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The Yuuzhan Vong whipped around, flinging blood in all directions, his closely set eyes searching the room. Barreling between Kalenda and Eicroth, whom he toppled like rag dolls, he overturned the cot with one hand and grabbed hold of Elan with the other. His fingers vised around the priestess’s long neck, and he lifted her off her feet and pressed her to the wall.

At the same instant, Mobvekhar regained consciousness. Powerful legs launching him off the floor, he caught the assassin around the waist and sank his teeth into the enemy’s back.

The Yuuzhan Vong howled. Swinging a flailing Elan to one side, he used his free fist to rain hammer blows on the Noghri fastened to him. Mobvekhar grunted and moaned as the air was driven from his lungs, but he clung tenaciously to his prey.

Dazed, Kalenda struggled to her feet, gave her head a clearing shake, then leapt onto the assassin’s pumping arm, which she rode up and down for a moment, until the Yuuzhan Vong hurled her aside like some minor inconvenience. Her head struck something solid, and she blacked out. Bright shapes punctuated the momentary darkness; then, contorted in a corner of the room, she had an upside-down view of Showolter, his poncho twisted around his neck, crawling out from under Yintal and drawing a small blaster from a shoulder holster.

From a prone position—and careful to miss Mobvekhar, who had been driven to the floor—the major fired, catching the Yuuzhan Vong between the shoulder blades. Smells of ozone and burned flesh mingled in the air, but the assassin barely reacted. Showolter fired again, catching the Yuuzhan Vong in the back of the neck and setting his hair on fire.

Showolter fired a final time.

The assassin stiffened and crumpled to the floor in a scorched heap, his left hand still clasped to Elan’s throat. Bleeding from her nose and eyes, the priestess pried open his thick fingers and slid down the wall, gasping for air.

Gracelessly, Kalenda somersaulted, and was bellying forward to help Elan when the hut was rocked by a powerful explosion. Showolter’s comlink chimed, and he fumbled it out of his pocket.

“Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers,” someone reported over the link. “Maybe half a dozen, executing strafing runs over New Nystao. Soothfast has been alerted. Starfighters are on their way.”

Showolter clamped his hand around Kalenda’s forearm. “Move her into the hardened area,” he rasped, coughing up blood. “Now!”

At the cold edge of the star system in which Wayland orbited, a solitary Yuuzhan Vong gunboat lurked. On the bridge, Nom Anor stood before a visual field fashioned by distant signal villips, observing coralskippers and New Republic starfighters exchanging fire in the skies over New Nystao.

“Don’t try too hard,” he said aloud to the pilots who manned the coralskippers. “Just enough to convince them.”

ELEVEN

Through the Happy Dagger’s wraparound slit of cockpit viewport, Han gazed queasily at the mottled indifference of hyperspace. Alongside him Roa dozed in the pilot’s seat, snoring softly, and behind him one of the ship’s droids was monitoring the navicomputer.

If only time were as easily outraced as light, Han thought. Then he might jump forward to a point where Sernpidal was a distant memory, or perhaps backward to a point before that harrowing day on the planet, so that he might restructure the events and put things right.

As it was, he was trapped in a tragic moment, compelled to relive it over and again …

The Falcon, taking on evacuees, hovering just above the bucking surface of Sernpidal. The small moon called Dobido caught in the grip of a Yuuzhan Vong monstrosity and descending.

Chewie on the ground with a kid under each massive arm, the wind tearing at his coat. Then Chewie and Anakin using blaster bolts and the Force to free a downed shuttle of rubble that held it fast.

The Falcon holding its own in a deafening wind, as Chewie rescued another child, thrusting him up into Han’s arms as he dangled from the extended ramp.

Sernpidal heaving and breaking apart.

Chewie