by Greg Keyes
“No,” she said. “But the name disturbs me.”
Nen Yim nodded agreement. “Ekh’m Val said the planet itself was alive, its life-forms symbiotic, as if shaped to live together.”
“They shape life as we do?”
“They shape life, yes. Not as we do. And the sentient race there is nothing like Yuuzhan Vong—indeed, from the records, I think they must be a race native to this galaxy—Ferroans.”
“Then I retract my earlier statement. Our ancestors can hardly have met this world before.”
“It seems unlikely. And yet, at the same time, it seems the only possible answer to the puzzle.”
“What happened to Commander Val?”
“He was attacked and repelled, but he managed to capture the ship before leaving the system.”
“And the planet?”
“Shimrra claims it has been destroyed.”
“You do not believe him?”
“No. I’ve been asked to create weapons that might affect it. Why should I do that if the danger has passed?”
“Perhaps he fears there are more such worlds.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps he merely fears.”
“What?”
“If we have met this race before, and fought them—perhaps they remember it better than we. If we have the key to attacking their biotechnology, perhaps they have the key to ours as well. Ekh’m Val was defeated, after all.”
“A few ships against a world.”
Nen Yim smiled thinly. “Tell me—what sort of memory do you think our glorious ancestors are more likely to have purged from the Qang qahsa? A glorious victory or an ignominious defeat?”
Ahsi Yim pursed her lips. “Ah,” she said. “And you think Shimrra knows something we do not.”
“I think he knows many things we do not.”
Ahsi Yim’s tendrils curled in agreement. Then she leveled her liquid gaze directly at Nen Yim. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” Nen Yim replied, “I think you know things I do not. Have connections that I do not.”
“What sort of things?” she asked, stiffly.
“For one, I think you have heard of Ekh’m Val before.”
A long silence, this time. “Are you asking something of me?” she said at last.
“If this planet exists, I must see it for myself. The ship alone is not enough. I must know more.”
“Why?”
“Because I think if I do not, our species is doomed.”
Ahsi pursed her lips. Her tendrils knotted and waved. “I can promise nothing,” she said, “but I will see what can be done.”
SIX
From the bridge of Yammka, Nas Choka surveyed the ruins of the occupation forces from Fondor. They weren’t much to look at.
He turned slowly to face Zhat Lah.
“How did this happen?” he asked. His voice was low, pitched only for the commander.
“Duro was attacked, Warmaster, as our intelligence suggested it would be. The executor there requested reinforcements. My men were hungry for battle, and I complied.” His eyes narrowed. “Then they came. I recalled the ships when I understood the ploy, but they were prevented from leaving the Duro system by their interdictors. The infidels kept our forces pinned in the planet’s gravity well and then fled. They are cowards!”
“Are you telling me cowards took the system you were entrusted with from you? You were beaten by cowards?”
“Warmaster, we were outnumbered. We fought until there was no hope.”
“No hope?” Nas Choka asked, in scathing tones. “You were yet alive, and had ships, and say there was no hope? Are you Yuuzhan Vong?”
“I am Yuuzhan Vong,” Zhat Lah growled.
“Then why did you not fight to the last? Might you not have taken a few more of their ships with you to the gods?”
“A few, Warmaster.”
“Then why did you flee? Where is the honor in that?”
Zhat Lah’s split lips twitched. “If the warmaster wishes my life, it is his to give to the gods.”
“Of course. But I asked you for an explanation.”
“I thought our remaining ships might serve better than to be cut to pieces in a battle we could not win.”
“Did you?” Nas Choka asked. “You had no thought for your own life?”
“My life belongs to the gods. They may take it as they will. I do not flinch from death. If the warmaster wishes me to take my personal coralskipper back to Fondor, I will die in battle. But given the numbers, the rest of my ships would have been destroyed with relatively little damage done to the enemy. If this was wrong, the responsibility is mine. My men own none of it.”
Nas Choka looked back out at the wreckage.
“Two frigates, all but undamaged. A battle cruiser with only minimal damage.” He turned to Lah. “You did well,” he said.
The commander’s eyes widened fractionally with surprise.
“We have spread ourselves too much, over too many star systems,” Nas Choka said. “We have lost too many ships because too many commanders have no more sense of strategy than to fight to the death.”
He clasped his hand behind him and regarded Lah. “We have the late leader of your domain to thank for this situation.”
“Warmaster Lah conquered most of this galaxy,” Zhat Lah protested. “He gave us their capital, now our Yuuzhan’tar.”
“Yes, and he spent warriors like so much vlekin doing so, and gave little thought as to how we would hold such vast territories.” He waved his hand. “Things are changing, Zhat Lah. Things must change. The infidels have adapted. They have undermined many of our strengths, but we have undermined ourselves even more. The pride of our warriors weakens us.”
“But the pride of our warriors is what we are,” Zhat Lah protested. “Without our pride, without our honor, we are as the infidels.”
“And yet you retreated because you thought it best.”
“Yes, Warlord,” he replied, his tone finally subdued. “But it was not … easy. I take the stain on myself, yet there is a stain.”
“Listen to me,” Nas Choka said. “We are the Yuuzhan Vong. We have been entrusted with the true way, the true knowledge of the gods. Our duty is to bring every infidel in this galaxy to heel and either send them screaming to the gods or bring them to the true path. There is no middle ground, there is no faltering. And there can be no failure. Our mission is more important than you or me, Commander, and it is more important than your honor or mine. Lord Shimrra himself has said it. And so, feel no stain. To win this war, we must set aside much we cherish. The gods ordain the sacrifice. We are blameless. We are those who do what must be done. And so I tell you again—you did the right thing.”
Lah nodded, understanding lighting behind his eyes.
“Now,” Choka went on, “these tactics—these feints and sudden withdrawals, these strike-here-and-hide-there maneuvers—what enables this? The infidels have no yammosk to coordinate their movements.”
“They have communications, Warlord. Their HoloNet allows them to communicate instantaneously over the breadth of the galaxy.”
“Precisely. But without their HoloNet, such precise coordination becomes much more difficult, yes?”
Lah shrugged. “Of course,” he said. “But destroying the communications system is difficult,” he said. “There are many relay stations, not always placed so as to be easily found. When one is destroyed, another may function, and the infidels have managed to repair or replace many we have destroyed.”
“The destruction of the HoloNet has never been a priority before,” Nas Choka said. “Now it is. And the gods have given the shapers a new weapon, one that should perfectly suit our needs.”
“That is well, Warlord.”
“It is.” He paced a moment.
“I’m giving you a new battle group. You will remain here, at Yuuzhan’tar, on alert to strike quickly. The infidels are growing confident; they will attack again, soon. I can feel it. And when they do, we will have something new to
show them. Something quite new.”
SEVEN
Beneath the black sky of Yuuzhan’tar, Nen Yim moved invisibly. The guards at their posts did not blink as she passed; the singing ulubs stayed silent as she moved lightly across the grounds of the Supreme Overlord’s compound. Damuteks glowed with faint luminescence, and ships coming and going were pale viridian or blood-colored mists of light in the sky.
Yuuzhan’tar had not always been dark at night. For millennia, it had been the brightest world in the galaxy, never knowing true darkness. Unliving metal had pulsed with unholy energies, hemorrhaging light and heat and noxious fumes to burn the womb of night.
Now that unnatural work had been undone, and any brightness came from the stars alone. Tonight, not even they troubled the closed eyelids of the gods, for a tarp of cloud had been drawn overhead, blotting even the fierce beauty of the Core. So long controlled by machines, the climate of Yuuzhan’tar was also finding its natural state.
To Nen Yim, it seemed paradoxically unnatural. She had been born and raised on a worldship, nurtured by an organism so large that she had been like a microbe in its belly, kept warm and secure. The vagaries of weather were only recently known to her, and though her mind rationally recognized that on some long-ago day the Yuuzhan Vong had lived on a world where seasons came and went, where rain fell when it wished or not at all—that this was, indeed, the natural course of things—her instincts rebelled at the capricious variability of it all. She was a shaper. She preferred shaping to being shaped.
And she despised being cold. She was cloaked in a creature of her own modification, a variant of the special ooglith cloakers that hunters wore. Its billion tiny sensory nodes gazed at the night, heard it, tasted it—and made her a part of it. For the first time in many, many months she was free of her guards, of her damutek. She did not fool herself that the freedom was real. If she did not emerge from her sanctum in a few hours, questions would be asked, and then a search would commence. Being invisible would not be enough, then. But the illusion was heady.
Though she had created the cloak for herself long before, there had never been any reason great enough to risk using it.
Now there was. A cryptic message, a meeting place, a possibility.
She passed from Shimrra’s fortress compound easily enough. Even a hunter could not have managed that, but the cloak of Nuun she wore was better than the usual sort. It hid her very thoughts, it disguised her mass as a movement of air.
She moved on rougher ground now, down a slope and then up to the platform where a shrine to Yun-Harla, the Trickster goddess, overlooked a vast pit that had once been sky-reaching buildings. Dark waters filled it now, and the burring cries of p’hiili rose in shrill chorus with the bass cooing of large-wattled ngom. Like the lim tree in her hortium, they were re-created creatures from the homeworld.
A single figure awaited her in the shrine, beneath a statue of Yun-Yuuzhan that had been made from the skulls and long bones of the conquered. It, too, carried a message from Yuuzhan Vong history—like the creatures of the pool, it proclaimed, This world is ours now.
The one waiting was male, lean, his hair knotted in a patterned scarf. All but three fingers had been cut from each hand. Nen Yim stood watching him for long moments. His eyes held a contained and fierce intelligence.
Priest, she thought. What could you want with me?
She stood on the vua’sa’s spine. Death seemed near. She wasn’t sure what she had expected, but it wasn’t a priest, alone, in the dark.
She moved out of his sight and removed the cloak, then walked back to the shrine.
This time his gaze found her instantly. His body remained still.
“You’ve come at a strange time to perform your ablutions,” the priest said.
“I come when I am called,” Nen Yim answered.
“So must we all,” the priest answered. “I am Harrar.”
Nen Yim’s spine prickled. She knew that name. So not just any priest. A very important one.
“I am called Nen Yim, Honored One,” she replied.
“You are a master. Our ranks are equivalent, so we may dispense with honorifics. My time is short, and I suspect yours is shorter still.”
Nen Yim nodded.
“There are rumors of you, shaper,” he said. “You labor alone, under heavy guard in the Supreme Overlord’s compound. It is said you are most favored by the gods, and yet so few know you exist at all. Even a whisper is too loud a tone to speak of you in. It is said that some have died who could not keep that whisper in.”
“And yet you know of me.”
“I know when and whom to whisper to.” He smiled thinly. “You, apparently, do not.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean your attempts to contact the Quorealist underground have been clumsy.”
“I do not even know who or what the Quorealists are,” Nen Yim asserted.
“Quoreal was the Supreme Overlord before Shimrra. Many do not think the gods chose Shimrra to take his place, they believe that Shimrra dishonorably murdered him. Quoreal’s old followers are understandably a reticent group, but they still exist.”
“These are new facts to me, if facts they are.”
The priest shrugged one shoulder. “It does not matter who you thought you were trying to contact. The point is that if you persist, Shimrra will discover you, and I doubt that anyone is so favored by the gods as to survive that.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “What I wish to know is this: Why is Lord Shimrra’s most favored shaper trying to contact the pitiful remnants of his political enemies?”
“I know nothing of these politics,” Nen Yim replied. “Shimrra is the Supreme Overlord. I owe allegiance to none other. I desire allegiance to none other.”
Harrar cocked his head. “Come now. Why else contact us?”
“Us?”
Harrar’s fierce grin expanded a bit. “Of course. Clumsy you may have been, but you have succeeded. Shimrra has enemies. You have found them. What do you want from us?”
“I’ve just told you, I seek no enemy of my Supreme Overlord.”
“But you move in secret, without his knowledge. What do you want?”
Again, Nen Yim hesitated. “There is something I must see,” she said. “Something I believe to be of vital importance to the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“How intriguing. Shimrra will not let you see it?”
“I cannot ask him.”
“More intriguing still. What is this thing?”
“It is very far from here,” Nen Yim said. “I need help getting there. I need help finding it.”
“You obfuscate.”
“I am cautious. You tell me you are the enemy of my Lord Shimrra. In that case you are my enemy, ultimately, and I will not betray information into your hands.” She paused.
“Suppose I merely lied to you, to test your loyalty?”
“Then I cannot trust anything you say,” she said.
“In that case, our meeting would seem to be over.” He paused again. “But I warn you, you are not likely to get another chance. You say this thing is of vital importance to our future. How important?”
“It could be our doom.”
“And yet you fear Shimrra will not address it?”
“Yes.”
“You think you know better what is best for the Yuuzhan Vong than our Supreme Overlord?”
Nen Yim drew her shoulders back. “In this case, I do.”
“Very well. My pretense of disloyalty was meant to draw a confession of your own. I now believe you are loyal to the order of things. I swear by the very gods, I am also loyal to Lord Shimrra. May they devour me if I lie.” He paused, and lowered his voice. “But like you, I do not think his judgment is infallible. Tell me of this thing you must see. Clearly you are willing to risk disgrace and death. This is not the time to balk.”
Nen Yim clicked the nails of her master’s hand together. Like her own master, Mezhan Kwaad, she had deadly weapons concealed in
it. If she decided the priest could not be trusted, the p’hiili would feed well this night.
“It begins with a commander named Ekh’m Val,” she said, softly.
His eyes widened at the name. “Ah,” he said.
“You have heard of him?”
“Indeed. I begin to understand your caution. Please continue.”
She told him, in brief, what she knew, but she left much out. She made no mention of her heresy, but couched her studies of the ship in orthodox terms. As she spoke, Harrar folded down into a cross-legged position and listened like a child does to the true-speaker in a crèche. When she was done, a moment of silence dragged a long tail.
“Astonishing,” he said, at last.
“You understand the implications, then?”
“Some of them. Others will come clear. And perhaps I understand some you do not.”
“I do not doubt that. The priesthood has its own knowledge, I’m sure.”
Harrar drew his lips back from his teeth. “How kind of you to think so,” he said.
“I meant no offense.”
“Naturally not.” He gestured. “Sit with me.”
She complied, resting on a small polyp.
“You swear to me that all you have told me is true?”
“I swear it, by the gods,” Nen Yim replied.
He nodded, then looked at her seriously. “Your master, Mezhan Kwaad, is said to have claimed there were no gods.”
“She was, for all her virtues, perhaps insane,” Nen Yim pointed out.
“Yes, my concern exactly.”
“You fear for my sanity?”
“I might, save for one thing. Are you aware of the heresy?”
Her blood went cold and heavy. “Heresy?”
“Among the Shamed Ones. The obscene belief that the Jeedai are somehow the saviors of the Shamed.”
“Yes,” Nen Yim replied, hoping her composure hadn’t slipped. “I was, after all, on Yavin Four when that heresy began.”
“You were, weren’t you? You’re a part of the story, in fact, at least in some versions. In a few, you died gloriously. In all, you vanished.”
“I am not current on the folklore of the Shamed Ones, I fear,” Nen Yim said, stiffly.