"Wonderful." Wedge slipped the card into his data-pad, reviewing the words that scrolled up on his screen. "How long will you be insystem?"

"Oh, until I get killed, I guess."

Startled, Wedge glanced up at him. "How's that again?"

"The Taanab Yellow Aces is an all-volunteer unit. Financed by the same fund-raising effort that went into purchasing and delivering all those inventory goods. Organized by me. When I resigned my commission, I told my superiors I'd be back with a piece of Tsavong Lah in my pocket. I can't disappoint them."

Wedge smiled. "Care to transfer into Rogue Squadron?"

"I'd love to. But I can't. I brought a squad and a half of Taanab and refugee pilots who sort of have the right to follow my lead."

Tycho made a tsk-tsk noise. "How very responsible of you, Wes."

Janson shrugged, rueful. "Sad side effects of age, I'm afraid." His expression became livelier. "Which you can help me forget. Tell me about a female pilot, Twin Suns Leader. She has a nice voice. Does she have looks to match?"

Wedge, struggling to keep from laughing, exchanged a glance with Tycho. "Well, yes. She's nice looking."

"Married? Attached?"

"Attached, I think. Recently attached." To my nephew, Wedge added to himself, no matter how hard they try to keep others from noticing.

"So, who is she?"

Wedge frowned as. if remembering. "Jay something. Isn't that right?" He turned to Tycho, "I think so."

"Jay, Jay..." Wedge let his expression clear. "That's it. Jaina Solo."

Janson's face paled. "Jaina Solo."

"I'm sure that's the name."

"Sith spawn, I was flirting with a nine-year-old."

"Nineteen," Tycho corrected. "And she has more kills than the three of us put together at the same age."

Janson sighed, defeated. "I guess I'd better apologize to her and then throw myself on her lightsaber."

Wedge shook his head. "No, just ask Han to shoot you. It'll be more merciful and it is his right as a father."

"You're still a nasty commanding officer, you know."

Wedge merely smiled.

Domain Hul Warldship, Pyria System The Yuuzhan Vong warrior Czulkang Lah was old, far older than any who had been seen by the natives of this galaxy; under the scars, tattoos, and mutilations that rendered his face almost black and his features almost unrecognizable were deep wrinkles of age. The frailty of his form was concealed by the augmented vonduun crab armor he wore, armor that added the strength of its own muscles to his.

He stood in his preferred control chamber of the Domain Hul worldship. The walls were thick with the stations of his various advisers and subordinate officers, including his personal aide, the warrior Kasdakh Bhul. Most of the stations were series of shelflike recesses in the yorik coral wall, and upon those recesses were villips, the preferred communications method of the Yuuzhan Vong; some were in contracted form, featureless blobs, while some were everted to look like glossy, colorless Yuuzhan Vong heads whose lips moved and voices emerged in perfect synchronization with distant officers and spies.

Above Czulkang Lah's seat was a great membranous lens, in diameter three times the length of a tall warrior; it gave him an unparalleled view of the space before Domain Hul, and could contract to magnify very distant objects.

Before the old warrior was a priest. He was tall, his leanness suggesting self-deprivation, and he wore the ceremonial robes and head wrap of the order of the Trickster goddess, Yun-Harla.

"Welcome, Harrar," Czulkang Lah said.

"It is my honor to come before you again." The priest offered the sort of bow that equals exchange, then straightened. "And to find you engaged in work benefiting the gods and befitting your status. I bring you ships and ground reinforcements to help you in your aims." Indeed, the reinforcements had made a flyover to announce their presence to, and respect for, the old warrior, commander of Yuuzhan Vong forces in the Pyria system.

"I am directed by my son to offer you every assistance in capturing Jaina Solo." The old warrior beckoned to a much younger male who waited near the wall. The younger warrior stepped forward and knelt. "Harrar, I bestow upon you Charat Kraal. He has been in charge of special operations where Jaina Solo and other matters are concerned. He leads an inventive and well-motivated unit made up of Kraal and Hul pilots and knowledge harvesters. My burdens of command will be lightened, rather than increased, if you simply take him off my hands and assume direct control of those operations."

Harrar addressed the younger warrior. "Do you feel you can readily transfer your service?" The question was a matter of life and death; should Charat Kraal, in honesty, say he could not, he would naturally be killed and a more agreeable commander installed.

Charat Kraal raised his head to look into Harrar's face. The warrior's nose was not just deformed, a mutilation common to Yuuzhan Vong warriors, but entirely missing, with ragged, reddened edges all around to suggest the violence with which it had been removed. His forehead was high, more like a human's than that of a 'uuzhan Vong, and elaborately tattooed with perpendicular lines and stripes that drew the eye back along it and made it seemed flatter. "My duty is to the gods, our leaders, and Domain Kraal," he said. "I will serve gladly."

"Good," Harrar said. "What are your most current operations?"

"We have recently lost our human spy within their great abomination-building. So I have engineered a plan to introduce one or more new spies into their camp. We will do this on the next occasion that an assault is made against their camp."

"Just like that?" Harrar asked. "The infidels get no opportunity to refuse our gift of a spy?"

Charat Kraal offered a warrior's smile, broken teeth visible through slitted lips. "They do not, great priest."

"When my audience with Czulkang Lah is done, you will come with me and tell me of your plan."

Coruscant As his group entered a long gallery that had once been, flanked by stores and emporiums, Luke again felt a twinge, some distant wrongness in the Force. The sensation had come to him before and he had steered toward it, hoping that it was the source of the unease, the visions that had brought him to Coruscant on this mission. But his fellow Jedi had not always seemed to share his perceptions.

He glanced at them. Mara was already looking his. way, nodding.

Tahiri stared off into the distance, in the direction of the twinge, alert as a hunting beast.

Even Danni was gazing in that general direction, a hint of confusion evident even through her Yuuzhan Vong makeup. "Did any of you feel something?" she asked.

"Yeah," Kell said. "Hunger. Time to break?"

Luke shook his head. "Not in the open like this."

"Awww. Explosive charges are so much more vivid when they go off in the open."

Tahiri stared up at him, scornful. "Do you only ever think about one thing? "

"One thing at a time, sure. Now it's my stomach."

Another feeling intruded on Luke's finely tuned senses, a whiff of danger, far more immediate than the previous sensation. He whispered, "Trouble."

In a moment, the others moved to form a circle, Mara, Tahiri, Kell, and Face on the outside, the others within. No one brought out a technological weapon, but Luke felt to make sure that his lightsaber was still hanging at hand, and Face and Kell snapped their false amphistaffs out into rigidity.

A great roar of voices sounded from ahead and above. Out of two storefronts at this level, and one on either side on the first balcony level above, came a stream of beings, shouting, charging toward Luke and his party.

They were humans and humanoids, male and female, their clothes largely filthy and in tatters, carrying primitive spears and knives and crude swords in their hands. In moments at least a score were charging Luke's position, and more were pouring out of the doorways.

Luke breathed a sigh of relief. "Time to make contact," he said. He reached up for his helmet.

"Run," Bhindi said.

"What?"

"Run." Bhindi suited actions to words by turning back the way they'd come and racing away from the oncoming mob.

Luke looked at Mara. Both shrugged, then turned to follow Bhindi, the rest close after them.

They charged out through the broad archway that had heralded the opening into the shopping gallery, quickly outdistancing their pursuers.

They took a right at the next broad cross-corridor, charged a considerable distance along it, and then Bhindi angled into a doorway that led to an emergency stairwell. She led them up the stairs two at a time until they'd climbed five flights; then they could emerge into a much darker, narrower corridor. There they stopped, many of them panting.

Kell leaned over to put his hands on his knees as he struggled to breathe. "I'm too old for this."

Danni leaned against the wall, Sweat poured down her face but did not mar her Yuuzhan Vong makeup. "Would you mind telling me why we ran? I thought you wanted to make contact with pockets of survivors! Something about setting up resistance cells?"

Bhindi offered her an unlovely smile. "Two reasons. First, normal people who want to stay alive don't charge Yuuzhan Vong warriors that way, even if they outnumber them a hundred to one. Meaning that they probably had some way to kill those supposed warriors, like retreating before us and leading us to a spot where fifty tons of scrap can drop on our heads."

Danni considered that and her expression relented. "Good point."

"Second," Bhindi continued, "we don't have any reason to believe that any of the Vong warriors who attacked us on the walkway are still alive. Some are chopped up, some are blown up, some are flat as a roadway accident three hundred meters down, and some are all three. So our secret, the fact that we're wandering around in effective Yuuzhan Vong disguises, is probably intact. If we let a hundred starving survivors know about it, inevitably one will sell us out and the Vong will know, too."

"So," Luke said, "a detachment of us take off our disguises and go to talk to them as humans."

"While the rest wait here and breathe," Kell said.

"Right." Luke looked over them. "It'll be me, Mara, Face, and Bhindi going back. The rest stay here."

Instead of offering up a noise of complaint, Tahiri grimaced, a cynically adult expression, and lowered her pack to the passageway floor.

Luke shrugged, offered her a smile. "We need at least one Jedi with each group."

"So I'm baby-sitting people twice, three times my age. Where's the fun in that?"

Kell snorted, then pitched his voice as an adolescent whine. "Aunt Tahiri, tell me a story."

Luke, now dressed in the dark garments he affected whenever making a public appearance in the guise of Jedi Master, stared at the woman on the other side of the heating element protruding from the gap in the floor panels. He, his three companions-also in dark, inconspicuous civilian dress-and six men and women of the Walkway Collective sat cross-legged on the floor, in a loose circle around the heating element, while a pot of greenish soup rested atop the thing and gradually heated to boiling. "How have you survived?" Luke asked.

They were in a back room of what had once been a clothing emporium of the Catier Walkway, the shopping gallery where Luke's party had so recently been Stacked. The woman he addressed-once plump and blond, he thought, now leaner from a subsistence diet, hair streaked with dirt, brown eyes hard from sacrifice and suffering-was Tenga Javik, nominal leader of the Walkway Collective.

"We've rigged photon collection screens and heat harvesters for power," she said. Her voice was raspy; that, and the light scarf wound around her neck, a curious affectation in the warm, moist air of Coruscant's landscape of building interiors, suggested that she had taken an injury to the throat in the not too distant past. "One of us worked at a grayweave production plant. Have you ever eaten grayweave, Master Sky walker?"

"On occasion." Grayweave was the nickname for a sort of single-cell-organism-based food, manufactured for and sold to the poorest of the poor; in texture, it looked like thick gray felt, but didn't taste anywhere near as good. Its chief virtues were that it was very inexpensive and lasted a long time without preservation.

"We stole the grayweave reactors and scattered them all through our territory," Tenga said. "Well-hidden. We keep them supplied with power and water, water we process through our own stills. We hide from the Vong most of the time, set traps for them when we're sure we can take them.

We're going to survive, Master Skywalker."

"How's the air?" Bhindi asked.

Tenga looked into the soup as if unwilling to meet Bhindi's eyes.

"Getting worse," she said. "We're working on that. Trying to put together a series of blowers to bring in air from where it's better." She didn't sound confident. "If that doesn't work, we may have to relocate. Go deeper." She met Luke's eyes, her expression suddenly fierce. "When will the fleet come, Master Skywalker? When can we expect relief?"

"Not soon," he admitted. "I wish I could tell you differently, but you're going to have to rely on yourselves for some time to come."

Several of Tenga's fellows sighed or made noises of discontent, but they didn't direct anger at Luke; his words did not seem to be entirely unexpected.

Tenga returned her attention to the soup. "We need the fleet," she rasped, her tone lower; she did not seem to be speaking to Luke. "We need the Jedi."

"This is our first mission back," Luke said, projecting confidence with his voice and through the Force. "And more will come. We're not going to let Coruscant remain in enemy hands. You have to decide whether you're going to be alive when the world is liberated. Because the weariness and disillusionment you're feeling can kill you as surely as the Yuuzhan Vong."

"You've done very well here," Bhindi said. "I can show you how to do better."

That got Tenga's attention. "Better how?"

"Hide better, ambush and defeat Vong patrols better, repair and maintain equipment better."

"I'm listening," Tenga said.

"First things first," Mara interrupted. "A little more information.

Have any of you seen or felt anything unusual in this region? I mean, unusual in excess of all the changes brought on by the Vong?"

Most of those present shook their heads, but one, in the second rank of the circle, a thin, middle-aged man with a dark, suspicious look to his features, said, "Lord Nyax."

Some of his companions sighed; one or two offered up little groans.

Luke grinned before he could suppress it. "That's a children's story."

"He's real," Yassat said.

Mara raised an eyebrow. "I haven't heard this one."

"In ancient times," Luke said, "on Corellia, Lord Nyax was what parents threatened their children with if they didn't eat their stewfruit or go to bed on time. 'If you keep on being a bad boy, Lord Nyax will come for you.' He was a monstrous pale ghost who took children away, and no one ever saw them again."

"A typical folk tale," Mara said.

"Yes." Luke sobered. "But a while back, stories of Lord Nyax got a lot more common. Because during the Jedi purges, there was someone who came for children in the night-someone who came for Force-sensitive children."

Mara's reply was a whisper: "Darth Vader."

"That's right, 1 think that some of Darth Vader's covert missions to round up Force-sensitive children became merged with the Lord Nyax legend, and spread from Corellia all over the galaxy during the early Imperial years."

"Yassat here is one of our far scouts," Tenga said. "He travels out beyond our territories, exploring and scavenging."

"And he sees things," another said. That man tapped his temple with one hand while jerking a thumb at Yassat with the other, suggesting that Yassat was not completely functional in a mental sense.

"I do see things," Yassat said. "But they're there."