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“Someone who thinks he can save the galaxy single-handedly,” Leia mumbled.

On Gyndine, explosions began to blossom along the transitor and deep into the planet’s dark side. A fiery speck in the night, the planet’s orbital shipyard slowly disintegrated. Leia became dizzy at the sight and had to steady herself against a bulkhead. The explosions didn’t so much stir memories as prompt a troubling vision of some event yet to come.

A tone sounded from the navicomputer. “Hyperspace coordinates received and locked in,” the navigator announced.

The ship shuddered. Starlight elongated, as if the past were making a desperate bid to forestall the future, and the transport jumped.

Crouched in the shadows of the smoldering embassy building, Wurth Skidder watched the last of the troop carriers take to the scudded sky. Thousands of Gyndine’s indigenous forces had fallen back to the gated compound on the off chance of being evacuated with New Republic effectives. Few had been taken, however, and many of those who had were officers with political ties to Coruscant or other Core worlds.

There was still some furious fighting going on in the city, but the majority of ground troops, realizing that their hopes for salvation had left with the last ship out, had tossed aside their repeating blasters and stripped off their uniforms in the belief that the Yuuzhan Vong would go easier on noncombatants.

Which just went to show how slowly news traveled to remote worlds, Skidder thought ruefully.

When it came to sacrificing captives to their gods, the enemy drew no such distinctions. In fact, in some cases a uniform—or at least evidence of a fighting spirit—could mean the difference between the mercifully quick death the Yuuzhan Vong offered those who measured up to their warlike ideals and the lingering death they reserved for those taken into captivity. He had heard rumors about captives undergoing dismemberment and vivisection; others about shiploads of captives being launched into the heart of stars to ensure victory for the Yuuzhan Vong.

As if the invaders needed a helping hand.

The gasbag, fire-breathing abominations that had torched Gyndine’s forests and turned lakes into boiling cauldrons were gathered on the eastern outskirts of the capital. Flame-carpet warheads couldn’t have done as much damage. Yuuzhan Vong infantry units—reptilian–humanoid Chazrack warriors—had followed the fire breathers in to clean out pockets of resistance and generally mop up. The sky had actually brightened slightly, but what light filtered in through smoke and scudding clouds was blotted out by descending drop ships.

One of them—a mesh tent pierced by crooked sticks—was hovering over the embassy grounds now. Skidder had just changed positions to get a better vantage on the ship when its tentlike hull suddenly burst open, releasing a dozen or more huge, rod-shaped and bristled bundles that fell straight to the ground. Skidder didn’t understand that they were living creatures until he saw the bioluminescent eyespots, twitching antennae, and the hundred pairs of sucker-equipped legs that sprouted down the length of the segmented bodies.

He observed the creatures in undisguised awe. They had the capacity not only to ambulate forward and backward, but also to skitter sideways—which they commenced doing at once, creating a living perimeter around the embassy grounds and moving slowly inward, as a means of forcing everyone toward the center.

The sight of the creatures was enough to strike fear in the heart of the most valiant, but Skidder had the Force on his side and was undaunted. Large as the creatures were, he was not without his own grab bag of abilities, and he could easily vault his way to freedom if he wished. After that it would be a simple matter to conceal himself from the Yuuzhan Vong. He could set off into the countryside, away from the devastation, and live off the land, as many of Gyndine’s residents had opted to do when word of the imminent attack had spread. But Wurth Skidder wasn’t a forager, and he certainly wasn’t a deserter.

The