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“Don’t be so hopelessly optimistic,” Corran said.

“Perhaps I misphrased, somehow,” the Givin said. “I did not mean to imply optimism on my part.”

“I was being sarcastic,” Corran said. “Never mind. Where are the vac suits?”

The dodecian gestured at another Givin. “In the old storage lockers at what you may remember as designated ring one-C of the docking area. My subordinate will take you to them in case your memory fails. I regret your position in all of this. I regret further that an attempt was made to bargain with your lives.”

“They didn’t bite?”

“On the contrary,” Illiet said. “I reached a settlement with them. They promised to spare our station if you were turned over to them.”

“Then why …?”

“I did not believe their promise,” the dodecian said. “Go. There is a small ship at docking port twelve, berth thirteen, if it has not already been destroyed. I grant you use of it. The rest of our vessels were used to evacuate unnecessary personnel before the attack commenced.”

“Thank you,” Corran said.

“Thank you for your efforts on our behalf,” the Givin replied. He looked back at the tactical readouts. “You should hurry.” He didn’t look back up.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Nen Yim bathed in a sea of knowledge. Protocols glistened and swirled in the depths, revealing the foundations and endless permutations of life in intimate and splendid detail. Beneath the cognition hood her expression was one of awe and wonder, and for the moment she was the eager, maze-eyed young woman she had been only a few cycles before, loving and in love with the art of shaping, with knowledge itself.

She had long since passed the fifth cortex into the realm of the masters. Here were the living designs for the dovin basals, the thought-seeds of yorik coral, and yes, the protocols governing the creation of master hands. These she passed, navigating the shoals and depths with her questions, steering with her determination.

She found the germ of the worldships and swam through its thick skin. Parts she had seen before, of course—the outline of the recham forteps, the pattern of the osmotic membranes of the endocrine cloisters—but these were only components. She had never seen the profound logic of the vessels laid out holistically. Her grasp of the organic relationships between organs had been based mostly on deduction, and she found it instructive to observe where she had been right and where wrong.

At the center of it, at the outer limits of the seventh and final cortex, she found, at last, the brain. Its making uncoiled for her. She opened herself in turn and absorbed the information, let it fill the places her vaa-tumor had burned a place for. Strands of amino acid sequences flowed by like twisting rivers, pooling in her enhanced memory. Neurons divided, splitting and scrolling into million-branched ganglia that further folded into cortical coils. Subsystems nomic and autonomic explained themselves as the developmental process continued, finally settling into stability, maintenance, reorganization, stasis.

And in the end, when it had all come and gone, when her own brain strained at the rush of knowing, she understood at last.

The ship was doomed. The rikyam would die, and there was no protocol to stop it. Wonder dimmed in her, and the vast living library around her suddenly stood revealed to her not so much as a storehouse, but as a prison. Or a mausoleum, for though it created the impression of being alive, everything in the great Qang qahsa was desiccated, sterile, unchanging. There was nothing new here. If the protocols truly came from the gods, the gods had not seen fit to add anything to the sum of Yuuzhan Vong knowledge in a thousand years.

But that was impossible. Since the invasion of the infidel galaxy, new protocols had been handed down from the gods to Supreme Overlord Shimrra and thence to the shapers. The gods had been generous, especially in doling out weapons. Where had that knowledge gone?

That thought stirred something in the Qang qahsa, as if it had been waiting for someone to think it. The seventh cortex faded