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Gavin heard the curse over the comm and almost snapped at the lack of comm discipline, when he realized he’d been the one to say it. “Snoop, are you operational?”

“Affirmative, Leader. Pods deployed.”

“Good, get it all.”

Gavin couldn’t be certain what he was seeing because, while he had seen similar things, it had never been in space. With his wife, back on her homeworld of Chandrila, he’d gone diving and had marveled at the life hidden under the surface of the water. Having come from a desert world, the idea that much of anything could hide beneath the waves just hadn’t occurred to him. He had come to love diving and especially watching the teeming life around various reefs in the Silver Sea.

Clinging to the sunny faces of Sernpidal’s fragments were things that looked very much like snails, only huge. Large enough to house a flight of X-wings! He could see where some of them had worked their way down along the rock, leaving a softened trail behind them, as if they were eating the rock. In their wake came countless smaller creatures of a similar design. They seemed to be following up on specific veins of minerals the large ones had exposed.

The snails clinging to the rock were not the only ones he saw. Others—a cloud of them—drifted out to a nexus point that seemed vaguely equidistant between most of the fragments. There Gavin made out a stony lattice somewhat ovoid in shape and easily the size of a small moon. Some of the snails, both big and small, moved over it, layering rock across it. Some of the snails, with decidedly different shells than those eating rock, were being incorporated into the lattice, along the spine and located in a couple of other places. Slender filaments that glistened in the sunlight linked them, calling to mind images he’d once seen of nerve plexuses.

They’re growing a ship, a huge ship. Gavin glanced at his range finder and saw he was still a good forty kilometers from the skeleton. That’s as big as the Death Star was.

“What do we do, Lead?”

Gavin heard Major Varth’s request for a mission and immediately started picking out targets. He stopped only when the absurdity of it struck him. One proton torpedo might have killed a Death Star, but this thing had no shielded reactor exhaust port. It has no reactor. It is alive . . . or will be. Even a direct hit by every proton torpedo in the squadron would only thin the work force, not even cripple it.

“Nine, we do nothing. We’re here as eyes.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth, but he could say nothing else. “Someone wiser than me will have to figure this out, Rogues. Let’s hope they can.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Corran Horn knelt on one knee in the brush near the rendezvous site he’d worked out with his local contact. He wore a padded combat suit that had been supplemented with some duraplast panels encasing his arms and legs. They, like the padded suit, were a motley pattern of red, gray, and purple, matching them to the vegetation on Garqi. Sunk as he was back in the brush, his suit made him all but invisible to the naked eye.

His contact was late, and while Corran sensed nothing out of the ordinary through the Force, it didn’t lessen his apprehension at all. Of course, had the Yuuzhan Vong been closing in to ambush him, he’d have felt nothing through the Force. As a hedge against that possibility, Jacen, Ganner, and the Noghri had set up a perimeter. Corran was certain that if anything happened to them and somehow they were not able to use their comlinks to get him a message, he’d pick up their distress through the Force and be alerted.

Having an alarm because I’m losing someone, though—that’s nothing I want. The mission to Garqi had, so far, passed a week without incident. The Best Chance had gotten well away from the crash site, and the Yuuzhan Vong seemed unable or uninterested in following up the little bits and pieces of the trail they’d left behind in making their escape. They’d brought the ship to ground at an agri-combine facility about forty kilometers north of Pesktda, the world’s capital, and secreted it away in buildings