• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He turned to control. “No one else breaks formation,” he said. “No one.”

“Sir, they’ll be slaughtered.”

“Yes,” Wedge said, gruffly, “they will.”

One by one, over the course of the next few hours, the Duros ships vanished in bursts of plasma. Three hours after the last was gone, another message came over the comm board. Wedge gave the order to cease interdiction, and the Galactic Alliance ships jumped, leaving Duro once again to the Yuuzhan Vong.

THREE

A distorted grin sliced Onimi’s crooked head in a sign of mock regard. “Sweet Nen Yim,” he croaked. “How delightful your presence.”

How disgusting yours, Nen Yim thought. She did not say it, and she did not need to. The tendrils of her headdress writhed and curled in revulsion, and her multifingered master’s hand spasmed into a knot.

If the Supreme Overlord’s jester noticed any of this, he made no sign, but stood there grinning at her as if they were close crèche-mates sharing a joke. They weren’t; she was the most important of all shapers, and he was an appalling example of a Shamed One, a being upon whom the gods had placed a permanent stamp of unreserved disapproval. Why Shimrra, the chosen of the gods—the Supreme Overlord of her entire species—should choose him as emissary was utterly beyond her comprehension. It was more than an affront, it was a misery to even be in his presence, especially when she remembered—and she could hardly forget—that those fingers had once touched her, when he had disguised himself as a master shaper.

For that alone, he deserved the most ignominious death imaginable. She had plotted his murder even when she believed him to be her superior, and blessed by the gods. Now, when she had the means at her disposal and knew what he really was, she did not dare.

But she could still dream.

Onimi simpered and smiled. “Your thoughts croon toward me,” he said. “Your tendrils ache for my touch. So much I can see of you, Nen Yim.”

Well, he had noticed something, she reflected. He merely mistook her passion.

“Have you come on some errand, Onimi, or merely to waste my time in foolish conversation?”

“Conversation is not foolish that begs the fool,” Onimi said, winking, as if that actually meant something.

“Yes, as you wish,” she said, sighing. “Do you bring word from the Supreme Overlord?”

“I bring a dainty,” Onimi said. “A glistering pustule from the gods, a gift for my sweet little—”

“Address me as master,” Nen Yim said, stiffly. “I am no ‘little’ anything of yours. And come to the point. Whatever else the Supreme Overlord wants of me, I doubt he wants much of my time taken up, not with so much that needs doing.”

From the corner of her eye she caught one of her assistants suppressing a smile, and reminded herself to reprimand her later.

Onimi’s eyes went wide, and then he set a finger to his lips, leaned near, and whispered, “Fleeting time laps hours, devours days, months and years, passes them like gas.”

She said nothing. What other response was there? But Onimi gestured, and with a great deal of reluctance she followed him down the mycoluminescent corridor of her central damutek, through the laboratories where she worked her heretical science to produce the miracles the Yuuzhan Vong needed to take their rightful place in a galaxy of infidels. When they passed into a corridor secured even from her, she began to grow intrigued, and more easily ignored the off-key singing of the jester, who was blasphemously describing in ancient octameter certain activities of the goddess Yun-Harla of which Nen Yim—thankfully—had never heard.

Of course that was spoiled now.

At last they arrived in a dim space. Something irregular and large bulked ahead. Light was in it, a faint shifting radiance so delicate it could almost be the colors of the dark behind her eyes.

She walked nearer, her shaping fingers outstretched to feel and taste the surface. It was smooth, almost slick. It tasted of long carbon chains, and water, and silicates. It tasted quick and familiar.