Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 20_ The Final Prophecy - J. Gregory Keyes [40]
She rolled to get back to her feet, but the remaining warrior kicked her in the side of the head. The blow rang in her skull, and white lights threatened to blot out her vision. She swung wildly, but failed to connect with anything. Then everything went strange as something hard and sharp went through her shoulder.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Her arms were suddenly rubber.
The warrior grinned in triumph.
“No,” she told him. “No, absolutely not.”
She grabbed the amphistaff that had impaled her, but she barely felt it. She tried to focus beyond the pain, use the Force to throw herself back, but all she saw was the snarling face of the warrior who was about to kill her, and all she felt was her body husking out, going light, fading …
She saw the warrior look away, and then suddenly he was headless. His body dropped away almost gently.
Corran stood above her. “Come on,” he said.
“Poison,” Tahiri mumbled. She tried to stand, but her legs were already beyond answering her demands.
She was vaguely aware that Corran got her up on his shoulder and was taking her toward the strange ship. After that, time condensed. She remembered yelling, and concussions, and the ship shivering. New voices, then nothing.
Nen Yim settled in the pilot’s couch and placed the cognition hood on her head. The ship hadn’t come with one, but it had been an easy matter to implant a Yuuzhan Vong matrix ganglia to the alien but relatively straightforward neural web. It ought to respond like any Yuuzhan Vong ship.
She hadn’t been able to regenerate all the ship’s systems, and had replaced them with specially bioengineered equivalents. She had installed dovin basals in place of the abominable machine drive; she wouldn’t have known how to repair that even if she had wanted to. The frame she could do nothing about, and she’d left many of the other bits of infidel technology in place because she either wasn’t sure what they did or because it was unclear whether the ship would function properly without them.
A flutter of tension moved through her as she melded with the ship’s senses. The ship felt confused, uncertain, as if it was wondering—as she was—whether the repairs and modifications would work. Her experiments suggested they would, but of course she had never flown it.
We’ll try this together, yes? she thought to the ship, and received a tentative affirmation.
Where were the Jedi?
She could not see them from the transparent cockpit, so she activated the ship’s exterior optical sensors and quickly located them. They seemed to have gotten into another fight, and the yellow-haired one was down, wounded.
That wasn’t entirely bad, Nen Yim considered. Things might go more smoothly if the girl died.
A few moments later, the two were on board and Nen Yim dilated the inner and outer locks.
“Tahiri’s hurt,” the male Jedi called. “It’s an amphistaff wound.”
“Do what you can for her,” she told him. “I can’t help at the moment. We have to leave.”
Hoping once again that the inelegant mixture of Sekotan and Yuuzhan Vong technology wouldn’t fail her, she willed the ship to fly.
In a blur they were through the opening, though she felt it scrape along her skin on one side. No damage, though—the hull could shed starstuff for a time, so yorik coral was no real problem. She might even have been able to break through the wall with the nose of the ship, but the Jedi had been there with their swords, so why not use them?
“We’re meeting the Prophet at the shrine of Yun-Harla,” the Jedi told her. She didn’t like his tone of voice. It sounded as if he imagined she was under his orders.
“I’m aware of that,” she said, trying to remain calm when all her instincts told her that she was far too high above the ground, that she was going to fall.
There