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“And yet you retreated because you thought it best.”

“Yes, Warlord,” he replied, his tone finally subdued. “But it was not … easy. I take the stain on myself, yet there is a stain.”

“Listen to me,” Nas Choka said. “We are the Yuuzhan Vong. We have been entrusted with the true way, the true knowledge of the gods. Our duty is to bring every infidel in this galaxy to heel and either send them screaming to the gods or bring them to the true path. There is no middle ground, there is no faltering. And there can be no failure. Our mission is more important than you or me, Commander, and it is more important than your honor or mine. Lord Shimrra himself has said it. And so, feel no stain. To win this war, we must set aside much we cherish. The gods ordain the sacrifice. We are blameless. We are those who do what must be done. And so I tell you again—you did the right thing.”

Lah nodded, understanding lighting behind his eyes.

“Now,” Choka went on, “these tactics—these feints and sudden withdrawals, these strike-here-and-hide-there maneuvers—what enables this? The infidels have no yammosk to coordinate their movements.”

“They have communications, Warlord. Their HoloNet allows them to communicate instantaneously over the breadth of the galaxy.”

“Precisely. But without their HoloNet, such precise coordination becomes much more difficult, yes?”

Lah shrugged. “Of course,” he said. “But destroying the communications system is difficult,” he said. “There are many relay stations, not always placed so as to be easily found. When one is destroyed, another may function, and the infidels have managed to repair or replace many we have destroyed.”

“The destruction of the HoloNet has never been a priority before,” Nas Choka said. “Now it is. And the gods have given the shapers a new weapon, one that should perfectly suit our needs.”

“That is well, Warlord.”

“It is.” He paced a moment.

“I’m giving you a new battle group. You will remain here, at Yuuzhan’tar, on alert to strike quickly. The infidels are growing confident; they will attack again, soon. I can feel it. And when they do, we will have something new to show them. Something quite new.”

SEVEN

Beneath the black sky of Yuuzhan’tar, Nen Yim moved invisibly. The guards at their posts did not blink as she passed; the singing ulubs stayed silent as she moved lightly across the grounds of the Supreme Overlord’s compound. Damuteks glowed with faint luminescence, and ships coming and going were pale viridian or blood-colored mists of light in the sky.

Yuuzhan’tar had not always been dark at night. For millennia, it had been the brightest world in the galaxy, never knowing true darkness. Unliving metal had pulsed with unholy energies, hemorrhaging light and heat and noxious fumes to burn the womb of night.

Now that unnatural work had been undone, and any brightness came from the stars alone. Tonight, not even they troubled the closed eyelids of the gods, for a tarp of cloud had been drawn overhead, blotting even the fierce beauty of the Core. So long controlled by machines, the climate of Yuuzhan’tar was also finding its natural state.

To Nen Yim, it seemed paradoxically unnatural. She had been born and raised on a worldship, nurtured by an organism so large that she had been like a microbe in its belly, kept warm and secure. The vagaries of weather were only recently known to her, and though her mind rationally recognized that on some long-ago day the Yuuzhan Vong had lived on a world where seasons came and went, where rain fell when it wished or not at all—that this was, indeed, the natural course of things—her instincts rebelled at the capricious variability of it all. She was a shaper. She preferred shaping to being shaped.

And she despised being cold. She was cloaked in a creature of her own modification, a variant of the special ooglith cloakers that hunters wore. Its billion tiny sensory nodes gazed at the night, heard it, tasted it—and made her a part of it. For the first time in many, many months she was free of her guards,