Sacrifice

by Karen Traviss

  A battle formation was usually four Gladiators linked to a Pursuer, yet this motley squadron slotted together, wordless and automatic. Beviin watched his comrades’ weapon icons illuminate almost simultaneously in his HUD. Slave I already had missile, cannon, and torpedo lock on the vanguard ship. No, Fett wouldn’t get caught with his pants down either.

  The other asteroid vessels were now visible, line astern, both on the scan and in visual range. One eased out to port and broke from the line, heading for the Mandalorian squadron.

  “Steady,” said Fett. “Whites of their eyes …”

  Cham’s snort was audible. “They better have eyes.”

  The lead ship—if that was what it was—would have stretched from one end of Beviin’s farm boundary to the other. It was monstrous in every sense of the word, and all the worse for being frankly unrecognizable as a vessel. The audio feed in his helmet clicked as Fett transmitted.

  “Unidentified vessels, this is Slave One.” Fett should have been anxious, Beviin thought, but there was never a trace of it in his voice. Maybe after you survived the Sarlacc, nothing ever really scared you again. “I have no transponder code for you. Identify yourself.”

  There was softly hissing silence, and Beviin somehow expected nothing else. Which one would respond? His attention moved between his cockpit scan and the void beyond his canopy, now both full of targets that could only be a fleet of vessels. No natural phenomenon behaved with that much purpose. He tightened his fingers around the control stick and rolled his thumb across the tilting ball that would fire one or all of the four cannons. If they could make more than a dent in the fleet—well, he’d take out what he could.

  Why do I automatically assume they’re hostile?

  Why didn’t I call home and talk to Medrit when I had the chance?

  I knew I’d never die in my sleep, but this isn’t how I thought it’d be.

  He’d lost count of the behemoths now. His scan screen was so full of points of light tagged unidentified that he couldn’t put a pin between them. The void of space that filled the transparisteel canopy was peppered with stars of reflected light, as if a new galaxy had suddenly arrived.

  The cloud of objects—of ships—was on course for Belkadan.

  “Mandalorians,” said a familiar voice over the comlink. “We come to free you and your entire galaxy from the heresy of technology and teach you respect for the Great Ones.”

  “Udelen …” Beviin said.

  “I am Nom Anor, executor, and what you see is the vanguard of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet. It has taken decades to reach here, and now your galaxy will be reformed. Transformed.”

  Beviin heard Fett’s slight intake of breath. Coming from him, that was a yelp of surprise.

  “I think some people might want to discuss that first.” Fett’s weapons were still locked on. “Depending on what you mean by reformed.”

  “You would call this an invasion. And you have the privilege of being among the first infidels to witness our arrival.”

  Beviin hung on a frozen second, unsure whether to open fire or wait for Fett’s orders. Yes. It really was a new galaxy that had come to visit. He struggled to take it in. On the open comlink, everyone’s breathing was audible, and it sounded urgent, shallow—afraid.

  “Fett, follow these coordinates and enter my ship. We’ll show you the future of your galaxy, and how you’ll play your part in achieving this much-needed transformation.”

  Fett’s response would normally have been a well-aimed ion-cannon round and a fast escape. Nothing changed or charged up on the shared HUD display. Beviin heard him swallow before responding.

  “I’ll leave my troops to await my safe return, then.”

  “No need for you all to enter, I agree. And you’ll vouch for them.”

  “Given the size of your fleet, what could a few small ships do anyway?”

  “Mand’alor, I’ll escort you,” Beviin interrupted. Planning and thought never came into it. He heard himself react. We rally to the Mandalore. This is how we survive. “I’ll follow you in.”

  “When I find out what in means,” said Fett, “then do it.”

  Beviin powered down his weapons and swung the Gladiator in behind Slave I as the vessel edged forward toward the giant scarred rock of a warship. “Ke’pare,” he whispered down the comlink. Fett didn’t speak Mando’a, but neither would these Yuuzhan-whoever-they-were. Almost no aruetii did. “Ke baslana meh mhi Kyrayc.”

  Stand by, and get out if we don’t make it.

  They’d know what to do, and when to do it. It was hardwired and hard-trained into all of them.

  The gray asteroid became a mountain range that filled his field of view as he trailed behind Slave I’s thrusters at a safe distance into a mouth-like opening of the warship.

  “Oya,” Suvar responded. Go get ’em. And stay alive.

  Funny word, oya. It adapted to any situation. Oya. Beviin seized it for courage.

  He had the feeling he had seen nothing yet.

  Nom Anor: docking bay of the miit ro’ik.

  The warriors ask if the Mandalorians are the droids the infidels use. They cluster around the little fighter craft and stare at the metal figures that climb out. They might as well be, because they seem to have surprisingly little fight in them for professional soldiers; we’d have fought back by now.

  They are excellent saboteurs, though.

  I hope Fett avoids using his jetpack. The warriors would be enraged to see artificial combustion, the first abomination. They’re already disgusted that I let these infidel Mandalorians bring their machines into this miit ro’ik, and they dislike my use of the infidel comlink, but I’m an Executor, and they don’t dare argue with me.

  I can’t see these infidels’ faces, but I know they’re amazed by the perfection they see. Fett is looking everywhere, studying everything, if the movements of his head are anything to go by. I hear he has impressive scars: but they were merely an accident. His lackey, Beviin … he follows his master.

  They might well fit into the natural order of things, after all.

  Yuuzhan Vong miit ro’ik warship.

  Beviin couldn’t be heard outside his helmet, but he still whispered as he walked along the living corridor behind Fett into the heart of the ship.

  “How was I supposed to know what he was?”

  “You weren’t.” That ugly barve Udelen—Nom Anor—had fooled everyone. How he disguised a mutilated face like that was a miracle. Fett had a good look at his real face now. “And better that we find out what we’re dealing with than get a surprise like the rest of the galaxy.”

  “This isn’t going to be like the good old Sith and Jedi puppet show, is it?”

  “I don’t know. All that matters is if there’s something in it for Mandalorians.”

  Fett didn’t expand, not then. He had his father’s nose for trouble, and he smelled it this time like never before. The ship itself was bad enough: for all the vibrant color on every surface and crew member, it was like being in a stinking cave infested with unrecognizable vermin. There wasn’t a smooth, spotless durasteel bulkhead or reassuring piece of normal cleanly oiled engineering to be seen.

  Yes, it had a distinct scent, the smell of damp forest and weed drying on beaches and a hint of blood.

  It was like being in something’s guts. It was like being back in the Sarlacc.

  And it was the smell of Udelen when he met him at Keldabe spaceport. I didn’t see this coming. I should have. And now I know—well, maybe this is the best position to be in.

  Fett ran every recording and analysis device in his helmet as he walked through the ship, from penetrating radar to thermal imaging. Every so often he stopped and touched the—no, not bulkheads, walls. He couldn’t shake the idea of stomach walls. He wiped his fingertips along them, feigning awe and curiosity, and then discreetly transferred whatever organic traces he’d picked up on his gloves to one of the pouches on his belt.

  “Samples,” he said quietly. “Anything
small—any bits of this thing you can steal—pocket it. Okay?”

  “Got you,” said Beviin.

  What he needed most of all, though, was a slice of the Yuuzhan Vong invader who walked ahead of him, a snakelike thing coiled up one arm. It was alive.

  “Pet?” he asked. Jabba always kept some weird wildlife that amused him. Maybe Yuuzhan Vong did the same. “A familiar?”

  “Weapon,” said Nom Anor. He shook it off his arm in one elegant gesture; it stiffened immediately into a rod before writhing back into coils and slithering back onto the executor’s arm. “A living weapon called an amphistaff.”

  Fett had done business with the worst of life-forms, and it never seemed to matter either way who was running the galaxy. Small lives went on in the social undergrowth, a grim quest for daily survival, and the power floated to the top and was misused and sucked dry for advantage. Fett just took his cut and satisfied himself with living by his own code, because he was a practical man and knew what he could and could not change about the galaxy.

  But the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to think there was nothing they couldn’t change about it.

  Nom Anor, stripped of his human disguise and black business suit, strode along pointing out organic technology with a pride bordering on arrogance and then stepping clean across that line.

  “I’ve been among you infidels eighteen years,” he said. “Not once have I found a pure culture with fully organic technology.”

  Beviin muttered, audible only to Fett. “Aruetii. We’re not his best buddies any longer, then.”

  “We do our best,” Fett said to Nom Anor. “You’ll have to teach us how to do things right.”

  As they ambled through the ship, Beviin appeared to trip and steady himself against a wall from time to time, or pick up something of no consequence from the deck. Good man.

  “We will,” said Nom Anor. The warriors were giving him a wide berth.

  “So you’re a senior officer.” Investigate, record, understand. Intelligence saves your life sooner or later.

  “Commander?”

  “I’m intendent caste,” said Nom Anor. “An executor. My caste are administrators. That makes me superior in the hierarchy to a warrior.”

  It was almost as if the Yuuzhan Vong had set out to compile a list of things that Mandalorians found repellent and then ram them down their throats to make a point of how alien they were. A bureaucrat and spy, lording it over a soldier, looking down his nose—

  Fierfek, the barve didn’t even have a nose.

  Fett stared at the warriors he passed. They were covered in the most impractical armor he’d ever seen, literally encased from head to foot, with huge, savage, claw-like projections on shoulders and knees, wrists, and even the backs of their legs. They never sat down on duty, that was for sure. As one soldier passed, what Fett thought was a brilliantly-varnished scarlet decoration on his chest suddenly moved. It was a beetle, a huge beetle.

  Fett switched to voice projection. Now wasn’t the time to get prissy about cultural differences. “What’s that armor made from?”

  “Not made,” said Nom Anor. “Bioengineered. A living vonduun crab, and technology is a poor second to it. Blasters won’t penetrate the shell.”

  Go ahead, tell me all your trade secrets. If I make it out alive—“They’d fetch a good price.”

  “And they kill anyone but the warrior for whom they were grown.”

  “You’ve not come on a sales mission, then.”

  Nom Anor might have smiled as he turned his head to glance at Fett, but with a mutilated face like that it was hard to tell. His mouth was set in a permanent rictus of a humorless grin, devoid of lips.

  “We’ve come to claim this galaxy and colonize it. I did say invasion, did I not?”

  There were millions of planets in the galaxy and someone was always invading and colonizing someone else. It was inevitable. But Fett hadn’t come across anyone with ideas about taking over the whole galaxy before, unless he counted Palpatine. “And you think we’ll help you do it.”

  “You have little choice.”

  “And you’re going to have to fight your way across this galaxy, a world at a time, and you know it. Why did you recruit us if you thought you could do it alone?”

  “Are you asking for more credits?”

  Fat lot of good the creds would do us if these things succeed. “Maybe.”

  “You attempt to blackmail me?”

  “I’m telling you that it’s easier to do it with us than without us.”

  “You’re being paid.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “You’re in no position to bargain.”

  “I think I am.”

  Beviin sounded as if he was holding his breath. Fett could see him, arms slightly away from his sides, and he could also see where he was directing his visual scan from the shared icon in his own HUD. Beviin was checking out the deckhead of the ship. Fett reverted to the closed comlink. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Just recce.”

  There was a time for shooting your way out of trouble and a time for reasoning an escape. Survival depended on finding out as much about the enemy as you could.

  Besides, were these creatures any more of an enemy than a Sith empire or a Jedi republic? He’d done business with a lot worse. Right now, they were still customers—but only just. He could get something out of them.

  “I want to know exactly what you want from us,” Fett said, moving his gaze slowly left to right and back again as he walked. The sensors in his helmet range finder and the penetrating radar built up a more detailed three-dimensional plan with each sweep. A med scanner and a mining probe might have done the job better, though. “And what do you want from the galaxy?”

  Nom Anor stopped at a ragged opening in the bulkhead and gestured them inside. “I thought I’d made this clear. Surrender and obedience.”

  Dream on, barve. “Be specific.”

  “We’ll cleanse your galaxy of technology and replace it with ours. Organic technology. Living technology. No machines, no artificial combustion, no artifacts. These are, you’ll come to understand, an abomination and an insult to the Great Ones. To the gods themselves.”

  Fett had a sudden image of having a crab-suit grown on him. No. That was not going to happen. “And our role in this great scheme?”

  “Intelligence gathering and the more subtle work we require.”

  Fett still didn’t have a clear idea of what Nom Anor meant by organic technology. Some species made limited use of it, but it looked nothing like what he was seeing, smelling, and hearing now: grotesque men encased in living crabshell, weapons that were animals, ships that were miniature planets.

  “Show me,” said Fett.

  What did you call an enclosed space in a Yuuzhan Vong ship? A cabin, a compartment, a hangar? They walked into a chamber that felt to Fett like a stomach. The bulkheads might have been set with glowing, moving, beetle-like lumps, but he couldn’t shake the analogy now. Another bizarre figure—a warrior, possibly, but maybe a different specialty or caste judging by the lack of clawed armor—crouched on the deck, arms clasped over his head. When he moved, there was some kind of armor gorget at the base of his throat.

  But the trouble with staring at something you didn’t quite recognize was that it suddenly shifted into perspective and context, and you could see it for what it was with shocking clarity. Fett realized he wasn’t looking at a Yuuzhan Vong.

  “What the shab have you done to him?” Beviin asked.

  It was a human male, more or less.

  The nape of his neck skin was covered in grimy pink lumps that looked at first like knobbly vertebrae that disappeared under a rough gray shirt but on second glance appeared more like stone. It was hard to tell how old he was or where he came from; the visible skin was olive and smooth. His head was shaven. But he was human, or humanoid, all right.

  Nom Anor looked down at the figure with detached interest.
<
br />   “We took this prisoner on Ter Abbes. The yorik-kul implant is an experimental one, a new strain.”

  He caught the man’s shoulder with one hand and jerked him half-upright so that his head lolled back as if drunk. The object that Fett had taken for a gorget, an armored throat piece, was the same bone-like pink mass as the knobs on the back of the prisoner’s neck. Ridges in it aligned with the knobs. Fett suddenly saw the lumps as the ends of projections from the gorget that somehow passed clean through the prisoner’s neck, and it was one of those images that he put out of his mind the moment it formed.

  The man didn’t seem to be in pain. His eyes were glazed and fixed on the mid-distance. Fett concentrated on staying detached even though the animal core of him was revolted and telling him to run for it.

  “You going to explain that?”

  “It’s coral,” said Nom Anor. “It colonizes the body and enables us to control captives and turn them into productive slaves. This specimen was a little different and so our shapers are observing how the yorik-kul adapts to him. The process is … incomplete.”

  “And that’s what you have in mind for the whole galaxy, is it?” Don’t say a word, Beviin. “All of us.”

  Nom Anor’s eyes darted across Fett’s visor. They still looked like the trapped remnants of a human, and Fett kept thinking cyborg, and how ironic that would be for a species that found machines an abomination. Abomination. Religious word. And he didn’t trust cults any more than he trusted politicians and accountants.

  “Not necessarily as slaves,” said Nom Anor.

  “Good. Because it’s going to be a tough sell.”

  “Some will see the truth and become Yuuzhan Vong.”

  “And those who don’t? Let me guess.”

  “They’ll be Yuuzhan Vong, or they’ll be dead.”

  This was the point at which Nom Anor ceased to be simply unpleasant business and became something Fett hadn’t really seen before: a threat he might not be able to handle.