Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 09_ Edge of Victory 02_ Rebirth - J. Gregory Keyes [12]
Mom! He could feel the hammering of her pulse behind him, and pain in her not-quite-healed legs.
He propelled himself back into the Millennium Falcon, pushing himself madly toward the cargo lift area.
It took him an instant to sort out that that battle was over, too. The Noghri were still dismembering one of the Yuuzhan Vong boarders. The second floated near Leia; his head was drifting a few meters away. Han seemed to have just come in, brandishing a blaster.
“Jacen?”
“Got both of ’em,” he acknowledged grimly.
“Great. Leia, you keep watch. Let us know if they send anything else our way. Jacen, you check out those skips and figure out some way we can accelerate without opening ourselves to space.”
Right, Jacen thought. The minute the drive went on, the coralskippers would exert their inertia. At some point acceleration would make them massive enough to tear the couplings, no matter how strong they were.
“I’m on it, Dad. And hang on before you engage the drive. I have another idea.”
“Always thinking. That’s my boy.”
FOUR
Nen Yim pushed up through the clear membrane and stroked the pale, feathery coils of the ship’s brain, the rikyam, with her shaper’s hand. She trembled, her specialized fingers twitching. Once those digits had been the legs of a crustaceanlike creature, bred for no other purpose but to be hands to shapers. Its animal origins were still obvious; her fingers—narrower, slimmer, and stronger than those of the average Yuuzhan Vong—protruded from beneath a dark, flexible carapace that now served as the back of her hand. Two of the “fingers” ended in pincers; another had a retractable blade. All were studded with small, raised sensory nodes that tasted anything they touched. Nen Yim’s training as a shaper required that she know by taste all elements and more than four thousand compounds and their variants. She had known the quick, nervous flavor of cobalt with those fingers, savored the pungency of carbon tetrachloride, wondered at the complex and endless variations of amino acids.
And now she trembled, for the scent here was morbid.
“The rikyam is dying,” she murmured to the novice at her side. “It is more than half dead.”
The novice—a young man named Suung Aruh—twitched the tendrils of his headdress in dismay.
“How can that be?” he asked.
“How can it be?” Nen Yim repeated, anger creeping into her voice. “Look around you, Novice. The luminescent mycogens that once sheathed our halls in light now cling in sickly patches. The capillaries of the maw luur are clotted with dead or mutated recham forteps. The Baanu Miir worldship is dying, Initiate. Why should the brain be any different?”
“I’m sorry, Adept,” Suung said, his tendrils knotted in genuflection. “Only … what is to be done? Will a new rikyam be grown?”
Nen Yim narrowed her eyes. “Under whom were you trained before my arrival?”
“I—the old master, Tih Qiqah.”
“I see. He was the only master shaper here?”
“Yes, Adept.”
“And where are his adepts?”
“He trained no adepts in his last year, Adept Nen Yim.”
“Nor did he really train any initiates, it seems. What did you do for him?”
“I …” His mortification deepened.
“Yes?”
“I told him stories.”
“Stories?”
“Crèche-tales, but with adult overtones. He insisted.”
“He used you merely to amuse himself? As personal servants?”
“Essentially, Adept.”
Nen Yim closed her eyes. “I am assigned to a dying ship. At the mere rank of adept, I am the highest member of my caste, and I haven’t even a trained initiate.”
“I have heard,” Suung said, “that the lack is due to the need for shapers in the battle against the infidels.”
“Of course,” Nen Yim replied. “Only the senile, inept, and disgraced remain to tend the worldships.”
“Yes, Adept,” Suung said.
“Aren’t you going to ask which I am?” Nen Yim snarled.
The novice hesitated. “I know you were once part of one of the holy programs,” he said cautiously.
“Yes. A program that failed. My master failed. I failed. We failed