Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [47]
“You’re not acting like someone who’s won a substantial military victory, Wedge,” Leia said.
Wedge made a glum face. “It’s the sort of victory that can cost us the war. We were hoping to get a Yuuzhan Vong commander of average skills, with an average fleet, and I suspect that we did. We were going to string him along for as much time as we could, but circumstances today dictated that we wipe him out right away. The next one they send is going to be much tougher, and that’s going to make things more difficult for all of us. But you two have come at a good time. We need your skills.”
“Leia’s skills, you mean,” Han said. “Without her, I don’t think there’s any way the New Republic can hold together.”
“Both your skills,” Wedge said. “Because the New Republic is dead. An oversized hulk with a decentralized nervous system; the extremities don’t realize that the heart isn’t beating anymore.”
Leia and Han exchanged a glance. “Let’s hear it,” Leia said.
EIGHT
Yuuzhan Vong Worldship, Coruscant Orbit
Maal Lah paused outside the barrier leading into the tracer spineray chamber. He glanced at the guard who had conducted him here as though to ask, Are you certain he is here? But the guard avoided eye contact, whether because he dared not look into the eyes of a superior or because he knew what fate waited beyond the barrier, Maal Lah could not say.
As Maal Lah advanced, the barrier retracted, a fishlike mouth that parted before him, and he stepped into the chamber.
It was a place of knowledge and of training. The tracer spineray was close kin to the provoker spineray that was capable of tracing neural pathways as its subjects thought about certain topics … and then directing pain into those pathways to prevent the subject from reexamining those thoughts. The tracer, too, traced neural paths, but had only related functions: to determine how efficiently signals were transmitted along those pathways, and to issue pain to receptors with micromillimeter precision, allowing the subject to gauge the degree to which tissues remained injured or imbalanced once healing seemed complete.
The chamber was poorly lit, bioluminescent glows reflecting from red and black coral walls suggesting thick deposits of half-dried blood. It featured one central table with a gray oval top, the carefully engineered terminus of the tracer spineray, tilted so that one end nearly touched the floor. A male of the shaper caste stood beside the table; Tsavong Lah lay atop it, his feet toward the ground. He was fully clothed, but his left arm lay bare against the leatherlike surface of the table, and Maal Lah knew that the warmaster’s visit was purely medical; the tracer spineray had to be evaluating the condition of the radank claw grafted onto his arm. It looked no worse than the last time Maal Lah had seen it, but no better. Perhaps the warmaster wished him to see that it had not deteriorated, so that he might inform others, head off speculation about Tsavong Lah’s possible rejection of the graft.
Tsavong Lah glanced at him without moving his head and beckoned. The shaper moved to the side so that they might speak privately, but Maal Lah could feel that one’s eyes on him.
“I require your insight, my servant,” Tsavong Lah said. “An interpretation of events.”
Maal Lah nodded, not speaking. He preferred not to speak much before his warmaster. Those who did inevitably said too much and earned Tsavong Lah’s ire; Nom Anor was constantly on the receiving end of that displeasure.
“I dispatched Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet to Borleias to retrieve it from the infidels. We had assumed that the garrison there was simply intent on dying well.
“It was, however, a trap. The infidels demonstrated unusual precision, daring, and savagery in a brilliantly conceived and executed plan. They dropped their largest spacecraft, one that we did not know was part of the fleet there,