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Kyp’s determination took a quantum leap as soon as the X-wing entered the ruined sphere. Vacuum had bled the module of atmosphere, but gravity was close to human standard and there was ample room for all nine fighters to settle down on a deck that wasn’t much different from the pitted hulls of the enemy warships. The Falcon’s powerful guns had made a mess of things, but even without the damage it would have been difficult to discern just what they were looking at. Kyp suspected that the hivelike structure at the rear of the space was a neuroengine of some sort, and that if he popped it open, he might find a couple of stunned dovin basals curled up inside.

“Breathers and blasters,” he said over the net as the X-wing’s canopy was opening.

Recalling his first contact with the Yuuzhan Vong in the Outer Rim, and the grotesque creature whose secretions had burned through the transparisteel of his XJ, Kyp had expected to find similar monstrosities waiting, but in fact, the hold was deserted. Ganner had obviously been thinking the same thing. Jumping agilely from the cockpit of the Y-wing, he said over the rebreather comm, “They’ve probably withdrawn to protect the yammosk.”

“Then they’ve already simplified our mission,” Kyp told him.

They unhooked their lightsabers from the belts of their flightsuits and thumbed them on, the sibilant hiss of the energy blades loud in the deserted chamber. Everyone else carried either a sidearm or a blaster rifle.

“Watch your step,” Kyp advised. “The Yuuzhan Vong have been known to make use of an immobilizing living jelly.”

Warily they advanced on the wall of the adjacent sphere, ignorant as to whether they were moving forward or aft. Like the walls of the collapsed module, the curving bulkhead had an organic, membranous appearance. They searched futilely for anything analogous to a hatch release.

“There has to be a way of opening a portal from one sphere to the next,” Deak said. “Maybe they’re separated by hydrostatic fields.” But while resilient, the bulkhead did not admit him when he pressed himself to it.

“Maybe it recognizes only Yuuzhan Vong,” Ganner suggested.

“Now isn’t the time to debate it,” Kyp said. “We’re not on a scientific survey.”

He thrust his lightsaber straight into the curve. When the tip had sizzled through, Kyp rolled his wrists, gradually opening a circular hole large enough for them to step through. The hold on the far side of the bulkhead was no different from the one they had left.

“No oxygen,” Ganner reported after glancing at an indicator strapped to his wrist.

They moved in single file into a passageway that might have been the gullet of an outsize creature. Colonies of microorganisms attached to the walls and ceiling provided a faint green bioluminescence. Eventually they came to another curving bulkhead, but this was equipped with an iris portal that admitted them into a sealed antechamber. The fact that the chamber served as an airlock didn’t become evident until they stepped from it into a spacious hold that held breathable air.

There also were the Yuuzhan Vong warriors Kyp and Ganner had expected to encounter earlier on.

They were thirty strong, some sporting chitinous armor, some without, but all of them armed with double-edged blades or the living staffs Kyp knew were capable of being employed as whips, clubs, swords, or spears. For a moment the two groups stood still, studying each other, then one warrior stepped forward and bellowed a phrase in his own language.

He made it sound like a statement, but the charge that immediately followed confirmed it as a war cry. Deak and the other non-Jedi opened fire with their blasters, dropping ten or more of the unarmored warriors before they had made it halfway across the hold. Kyp and Ganner glided into the press of survivors, their feet barely leaving the deck, telekinetically disarming some of their opponents even in the midst of parrying blows from stiffened amphistaffs or crosscuts by coufee blades and deflecting spears. One by one the