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Behind the commander rose a membranous partition, beyond which—Skidder was certain—lay the nucleus of the ship. When Chine-kal turned, the membrane parted like a stage curtain.

Though Skidder had never seen one in the flesh, he knew immediately that he was gazing at the living model for the statue that adorned the hold: a maturing war coordinator—the grotesque biogenetic creature the Yuuzhan Vong called a yammosk.

SIX

A cool mist obscured the flowering crowns of Yavin 4’s tallest trees. The steep stairways of the ancient temples the Rebel Alliance had claimed so many years before and that had since become a training ground for the Jedi Knights climbed into the mist and vanished. Chucklucks and chitterwebs, ordinarily raucous at that time of the morning, perched on the low branches of Massassi trees, waiting for the sky to clear. Stinger lizards and stintaril rodents sat motionless as statues. Even the gas giant Yavin was not to be seen, though it backlighted the mist a deep orange color.

Stopped in a pathway that meandered to the Great Temple, Luke Skywalker drank in the stillness. The Force, ordinarily lucid, seemed blanketed by the mist, as well, and could manage little more than a whisper.

Somewhere in the ghostly, virid surroundings a belly-bird cooed. But Luke knew that what struck his ear as melodic was only the bird proclaiming its territory, warning others away. He listened more intently, catching the sounds of creatures foraging or on the hunt for food. It was the way of the Force that some should survive and others perish. Death without malicious intent, for nature didn’t have a dark side. One couldn’t compare the crystal snake’s search for prey with what the Emperor had done during his cruel reign and what the Yuuzhan Vong were doing now. But Luke had been asking himself, almost since the start of the invasion, how did life reveal itself to Yuuzhan Vong eyes and ears?

He stared into the mist. It was as if someone had thrown a gauzy veil over his eyes. Images came to him of insects disguising themselves as leaves, twigs, and flower blossoms, and of small animals mimicking the variegated litter of the forest floor. Camouflage, Luke thought.

Deception, stealth, misdirection …

The Yuuzhan Vong had swept into the galaxy like one of the unpredictable storms that blew across Yavin 4. Their faith in their gods was like Palpatine’s faith in the dark side of the Force. And yet, for all the evil they embodied, they were not Sith; they were not emissaries of the dark side. Blind obedience provided justification for even their most hideous actions. What made them servants of evil was not their faith but their need to force that faith on others and to destroy wantonly any who stood in their path. They failed to recognize light or dark because in some sense they saw existence as an illusion. Lacking any intrinsic value, life was to be lived in service to the gods, and the reward for that service waited in a life beyond.

When Luke or other Jedi had tried to peer into them, the Yuuzhan Vong had been found to be voids in the Force, absent the animated luminosity that embraced all living things. But if the Force did not flow through them, was it possible that the Force was likewise nonexistent in the galaxy in which they had evolved? Could the Force be specific to one place and not another, as if the result of an evolutionary occurrence unique in the universe? Or was it rather that the Force was lacking only in the Yuuzhan Vong—and in their living weapons, of course, which were little more than extensions of themselves?

In all likelihood Mara had fallen victim to one of those weapons—an illness the Yuuzhan Vong had introduced—and while her strength in the Force had held the illness in check where it had overwhelmed others, Luke wasn’t absolutely certain that the Force would have been the ultimate victor in Mara’s battle. Not when her recent return to better health owed to an antidote introduced indirectly by the Yuuzhan Vong.

Deception, stealth, misdirection