Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [201]
Even before he stepped back, she had lost feeling and movement in her arm, and now she could feel the numbness beginning to spread like a dark tide, coursing through her armpit into her upper chest, spreading across her chest and into her other arm, up into her neck and head, and down through her torso and legs. She became as pliable as soft leather. She remained alert but her lips and tongue couldn’t form words. Her eyelids fluttered, and sounds grew indistinct.
One thought kept repeating itself in her mind as she slipped into the blackest of voids.
Before he had dropped on her, she had sensed him through the Force!
Buffeted by updrafts warmed by fires raging in the canyon, the Sekotan airship swayed precariously as it descended toward the landing platform. In the gondola’s cramped cabin, Magister Jabitha, Cilghal, Tekli, Danni, and two male Ferroan pilots kept their gloomy silence. With the cold sky raked by the fiery streaks of attacking coralskippers, the trip to the cave had been dangerous and, in the end, in vain. If in retreat there, Sekot had refused to speak with any of them.
Danni sat closest to the cabin door, trying without success to warm her fingers with her breath. The temperature was still a degree or two above freezing, but she felt colder than she had been at Helska 4, so many years earlier, trapped under kilometers of ice. Born of dread and sadness, the chill rose from inside her, and she was powerless against it.
No matter what Luke or any of the others said, she was not a Jedi.
She couldn’t even wield a lightsaber properly, much less warm herself by drawing on the Force, as tall Cilghal and diminutive Tekli had obviously done. Whatever skills she had demonstrated while serving as sensor officer aboard the Wild Knights’ blastboat, or helping Cilghal fashion yammosk jammers, they did not owe to the Force, but to a talent for science she had inherited from her astrophysicist mother, and to twenty-four years of working closely with droids and cutting-edge technology. Yes, like the Jedi she could sometimes intuit the Yuuzhan Vong as voids in the spectrum of life, but if she were truly as Force-sensitive as Luke, Jacen, and Cilghal claimed her to be, then how had she failed to recognize Yomin Carr as not only a threat to her ExGal-4 science team on Belkadan, but also a harbinger of a new evil about to be unleashed on the galaxy?
She was not a Jedi.
She thought of herself as a sky-watcher who had been in the right place at the wrong time. First to be taken captive by the Yuuzhan Vong at the start of the invasion; first to have had an up-close look at their biotech; first to have witnessed the breaking of a Jedi Knight—and because of those events, catapulted to the center of a war from which she might otherwise have hidden.
Had Jacen not heard her distress cry through the Force, had he not come to her rescue in his iceborer, she would have died at Helska 4, or perhaps been broken and remade into a Yuuzhan Vong, as had nearly happened to Tahiri. She owed her life to Jacen, and at one point had come close to falling in love with him. But as indebted to him as she was—and to Luke and the others, for allowing her to see and do things she might never have—she sometimes felt as if she had been conscripted into the Jedi order. Much as Jaina had been named the Sword of the Jedi, and much as Jacen was seen as almost emblematic of a new awareness of the Force, Danni saw herself as the would-be Jedi—part technical officer, part familiar.
Spokesperson at Agamar—how proud her bureaucratic dad must have been—member of the Eclipse base team, reconnaissance