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She turned around and spotted a transparent lift tube. R2-D2 had shown her a readout of Duro Defense Force’s command post, located on a superstructure over Duggan Station. She stared up the lift tube—way up—to a small platform just under the habitat’s main structural supports. Two tall, gray guards stood outside the tube’s base.

“I need to speak with Admiral Wuht,” she said.

“He is not available,” the near guard answered.

“So I assumed.” Mara glanced upward again. Too far to jump—maybe Luke could make this one, but she couldn’t.

“Listen,” she said quietly. “I only want to talk with him. I’m not going to harm him, but if you insist on getting in my way, I can promise you I will hurt you.” She added an overlay of Force energy. Too much was at stake, too many lives on the line, to hold back. “Let me through,” she said firmly, barely raising her hand to gesture.

One guard touched the lift control, opening the door. The other pulled out a comlink and turned aside.

Mara tossed her head, marched onto the lift, and punched for the command level.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Leia slid into the upright gap between the number-one hydroponics complex and her administration building. Here, the duracrete walls were less than half a meter apart, just close enough that a reasonably agile person could climb them chimney-style.

She holstered her blaster, then pushed one foot and one hand against the right wall, one foot and one hand against the left wall, and started up.

Though the duracrete was rough enough for hand- and foot-holds, chimneying meant holding her wrists and ankles at angles that brought on a dull, throbbing ache. Using Jedi techniques to ignore that pain, she kept climbing. Finally, she stretched out prone on the roof and peered north, toward the construction barns.

Motion caught her eye almost directly below. A pair of Yuuzhan Vong hauled a travoislike cart down the admin building’s main steps. Her breath caught as she recognized Abbela Oldsong’s pale-blue shoulder wrap, bunched around one limp form that lay on the travois. Leia leveled her blaster at the nearer alien’s neck, at the joint in its armor, then lowered her weapon. Abbela wasn’t breathing. Something like a crimson snake had wrapped tightly around her neck.

Leia grimaced, glad that the woman lay facedown. Other limbs, human and nonhuman, stuck out beneath Abbela’s body. Leia wondered if they’d been sacrificed to some horrible, so-called god.

She was barely aware of Olmahk creeping forward to lie beside her, his lean gray face coming level with hers.

“Keep your head down, Lady Vader.”

“I am.”

Then she saw one of her block-stacking machines jerking forward, being dragged and shoved instead of running under its own power. Ahead of it, between the construction shed and garden plots, lay a deep new pit. Yuuzhan Vong swarmed its edges, deepening and enlarging it with what looked like picks and staffs, but were probably creature-tools. West of the pit, hundreds of refugees sat close together. Although the evening was slipping toward midnight, no one lay down. As Leia watched, another group joined them. Yuuzhan Vong on lizardlike beasts patrolled the area, and near the construction shed, something moved.

Then she saw the upper creature’s tentacled head, attacking the wall in a frenzy.

She clenched a fist. Where was SELCORE now? Senator Shesh sat on Coruscant while Leia lay here, watching alien biocreations shatter SELCORE’s haven.

Not alone, though. She heard more soft scuffling behind her, then Jaina crept up on her stomach.

“Remind you of anything?” Jaina asked, adjusting her mask one-handed.

Leia nodded. “Rhommamool, and a pit full of droids. We’ve got to get those people out of there.”

“With what?” Jaina asked bitterly.

“Just help me get the mining laser up here,” Leia said. “They still haven’t shut down the main power plant.”

“What about lifting something out of that pit,” Jaina suggested, “using the Force? And just dropping it on them? They wouldn’t have a clue where we