“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. “Aruttetii. 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 intendant 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.”
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 vou 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 lam.”
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.