Balance Point Page 2

  Han Solo stood with his left hand on his hip, arguing with Mezza, who led the larger of two Ryn clan remnants, but keeping one eye on the transgressors, a group of youths about Jacen’s age, with fading juvenile stripes on their cheeks. The Ryn clans occupied one of Settlement Thirty-two’s three wedge-shaped arrays of blue-roofed huts. The synthplas dome arched overhead, as gray as the polluted mists that swirled outside.

  Jacen had been blessed—or cursed—with a sensitivity that he once hid behind labored jokes, and he did find it easy to see both sides of almost any argument. Part of his job here was to help his dad negotiate. Han tended to cut to solutions, instead of listening to both parties’ points of view. Han had chased the Ryn over half the New Republic, trying to gather his new friend Droma’s invasion-scattered clanmates. As world after world closed its doors to refugees, the Ryn had been beggared, duped, and betrayed. They’d taken terrible losses. They needed a sponsor.

  So a reluctant Han Solo registered with the burgeoning Select Committee for Refugees. “Just long enough to settle them someplace.” That was how he explained it to Jacen, anyway.

  Jacen had fled here from Coruscant. Two months ago, the New Republic had called him and his brother Anakin to Centerpoint Station, the massive hyperspace repulsor and gravity lens in the Corellian system. There’d been hope that Anakin, who had activated Centerpoint once before, could enable it again. Military advisers had hoped to lure the Yuuzhan Vong into attacking Corellia, and they meant to use Centerpoint as an interdiction field, to trap the enemy inside Corellian space—and then wipe them out. Even Uncle Luke hoped the station might be used only in its shielding capacity, not as a weapon.

  The New Republic might never recover from the catastrophe that followed.

  Jacen could see stress in his dad’s lined face and his labored stride, and in the gray growing into his hair. Even after all these years of hobnobbing with bureaucrats and tolerating his wife’s protocol droid, patience clearly wasn’t his strong suit.

  Standing on the dust-beaten lane outside the Solos’ hut, Mezza’s opposing clan leader twisted his own tail between strong hands. The fur on Romany’s forearms, and the tip of his tail, stood out like bleached bristles.

  “So your clan,” Han said, pointing at Romany, “thinks your clan”—pointing now at Mezza—“is likely to hijack our transport ships and strand everybody else here on Duro? Is that it?”

  Someone at the back of Romany’s group shouted, “I wouldn’t put it past them, Solo.”

  Another Ryn stepped forward. “We were better off in the Corporate Sector, dancing for credits and telling fortunes. At least there we had our own ships. We could hide our children from poisoned air. And even more poisonous … words.”

  Han stuck his hands into his dusty coverall pockets and caught Jacen’s glance. Jacen could almost look him in the eye nowadays.

  “Any suggestions?” Han muttered.

  “They’re just venting their frustrations now,” Jacen observed.

  He glanced up. The gray synthplas dome over their heads had been imported in accordion folds and unfurled over three arched metal struts. The refugees were reinforcing it with webs of native rock fiber, roughly half the colony working double shifts to strengthen the dome and their prefab huts. The other half labored outside, at a pit-mine “reservoir” and water purification site assigned by SELCORE.

  Abruptly Han flung up an arm and shouted, “Hey!”

  Jacen spun around in time to see one young male Ryn somersault out of Romany’s group and crouch for fisticuffs. Two from Mezza’s group body-blocked him with surprising grace. Within seconds, Han was wading into an out-and-out melee that looked too graceful to actually endanger anyone. Ryn were natural gymnasts. They swung their opponents by their bristled tails, hooting through their beaks like a flock of astromech droids. They almost seemed to be dancing, playing, releasing their tensions. Jacen opened his mouth to say, Don’t stop them. They need to cut loose.

  At that moment, he collapsed, his chest flashing with fire as if he’d been torn open. His legs burned so fiercely he could almost feel hot shrapnel. The pain blasted down his legs, then into his ears.

  Jaina?

  Joined through the Force even before they were born, he and Jaina had always been able to tell when the other was hurt or afraid. But for him to sense her over the distances that lay between them now, she must’ve been terribly—

  The pain winked off.

  “Jaina!” he whispered, appalled. “No!”

  He stretched out toward her, trying to find her again. Barely aware of fuzzy shapes clustering around him and a Ryn voice hooting for a medical droid, he felt as if he were shrinking—falling backwards into a vacuum. He tried focusing deep inside and outside himself, to grab on to the Force and punch out—or slip into a healing trance. Could he take Jaina with him, if he did? Uncle Luke had taught him a dozen focusing techniques, back at the academy, and since then.

  Jacen.

  A voice seemed to echo in his mind, but it wasn’t Jaina’s. It was deep, male—vaguely like his uncle’s.

  Making an effort, Jacen imagined his uncle’s face, trying to focus on that echo. An enormous white vortex seemed to spin around him. It pulled at him, drawing him toward its dazzling center.

  What was going on?

  Then he saw his uncle, robed in pure white, half turned away. Luke Skywalker held his shimmering lightsaber in a diagonal stance, hands at hip level, point high.

  Jaina! Jacen shouted the words in his mind. Uncle Luke, Jaina’s been hurt!

  Then he saw what held his uncle’s attention. In the dim distance, but clearly in focus, a second form straightened and darkened. Tall, humanoid, powerfully built, it had a face and chest covered with sinuous scars and tattoos. Its hips and legs were encased in rust-brown armor. Claws protruded from its heels and knuckles, and an ebony cloak flowed from its shoulders. The alien held a coal-black, snake-headed amphistaff across its body, mirroring the angle of Luke’s lightsaber, pitting poisonous darkness against verdant light.

  Utterly confused, Jacen stretched out through the Force. First he sensed the figure in white as a respected uncle—then abruptly as a powerful depth, blazing in the Force like a star gone nova. But across this slowly spinning disk, where Jacen’s inner vision presented a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, his Force sense picked up nothing at all. Through the Force, all Yuuzhan Vong did seem utterly lifeless, like the technology they vilified.

  The alien swung its amphistaff. The Jedi Master’s lightsaber blazed, swept down, and blocked the swing, brightening until it washed out almost everything else in this vision. The Yuuzhan Vong’s amphistaff seemed darker than any absence of light, a darkness that seemed alive but promised death.

  The broad, spinning disk on which they both stood finally slowed. It focused into billions of stars. Jacen picked out the familiar map of known space.

  Luke dropped into a fighting stance, poised near the galaxy’s center, the Deep Core. He raised his lightsaber and held it high, near his right shoulder, pointing inward. From three points of darkness, beyond the Rim, tattooed assailants advanced.

  More of them? Jacen realized this was a vision, not a battle unfolding in front of him, with little to do with his twin sister.

  Or maybe everything to do with her! Did these new invaders symbolize other invasion forces, more worldships—besides the ones that were already beating back everything the New Republic could throw at them? Reaching out to Jaina, maybe he had tapped the Force itself—or maybe it broke through to him.

  The galaxy seemed to teeter, poised between light and darkness. Luke stood close to the center, counterweighing the dark invaders.

  But as their numbers increased, the balance tipped.

  Uncle Luke, Jacen shouted. What should I do?

  Luke turned away from the advancing Yuuzhan Vong. Looking to Jacen with somber intensity, he tossed his lightsaber. It flew in a low, humming arc, trailing pale green sparks onto the galactic plane.

  Eyeing the a
dvancing horde, Jacen felt another enemy try to seize him: anger, from deep in his heart. Fear and fury focused his strength. If he could, he would utterly destroy the Yuuzhan Vong and all they stood for! He opened a hand, stretched out his arm …

  And missed.

  The Jedi weapon sailed past him. As anger released him, fear took a tighter hold. Jacen flailed, leapt, tried stretching out with the Force. Luke’s lightsaber sailed on, shrinking and dimming with distance.

  Now the galaxy tipped more quickly. A dark, deadly tempest gathered around the alien warriors. Disarmed, Luke stretched out both hands. First he, then his enemies, swelled to impossible sizes. Instead of human and alien figures, now Jacen saw light and darkness as entirely separate forces. Even the light terrified him in its grandeur and majesty. The galaxy seemed poised to plunge toward evil, but Jacen couldn’t help staring at the fearful light, spellbound, burning his retinas.

  A Jedi knows no fear … He’d heard that a thousand times, but this sensation was no cowardly urge to run. This was awe, it was reverence—a passionate longing to draw nearer. To serve the light and transmit its grandeur.

  But compared to the forces battling around him, he was only a tiny point. Helpless and unarmed, besides—because of one moment’s dark anger. Had that misstep doomed him? Not just him, but the galaxy?

  A voice like Luke’s, but deeper, shook the heavens. Jacen, it boomed. Stand firm.

  The horizon tilted farther. Jacen lunged forward, determined to lend his small weight to Luke’s side, to the light.

  He misstepped. He flailed for Luke’s hand, but missed again. And again, his weight fell slightly—by centimeters—toward the dark enemies.

  Luke seized his hand and held tightly. Hang on, Jacen! The slope steepened under their feet. Stars extinguished. The Yuuzhan Vong warriors scrambled forward. Whole star clusters winked out, a dark cascade under clawed enemy feet.

  Plainly, the strength of a hundred-odd Jedi couldn’t keep the galaxy from falling to this menace. One misstep—at one critical moment, by one pivotal person—could doom everyone they’d sworn to protect. No military force could stop this invasion, because it was a spiritual battle. And if one pivotal person fell to the dark side—or even used the ravishing, terrifying power of light in a wrong way—then this time, everything they knew might slide into stifling darkness.

  Is that it? he cried toward the infinite distance.

  Again, Jacen perceived the words in a voice that was utterly familiar but too deep to be Luke’s. Stand firm, Jacen.

  One of the Yuuzhan Vong leapt toward him. Jacen gasped and flung out both arms—

  And grabbed a flimsy bedsheet. He lay on his back, on a cot under a corrugated blue synthplas roof. The room was bigger than a refugee shelter. It had to be the medical end of the dome’s hardened control shed.

  “Junior,” another familiar voice drawled. “Hey, there. Glad you could join us.”

  Jacen looked up into his father’s wry half smile. Worry lines crowded Han’s eyes. Behind him, the Ryn named Droma clutched and twisted his soft red and blue cap, and his long mustachios drooped. In recent months, Droma had become his dad’s … what? His friend, his assistant? Certainly not a partner or copilot, but a real presence.

  The settlement’s most valuable droid, a 2-1B medical unit that Han pirated no-one-knew-where, lingered on Jacen’s other side, retracting a flexible breath mask.

  “What happened?” Han looked befuddled. “Hit your head on the way down? Skinny, here—”

  Droma pointed at the droid and finished Han’s sentence. “—wants to dump you into the bacta tank.” Ryn were shrewd observers, perceptive enough to lock into other people’s thought patterns and finish their sentences.

  Han swung toward his friend. “Listen, bristle-face. When I want to say something, I’ll say it—”

  “Jaina,” Jacen managed. The back of his skull throbbed in rhythm with his pulse. Evidently he had hit it as he fell. He almost opened his mouth to describe what he’d seen, but he hesitated. Han was already confused by Jacen’s emotional paralysis, and the way he’d begged out of the other Jedis’ rescue and fact-finding missions. As hard as Jacen had tried to pull back from Jedi concerns, the Force wouldn’t leave him alone. It was his heritage, his destiny.

  And if the fate of billions rested on a balance point so narrow that one misstep could doom everyone, did he dare even mention his vision until his own path seemed clear? He’d almost gotten himself enslaved once, following a vision into danger. The Yuuzhan Vong had gone so far as to plant one of their deadly coral seeds against his cheekbone. Maybe this time, he’d been given a private warning to steer clear of some dangerous course. Would he know it when it opened up in front of him?

  This vision hadn’t eased his confusion at all.

  “What?” his father demanded. “What about Jaina?”

  Jacen squeezed his eyes shut, refusing to trivialize the Force by using it to ease a headache. What is it, he begged the unseen Force, that you want me to do?

  Or would he cause the next galactic catastrophe by trying to prevent it?

  “We’ve got to contact Rogue Squadron,” Jacen blurted. “I think she’s been hurt.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  At the control shed’s other end, a shapely young Ryn female sat near the middle of a wall of mostly dark displays, cradling a child in her lap. The colony’s resident Hutt—Randa Besadii Diori—lay snoozing along the near wall. His long tan-colored tail twitched.

  “Piani.” Han Solo stepped into the main room right behind Jacen. “We need a line out.”

  The smile faded below Piani’s chitinous beak. Ryn were such sensitive body-language readers that she was probably closing in on what had them worried. “Outsystem?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Jacen said. “Can you raise the relay repeater? We need to get a message to my sister, with Rogue Squadron.”

  Piani eased her sleeping child away from her shoulder, then laid him in a padded cargo crate on the floor.

  “I’ll try,” she promised. “But you know Admiral Dizzlewit. Sit down, have a bedjie.”

  She motioned toward a sideboard, where several small, dark fungi steamed beside a hefty pot of caf. Bedjies were easy to raise—seed a shallow tank with spores, wait a week, and come back with a net. They were becoming standard refugee fare.

  Jacen wasn’t even slightly hungry, but Han grasped one between thumb and forefinger and nibbled. Steamed, unspiced bedjies were unspeakably bland, but the Ryn matriarchs had taken to hoarding their herbs.

  “Solo!” Randa awoke from his nap. He rolled over and ponderously pulled his upper body into the air. “Why are you here?”

  Jacen had tried to get along with Randa. Raised as a spice merchant, sent by the Hutts to run slaves for the Yuuzhan Vong, Randa had defected at Fondor—supposedly.

  “Getting a message out,” Jacen said numbly. A Jedi knows no fear, he’d been taught. Fear is of the dark side.

  Fear for himself, he could thrust aside. But for Jaina? He couldn’t help being afraid for his sister. They were linked at an uncanny depth.

  Still young, relatively light, and lithe enough to move under his own power, Randa slithered closer.

  “What are you doing here?” Han demanded.

  Randa puffed out his sloping chest. “I told you. With my parent Borga defending Nal Hutta with only half the clans’ support—and pregnant with my sibling, at that—where am I? Stranded, as shipless as one of these idiot Vors. I am willing to stand communication watch day and night. That way, I will hear any news from home and free up your workers for—”

  “We’ll talk about it,” Han interrupted. “Piani, what—”

  Scowling, the Ryn whirled her chair away from her set. “I can’t even get through to Dizzlewit. He left orders. ‘No civilian use of relay without authorization,’ ” she mocked. “So I applied for authorization.” She shook her long, sleek mane of hair. “I can notify you as soon as I get it.”

  Han glared. He and the Duros Admiral
Darez Wuht had ended up crosswise twice before his first week on Duro ran out. Admiral Wuht hadn’t even tried to pretend he felt hospitable toward refugees.

  It’d been hoped that the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t be interested in a planet that was nearly dead. SELCORE, searching the Core region for a place to locate millions of war refugees, had struck a deal with the Duros High House, one of the few remaining local governments that still seemed willing to accept refugees at all. Displaced people could help reclaim its surface, bring abandoned manufacturing plants back on-line, and take over the food-synthesis plants that still fed Duros in their orbital cities. Duros who had worked groundside could go home. Refugees with military experience, it had been argued, might even help defend Duro’s vital trading hubs, including one of the New Republic’s top ten remaining shipyards.

  Except that the refugees weren’t volunteering for military service in anything like the numbers Wuht anticipated.

  Commanding the orbital cities’ overlapping planetary shields, four squadrons of fighters, and the Mon Cal cruiser Poesy, Admiral Wuht provided the refugees some cover, even as the orbital cities retooled for military production. With the Fondor shipyards lost and all the other main military shipyards such obvious targets, the New Republic was hastily decentralizing military production.

  Unfortunately, most of the New Republic’s other warships in this area had been redeployed to Bothawui, or out the Corellian Run. Jacen had heard that the Adumari had attempted a flanking attack on Yuuzhan Vong positions up near Bilbringi. He hoped it was true.

  Jacen eyed Piani’s comm board. “How’s the cable to Gateway? Could we get them to send out a signal faster?”

  Thanks to SELCORE’s official presence at that nearby settlement, Gateway reportedly had a dependable uplink, even an outlink. Insulated fiber cables connected the two domes, but Duro’s only surviving fauna—mutant fefze beetles—found fiber cables perfectly tasty. Duro’s corrosive atmosphere was too murky for line-of-sight transmitting or satellite bouncing.

  Predictably, Piani shook her head. “Gateway’s scheduled to send out a cable rider in two days.”