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.
“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.”