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Suppose ten billion people died in the Yuuzhan Vong bombardment—

Suppose twenty billion more were killed in the ground-quakes that accompanied the alteration of the planet’s orbit—

Suppose another thirty billion have since starved to death, or been killed by Yuuzhan Vong search-and-destroy teams, or have been poisoned, or eaten, or otherwise died from contact with Vongformed life—

Suppose an additional forty billion have been enslaved, or interred, or otherwise held captive by the Yuuzhan Vong.

These supposed numbers are exactly that: pure supposition. Imaginary. Even when Coruscant’s planetary database had been intact, the global census had been mostly guesswork. In the wake of the conquest, there was no practical way to number the missing and the dead. One hundred billion is an unreasonably high figure—probably outrageously inflated—but even so—

Subtract these casualties from the preconquest population of Coruscant.

There are nine hundred billion people left over.

Nine.

Hundred.

Billion.

Survivors can be a weapon, too.

The camp ships had been popping out of hyperspace for months now. No one could predict when, or in what star system, the next would arrive. The camp ships were kilometers thick, roughly globular, vast random glued-together masses of hexagonal chambers that ranged from the size of a footlocker to the size of a carrier’s flight deck. The ships might have been some kind of plant, a vegetal species specially bred by the Yuuzhan Vong; they might have been agglomerate exoskeletons abandoned by gargantuan interplanetary animals.

Analysis of sensor data showed clear indications of dovin basal–like gravity fields around the hyperspace exsertion points; and mere seconds after each ship’s appearance, there would follow a new gravity-distorting burst. Some New Republic analysts thought these secondary bursts were dovin basals collapsing into self-generated point masses. Others claimed that the secondary bursts were the signatures of whatever dovin basal–like creatures had served as the engines of the camp ships, vanishing back into hyperspace to return to their starting point.

This much was certain: these ships came at random, infalling through inhabited star systems. These ships had no food supplies, life support, or usable engines. All these ships had was people.

Millions of people.

Hundreds of millions: survivors from the conquest of Coruscant.

Each populated system that unexpectedly found itself the custodian of a camp ship faced a stark choice: it could further strain its war-burdened resources to house and feed the refugees, or it could let them die: smother, or starve, die of thirst, freeze, or slowly cook in their own waste heat. The ships could be simply ignored—left to drift between planets, frozen mausoleums eternally commemorating that stellar system’s callous, lethal neglect of a hundred million lives.

No world of the New Republic could face collective guilt on that scale; if they could, they never would have been admitted to the Republic in the first place.

No one knew if any camp ships had been jumped to uninhabited systems. No one wanted to think about that. Some Jedi explored, feeling with the Force through vast dust-swept reaches; but there had never been many Jedi in the first place, and the few who remained had little time to spare from the war. Planetary and system-wide governments mounted no searches. They couldn’t afford to. They didn’t have the resources to support the refugees who had ended up in their laps already; to search for others would be not only useless, but insane.

Despite painful shortages of both raw materials and technical expertise, the New Republic systems did what they could.

To construct cities big enough to shelter hundreds of millions of people was clearly impossible in the wartime economy, but there was another option. The ships were roomy, and held air against the vacuum of space. So the refugees were kept where they were, while the host systems did their best to supply the overcrowded ships with waste and water recycling,