The villip stared at Viqi Shesh with the face of a human man, large-boned, the angle of his head suggesting fear and pain. “I’m not in a position to learn any secrets,” the villip protested. “I just follow Wolam Tser around, recording his observations and interviews.”
Viqi made her voice a purr. She hoped its tones and nuances would carry across the villip. This voice excited men, made them long for her, and the notion that desire for her would torment this man amused her. “You met Danni Quee. Become her friend. Her lover, if you’re capable of it. Convince her to confide in you. Volunteer for additional duties when Tser isn’t making use of you. You can do simple electronics repairs, can’t you?”
Tam’s voice sounded pained. “Yes.”
“Get a job doing that. Put recorders or transmitters in devices that will go in critical places. Iella Wessiri is good enough to find anything you might plant, so don’t try to harvest the information those devices might bring you; instead, leave counterpart objects where blame will fall on people within their command structure, people Antilles and Skywalker don’t quite trust yet. Cause paranoia. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Prove it, simpleton.” Viqi stroked the villip and it contracted, cutting off the communication.
She sighed and stretched. The skin of her back, still healing, protested, but she did not let that minor pain show on her face. Then she turned, the bloblike material that served her as a chair accommodating itself to her motion, and faced her own controller.
He was dressed in the loincloth of a warrior, amphistaff in hand. His nose had been smashed flat, an oddly symmetrical mutilation for a Yuuzhan Vong, and part of his right upper lip was gone, revealing teeth beneath. His skin was decorated extensively with tattoos.
But his most extensive mutilation was a single puckered scar. In most places it was an angry red, sometimes graduating to a scabrous brown, everywhere standing out starkly against his skin. It started out at the top of his bald head, wound down his right cheek to his chin and up the other side, then turned downward again just short of his left eye. It continued down his neck and wound back and forth across his chest before disappearing beneath his harness. It reemerged on his right thigh, ending in a circle around his knee. It must have been among his earliest decorations, for his tattoos paralleled it, never running across it.
His name was Denua Ku, and Viqi knew from the few words she had exchanged with him that he had no grasp of Intelligence operations. He was here to guard her, not to help her with her assignment. She gave him a smile that was all contempt and mockery. “All done,” she said.
“Then you will return to your quarters.” His voice suggested mutual contempt, even through the tizowyrm, an organic translator of the Yuuzhan Vong, implanted in her ear.
“I’m sick of my quarters. I do half an hour’s worth of work a day managing this idiot of an operative and spend the rest of my time in chambers that smell like half-cooked bantha tripe. I want something to do.”
Denua Ku said nothing. Viqi took that as a good sign. If he’d been under strict orders to keep her in her quarters, he would have immediately demanded that they go there. But he wasn’t going to suggest any sort of recreation to her; she’d have to find her own diversion.
She knew they’d never agree to a diversion that would get her near spacecraft or pilot training, so she’d have to find some other way to get her into other parts of the worldship, places where she could meet other Yuuzhan Vong—or even some of their prisoners.
“I want to learn how coralskippers and buildings and armor are grown. How everything is grown. I suppose I’ll need a skill for when the Yuuzhan Vong have subjugated everything and don’t need an Intelligence division anymore.” Denua Ku didn’t answer, so she added, “Take my request to the warmaster. I suspect he’ll agree to it.”
It was the carrion-eaters’ hour, or so Tsavong Lah thought of it, the hour in which he permitted visitors to come before him on miscellaneous errands, the hour in which he cleaned away his visitors’ petty difficulties so they didn’t accumulate like carrion. He steered his attention away from that customary thought, as it came too close to his problem with his new arm.
The warrior Denua Ku came before him with Viqi Shesh’s request. Tsavong Lah authorized it. The human woman would never abandon her manipulative ways to learn a productive trade.
Next into the small reception chamber was Maal Lah, his kinsman and one of his best military advisers. Maal Lah’s features were surprisingly regular, his jawline unbroken, but his face was meticulously decorated with red and blue swirls.
“Yes, my servant?” the warmaster asked.
“I have learned a curious thing,” Maal Lah said. “The infidel fleet that took Borleias has not yet begun its withdrawal. And the surviving warriors of Domain Kraal report that the tool-users are digging in as if against a siege.”
“That makes little sense from a military viewpoint,” the warmaster said. “They cannot hope to hold it. They cannot hope for relief.” He considered the matter. “Send Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet to crush them. Domain Kraal despises Domain Cha; having to admit a debt to Cha will be additional punishment for not holding Borleias as they should.”
“Yes, Warmaster.”
“Was there anything else?”
“No, Warmaster.” Maal Lah withdrew.
Next to receive an audience was Takhaff Uul, a priest. Highly placed within the order of Yun-Yuuzhan, the great god of the Yuuzhan Vong, Takhaff Uul was young for his duties; others of his age in the same sect were low-ranking priests, servants and aides to senior priests, while he was already a well-respected interpreter of the god’s will. His tattoos were not geometric designs or exaggerations of deformities; his designs were of eyeballs, small clawed hands, tentacles, all rendered in realistic detail as if to suggest he had had dozens of transplants in his short life. He bowed low before the warmaster.
“Speak,” Tsavong Lah said.
Takhaff Uul straightened. “I speak out of place,” he said, “bypassing the high priest to bring words directly to your ears, so I have come prepared to die if my words displease you.”
“You should always come prepared to die,” Tsavong Lah said. “You should not try to predict when your words will displease me.”
“Speak your mind.”
“I speak not my mind, but the will of the Creator, Yun-Yuuzhan. My visions of him in last night’s dreams led me to thoughts of you and your … affliction.”
Tsavong Lah lifted the hand of his radank claw and studied its grasping digits. With this limb, he could rend the throat of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior … assuming the limb did not tear free of him with such an exertion. “What did he say of me?”
“Only that your pursuit of this war brings much pleasure to the heart of the slayer Yun-Yammka.”
“I do not see how this relates to my arm.”
“It was what he did not say, Warmaster. I felt—and this was only a priest’s intuition—that the Creator believed himself to be separate from the glory you are achieving. That he is not receiving his due share. That he is displeased.”
“And what did you feel would correct this measure?”
“A dedication, Warmaster. A gift. Something offered to Yun-Yuuzhan alone. An entire world devoted to the Creator and his priests and concerns.”
“But the priests of Yun-Yuuzhan have haven everywhere, among all domains and colonies.”
“Yes, Warmaster. I know you are correct. But who can know the mind of a god? I can only interpret the dreams I have, and hope that I am correct.”
“I will consider this.” With his radank claw, Tsavong Lah made a shooing gesture, and the young priest withdrew.
As soon as the priest’s back was turned, Tsavong Lah nodded to one of his trusted guards and made a gesture that only the warmaster and his personal guards understood. That guard followed Takhaff Uul to the chamber portal; when the priest was well down the corridor, the guard spoke quietly to another guard, then returned to stand behind Tsavong Lah’s seat.
The warmaster dealt with another pair of administrative matters. Then the guard who had followed Takhaff Uul returned and presented himself before the warmaster.
“Well?”
“He went to the chambers of Ghithra Dal, the shaper,” the guard said.
Tsavong Lah sat in contemplation for long moments. Ghithra Dal was the shaper who had attached his radank claw.
Viqi Shesh might have been correct.
He would have to find out.
The fleet of Wyrpuuk Cha slowed as it entered the outer limits of the Pyria system. The system’s distant sun was visible through the amber-colored shell that served the bridge as a viewport, but Wyrpuuk Cha paid it no attention, concentrating instead on the cloud of blaze bugs that hovered in the black hemispherical depression at the rear of the chamber.
The insects, capable of hovering in flight and glowing or growing dark at the mental command of the fleet’s yammosk, formed glowing patterns and shapes within that depression. A spherical cluster of them represented the system’s sun. Others formed smaller balls representing the planets of the system. Numberless glowing mites of a related species, too small to see but for their bluish glow, arrayed themselves to represent the crisscrosses of ionic trails that decorated the solar system, indicating where the hated metal ships of the enemy had recently made runs.
Other blaze bugs hovered singly or formed into small, irregular patches. These, Wyrpuuk Cha knew, constituted groups of enemy ships. Knowledge of their whereabouts came from villip transmissions from the Yuuzhan Vong refugees on Borleias and from the gravitic senses of the yammosk, but the information was incomplete; fleet elements too near gravity wells would not be detectable, nor would ships situated at distant points in or just beyond the solar system. The enemy could have hundreds of ships located here; it would take time and sacrifice to root them out and destroy them.
Time he had, and warriors in great number willing to make that sacrifice. Depending on the enemy forces and commanders, it might prove a struggle, but Wyrpuuk Cha would be able to take this system.
The question was whether he’d be able to take it swiftly enough, efficiently enough to please Warmaster Tsavong Lah. He could not afford to spend too much time or expend too many resources. He needed, strategically speaking, to bare his belly, invite his enemy’s attack, and gut his opponent while that opponent was outstretched, out of balance, out of position. He could afford one feint, maybe two.
“They have not reestablished shield platforms in orbit around the planet.” That was a female voice. It belonged to Kadlah Cha, a military analyst belonging to his own domain.
He spared her a look. Her facial tattooing was startling even by Yuuzhan Vong standards, darkness around her eyes and below her lower lip suggesting, at first glance, that those features were grossly oversized. Her decorations were a mirror image of, and copied from, his own, though his were accentuated by scarring from warfare and a slit at the center of his upper lip, rising nearly to his nose, that acted as an artificial harelip and perpetually bared his upper teeth. “So they will have situated a minefield around Borleias, and simulated a shield with their metal ships.”
“No, Commander.” She moved to the blaze bug depression and extended her hands into it, waving many of the images aside, waving the spherical cluster representing Borleias toward her. The dismissed insects swarmed toward the sphere, expanding it, adding details representing vessels in orbit around the planet. “See? They have capital vessels in what looks like geosynchronous orbit above one point on the planet, not far from the Domain Kraal touchdown point, and other vessels in more typical orbits. Nothing else. And the Kraals report no buildup of ground-based shield generators except at this site.”
“A hardpoint defense of one location.” Wyrpuuk Cha considered that, reevaluating the situation. He reached into the depression and gestured to return the image to its previous magnification. “And see here. Recent, repeated travel to this orbit above the sixth planet, an orbit corresponding to one of its moons. Yet no indication of ships here now. A hidden base of some sort? They’re not protecting the primary world from intrusions that could drop planetshaping materials, so they don’t care about the world itself … just what is to be found at that one site. We must find out what they protect there and on that moon.”
The alarm jolted Wedge and Iella out of their sleep. It was a shrill, keening thing, not the sort of alarm installed in a military installation; it had to be some sort of biological hazard alert that was part of this station’s original equipment. Wedge groped on the table beside his bed for his comlink and found it was already beeping for him, the sound drowned out by the alarm. “Antilles here.”
“We have a major Yuuzhan Vong intrusion.” The comm officer’s voice was a disinterested drawl in distinct contrast with the importance of his message. “Dozens of capital ships entering the system at its outer fringes from Coruscant’s bearing. No sign yet of coralskipper launch.”
“Issue a systemwide alert condition. I’ll be there immediately.” Wedge rose, mind already clear and focused on his task, and began to dress.
He saw that Iella was already one jumpsuit ahead of him. She sealed her suit’s main seam and asked, “What’s the plan for today?”
“Bad tactics. We’re leaving a gap in our coverage of the sensor station on the fourth moon of Pyria Six. We’ll beat back whatever comes at Borleias but let them chase us off that moon. I’ll be coordinating from the ground so they can detect that I’m coordinating from the ground. Reinforces the impression that there’s something important down here, too.”
She helped him seal his suit and gave him a quick kiss. “I hate it that you’re going to lose, even on purpose.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a bad loser.” He gave her a grin. “Ultimately, I intend to be a very, very bad loser.”