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“Start with threatening to pull their wings off,” the short human said.

S’yito opened his hand to display the winged bug, pinched between forefinger and thumb but unharmed. “This is why you lose the war, and why coexistence with you is impossible. You believe we inflict pain for sport, when we do so only to demonstrate reverence for the gods.” He held the pitiful creature at arm’s length. “Think of this as yourselves. Obedience leads to freedom; disobedience, to disgrace.” Abruptly, he smashed the insect against his taut chest. “No middle path. You are Yuuzhan Vong, or you are dead.”

Before any of the prisoners could reply, a human officer stepped from the doorway of the nearest hut into the harsh sunlight. Thickset and bearded, he wore his filthy uniform proudly. “Commenor, Antar, Clak’dor, that’s enough chatter,” the officer said, referring to them by their native worlds rather than by name. “Carry on with your duties and report back to me.”

“On our way, Captain,” the short human said, saluting.

“That’s Page, right?” the Gotal asked. “I hear nothing but good things.”

“All of them true,” one of the Bith said. “But we need ten thousand more like him if we’re ever going to turn this war around.”

As the prisoners moved off, S’yito turned to regard Captain Judder Page, who held the subaltern’s appraising gaze for a long moment before stepping back into the wooden building. The body bearer had spoken the truth, S’yito thought. Warriors like Page could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

The Yuuzhan Vong held the high ground in the long war, but only barely. The fact that a prison camp had had to be grown on the surface of Selvaris was proof of that. Normally a battle vessel would have served as a place of detention. But with the final stages of the conflict being waged on numerous fronts, every able vessel was deployed to engage hostile forces on contested worlds, patrol conquered systems, defend the hazy margins of the invasion corridor, or protect Yuuzhan’tar, the Hallowed Center, over which Supreme Overlord Shimrra had now presided for a standard year.

In any other circumstance there would have been little need for high walls or watchtowers, let alone a full complement of warriors to guard even such high-status prisoners as the mixed-species lot gathered on Selvaris. At the start of the war, captives had been fitted with manacles, immobilized in blorash jelly, or simply implanted with surge-coral and enslaved to a dhuryam—a governing brain. But living shackles, quick-jelly, and surge-coral were in short supply, and dhuryams were so scarce as to be rare.

Were S’yito in command, Page and others like him would already have been executed. As it was, too many compromises had been made. The wooden shelters, the disposal of bodies, the food … No matter the species, the prisoners had no stomach for the Yuuzhan Vong diet. With so many of them succumbing to their battle wounds or malnutrition, the prison commander had been forced to allow food to be delivered from a nearby settlement, where the residents plucked fish and other marine life from Selvaris’s bountiful seas, and harvested fruits from the planet’s equally generous forests. Against the possibility that resistance cells might be operating in the settlement, the place was even more closely guarded than the prison.

It was said among the warriors that Selvaris had no indigenous sentients, and in fact the settlers who called the planet home had the look of beings who had either been marooned or were in hiding.

The sentient who delivered the weekly rations of food was no exception.

Covered with a nap of smoke-colored fur, the being walked upright on two muscular legs, and yet was graced with a useful-looking tail. Paired eyes sparkled in a slender mustachioed face, the prominent feature of which was a beak of some cartilaginous substance, perforated at intervals like a flute and downcurving over a drooping polar mustache. He was harnessed to a wagon that rode on two yorik coral wheels and was laden with baskets, pots, and an assortment of bulging, homespun