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“Copy, Alliance control. Standing by.”

Instructing Twin Suns to form up on her, Jaina led the squadron to its assigned coordinates, at fixed orbit over the frozen spheroid, in the company of a wing of starfighters made up of Rogue, Vanguard, Scimitar, Blackmoon, and Tesar Sabatyne’s Wild Knights.

“Hey, Sticks,” another familiar voice said.

Jaina opened a channel to Gavin Darklighter. “How long have you been sitting here, Rogue One?”

“Too long. Was Intelligence correct about the number of Vong ships?”

“I think they underestimated.”

Before Gavin could respond, Wedge broke in. “Group and squadron leaders, the beast is at the gate. I know you’re all eager to welcome it, but you’re going to have to wait your turns.”

The comm fell eerily silent, then erupted in chatter as the Yuuzhan Vong war vessels began to emerge: cones and polygons, faceted and smooth, bone white to reddish black, craggy with plasma launchers or strung with coralskippers. More rapidly and in increasing numbers they came, filling local space and eventually blotting out Mon Calamari’s distant sun. Just when it seemed that the last of them had reverted, still more appeared.

Somewhat removed from Alliance forces, and almost as if performing for an audience, the vessels began to tighten up, maneuvering into positions that ultimately created an oblate mass of yammosk carriers and destroyer and cruiser analogs. From that mass—emerging from berthing cavities in the largest ships or dropping from anchorage on yorik coral branches—streamed hundreds of picket ship analogs and coralskippers, deploying to forge the multitude of short and long tendrils that were meant to simulate the tentacles of a yammosk.

To Jaina the final arrangement more closely resembled a flaring star, or perhaps the spiral arm galaxy the Yuuzhan Vong were determined to overwhelm. But whatever the armada’s form, beast was the description that fit it best.

Then the immense organism was on the move, tentacles elongating from the hub as the cluster advanced on Mon Calamari, acutely aware of the reception party that awaited it, but resolute in its purpose.

“All group and squadron leaders,” a male voice announced over the battle net, “seedships have arrived.”

Alliance command might have borrowed the term from the Yuuzhan Vong, but the reference was not to the vessels that initiated the process of worldshaping; it was to the several dozen unarmed and remotely piloted freighters that gushed from behind Iceberg Three and launched straight for the armada. Plasma missiles assaulted the bulky container ships from all quarters, though armor plating kept most of them intact until they were within the embrace of the longer tentacles. There they surrendered their payloads of thousands of probe droids.

With wide-domed heads and dangling mechanical legs, the probots were marine in appearance, and indeed they spread out like a school of deep-sea creatures riding the currents of a rising tide.

Normally the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t have wasted firepower on droids, but each probot had been programmed to mimic the propulsion signatures of Alliance starfighters, so the coralskippers and pickets had a field day, slagging the probots with fiery projectiles, or simply dismembering them by collision. The Alliance might as well have been providing the yammosks and coralskipper pilots with practice for acquisition and targeting, but in fact each probot was contributing invaluably to Alliance command’s goal of clearing fire lanes to the heart of the armada.

Many of the battles fought during the long war had been decided not by firepower or kill ratios, but by the ability of Yuuzhan Vong biots to detect mass signals and to manipulate gravity. As intelligent as the yammosks were, they were evenly matched by the crunching power of battle analysis computers, combined with the targeting skill of pilots. The dovin basals were a different animal. For a time the Alliance had managed to outwit them by employing decoys,