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“Issue the order that all the Yuuzhan Vong dead are to be stripped of gear for study, but their bodies are to be left where they fell.” This was not an act of insult on Wedge’s part. The Yuuzhan Vong had several times in the past demonstrated a need to retrieve the bodies of their dead. By leaving the bodies, Wedge hoped to reduce the number of assaults that his troops would suffer, since there would be no assaults while attempting to retrieve bodies.

“Keep a detachment on duty to contain the Yuuzhan Vong base while another detachment, plus Danni Quee’s people and Lando’s droids, searches it for prisoners and hiding Vong. When they’re done evacuating the site, have the engineers blow it up.”

He sighed to himself. After a brief respite from it, he was back to niggling administrative details. He’d rather be retired or fighting again.

Borleias Occupation, Day 2

A day later, the biotics building was secure and operational.

The occupation forces hadn’t found any Yuuzhan Vong hiding within the structure, but it was obvious the enemy had been here on a few occasions, breaking up machinery, smashing furniture—warrior-vandals. The bad news was that the building’s generator had been smashed. Currently a small freighter was situated next to the building, heavy cables running from its engine compartment into the building’s basement and to field shield units set up to protect the complex.

The building was now surrounded by six square kilometers of destroyed jungle growth. His forces had used fire, lasers, defoliants, whatever they could get their hands on. The biotics facility, a secret home of ugliness, was surrounded by obvious ugliness. To step out of the building was to step into a hot, humid environment that stank of burned vegetation and offered no view but char, ships that had landed for repairs, and distant jungle.

Luke, returning from a perimeter sweep around the Yuuzhan Vong settlement—a sweep in which they’d encountered no Yuuzhan Vong, but suspected, from the behavior of Borleias’s animal life, that Vong were out there—learned that Wedge had requested his presence at a general meeting of his senior officers and personal allies. He joined the crowd in the biotics building’s ground-floor mess hall. Mara was already there, baby Ben in her arms; at her feet was a baby carrier she’d jury-rigged from a backpack. On one ankle was a cast, immobilizing it against the bone break she’d sustained when she crash-landed during Coruscant’s fall.

Luke headed for a seat beside her, but Wedge waved him up to the head of the table, to the other seat beside him. Luke gave Mara a smile of apology and moved to sit by Wedge.

“Our stay here is going to be short,” Wedge said to the entire assembly. “But it’s going to be longer than we’d like. There’s going to be more fighting. I’d like to have some tricks up our sleeves to offer the Yuuzhan Vong when they come, so I want you to be thinking about it. Transmit your ideas to your commanding officers. The commanding officers will transmit them to me—and I don’t want there to be too much editing of them. Now’s not the time to think conservatively.”

A naval officer Luke did not know, a woman in a lieutenant’s uniform, spoke up. “General, if I can ask—”

“Go ahead,” Wedge said.

“Why do we want to stay here at all? The garrison has to have alerted their commanders that they were being overrun. The Yuuzhan Vong will be coming.”

Wedge nodded. “Well, there are several reasons. The first is this: because Borleias—rather, the Pyria solar system—is an important hyperspace crossroads, the convenient intersection of a lot of routes, it’s on a lot of people’s nav computers. It’s inevitable that many refugees fleeing Coruscant—or arriving there and suddenly discovering that the Yuuzhan Vong have taken it—will be coming here as the first stage of their escapes. Someone needs to help them. A lot of them may be in damaged craft. We can’t have them clogging up our repair facilities in space, not when they’re needed to repair combat craft, so