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.
“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.
It was as if the executor changed before his eyes, shifting subtly from just a hideously disfigured face made worse by its few vestiges of normality into something totally alien he had to be able to kill. It felt personal for a moment, and that was anathema. The trick was to understand the enemy without identifying with him. Now he’d name his higher price. He knew exactly what he had to demand.
“As long as we work for you,” Fett said, “you leave the Mandalore sector alone.”
Nom Anor stared into Fett’s visor and Fett stared hack, his helmet cam recording, even if the executor couldn’t tell that. The creature’s face was a nightmare, a corpse from a battlefield: nose and lips missing, leaving a hole in the center of his face set above teeth that were every bit as human as his own. His skin was a mass of puckered but regular scars and intricate tattoos. A thick ridge of bone or scar tissue-Fett wasn’t sure which-ran from under his sunken eye sockets to the back of his hairless, scarred, tattooed scalp. It was just the eyes and the teeth.
They were utterly human, as if someone were trapped in a monstrous suit and trying to get out. The image clicked into place almost like an overlay on a holochart. Fett suddenly imagined what Nom Anor might have looked like with a nose, and a mouth, and regular skin. He imagined what the warriors would look like: because these invaders all had the same terrible faces. They mutilated themselves deliberately.
Fierfek. If that’s what they do to themselves. . .
“You still try to bargain with me,” said Nom Anor.
“That’s my price. It goes up when I find clients haven’t been totally open with me.” Like not mentioning a galactic invasion. Fett was the one doing the buying now, though: he was buying time. “You’re going to have to fight for every meter of ground here. Thousands of sentient species, countless worlds, and every one will put up a fight. You need us. If only to deal with the Jedi.”
“And I could kill you now, of course.”
“I’m one man. The clans will find a new Mandalore right away, and then they’ll fight. Your call.”
Beviin muttered irritably, “Thanks, ‘Alor.”
The prisoner began moaning incoherently and slumped back on the deck, convulsing, eyes rolled back in his head. Nom Anor watched him with apparent fascination, making no attempt to help, and for a second Fett seriously considered drawing his blaster and putting the wretched man out of his misery. He decided it wasn’t his business, but he also knew he would regret not doing it for the rest of his life.
Another Yuuzhan Vong entered the compartment, as tattooed and mutilated as Nom Anor but wearing a draped charcoal-gray robe-for want of a better word- that seemed to be stapled to his flesh, from shoulders to scalp. These people liked pain. Fett could grit his teeth and take it, but there was endurance, and then there was the sick, disturbing fondness for it; and pain looked like it was central to the Yuuzhan Vong way of life.
He’d seen enough. Or at least he thought he had.
The new Yuuzhan Vong bent over the prisoner slumped on the floor and took a firm grip of the coral gorget to wrench it out of his neck. The captive looked dead: Fett was pretty good at spotting dead now.
Beviin, standing with fists on hips and outwardly impassive, swore angrily in the privacy of the helmet comlink. “I want to hunt down every last crab-boy in the galaxy,” he muttered. Beviin was usually the most easygoing of men, and the venom in his voice surprised Fett. “Whether you have a deal with them or not, Mand’alor.”
Two freakish creatures with far less exotic scars and tattoos than Nom Anor arrived with a new prisoner, a thin male Twi’lek in late middle age, and he was terrified, struggling, screaming. Fett wasn’t squeamish, but his code of honor said that you killed cleanly, and pain was a side-effect, not a hobby. It happened fast: the hired help held down the Twi’lek and the creature in the stapled robe simply rammed the yorik-kul that had been tipped from the dead victim up into the sternum of the new prisoner, so hard that the nodules broke through the skin of his neck, leaving him gurgling and choking. The surgical shock should have killed him, but somehow the crab-boys-Beviin had a gift for well-crafted abuse-could keep him alive.
Fett made a point of not looking at Beviin in case it started him off. He could hear him grinding his teeth and swallowing hard. If Beviin gave in to his urge to sort things out with a blaster for one victim, there would be an awful lot more in the Mandalore system who paid the price.
“Easy, Goran,” he whispered into the HUD comlink. Fierfek, I’ve never used his first name, ever. “Time for that later.”
Fett couldn’t begin to imagine the pain. He knew now that he despised the Yuuzhan Vong, not for their apparent asceticism and brutality, but for their greedy indulgence of a perversion. It was as weak in its way as drunkenness and glitterstim addiction. He also despised Nom Anor for crude theatrics designed to show him what would be in store for Mandalore if he didn’t comply.
Your threats will only motivate me more.
Nom Anor considered Fett’s price with visible slowness. “The Mandalore sector will not be touched,” he said.
Liar. You’ll swarm across the galaxy and when it suits you, you’ll come back for us. You lived among us for eighteen years, so one more lie just rolls off that tongue of yours...
And I’m a liar too, because we don’t.
No, Fett was keeping his word. It mattered to him to phrase his acceptance carefully so he could thwart these monsters every step of the way and retain his sense of honor. My word is my bond, and you lied to me. Beviin reached down and picked up a fragment of the living coral that had broken off from the dead prisoner, casual as a man gathering firewood.
“Your next task is to secure a landing zone for us at Birgis,” said Nom Anor. He handed Fett a data-chip, and that must have rankled: filthy technology. “Here’s the reconnaissance data we’ve just received, in a format that you can use. We could simply destroy the surface from orbit, because the planet will be reshaped and reengineered to our requirements anyway, but we wish to take the inhabitants alive to work for us.”
“When?” Fett asked.
“Five days’ time.”
“We’d better get moving, then.”
It was hard not to break into a jog down that gullet of a corridor. Beviin strode alongside him, one hand on his belt pouches as if protecting their contents. They split up in the docking bay area and went to their respective vessels, watched by silent Yuuzhan Vong warriors, a forest of grotesque thorn-trees with snakes clinging to them, the cold black future of the galaxy, and suddenly everything he detested.
Beviin powered up the Gladiator’s ion drive. Armored warriors stepped back; one stood his ground and watched, arms folded across his chest. Fett tapped Slave I’s console, and the Firespray came alive with a rising whine that settled into a steady note. The Gladiator lifted a few meters clear of the deck and hung back. Beviin was waiting for him to maneuver.
“You first,” said Fett. “We’ve got some planning to do.”
“You can’t believe they’re serious about the deal.” Beviin was loyal to his Mandalore, ever the traditional Mando’ad, but that also meant he reserved the right to tell the Mandalore to go stuff himself if he’d made a visibly suicidal choice. “Not after what we saw.”
Fett took Slave I on manual toward the irregular opening that passed for the main hatch. “No. And neither am I, and let’s assume he knows it.”
“If he knows anything about Mandos, he has to realize we’re polar opposites to the crab-boys.” Beviin cleared the bay, the drives flaring faintly violet as he picked up speed. The Gladiator looked like a flattened oval until it climbed steeply, suddenly becoming the characteristic shape of a saber thrust through a shield. “Slaves, caste systems, crazy gods-the shabuir said you were either Yuuzhan Vong or you were dead.”
“I like my armor the way it is. Cold metal.”
Beviin sounded like he was struggling to sound disenchanted rather than consumed by loathing. “Credits don’t matter anymore. Nothing worth buying in a vong’yc galaxy anyway.”
“I know that. So we’re going to spoil their grand plan.”
No Mandalorian would have taken the Yuuzhan Vong credits if they’d known them for what they were. But Fett had done the deal, and now he had to choose: turn on them and fight, as the rest of the galaxy would, or use the precarious inside track they now occupied to do as much damage to the invaders as possible.
“What do you have in mind? It’ll take time to mobilize a whole army on Mandalore.”
“And we’ll take massive casualties if we make a move before we know exactly what we’re dealing with here. This is technology we’ve never seen before.”
“Sit and wait? You must be-”
“They fooled us. Now we fool them. We play nice and look like we’re on their side while we gather Intel until we have enough to hit them hard. We pretend to be in it for the money.”
Fett didn’t know how much time they had. In the end, the Yuuzhan Vong would come for Mandalore to remake it as a world of living machines and parasitized slaves like every other planet. It was only a question of when. Fett took off his left gauntlet and ran his fingertips over the smooth composite of Slave I’s console, one of the few original parts of the ship left from his father’s time. Refit after refit had changed her capabilities almost beyond recognition, but if Jango Fett were to return now, he would snap the pilot restraint into a sitting position, check the console for dust and smears like he usually did, and feel right at home. He wouldn’t feel at home in an enslaved galaxy with one brutal culture that had erased any trace of Jaster Mereel’s heritage.
Fett checked his fingertips for dust. Slave I was spotless. She didn’t look like what she really was, either. This was going to be a little war of deception. He hoped Nom Anor appreciated irony.
Beviin was chewing it over. “We still can’t fight the crabs alone. What about the New Republic? They’ll need whatever intel we get.”
“Can’t trust them. We didn’t spot Nom Anor. Those disguises they use mean they could be anybody.”
“We might have to trust them.”
“We could slip them the data we’ve got now. Test the water. Find out the hard way.”
“And if the New Republic blows our cover, for whatever reason, and the Vongese take their revenge on Mandalore...
“-then we fight to the last, or we go and find those other galaxies the Yuuzhan Vong say are out there.”
“It’s too far.”
“And death’s too final. So we’d better win.”
“Your father would be proud of you, Bob’ika” Beviin was younger than Fett, but he still called him by the kid’s form of his name. Sometimes it irked Fett and sometimes it didn’t. Right then, it was fine. “For a man who says he doesn’t care about anyone else, you always come good for the Mando’ade when you’re needed.”
“I’m Mandalore. It’s just my job.”
“‘Course it is,” said Beviin. “I believe you.”
The Aggressors and Gladiators holding position at the rendezvous point looked pathetically small. Behind them, the waves of Yuuzhan Vong ships speckled the void. It was as eloquent a summary of the odds as Fett had ever seen: bad, and not even worth counting.
It wouldn’t have bothered Jango Fett, though. And so it wouldn’t bother him.
Nom Anor: notes for assault on Birgis.
Fett refuses to use villips and insists on keeping his own communications devices. I regret I must keep this infidel technology too, then.
I didn’t expect him and his mercenaries to accept them, I admit. And trying to use villips in isolation, without yorik-kul or vonduun, would be unsatisfactory anyway. The Mandalorians seem especially repelled by enslavement by the yorik-kul, which I find ironic for a race whose history is full of pillage, occupation, and daughter. But slavery is something that seems to haunt them: it must have played a painful role in their own history. They obviously fear it.
They don’t fear death, though. They don’t embrace it, but they say that you live for as long as someone remembers your name. They never remove those helmets, so I can’t judge from their expressions, but the tone of their voices tells me that the erasure of their culture by ours will be worse than death for them.
I suspect this is the key to keeping them loyal. Mandalore will remain untouched for as long as I need them. But enslavement will be the only way to handle them in the end.
Birgis: perimeter of spaceport, one standard week after invasion of Helska 4.
Beviin had to assume the Vongese knew what they were doing when it came to overrunning galaxies, but they didn’t seem to care about stealth.
The main spaceport on Birgis-which served both civil and military vessels on this small planet-was the most obvious asset they could have targeted. From the observation point on the far perimeter, hidden in long grass, he could see the assault speeders patrolling the landing strips in a flurry of flashing lights. Others showed no lights at all but were detailed green targets in his night-vision visor. The military vessels and vehicles were an eclectic mix of the squadron based here and the remnants of others that had escaped the relentless invasion fleet and regrouped onsite.
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nbsp; Destroying those assets on the ground would be the hardest task Beviin could imagine. Playing the double agent was fine until you had to preserve the illusion by hitting your own side convincingly-lethally.
And the New Republic didn’t even know yet that the Mandalorians were now their allies.
“I still say we should have hit the main civilian power station if they wanted a diversion,” Cham muttered, propped on one elbow as he lay in the cover of the grass calibrating a portable missile-launcher. “Still, they’re paying. Their call.”
Fett tapped a pouch on his belt. “Good opportunity to hand over this data. Especially now that we’ve got our next two mission briefings on it. Something the New Republic can act on.”
“There must be something I’m missing. The folk here won’t exactly be in a teachable moment.”
“You got a better idea for making contact with the New Republic with the Vong crawling all over us?”
“No, Mand’alor.”
“So let’s go and look like a credible commando raid.” Fett gestured to take up positions. “Try not to kill everyone until we know if there’s an officer we can make contact with, and leave a tighter or two intact. Got that, everyone? Somebody has to escape this to pass on the data.”
Beviin kept one channel on his comlink on intercepted New Republic voice traffic. O for obvious, all right: they were expecting a Yuuzhan Vong landing of the kind that had breached the Outer Rim, massive aerial bombardments of magma and burning rock followed by troops spewed from what could only be described as gigantic worms. The psychological factor-vessels and weapons that looked like freakishly deformed organs-was hitting almost as hard as the sheer destructive power of the Vongese’s fleet.
NEW JEDI ORDER: BOBA FETT: A PRACTICAL MAN Page 4