Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [71]
“Luke. It’s just Luke.” Luke sat back, frowning. “Is this their worldshaping?”
Danni nodded. “More like ‘Vongforming.’ It’s a lot faster, more brutally efficient than our equivalent techniques.”
“Is there any good news?”
“A little.” Danni pointed at the first of three computer screens.
This one showed a holocam view of a building roof. It seemed to be shedding; fragments of some leaflike material were being tossed around by winds. “We’re witnessing a die-off of some of the Vongforming plants. The grasses and explosive fungi they used to begin the breakdown of the building surfaces are starting to die. We don’t know whether it means they’re not adapting well to this environment, or just that they’re the first step of the Vongforming process, with more steps to come. Doctor Arnjak suspects the latter.”
“That’s ‘Science Boy’ to you,” Baljos said.
“So that may or may not be good news,” Luke said.
Baljos nodded. “Correct. Here’s some news that’s a little less ambiguous.” He indicated the other two screens, one full of graphical charts and text, the other broken down into eight holocam images—still images of Yuuzhan Vong warriors digging through rubble, engaged in training exercises, lined up in a disciplined row.
Luke peered at the screens. The information on the first one seemed to relate to proportions of gases in the atmosphere. “What’s it mean?”
“The proportion of toxic gases in the atmosphere has pretty much stabilized. Oh, they’re worse at some specific altitudes than others, but they’re not increasing in proportion. I think they relate to the biological actions of the Vongforming plants that are breaking down the duracrete and metals. Meaning that the Vong aren’t trying to make the atmosphere poisonous to us. This increases the chances of survival of, well, the people who are still alive down here.”
“That’s something, I guess.” Luke looked at the scientists. “And the other one?”
Danni said, “You remember that we brought along some little stealth droids. Shaped like fungi, mosses, that sort of thing. We’ve been taking them out and depositing them in areas the Vong seem to patrol heavily. They’re following those paths, very slowly, and transmitting images in very short, hard-to-track comm bursts. These are our first sets of images. They don’t tell us much yet, but we hope they will someday.”
“So, what do you get from the atmospheric data?”
Danni and Baljos exchanged a look, and Luke could read all sorts of things into it. They’d already come to some conclusions. They were just trying to decide which ones to present him, and in which order.
“We’ve kind of been giving the survivors the impression that the New Republic forces are going to come back and seize Coruscant,” Danni said.
Luke nodded. “That’s the objective.”
“I don’t think there’s going to be a Coruscant to come back to. How long will it take? A year? Five years? Ten? By the time our forces get here, it’s going to be something else. A Yuuzhan Vong world.”
“That won’t give the survivors much hope.”
“So,” Baljos said, “we think we should take a different approach to what we were doing. We teach the survivors how to survive on this world—this alien world. Not necessarily so they can come out fighting when the big push comes. Just so they can survive. Maybe escape. We analyze all the new life-forms we run across, the ones introduced by the Yuuzhan Vong, and teach our people which ones are good to eat. Teach them how to find safe water.”
“Maybe how to wall off whole complexes,” Danni said, “so the Vong just never come down into them.”
“If we do all that …” Luke considered the matter for long seconds. “We’re admitting that we’ve lost.”
“That we’ve