CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The University of Agamar students had been very resourceful in dealing with the conditions they discovered on Bimmiel, Corran decided. Once the sand started to fly, they developed broad, flat footgear that could be buckled to the bottom of boots, expanding the size of a walker’s footprint. It distributed enough of the walker’s weight that he didn’t sink into the sand. A second iteration of the design included a compartment beneath the heel that could be filled with the dead-slashrat scent—referred to, rather accurately, as stink—so slashrats wouldn’t track folks out scouting around.

The sandgales picked up again shortly after the Jedi’s arrival, trapping them in the cavern with the field team. Corran quickly established that he and Ganner would take watches at the cave mouth, especially at night, when their Force senses could make picking out the approach of slashrats much easier. The fact that these watches also tended to be cold meant none of the students lamented giving them up. Because the students had infrared monitoring equipment that allowed them to spot the heat that slashrats gave off—thereby rendering them technologically visible at night—an undercurrent of comments started about how stupid the Jedi were to rely on archaic practices and the Force when technology worked just as well and allowed a full division of labor.

The criticism annoyed Ganner, but Corran didn’t mind it. As he explained to Ganner in the dead of the night, “If they think we’re a bit slow, they’ll believe themselves superior. This makes us much less of a threat in their eyes. Since we’ll be living with them for a while, having them think us more buffoon than brute won’t be bad.”

Ganner had his own ideas about how to improve relations with the students, which resulted in Trista spending part of the watches talking with him in hushed tones that were punctuated by far too many giggles. Ganner’s getting along with Trista did have a curious effect on the rest of the company. Males in the group who found her desirable didn’t pick on the Jedi too much, lest they risk offending her. Her female friends remained neutral toward the Jedi, or at least toward Corran. The others, including Dr. Pace, seemed to take the budding romance as a sign that Ganner was human—or manipulable—and that eased some tension.

The week of storms did allow Corran to learn more about the Yuuzhan Vong body and artifacts the team had discovered. At his suggestion they looked at the artifacts and confirmed that the weapons and armor were, or once had been, living creatures.

The fact that the Yuuzhan Vong had been on Bimmiel before and, perhaps significantly, during the exit half of the orbit, suggested to Corran that if they returned, they would be very well suited to local conditions since they knew what to expect. He felt certain they had returned and were in the area: as martial a people as they seemed to be, he could easily imagine them coming to recover the remains of their fallen comrade. Corran had no idea why it took the Yuuzhan Vong fifty years before returning to recover the body. Perhaps this one was an early scout. However, if his hunch was true, everyone in the university field team was in serious jeopardy.

As the gales died down, Corran made plans for himself and Ganner to recon the area. They waited until nightfall, strapped on sandshoes, and headed out to the east, toward the shores of what, during the time of the Imperial survey, had been a lake. Their progress was not fast, but the sandshoes did allow them to keep moving without having to dig themselves out of deep sand.

Corran and Ganner crouched downwind of a discovery. Two dunes over, painted in silver and gray by the moon’s light, there boiled a ball of slashrats savaging some other creature. The predators made angry little growls as they shot up through the sand and dived back down into it, or slithered back and forth, wagging their heads in fights over scraps of carrion. Watching them feed, Corran almost felt sorry for the Yuuzhan Vong they’d attacked.

More curious than the battling was a sharp, sour scent that wafted to them on the wind. Corran wrinkled his nose. “That’s worse than stink.”

Ganner nodded. “That’s killscent. Trista says the slashrats exude it when they’re making a kill. It lets others know food is in the area. They’ll close in, herding the shwpi back toward the main kill site. Some experiments showed that the slashrats will ignore stink to get at killscent. While the students could synthesize it, they don’t for fear of inviting a feeding frenzy.”

“Wise idea.” Corran got up and started moving around to the south. “We skirt the killball and keep going. I’m getting faint glimmerings of stuff farther on.”

“As am I. Strange things.”

The two Jedi continued on in silence—at least, audio silence. When one is attuned to the Force, the emotions playing through another can feel as sweet as music sounds, or as harsh as breaking transparisteel looks. Excitement tinged with resentment trailed off Ganner, so Corran decided to give fewer orders and invite Ganner’s input on little choices, like how to work around a rising line of stony outcroppings that capped the hills overlooking the lake. Ganner gladly took the lead, and once they had removed their sandshoes, they made good progress through the rocks.

At the pinnacle they paused, then slipped into shadows and descended toward the sand-strewn lake bed. They kept behind cover as much as possible, assuming that if the Yuuzhan Vong were there, they would have had the equivalent of infrared monitors available to them. At the base of the rocks they stopped and studied the flat expanse before them.

A village of sorts had been laid out on the lake bed, but clearly the designer had been working with some logic that Corran couldn’t understand. Closest to their position were small rounded buildings, bowl-like and inverted, with any opening in them pointing farther east, away from the Jedi. Corran counted two dozen of the stone huts, gathered in four rough ranks of six each. Beyond them came a trio of larger buildings, on the same design, and closest to the rising sun was a single, very large building—easily large enough to house a freighter and have room left over for storing cargo between trips.

Two things struck Corran about the buildings. The first was that they reminded him of mollusk shells. He knew of sea life that appropriated the castoff shells of other creatures, and found it easy to imagine that the Yuuzhan Vong had just come down and grown domiciles for themselves. He had no idea what they did with the creatures that actually grew the shells, but assumed they either moved on to grow the larger ones, or likely were a prime source of food.

The second thing that he noticed was that he got a Force sense of inhabitants only in the smallest of the shells. He glanced over at Ganner. “Something is wrong with the people.”

The other Jedi’s eyes narrowed. “It is as if there is static coming through the Force from them. Their link to the Force is weakening. I think they’re dying.”

“Good insight. And you get nothing from the larger shells?”

“Shells? Of course, that’s what they are. No, I don’t.”

“So, if there are Yuuzhan Vong around, they’re likely in those bigger ones.”

“That would be my assumption.” Ganner pointed a finger at the village and circled it around. “Notice anything about the slashrats?”

Corran stretched out with the Force. He found slashrats easily enough, but they were all twenty meters from the Yuuzhan Vong village. They were active and would move toward it, directly or at an angle, then turn back. Some would even tunnel deep under it but never come up through the heart of it. “Do you think they’re able to repel the slashrats?”

“I don’t know.” Ganner pulled his sandshoes from where he’d fastened them over his back to climb, and started to buckle them to his boots. “A quick look might tell us something.”

The older Jedi frowned. “We’re not very agile in these things. Going down there could be suicidal.”

Ganner smiled coldly. “I have an assist that makes me more agile.”

“You’re not going down there alone.”

“You will be too slow. If we get into trouble, you’ll be—”

“I’ll be waiting for you to use your assist to get me out.” Corran pulled on his sandshoes. “Trista should have you all knowledgeable about what is normal on this rock, so keep your eyes open for anything unusual down there. Let’s get samples of the sand and figure out what keeps the slashrats back.”

“I’m not stupid, you know.”

Corran arched an eyebrow at him. “You say that, but you’re the one who suggested going down there.”

“How smart are you for going with me?”

Corran rolled his eyes. “Just move it.”

Ganner led the way, and the slashrats gave them a wide berth. The two Jedi slipped into the Yuuzhan Vong village at the western end, and each of them crouched in the shadow of one of the shell huts. From inside the hut Corran expected to sense the peaceful flow of the Force he related to sleeping creatures, but jagged breaks in it disrupted the pattern.

He shuffled his way forward and discovered an opening on the eastern side of the shell. The creature that had originally grown the shell must have coiled about a central axis as it grew its armor home. The shell had been set in the sand so the lip of the opening dug into the sand a little. It appeared to Corran, given his sense of where the inhabitant lay, that the person crawled into the shell, then pulled himself deeper into it, sleeping in the small section that lay above the opening itself.

Paralleling Ganner, he moved deeper into the village. His sense of things remained the same. He stopped and pulled from a belt pouch a small duraplast cylinder, then dug it into the ground to take a sample of the sand. He stoppered it, then noticed movement in the sand. A beetle climbed to the top of the sample and started circling around the glassy wall, looking for a way out.

Corran slipped that cylinder back into his pouch and pulled out another empty one. He dug down a little bit into the sand and noticed a beetle emerge into the hole and inspect it. He scooped that beetle up in a cylinder and discovered, by dint of the twin horns on its head, that it was different from the first beetle he’d captured. He dug around some more and found a third type of beetle, much smaller than the first two, and caught it up. He wasn’t certain if it was just young or an entirely different species.

More test holes produced nothing, so Corran started to move on. Ganner had gotten ahead of him and was huddled behind a shell hut in the first rank. Corran immediately cut over to his left, putting him directly on Ganner’s track. He shouldn’t have gone that far ahead. The fact that Ganner appeared to be fingering his lightsaber and had a rising sense of anxiety about him began to alarm Corran.

All of a sudden something shrieked from within one of the shells. A desperate creature crawled from a shell between the two Jedi and stumbled to his feet. He looked vaguely human, but was knock-kneed and had growths on his arms and legs and spine that looked like coral outcroppings. He clawed at a big coral spike growing from his right cheek and shrieked in a hoarse voice that was more animal than man, and more pain than anything else.

The creature ran past Ganner, then fell in the sand and struggled to get up again. The sand itself around the creature began to vibrate, with a dusty mist rising from it as if it were steam boiling off water. Corran couldn’t figure out what was causing the sand to shiver, but he felt a curious vibration from his own belt. He pulled out the beetles he’d captured, and one, the horned one, was beating wings furiously.

Two long and lean Yuuzhan Vong warriors emerged from the first two medium-size shells—which had openings large enough so the tall aliens did not have to stoop as they came out. Neither of them seemed surprised or concerned about the slave. With a fluid grace that would have seemed almost sensual, were they not cadaverously slender, the Yuuzhan Vong split up and approached the slave from either side. One, then the other, taunted him with harsh and sharp comments, causing the slave to cower for a moment, and dart away from one, then back toward the other.

All the while the sand around his feet danced as the beetles flapped their wings in alarm.

Corran felt the slave’s fear spike through the Force, then a severe burst of static rattled through Corran. The slave’s fear vanished to be replaced by fury. With fingers hooked into claws and a feral scream falling from his lips, the slave charged headlong at one of the Yuuzhan Vong.

The alien warrior barked abruptly in what Corran took to be a cruel laugh. The warrior dodged to the right, then brought his left fist up in a punch that caught the slave over his heart. The slave arced up into the air and flew back a meter or so, then landed on his heels and flopped onto his back. Corran felt certain he’d heard ribs crack, but the slave rolled to the left and stood again, then charged the other Yuuzhan Vong.

The second warrior stopped the charge with a straight right hand to the slave’s face. The sharp pop of bones breaking overrode the slave’s muted whimper. The Yuuzhan Vong took a step back, then dropped another right hand onto the same cheek. The bony knobs on his knuckles came away dark and glistening. Then he swept his left leg up and around in a kick that slammed into the slave’s ribs and pitched him back toward the first Yuuzhan Vong.

The first Yuuzhan Vong warrior opened his arms, almost in a welcoming gesture. He said something to the battered slave. It seemed like a question, and the reaction from the slave was one of disbelief. The slave spat, hugging arms to his ribs, then snarled and dashed at his interrogator.

The first Yuuzhan Vong warrior hammered the slave with a left hook that snapped off the coral spike on the man’s right cheek. The blow spun him around. The Yuuzhan Vong then drove his right fist into the slave’s back, precisely over the kidneys. Corran winced in sympathy as the slave went to his knees.

A quick burst of fury alerted Corran to a new problem. Ganner had brought his lightsaber to hand but had not yet ignited it. Knowing what Ganner wanted to do, but also knowing it would get them and the students killed, Corran acted. He used the Force to drill through Ganner’s sense of outrage and pumped the acrid scent of stink straight into his brain.

Ganner immediately dropped to his knees and doubled over. He covered his mouth with his gloved hands as his chest convulsed. What little was left of his supper leaked out through his fingers and puddled in the sand. He shot Corran an incendiary glance, then his body heaved again.

Beyond him, in the space between the huts, the two Yuuzhan Vong towered over their slave. Both of them barked questions at him. Confusion rolled off the slave, then outrage. He coughed out an incoherent comment and composed his face into a mask of defiance. He pushed off the ground with one hand and tried to rise and run, but his captors never gave him the chance to escape.

A kick to the stomach jetted dark fluid from the slave’s mouth. Blood rolled down from his cheeks like a flood of black tears. The Yuuzhan Vong circled the slave, their punches and kicks knocking him back and forth between them. If not for the sheer violence of their assault, he would have fallen to the sand. They kept him upright despite the fact that their blows shattered his skeleton and made it impossible for him to keep himself on his feet.

Finally the slave sagged to the ground. He was so far gone that a few more kicks couldn’t even send a spark of pain from him to Corran through the Force. The Yuuzhan Vong looked at one another, traded laughter and comments. They mimed blows they had struck and used their hands to mimic the way the slave had bounced between them. Then they stooped and grabbed the slave, wrist and ankle, and carried him to the edge of the village. Swinging him back and forth four times, they lofted him out into the sand, and very quickly a slashrat killball marked the place he landed.

The Yuuzhan Vong picked up handfuls of sand and used it to scrub blood from their bodies, then wandered back to their huts and disappeared back inside.

Corran projected the image of the hills into Ganner’s mind, then began his own retreat from the village. He took it slowly and monitored Ganner’s progress. He waited close by until the younger Jedi actually got out on the sand outside of the village. He hoped the tang of killscent would remind Ganner how close death lay to them.

Again nestled in the rocks of the hills, the two Jedi removed their sandshoes to begin their ascent. Ganner sullenly strapped the shoes across his back, then turned on Corran.

“If you ever do anything like that again, I will kill you.”

“At least then death will be deferred, not immediate, as it would have been here.”

“That man, you watched them beat him to death, and you did nothing.”

“That’s right, I did nothing because our tracks could be followed back to the students. We saw only two of the Yuuzhan Vong, but there could be dozens more, maybe hundreds in the big shell. Cutting those two down, right there, if you could have done it, would have doomed Dr. Pace and Trista and the others.”

Ganner snorted angrily. “Not if they were the only two Yuuzhan Vong here.”

“And what do you think the chances of that are?”

The younger man arched a dark eyebrow. “There are only two Jedi here.”

“Unassailable logic, that, Ganner.” Corran settled the sandshoes across his back, then tugged on the cuffs of his gloves. “Maybe there are two, maybe there are two thousand. I don’t doubt that before we get off this rock, we’re going to have to kill some of them, but the longer we can delay that confrontation, the better.”

“So more people can die?”

“No, so we have a good chance of stopping the Agamarians from being captured. What we saw here is a data point, and one I want to study. That wasn’t just a beating.”

“It was sport, cruel sport.”

“Maybe, at the end, yes, but there was something else.” Corran frowned. “The way they spoke to him, they expected something from him. Their contempt, their anger, as shown by the frenzy at the end—something else was going on there.”

“Fine, you think about the motives of our murderers. I don’t think that data point will do you any good.”

“Maybe not, but it’s not all we’ve got. Our soil samples are more data points—”

“Killing Yuuzhan Vong will generate precious data points for you.”

“Maybe. Dead Jedi would make for even more data points.” Corran tapped two fingers against his right temple. “The vital thing right now is that we get back to the students, see if they can help us figure out what’s going on here, then see if we can get away safely with what we know.”

“And, if we can’t?”

Corran shrugged. “The first few times the Yuuzhan Vong fought Jedi, we won. We’ll just have to see how far we can extend that streak.”