Book 10 - Star by Star

Author:Troy Denning [Denning, Troy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Wars, Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345428677
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 2001-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

In the dim planetglow shining down from Myrkr’s emerald face, the flattened senalak shafts looked more like ice spikes than any security system Anakin had ever seen. The rigid stalks were only knee-high and no thicker than a finger, but as Jovan Drark’s invisible Force wave pushed a safe furrow through the field, their blunt blue caps released a meter-long strand of thorns. The barbed cord would flail around in the vacuum for a couple of seconds, presumably entwining and capturing—if not killing—whatever had disturbed it.

Had Alema not warned them about the trap, the strike team would have entered the security field completely unprepared. Given the trap they had already flown into aboard the Exquisite Death, Anakin was beginning to wonder if they were really prepared for this. Ulaha had given them less than a 50 percent chance of success, and as far as he could tell, things were not getting any better. He was beginning to wonder if coming after the voxyn queen had been such a good idea after all.

“Anakin, this has to be done—and you’re not making it any easier with that big negatude.” Tahiri was crawling along behind Anakin, her blond hair spilling out behind her faceplate. “So they were expecting us. You dealt with it, and now they aren’t.”

“Sorry. Thought I had that stuff closed off.”

“You did.” Tahiri rolled her eyes. “This is me, Anakin.”

The last of the senalaks fell to Jovan’s Force wave, and they found themselves at the edge of the spaceport. Basically a huge pit thirty meters deep and a kilometer across, it was surrounded by a cavernous colonnade sealed behind a transparent membrane and accessed by a ring of air-locked valveways. Twenty biotic berthing bays lay spaced evenly across the floor, all covered by retractable carapaces and sized to accommodate corvette-analog vessels.

On the near side of the spaceport, the latest rescue transport to return from the space battle was just berthing, the two halves of the bay carapace rising up to press themselves against the lumpy hull. Though Anakin and the others had not been able to see the battle as they stole across the worldship’s pocked surface, the steady stream of rescue vessels returning from space told them that their comrades had put up a good fight. They also knew the outcome; 2-1S had burst-commed a final situation report to 2-4S, and they had all felt Ulaha’s death—one of the reasons, no doubt, for Anakin’s “negatude.”

Perhaps five kilometers beyond the landing pit rose the hive-shaped grashal peaks they had seen from space. Anakin did not need to stretch out with the Force to know that was where the voxyn were kept. He could feel their hunger clearly, coming straight from that direction. The Jedi prisoner was another matter. He could not sense him—or her, or them—at all, even when he exerted himself.

“Ysalamiri?” Alema asked. She crawled up beside him on the side opposite Tahiri, stopping so that the shoulder of her vac suit touched his. “If they’ve got a Jedi, they’d need ysalamiri.

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