Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime Read Online Free PDF Page A

members were not original colonists, but had rotated in from other ExGal satellite stations, or from the independent ExGal Society’s home base.
    The bottom rim of the sun dipped below the distant horizon, and the orange and green tints spread wide from north to south. Somewhere unseen in the jungle, a redcrestedcougar gave a long and low growl, heralding the onset of twilight.
    Danni took it all in and tried to dream, but given the reality of her current tedium, the endless listening for signals that never came, the endless staring at the same intergalactic haze, she wasn’t quite sure of what she should dream about.
    Behind her, from one of the windows of the station’s center structure, Yomin Carr watched the young woman’s every move. He was new to the station, the most recent to join the crew, and it hadn’t taken him long to recognize that many of the others looked up to Danni Quee, and that many of the men were obviously attracted to her.
    Yomin Carr didn’t understand that sentiment at all. He found Danni, as he did all humans, quite repulsive, for while Yomin Carr’s people, the Yuuzhan Vong, resembled humans in form—though they were on average a dozen or so centimeters taller and quite a bit heavier and had less hair on their heads, both face and scalp—their ways were hardly similar. Even if Yomin Carr might admit that Danni was somewhat attractive physically—though how could she be, with not a single scar or tattoo to mark her rise toward godhood!—those tenet differences, attitude differences, made him consider any union with her with disgust. He was Yuuzhan Vong, not human, and a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. How ironic then that the pitiful humans thought him one of them!
    Despite his revulsion, he did watch Danni, and often, for she, above all others, was the leader of this democratic group. According to the others, she had been the one to kill the cougar that had slipped into the compound that first year; she had been the one to take the creaking old Spacecaster shuttle into orbit to repair the damaged orbiting telescope only a couple of months earlier, and she had been the one to figure out how that scope might be repaired in the first place.
    They all looked up to her.
    She was the one Yomin Carr could not ignore.
    “Early again?” came a voice behind Yomin Carr.
    He turned to regard the speaker, though he knew from the voice, particularly the teasing tone, that it was Bensin Tomri.
    “Or is it that you’re still here from last night?” Tomri went on, and he gave a chuckle.
    Yomin Carr smiled, but did not reply—no answer was needed, he understood, for these people often wasted words merely to hear the sound of their own voices. Besides, there was more truth to the words than Bensin Tomri could ever guess. Yomin Carr had not been in here straight through since his shift the previous night, but he had been present more often than not. The others of the station thought it was simply “newbie” excitement, the feeling they had all shared when they had first arrived that the elusive extragalactic signal could happen at any time. In their eyes, Yomin Carr had taken that excitement to the extreme, perhaps, but he had done nothing, he was confident, to arouse any real suspicion.
    “He’ll get bored with it soon enough,” Garth Breise said, another of the night-shift controllers, sitting up on the wide room’s higher level, where the comfortable chairs, the gaming table, and the food could be found. The room was elliptical, with a wide viewscreen on the front wall, seven control pods in a three-one-three pattern before it, and the raised galley area taking up the rear quarter.
    Yomin Carr forced another smile at the remark and made his way down toward the front of the room, to his usual position at Pod 3, the left-hand one of the first row. He heard Garth and Bensin whispering some remarks about him from above, but he ignored them, taking the attack on his pride—normally a call for a death