Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [49]
He saw pretty clearly what he had to do. The next time his feet hit a branch, he hurled himself up and out, feeling the breath of several strands passing beneath and by him. He aimed himself at the hole in the Force.
The problem with that, of course, was that he couldn’t sense a landing place. He came down on top of the craft, but the surface was uneven, and he slipped, bounced once on the rear of the thing, and slid off. He caught a projection as he fell, and for a brief moment felt an odd disorientation, as his inner ear suddenly told him that down was in two different directions, as if he stood on the dividing line between two different gravities.
In a flash, he knew what that must mean. Whatever this thing was, it was, like other Yuuzhan Vong craft, propelled by a dovin basal, the creatures that somehow generated gravitic anomalies. He was hanging next to the craft’s lifts.
The craft jerked and spun over. Anakin lost his grip, but he had a fix on the gravity source now. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creatures might not exist in the Force, but gravity did.
As he fell, he hurled his lightsaber up, guiding it with the Force. It struck at the heart of the gravitic anomaly, and sparks showered the canopy below. As Anakin fell through the first layer of leaves he saw his lightsaber rupture into a bright purple flare.
Concentrating on the weapon, Anakin glanced off a branch, falling like a rag doll. Trying to focus through the pain, he found the forest floor, pushed against it, pushed …
Until it pushed him back. All of his breath coughed out in a rush, and he folded around his gut, sucking for wind that would not come.
The morning sun found Anakin turning blue and black over much of his body, but still functional. In the dim light, he cautiously climbed from his hiding place in the hollow of a tree and looked around.
The Yuuzhan Vong craft was down, perhaps eighty meters away. It reminded Anakin of some sort of flat, winged sea creature, though it looked as if it were grown from the same stuff as the coralskippers. It was fetched up against a tree. The cockpit was a transparent bubble extruding from the top. The pilot inside looked quite dead.
Anakin found he’d been right about the dovin basal. It looked roughly the same as the larger ones he’d seen, except it had a huge, oozing gash in it. His lightsaber lay nearby. When he picked it up and tried to activate it, his fears were confirmed—nothing happened.
“Perfect,” he murmured aloud. “No weapons at all. Perfect.”
He found the remains of his speeder, still attached to the cable snaking from the Yuuzhan Vong craft. It didn’t take much of an inspection to tell him that this time he wouldn’t be salvaging anything.
From here on out, he was walking.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Nen Yim watched the damutek ships settle amongst the alien trees, with a giddiness she tried hard to conceal. No reward could come from a display of emotion, especially childish ones. A shaper was circumspect; a shaper was analytical. A shaper did not stare in wonder and joy and wave the tendrils of her headdress in abandon.
So Nen Yim did none of that. But by the gods, she felt like doing it. This was a planet! Perhaps technically a moon, but a world, an unknown world! The unfamiliar smells of the place, the unanticipated movement of the air, the unimagined oddness of a gravity that wasn’t exactly right had her senses buzzing. But the real excitement came from within her. Like the thick-trunked damutek, she was a seed, finally come to the right soil to sprout in.
Soil. She reached down, bent, and scratched up a fistful of the rich black dirt. It smelled like nothing she had ever known—a bit