The Unifying Force Read Free Page B

been able to fabricate or steal during the excavation of the fire pit, in which several dozen droids had been ritually slagged by the camp’s resident priests.
    Every prisoner in the hut was awake, and many hadn’t slept a wink all night. They watched silently from the flattened fronds and grasses that were their beds, wishing they could voice a personal
good luck
to the four who were about to embark on what seemed a hopeless enterprise. Lookouts had been posted at the doorway. The light was gauzy, and the air was blessedly cool. Outside the hut, the chitterings and stridulations of jungle life were reaching a fevered crescendo.
    “You want to go over any of it?” Cracken asked in a whisper.
    “No, sir,” the four answered in unison.
    Cracken nodded soberly.
    “Then may the Force be with all of you,” Page said for everyone in the hut.
    The cramped entrance to the tunnel was concealed by Cracken’s own bed of insect-ridden palm fronds. Below a removable grate, the hand-hewn shaft fell into utter darkness. The secret passageway had been started by the first captives to be imprisoned on Selvaris, and had been enlarged and lengthened over the long months by successive groups of new arrivals. Progress had often been measured in centimeters, as when the diggers had struck a mass of yorik coral that had taken root in the sandy soil. But now the tunnel extended beneath the prison wall and the senalak grasses beyond, to just inside the distant tree line.
    His facial fur blackened with charcoal, the gaunt Jenet was the first to worm his way into the hole. When the three Bith had bellied in behind him, the entrance was closed and covered over.
    What little light there had been disappeared.
    The nominal leader of the would-be escapees, the Jenet had been captured on Bilbringi, during a raid on an enemy installation. His fellow captives knew him as Thorsh, although on his homeworld of Garban a list of his accomplishments and transgressions would have been affixed to the name. Reconnaissance was his specialty, so he was no stranger to darkness or tight spots, having infiltrated many a Yuuzhan Vong warren and grashal on Duro, Gyndine, and other worlds. The Selvaris tunnel felt comfortably familiar. The Bith had it harder because of their size, but they were a well-coordinated species, with memory and olfactory abilities that rivaled Thorsh’s own.
    Indeterminate minutes of muted crawling brought them to the first of a series of confined right-angle turns, where the tunnelers had been forced to detour around an amorphous mass of yorik coral. To Thorsh the detour meant that the team was directly under the prison wall itself. Now it was just a matter of negotiating the long stretch beneath the senalaks the Yuuzhan Vong had cultivated outside the perimeter.
    Thorsh knew better than to relax, but his continued vigilance hardly mattered.
    In the space of a local week, senalak roots had penetrated the roof of the poorly braced tunnel, and the convoluted roots were every bit as barbed as the strands released by the knee-high stalks themselves.
    For meters at a stretch there was simply no avoiding them.
    The barbs shredded the thin garments the four had been wearing when captured, and left deep, bleeding furrows in the flesh of their backs.
    Thorsh muttered a curse at each encounter, but the Bith—ever careful about displaying emotion—endured the pain in silence.
    The brutal crawl ended where the tunnel sloped upward at the far edge of the senalak field. Shortly the team emerged inside the buttressed base of an enormous hardwood. The thick-trunked tree bore a striking resemblance to the gnarl-trees native to Dagobah, but was in fact a different species altogether. One hundred meters away, the prison wall glowed softly green with bioluminescence. Two sleepy guards occupied the closest watchtower, their amphistaffs stiff as spears, and a third could be glimpsed in the adjacent tower. Those warriors who weren’t elsewhere within the walls