• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Viqi shrugged. “I might have found out, if Denua Ku hadn’t been so quick to exterminate him.” She waited until Raglath Nur’s attention was on the voxyn before she tucked the object out of sight under the neckline of her robeskin. She got a glimpse of it before it was concealed; it seemed to be a tiny remote, one with a pair of buttons on one side, another button and a screen so small as to be nearly useless on the other.

The ugly what?

The handlers, dragged by the voxyn, were first to pass through the ruined metal doors, which were three times the height of a human and broad enough to permit ten pedestrians walking side-by-side. The lettering above the door read:

ELEGAIC FABRICATIONS

THE COMFORT YOU DESERVE

Raglath Nur paused outside the doorway and stared with suspicion at the darkness beyond. He whirled on Viqi. “What is this?”

“A manufacturing plant,” she said. “They manufacture furnishings. Very expensive, very functional furnishings.”

“Such as what?”

“Such as chairs that convert into extravagantly comfortable beds, chairs that carry their owners about in the air, furnishings that massage those who sit in them …”

“Massage?” Evidently that didn’t translate well through Raglath Nur’s tizowyrm. “Inflict pain?”

“Inflict pleasure.”

The warrior gave her a revolted look and led his fellows into the darkness. Viqi, alongside Denua Ku, followed.

Though the manufacturing concern had seemed pitch-black from outside, once her eyes began adjusting, Viqi discovered that it was not so. There were light sources everywhere, but dim ones, mostly at floor level—emergency lighting, she decided, probably running low on battery power. In the faint glows from the light sources, she could see looming production-line machinery and immobile fabricator droids, some of them huge.

She wondered if any samples of their stock were still in existence. But doubtless her Yuuzhan Vong companions would not let her enjoy such a chair, not even for a moment.

She heard the voxyn’s hisses go from excited to ferocious, heard their handlers call after them as they yanked leashes free from the handlers’ grips.

“Jeedai!” called one of the warriors. “Now you die!”

Viqi heard the distinctive snap-hiss of a Jedi lightsaber igniting. One point on the far wall of the manufacturing chamber and the ceiling above it were illuminated by red light—moving light. The claws of the voxyn scrabbled as they charged for their prey.

Then there was another snap-hiss, and another, and another. The distant red glow brightened. Viqi saw the silhouette of a voxyn leaping high, vaulting intervening machinery, backlit by the glow—and then something rose to meet the voxyn in mid-flight.

It was not a Jedi, not a lightsaber blade. A block of machinery two meters on a side flew up from below and crashed into the leaping voxyn, striking with such force that Viqi heard the creature’s bones shatter. The impact smashed the voxyn back through the air, a wobbly caricature of a once-living beast. The voxyn’s body crashed onto the factory’s duracrete floor and the block of machinery landed upon it, breaking more bones, and stuck there, not bouncing or rolling forward as it should have.

“Forward,” Denua Ku said. He whipped his amphistaff free from his waist and charged after the other Yuuzhan Vong warriors, who now howled in rage and anticipation.

Viqi took two steps in Denua Ku’s wake and then something crashed into her, took her from her feet, slapped her to the duracrete.

It was not a physical thing. It was despair and hatred, loathing and worthlessness, fear and howling rage. It was as though Viqi had spent every one of her years packing all the hateful emotions an ordinary person felt into a storeroom—and suddenly all the pressure had burst through the door and swept her away. She could only lie there, her arms and legs twitching outside her control, her stomach rebelling, her heart hammering inside her.

She heard the howl of the second voxyn, heard the ripping noise of the creature vomiting its acid at its prey. Then