Darkness had fallen by the time the TIE Defender arrived at the site of the old Jedi enclave, far to the north of Capital City.
In the end, the plan they'd come up with was fairly simple - Anakin, Tahiri and Jaina would go ahead to pick up the voxyn as arranged, and Jacen, Alema Rar, Lowie, Jacen Syndulla and his Lasat apprentice Jara La would form a backup team to move in when required, with extra support from the Lothal militia and the Ravelin.
Discussing the details wasn't easy, with Jacen still distrustful, Anakin having to fight down his own urge to walk away, and none of them wanting to explain to the locals about the time-travel elements. But at least they'd been able to get a decent lunch, and grab some of their own clothes from the Yavin Turtle - or Anakin and Tahiri had. Jaina was still in her Imperial uniform.
The archaeological site looked impressive from the cockpit, a vast excavation sunk deep beneath the flat, frozen ground that stretched away into the surrounding night, protected by a transparent roof set almost at ground level, and floodlit inside so that it seemed brightly alive in the darkness, and in daytime that same roof would allow the intrior to be filled with natural light from the immense sky overhead.
Apart from the excavation itself, the only structure was a discreet building at the rear - simple, low and modern, with sunken subterranean floors alongside the excavation, and a flat roof only a meter or two off the ground that doubled as a landing pad.
The interior, however, simply wasn't very impressive - one area near the entrance was mocked up to look like it was still under excavation, criss-crossed with grid wire and with artefacts half-buried in the ground, but it had the static look of an old fake. The other side of the floor was filled with an unimaginative display of low, square cabinets, showing uninteresting artifacts, too neatly-ordered, with uninformative holo-labels, and some errors of identification that even Anakin knew enough to correct.
Large display boards on the walls around the rear told the story of the Jedi enclave, though most of it was superficial speculation, summarised from a basic history of the sector, with a dramatic account of the site's destruction by the Empire three decades earlier, which did nothing to communicate the actual violence of cultural suppression, and instead offered a dramatic poster-image of a Mandalorian girl blowing up stuff, who turned out to be some sort of Rebel commando.
A small holodisplay in the centre of the entrance lobby gave a more detailed look at what had been destroyed, showing a structure that looked like one of the little stone outcrops that jutted from Lothal's plains.
"Looks like a grashal," Tahiri frowned.
"Not an urtya?" Anakin offered gently.
She ribbed him with her elbow. "No. We have proper domed urtyas, and Vexa's people used funny pointed ones, but never in combination. See that banding in the cross-sections? That's deposited limestone, just like all the best Yuuzhan Vong architecture. And our permanent slave-restraints."
She gave him a little tease with her fingertips, where the hair at his nape met the collar of his jacket.
"Naturally occurring grashals, then?"
"Mmm. I like the idea that your Galaxy was doing things like that for our arrival…"
"You two are doing my head in," Jaina murmured, wandering back with a group of what looked like uniformed scientists, mostly human, plus a few droids and a single young Mon Cal, led by a lean young woman who seemed vaguely familiar.
"I'm Shayla Na'al," she said, with a nervous smile. "From NRI on Coruscant."
"Kenth Hamner sent us," Anakin lied. "I've done some work with Joi Ecroth on Yuuzhan Vong weapons implants. We're here to get an update on what you're doing with the voxyn. And the other project you were already working on here…?"
Evidently, she was someone who name-dropping worked with, blue eyes widening in reaction. "You'd better come this way, then."
Tahiri gave a smirk, as they fell in step beside the archaeologist.
"The voxyn are in the annexe that was built to store the temperature-sensitive artefacts, but the other arm of our project here is still on public display. I was a student volunteer on the original excavation here with Corellia Antilles, so they appointed me as project supervisor. There used to be a huge temple here, but as you probably already know, the Empire tore it down, partially for looting purposes and partially to gain access to what I'm about to show you. There are still some fragments of the monumental doorways, some recovered from storage buildings of the Galactic Museum, others in more fragmentary form from Mount Tantiss." She gestured at a hologram that appeared to one side, an illusory doorway with its arch engraved with glyphs, and a display alongside showing their meaning. "I don't know if you know this ancient Jedi script - we think it might be pre-Republic."
"Hang on a moment," Tahiri said. "How many letters are there in that script?"
"The usual twenty-five, like High Galactic or Reformed Aurebesh. Why?"
She gave an amused shake of her head, a sort of silent laugh. "Any letter-system with those specific twenty-five characters is directly based on High Galactic, however different the glyphs look. There's no reason at all that those specific sound-qualities ought to be selected for letterforms - they're arbitrary enough in Basic. So when you find scripts that try to look unique but use those specific twenty-five glyph-sounds, it's pretty much guaranteed that they were made up by someone trying to pretend they're older than they really are. I won't name the guilty. But if you look at the Tionese alphabet, which is probably an older script, you can see what a system actually adapted to another language looks like. Twenty-four letters, but seven vowels, and four or five unique consonants. Probably High Galactic was adapted from it via a dialect variant. Aurebesh is like that as well, all those funny sibilants and diphthongs which tell you it was adapted from High Galactic for a non-human species, maybe via a language that had already added Nen… the Empire-era reforms to reduce it to the same twenty-five sounds as High Galactic are ludicrous, because apparently COMPNOR were just as terrible at linguistics as they were at politics or genetics - the idea that there's something natural about those glyphs is like believing bureaucratic Core humanoids are a master race. You want really weird, try something like Massassi. Or the abjad that we use on Tatooine."
Jaina frowned. "That funny Huttese-looking aurebesh that Uncle Luke's computers always auto-convert everything into?"
"That one," Anakin nodded. "Anyway, Tahiri's right, the inscriptions here look secondary. They might only be a few centuries old. Did you run a hyperluminescence scan on the incisions?"
Shayla Na'al looked a bit uncomfortable at that. "Not really, no."
Before things could get any more awkward, they found themselves standing in front of a vast mural, depicting three austere figures.
"The Ones," Anakin murmured, blinking in disbelief.
The archaeologist gave him the look that he'd seen often enough when he'd been a kid, the one he got by blundering into adults' areas of expertise. She raised her voice, as if addressing the scientists at the back. "For those of you who don't know, the Ones are ancient Jedi symbols. They represent the Unifying Force, and the opposing powers of Dark and Light, personified under the names of Son and Daughter..."
"Brenzlit," Tahiri spat. "Khaphet. You explain."
"Ah." Anakin stepped forward, gesturing towards the mural before his girlfriend decided to purify the area by actually decapitating somebody. "Yuuzhan. Yammka, and Ne'shel. The Yun'o, or Ones… ah, symbolic concepts, you might call them, in the Yuuzhan Vong religion. Yun-Yuuzhan is normally presented as much more abstract and unknowable, but Yammka and Ne'shel. Um, if there's some Jedi text that equates them with Dark and Light, then I'm not sure that's correct. They actually represent the imposition of order and the liberation that comes from finding true pattern. Or assertion and acceptance, strength and subtlety, Male and Female in their sexual aspects, Brother/Sister. Uhh. High Priest Harrar would call them a metaphor for essential aspects of the pattern of existence…"
Jaina looked appalled. "What?!"
"This is a baanu al'tirna." Tahiri's shrug was deceptively casual. She still had that sway in her movements that she got when she was feeling dangerous. "A Yuuzhan Vong time-travel portal."
The NRI archaeologist gave a frown that suggested she was feeling really uncomfortable now. "Does that translate as World Between Worlds…?"
"Bad translation," Tahiri snapped. Then she laughed, suddenly joyous and human. "Terrible translation, actually. Where did you find that term?!"
Anakin mulled that for a moment, seeing how the translation completely lost the counterpointed dimensions of world-as-sphere and world-as-surface, the connotations of relativistic movement between planes of reality. "Could do, yeah."
"Hang on," Jaina murmured, frowning. "Something doesn't add up here..."
Shayla Na'al gave a guttural sound that made all three Jedi spin towards her, reaching for their lightsabers - but she swayed, and spun, dropping to her knees and then sprawling full-length on the floor, with some sort of bright-tufted dart, or perhaps a streamlined flying creature, projecting from her neck.
And the entire floor of the excavation was suddenly full of Yuuzhan Vong.