whatever it indicated. On the little screen, the white dot
representing that object and the dot indicating her current position were almost
one point.
She shrugged. So she hadn't been able to find her way to the object. It
might just be a matter of ascending one floor, descending one, searching more
diligently to find the spot that gave her access.
the remote and depressed that button again.
There was a noise, a faint "ponk" of some mechanical apparatus being
activated, from above her head. She looked up and then jumped aside just in time
to avoid a descending ceiling panel. Its bottom edge came down to rest against
the floor. She moved around to look up.
It was a set of metal stairs, narrow and without rails, leading up into
darkness.
Breath catching in her throat, she hurried up the staircase. She found
herself in a narrow, low corridor that led for three meters straight to the wall
she had found so impassable-straight to a corresponding gap in that wall, a gap
that was lit from the other side.
Before moving on, she looked around and found a small button control by the
top of the hidden staircase. She pressed it and the stairs rose, locking into
place behind her.
The gap in the wall opened into a cylindrical chamber a few meters across.
Occupying most of the chamber, resting on its stern, was a vehicle-about twelve
meters long, squat at its stern and tapering toward the bow, all in a uniform
deep matte blue that made it difficult for Viqi to make out details of its hull.
There were protrusions everywhere, plates and hemispherical antennae and
maneuvering or braking flaps.
The floor of this chamber was some four meters below Viqi's feet. She stood
directly opposite a hatch that opened into the vehicle's interior, one-third of
the distance from the stern.
The thing looked like some sort of oversized military landspeeder, enclosed
to protect its crew, but since it rested on its tail-with no machinery evident
to allow it to be lowered into a horizontal position-Viqi suspected that it was
equipped for flight; she could not tell if it was an atmospheric vehicle or
spaceworthy. On the side was stenciled the vehicle's name, Ugly Truth.
She looked up. The cylindrical chamber continued upward another thirty
meters beyond the vehicle's nose, ending in a jumble of fallen metal beams and
duracrete blocks. Viqi could see faint sunlight through that deadfall. Scarcely
able to believe her good fortune, she moved forward across a narrow span of
metal that gave her access to the open hatch and clambered into the vehicle. As
the vehicle was resting at a ninety-degree angle to its intended orientation,
when she stepped down from the hatch she stood on what was obviously meant to be
the main cabin's rear bulkhead. A crudely constructed ladder of spare metal
parts wired together allowed her to climb up to the pilot's seat at the bow.
Under her touch, the secondary power switch engaged without hesitation or
resistance. The cabin lights came up; the vehicle's navigation computer went
through its power-up sequence.
Viqi felt a slow, wondering smile spread across her face. This was an
emergency evacuation vehicle, cunningly hidden away in the event of disaster...
but its owners had not been able to get to it in time as Coruscant fell. Perhaps
they had died, perhaps they had been off-world already.
Who was the youth who'd given her the locator? Son of the vehicle's owners?
A builder who'd known and kept the secret of this hidden chamber, and later
intended to use the vehicle when it became clear that its owners would be unable
to? He'd probably been prevented from escaping by the collapse of the access
above him. Perhaps he'd been working all this time to dig his way clear of that
obstacle. Now he was dead, and the vehicle was hers.
She was free of the Yuuzhan Vong and in possession of an escape from their
world.
A thought hit Viqi and her hands fell away from the controls. If this
vehicle was designed as a last-ditch opportunity for survival, perhaps it was
carrying...
She scrambled down the makeship ladder to the vehicle's stern. A hatch into
the stern compartment lay at her feet. She struggled with its locking bar and
then hauled the heavy hatch open.
Below was a storage compartment with restraining nets to either side and a
hatch at the far end. Doubtless the hatch gave access to the vehicle's
thrusters. Viqi didn't care. Her attention was riveted by what she saw in the
nets.
Rations. Military rations, carefully packed into individuat meals,
guaranteed to survive for years on the shelf. With a moan, she clambered down
into the compartment, grabbed the nearest meal at hand, and tore into the
wrapping flimsy around it.
EIGHT
Aphran System, Aptiran IV
Aphran IV was a heavily forested world whose green landmasses stood out in
stark contrast from her blue seas. She was a warm world, lacking polar ice, with
no moons to contribute tides. And she was a comparatively poor world whose
people were noted chiefly for mastery in woodworking, whose artistic inlays were
prized by collectors.
All this Han knew from a brief look at the star map records in the Falcon's
computer. The records suggested that Aphran would never survive even a weak
Yuuzhan Vong attack. Considering how close she was to the Yuuzhan Vong zone of
control, not far from Bilbringi, only her relative unimportance had kept her
from being conquered by the enemy.
Han glanced at his wife. She looked very different than usual: her hair was
long, black, and straight, her eyebrows broader and darker to match, and she
wore garments that Senator Leia Organa Solo would never have been caught dead
in.
They started with a bodysuit that was black and glossy.
Though synthetic, it creaked like hide when she moved. Her boots, low-slung
blaster holster, and gloves were of a similar material, but matte rather than
glossy. In the spirit of the character she was to portray, she had her feet up,
crossed at the ankle, on the copilot control board before her. She fixed Han
with a forbidding stare. "What are you looking at, ground-pounder?" Han shook
his head. "If your daughter could see you now..."
Leia broke character for a moment and grinned. "I'll make sure Artoo gets a
holo for her. He'll have to get you, too."
Han nodded. "I am magnificent." He'd spent enough time in front of the
mirror both to make sure that his disguise was adequate and to be certain that
his costume provided sufficient dash and drama.
He wore a close-trimmed beard. His real hair and his false facial hair were
a matching, distinguished shade of silver-gray. But he was not trying for the
look of an elder statesman; his uniform was a dark gray, two shades more somber
than the old Imperial Navy uniform, and thick with accoutrements: a brand-new
pistol on his hip, twin vibroblades on the other hip, a brace of alternating
vibroblades and small backup blasters across his chest. The metal gauntlet on
his left hand looked like a commercial robotic replacement and contained enough
circuitry to read as a prosthetic to most scanners. The contact lens on his left
eye made the eyeball silver-reflective; the false puckering scar reaching upward
and downward from the eye suggested the violence that had caused the mechanical
replacement to be installed.
C-3PO, in the passenger seat behind the pilot's chair, spoke up. "So that I
do not jeopardize your mission through misstatement or omission, Princess, may I
ask why the deception?"
"Aphran is something of an unknown quantity," Leia said. "The smugglers
we're going to meet and try to persuade to act as our local resistance
organizers say that there've been a lot of surreptitious comings and goings with
government envoy ships. What does that suggest to you?"
"That matter is rather outside my fields of expertise," the droid replied.
"But it would seem to me that the planetary government does not need to be
surreptitious when sending representatives to the New Republic. That would
suggest that they are sending their envoys to someone they wish the New Republic
to know nothing about."
Leia nodded. "Very good. To whom?"
"Since the most far-reaching government outside the New Republic is that of
the Yuuzhan Vong, simple statistics give the highest probability of it being
them."
"Correct. Or perhaps the Peace Brigade, acting as intermediaries for the
Yuuzhan Vong."
"Oh, I hope not, Princess. The Peace Brigade are, well, very unpleasant.
Very difficult." This was something of an understatement; the Peace Brigade was
a loose alliance of mercenaries who cooperated with the Yuuzhan Vong. Believing
the Yuuzhan Vong claim that a galaxy without the Jedi would be a galaxy at
peace, or just to earn profits, they had hunted the Jedi, capturing some and
turning them over to the enemy. Definitely "unpleasant"-except to those who
shared their ability to cast blame for the current war on anyone but the
aggressors-they were widely regarded as traitors to the New Republic.
Han said, "And if they're talking to the Vong, the Solos can't be
recognized here."
Leia nodded. "If the Yuuzhan Vong learn that the Solos are here, they come
to get us. Even if we use false names, if a Corellian YT-Thirteen-Hundred
freighter lands with a dashing, vainglorious man at the controls, it doesn't
matter what name he uses, people are going to think Han Solo."
Han shot her an offended look. "Vainglorious?"
"Vainglorious," Leia affirmed. "Vain plus glorious. Go ahead, deny it."
"Well... I can't, really."
Instead of being directed to a berth on the planetary capital's commercial
district, the Falcon followed her homing beacon to a government spaceport
district some distance away from the capital. The spaceport was an enormous
thing, kilometers long, with landing bays and Warehousing domes on spars that
extended like the arms of some sort of mutant sea creature from a central hub.
As they followed the beacon in, Han spent a lot of time at the comm board,
arguing first with one minor official, then another. Finally, just before final
approach, he leaned back and sighed. "We can't land in the commercial zone," he
said.
Leia frowned. "Why not?"
"All cargo has to be off-loa
ded and inventoried here. New regulations. Once
it's all off-loaded, we can decide where it's to be taken by their cargo
haulers. Back on the ship, for transport elsewhere, or into one of the
warehouses up here for evaluation by buyers. The thing is, no matter where it's
loaded, it costs money to move it. and it costs more to put it back on the ship
than to warehouse it."
Leia nodded, a world-weary smile on her lips. "Which is an inducement to
keep the cargo up here so that a more limited range of buyers can look at it.
Which helps keep prices and bribes where they want them."
"And people called me dishonest," Han muttered, "On the other hand, we
don't have to wait around for them to complete their inventory. We can take a
commercial landspeeder in to their capital. That'll give them lots more time to
steal expensive bits and pieces from our cargo, which is really what it's for
anyway."
A pair of Aphran men standing in front of a refueling station watched the
duo emerge from the landing bay that now housed the Corellian YT-1300 freighter.
"I see a man and a woman I don't recognize," said the first. He was a man
of middle height, his hair, beard, and mustache graying. With his reserved,
courteous manner and his colorful, comparatively expensive clothing, he looked
like a fit merchant. But the hardness of his eyes, when he was not trying to
cause someone to like or trust him, suggested that he was not that peaceable a
man. "And while the man and the woman could be the Solos, they could also be
billions of other people."
"I didn't say they were the Solos," the second man said. His jumpsuit
matched the lavender-with-black-pinstripes decor of the front of the refueling
station; he was as lean and tough looking as the banded artificial muscles found
in cybernetic limbs. "1 said that it was the Millennium Falcon. I don't care
where they slap paint on her or how many new antennas they mount on her, I know
the look of her. I know the sound of her creaks when she comes in for a landing.
"
"Hmm. Well, until we're sure, we play it safe."
"There's less money in playing it safe."
"There's longer to live and spend that money in playing it safe."