Conquest: Edge of Victory I (16 page)

But it was his ears, again, that alerted him. Something crashed through the treetops behind him, and all of the hairs on his neck stood up. What was he facing? A living ship? A beast?

He dropped and cut a sharp turn, slipping between two trees, scraping one of them. For an instant, he thought it had worked, but then he heard the whirring turn to follow him.

How does it see?
he wondered. Infrared? Or, given that the Yuuzhan Vong used only living technology, maybe it smelled him. Whatever the case, it certainly had a lock on him. It was faster, too, though less maneuverable in the trees due to its greater size.

He thought he was evading it pretty well until something hissed past his ear—not a branch, not anything he could feel in the Force. Desperately he increased his evasive
tactics, spinning and rolling, coming as near the trees as he dared, slipping through the narrowest spaces he was able to.

Dark things licked past him, hissing in the leaves, and then something caught the speeder in a grip that stopped it dead in the air.

Anakin didn’t stop, however. With all of the forward momentum that had just been stolen from his craft, he was hurled into the night, a rocket of blood and bone. He tucked and spun, slowing himself with the Force, and dropped onto a branch bigger around than he was.

He turned and found himself facing a hole in the night.

A thin tendril whipped out from the thing and wrapped around his waist, cinching painfully tight. With a hoarse cry, he snapped on his lightsaber and cut, just as the strand started to tighten further, as if reeling him in. Incredibly, the strand—it seemed no thicker than his thumb—resisted the first cut, though it yielded to the second.

By then he had been jerked off the branch, and once again he was falling. Closing his eyes, he nudged his course to another branch and used it as a springboard to propel himself toward the next unseen landing place. He never made it. Another of the strands caught him in midair. He managed to twist himself and chop it, but by that time another had fastened on him. He managed to cut it, too, but noticed the severed pieces weren’t dropping off, but retained their grip on him. If this kept up …

He saw pretty clearly what he had to do. The next time his feet hit a branch, he hurled himself up and out, feeling the breath of several strands passing beneath and by him. He aimed himself at the hole in the Force.

The problem with that, of course, was that he couldn’t sense a landing place. He came down on top of the craft, but the surface was uneven, and he slipped, bounced once on the rear of the thing, and slid off. He caught a projection as he fell, and for a brief moment felt an odd disorientation, as his inner ear suddenly told him that
down
was in two different directions, as if he stood on the dividing line between two different gravities.

In a flash, he knew what that must mean. Whatever this thing was, it was, like other Yuuzhan Vong craft, propelled by a dovin basal, the creatures that somehow generated gravitic anomalies. He was hanging next to the craft’s lifts.

The craft jerked and spun over. Anakin lost his grip, but he had a fix on the gravity source now. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creatures might not exist in the Force, but gravity did.

As he fell, he hurled his lightsaber up, guiding it with the Force. It struck at the heart of the gravitic anomaly, and sparks showered the canopy below. As Anakin fell through the first layer of leaves he saw his lightsaber rupture into a bright purple flare.

Concentrating on the weapon, Anakin glanced off a branch, falling like a rag doll. Trying to focus through the pain, he found the forest floor, pushed against it, pushed …

Until it pushed him back. All of his breath coughed out in a rush, and he folded around his gut, sucking for wind that would not come.

   The morning sun found Anakin turning blue and black over much of his body, but still functional. In the dim light, he cautiously climbed from his hiding place in the hollow of a tree and looked around.

The Yuuzhan Vong craft was down, perhaps eighty meters away. It reminded Anakin of some sort of flat, winged sea creature, though it looked as if it were grown from the same stuff as the coralskippers. It was fetched up against a tree. The cockpit was a transparent bubble extruding from the top. The pilot inside looked quite dead.

Anakin found he’d been right about the dovin basal. It looked roughly the same as the larger ones he’d seen, except it had a huge, oozing gash in it. His lightsaber lay
nearby. When he picked it up and tried to activate it, his fears were confirmed—nothing happened.

“Perfect,” he murmured aloud. “No weapons at all. Perfect.”

He found the remains of his speeder, still attached to the cable snaking from the Yuuzhan Vong craft. It didn’t take much of an inspection to tell him that this time he wouldn’t be salvaging anything.

From here on out, he was walking.

Nen Yim watched the damutek ships settle amongst the alien trees, with a giddiness she tried hard to conceal. No reward could come from a display of emotion, especially childish ones. A shaper was circumspect; a shaper was analytical. A shaper did not stare in wonder and joy and wave the tendrils of her headdress in abandon.

So Nen Yim did none of that. But by the gods, she
felt
like doing it. This was a planet! Perhaps technically a moon, but a world, an unknown world! The unfamiliar smells of the place, the unanticipated movement of the air, the unimagined oddness of a gravity that wasn’t exactly right had her senses buzzing. But the real excitement came from within her. Like the thick-trunked damutek, she was a seed, finally come to the right soil to sprout in.

Soil. She reached down, bent, and scratched up a fistful of the rich black dirt. It smelled like nothing she had ever known—a bit like the sluices beneath the mernip breeding pools, or the exhalations of the maw luur of the great worldships. The latter took in waste through its vast capillary network and digested it into nutrients, metals, and air. As a child, she’d often stood where the maw luur exhaled; until now, it was the only wind she had ever known.

“Your first time on a true world, Adept?”

Nen Yim turned, thinking to find one of her fellow adepts speaking to her, but suddenly arranged the tentacles
of her headdress into genuflection when she saw it was no such lowly creature, but her new master, Mezhan Kwaad.

The master let her finish, then beckoned her to face her. “You may turn your eyes on me, Adept.”

“Yes, Master Mezhan.”

Mezhan Kwaad was a female nearing the final edge of youth. If she were not a shaper, she might yet bear a child, but of course that was the one form of shaping forbidden to masters of their caste. She was lean but still wore the form of a mature female, despite her high status. Her broad, high-cheekboned face bore the ritual forehead scars of her domain, and her right hand was an eight-fingered master’s hand. Her other alterations, in keeping with the aesthetic of the shapers, were more discreet. The marks of her sacrifices were not external, as they tended to be for the other castes. She wore the body-hugging oozhith of a master, its tiny cilia rippling in subtle waves of color as it sought and captured the alien microorganisms in the atmosphere to feed itself.

“And answer my question,” the master went on.

“Yes, Master. I have never before known a world outside of our worldships.”

“And what are your impressions?”

“Our worldships are built for centuries, perhaps millennia. Yun-Yuuzhan created planets and moons for millions and billions of cycles. The resources in the moon’s interior are released slowly, by tectonic processes, or by life adapting to lack.” She looked back down at the dirt beneath her feet. “But it does feel so strange, the unimaginable wealth I’m standing on. And the life! Different from our own, and varied, and none of it made to serve us!”

The master shaper narrowed her eyes. “It
is
made to serve us,” she said quietly. “It is the will of the gods that life serves us. You were taught this.”

“Of course, Master,” Nen Yim said. “I only meant we have not shaped it yet. But we shall.”

“Yes, we shall,” Mezhan Kwaad agreed. “And I emphasize
we
. Do you know why you are an adept, Nen Yim? Do you know why you are here, and not correcting the mutations of methane-fixing recham forteps in a decaying maw luur?”

“No, Master.”

“Because I saw your work on the endocrine cloister in the worldship
Baanu Kor
.”

Nen Yim knotted her headdress in a humble posture. “I only did what needed to be done,” she said.

“You did it optimally. Many would have stopped short at the molding of tii, but you went beyond that. You applied the Vul Ag protocol, though such has never been used in an endocrine cloister.”

“I thought it would make the outer osmotic membranes more efficiently transpire—”

“Yes. Tradition and propriety are of absolute importance to our task, and yet immersion in those qualities can lead to hidebound thinking. I need adepts who are resourceful, who can use the sacred, unchanging knowledge in new ways. Do you understand?”

“I believe so, Master,” Nen Yim answered cautiously. A small lump of fear formed in her throat. Did the master
know?

But she couldn’t. If she knew that Nen Yim had dabbled in heresy, she would never have promoted her. Unless she herself—

No. Not a master. That was impossible.

“Don’t believe,” the master said. “Know, and you shall go far. Do you see? As you say, after generations we have a whole new galaxy of life at our fingertips. It is time to demonstrate exactly what Yun-Yuuzhan intended us for.”

Nen Yim nodded, watching the damuteks again. They were already splitting from their protective skins and beginning
to expand, to grow into highly specialized shaper compounds.

“Come, Adept,” the master said. “It is time to receive your hand.”

“So soon?” Nen Yim asked.

“Our work begins tomorrow. We have one of the
Jeedai
, you know. Only one, but we shall have more. Supreme Overlord Shimrra himself is watching what we do here
most
carefully. We will not disappoint him.”

   Nen Yim stepped from the ceremonial bath into a darkened oozhith. At her touch it wrapped itself firmly about her, and she felt the tingle as it inserted cilia into her pores. It was not a full-skin oozhith, but a shortened garment that left her arms and most of her legs bare. She smoothed back her short dark hair and held out her right hand, looking at it as if for the first time rather than the last. Then she allowed the attendant to escort her into the darkened grotto of Yun-Ne’Shel, where the master waited.

The grotto smelled of brine and oil. It was close and damp and reacted faintly to the touch. The grotto was a distant relative of the yammosk; what you felt in the chamber came back to you, enhanced.

And so now both her eagerness and her trepidation had her pulse hammering as she knelt at the mouth of the grotto, a hole the size of a fist surrounded by a massive bulge of muscle. Without pausing or flinching, she placed her hand through the opening.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the teeth slid out of their sheaths, eight of them, and pricked into her wrist.

Sweat started on her brow as she surrendered to the pain, as the teeth, with glacial slowness, sank through tissue, grated into bone. The lips closed occasionally to suck away the blood. The grotto gave her back her pain, amplified, and her breath went choppy. She lost her sense
of time; every nerve ending in her body was raw, as if the cilia of her garment were writhing needles.

Until, finally, the teeth met in the center of her wrist; she felt them click together. She tried to take a long, calming breath to prepare for what was to come next.

It happened quickly. The mouth suddenly rotated ninety degrees. Her arm twisted with it no more than a degree or so, and then the hand came off with a wet
snick
. Nen Yim held up the stump of her wrist and stared at it in dull astonishment. She barely noticed the attendant taking her by the shoulders, guiding her toward the dark basin in the center of the grotto.

“I can do it,” she whispered. She knelt by the basin, her head spinning. Dark things moved in the waters, five-legged things that came to the scent of her blood eagerly. She pushed her gushing stump into the water.

She had thought her body could feel no greater pain than it already had. She was wrong. She didn’t feel it in her hand at all, but in a great spasm that arched her body like a bow and kept it cramped there. She couldn’t see the creature grappling with her wrist. For a horrible moment, she didn’t want to. A great flash of light exploded in her head, and for a time she knew nothing.

She awoke, and tears of shame started. Through them she saw the master standing over her.

“No one has ever endured it without a brief lapse the first time,” she said. “There is no shame, on this occasion. If you ever receive your master’s hand, it will be different. But you will be ready.”

Hand
. Nen Yim raised it before her.

It was still seating itself, a thick greenish secretion marking the line between it and her wrist. It had four narrow fingers and a thumb protruding from the thin but flexible carapace that now served as the top of her hand. Thousands of small sensor knobs covered the fingers and palm. The two fingers farthest from her thumb ended in
small pincers. The finger nearest the thumb had a thin, sharp, retractable claw.

She tried to wiggle the fingers; nothing happened.

“It will take some days for the nerve connections to complete themselves, and some time after that for your brain to become used to the finer modifications,” the master said. “Rejoice, Nen Yim—you are now truly an adept. You will join me in shaping the
Jeedai
, and will bring glory to our caste, our domain, and the Yuuzhan Vong.”

Anakin sank farther beneath the roots of a marsh-grubber tree and submerged himself up to his mouth, peering through the twisted growths at the elusive sky. For long moments he thought perhaps he had been mistaken, that the noise from above had been his imagination, but then he saw a shadow much too large to be any native bird pass across the fetid U-shaped lake that concealed him.