What An Incredible Smell You've Discovered

[Velok the Younger]

SHADOWLANDS BENEATH RUINS OF YUGWAAARGH​

KASHYYYK​

REPUBLIC TERRITORY​

This place had died hard. Splintered tree-branches the size of capital ships, shards of wood like starfighters, the clean-picked bones of thousands upon thousands of fallen Vong. Vong, and something else entirely.

This far down, sunlight was a myth. For light, Kash used a glowrod and her speeder's headlamps. In the headlamps' light, she crouched by a flattened pod ten metres across. It was, or had been, the husk of a predatory plant whose food had proven too tough to chew. In death, the plant's chemistry had changed. Kash hummed softly to herself as she sliced the pod-husk open with a vibroblade. Within was a jumbled, grotesque mess, drained of fluids but still largely intact. Three Vong, their armor's Bafforr bone worms dead but intact -- she claimed those with her bladetip and put them in vials, in case they were interesting -- and two things she hadn't seen before. Sithspawn, varieties of Force-mutated humanoids, stinking of the waters of Aza'zoth. With immense telekinetic care, she wrapped the still-hazardous corpses in plastic and stowed them in the back of the speeder with the rest. In the long months since the Battle of Yugwaaargh, most of the samples had decayed or been knawed down to skeletons.

"Crude, crude, crude..." She slipped her glowrod through her belt and got behind the controls. The speeder truck headed off through the Shadowlands, headlamps scanning for anything of substance.

 

[Velok the Younger]

It would, in the end, be a misnomer of sorts to call the Shadowlands Republic territory. Oh, Republic fleets patrolled this sector, Republic allies controlled this planet's cities and fortresses, but nobody and nothing controlled the Shadowlands. The lowest of Kashyyyk's seven arboreal levels was home to the bones and wreckage of the Sith army -- and of those who'd sought to make their fortune on its salvage. One little speeder with headlights couldn't, shouldn't, have been possessed of a life expectancy worth the name. Kash navigated around tree-roots the size of command walkers and pushed her way through trackless undergrowth, but she remained, for now, undisturbed. Part of that was instinct, a bone-deep understanding of monsters. Part of that was luck.

And part was the high-powered subsonic resonator in her passenger seat. She wasn't the kind of idiot that trusted the Force and ignored technology. Frankly, she thought the Force had a tendency to play with a rigged deck anyway; trust didn't enter into the equation.

The speeder came to a halt again, near the rotten hulk of a rakamat. Chunks had been ripped from the ground and nearby tree-roots as the dovin basals lashed out in terror. They'd been eaten all the same, their finely-tuned gravitic biotech just as nutritious as any undifferentiated meat. The rakamat, broken by the fall, had been hollowed out by scavengers and insects. Trapped beneath it, pressed to the ground by plating, were flattened corpses that were only partially gone. And here, too, she found the surgically- and magically-altered beings that the Sith had used as weapons a long, long way above.

 

[Velok the Younger]

The speeder trundled to a halt in the shadow of another, a cargo model with a droid at the wheel. She'd estimated her route's dropoff points more or less accurately: her speeder's cargo bed was about three-quarters full of plast-wrapped samples. She transferred them personally, then sent minute tissue samples off with a separate droid, a small aerial model. That done -- the bed of her speeder still reeking -- she headed off alone once more, on a divergent course from the rising truck. This route would loop her through the roots of Yugwaaargh, a deep hollow nourished by the blood of thousands. Other things had mixed with the blood, things even she couldn't name.

Yet.

As the departing truck's engine whined away into the Shadowlands, Kash descended into the hollows of the roots. She left her own speeder, liberally daubed with decay, at a choke point, then descended on foot. In the dark, her cat's-eyes glowed gently after she adjusted them.

 

[Velok the Younger]

Adjustment -- well, there wasn't exactly a word for what she did to activate them. It had as much in common with a reverse lullaby as it did with flipping a switch. Her cat-slit eyes flared to golden light, glowing for a moment, no more. What would be the use of night-vision that blotted out its own sensitivity with background light? No, the Eyes of the Dunaan, as they were called -- they operated well enough in near-total darkness that the added light was beyond negligible, and thus it didn't last. It wasn't bad for brief intimidation, though, not that there was anything to intimidate down here. The apex monsters of the Shadowlands didn't believe in being afraid.

And here she found it, the one that had evaded Rave Merrill's Great Hunt years before. At a guess, it had been drawn here by the blood of martyrs and butchers, and by the Force maelstrom that had been born overhead while Masters used their full powers against armies. Its eyes, too, glowed as she approached, like a Bando Gora reaver forty feet tall. It had carved its way down here through wroshyr wood and bloody earth -- she walked the scars of its passage -- but its presence still baffled some part of her mind. The terentatek growled a monosyllabic, near-wordless question. Some rancors could read, and terentateks had a wisdom all their own. And you didn't get to be an alpha, a true akure, without a cunning that grew over the ages.

Kash spread her empty hands. "No blade today, old one."