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Those are slave gangs.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Vergere said from beside him.

Jacen shook his head. “Madness,” he answered. “I mean, look at this—”

He swung a hand toward a nearby bog. Along its bank, a crew dug savagely with crude shovels, howling as they threw muck and vegetation and dirt in all directions, trying to excavate what would probably have been some kind of drainage ditch, while another howling gang worked just as savagely to fill the ditch in once more. A little farther away, a knot of shouting, swearing people stuck grain cuttings into the mud, while a handful of others followed behind, moaning through streams of anguished tears while they stamped the cuttings flat. The sphere was filled with similar useless struggle: stone cairns being simultaneously built up and torn down, fields being packed flat with rolled stone while still being plowed, saplings being planted and chopped down, all by half-naked slaves staggering with exhaustion, some cursing, some sobbing, the rest only bellowing and shrieking wordless animal pain.

Even where there was no struggle, the slaves lurched from task to task as though pursued by invisible clouds of stinging insects; a man digging a hole might suddenly spasm as if he’d touched an open power bus, then clamber out to half build a dike, then jerk again and stumble away to uproot marsh grass by the handful and scatter it randomly to the wind.

“This, this insanity …” Jacen hugged himself, swallowing hard, his breath shallow against a retch that twisted his guts. “How can you call this magnificent?”

“Because I see beyond what it is, to what it shall become.” Vergere touched his arm. Her eyes danced. “Follow me.”

Coils and knots of veins made footholds up the outer skin of the tunnel. Vergere sprang from one to the next with assured agility, then waited at the crest while Jacen struggled painfully up to join her. The thick reeking air had him gasping, drenched with sweat, half smothered as if he’d been wrapped in a blanket of wet tauntaun hide. The pair of warriors followed, impassive and deliberate.

“But what is this place for?” Jacen waved a hand at the pandemonium. “What does this have to do with Vongforming a planet?”

“This?” Vergere’s head tilted in a way that Jacen had learned to interpret as a smile. “This is a playground.”

“A playground?”

“Oh, yes. Is this not what playgrounds are in the New Republic—a place for children to learn the boundaries of behavior? One learns to fight in playground scuffles; one learns politics in playground cliques. It is on the playground that one is initiated into the madness of mobs, the insidious mire of peer pressure, and the final, unthinkable, inarguable unfairness of existence—that some are smarter, others stronger or faster, and no force at your command can make you better than your gifts.”

Her gesture encompassed the entire sphere. “What you see around you is the work of powerful, undisciplined infants … playing with their toys.”

“These aren’t toys,” Jacen blurted, appalled. “These are living beings—humans, Bothans—”

“I will not argue names with you, Jacen Solo. Call them what you will. Their use remains the same.”

“What use? What possible value could anybody get out of this—this pointless suffering?”

Vergere shook her head pityingly. “Do you think a process so complex as re-creating an entire planetary ecology can be entrusted to chance? Oh, no no no, Jacen Solo. There is learning involved. Education. Trial and error—more error than not, of course. And practice. Practice, practice, practice.”

She opened a hand like a service droid offering a table in a fancy restaurant, indicating a large pond not far from the base of the hill where they stood. An island bulged from the pond’s middle, a huge hulking mound of slick, waxy hexagonal blocks like sealed birth chambers in a hive of Corellian wine-bees—except each of these chambers was large enough to swallow the Millennium Falcon.

A ring of Yuuzhan Vong warriors circled the pond, facing outward with weapons at the