The group commanders-those who still lived-returned the warrior salute.

Ebaq 9's shields shuddered as another frigate thundered down.

Tsavong Lah sat back in his chair and ordered another capital ship to its death. "Prepare the oggzil," he said, and as one of his subalterns attached the grasping appendages of the creature to one of the villips used for communication, Tsavong Lah detached himself from the cognition throne and lumbered from the dais.

He wanted to deliver this particular message himself.

The oggzil had enfolded the villip by the time he arrived, its long antenna-tail dangling. Tsavong Lah took the creature in one hand, gazed at it, and forced his face into a smile.

Knowing that the oggzil was broadcasting his words and his image on New Republic frequencies, he said in his crude Basic, "This is Warmaster Tsavong Lah. We arc having a Jeedai hunt on Ebaq Nine! Although anyone else coming near will be destroyed, all Jeedai are welcome to partic.i.p.ate!"

Chapter 26.

The commander's voice hissed with interference as he spoke, through the comm, from his armored communications center in the old mine headquarters. "They've brought down our shields. We're evacuating into the bunkers."

"Thanks for letting us know," Jaina said. She shivered from cold as she signed to Lowbacca to seal the blast doors.

"We're setting the mines," the commander said. "We're going to nail a lot of them as they come in."

"Good luck," Jaina said, but hydraulics began hissing and the doors boomed shut, and she doubted the signal ever reached the commander in his communications center just below the surface of the moonlet.

Jaina turned off the comm and looked at her group of pilots. "Put on your vac suits. And our body armor over the vac suits."

At that moment the artificial gravity switched off. And so did the lights.

How many Yuuzhan Vong warriors to capture a moon? Tsavong Lan wondered. He had twenty thousand in the troopships under his command, but surely that was excessive.

Ten thousand, then. The rest could escape to fight another day.

Nor did he need the entirety of the Battle Group of Yun-Yuuzhan.

One-third should be sufficient to repel the New Republic forces long enough to a.s.sure the success of his sacrifice.

"Come, Jeedai!" he shouted to the oggzil. "Come to the hunt! Where is your courage?"

Then, turning to the subalterns around the cognition throne, he told them to order the other battle groups to withdraw from the fight. He ordered two of the three divisions of his own squadron to flee as well, and half the troopships.

"But not those containing grutchyna!" he called. "These we shall need once we land on the moon!"

The rock-eating grutchyna would be a surprise, he thought. The Jeedai would be forced to move through the tunnels that already existed, but the grutchyna could dig their own.

But before the grutchyna landed, the soldiers would have to secure the area. He ordered the first transports to the surface, covered by the fire of the ships above.

"Warmaster!" came the call from one of his subalterns. "A report from the Battle Group of Yun-Harla. They succeeded in withdrawing into hypers.p.a.ce, but their jump has failed. They report mines. . ."

Mines. . .

The Battle Group of Yun-Harla and the Battle Group of Yun-Txiin leapt into hypers.p.a.ce together, racing to safety down the narrow corridor that snaked through the Deep Core. But both were yanked out of hypers.p.a.ce by the interdiktor mine that had been set up in the lane's choke point, and all then found themselves in the middle of the enormous minefield that had been laid clean across the narrow corridor.

Every second the enemy remained in the minefield, thousands of mines detected the intruders, swung toward their new targets, and fired themselves at the Yuuzhan Vong.

Many of the Yuuzhan Vong ships were damaged and unable to defend themselves properly. Overwhelmed by the mines, many of these were destroyed in a blizzard of explosions. The few with undamaged defenses fared better, though few escaped without any damage at all.

The Battle Group of Yun-Q'aah, which had been engaged by the fleet of Garm Bel Iblis and the small Smugglers' Alliance squadron, managed a clean jump into hypers.p.a.ce and arrived in the minefield more or less together. Fewer of their ships had suffered critical damage, and most were able to fight their way out.

The two-thirds of Tsavong Lah's Battle Group of Yun-Yuuzhan were warned of the minefield's existence before they jumped, prepared themselves beforehand, and fared best of all. But the lightly armed troop transports were unable to defend themselves effectively, and within a few minutes in the minefields ten thousand Yuuzhan Vong warriors met their deaths.

As for the Battle Group of Yun-Yammka, it was too far into Ebaq's gravity field to jump, pinned by overwhelming New Republic forces, and wiped out.

More than a third of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet had been destroyed, and that did not count the remainder of Tsavong Lah's battle group, gathered about Ebaq 9 to defend their commander and his ground forces.

There, the first Yuuzhan Vong warriors to charge into the New Republic command centers were met by automatic mines that shredded them through their vonduun crab armor. The warriors charged over their own dead and encountered even more mines.

"You are already dead!" Tsavong Lah told them by villip. "The only question is whether you will die honorably as Yuuzhan Vong, or as a cowardly disgrace to the G.o.ds who made you!"

None of the warriors were cowards. More than a thousand gave their lives to the mines, and the rest trampled their dead brethren and found only an abandoned facility. There, they wrecked enough of the equipment to finish off the power supply and drop all of Ebaq's shields.

"Bring Blood Sacrifice to the surface!" Tsavong Lah commanded. "We will release the gnitchyna-and the voxyn!"

The huge flagship was brought to the moon's surface. Before Tsavong Lah left for the moon, he seized the oggzil again and shouted again in Basic.

"Are you not coming, Jeedai? Won't you join the hunt? Where is your courage?"

To his surprise, the answering voice was one he recognized.

"This is Jacen Solo," the villip reported. "I'll play your game, Warmaster."

Tsavong Lah's answer was filled with grim satisfaction. "Welcome, traitor! I shall look forward to seeing you again."

"And I you, Warmaster."

Menace rang in the warmaster's words. "Once I swore to sacrifice you, Jacen Solo. Perhaps we shall have the sacrifice after all."

"Perhaps I'll manage to delay it again," Jacen said. "Will you let me land, Warmaster?"

"Any Jeedai may land. I will so instruct the fleet."

"That's very courteous of you, Warmaster."

"Not at all. Would you come to Ebaq if I order the fleet to blast you out of existence the second you arrived?"

Jacen would, but there was no point in telling the warmaster that.

"I'll see you soon, Warmaster," Jacen said, and keyed off.

His astromech droid bleated at him to let him know he had another incoming call. Jacen switched frequencies.

"Jacen," Luke said. "What are you doing?"

"Helping my sister." Jacen couldn't quite keep defiance out of his voice. Jacen felt a surge of Luke's presence through the Jedi meld, a forceful effort by Luke to contact him emotionally as well as by words.

"You can't help her by sacrificing yourself," Luke said.

"I'm not planning on getting sacrificed."

"Jaina and the others are in a hardened bunker. All she has to do is wait there until the fleet comes to get her. And we are coming, all of us. Kre'fey, Farlander, Bel Iblis. And your parents."

Jacen felt the Force-meld urging him to listen to Luke, to surrender to his reasonable argument. He fought the compulsion and tried to sound as calm and reasonable as he could.

"I don't trust Tsavong Lah to do what people expect him to," he said. "I felt your surprise when he moved on Ebaq Nine."

Luke didn't have an answer for that.

"I have a plan," Jacen continued. "I'm not going to run right into his arms, I'm going to distract him and keep him off Jaina's neck."

A stab of fear ran through the Jedi meld, and the taste of it was Jaina's.

"Jaina's being hunted," Jacen said. "I've got to go now."

He snapped off the comm. Luke and others continued to try to contact him through the meld, but Jacen withdrew, and tried instead to concentrate on his Vongsense. He was out of practice-- there had been no Yuuzhan Vong to practice on-but as he slowed his respiration and entered a meditative state, he felt the enemy out ahead of him, grim determined flecks of consciousness, all ready to sacrifice themselves for their leaders.

Yuuzhan Vong bravery and determination weren't surprising. What did surprise him was the numbers.

On Ebaq alone, there must have been thousands.

Jaina waited in the dark. The Jedi were perfectly at home in the dark, strengthened by the Force and able to sense the walls around them, but she felt anxiety grow in her non-Jedi companions, so she had them all switch on helmet lights and belt lights.

Through the Jedi meld she felt the growing certainty of victory, and then the growing triumph as one Yuuzhan Vong squadron after another fled the battle. She sensed that Jacen was doing something completely out of the box, but she didn't know what, and she sensed the others trying to do something about it. Distress trickled into her at this knowledge, but she didn't have a comm unit that could reach Jacen, and she couldn't talk to him. She had made up her mind to try to reach him through the meld when something else drew her attention.

Or perhaps, something not else.

Through the enhanced perceptions of the Force-meld she felt an emptiness, a void. Something that was not in the Force.

The Yuuzhan Vong.

And then she felt a surge through the Force, a purposeful sensation as malevolent and certain as the sound of a blaster being c.o.c.ked next to her ear. Voxyn.

Voxyn hunting her.

Lowbacca snarled.

"Remind me to tell the high command how much I hate their battle plan," Jaina said. There were hundreds of mineshafts in the old diggings, and a dozen or so that had been shielded by blast doors to delay the enemy. Some had been b.o.o.by-trapped to make the Vong cautious. The battle plan a.s.sumed that the odds of the Yuuzhan Vong finding her particular blast doors and committing their forces to breaking through were very low.

The battle plan hadn't a.s.sumed the presence of voxyn that could sense any Force-user and lead the enemy straight to Jaina, whether she was anonymous behind blast doors or not.

"Too bad we don't have any of those YVH droids," one of her pilots said.

"There aren't enough of them," Jaina said. "The ones they've got are guarding the government." She considered. "Stand well away from the doors," Jaina decided. "I don't know what they're going to use to bring them down, but I know I don't want to be anywhere near the blast."

"Perhaps it iz time to deploy the minez," Tesar said. His vac-suited tail lashed left and right.

"Yes. But away from the entrance. I don't want our mines wrecked by whatever they use to knock the door down."

And then, on cue, they felt as well as heard a crash. The floor trembled, and the still air of the shaft reverberated to the sudden thunder that came from the other side of the blast door.

The eight pilots of Twin Suns Squadron fell back down the tunnel without a word. They busied themselves in the dark setting up antipersonnel mines while the crash repeated itself again and again.

It was through the Force as much as by eyesight that Jaina sensed part of the wall cracking, parts of it flaking off and coming down.

"They're not coming through the door!" she said. "They're coming around it!"

Something else the plan had not foreseen.

The Yuuzhan Vong filled the long tunnel that ran the length of the moon, a thousand in the advance guard followed by baying voxyn and a pair of ma.s.sive grutchyna, surprisingly light and agile in the low gravity.

Then came the main body, with Tsavong Lah and half the communications staff from the Blood Sacrifice.

Explosions ripped the air ahead, and two score of the advance guard went down in their own blood-another trap laid by the cowardly infidels, who would not fight hand to hand but instead with these machine snares.

The rest marched over them, past one set of durasteel blast doors after another.

The Yuuzhan Vong would not halt until the voxyn did.

The voxyn, their sensory bristles erect, stopped before a blast door indistinguishable from the others. One of them was so close to death that it could barely drag itself along, even in the low gravity. They tasted the door with their forked tongues, and then their howling filled the huge tunnel and sang like a melody in Tsavong Lah's nerves.

"Voxyn back!" Tsavong Lah told the trainers. "Bring the grutchyna forward!"

The grutchyna were sleek black armor-plated beasts six meters long, much larger cousins of the metal-eating grutchins that Yuuzhan Vong fighter craft used as weapons. The grutchyna lacked the grutchins' flight capability, but also their mindlessness: these were trainable and semi-intelligent, and Tsavong Lah had brought them on this expedition knowing he might have to dig the infidels out of their hiding places.

The huge beasts snarled forward, steel-sharp mandibles deployed.

Tsavong Lah looked for a moment at the blast doors, then shouted at the trainers.

"Have them dig through the tunnel walls! The walls are softer, and the doors may be mined!"

The tunnel shivered as the grutchyna hurled themselves at the rock walls. Tsavong Lah, thinking of mines, prudently retreated into the main body. He had no fear of death-and in any case he knew he would die today-but dying foolishly as the victim of a mine would be to trivialize his own end.

"Blood Sacrifice reports that Jacen Solo has landed," one of his subalterns reported.

"Very good," Tsavong Lah said. "Did Blood Sacrifice say where?"

The subaltern communed with his villip for a moment. "Not at the main entrance. Somewhere on the far side."