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“That’s right, I did nothing because our tracks could be followed back to the students. We saw only two of the Yuuzhan Vong, but there could be dozens more, maybe hundreds in the big shell. Cutting those two down, right there, if you could have done it, would have doomed Dr. Pace and Trista and the others.”

Ganner snorted angrily. “Not if they were the only two Yuuzhan Vong here.”

“And what do you think the chances of that are?”

The younger man arched a dark eyebrow. “There are only two Jedi here.”

“Unassailable logic, that, Ganner.” Corran settled the sandshoes across his back, then tugged on the cuffs of his gloves. “Maybe there are two, maybe there are two thousand. I don’t doubt that before we get off this rock, we’re going to have to kill some of them, but the longer we can delay that confrontation, the better.”

“So more people can die?”

“No, so we have a good chance of stopping the Agamarians from being captured. What we saw here is a data point, and one I want to study. That wasn’t just a beating.”

“It was sport, cruel sport.”

“Maybe, at the end, yes, but there was something else.” Corran frowned. “The way they spoke to him, they expected something from him. Their contempt, their anger, as shown by the frenzy at the end—something else was going on there.”

“Fine, you think about the motives of our murderers. I don’t think that data point will do you any good.”

“Maybe not, but it’s not all we’ve got. Our soil samples are more data points—”

“Killing Yuuzhan Vong will generate precious data points for you.”

“Maybe. Dead Jedi would make for even more data points.” Corran tapped two fingers against his right temple. “The vital thing right now is that we get back to the students, see if they can help us figure out what’s going on here, then see if we can get away safely with what we know.”

“And, if we can’t?”

Corran shrugged. “The first few times the Yuuzhan Vong fought Jedi, we won. We’ll just have to see how far we can extend that streak.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Jacen Solo’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment, he wondered where he was. He knew he was on Belkadan, but he found himself surprised to be back at the ExGal facility. Why that surprised him he couldn’t immediately identify. He kicked off the light blanket covering him, then swung his legs over the edge of the cot and sat up.

Jacen raked fingers back through long brown hair, then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Before he had awakened, he’d been in a Yuuzhan Vong village, the one where the villips were being grown. He’d gone there to free the slaves. He’d waded into the water and called them to him. They’d come, and their master had come after them. As the slave master had done with the old man, Jacen had left the Yuuzhan Vong warrior slowly sinking in the murky, still water.

It feels so real. Jacen pulled his hands away from his eyes, then focused until his hands emerged as ghostly shadows in the dim light. His hands still tingled with the sense of having held his lightsaber in a duel with the Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He shifted his shoulders and stretched his back, searching for any trace of pain to somehow validate the reality of what he’d seen.

He knew it probably had just been a dream. In the week since they watched the murder of the old man, they had done quite a bit of scouting. The Yuuzhan Vong had indeed turned Belkadan—or at least this section of it—into a shipyard. They were growing villips, coralskippers, and dovin basals all over the place. The laborers were slaves all, by the look of it, though some of the overseers had aides who appeared, to Jacen, to be human and cooperating. They all had the growths on them, too, but the Force was not filled with static from the collaborators, just greatly diminished.

The vision’s being just a dream made sense. It was clearly a fantasy being fulfilled to let him drain away his frustration. He was almost willing to accept what he had seen as a dream, then to drop back off to sleep.

Two things prevented him from doing