Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [115]
“He’s telling them that the commander is waiting,” Page translated quietly.
One of the warriors stumbled a bit as they crossed the threshold into the gloomy interior of the minshal. Oddly, he was the only one of the three who hadn’t been wounded during the brief action.
Kyp noticed the stumble as well. “Something’s not right.”
He received a hard jab in the ribs for speaking.
Inside, the smell of rot was overpowering. Pools of sallow liquid had collected on the spongy floor, and the bioluminescent wall lichen was rashed with black spots. Thousands of dying arachnidlike insects—similar to the ones Leia had seen in the living cofferdam—crawled about in seeming confusion.
Dead flitnats littered the ground. A female shaper was borne into the antechamber on a litter, carried by two more of the squat, dark-complected warriors. Her skin was as pale green as Leia’s falsely colored face, and the many-fingered hand that had been grafted to her wrist hung limply at her side. The warriors shoved Leia and the others forward, and rolled Han onto his back nearby.
Leia’s heart leapt when she saw him stir.
The shaper was addressing the warriors from atop her litter.
“She’s congratulating them on capturing us,” Meloque whispered to everyone. “She says we will contribute greatly to the sacrifice.”
The shaper called two of the troops forward and spent a long moment looking them over, inspecting their faces, limbs, and torsos. One of the warriors indicated a tumorlike growth on his neck, and dropped to one knee at the foot of the litter, in what appeared to be humiliation.
“What’s going on?” Kyp asked Meloque.
She listened for a moment. “The warrior thinks he has become a Shamed One, because his body is rejecting some sort of … enhancement he received.” Meloque listened for a moment more, then added: “The shaper’s telling him that he is not Shamed. That the growth of the tumor has nothing to do with the gods, and everything to do with this world—everything to do with Caluula.”
“Caluula?” Page repeated in bafflement.
The warrior looked relieved. Rising, he drew his coufee and turned toward Leia, only to be restrained by the shaper’s touch.
“He wants to kill us,” Meloque explained.
“I got that much,” Kyp said.
“She’s reassuring them that we will die before sunset.”
“That’s a relief,” Wraw said. “For a minute I thought they were going to let us go.”
Kyp glanced at the Bothan. “Get out all your jokes while there’s still time.”
The shaper was speaking again. Leia recognized the word Yuuzhan’tar.
Meloque translated. “She’s ordering the special warriors—the slayers, she calls them—to return her to Yuuz—to Coruscant immediately. She says it’s imperative that she apprise her master of what has happened here to render everyone ill. She is promising the slayers that the commander is going to see to us personally.”
“Yun-Harla succors me in my time of need,” a male voice said in Basic.
The accent was familiar to Leia, and clearly to Page, who craned his neck to see who had spoken.
A tall, rail-thin Yuuzhan Vong elite entered the antechamber, his scarified arms draped in support around the shoulders of two large but plainly enervated warriors.
“Welcome, Jedi, Ho’Din, and Bothan. And to you, Captain Page. Did I not promise that I would see you on a funeral pyre?”
Leia suddenly recalled where she had seen him before—aboard the Yuuzhan Vong convoy vessel.
It was Commander Malik Carr.
TWENTY-FIVE
With the armada’s rotation, the distal ends of several tentacles had whipped themselves into ensnaring loops. Starfighters trapped in the loops twisted and swerved to avoid scudding coralskippers, but they were fast running out of maneuvering room.
The overwhelmed deflector shields of Jaina’s X-wing were barely viable, and Cappie was probably beyond repair. Each tongue of plasma or missile of molten rock landed like a punch. Despite the harnesses that fastened her to the padded seat, she was flung