Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [11]
The main building was surrounded by numerous smaller buildings, these shaped like the curved shells found on the backs of oceangoing arthropods and some land-based snails. Each was the size of a small house, aesthetically pleasing in muted color and curving design—so long as one didn’t remember that they housed beings who killed other sapient beings without mercy and injured themselves for pleasure.
The rest of the old base was in ruins, docking bays and outbuildings turned into blackened, crumbling shells. It looked to Wedge as though they’d been used for target practice by the coralskippers’ plasma cannons.
The area was swarming with New Republic troops. Dead men and women in New Republic uniforms lay at various points on the ground; there were many dead Yuuzhan Vong among them. Wedge saw his troops leading prisoners into open patches of ground surrounded by other troops. Many of the prisoners were human, their foreheads, even at this distance, clearly bearing the coral-like twin horn growths that signaled they were slaves of the Yuuzhan Vong. Other prisoners were Yuuzhan Vong, but their skins were smooth, unadorned by the extensive tattooing or scarring he’d seen on Vong pilots; Wedge assumed that they were members of the Shamed Ones, the pariah caste of Yuuzhan Vong society, whose bodies rejected modifications and who could thus never climb the ranks of the Yuuzhan Vong social hierarchy.
The base was a loss, and, even though it was captured, the new Yuuzhan Vong base on top of it was not the sort of place Wedge wanted to use as a ground-based operations center. It might contain numberless traps and dangers for New Republic occupants, and it certainly wouldn’t reassure the New Republic refugees he expected to begin streaming in from Coruscant.
He keyed his comlink. “Rogue One, this is Antilles. Give me an escort. We’re going to visit the biotics facility.”
“Will do.” A few moments later, two X-wings, one belonging to Gavin Darklighter and the other to his wingmate Kral Nevil, maneuvered to flank him. Wedge heeled about toward the biotics facility and hit his thrusters. Not long after, he hovered over the site of that base.
General Derricote’s biotics facility was a long single building, several stories tall, its eastern facing a sheer drop, its western facing graduated downward in an aesthetically pleasing slope; the top story was a narrow strip, wide enough for a corridor along one set of rooms, the next story down wider, the next story down wider still, so that the whole thing seemed to be a gigantic wedge whose sharp edge pointed at the sky. Officially, it had been a site where Derricote preserved and studied samples of rare plant species from the world of Alderaan. Secretly, it had been used to engineer a deadly disease, the Krytos virus, which afflicted and killed members of nonhuman species. It was spread by the Imperial forces when the Alliance captured Coruscant.
From this height, Wedge could see that the building was still intact. The jungle had grown right up to it, trees surrounding it, vines draping over the turquoise-colored banks of viewports. But those viewports were unbroken; it didn’t surprise Wedge that Derricote had used transparisteel instead of some lesser material.
Wedge transmitted a holocam view of the site, adding coordinates to the data stream accompanying the transmission. “Mon Mothma, this will be our ground facility. I want an occupation force and engineers here from our battle reserves as soon as possible. I want the jungle burned away for a kilometer around on the north, east, and south faces, two kilometers to the west—with escaped Yuuzhan Vong in the jungle, I want a substantial kill zone. Once that’s done, have the ground forces enter and clear it of Yuuzhan Vong and other predators, then bring in personnel to clean it up, get its generators working,