• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Jacen felt weak. “Home?”

“A planet can be described as a single organism, a living creature with a skeleton of stone and a heart of molten rock. The species that inhabit a planet, plant and animal alike, from microbe to megalossus, are the planet-creature’s organs, internal symbionts, and parasites. This seedship itself is composed mostly of incubating stem cells, which will differentiate into living machines—which will in turn construct an entire planet’s worth of wildlife with vastly accelerated growth. Animals will mature within a few standard days; whole forests within weeks. Mere months after seeding, the new world will bear a fully functioning, dynamically stable ecosystem: the replica of a planet dead for so many thousand years that it is barely a memory.”

“Their homeworld,” Jacen muttered. “The Yuuzhan Vong. They’re making themselves a new homeworld. That’s what this is.”

“You might call it that.” Vergere stopped and gestured to one of the warriors. She touched a spot on the tubeskin. The warrior stepped forward and twitched his right arm; his amphistaff uncoiled into a blade that ripped a long, ragged slash through the wall. The lips of the slash seeped milky fluid. Vergere pulled one lip aside as though holding open a curtain. She made a slight bow, beckoning Jacen to step through.

“I would call it a work in progress,” she said. “Rather like you.”

Darkly swamp-smelling fog gusted into the tube, warm and thick and smoke-roiling. Jacen snorted. “Smells like the plumbing broke in your barracks refresher. What’s this supposed to teach me?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

Jacen pushed through the gap, into air smotheringly thick with rot and excrement and hot wet mold. Sweat prickled out over his skin. The milky fluid-blood from the gap trailed pale sticky strings that clung to his hair and his hands. He scrubbed at them with the robe, but the milk liked his skin better than the fiber.

Then he looked up, and forgot about the milk.

This was where the screams had been coming from.

He stood in a world turned inside out.

The tunnel at his back made a knotted hump like a varicose vein across the crest of the hill. From up here, Jacen had a clear vantage over a boil of swamp and jungle all the way to the horizon.

But there was no horizon.

Through storm-swirls of stinking fog, an endless bowl of scum-stained pools and fetid belching quagmires rose higher and higher and higher until he had to squint against the actinic blue-white pinprick that was this place’s sun. Then a rift parted the fog above, and he could see beyond the sun: other swamps and jungles and ridges of low hills sealed shut the sky. Blurred in the regathering mist, it seemed that vast creatures roamed those hills in disorganized herds—but then the mist thinned again, and the scene snapped into perspective.

Those creatures weren’t huge; they were human.

Not just human, but also Mon Calamari, and Bothan and Twi’lek, and dozens of other species of the New Republic.

Those hills overhead were only a klick away, maybe a klick and a half. The “sun” must have been some kind of artificial fusion source, probably not much bigger than Jacen’s fist. He nodded to himself; with the fine gravity control wielded by dovin basals, it wouldn’t be much of a trick to contain a fusion furnace. Filtering out damaging radiation would be trickier, though. He couldn’t guess how they managed it without shield technology; he’d never been technical. His gift had been with animals. For that kind of question, he’d just ask Jaina, or Anakin—

He shook himself, and ground his teeth together until the pain ebbed.

Now he could pick out Yuuzhan Vong among the groups: some warriors—not many—but hundreds and hundreds of what he guessed must be shapers, moving in slow and purposeful paths, taking soil and water samples, collecting leaves and strips of bark, stems, and handfuls of algae, paying no attention at all to what he’d originally taken for herds.

Those herds—

If he’d