Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [8]
“Ooh,” Ace-One said. “Don’t say engagement. Unless you’re volunteering, that is.”
“Ace-One, Reckless Abandon. Do you suppose you could confine your courtship rituals to groundside?”
“Copy, Reckless. Twins Leader, look me up when we’re on the ground. Ace-One out.”
Jaina switched back to send out only over squadron frequency. “Arrogant little monkey-lizard.”
“I agree.” That was the mechanical voice of Piggy, Jaina’s Gamorrean pilot and tactics expert. “I know him.”
Borleias
Creatures moved within Tam Elgrin’s field of vision. He couldn’t seem to hold his eyes open enough for visual clarity, so most of the time they were mere blobs of white or orange, walking back and forth before him, speaking in muted tones.
He was content with that for a while, even content to understand that he wasn’t thinking clearly, wasn’t remembering, but eventually curiosity got the better of him and he forced his eyes open wider, forced himself to focus.
He could see now that the traffic was beyond the bed he lay on. A clean sheet in a soothing blue covered his large, ungainly frame. Beyond his feet was the metal footboard of a bed, and beyond that was some sort of pedestrian traffic lane; the blobs of color he had seen were people, humans and the occasional Twi’lek or Rodian or Devaronian, most in medical whites, some in pilot jumpsuit orange, moving past his field of vision, paying him no mind.
To either side of his bed were hung opaque curtains of that same offensively inoffensive blue, so patently obvious a measure to provide him with privacy from two directions and suggest calm that he finally understood that he was in a hospital.
That realization was enough for now. He didn’t need to know why he was here. The fact that his brain worked well enough to process information again was sufficient.
But a moment later, a figure left the traffic lane and moved into his curtained cubicle. It was a Mon Calamari; Tam’s long experience with nonhumans suggested that it was a female. She wore medical whites, and her skin was a deep, appealing pink. “You are awake,” she said, her tone suggesting that it was a minor achievement, something for which everyone should be at least slightly pleased.
“Um,” he said. It was supposed to have been yes, but it came out um.
“Do you know what has happened? Where you are, and why?”
He shook his head. “Um.”
“You’ve been rather badly used by the Yuuzhan Vong, conditioned by them to do their bidding. But you resisted your conditioning and probably prevented a tragedy. Resisting it did you a certain amount of physical harm, which is why you’re here now.”
It was as though he had been facing a dam between him and his memories … then the dam crumbled and memories washed down over him, hammering him, sweeping him away. He remembered being on the world of Coruscant as it fell to the Yuuzhan Vong, remembered hiding and running from them afterward, remembered being captured by them. Then there were days—how many? Only two, though it seemed like a lifetime—of lying on a table that twitched, of listening while one of the Yuuzhan Vong told him to do things, of feeling agonizing pain whenever he worked up the nerve to refute their words, refuse their orders. The pain came even when his refusal was deep in his heart, even when it was made without him speaking or glaring or shaking his head to let them know of his rebellion. The table always knew, the table always hurt him, until the words of the Yuuzhan Vong came and he could no longer resist them, no longer offer even the most secret of refusals.
Then he had been allowed to “escape,” reunite with his employer, historian Wolam Tser, and escape Coruscant to Borleias, a temporary stronghold of the reeling New Republic military. There he had spied upon the New Republic operations, the scientist Danni Quee and the pilot Jaina Solo.
Only when he knew that he would have to