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The morning air was thick with the smell of burning foliage.

Flat out, the swoop tore from the underbrush into a treeless expanse of salt flats, pink and blinding white, the nighttime sleeping grounds for flocks of Selvaris’s long-legged wading birds. Determined to reach cover before the coral-skipper showed up again, Thorsh gave the accelerator a hard twist and banked the swoop for the nearest stand of trees.

Thorsh had just reentered the jungle when a clamor began to build in the canopy. His first thought was that another coralskipper had joined the pursuit. But there was a different quality to the sound—an eagerness absent in the deadly sibilance of a coralskipper.

Thorsh felt his rider sit up straighter on the seat, in defiance of the hazards posed by overhanging branches.

“Is that what I think it is?” the humanoid asked.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Thorsh yelled back.

Again he twisted the accelerator. Wind screamed over the swoop’s inadequate fairing, forcing another flood of tears from his eyes. But his actions were in vain. The objects responsible for the escalating tumult passed directly overhead, silencing the racket of the swoop, then outracing it.

“Lav peq!” the Bith screamed.

Thorsh knew the term; it was the Yuuzhan Vong name for netting beetles, voracious and meticulous versions of the winged sentinels that had roused the prison guards. Lav peq were capable of creating webs between trees, bushes, or just about any type of barked foliage. Typically the beetles arrived in successive fronts, the first fashioning anchor lines, and those that followed feeding on bark and other organics to replenish the fibers needed to complete the filigree. A well-constructed web could ensnare or at least slow down a human-sized being. The strands themselves were tenaciously sticky, though not as adhesive as the enemy’s blorash jelly.

The Bith’s hunch was verified as the swoop raced through the vanguard wave of the swarm. Within seconds the down-sloping front cowling was spattered with smashed beetle corpses. Thorsh plucked several from his fur-covered forehead and threw them aside. Just ahead, thousands of lav peq were plummeting into the jungle, tearing through the leafy canopy like hailstones. Thorsh ground his teeth and lowered his head. As strong as the strands were, they were no match for a swoop in the right hands.

Fifty meters away the first web was already taking shape. Thorsh squinted in misgiving. More tightly woven than any he had seen on other worlds, the web actually obscured the trees. It took only a moment to realize that Selvaris’s species of netting beetle was special. While half the swarm was flying horizontally at various levels, the other half was flying in vertical rows. The result was a warp-and-weft weave—a veritable curtain that, for all Thorsh knew, could snare the swoop as easily as a spiderweb might a nightfly.

Extending his legs behind him, he flattened himself over the surging engine. With a distressed cry, the Bith followed suit, pressing himself to Thorsh’s back.

Thorsh cranked the accelerator for all it was worth, aiming for what he thought might be an area of relatively few trees. The swoop ripped through the webs at better than two hundred kilometers per hour, each successive curtain parting with loud cleaving sounds that sometimes resembled screams. Rear-guard beetles struck the cowling with the force of malleable bullets, and the Bith yelped in pain time and again. The swoop wobbled and the repulsorlift began to howl in protest. Thorsh fought to hold on to the handgrips as they were yanked from side to side by the viscous strands. He risked an ascent, only to learn the hard way that the situation was even more perilous in the upper reaches of the trees, where the branches fanned out and the leaves were home to clouds of insatiable needle fliers.

Refusing to give a centimeter, he demanded every last bit of power from the struggling machine. Then, all at once, the swoop tore through the final web. Sticky strands cooked on the superheated engine, sending