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The roar of the returning X-wings began to rattle everyone and everything in the field. Lando watched the skies with a small part of his attention and kept the rest on the oncoming creature. Its front feet were over, then past the buried cache of explosives, and its main body was moving into place above the disturbed ground that marked its location.

Lando swallowed. If he was successful, the beast would die. Innocent, and Lando found it painful to watch it lumber toward him, toward its death.

He put the blame on the Yuuzhan Vong. It was better than accepting every bit of responsibility for killing a tremendous creature that, but for its controllers, might never have endangered him.

The X-wing roar rose in volume, and the plasma cannons on the beast diverted their streams of fire from the Record Time into the air. Lando saw the vehicles flash in from two sides, north and south this time instead of east and west. He saw red lasers flash down into the blackness of the beast’s voids, saw return plasma fire clip an X-wing’s underside and begin burrowing in.

Then the snubfighters were gone, the plasma cannons sending fiery destruction after them. “Now!” Lando shouted.

He didn’t even see the woman press the button; he was aware only of the fire, reddish yellow and as evil looking as anything produced by the Yuuzhan Vong, roiling out from under the beast. It engulfed the creature and slammed Lando with heat and noise; he buried his face in the grass to escape it.

A moment later, he could look again. The creature was down on its side, its belly ripped and blackened by the force of the explosion. Blood streamed from it, but amazingly, it still lived, at least for the moment, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe.

It was not firing on X-wings or the troop transport now. Lando could hear and see the transport’s lasers picking up again, not concentrating their fire on the creature, now picking off individual Yuuzhan Vong warriors within sight.

Lando’s droid was firing, too. Lando looked over to see the droid placing shot after shot into the body of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior who’d come so close to killing him. The warrior was dead, the neck and top torso portions of his armor burned away by repeated blasts.

“One-One-A, you can stop now,” Lando said. “What’s wrong? Is your threat-recognition software on the blink?”

The droid looked at him. “Yes, sir. I suspect so, sir. I still register this one as a threat.”

“Override control twenty-seven aye aye six, flag this target as no threat.”

“Understood, sir.” The droid stopped firing.

“We’ll get you in for repairs,” Lando said. “But don’t feel bad. You did well.”

“Yes, sir.”

The situation was largely under control by the time Wedge descended to the planet’s surface in his shuttle. He made a pass over the site of the Borleias New Republic base.

Once upon a time, it had been an Imperial base, housing TIE fighters and stormtroopers, charged with the duty of defending a nearby biological research facility managed by the Imperial general Evir Derricote. Then Rogue Squadron, at the time commanded by Wedge himself, had come as the spearhead of a mission that had wrested control of the world from Derricote. The Imperial base had become a Rebel Alliance base, and then, once the Rebels had taken Coruscant and become the legitimate government in this part of the galaxy, a New Republic base.

Now it was rubble. Wedge doubted that any part of the original base was more than two meters in size. Where the main facilities buildings had once been now rested another sort of building, pastel red and pearl, several stories in height, a circular core from which eight more or less evenly spaced extensions radiated, like arms on a sea creature. Wedge didn’t have to ask to know that the building was something organic, a living creature bred by the Yuuzhan Vong to serve as a dwelling. Had it been dropped on the former base like a bomb, crushing it flat, or had it grown out of the middle? Wedge didn’t know.

Lying beside it was a gargantuan creature, another of the Yuuzhan