TWENTY-ONE

Mirroring the sweeping curve of the planetary ring, the war vessels of the armada were spread above bright-side Yuuzhan’tar like fine grains of crystalline sand. Arrayed in battle groups and reprovision flotillas, each cruiser, carrier, and tender analog had been branded with domain emblems and daubed with blood preserved from the sacrifice of the Alliance captives. Some of the vessels flew battle standards earned over countless generations. Others were necklaced hundreds strong with coralskippers. Behind the mica transparencies of observation blisters and resupply balconies, commanders and subalterns crouched on one knee, their heads lowered in obeisance, and their right fists pressed to the yorik coral decks.

There lazed Realm of Death, Blade of Sacrifice, River of Blood, Slayer’s Conceit, Serpent’s Kiss, and the pennant vessel, Yammka’s Mount, commanded by Warmaster Nas Choka.

Closer to orbitally altered Yuuzhan’tar, closer to the massive dovin basals that were the planet’s first line of defense, closer to the rainbow bridge—symbolic of Yun-Yuuzhan’s traffic with the species he had created—floated the oblate yacht that had carried Shimrra and the nonwarrior elite from the surface. Smeared with blood, the throne chamber of the yacht was also festooned with wreaths of thorn-vine and adorned with hundreds of delicately wrought fans, sacred to Yun-Yammka. In honor of the launching, all present in the chamber wore glistaweb armor, including Shimrra’s prefects and seers, Qelah Kwaad and her chief shapers, High Priest Jakan, even preposterous Onimi.

The Supreme Overlord stood tall and self-possessed before a unique villip that forwarded his visage and words to every villip contained in every vessel, dedicated or choir member, warship or coralskipper.

“Yun-Yuuzhan, Great Maker,” Shimrra murmured, “we beseech your blessing for these vessels we dispatch into the void, for their mission is yours also by injunction. With this final battle we fulfill our obligation to cleanse the realm you saw fit to provide us, to make it worthy, and in turn to be made worthy by victory of claiming it as our home. From this moment forward, we will set ourselves to the task of taking these humbled species under our wing, and of instructing them in the truth you bade our ancestors hear at the dawn of time.

“We pledge that from these beginnings we will carry our task through to completion, purging this realm of machines, and replacing them with our biological partners. When Yuuzhan’tar has been fully reshaped according to the ancestral architecture, and when temples to you and your sacrosanct domain crown the tops of the highest mountains and dominate the principal population centers of every occupied world, we will petition that you judge our work one final time.

“The grand moment has arrived—the culmination of generations of voyage and discovery. Even now, in these unfamiliar skies, the ancestral galaxy moves into beneficent aspect with this newfound home. What was distant is near at hand; what was completed is begun anew.”

In a blinding display of honor and power, the largest of the war vessels launched five thousand plasma missiles toward Yuuzhan’tar’s primary. Then in groups, and led by Yammka’s Mount, the armada began to move out, building momentum for the transition to darkspace.

Nom Anor watched from his assigned place in the holy yacht, wondering what Nas Choka might be thinking. The outcome of the war and the future of the Yuuzhan Vong hinged on what would occur over the next quarter klekket. The warriors and priests, lifted to ecstasy by days of fasting and dancing, were sanguine that the armada would prevail.

But not everyone was so assured.

The consuls under Nom Anor’s command, and the executors under their commands, had brought to his attention rumors of grave apprehension and doubt among the high caste. And beneath those vague rumblings, Nom Anor could feel the more sinister roiling of hatred among the dispossessed.

From beneath the bridge, from the dark underworld of Yuuzhan’tar, he could hear the clamor of angry voices, the words of the heretics growing louder and more forceful, venomous in the aftermath of the executions, the dissent spreading through the ranks, among not only the Shamed Ones but also others who had lost or were beginning to lose the faith in Supreme Overlord Shimrra. A vast wave, building and building, threatening to break against the Yuuzhan Vong’s every shore, to wipe the armada from the sky, and to pull into the depths the holy yacht and everyone aboard.

Shimrra had told Nom Anor that his war was with the gods. But Shimrra had overlooked the real enemy—the enemy that surrounded him and on whose shoulders he stood. Even Quoreal in his final days had not been the object of such suspicion and loathing. If it were left to the Shamed Ones, Nas Choka’s mighty force would be routed at Mon Calamari, and Shimrra would be dragged from the throne by Yun-Shuno himself, to be devoured in public by packs of starved bissop hounds …

Nom Anor shifted his troubled gaze from the departing ships, and at the same moment Onimi shifted his, to needle Nom Anor with a meddlesome look. Nom Anor wondered if Onimi’s olfactory sense was so keen that he could smell the fear coming off him. Perhaps that was just one of the reasons why Onimi’s rhymes were so biting: because he could read subtle signals in all those who appeared before Shimrra.

Nom Anor stiffened in disgust and something close to dread as Onimi wobbled over to him from across the throne chamber.

“Be encouraged, Prefect,” Onimi said in confidence. “As is true between the gods and the Yuuzhan Vong, Shimrra’s strength flows from the combined certitude of his subjects. Falter, display doubt or weakness, and the careful balance may tip …”

Nom Anor sneered. “Who are you to address me, Shamed One?”

Onimi’s uneven mouth twisted into a frigid smile. “Your conscience, Prefect. The still-small voice that reminds you how tenuous your position is.”

Still wearing her silver-locked wig, Leia was deflating Han’s and her sleeping pad when she saw Sasso drop something by the smoldering campfire. A leathery creature about the size of a shock-ball, it looked like a villip with wings—and this one had been pierced by a wooden quarrel fired from the Rodian’s crude bowcasterlike weapon.

“That’s one that won’t be able to report on us,” Sasso said, examining his fresh kill with the thoroughness of a born hunter.

Leia went over to the fire to have a closer look at the dead creature. “The biot we saw yesterday?”

“Maybe not the same one, but from the same flock.” Sasso’s green snout twitched. “Got it on the first try. That’s never happened before.”

Leia regarded him questioningly. “I hope you’re not thinking of cooking it.”

“I am curious … but no. I’m trying to decide whether to burn it or bury it.”

“I vote for burning it,” Han said from behind them. “Otherwise the bissops might be able to sniff it out.”

Caluula’s sun had been up for an hour, but the ravine’s forest of cane trees was still waking up. Birds were abundant, and the flitnats—Leia’s personal flitnats—had returned. Thanks to the netting supplied with the bedrolls, she and Han had slept flitnat-free and wonderfully, waking frequently if briefly to watch for shooting stars or listen to the calls of nocturnal creatures. Han had prepared breakfast over the fire, while she and Wraw had broken camp. It was an elemental life, but one she thought she could get used to.

Under cover of darkness, Sasso and the Ryn, Ferfer, had sneaked off to a nearby supply cache, and returned by first light with the bowcaster and a couple of weapons old enough to have been carried by Leia’s adoptive father’s bodyguards, including a thick-barreled blaster with a large hardwood handgrip; another with a finger-contoured grip and built-in scope; two black military-grade hand weapons with trigger guards and top-mounted heat radiators; and a rifle Han identified as a DC-15, with a folding stock.

The blasters were now stashed in the duffels, but not so deeply they couldn’t be retrieved in a hurry.

Meloque and the mustachioed Ferfer returned to camp just as Han and Wraw were about to secure the gear bags to the timbus. The docile animals were foraging for food in the tall grass.

The stately Ho’Din female looked disappointed.

“Couldn’t find any winged-star shells?” Han said.

She shook her head. “We found hundreds, but all of them were inactive. At least some should have opened by now.”

“The weather has been off,” Sasso said. “Hotter than usual for this time of year.”

Meloque considered it. “I suppose that could account for it.”

By firelight the previous evening, she had given everyone a biology lesson on the Nocturne of the Winged-Stars. Similar in appearance to the drone-flitters found on countless worlds, winged-stars emerged from chitinous shells. Unique among flitters, however, Caluula’s had but one day to perform their mating dances, display their celebrated luminosity, mate, and lay eggs, which would hatch 299 years later. The larval stage lasted less than a local week, at the end of which the surviving larvae would be encased in durable cocoons. Those newly emerged winged-stars that weren’t immediately devoured by flying lizards and other predators would die of natural causes by the time the sun set on the day of their emergence.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Meloque,” Wraw said, “but unless you’re aging more gracefully than a Wookiee, you’ve never actually observed a Nocturne.”

“That’s true,” she told him. “But on Moltok we have been able to simulate the life cycle in controlled settings.”

“Maybe the Yuuzhan Vong have something to do with the casings not opening on schedule,” Han suggested. “They might have introduced some organism that’s affected the ecology. Look what they did on Tynna and Duro.”

“I find that very improbable,” Meloque said. “Those worlds were altered for strategic and logistical reasons, where a world like Caluula must please the Yuuzhan Vong to no end. For all the barbarity they’ve demonstrated, they have a reverence for life.”

Wraw snorted. “You sound like a sympathizer, Professor.”

“Wraw,” Leia said sharply, but Meloque only waved her sucker-equipped hand in dismissal.

“What other attitude can be expected from a member of a species that has declared its intent to exterminate the Yuuzhan Vong?” Meloque was referring to the Bothan doctrine of ar’krai, or total war.

Wraw laughed. “I was only joking.”

His head fur betrayed nothing. Leia waited until Meloque and Ferfer had left to search for additional shells before she went over to Wraw. “I don’t think Meloque appreciates your sense of humor.”

Wraw shrugged. “What can I say? We’re worlds apart.”

“Then your cynicism doesn’t stem from your commitment to an amoral, unprofitable career?”

“Amoral, maybe, but certainly not unprofitable.”

“In terms of credits, you mean.”

“What other terms are there?”

Leia glanced at Han, who merely spread his hands. “Go ahead and poke him if you want to. I won’t try to stop you.”

Just then Page and Kyp returned to camp. Page looked from Han to Leia to Wraw, then back to Han. “We interrupting something?”

“Just a little campfire sing-along,” Han said.

Page didn’t ask for an explanation. “We found signs of a Yuuzhan Vong patrol—tracker beasts and a couple of those twelve-legged mounts.”

“Bissops and quenaks,” Sasso said, getting to his feet. “We’d better get moving. The sooner we cross the next ridge, the better.”

Everyone pitched in to load the remaining gear. With Ferfer riding point, they climbed to the crest of the ridge, then began a slow, switchback descent through dense forest. Sasso, Page, and Kyp rode ahead to scout the trail. Halfway to the valley floor, Han spurred his timbu to come abreast of Wraw’s.

“I figure you spend a lot of your time hanging around with low-life characters,” Han said. “But everyone here is on the same side, understand?”

“You’re one to talk about consorting with low-life characters, Solo.”

Han forced a smile. “I got over it, pal. So maybe you should look to me as an example.”

The Bothan nodded. “I’ll give it thought.”

Han fell back to ride alongside Leia.

“Why do you even bother?” she asked.

“Well, either I’m going to change his mind, or I’m going to change his face.”

“You still won’t be rearranging the person inside.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll feel a whole lot better.”

Leia heard rapid hoofbeats up ahead, and a moment later Kyp rode up.

“Yuuzhan Vong. They’re climbing out the valley.” He pointed down through the trees. “Just there—at that stand of broadleafs.”

“Is there a way to avoid them?” Leia asked.

“No. And we can’t afford to fight them here.”

Han rose up on his stirrups and motioned to an outcropping of rocks below the next switchback. “Looks like a decent ambush point.”

Kyp nodded. “That’s my thinking, too.”

They hastened through the switchback and into a gulch, where Sasso and Page were waiting. Ferfer led the mounts away, and everyone else scrambled to take up firing positions in the boulders on both sides of the trail—Han, Leia, Page, and Meloque on one side; Wraw, Sasso, and Kyp on the other.

Han sighted down the barrel of the military blaster; Page did the same with the DC-15 rifle. Meloque wrapped her huge hand around the wooden grip of the antique sidearm. Leia took hold of her lightsaber, but didn’t activate it.

Shortly they heard the patrol approaching. First to appear were a trio of bissop hounds. Low-bodied creatures, they moved in a waddling motion, their long snouts sniffing the air and ground, and their clawed feet leaving distinctive tracks in the dirt. Behind them walked three Yuuzhan Vong warriors armed with amphistaffs and bandoliers of thud and razor bugs. Two were sporting shoulder-mounted tactical villips. Behind them came three warriors on riding beasts as large as grutchyna but as sedate as rontos.

“I’ll take the tracker on the right,” Page whispered to Han. “You take the one in the middle. Go for the villips first.”

Page waved a signal across the canyon to where Kyp and the others were concealed.

Then everyone hunkered down to wait for the patrol to move into the crossfire.

The bissops lifted their snouts toward the boulders just as the first blasterbolts were raining down on them. Han’s and Page’s shots blew the two small villips to pieces, while sizzling red bolts from across the ravine knocked two warriors from their mounts. But even though taken by surprise, the Yuuzhan Vong were quick to counterattack. Razor and thud bugs swarmed into the air, and—rearing and snarling—the three bissops surged up into the rocks.

By then Han, Page, Leia, and Meloque were already in motion, firing on the run and scampering for new positions. A bolt from Han’s heavy blaster shattered the skull of a charging bissop. A second bolt caught one of the trackers squarely in the chest, blowing a smoking hole in the warrior’s vonduun crab armor and sending him flying backward, to be trampled underfoot by a confused quenak.

Running down the opposite outcropping, Wraw came within a meter of being bissop fodder, but a well-placed shot from Sasso dropped the beast before it could snap at the Bothan a second time.

Kyp front-flipped down onto the trail ahead of the patrol. Lightsaber ignited, he fought his way through a hail of razor bugs to take the fight to the remaining warriors. Han was astonished to see the Jedi’s blade neatly cleave a rigid amphistaff, then, on the reverse stroke, sever the head of the warrior himself. Still in the rocks, Leia was similarly engaged in fending off a stream of frenzied bugs. Meloque was cowering below her, afraid to show her head. Pulling the frightened Ho’Din to her feet, Leia led her to a safer position, whirling twice to send return flights of bugs smashing into the rocks.

Han emerged from the boulders to see Kyp kick a coufee out of the hand of the only Yuuzhan Vong left standing, then pierce the warrior through the neck as he was running for his mount, as if in an attempt to flee. A blur of motion drew Han’s attention to the left, and he swung around, flattening himself to the ground. The last of the three bissops hurdled him and bounded up into the rocks, close to where Meloque was crouched, staring distractedly at her heavy-gripped blaster.

Unable to get a clear shot at the retreating beast, Page shouted to Meloque: “Kill the hound!”

She glanced at the escaping bissop, then in bewilderment at Wraw. “It’s just an animal—”

“Kill it!” Page repeated.

“I—”

Bolts from Wraw’s weapon stopped the bissop dead, just short of its disappearing over the rim of the gulch.

“Butchers,” the Ho’Din said as sudden quiet descended. She staggered out of the rocks, and down onto the trail to join Leia and the others. “Butchers!”

“Bissops are trained to return to base,” Page said calmly. “Another patrol would have picked up our trail in no time flat.”

Meloque heard him out, then nodded dully.

Six Yuuzhan Vong, two lizard-hounds, and one quenak lay sprawled in the dirt. Page moved from warrior to warrior, making certain that each was dead. He put the convulsing quenak out of its misery with a single bolt, then did the same to three amphistaffs.

Han squatted down beside the warrior he had shot in the chest, then regarded the thirty-year-old weapon that had supplied the lethal bolt. “I never knew these old blasters packed such a wallop.”

“They don’t,” Kyp said from where he was crouched near another warrior. He rapped his knuckles against the breastplate of the Yuuzhan Vong’s living armor. “Inferior armor, inferior weaponry, inferior troops.” He glanced around. “Even the bissops were slow.”

Leia glanced at Sasso in sudden uncertainty. “Another side effect of the heat wave?”

The Rodian shook his head in perplexity.

“Let me get this straight,” Wraw said. “You’re disappointed because we won too easily?” He snorted a laugh. “I’m beginning to wonder if all of you aren’t sympathizers.”

“He’s right.” Page said. “We can use every bit of luck we get.”

“I’ve played enough sabacc to know luck when I see it,” Han said, “and this wasn’t it.” He scanned the boulders and nearby trees. “They could be luring us into a trap.”

Kyp glanced at him. “Something else is going on here,” he said.