A/N: The aliens referenced in this chapter, including their violent tendencies, are SW canon from the Black Fleet Crises, one of the better SW trilogy books.
Chapter Twenty-Five: Bloody Claws
"You don't smell any different than the Imperials," Nil Spaar said with a sneer of contempt.
Han Solo shifted his feet and looked back at Leia before turning his attention back to the Yevethan. "Must be the aftershave."
Spaar did not appear amused.
"The difference is not in our appearance or smell, but in our purpose," Leia said quickly. "The Empire invaded your world and enslaved your people. They have done the same throughout the galaxy. We are fighting for justice and freedom. Our actions speak for us."
"Your actions say very little to me or my people," Nil Spaar said. "The Yevetha are still enslaved. Our soil is still profaned by the boots of humans. What you ask will only bring more reprisals. Our world will only suffer more."
They sat barefoot on small floor cushions in a small room atop a thin spire in Giat Nor, the capital of N'Zoth. One of Kyle Katarn's and Han Solo's smuggler contacts named Platt Okeefe managed to get Leia, Han, Kale and Mara onto the surface of the planet.
Across from them sat the leader of the slave labor pool that ran the Type-II orbital repair yards orbiting their world. The yard held at least one Executor -class star dreadnaught and six small star destroyers.
In the Force Nil Spaar thrummed with hatred—and his hatred was not constrained just to the Imperials. His hatred included the four seated in front of him now and possibly everyone else in the galaxy that was not Yevethan.
Leia trusted the being about as far as she could throw him without the Force. But he was the key to the first stage of their plan. She thought upon reading of the Yevethan subjugation that it would be easy to enlist his support. She never counted on the Yevethan xenophobia, however. "What can we do to earn your trust?" she asked.
"Die," Nil Spaar said, smiling gruesomely for the first time. "Your blood is useless, but such an act would show me you are serious. Shed the blood of one of your underlings for me. Prove to me you are worthy of aid from the Yevetha."
Leia blinked and paled as she studied the skeletal face of the being before her. His thin hard lips were curled back with contempt. The expression told her he fully expected her to leave in a huff, and that was his intended goal.
If she failed here, the Alliance would have to scuttle their plans. Black 15 was the least protected orbital ship yard the Empire had, and the proportion of slaves to Imperial personnel was the highest of anywhere. It had to be here, or not at all. She thought of the year spent under the Emperor's personal care, and realized failure was simply not an option.
She nodded abruptly in decision and held out her hand. Han's blaster flew from his holster to her waiting fingers. Without missing a beat she turned, pointed at a surprised Kale's chest and pulled the trigger.
Kale grunted and fell back to the floor, motionless. Mara rested a hand on his chest, a stunned expression on her face. "What do you think you're…." she started to say.
Leia turned and glared at her. At the same time, she slipped a quick look at Kale and then back at Mara, as if to say, Who else could it have been?
Mara lowered her eyes and then turned back to Kale, resting her hands on his chest and lowering her eyes below the line of her luxurious red hair to hide her face.
Leia turned back to Spaar. "Your ways are not ours, Nil Spaar. We care for and grieve for our dead. What you ask of us is worth many times more to us than such an act would mean to you. But our mission is too important to risk. I have shown you I am serious. What will you show me?"
Spaar clicked his teeth and two young male Yevethans ran into the room. As Spaar stood, the two males knelt down and lifted their heads to expose their necks. Leia steeled herself for what she suspected would come next. In the Force, she reached out to Han and Mara both.
The elder Yevethan unsheathed a foot-long blade of bone from each of his forearms just under his wrists. With a satisfied cluck of his tongue he slashed each blade without hesitation across the necks of the two young males.
"These nitakkas' blood shall feed the mara-nas of my females," Spaar said. Instantly two more males came from the same side door as the first and lifted the dead Yevethans away. With Leia's warning, Han managed to keep his face perfectly neutral.
"Then we are of agreement?" Leia asked, her face also perfectly neutral.
"We are," Spaar said. "But there is a price."
"Name it," Leia said.
"The Yevetha keep one of the ships."
Since their campaign projections foresaw the loss of at least one of the ships in the shipyard, this was acceptable. "Done," she said. "We must have the Intimidator for our plan to succeed, but any one of the others is yours."
"We also wish to keep the Imperials."
Having just seen what Spaar was willing to do to his own, Leia shuddered to think what he would do to humans who had enslaved his people. But as she said before, this mission was so important. In a decision she knew she would come to regret, she nodded slowly. "Very well."
"Then we have agreement," Spaar said. "Leave now. In five days' time, all will be ready."
When the meeting was done, Han made a show of lifting the larger Kale onto his shoulder as if he weighed nothing, and they left in a closed ground car through the back of the spire. The closed car continued toward the small trading outpost kept under Imperial supervision.
By the time they got back to the smuggler ship, their pilot and a smuggler nearly as famous as Han Solo himself, Platt Okeefe, was getting nervous. "Did everything go okay?" she asked as they disembarked. Then she saw Kale over Han's shoulder and slowly pulled her light blonde hair back from her eyes. "What…?"
"I'll tell you when we're off the surface," Han said quickly.
Leia pushed past both of them. "I need a shower. I feel filthy."
The Yevethans who had driven them merely stood watching until all the humans were aboard and the ship boarding ramp retracted. They then returned to their posts. In the ship, as they started heading away from the planet surface, Kale finally sat up and rubbed the spot where Leia shot him. "That was quick thinking," he congratulated her.
Okeefe stared at the burn mark on Kale's shirt. "Must have been one heck of a performance."
"He's a real prodigy," Han said. To Kale, he said, "That was quick thinking too for you to play along so well. And were you making yourself lighter so I could carry you?"
Kale shrugged with a smile.
Leia ignored the exchange and shook her head. "It wasn't enough," she said. "I…I can't believe I just agreed to let those monsters take the Imperials. I've just condemned thousands of men and women to a gruesome death."
Surprisingly, it was Mara who sat beside her and rested a hand on her back. "They're going to have to die anyway, Leia, for this plan to work. It isn't enough just to steal the ships. We have to keep the Empire from knowing we stole the ships for as long as possible. Just putting them on the surface would not have ensured that."
"That's what I told myself when I agreed," the princess said. "But my soul tells me I am guilty of a terrible crime." She looked up at all of them, her mouth turned into a grimace. "This entire plan—Han, the Alliance has never acted like this before. We've never been so blasé about casualties before. We're going to be killing untold thousands. How are we any different from the Empire?"
Han sat on the other side from Mara and put a hand gently on her back as Mara removed hers. "We're at war, Leia, and you did what you had to do to ensure our side has a fighting chance. And our plan is a lot gentler than what Vader did to Aldera City, or Tarkin to Toprawa, so I don't buy this story that we're no better." He leaned over and kissed her cheek. "But you know what? History can debate it later. For now, let's get back to the Taskforce."
Leia nodded. "There's one more problem, though."
"What's that?"
"I don't trust Spaar at all," she said. "The Force tells me he is going to betray us."
"It's whispered the same thing to us," Kale said with a quick, affirming glance at Mara.
~~Last Son~~
~~Last Son~~
The Empire had chosen to invade N'zoth for one reason—they wanted the Yevetha. The young species had proven to be highly intelligent, adaptable and resilient, qualities that made for excellent slaves. Like the Wookies, the Empire harnessed the greater physical strength and the significant mental abilities of the Yevetha as slave labor to man the ship yard for Black Sword Command, the Oversector authority for that region of space.
During the height of construction during the day, there were two Yevethans for every human onboard the six vessels. Granted, the Imperials had stormtroopers overseeing the slaves, but since the Yevethans had stopped fighting after Nil Spaar became the defacto leader of the slaves, security had relaxed a great deal.
The ships were down to a skeleton crew of engineers to oversee the construction or repairs of their ships and a few flag officers. The rest were ferried down to the Imperial outpost on the surface for some fresh air. The crown of the yard was the Intimidator, a newly constructed Executor-class ship still in its final finishing stages.
After the destruction of the Death Star, and with the threat of Kale Naberrie hanging over his head, the Emperor opted to increase production on the super star destroyers rather than build a new battle station. The new destroyers, although incredibly expensive, were still only a fraction of the cost of a Death Star.
Still, on that particular day, the Intimidator had only a small skeleton crew of humans, but with thousands of Yevethans on board. It made things ridiculously easy. Nil Spaar himself was working near the reactor of the Intimidator when he gave the signal.
"What do you think you're doing?" the engineering overseer said when Spaar set his tools down.
"Animal," Spaar snarled in Yevethan. He extended his dew claw, and with one quick slash had the human's throat open.
The flowing blood was the signal. The stormtroopers managed to get a few shots off, and many nitakka shed their blood for the battle, but in the end the pitiful Imperial guards were overthrown.
When they held engineering without any alarms being sounded, Spaar nodded in satisfaction. "Send the signal to the others," he ordered his underlings. "The Yevetha are no one's slaves!"
Across the nineteen-kilometer length of the Executor-class ship and the surrounding star destroyers, thousands of Yevethan slaves unsheathed their claws and turned on the Imperials. Casualties were higher in other parts of the Intimidator and the surrounding ships, but in a society where murder could only be committed when an inferior killed a superior and life meant nothing, the loss of ten thousand Yevetha for the deaths of five thousand Imperials was more than satisfactory.
On the surface below, the trader and Imperial outposts were suddenly surrounded by hordes of hundreds of thousands of angry Yevethans as their internal power generators were disabled or completely destroyed through further sabotage. Shortly after the Yevethans gained control of the shipyards, the Rebel transports arrived, ten beetle-shaped ships with minimal weapons, crowded with thousand of filthy humans and aliens.
"Bring the turbolasers online," Spaar ordered. "The Yevetha serve no one."
"Yes, Darama," a young male said. The ship clanked as the turbolasers of the brand-new super star destroyer rotated to face the transports.
"Prepare to fire."
A voice crackled over the speakers. "Spaar, what are you doing?"
"What I should have done years ago," the Yevethan snarled. "I am ridding my world of the profanity of your presence."
"Darama!" a male said, falling to his knees by Spaar. "An object approaches from the rebel ships."
"Shoot it down."
"I tried, Darama."
"Arrghh," he growled in frustration. He struck the male's throat so hard he nearly took the creature's head off. "Someone destroy that object, and you shall be my second!"
All the Yevethans at the weapons control banks attempted to do as asked, but they had no hope. The object resolved itself right outside the transparisteel windows of the command deck itself. Spaar walked slowly toward the window and stared out with something that a lesser being might have described as fear.
He was staring at the one Princess Leia had shot. The creature floated un-aided in open space, staring through the window directly at Spaar. With a cold smile, the creature pulled back one fist and swung at the unbreakable transparisteel.
The transparisteel broke. It did not just break, it exploded inward over the Yevetha. Alarms sounded and an armored plate started to drop over the breach, but the strange creature caught the emergency plate in one hand and easily lifted it back up as he climbed inside the ship. Around the bridge small bits of debris and trash swirled about under the sudden vacuum, but that ended abruptly when the terrible alien let the armor plate drop.
"You are supposed to have been dead!" Spaar declared angrily.
"Then it looks like the Yevetha are not the only ones who lie," the stranger said.
Infuriated, Spaar unsheathed the dew claws and slashed both arms quickly at the intruder. He caught Spaar's razor-sharp claws in his hands and stopped the Yevethan's motion instantly. With an easy twist, he snapped the claws off.
Spaar stared at his broken dew claws for the longest time, stunned. Finally, though, he reared his head back and screamed, not in pain, but rage. He rushed the intruder again, only to stop in shock as some unseen force lifted him off the deck plating. Around the command deck, the other Yevetha fell to their knees, staring in awe and terror at the sight of their leader being levitated.
"My name is Kale Naberrie. I am a Jedi Knight. And you will abide by your side of the bargain."
"I will not do business with barbarians!" Spaar screamed.
"Your claws are broken, Spaar," Kale said. "I've seen and sensed enough of your people to know what that means." Kale flung Spaar across the deck at the feet of another Yevethan. "You are now not even nitakka, you are a broken claw!"
Spaar's eyes widened. "How do you know those words?"
"From your mind," Kale said. "From the Force. Are you above your own customs, Spaar? You are a broken claw."
Suddenly the Yevethan's face drooped. He turned away from Kale and up at the male standing in front of him. "He's right," he whispered in his own language. He lifted his chin. The other male slashed his throat without hesitation, and Nil Spaar died just as he had lived—bathed in blood.
The male who killed him walked across the command deck to face Kale. "We shall keep our side of the bargain," he said in stilted Basic. "We shall deal with the Imperials on the surface, and we keep one ship."
"Yes," Kale said.
"After this, no more bargains. Tell your kind to not ever return to the Koornacht Cluster. This is our home."
Kale nodded. "Very well."
The male motioned to the others, and in silence they shuffled out. Only when they were gone did Kale notice that Nil Spaar was also gone. The only thing of him that remained were his shattered claws by Kale's feet, and the blood on the deck plating where he fell.