Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Dark Tide 01_ Onslaught - Michael A. Stackpole [63]
He shuffled his way forward and discovered an opening on the eastern side of the shell. The creature that had originally grown the shell must have coiled about a central axis as it grew its armor home. The shell had been set in the sand so the lip of the opening dug into the sand a little. It appeared to Corran, given his sense of where the inhabitant lay, that the person crawled into the shell, then pulled himself deeper into it, sleeping in the small section that lay above the opening itself.
Paralleling Ganner, he moved deeper into the village. His sense of things remained the same. He stopped and pulled from a belt pouch a small duraplast cylinder, then dug it into the ground to take a sample of the sand. He stoppered it, then noticed movement in the sand. A beetle climbed to the top of the sample and started circling around the glassy wall, looking for a way out.
Corran slipped that cylinder back into his pouch and pulled out another empty one. He dug down a little bit into the sand and noticed a beetle emerge into the hole and inspect it. He scooped that beetle up in a cylinder and discovered, by dint of the twin horns on its head, that it was different from the first beetle he’d captured. He dug around some more and found a third type of beetle, much smaller than the first two, and caught it up. He wasn’t certain if it was just young or an entirely different species.
More test holes produced nothing, so Corran started to move on. Ganner had gotten ahead of him and was huddled behind a shell hut in the first rank. Corran immediately cut over to his left, putting him directly on Ganner’s track. He shouldn’t have gone that far ahead. The fact that Ganner appeared to be fingering his lightsaber and had a rising sense of anxiety about him began to alarm Corran.
All of a sudden something shrieked from within one of the shells. A desperate creature crawled from a shell between the two Jedi and stumbled to his feet. He looked vaguely human, but was knock-kneed and had growths on his arms and legs and spine that looked like coral outcroppings. He clawed at a big coral spike growing from his right cheek and shrieked in a hoarse voice that was more animal than man, and more pain than anything else.
The creature ran past Ganner, then fell in the sand and struggled to get up again. The sand itself around the creature began to vibrate, with a dusty mist rising from it as if it were steam boiling off water. Corran couldn’t figure out what was causing the sand to shiver, but he felt a curious vibration from his own belt. He pulled out the beetles he’d captured, and one, the horned one, was beating wings furiously.
Two long and lean Yuuzhan Vong warriors emerged from the first two medium-size shells—which had openings large enough so the tall aliens did not have to stoop as they came out. Neither of them seemed surprised or concerned about the slave. With a fluid grace that would have seemed almost sensual, were they not cadaverously slender, the Yuuzhan Vong split up and approached the slave from either side. One, then the other, taunted him with harsh and sharp comments, causing the slave to cower for a moment, and dart away from one, then back toward the other.
All the while the sand around his feet danced as the beetles flapped their wings in alarm.
Corran felt the slave’s fear spike through the Force, then a severe burst of static rattled through Corran. The slave’s fear vanished to be replaced by fury. With fingers hooked into claws and a feral scream falling from his lips, the slave charged headlong at one of the Yuuzhan Vong.
The alien warrior barked abruptly in what Corran took to be a cruel laugh. The warrior dodged to the right, then brought his left fist up in a punch that caught the slave over his heart. The slave arced up into the air and flew