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eyelid. Andnow, showing his ornamental disfigurements and tattoos, he was ready to address the executor on this most important matter.
    He moved to the side of the room, to his locker, and he was trembling so badly that he could hardly work the combination. He finally did manage to open it, though, and as the top rolled back, the platform inside raised up, showing a brown cloth covering a pair of ball-like lumps.
    Gently, Yomin Carr removed the cloth and considered the lumps, his Villips. He almost went to the one on the left, the one joined with Prefect Da’Gara’s villip, but he knew the protocol and wouldn’t dare disobey.
    So he went to the one on the right and gently stroked its ridged top until the single break in the membranous tissue, a hole that resembled an eye socket, puckered to life.
    Yomin Carr continued to stroke the creature, to awaken the consciousness-joined villip more than halfway across the galaxy. He felt the pull of that creature a moment later and knew the sensation to mean that the executor had heard his call and was likewise awakening his own villip.
    Yomin Carr moved his hand back fast as that central hole puckered and then opened wide, and then rolled back over itself, the villip inverting to assume the appearance of the head of the executor.
    Yomin Carr bowed respectfully. “It is time,” he said, glad to be using his native language once more.
    “You have silenced the station?” the executor asked.
    “I go now,” Yomin Carr explained.
    “Then go,” the executor said, and with typical discipline, not even inquiring about the details of the incoming signal, he broke communication. In response, Yomin Carr’s villip rolled back in on itself to once again appear as a nondescript ridged membranous ball.
    Again, the warrior resisted the urge to utilize the other villip, reminding himself that he had to move fast, that the executor would not tolerate any failure from him at this criticaljuncture. He rushed across the room, back to his closet, and took out a small coffer; he kissed it twice and muttered a swift prayer before opening it. Inside sat a small statue of a creature, the most beautiful creature of all to Yomin Carr and to all the warriors of the Yuuzhan Vong. Its mass resembled a brain, with a single huge eye and a puckered maw. Many tentacles extended from that bulk, some thick and short, others fine and long. This was Yun-Yammka, the Slayer, the Yuuzhan Vong god of war.
    Yomin Carr prayed again, the entire litany of Yun-Yammka, then kissed the statue gently and replaced the coffer in his closet.
    He wore only a skin loincloth, as it had been in the purer days of his warrior people’s dawn, showing all of his remarkable tattoos and his rippling muscles, and he carried only his coufee, a crude, but ultimately effective, large double-edged knife, again, a ceremonial throwback to the early days of the warrior Yuuzhan Vong. Yomin Carr thought all ceremony appropriate for this particular mission, the linking salvo between the advance force and the actual invasion. He poked his head out into the hall, then moved through the complex, his bare feet making not a whisper of sound. He knew that getting out of the place without his human disguise might be difficult, but realized also that if he was discovered without the masquer, no one would recognize him as their associate. Besides, he figured, if he was discovered, that would only be an excuse to kill someone, an appropriate sacrifice to Yun-Yammka on this momentous night.
    The night was chill, but that only invigorated Yomin Carr. His blood pumped furiously from the excitement, from the danger of this mission to the understanding that the Great Doctrine was at last under way. He ran to the wall and sprinted up a ladder, scrambling over the top and dropping, with hardly a thought, to the cleared ground outside.
    The distant roar of a redcrested cougar gave him no pause. He was in that creature’s element now, but he, too, was ahunter.