Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (25 page)

Nen Yim could make out the faces of many, including
the shaper Ghithra Dal, whom she had accused, and Takhaff Uul, the priest who had been in Ghithra Dal’s constant, if surreptitious, company these last many weeks.

“As you know,” Tsavong Lah said, “you travel there to take possession of Borleias once it falls. That green, rich world, almost free of the touch of the infidel, will be your reward for service to the gods, service to the Yuuzhan Vong. Half will be the domain of the priests, half of the shapers, all united in the worship of Yun-Yuuzhan. All you need to do to claim it is raise your mighty temples, your gloriously crafted domains upon her.

“Sadly, you will fail to do this.”

And there it was, the start of the warmaster’s revenge, expressed in a handful of calmly expressed words.

The crowd quieted, with many of its members turning to one another, muttering questions.

“I look forward to waking each day without being assailed by the smell of sickness, the odor of the decay of my own arm. I look forward to rising each morning in the sure knowledge that I have not displeased the gods—only a few rogue priests and shapers who dared to misappropriate the god’s will.” Tsavong Lah’s voice turned thunderous, and Nen Yim saw his broad back shake with the emotion of his words. “I look forward to knowing that those who remain behind are united in their hatred of the infidels, not in their greed for what they may obtain at the expense of others. I rejoice to think that you will soon be gone.”

“No, Warmaster.” That was the voice of the priest, Takhaff Uul, young for his posting, ambitious beyond his years. “There has been no such treachery. You must
not think it. Only in the true service to Yun-Yuuzhan can you save your arm, save yourself from the company of the Shamed Ones.”

“There are some who say that trust is a matter of faith,” Tsavong Lah replied. “I say that trust is a matter of knowledge, of observation. Find one who is trustworthy, and there is trust. Find one who is not, and there is none. But I will give you a chance at life. Takhaff Uul, do you trust our gods?”

The youthful priest cried up to him, “I do, Warmaster.”

“Do they trust
you
?”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“If they trust you, trust that your motives have been true, trust that you have thought only of their honor and not your own, I am certain they will save you. From this.” He raised his radank claw arm, pointing its pincer at the enormous leaves covering the chamber’s far entryway.

That was Nen Yim’s cue. Beneath her robe, she stroked a tiny kin to that enormous plant, coaxing it to act. It did; it curled into a tube.

So did the ones in the distance, revealing a dark gap in the wall beyond; the gap was four times the height of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, four times as wide.

A snuffling noise emerged from the gap, then something like a low, muted roar.

Then something emerged.

Like a Yuuzhan Vong, it had two arms, two legs. But its stance was low, crouching, animalistic. It had tremendous muscles, hard and corded enough to support its tremendous weight, for it was as tall as the gap through which it emerged. Its face was tusked, its teeth were huge, and its head swiveled as it spotted the Yuuzhan
Vong on the chamber floor. Its eyes followed these small creatures with the avidity of a hungry beast.

“This is a rancor,” Tsavong Lah said. “A beast of this galaxy. You do not deserve honorable death at the hands of one of our own living weapons. When you die here, it will not be as fighters, but as food to sate the creature’s appetite.”

“What if we kill it?” That was the voice of Ghithra Dal, filled with spite.

“Then you live for a while longer,” said the warmaster. “A short while.”

Through the gap emerged another rancor, then a third, and a fourth. They spread out from the gap, moving along the walls of the chamber, circling their tiny prey.

Tsavong Lah leaned back, and the tongue retracted, carrying him and Nen Yim into the ganadote mouth. As the first screams began, as the first roars echoed from the chamber walls, they turned away from the feasting scene below and the warmaster led the shaper out through the back way.

“Warmaster, may I ask two questions?”

“You may.” They emerged from the ganadote into a large, blood-blue corridor, and were joined by Tsavong Lah’s personal guards, who marched a respectful distance ahead of and behind them.

“First, will there be no outcry from the priesthood of Yun-Yuuzhan, from the shapers?”

“An outcry? Of course there will be. A cry for blood. When word returns to us that their transport was attacked by pilots of Borleias, all its passengers slaughtered, there will be a great cry for revenge.”

“Ah.” Nen Yim walked along in silence for a moment, knowing that his reply had spelled her doom, too. “Should I not go with them? Or is my death to be a different one?”

“I can’t kill you. You’re on loan from Overlord Shimmra. Besides, I have no reason to wish you harm.” They entered the stomach compartment that now housed Tsavong Lah’s private transport. The eyelidlike wall on the far side was closed now, keeping the chamber’s atmosphere intact. They walked to the transport’s ramplike protrusion and climbed into the creature’s passenger stomach. “I am pleased with you, Nen Yim. Do you plan to tell this story? To rouse hatred against me?”

“No.”

“If you did, what would happen?”

She thought about that as she settled into her seat. Its fleshy surface flowed around her waist, her torso, holding her in place against the acceleration to come. “The only reason to do so would be to harm you. In which case it becomes the story of a discredited shaper against that of the warmaster. And I would die before I could present proof.”

“And such a waste. Your cleverness, used in our service, more than makes up for the loss of Ghithra Dal and his conspirators. Will you use it in our service?”

“I will.” She did not hesitate. Tsavong Lah said
our service
. To her, that meant the Yuuzhan Vong, not him personally, and she could swear to that with a whole heart.

“Some day soon, the seedship will return to this world and complete its transformation. I wish you to return to Lord Shimmra and study the World-Brain. I wish you to
do nothing to displease the gods … but to find that knowledge which the gods do not mind us knowing.”

“I will, Warmaster.”

“Then speak no more of your death. It will come when the time is appropriate. It is not appropriate now.”

Baljos Arnjak was beginning to look like he, too, was being Vongformed. His beard and mustache were growing in; shaggy and in colors that ranged from light brown to black, his beard seemed like a riotous life-form not native to this world. The orange jumpsuit he wore when not traveling in Yuuzhan Vong armor seemed to have many more stains on it now, and some of them might have been living patches of mold or lichen. But these changes and the group’s circumstances seemed to be sitting well with him; his eyes were bright, his manner animated. “Come in, come in,” he said, waving the Jedi and Danni into the Lord Nyax suspended animation chamber. Bhindi was already there, perched on a stool.

“Tell me you have some information,” Luke said.

Baljos beamed. “I have some information. There, that was painless, wasn’t it? You can all go now.”

“Don’t taunt the Jedi,” Bhindi said. “And don’t take credit you don’t deserve.
I’m
the one who dug most of the information out of the wrecked guts of those maintenance machines.”

“True enough, Circuitry Girl. Not that you could have interpreted—” Baljos doubtless saw the impatience in someone’s face, probably Tahiri’s, for he broke off that
line of talk. “We’re prepared to tell you whatever you need to know about Lord Nyax. Anything Bhindi didn’t find in the machine memory, we’ll just make up.”

Luke leaned against a wrecked computer console and crossed his arms as though to put up a defense against whatever information was to come. “So, who is he? What was he modified for?”

Baljos nodded as though that was the first pair of questions he’d expected. “He is—or used to be—a Dark Jedi. His name was Irek Ismaren.”

Luke frowned, then shook his head. “No, that’s not possible.”

“Who’s Irek Ismaren?” Tahiri asked.

Luke dug his datapad out of a belt pouch. “Like Baljos said. He was a Dark Jedi in training. A son either of the Emperor or of one Sarcev Quest by a woman named Roganda Ismaren. She was a crazy woman who modified her son with computer implants. My sister Leia ran into him on Belsavis, oh, about fifteen years ago.”

He opened the datapad and began scrolling through entries. Though nowhere near as comprehensive as the database he kept in whatever hidden site might serve as the Jedi headquarters, this datapad included an abbreviated listing on every Jedi, Sith, Force-sensitive, or Force-related person or site he had ever encountered in his long searches for knowledge of the Jedi Order.

Within moments, he found the file he wanted. A face resolved into clarity on the datapad screen: aristocratic, handsome, somehow unfinished in a teenaged way, framed by curly dark hair.

It was the face of a younger Lord Nyax.

Suddenly Luke felt as pale as Lord Nyax. He showed the image to Mara.

She nodded. She noted some of the details that appeared on the screen under Irek’s name. “So he should be about thirty now.”

“Yes. And of normal height.”

“Except,” Baljos interrupted, “he spent most of the intervening years in that suspended animation chamber, so he’s physically younger than his chronological age. His vital processes were slowed. He was subjected to the medical treatments I mentioned earlier, treatments that kept his bones growing long past the point they should have sealed, that gave him lots more muscle mass. As a baby, he’d had a computer apparatus implanted in his brain by his mother; it helped give him enough focus—
monomania
may be a better word for it—to learn to control the Force far out of proportion to his age. When he was here, that apparatus was augmented to make his control even greater. It apparently stimulates what’s left of his brain in ways beneficial to Force control. He was equipped with lightsaber weapons, their use part of the hard coding in his brain implant—”

Luke snapped the datapad shut. “How did this happen?”

Bhindi said, “It appears that after leaving Belsavis, he and his mother came to Coruscant and hid here … and by ‘here’ I mean in this very facility. His mother carefully monitored his progress in the Force, training him so that he’d be the most powerful Dark Jedi in existence, and gave him medical treatments to make him much bigger, more imposing, more physically powerful. She also arranged to bring in the ysalamiri to keep him hidden as his presence in the Force grew stronger.”

“Then something happened,” Baljos said. “The notes are not exactly clear, but it seems like they found and took on a partner, another Dark Jedi, and at some point Irek and the new partner got in a dispute and dueled. The partner was killed, and Irek took a lightsaber thrust right through the skull. He died.”

“Died,” Luke said.

“
Technically
died,” Baljos added. “Brain activity ceased. He fell down and didn’t move anymore. But his mother and the attendant medical droids were able to maintain his autonomic functions and keep his body alive. Her journal, not surprisingly, gets a bit harder to understand at this point, and becomes increasingly demented over the years, but it becomes obvious that she kept his body in suspended animation and had the medical droids insert increasingly sophisticated components into the computer apparatus in his skull.”

Luke grimaced. “With what purpose?”

“I think,” Baljos said, “that she was trying to make him into her son again—an unlikely prospect, since most of the portions of the brain that pertained to memory and the less violent emotions were charred into carbon—and also to make him into a new leader for the Empire. She was just crazy enough to imagine he could be Emperor Irek, loving son, Dark Jedi, and unconquerable tyrant.”

Luke exchanged a look with Mara. She didn’t let any of her emotions reach her face, but he could feel them through the Force, a revulsion for a woman mad enough to keep her own son on the butcher’s block like that for so many years. “What happened to Roganda Ismaren?” he asked.

“She was the female corpse we found here. We ran cell samples against her records in the files. There’s no mistake.”

Luke gave him a disbelieving look. “Irek killed her?”

“He’s not Irek anymore.
Lord Nyax
killed her. He didn’t recognize her. She was just another moving shape in the way when he broke out of his holding tank.” Baljos shook his head. “Very nasty business. It gives even mad science a bad name.”

“Does he have any weaknesses?” Mara asked.

“Oh, yes.” Baljos gestured at the suspended animation unit. “He’s not ripe.”

“Ripe,” Luke repeated.

“It appears that a groundquake caused some ceiling rubble to drop onto one or more of the ysalamiri, killing them and damaging the unit. He woke up, burst out, went on a rampage, and fled. But he wasn’t due to come out for another couple of years.” Baljos pointed at one of the computer consoles. “All his operational programming was
there
, plus the refabricated ‘Irek’ memories Roganda planned to implant in him, and they weren’t transferred over. He has his instincts, he has some combat programming, and he has some deep-level motivations—such as to seek out Jedi and kill them, to seek out hotpoints of the Force and control them, to conquer the universe, little things like that. But he lacks memories, tactical skills … even language, I think. I doubt he’s even verbal.”

“So we can’t even talk to him.” Tahiri looked downcast. “Maybe that’s a weakness, but it doesn’t make things easier on us. He can’t be reasoned with.”

“I guess that leaves me with only one more question.” Luke returned the datapad to his belt pouch and prepared himself for what he expected to be more bad news. “Is there any way to save him? To befriend him, teach him about the light side?”

Baljos finally became serious. “I don’t think so. He’s had almost all humanity burned out of his brain. He’s just a predator whose only goal is to dominate.”