Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [7]
His facial fur blackened with charcoal, the gaunt Jenet was the first to worm his way into the hole. When the three Bith had bellied in behind him, the entrance was closed and covered over.
What little light there had been disappeared.
The nominal leader of the would-be escapees, the Jenet had been captured on Bilbringi, during a raid on an enemy installation. His fellow captives knew him as Thorsh, although on his homeworld of Garban a list of his accomplishments and transgressions would have been affixed to the name. Reconnaissance was his specialty, so he was no stranger to darkness or tight spots, having infiltrated many a Yuuzhan Vong warren and grashal on Duro, Gyndine, and other worlds. The Selvaris tunnel felt comfortably familiar. The Bith had it harder because of their size, but they were a well-coordinated species, with memory and olfactory abilities that rivaled Thorsh’s own.
Indeterminate minutes of muted crawling brought them to the first of a series of confined right-angle turns, where the tunnelers had been forced to detour around an amorphous mass of yorik coral. To Thorsh the detour meant that the team was directly under the prison wall itself. Now it was just a matter of negotiating the long stretch beneath the senalaks the Yuuzhan Vong had cultivated outside the perimeter.
Thorsh knew better than to relax, but his continued vigilance hardly mattered.
In the space of a local week, senalak roots had penetrated the roof of the poorly braced tunnel, and the convoluted roots were every bit as barbed as the strands released by the knee-high stalks themselves.
For meters at a stretch there was simply no avoiding them.
The barbs shredded the thin garments the four had been wearing when captured, and left deep, bleeding furrows in the flesh of their backs.
Thorsh muttered a curse at each encounter, but the Bith—ever careful about displaying emotion—endured the pain in silence.
The brutal crawl ended where the tunnel sloped upward at the far edge of the senalak field. Shortly the team emerged inside the buttressed base of an enormous hardwood. The thick-trunked tree bore a striking resemblance to the gnarl-trees native to Dagobah, but was in fact a different species altogether. One hundred meters away, the prison wall glowed softly green with bioluminescence. Two sleepy guards occupied the closest watchtower, their amphistaffs stiff as spears, and a third could be glimpsed in the adjacent tower. Those warriors who weren’t elsewhere within the walls of the compound were attending prayer services at the temple.
The bold incantations of the latter wafted through the jungle, counterpoint to the riotous calls of birds and insects. Strands of mist meandered through the treetops like apparitions.
One of the Bith elbowed his way alongside Thorsh, and aimed his slender forefinger to the west. “There.”
Thorsh sniffed repeatedly and nodded. “There.”
Deeper into the trees, ankle-high mud gave way to swamp, and it wasn’t long before the four were wading waist-deep through black water. They made scarcely half a kilometer before an alarm sounded. Neither the howling of a siren nor the raucous bleating of a starship’s klaxon, the alarm took the form of a prolonged and intensifying drone that arrived from all directions.
“Sentinel beetles,” one of the Bith said in a grating voice.
Small creatures that resembled turfhoppers, sentinels reacted to intruders or danger with rapid beating of their serrated wings. The species was not native to Selvaris, or indeed to any other world in the galaxy.
Thorsh’s clawed feet dug into the thick organic muck, and he quickened his pace, waving for the Bith to follow him.
“Hurry!”
The need for caution was behind them. They flailed