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Despite not providing a deep foundation to the building complex, the defenders did dig a hole beneath the building. This hole they filled with explosives and then laid the building slab over the top. The detonators for the explosives were wired to one of the computers stored in the heart of the building. Once General Dendo armed it by a comm signal, the detonation sequence would begin only if the computer shut down.

Having an amphistaff shoved into it and twisted accomplished this end rather nicely.

The resulting explosion shattered the slab and filled the basement with fire, consuming a half-dozen Chazrach that had wandered down there. The expanding fireball then vaporized the next floor, taking with it the Yuuzhan Vong warrior, his amphistaff, and the computer he’d destroyed. The blast cracked what few internal supports had been placed in the building, and as the fireball collapsed, the building collapsed in on top of it.

Walls buckled and the uppermost floor pancaked into the second one. The exterior walls cracked and sagged in, albeit unevenly, providing some room for survivors to hunker down. Smoke and dust poured out through broken viewports, with the wailings of the trapped and wounded following closely behind.

Shedao Shai picked himself up off the ground and snarled. The villip on his left shoulder started chattering, but the whine of blaster bolts tearing through the jungle on his right flank alerted him to his immediate problem. The fact that he heard nothing from his left flank displeased him even more. He snapped an order into the villip, ordering a withdrawal, and began to stalk back through the night.

How could I have allowed this to happen? His eyes tightened. Elegos! The Caamasi had been so open and peaceful, so intelligent and honest, that Shedao Shai had discounted the sort of cunning and guile such an ambush would require. They might have even anticipated what I thought of them based on my contact with Elegos. These people are not the Chazrach. Their conquest will not come easily.

Shedao Shai let an angry howl split the night. It will come, though, and it will be at my hands.

Mara heard Anakin’s call and the order he’d been given to head to the opal grove. She reached out with her senses and picked him up, then got flashes of trouble in the vicinity. She keyed her comlink. “Jade moving to intercept Twelve.”

Mara felt the Force flood through her. She’d been waiting deep in the Jedi formation, across the green strip from where Anakin had been stationed. The fighting on her side had not been fierce, so she’d not been asked to move up. As she raced along a walkway, then vaulted the balustrade to drop to the next level below, she found out why.

The Yuuzhan Vong had made a solid drive at the center of the Jedi formation. Kyp Durron and Wurth Skidder, both bleeding from numerous cuts, faced four of the warriors. Beyond them, coming down the walkway, Anakin had stopped at the top of a small rise. He’d set Daeshara’cor down and, with two lightsabers, was holding off a knot of the reptoids.

The idiots should have called for help! Mara thumbed her lightsaber to life, splashing a cold blue glow over the Yuuzhan Vong. She launched herself into a long, flying somersault, then ducked beneath the slash meant to open her from hip to hip. She stabbed her blade through the space between the Yuuzhan Vong’s legs, then cocked her wrist and stroked the blade against the back of his left knee. Tugging, she came up and through the limb, severing it completely.

Snarling, the warrior began to go down. Mara leapt above the weak return slash, then came down with a heel hard on the fallen Yuuzhan Vong’s wrist. Bones crunched and the amphistaff rolled free. Mara batted aside the warrior’s other hand, scattering fingers, then stabbed her blade through his throat.

Mara spun as Wurth shrieked. The man reeled back, his right forearm bent where no elbow existed, and bent in a direction that no elbow could take it. His