The spiral-armed disc of the Yuuzhan Vong worldship hung against the dark green curve of Myrk's surface. Sunlight caught its jagged surface at an oblique angle, highlighting the crumbling of its yorik coral surface. To Zekk, it frankly looked like an omen.

He was still trying to wrap his mind around all the sudden turns of the past few hours. Tahiri Veila's hired freighter, called Mandala, had docked at Wayward Soldier's second airlock, and leaving the gunship with a pair of disc-shaped freighters clinging to either flank. Even though Taryn and Trista had confirmed that Tahiri had surrendered to them on Shedu Maad and later been released by Tenel Ka, he found he couldn't bring himself to trust the woman. He couldn't trust Praelyx either, despite the sudden turns, and the only people he could even sort-of trust were Taryn and Trista.

It was not the way he wanted to begin his return to the worldship that had left him with awful memories and lingering nightmares for years to come.

He was one of many now crammed into the cockpit of the Zel's freighter, Red Kiss. The sisters took the pilot and co-pilot's seats while Praelyx was strapping into his crash webbing behind Trista and the captain of Tahiri's transport, a worn but dignified grey-haired woman named Rahley Muro, took the spot behind Taryn. That left Zekk on his feet beside Tahiri; the two stood awkwardly apart and said little, though Zekk could tell she kept on staring at Praelyx, to whom she'd been introduced not ten minutes earlier.

"How much longer until we're ready for lift-off?" she asked.

Trista flipped a few switched above the pilot's seat and said, "No more than five minutes. I want to run one more passive sensor scan before we get any closer to the worldship."

"Good idea." Tahiri looked straight at Praelyx. "Captain, can we have a word in private?"

The masquered Vong turned in his chair and gave her a polite smile. "Are you sure it can't wait?"

"It won't take long."

"I think we can spare a few minutes," said Zekk.

Still smiling politely, Praelyx unbuckled his crash webbing and stood. "Well be right back," he told Trista, who responded with just a distracted nod.

Zekk, Tahiri, and Praelyx moved out of the cockpit. In the rear hold, a half-dozen of Praelyx's privateers were getting ready for the landing, and they captain gave them a short wave as he followed the Jedi to an empty cargo hold in the ship's aft.

Praelyx looked straight at Tahiri. "I've already been through this once with your friend here, but I suppose you want to hear it from me."

"Please." She crossed her arms over her chest.

"I was an intendant during the war. My ship crashed during the battle for Hutt Space. I concealed myself with an ooglith and fell in with a group of Hutt mercenaries."

"And you ended up in command of a pirate ship?

"Exactly."

"Pretty unusual fate for a Yuuzhan Vong."

"My previous career was already starting to lose its appeal. Even if I somehow returned to the Yuuzhan Vong they'd have executed me for surviving when the warriors assigned to me died."

"I don't suppose the Zels know about your old life."

"Of course not."

"And your crew?"

"Some. I do not flaunt it."

"I wouldn't think so. And you insisted on coming to the worldship for what reason? Nostalgia?"

"I was promised a lot of credits for this mission. I want to make sure it succeeds."

He delivered it with the same aplomb he always used, but Tahiri's face was skeptical. For the first time Zekk remembered that she possessed a 'Vongsense' thanks to the failed attempt to shape her and might be able to sense Praelyx's true emotions in a way Zekk could not.

"I understand your friend has been on this worldship before," Praelyx gestured to Zekk. "Is the same true for you?"

Tahiri's answer was a nod.

"Then you both probably know more of what we're getting into than I do. I suggest we head back to the cockpit. They should be ready to take off in a minute."

Praelyx turned and walked out of the hold without looking back. Before Tahiri could follow, Zekk reached out and grabbed her arm.

Leaning in close he asked, "What did you get from him with your Vongsense?"

"I'm not sure. Vongsense isn't like the Force. I can't just… feel the truth of things. But I don't think he was lying." When Zekk didn't release her arm she asked, "I'm not lying either."

"I know." He let her go. "Trista and Taryn confirmed what you said."

"Then you know why I'm going down there."

"What about Captain Muro?"

"She has her own score to settle with the Yuuzhan Vong. Maybe this will help her get closure. I hope so."

Zekk didn't know what he expected to find on the worldship, but he doubted it was closure.

"Tahiri, I-" He stopped, unsure of what to say.

"You can trust me Zekk. Really." She held his eyes for a moment, silently pleading, then turned and hurried back to the cockpit.

Zekk followed, and the two of them took their places in the back of the cockpit as Red Kiss broke coupling ports with Wayward Soldier and accelerated toward the worldship.

He tried to tell himself that yes, he could trust Tahiri, that she was telling the truth, that maybe even Praelyx was trustworthy, but he couldn't believe any of it. He knew, intellectually, that what Tahiri was doing now was a lot like what he'd done almost twenty years ago, after his experience in the Shadow Academy. Back then he'd left behind the Solo twins and his other Jedi friends to sort out his own problems by running as a solitary bounty hunter. He'd fallen back in with his friends after a short time but right then he'd felt he need to distance himself from everyone else and seek restitution in his own way. It was entirely likely that Tahiri was doing the same: trying to work things out alone, in her own way.

But when he felt her in the Force, he still felt the low-simmering anger and hard determination that he remembered from his own sojourn in the dark. Maybe Tahiri was really trying improve herself and didn't realize how deep her own darkness went, how hard it was to truly escape; if anything that was cause for more concern, not less.

He tried to force his thoughts of all of that as he watched the worldship swell ahead of them. At the co-pilot's station, Taryn was scanning over the sensor output.

"Still some fusial thrust traces," she reported. "Seems like it's old. It's been scattered over space, so I can't get a strong vector."

"I bet they're heading the same place we are," Tahiri said as she leaned forward over Muro's shoulder. "Fly us right into the crack in the hull."

"Can you direct us exactly where to go?" Taryn asked.

She nodded. "I'll show you right where I landed before. It's not far from the shapers' lab."

Red Kiss was close enough to turn on its forward flood-lamps and light up some of the surface of the worldship. It had been so long since Zekk had seen this thing up close, and a shudder went though his spine as he remembered the strike team's desperate landing on its rocky surface, their trek to the spaceport as they watched coralskippers shoot down the captured shuttle piloted by brave, doomed Ulaha Kore.

Ulaha. Her death had rattled the strike team to the core. He hadn't thought about her in months.

Maybe even years.

Tahiri might have been thinking the same thing, or maybe sensed his thoughts in the Force, because she passed him a look of grim, silent understanding.

The fissure in the hull was new, and it was more than wide enough for Red Kiss to slip through. It ran for kilometers ahead like a deep canyon, and Trista settled them into a level flight down the breach, toward the center of the disc.

"Look familiar?" Taryn asked, looking back at the two Jedi.

Zekk and Tahiri both crept closer to the viewport. Red Kiss swung lights down below, highlighting sweeps of vacuum-dessicated superstructure. He thought he saw long flat dusty wastes, intermixed with a few crevasses that looked almost like dried-up riverbeds. When he saw the angular, boxy structure of the mock-city, he knew exactly what he was looking at.

"This was the training ground they used to teach voxyn to hunt," he said. "They had rivers and plains, even a fake city full of slaves."

He remembered, too, how the Yuuzhan Vong pursuit party had ambushed them in the city as the Jedi, being Jedi, were distracted trying to help all the slaves that were being used as meals for the voxyn. The Vong had killed Jovan Drark and Eryl Besa: two more people Zekk hadn't thought of in forever. That had also been the place were Anakin Solo took the lance-wound that ended up a death sentence.

Zekk glanced at Tahiri. Her face was stiff and she gave off nothing in the Force. But then, she'd seen this place not so long ago, when Caedus had taken her flow-walking back to Anakin's last moments.

Taryn probably had that in mind when she asked, "Well, what's next?"

"We're getting close to where the lab is. There's going to be a big wall coming up. The lab is on the other side. There's a big flat plain where we can set down."

"And this is all open to the vacuum?" Muro asked.

"That's right. We'll need to seal our vac suits." They had all dressed in thermo-jumpsuits before leaving Wayward Soldier, but they still had to put on the vacuum-proof helmets kept in a pile in the main hold.

"Do we know what we're looking for is actually in the lab?" asked Praelyx.

"No," Tahiri admitted, "But it's the best place I can think of to start."

"If we're picking up dispersed thrust trails it's possible Khal and the Imperials have already been here and grabbed the bioweapon."

"They didn't get that much of a head start," Taryn said defensively.

"Also, I doubt they could just grab it and go," said Tahiri. "That weapon was never completed by Yal Phaath. Otherwise they would have tried to use it. What's in there is a template. That's why the Imps brought along Sinsor Khal. They need somebody with enough knowledge of Yuuzhan Vong bioscience to complete it for them, and I'd bet good money that Khal would want to stay on Baanu Rass so he can use as much native equipment as he can get his hands on to finish the project."

She spoke with enough authority to silence any more doubters. Red Kiss began to drop altitude and slip lower, beyond the jagged canyon-walls of the crack and into the interior of the worldship itself.

It was Taryn who spoke next, her voice uncharacter-istically tense. "I'm getting a new reading. Looks like something metallic."

Zekk looked at Tahiri. "Any idea?"

"No," she shook her blond head. "We should assume it's hostile."

"Shields up," Trista announced, flipping two over-head switches. "Arming weapons."

Muro and Praelyx shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. Zekk wanted to ask the Vong captain whether he was regretting his decision to come aboard, but now wasn't the time.

"What do we have, sister?" asked Trista as her hands gripped the control yoke tightly.

"I'm not sure." Taryn frowned. "It's almost like they've raised a low-intensity jamming field."

"They're probably in the labs already," Tahiri said. "We should signal for-"

"Incoming missile!" Taryn shouted as a proximity alarm started to wail.

Trista pulled Red Kiss into steep upward climb, vectoring back to the narrowing canyon-walls of the breach. Before they could get there, their shields shuddered under heavy impact. The ship went tumbling for a minute before Trista could wrest it back under control; by that time they'd been knocked off-course and found themselves flying upward toward a thick yorik coral flight ceiling.

"Another one!" Taryn announced as Trista snapped them into a sideways roll. Tahiri was slammed into Zekk who in turn slammed against the bulkhead hard enough to split the skin on his forehead and draw blood. Red Kiss shuddered once again, this time so hard that Tahiri and Zekk were thrown into the opposite bulk-head as the freighter started tumbling toward the plain below.

"What happened to the shields?" asked Muro.

"Still holding, barely," Trista grimaced. "Sister, where are they? Who's shooting at us?"

Taryn kept her eyes glued to the scanners. "I see them. One assault shuttle, on the ground… Two kilo-meters ahead, eighty degrees."

"Good. Get ready to give them a missile of our own."

"Gladly, sister."

Zekk and Tahiri, knocked around and tangled up in the back of the cockpit, extricated themselves from each other's limbs and surveyed the damage. Zekk was bleeding from his forehead and he could feel blood tickling as it caught in his eyebrow. Tahiri was bruised on one cheek but that was about it.

Muro grabbed the back of Taryn's seat. "Do we have to destroy them? We could try and capture them-"

"They're trying to kill us," the Hapan woman snapped. "I'm going to kill them right back. End of story."

Without warning, Trista dropped Red Kiss into a steep dive. The viewport was filled with the approach-ing plain, and the proximity alarm began to wail with the approach of yet another missile.

"Power doubled to dorsal shields," Trista announced. "Sister, do you have the target?"

"I have it," the other woman said, though Zekk still couldn't see the shuttle ahead.

"Fire when ready, sister," Trista gritted her teeth.

Taryn didn't need to be told twice. Red Kiss shuddered as a pair of concussion missiles streaked out from its ventral launch bay. Projectiles shot straight ahead on red streaks as Trista threw the freighter into one more twist, firing upward with its automated laser cannons to catch the missile Zekk could see looping down on them.

Dark space lit up all at once. A chain of laserfire caught the missile, detonating it a second before it could shatter Red Kiss' shields. At the same time, the two missiles dead ahead burst; in their short illumin-ation Zekk could spot the shiny, angular hull of an Imperial Gamma-class assault shuttle.

"Did we hit it?" asked Tahiri.

"Looks like they sent up some chaff," Praelyx said.

"We didn't score a direct hit, but that thing can't raise shields on the ground," Taryn reported. "It should have taken some damage, unless they're jamming our tracking systems."

"Is it still on the ground?" asked Muro.

"Still there," Taryn confirmed. "If they haven't run they've got to have people on the ground."

Trista pulled Red Kiss around in a tight loop. "Got another one in the tube, sister?"

"Getting a lock now."

"One more incoming!" Trista announced. "Any time, sister!"

"Got it!" Taryn said, and two more missiles lanced out.

Zekk could see it through the viewport: two missiles riding red tails, slicing past one headed the opposite direction. Trista swung Red Kiss upward as the missile flashed close-

-the explosion threw Zekk nearly onto Muro's shoulder. The freighter was tumbling, tumbling toward the plain that was coming up fast. He heard a hard pop somewhere and the whine of oxygen rushing through a hull breach, but all he could think about was the surface rushing toward them. Trista was swearing and Taryn pounding her console; Muro was a beacon of raw fear in the Force.

And Tahiri, gripping the back of Praelyx's seat hard, was focusing.

Zekk followed her lead. He found one still place in the panic and grabbed the freighter's nose, pulling it upward. He couldn't keep the ship from crashing, but he could at least prevent all of them from getting killed when the cockpit slammed into the ground at critical velocity.

His gut tried to jump out of his throat as Red Kiss belly-flopped onto the hard plain. It continued to scrape and slide across the rough ground until finally coming to a rest. The ship's interior lights shuddered and went dark and the roar of the engines dwindled to nothing. Suddenly the only sound was the panting of the people in the cockpit and the distant whine of escaping air.

Then a set of dim emergency lights kicked on, casting the room in an appropriately dire shade of red. Voice cracking, Zekk asked, "Is everyone all right?"

"Shockingly," Praelyx groaned, Muro nodded, and Tahiri sent Zekk gratitude through the Force.

As for the Zel sisters, Taryn was unbuckling her crash webbing while Trista stared grimly at the controls to her ship.

"I take it we won't be going anywhere soon," Zekk said.

"We're still losing oxygen, and the Imps are still out there." Trista said. "Everyone needs to seal their vac suits. Now."