Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 20_ The Final Prophecy - J. Gregory Keyes [113]
Two charred yorik-trema landing craft, not yet fully healed from recent deep-space engagements with the enemy, sat in the spacious prison yard. Shuffling past them came a group of humans, bald-domed Bith, and thick-horned Gotals, carrying three corpses wrapped in cloth.
His back pressed to one of the coralcraft, a Yuuzhan Vong guard watched the prisoners struggle with the dead.
“Be quick about it,” he ordered. “The maw luur doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
The camp’s prisoners had argued vehemently to be allowed to dispose of bodies according to the customs of the deceased, but graves or funeral pyres had been expressly forbidden by order of the Yuuzhan Vong priests who officiated at the nearby temple. Their ruling was that all organics had to be recycled. The dead could either be left to Selvaris’s ample and voracious flocks of carrion eaters, or be fed to the Yuuzhan Vong biot known as a maw luur, which some of the more well-traveled prisoners characterized as a mating of trash compactor and Sarlacc.
The guard was tall and long-limbed, with an elongated sloping forehead and bluish sacs underscoring his eyes. The light of Selvaris’s two suns had reddened his skin slightly, and the planet’s hothouse heat had turned him lean. Facial tattoos and scarifications marked him as an officer, but he lacked the deformations and implants peculiar to commanders. Bound by a ring of black coral, his dark hair fell in a sideknot to below his shoulders, and his uniform tunic was cinched by a narrow hide belt. A melee weapon coiled around his muscular right forearm, like a deadly vine.
What made Subaltern S’yito unusual was that he spoke Basic, though not nearly as fluently as his commander.
The prisoners paused briefly in response to S’yito’s order that they hurry.
“We’d sooner see their bones picked clean by scavengers than let them be a meal for your garbage eater,” the shortest of the humans said.
“Make the maw luur happy by throwing yourself in,” a second human added.
“You tell him, Commenor,” the Gotal beside him encouraged.
Shirtless, the prisoners were slick with sweat, and kilos lighter than when they had arrived on Selvaris two standard months earlier, after being captured during an abortive attempt to retake the planet Gyndine. Those who wore trousers had cut them off at the knee, and likewise trimmed their footwear to provide no more than was needed to keep their feet from being bloodied by the coarse ground or the waves of thorned senalaks that thrived outside the walls.
S’yito only sneered at their insolence, and waved his left hand to disperse the cloud of insects that encircled him.
The short human cracked a smile and laughed. “That’s what you get for using blood as body paint, S’yito.”
S’yito puzzled out the meaning of the remark. “Insects are not the problem. Only that they are not Yuuzhan Vong insects.” With uncommon speed, he snatched one out of the air and curled his hand around it. “Not yet, that is.”
Worldshaping had commenced in Selvaris’s eastern hemisphere, and was said to be creeping around the planet at the rate of two hundred kilometers per local day. Bioengineered vegetation had already engulfed several population centers, but it would be months before the botanical imperative was concluded.
Until then, all of Selvaris was a prison. No residents had been allowed offworld since the internment camp had been grown, and all enemy communications facilities had been dismantled. Technology had been outlawed. Droids especially had been destroyed with much accompanying celebration, and in the name of benevolence. Liberated from their reliance on machines, sentient species might at long last glimpse the true nature of the universe, which had been brought into being by Yun-Yuuzhan in an act of selfless sacrifice, and was maintained by the lesser gods in whom the Creator had placed his trust.
“Maybe you should just try converting our insects,” one of the humanoids