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Then she listened hard.

“Get up, Administrator Organa Solo.”

The voice seemed to echo, and she recognized it. She lay still a moment longer, reaching out with her other senses. All other humans must have fled the building. Most vitally, she couldn’t feel Jacen or Jaina close by. Either they’d escaped, or …

No. The Yuuzhan Vong had not killed them.

“We are aware,” the familiar voice said, “of when you regained consciousness. Get up. Show the courage that proves you worthy.”

Then she knew the voice. She’d heard it over her comlink, but never in person.

She opened her eyes. They showed a gray, weirdly slanted duracrete ceiling.

Stairwell. She’d been felled outside the storeroom. At the edge of her vision, duracrete spiraled up into the distance.

A Yuuzhan Vong stood between her and the nearest gray wall. He was smaller than many, with most of his head covered by tattoos. What little hair he had grew in a black tuft at the back. He wore a khaki-colored tunic over a thinner-looking version of the black body armor. But his face …

The nose was barely present, like two dark holes opening directly into his skull. The right eye was pale blue, with the eerie stripe of a feline pupil. The thing in his left socket was no eye. It looked leathery, except at the center, where a vertical slit split it like another pupil.

The creature held her lightsaber in one hand.

“Dr. Cree’Ar, I presume,” she said. “Or should I say, Nom Anor?”

“We have met,” he said, stretching his lips in a parody of a smile.

She sat up, rested her back against a rough wall, and straightened her head wrap. Now she saw three more of the alien warriors, one standing guard on the next landing up, two more behind her ersatz researcher.

“So you solved our problems,” she said, “using Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology.”

“In part,” he said. “I have dabbled in the kind of alchemy that can change your more useless microbes into powerful tools.”

“You made Mara sick. But here, you were only stalling. Distracting us.”

“You learn wisdom.”

“I suppose,” she said, also stalling—in the hope that her children would be far away before the aliens realized she hadn’t come alone.

Alone? What about Olmahk?

For her to be here, they must have killed him.

Chewie, Elegos, Abbela, and now Olmahk. Again, they made this war personal.

“I suppose,” she went on, “you actually have everything you’ll need to clean up Duro yourselves.”

“That is nothing to you. If the warmaster chooses to do so, he will.”

Warmaster? “Who is that?”

The alien’s lips drew back, exposing even more of his teeth. “Get up,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

Her legs moved stiffly. Nom Anor and his muscular cronies walked her up the stairs, into her own office-quarters.

The alien who waited between her equipment lockers and her desk was half a head taller than even his tallest guard. Large, rust-colored armor scales covered his body from neck to knees. His lips had multiple slits, his elongated head was tattooed, and a channel-like groove crossed the top of his head, almost from one ear to the other. She didn’t want to guess how he’d gotten it.

A smaller alien, with painful-looking black burn scars crossing her cheeks, offered the warmaster something on a tray. As he picked it up, pinching it delicately between claws that extended from each fingertip and knuckle, she saw that it looked like a worm.

She glanced aside. She’d left her bunk rumpled, rising in a hurry. The remains of her breakfast still sat on a plate beside the focus cooker. On her desk’s other side, near the tall alien, her equipment lockers hung open. Most of their contents lay on the duracrete floor, smashed into a tangle of ruined components.

The big alien tilted his head slightly and let the worm slide into his left ear.

Leia shuddered and planted her feet a shoulder’s width apart. She needed to stall him long enough for Luke and Mara to get back with reinforcements. Long enough for the refugees to escape.

“Warmaster,” she said, “your seizure of this dome, this planet, is utterly illegal. You may not—”

“Silence,” he ordered.