The Yuuzhan Vong claim Coruscant (Stephan Martiniere)
“Many men will volunteer to die, but few will be patient in the face of pain.”
—Attributed to Canderous Ordo, Mandalorian Neo-Crusader
Yavin 4, 27 ABY. Partial audio reconstruction begins.
The … to understand about … Vong isn’t that they invaded the galaxy from … Rim. It isn’t that they … based on pain, or a broken connection with the Force, or a caste … collar around your throat—or even that they shun machinery, and use biotechnology that scurries and bites.
The most important … Vong is this: They don’t believe in death.
Some of their sects say the Changing is … of reincarnation, while others speak of a greater world beyond this reality. Some … mystical explanations, while others are poetic descriptions … But they all agree that life—each individual, precious, sentient life—continues after death.
That is why … so freely in battle—and that is the terrible logic … mass sacrifice of slaves and prisoners. What better fate … exalted through a noble, agonizing death—to win them a better … next life? What better offering to the skies than purified living souls … exposed to truth?
None of that, however, really explains why they invaded the galaxy. If you want … listen to me.
The woman … eyes is Master Shaper Mezhan Kwaad … striking cheekbones is Priestess Ngaaluh of the Deception Sect.
And my name, little Jedi, is Vergere.
We represent a secret society … overthrow of the Yuuzhan Vong religion—along with the … and torture, the petty caste system, and the calcified rituals and superstition that keep these people in self-inflicted torment.
Sounds noble, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately—Tahiri, I believe your name used to be? We’re not here to rescue you.
The only way to sever the Yuuzhan Vong … by destroying their entire society … The dominant elite will helpfully get themselves killed … lumpen masses will be enlightened by the horrors of the battlefield … defeat. We’ve been working on this for fifty years, and … can’t allow one blond Jedi apprentice—or her blue-eyed boyfriend—to stop us.
Why have I told you all our darkest secrets, little Jedi? Because you won’t remember any of this—not even meeting me.
That collar around your neck—horrible, isn’t it?—is a mind-control creature called a provoker spineray. You’re docile … already programmed you … We’re about to do a thousand horrible things to your mind … a slavish disciple of everything I told you about at the start.
Why? To give the galaxy another agonizing symbol of all the inherent wrong of Yuuzhan Vong society. To mobilize the military potential … such as Anakin Solo to help us … tear down the rotting walls, and … out of their dead-end culture and into a better, brighter future.
So … for a good cause, you see.
Now, Ngaaluh and I … Mezhan can get back to her work, burning away your human soul.
And, like they used to say in the spy holos, we never had this conversation.
Partial audio reconstruction ends.
Fifteen-year-old Jedi apprentice Tahiri Veila, victim of a half-successful Yuuzhan Vong braintwisting, gave this “know-your-enemy” briefing to Corellian Security personnel in 27 ABY, at the request of retired CorSec director Rostek Horn. She was accompanied by Anakin Solo and his sister, Jaina.
Yuuzhan Vong weaponry is, in a word, weird. We use sharp-edged eels that serve as whips or edged weapons, blobs of jelly to tie up people’s limbs, and flying bugs in place of detonators. But it’s perfect for melee fighters and silent infiltrators. No noise, no telltale energy discharge, no circuits or power cells for sensors to detect. Vonduun armor is the living ebony shell of a man-sized crustacean, reworked to fit around a humanoid body. It may look weird—especially when they leave the limbs on—but it’s tough enough to stop blaster bolts.
Imagine being on perimeter patrol, or crouched waiting in trench positions. At night. In a rainstorm. Now imagine exploding bugs and venom-spitting whips and monsters in spiked armor—suddenly right on top of you, coming out of the dark from the wrong direction, with no warning. That is how we fight.
Our slave infantry don’t try to hide—they’re designed for wave assaults, but they aren’t expected to do much fighting until they get into a melee, either. They’re just expendable. So you gun most of them down with auto blasters, and the ones who are left claw their way into your position, and start biting you. We’re not a nice people, as I’ve repeatedly tried to explain to Anakin.
Where necessary, we’ve proved entirely capable of turning our biotechnology into guns—volcano cannons, your pilots call them. Our primary weapon for armored vehicles and warships is the yaret kor, or plasma mortar, which works just like a turbolaser, while most of our big ships fire magma missiles, flying spikes of rock that work just like proton torpedoes. Jaina says they have a better maneuver pattern than anything from Incom.
Of course, it all probably still looks weird to you, just like it looks weird to the part of me that’s still human. Take the Rakamat, the big warkeeper that Master Skywalker killed at Dantooine. It’s a six-legged armored monster the size of a krayt dragon, with plating a foot thick, and plasma cannons and dovin basals implanted along its spine. Those massive projecting plates along its back act as cooling vanes for its overheated biology. And it has a control room and troop compartment in its belly, which somehow doesn’t seem gross to me anymore.
And I think that’s enough explaining for today, if you don’t mind.
Yuuzhan Vong warriors (Chris Scalf)
Yuuzhan Vong society is divided into castes. Some are skilled and privileged, including administrators, scientists, and hierophants. Others—the laborers, the unclean, and the slaves—simply live to serve the elite. Every caste is subdivided into domains, political factions who claim shared descent from ancestral heroes.
The domains of the warrior caste form the backbone of the Yuuzhan Vong military, but vary widely in size and organization. Smaller septs supply a few infantry companies, along with recruits for the fighter squadrons and warship armada. Although the largest domains maintain powerful fleets, most warships—especially fighters and pickets—are part of an armada that belongs to no domain, and which recruits personnel from the other castes. Cadres of intendants serve as tacticians and villip handlers, while shapers act in place of engineers and science officers, all fully integrated into the military chain of command.
Most of the other castes also have their own troops, primarily as a counterweight against warrior dominance. The most notable are the Praetorite Vong, a subdivision of the intendant caste—their role includes military logistics, reconnaissance, and bridgehead assaults, as well as providing the personal bodyguard of the warmaster. Suicide missions are entrusted to expendable cadres of Shamed Ones, unclean ex-warriors expelled from their caste due to dishonor.
Slaves—a mixture of ancient servant species and prisoners of war—are also used in large numbers as expendable assault troops. The bravest of these can earn promotion into the warrior caste, but a typical slave soldier is no more than a living battle droid, fitted with yorik coral implants that work like restraining bolts and commanded by a combination of braintwisting and mind control.
In the final stage of the war, the false Shimrra created an elite order known as the Slayers. Combining the attributes of priest and warrior, and commanded by female shaper-intendants, they were placed outside the caste system, and designed as the advance guard of a new religious and social system. Compact and heavily muscled, they had dark, scarless skin that was impervious to lightsabers and blaster bolts, and were gifted with fighting reflexes faster than the greatest warrior champions. While most Yuuzhan Vong recognized that they were abominations born in a shaper’s lab, with sculpted bodies that were little more than living suits of armor, few dared to guess they had originated as Force-sensitive human slaves bioengineered from Jedi tissue samples.
CORALSKIPPER
The coralskipper was the standard starfighter of the Yuuzhan Vong, known in their own language as a yorik-et. It was a short-range fighter, comparable in role to the TIE fighter, but like all Vong vessels it was a biotechnological creature, organically grown in petrochemical paddies on plantation worlds. The living spaceframe was a slim delta wing of black yorik coral, typically around thirteen meters long, with a cluster of brightly colored nodes around the bow and a cockpit canopy perched toward the rear.
Like most Vong craft, a coralskipper was controlled by a cognition hood, a telepathic cowl that enabled symbiosis with the ship’s sensors and systems. The nodes at the bow included as many as three yaret-kor plasma cannons—even one of which boasted greater firepower than an X-wing’s quartet of lasers—plus a dovin basal that provided propulsion, inertial compensation, and shielding capacity. The coralskipper’s acceleration and maneuverability rivaled the best New Republic and Imperial Remnant starfighters, but the alien ships’ shielding capabilities were inconsistent, and opposing pilots developed several ways to penetrate them.
The Vong also used heavy starfighters, comparable in firepower and capabilities to Skipray blastboats. The yorik-akaga was a dedicated fleet escort, while the mandible-bowed yorik-vec was a long-range infiltrator that could fill a variety of roles, from escort patrol to commando insertions. A larger coralskipper variant with a hyperdrive was assigned to the elite Slayers in the final weeks of the conflict. Rumor had it these starfighters were created in part with voxyn genes in an attempt to give them rudimentary Force sensitivity.
YUUZHAN VONG CAPITAL SHIPS
At first sight, Yuuzhan Vong warships seemed as alien as the rest of their biotechnology. There were vessels resembling dark spires of basalt, spiky seedpods, and faceted crystal vertices. A closer look, however, revealed familiar principles of design and classification.
Small warships, corresponding to corvettes and frigates, made up around 90 percent of the Vong capital ships. Most were between one hundred and two hundred meters in length, crewed by just three or four pilots and a squad of gunners—but like all Yuuzhan Vong creations, these warships were living things, and veteran escort vessels could grow to the size of a light cruiser or larger. Regardless of size, these ships were more heavily armed than typical New Republic escorts, with plasma cannons and magma missile launchers on their bows and flanks. Their lean, narrow hulls tapered into points, designed to focus all weapons in a devastating forward salvo—but their ability to defend themselves and other ships was inferior to New Republic ships. This lack of protective escorts was one of the Vong’s major weaknesses.
The larger warships were more heterogeneous, but divided into two general classes, corresponding to the New Republic’s traditional heavy cruisers and Star Destroyers. The matalok was slow and defense-oriented, while the Miid Ro’ik was a faster type with armament meant for attack. Although hullforms varied widely, most Vong capital ship analogues had multicolored spars protruding at bow and stern that acted as docking racks for fighter squadrons. Many housed their weapons emplacements in recessed trenches cut across the width of the ship, so that the alternating pattern of rocky armor and dark shadow gave a banded appearance to their hulls. More distinctive vessels included bulbous-hulled yammosk carriers and twin-dagger Vua’spar interdictors, but these were classed as variants of the mataloks or ro’iks.
The largest Vong ships corresponded to dreadnoughts, and again fell into two classifications. Grand Cruisers were monster vessels with hunched, lopsided silhouettes, created by armoring victorious flagships with the bulging carapaces of broken escorts and defeated opponents. They were popular flagships for aggressive warrior domains, decked with trailing battle flags and decorated with bold heraldic glyphs. The greatest domains, however, had ancestral worldships—massive brethren to the transports that housed most Vong civilians. The ebony hulls of these warrior worldships were pitted with weapons and encircled by rings of huge claw-shaped docking pylons. The largest worldship of all, Domain Lah’s Baanu Rass, was the size of a Death Star. Parked in orbit at Myrkr, it housed the premier Vong military academy, and was the headquarters of the invaders’ project to hunt down and enslave the Jedi Knights.
This scandoc circulated widely in Confederation holofeeds in 40–43 ABY. It was variously claimed to be an Imperial Naval Academy lecture, an address to the Council of Moffs, or part of a memoir by Jacen Solo or Natasi Daala. Its true authorship has never been established.
In 25 ABY, alien invasion fleets attacked several remote systems in the northern quadrant of the Outer Rim. At Artorias and Vonak, they enslaved whole civilizations.
In response, the New Republic Defense Force let them advance unopposed, allowing them to conquer countless unprotected worlds and enslave as many beings as they wanted.
Seen from the clean decks of the Admiralty, the doctrine made sense—don’t waste troops and ships in pointless battles; hold back your forces, build up your power, lead the enemy to a battleground of your own choosing; then fight a decisive battle from a position of strength, and destroy your enemy. That was how the Rebel fleet destroyed the Empire, and variations on the same theme had served the New Republic well.
The top flag officers seemed to know what they were talking about. The new Supreme Commander was Admiral Sien Sovv, a Sullustan with a tenacious reputation as a task-force commander. His chief of staff was a dashing cruiser captain, Commodore Turk Brand.
But neither of them knew how to fight a war. They had no experience in large-scale fleet command, and their campaign thinking was learned from scandocs. Their key aides were specialists in tactical analysis and logistics rather than actual combat veterans, and many of them fetishized military discipline and pride to the point of obedient conformity.
Etahn A’baht, the only fighting admiral to retain a senior role, repeatedly called for a change of plan, but he was marginalized by Sovv and Brand, and resigned his commission less than a year into the war. He went off to take charge of the Dornean Navy in his home sector, and fought the local Vong to a standstill.
Sovv and his team were honest by their own standards, and took no pleasure in the duty of sending troops to fight and die. Necessary was a word they used a lot. Heroism, they said, usually cost more lives than it saved. At least that was what their books had told them.
In practice, though, their war plan made the Defense Force seem weak, and made the enemy seem unstoppable. And on a level that really mattered, this weakened the New Republic’s fighting ability. Among civilians and low-level military personnel, panic spread without restraint. Most front-line troops went into battle expecting to take a beating from the galaxy’s new apex predators.
Thus, the war assumed a grim, depressing pattern—a series of attempts by the military to lure the invaders into a decisive battle, which looked to everyone else like retreats and botched holding actions.
It didn’t have to be that way. At Ithor, the Imperial Navy stood and fought, with Bothan and Jedi support. They didn’t wait for Sovv’s permission before they forced the battle, and they destroyed the Domain Shai warfleet with minimal casualties. Perhaps if Sovv had given them more support, fixed defenses would have been in place, and the Vong wouldn’t have burned the jungle as they went down. But it was the Jedi and the Imperials whose reputations were tarnished, leaving Sovv in firmer control of the war.
By now, the admiral and his aides had a good picture of enemy strength and intentions, and believed they could lure a major part of the Vong fleet into a decisive battle. They put their plan into action—and their opponents manipulated them every step of the way.
Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo leading the fight against the Vong (Chris Scalf)
The New Republic laid their trap at Corellia—and the Vong fell on the undefended Fondor shipyards. Only the desperate firing of Centerpoint prevented the complete annihilation of the New Republic Defense Force. This time, the Corellians took the flak because half the Hapan fleet was caught in the Centerpoint backblast, but the shock of what Centerpoint did overshadowed the fact that the Defense Force had caused itself even more damage that day, and in a straight fight. The First Fleet was obliterated, the Third and Fifth mauled by enemy minefields, and the New Republic’s second-largest shipyard was out of the war.
Now the Vong warmaster took personal command of the invasion armada—Tsavong Lah, 150 kilos of armored muscle, a grinning face all slashed up with scars, and a military brain as sharp as a lightsaber. In three months, he conquered the Hutts and advanced to Duro, on the edge of the Core.
Then he stopped, and offered Sovv a cease-fire.
Sovv accepted. He reckoned that the Vong decision to take the longer southern route through Duro meant the New Republic defenses around the northern Core were impregnable, and he calculated that a pause in hostilities would favor his shipbuilding and recruitment statistics more than the Vong’s.
The Jedi Knights—seen by the military as undisciplined amateurs—were allowed to be hunted like animals.
And the Jedi weren’t the only people the High Command sacrificed to the enemy that year. The Vong had spent decades infiltrating the Empire and New Republic, laying the seeds of a thousand brushfire conflicts—resentments that festered like infected wounds, ready to flare when they were scratched. Combined with the biggest refugee crisis in years and the looming presence of insane alien conquerors, civilian confidence in the ability of the New Republic to maintain peace and justice collapsed. Hundreds of undefended local governments surrendered to the Vong.
The Defense Force ignored it all. They prioritized shipbuilding, munitions factories, and recruitment. They told themselves it was necessary, and that giving in to emotions was a dangerous weakness.
But they were already losing the war. In the northern and eastern quadrants, the Yuuzhan Vong now ruled.
No one knows if the skirmish at Yavin 4 was a deliberate provocation, Tsavong Lah’s way of finding an excuse to restart the war. It doesn’t matter. A group of smugglers and rogue Jedi apprentices liberated one of the invaders’ largest slave plantations.
There’s a holo of Han and Leia’s three kids standing on the dirt strip with lightsabers drawn, and Talon Karrde’s ships coming in to land behind them to free the slaves. That marked the resumption of the war—but perhaps more important, it served as an example of what the Defense Force was failing to do.
The Vong now showed their hand, using their Duro base to move west through undefended space lanes to Yag’Dhul, then bringing up new fleets to smash the Core defenses on the other side, Sovv’s impregnable Northern Line—thrusting through Bilbringi and Borleias, until they were standing right on top of Coruscant.
By now the Jedi were gearing up to fight their own war on their flank—starfighter raids, refugee support, all the stuff the New Republic wasn’t doing. To draw them off, the Vong feinted at their own private psychological flank—with a project to create Force-hunting monsters at Myrkr.
The Jedi fell for it, sending off their best young Jedi Knights on a pointless suicide mission.
Sovv, meanwhile, concentrated his three fleet groups at the capital, anticipating the decisive clash, or planning to destroy the enemy units before they could combine. It almost worked—with a little help from Han Solo, he caught the second-largest Vong fleet near the Black Bantha protostar and won a crushing victory—but their main force converged too quickly, and Sovv was forced to fight in the sky above Galactic City, with his back to the planetary shield.
The Battle of Coruscant was the blackest day in New Republic history, and the nadir of Sien Sovv’s career. At the start of the main battle, Chief Fey’lya tried to fire him, so he surrendered the tactical initiative to ensure the support of influential Senators and evacuated the Admiralty and NRI halfway across the galaxy to Mon Calamari.
The Hutts defend their ancient holdings (Drew Baker)
Luke Skywalker meets Shimrra Jamaane in battle (Bruno Werneck)
After Coruscant, the Vong ruled the capital, and had consolidated their grip on the Core and most of the Inner Rim, taking tribute from systems that surrendered, and conquering the remaining New Republic bases.
Relatively quickly, however, the Defense Force put forward a new analysis: The Vong had suffered massively from their loss of ships and troops above Coruscant, and were now committed to fortify exposed positions in the Core. This received more emphasis than the enslavement of a trillion beings and the New Republic’s obliteration as a functioning state.
Sovv spent the next few months calmly reorganizing the military, training recruits and building new ships, regrouping battle groups that had escaped intact from the rout, and sending them out on meaningless skirmishes to temper them for battle—a tactic the Vong had employed early in the war. Their first offensive move was an Intelligence-led raid to assassinate the Vong monarch at Obroa-skai. It was the sort of offer you couldn’t really pass up, and perhaps the first smart move they’d made in the whole war—but it was deemed a failure. The Alliance had been fed false intelligence, and the Yuuzhan Vong had sacrificed a spare worldship to sneak the real Supreme Overlord through to Coruscant.
Then, a few weeks later, Sovv managed to force another decisive battle. With Imperial help, he finally lured the enemy fleet into a trap at Ebaq 9 in the Deep Core, and threw everything he had at them—smugglers, mutineers, conscripts, even Jedi.
And won.
Tsavong Lah’s ships were surrounded and besieged, trapped in low orbit under New Republic guns. The warmaster was killed in a brutal lightsaber duel with Jaina Solo. Sovv, at last, had his decisive victory.
Decisive victory, however, proved to have no major effect on the wider flow of the war. The defenses of the Vong occupation zone proved rather more resilient than the Northern Line had been—or else Sovv was content to allow half the galaxy to remain enslaved while he played with his statistics. Kashyyyk, halfway to the void, was now the First Fleet’s forward base—supported by a chain of systems stretching back toward Mon Calamari, rather than a linear frontier. The rest was given to the Vong.
The leading Jedi Masters were still regarded with polite disdain because they wouldn’t join the Defense Force and had blocked the use of genocide weapons. So they were allowed to launch a mystic quest into the Unknown Regions in pursuit of Zonama Sekot, a legendary living world that figured in the Yuuzhan Vong mythology.
Meanwhile, attempts were made to acquire expendable troops from neutral powers—the entries of the Hapans, Imperial, and some Chiss elements into the war were hailed as a series of diplomatic triumphs for the Galactic Alliance, the powerless new government-in-exile that had come into being alongside the High Command.
Finally, after another year of preparation, the Alliance fleets began to lumber into action. Sovv and his aides devised a complex series of feints and strikes, designed to conquer staging systems for an assault on Coruscant. This Trinity plan proved a disaster. It reminded the Vong that the Alliance systems were more than a series of game preserves for hunting wild infidels. In response, they went on the offensive against New Republic shipyards, overrunning Kuat and Hakassi before moving on to Mon Calamari.
Mon Calamari was barely saved when Zonama Sekot came out of hyperspace near Coruscant—the mythical world turned out to be a living battle station, a forest-covered Death Star that could summon Force lightning superlasers from its treetops to destroy Vong dreadnoughts. This made the Vong panic. They recalled their entire fleet to face their crazy mythological enemy.
The Defense Force had avoided another pointless mauling at Dac, and now the Vong simply gave them the opportunity that years of campaigns had failed to create. Thanks to Sekot, the enemy’s military strength was concentrated in one place—Coruscant—and Sovv had another chance to win a decisive battle.
The battle didn’t happen the way Sovv planned. Instead, it split into multiple distinct engagements in different parts of the system. Hapan Battle Dragons defended Sekot against one Vong force, while Imperial Star Destroyers and TIEs established local air and space superiority above Galactic City to support the ground assault, and in a third battle, the Galactic Alliance was thrashed by the new warmaster, Nas Choka. It was all rendered irrelevant by an uprising, secured by oppressed heretics, antiwar factions in the Vong elite, and a few veteran Rebel operatives who’d wound up in the undercity by accident.
The destruction of the Supreme Overlord’s flagship by Jedi Knight Jacen Solo provoked the enemy’s surrender, but in retrospect, that may have been less significant than it seemed—the Vong had lost Coruscant, and the fleet battle was basically a brutal draw already. They didn’t have the strength or will left to fight anymore.
Under Jedi pressure, the surviving Vong were resettled in the Unknown Regions without further punishment, prompting Sovv to haul down his flag in protest; but the civilian government proved unable to function without him, and he was soon reappointed as Supreme Commander.
In hindsight, it seems clear that the Vong’s success owed a great deal to New Republic and Galactic Alliance failings. The Defense Force commanders surrendered territory and worlds to chase the mirage of a decisive fleet battle.
They also neglected commerce raiding, pinpoint attacks, and local defense—tactics that had been instrumental for the Rebellion. Above all, they didn’t allow local commanders much freedom to maneuver. Tsavong Lah was more than half monster, but at least he rewarded initiative, whereas Sovv sidelined and court-martialed people for it.
That’s not the whole story, though.
It’s all very well to say that Sien Sovv and Turk Brand sacrificed unnecessary lives to the dark gods of logistical discipline. It’s probably true.
But no one stopped them, either. A lot of ordinary people saw what they were doing—and let them do it.
And that, I suppose, is what’s really meant by the banality of evil.
