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He turned to look at her. She saw nothing behind his eyes, now, and it suddenly occurred to her that he might be worse than mad; he might be using one of the ancient, forbidden toxins that induced stupor. Such a self-indulgence … would be exactly like this being, she finished.

He hit her, then, a backhand that shattered one of her teeth and sent her spinning to the ground with the taste of blood in her mouth. She lay there, expecting him to follow the attack, ready to speak the word. This was her last chance; if she hesitated longer, he would have the grutchins destroyed because he thought them somehow imperfect.

He kept looking at her with that same vague expression, as if he had never moved his hand, never touched her.

“Fetch the Qang qahsa villip,” he said quietly. “I shall give you access. You shall shape me new hands. The perfect grutchin will not escape us.”

A trembling, diminutive triumph quivered in Nen Yim’s breast. She nurtured it with caution. Much could still go wrong, but she had found a chance, at least, to save the worldship. Though she wished she could bathe her body in acid to erase Kae Kwaad’s touch, he had agreed to give her the thing she needed most.

As she went to find the villip, she promised herself that whatever else happened, whether she saved the ship or failed, whether she was executed for heresy or not, this wretched, pathetic thing whose touch had polluted her would die before she did.

PART FOUR

REBIRTH

THIRTY-SIX

Realspace greeted Jaina with an actinic flare and a shock wave that bucked her X-wing violently. She flinched instinctively, closing her eyes against the glare, the memory of impaired sight still imprinted on her nervous system.

Have some sense, girl, she thought, forcing them back open. You’re in enemy territory!

And about to smack into an asteroid, the same one the coralskipper Gavin Darklighter had just drilled had exploded against. She yawed hard to port to avoid an identical fate.

“Heads up, Sticks,” Gavin’s voice crackled in her ear. “Rogues, form up. We’ve got plenty of company on the way.”

“As ordered, Lead,” Jaina said, weaving her way through the irregular bits of shattered planet that stretched as far as her sensors could make out.

Starboard and above her horizon, the yellow star at the heart of the system was half eclipsed by the outstretched arms of the distant gravitic weapon. Nearer and dead ahead was the more immediate target of Rogue Squadron—the cordon where Kre’fey’s stripped-down Interdictor had sacrificed itself. Its shields had already collapsed, and its mass-shadow generators were random ions; but an expanding cloud of superheated gas marked clearly where it had been. Wedge had added one thing to the Bothan admiral’s already good idea—he’d rigged the reactor to go supercritical when the shields reached 12 percent.

There was no knowing how many Yuuzhan Vong ships it had taken with it. However many it had, there were plenty left coming through the drifting planetary shards, and they were the business of Rogue Squadron. Calculations had shown that the temporary shift in gravitic stresses in the system would give them a very small window of opportunity—not big enough to risk Kre’fey’s larger ships on, but plenty big enough to sneak the Rogues and Kyp’s Dozen through. The Dozen were headed straight for the weapon to scout out whatever forces were guarding the thing. The Rogues’ job was to clean out the Yuuzhan Vong nested around the stable hyperspace entry, which was the only way in for the Ralroost—and for the Yuuzhan Vong forces at the perimeter of the system. The Rogues had to gain control of it.

“I make something big at the target coordinates,” Gavin informed them. “Might be a ship; might be a battle station. Designate Wampa. One-flight, we’ll take that. Two and Three, keep those skips off us.”

Jaina double-clicked to acknowledge, and peeled off with Three-flight, lining up off Twelve’s port wing. She felt a brief sadness, remembering that she had once flown wing for Anni Capstan, back when she first joined the squadron.