Star Wars: Skywalker's Rebellion

Chapter Thirteen: Vong Estate

Cade and Nyna Calixte entered the ransacked building carefully, but there was no one around. The inside of the building was a lot like the outside: messy, muddy, and disgusting. Which was really just like the rest of the planet. The whole tone of the planet was really taking its toll on Cade. He had been feeling different, more depressed and sadistic. It was hard not to on such a planet. Wayland was a truly horrible place.

To Cade's surprise, the large building wasn't just an open room. There were corridors, staircases, rooms. Cade and Nyna walked past several and peeked into them, looking for Wolf and Shado. One room had a mysterious machine in the middle, another had a bed with a crane thing over it. There was a room with a pool of strange liquid and also one with a strange, large conveyor belt. They had visited almost a dozen rooms when it struck Cade that they were all torture devices. A shiver went down Cade's spine, but they continued searching.

Although there wasn't a creature in sight, they didn't dare to call out for Wolf and Shado. Who knew what could hear them or wake up or something.

Eventually, they returned to the "main room" and decided to take a flight of stairs down underground. You'd expect a basement to be more disgusting than then the main levels, but Cade had seen enough nauseating things so it hardly even bothered him. The contents of the sub-levels were what really bothered him. Instead of "rooms", there were multiple long hallways with iron bars as walls. Behind the bars, there was a small square area of room that was cut off by a wall in between. They were jail cells. Hundreds of them.

Cade took the left side and Nyna took the right and they started to search the cells for Wolf and Shado. Cade tried not to focus too much on the creatures and things that he found in the cells. They had searched several dozen when Nyna abruptly threw her hands into the air and stopped.

"This is pointless," she said. "We're getting nowhere. We're not going to be able to search all of them before getting caught, and we don't even know if they're in here or not."

"So what do you want to do?"

"Let's search the other levels," said Calixte. "If we don't find them up there, we'll come back."

Cade nodded his agreement and he followed her back up the corridor of cells. They made their way up the stairs and began exploring the levels above the first floor. The second floor was a lot like the first, with torture rooms, normal rooms, and other indistinguishable rooms. It was the third floor, though, that got Cade's attention. Cade had been hearing faint noises and when he drew nearer to the third floor, they began growing louder.

Cade motioned for Nyna to follow him and he walked toward the noise. As Cade got closer, he realized that the noise was voices, but it was in another language. Yuuzhan Vong. Cade found the peak of the noise and peered in the room it was coming from. In the room, there were thousands of Vong packed in, listening to the leader speak. Cade glanced at Calixte, but if she understood the Yuuzhan Vong language, she didn't let on.

At least now he knew why the building was empty—they were having a meeting. Cade continued listening and tried to pick up on body language and voice tones, but that was just about impossible since the Vongs almost always looked, acted, and sounded angry and possessed.

Cade was about to suggest that they go and look for their friends again when he heard a muffled yelp from behind him. He spun around to see that a sack had been thrown over Nyna's head. Cade reached for his lightsaber, but before he could get a grip on it, he felt a sack fall over his own head. Cade squirmed and tried to get out of the sack, but someone or something was holding him tight. Before he could try and use the force, something hard hit his head and he lost consciousness.