Part 4 (1/2)

”In your hand. Is that some kind of weapon?”

Her crest flattened and spread again, its green now s.h.i.+mmering with yellow highlights.

”Why would I carry a weapon? Am I in danger?”

”I...” Jacen rubbed his eyes. Now only a blur hung from her fist; had he seen what he thought he saw?

”Probably just a trick of the light,” Vergere said. ”Forget about it. Come with me.”

He stepped through the hatch sphincter. The corridor had somehow changed; instead of the resin-smoothed yorik coral pa.s.sageway he had glimpsed when Vergere would come or go, he now stood inside one end of a tunnel--or a tube. The floor was warm and soft, fleshy, and it pulsed faintly beneath his bare feet.

A pair of tall, impa.s.sive Yuuzhan Vong warriors stood outside in full vonduun crab armor, right arms thick with the coils of their amphistaffs.

”Pay no attention to them,” Vergere said lightly. ”They speak no Basic, nor have they tizowyrms to translate--and they have no idea who you are. They are here only to ensure that you cause no mischief. Don't make them hurt you.”

Jacen only shrugged. He looked back through the closing sphincter.

He was leaving a lot of pain in that room.

He was bringing a lot of pain with him.

Anakin... Every time he blinked, he could see his brother's corpse on the inside of his eyelids. It still hurt. He guessed it always would.

But pain didn't mean so much to him anymore.

He fell in at Vergere's side as she stalked away along the slick warm tunnel; it was valved like the inside of a vein.

The warriors followed.

Jacen forgot about the hook of bone.

It had probably been just a trick of the light.

Jacen couldn't find a direction or a pattern in the route they walked, through endless tangles of fleshy tubes that seemed to branch and coil and knot themselves at random. Light filtered through the walls from outside, vividly illuminating striated arterial cl.u.s.ters in the tubes'

translucent skin. Valves before them opened at Vergere's touch; valves behind closed by themselves.

Sometimes the tubes contracted until Jacen had to walk hunched over, and the warriors were forced to bend nearly double.

Sometimes they were in large tunnels that flexed and pulsed as though pumping air; a constant breeze huffed at their backs like the breath of a well-fed watchbeast.

The tube-skin vibrated like a huge slack drumhead, making the air hum and rumble, sometimes so low that Jacen could only feel the sound with his hand against the skin wall, sometimes louder, higher, scaling up to a tidal roar of a thousand voices moaning and shouting and screaming in pain.

Often they pa.s.sed hatch sphincters like the one that had sealed the Embrace of Pain; sometimes these might be open, revealing chambers floored with gra.s.sy swamp, woody trunks branching above brownish muck, globular yawns draped with coc.o.o.ns of alien pupae, or caverns vast and dark where tiny flames of crimson and chartreuse, of vivid yellow or dim, almost invisible violet floated and gleamed and winked like eyes of predators gathered in the night to watch prey huddled around a campfire.

Rarely Jacen caught glimpses of other Yuuzhan Vong: mostly warriors, whose unscarred faces and unmutilated limbs hinted at low status, and once or twice even a few of the shorter, squattier-seeming Yuuzhan Vong, each wearing some kind of living headdress that reminded Jacen of Vergere's feathered crest. These must be shapers; Jacen remembered Anakin's tale of the shaper base on Yavin 4.

”What is this place?” Jacen had been on Yuuzhan Vong s.h.i.+ps before, and he'd seen their planetside installations at Belkadan: sure, they had been organic, more grown than built--but they had been comprehensible.

”Is this a s.h.i.+p? A s.p.a.ce station? Some kind of creature?”

”It is all those, and more. The Yuuzhan Vong name for this--s.h.i.+p, station, creature, what you will--translates as 'seeds.h.i.+p.' I suppose a biologist might call it an ecospheric blastoderm.” She pulled him close and lowered her voice as though sharing a private joke. ”This is an egg that will give birth to an entire world.”

Jacen made a face like he tasted something foul.

”A Yuuzhan Vong world.”

”Of course.”

”I was on Belkadan. And Duro. There was nothing like this.

To do their--what would you call it? Vongforming? - - they just sprayed gene-tailored bacteria into the atmosphere...”

”Belkadan and Duro are no more than industrial parks,” Vergere said. ”They are s.h.i.+pyards producing war materiel.

They will be used up, and abandoned. But the world transformed by this seeds.h.i.+p--it will be home.”

Jacen felt weak. ”Home?”

”A planet can be described as a single organism, a living creature with a skeleton of stone and a heart of molten rock.

The species that inhabit a planet, plant and animal alike, from microbe to megalossus, are the planet-creature's organs, internal symbionts, and parasites. This seeds.h.i.+p itself is composed mostly of incubating stem cells, which will differentiate into living machines--which will in turn construct an entire planet's worth of wildlife with vastly accelerated growth. Animals will mature within a few standard d ays; whole forests within weeks. Mere months after seeding, the new world will bear a fully functioning, dynamically stable ecosystem: the replica of a planet dead for so many thousand years that it is barely a memory.”

”Their homeworld,” Jacen muttered. ”The Yuuzhan Vong. They're making themselves a new homeworld. That's what this is.”

”You might call it that.” Vergere stopped and gestured to one of the warriors. She touched a spot on the tube-skin. The warrior stepped forward and twitched his right arm; his amphistaff uncoiled into a blade that ripped a long, ragged slash through the wall. The lips of the slash seeped milky fluid. Vergere pulled one lip aside as though holding open a curtain. She made a slight bow, beckoning Jacen to step through.

”I would call it a work in progress,” she said. ”Rather like you.”

Darkly swamp-smelling fog gusted into the tube, warm and thick and smoke-roiling. Jacen snorted. ”Smells like the plumbing broke in your barracks refresher. What's this supposed to teach me?”

”There's only one way to find out.”

Jacen pushed through the gap, into air smotheringly thick with rot and excrement and hot wet mold. Sweat p.r.i.c.kled out over his skin. The milky fluid-blood from the gap trailed pale sticky strings that clung to his hair and his hands. He scrubbed at them with the robe, but the milk liked his skin better than the fiber.

Then he looked up, and forgot about the milk.

This was where the screams had been coming from.

He stood in a world turned inside out.

The tunnel at his back made a knotted hump like a varicose vein across the crest of the hill. From up here, Jacen had a clear vantage over a boil of swamp and jungle all the way to the horizon.

But there was no horizon.

Through storm-swirls of stinking fog, an endless bowl of sc.u.m-stained pools and fetid belching quagmires rose higher and higher and higher until he had to squint against the actinic blue-white pinp.r.i.c.k that was this place's sun. Then a rift parted the fog above, and he could see beyond the sun: other swamps and jungles and ridges of low hills sealed shut the sky. Blurred in the regathering mist, it seemed that vast creatures roamed those hills in disorganized herds-- but then the mist thinned again, and the scene snapped into perspective.

Those creatures weren't huge; they were human.

Not just human, but also Mon Calamari, and Bothan and Twi'lek, and dozens of other species of the New Republic.