PART FOUR

REVELATION

Ngaaluh joined Nom Anor and Kunra deep beneath the quarters she had most recently been assigned. A double shift of guards outside the Prophet’s personal chambers let her through after checking with their master. Her expression was wary, concerned.

“Master.” She bowed her head in respect and nodded a more cursory acknowledgment of Kunra. “I came as quickly as I could. What is the emergency?”

“The emergency has passed, for now. I called you here to keep you informed.” In an unhurried, matter-of-fact tone, Nom Anor explained to his chief spy in the court of Shimrra what had happened the previous night. As she learned of Shoon-mi’s betrayal, her eyes widened. Even after years of training in the deceptive arts, she was unable to completely hide her shock.

“This is impossible,” she said at one point, shaking her head as though refusing to hear. “I cannot accept that Shoon-mi would do this.”

Nom Anor lowered the collar he had worn high all day, revealing the gash the traitor had put in his throat. “It happened,” he said. His tone remained calm, belying the rage still burning in his gut and the dark suspicion that was rising to take its place. “The fool dared raise his hand against me, and has paid for it. But I wonder if this is not the end of it.”

“I have asked around,” Kunra said, his expression grim. “Shoon-mi was not alone in his discontent. There is a feeling growing that we are not moving quickly or decisively enough.”

“And I wonder at Shoon-mi’s boldness,” Nom Anor added. “He simply didn’t have the brains to organize such a coup on his own. There has to be someone else behind it.”

Ngaaluh glanced at Kunra, then back at her Prophet. Her eyes were full of confusion and uncertainty. “Who would that be, Master?”

“At this point,” Nom Anor said, “your guess is as good as mine. But we will find them, and eliminate them.”

“There are rivals,” Kunra said. “There are at least two subordinate acolytes, Idrish and V’tel, who would take power for themselves, if they thought they could get away with it.”

“I find it …” Ngaaluh struggled for the right words. “…  appalling and inconceivable that someone in whom you have placed so much trust would consider turning on you.”

“That they would consider it is what makes them such good emissaries.” Nom Anor examined her alarm at the thought and found it sincere but puzzling. “Why does this surprise you? You are an expert at deception. You know that it is in everyone’s nature to betray—if not Shimmra, then me, or both of us.”

“But no—” She swallowed. “To attack you would undermine everything we have worked for. It is not something the Jeedai would sanction.”

Ah. The words of a true fanatic to whom the movement was as pure and incorruptible as its ideals. To Nom Anor, a realist, the heresy was something quite different, and it behaved as such. To him it was a means of attaining power, and there was nothing stopping others within the movement from trying to use it toward exactly the same end.

“Not all are as dedicated as you, dear Ngaaluh,” he said. “Not all see things so clearly.”

“Perhaps the attack came from outside the movement,” she said, her lips tightening into a thin, angry line, “from Shimrra.”

“The Supreme Overlord has tried to infiltrate us in the past,” Kunra conceded, “but he could never have gotten so close as to turn Shoon-mi without us knowing.”

“And he hasn’t the patience for such a plan,” Nom Anor said. “He would have used Shoon-mi to lead his warriors into the heart of our hiding place, then destroyed us in one sweep. No.” He shook his head decisively. “Had Shimrra been behind it, we would be rotting in the yargh’un pit right now with the other heretics.”

“If word spreads of this attack on you,” she said, exhibiting more of her usual spirit, “that might make a suitable cover story. It will provide a more palatable explanation than that one of your closest turned against you.”

“Word will not spread,” Kunra said grimly. “I have made certain of that.”

“And what good would such a tale do anyway?” Nom Anor asked. “It would fill our masses with anger and the need for revenge. They would demand that we attack Shimrra directly, to make it known that we cannot be intimidated. We cannot do that. It would be death for us all to make a move on the Supreme Overlord before we are ready.”

“If we were ready soon—”

“We won’t be, Ngaaluh. Our undertaking is massive and the risk great. Small acts of terrorism are one thing; we can afford to lose a cell or two if the perpetrators are discovered. But to throw everything into an ill-prepared confrontation with Shimrra?” He shook his head. “It would be less a case of doing than dying.”

She nodded slowly, as though faintly disappointed. What was it with fanatics? Nom Anor asked himself. Why were they ever willing to throw their lives away on doomed quests? This was one instance when the Jedi were setting a very bad example. After Ganner and Anakin Solo, pointless death seemed to have garnered a powerful glamour.

But not for Nom Anor, he swore. If he was going to fall, it wasn’t to be with some scruffy rabble on a misguided quest that had no hope of succeeding.

She seemed to accept it at last. Ngaaluh’s head hung down onto her chest as she said, “You are right, of course, Master.”

“I am,” he reassured her with more than a hint of command in his voice. “We are striving on numerous fronts. Our numbers grow every day. Shimrra is aware of us and our efforts. It’s only a matter of time before he accepts the inevitable.”

“Yes, Master.” Her head came up, and he saw in her eyes that she had swallowed his rhetoric completely. “He cannot ignore us forever.”

“So we continue with our plans. We will spread the message ever more widely, and facilitate its spread by getting rid of those who oppose us. The campaign against Zareb goes as expected, I presume?”

“Those who will speak against him have successfully infiltrated his household,” she said. “When the time is right, they will be captured and interrogated.”

“The time is right,” Nom Anor said. The time was always right to watch another rival fall. “Set the plan in motion tomorrow.”

“I worry about this,” Kunra said. “We are wasting resources, throwing novices in such numbers to their deaths.”

Nom Anor nodded. This was the strongest argument against his plan of revenge, but it was easily countered. “We will find more. The one thing we don’t lack for at the moment, Kunra, is a willing congregation.”

“They may become less willing if our targets remain lowly intendants and executors.”

“Not so lowly,” Nom Anor said with a scowl. He remembered his days as an executor with fondness after long months of squalor behind the mask of the Prophet.

“But it is hard to see their relevance in the larger scheme of things. Yes, they may create opportunities for those loyal to us to rise, but how long must the faithful wait before they are free?” Kunra’s eyes narrowed, as though he were squinting into a bright light. “I repeat only that which I hear on the lips of malcontents. It is not my opinion.”

“No, because you have no more wish to commit suicide than I.” Nom Anor exhaled heavily. “We will deal with malcontents as they arise. Let them attack Shimrra if they want. They will do it without my support, or my resources.”

“Perhaps one of them will get lucky,” Ngaaluh said with a gleam in her eye.

It was time to stop the conversation in its tracks. Killing Shimrra, Nom Anor knew, would have disastrous consequences for the heretics. Chaos would reign for as long as it took a new Supreme Overlord to take power—and how much harder would it be to curry favor from Warmaster Nas Choka or High Prefect Drathul, both of whom were relatively unknown quantities? Nom Anor needed Shimrra exactly where he was. If Shimrra fell and the war effort failed, he doubted that Mara Jade Skywalker and the Galactic Alliance would show much mercy when they found out who was really behind the Jedi Heresy …

“You received a courier today,” he said to the priestess. “I presume he carried word from Shimrra’s court.”

“Yes,” she said, momentarily flustered by the change in topic. “I have underlings bring me news on a regular basis. It does not do to keep out of touch for long. A misstep can be fatal.”

That Nom Anor knew well. “Do any of the developments concern us? Has High Priest Jakan’s spineray notion been approved?”

“It has been turned down, as expected.” She thought for a moment. “There was one matter my underling reported. It may not be of direct concern, but it is still intriguing. Do you remember that mission to the Unknown Regions I mentioned before?”

“The commander who thought he had found Zonama Sekot? He went missing, if I recall, after making his claims.”

“Yes. There is more to the story, now. It appears that this Ekh’m Val didn’t just claim to have found the living planet. He claimed that he had brought a piece back from it.”

“Really?” Nom Anor feigned interest. “Has this Commander Val been located yet?”

“No, Master.”

“And what happened to that piece of Zonama Sekot?”

“It has disappeared, too.”

He snorted. “Very convenient. What do you think, Kunra? Another boastful warrior with nothing to back up his claim?”

“There is corroborating evidence,” Ngaaluh said before Kunra could answer. “A yorik-trema was impounded about the same time as Commander Val is supposed to have made his claims. Also, a vessel by the name of Noble Sacrifice entered orbit around Yuuzhan’tar immediately prior to then. It was destroyed on suspicion of harboring infidel spies. The landing field records indicate that the impounded yorik-trema came from Noble Sacrifice.”

“I don’t understand the mystery,” Nom Anor said. “Why can’t this ship have been exactly what we’re told it was?”

“It is not in Warmaster Nas Choka’s nature to hide incursions of this kind. He would have reported it, used the fact that his warriors successfully stopped it to gain advancement in Shimrra’s eyes. He wouldn’t bury it like this.”

“Are you certain it has been buried? Perhaps your informants conveniently ignore a proper handling of the affair for the sake of a good story.”

Ngaaluh shook her head. “I checked. There is no mention of this Commander Val anywhere, in any of the official recordings.”

“So he didn’t exist at all.”

“Yet I did find him.”

That surprised him. “I thought you said he’d disappeared.”

“Not for those who looked hard enough.”

Nom Anor was intrigued now, whether he wanted to be or not. “Where is he, then? Have you spoken to him?”

“Sadly, no. He is in no condition to talk. Commander Val is dead. My underling found his body in the yargh’un pit. It had been stripped of all identifying features and tossed, lifeless, with the others Shimrra has shamed with a dishonorable death.”

For a moment, Nom Anor was convinced. Something was afoot; someone had wanted Commander Val silenced, for some sinister reason, perhaps inimical to Shimrra …

Then his usual skepticism returned.

“How did you know it was him?” he challenged her. “You said the body had no identifying marks.”

“The timing of the body’s death coincided with Val’s supposed disappearance,” she responded. “Besides, how many perfectly fit warriors have you seen thrown into yargh’un pits? That honor is reserved for those of the lowest ranks, starving heretics convicted of the foulest crime of heresy.”

“Treachery is not much higher. If Val had collaborated with the infidels, or allowed himself to be corrupted, his fate might have been the same. Your underling could have been mistaken—or simply added his own elaborations to the tale.”

“It’s possible,” she conceded.

“I fear that you have been taken for a fool, Ngaaluh. You should know better.”

“I will not argue that point with you, Master.” The priestess bowed her head. “I am simply saying what I have heard.”

“And my thanks for that. It is a diverting tale.” Nom Anor glanced at Kunra, who seemed immoderately fascinated by the conversation. The Shamed warrior’s critical faculties either had not kicked in, or lacked the capacity to separate likely falsehood from an unlikely truth.

“Look into the matter more closely when you return to Shimrra’s court,” he allowed her. “I’m always happy to be proven right. And if I’m wrong—well, perhaps there is something in it we can use.”

“Yes, Master.” She bowed again. “I will return in two days to present my evidence against Prefect Zareb.”

“Excellent.” Nom Anor experienced another pleasing rush at the thought of another old rival destroyed, the third in a row. “This plan is working perfectly well. As far as I am concerned, we are following the ideal course. And any who disagree with me can join Commander Val in the yargh’un pit.”

“That can easily be arranged,” Kunra said, “with Ngaaluh’s help. Any rumbling in the ranks will soon be quelled.”

“As my master wills it.” The priestess bowed her head a third time, and begged permission to leave. She was tired and required time to prepare for the days ahead.

Nom Anor permitted her to go, explaining that his concern over Shoon-mi’s betrayal had evaporated. What did he have to fear with contingencies such as this in place?

Pleased, she bade him a good rest himself, and left.

When Ngaaluh had gone, Nom Anor turned to Kunra.

“Well?” was all he asked.

“I believe her,” the ex-warrior said. “She is not the one who covets your throne.”

A knot eased in him, but he did not allow himself to relax. “Ngaaluh is a master of deception. You could not tell that she was lying simply by looking at her. Her prattle about this mysterious Commander Val could be nothing more than a distraction, to draw attention away from herself.”

Kunra shrugged. “That’s possible,” he said. “I am not as skilled as you in exposing lies.”

Nom Anor narrowed his gaze. Was that sarcasm he heard in Kunra’s voice? Perhaps they were in league together, he thought: the two closest to the Prophet plotting to unseat him and presenting a united front when the attempt failed.

Certainly Ngaaluh seemed keen to attack Shimrra—and she had received the mysterious courier that day …

“She remains useful,” he said, coming to a similar conclusion about Kunra even as he spoke the words. “While she remains so, I can live with my doubt. And I can take precautions. It takes more than a coufee in the dark to kill me, now more than ever.”

“That is eminently so.”

Nom Anor ignored the smugness in Kunra’s tone, just as he had ignored the sarcasm. “And our work continues. When is my first congregation here due?”

“Whenever you feel up to it.”

“Why wouldn’t I be up to it? Tell—” He hesitated, then quickly chose Shoon-mi’s replacement. “Tell Chreev he’s now the chief acolyte. He will make arrangements immediately in the morning. I see no reason to pause and give people reason to worry.”

The former warrior smiled. “I agree. Now would be the wrong time to lose momentum.”

That’s enough, Nom Anor thought. Saving my life doesn’t automatically give you a premium on my ear.

Nom Anor pointed at the door, but bit his tongue on harsh words. The time would come to teach his strong arm a lesson in humility. “Go. You have done enough for one day.”

Kunra bowed with barely sufficient reverence, and left.

The ride down was bumpy. Jag’s hands itched to take control of the ship and smooth out their descent, but he couldn’t. Although both sides knew that Collaborator was a ruse, it was important that the pretense was maintained. The rechristened picket ship would, therefore, spiral unpowered down to the upper atmosphere, at which point atmospheric drag would begin to decelerate it. Only when they were safely out of sight would Tahiri bring the barely skyworthy craft to an inelegant landing. It certainly wasn’t the way Jag preferred to fly, but it was important he didn’t interfere.

That everything went without a hitch didn’t surprise him, however. With the hopes of both sides riding on the mission, fighting had enjoyed a tense lull since the mission’s launch. Only the occasional skirmish marred Esfandia’s dark skies.

Something rattled violently from behind him. “Are you sure everything’s securely stowed back there?” he called out to Arth Gxin, the Imperial sergeant who had volunteered for the mission.

“Positive,” the sleek, black-haired man responded. Gxin looked more like an aristocrat than a dirt flier, but Pellaeon had assured Jag that he was the best atmospheric pilot he had. “Something’s probably just worked loose in the wreckage, that’s all.”

Jag nodded, satisfied by the explanation. It wasn’t as if any of them could get up to look, anyway. They were firmly strapped in, and would remain that way until their flight path had leveled out.

They were a diverse group, and among them they represented just about everyone who had a stake in the outcome of the battle. Jag and Jocell stood for the Chiss; Gxin came from the Empire, as did the six military-issue speeder bikes they’d brought with them on the mission; the Galactic Alliance was represented by Jaina and Enton Adelmaa’j; and Tahiri carried the Yuuzhan Vong inside her now. They were a motley crew, it was true, but together Jag was sure they’d be able to teach the Yuuzhan Vong ground forces a thing or two about atmospheric combat.

His idle reveries were interrupted when something seemed to hit them, spinning the ship into a tumble. He looked over to Tahiri, who was studying the meager range of instruments before her with a look of fierce concentration.

“Almost there,” she whispered. Her knuckles were white as they gripped the armrests of her crash couch. “Got it!”

Her hands came up to the controls, and Jag took that as his cue to join in. Together they wrestled the decidedly unstreamlined shape of the Collaborator under some semblance of control. Their altitude dropped alarmingly through the dense layers of Esfandia’s atmosphere, and he imagined he could feel the air around them heating up. The coordinates marking the location of the relay base—as given to Jaina by her mother—vanished around the bulge of the planet, followed a second later by the rendezvous point. They had one more turn around the world before they had to put down.

Put down was, of course, a euphemism. The plan was to ditch the ship entirely, in order to confuse pursuit. Collaborator’s reentry path would stand out like a fire breather on an ice floe, and he had no doubts that the Yuuzhan Vong ground crew would immediately converge on its terminus. If all they found was a burning wreckage, then all the better.

Glad that the locals had been warned to keep well out of their way, Tahiri applied some final adjustments to Collaborator’s trim and announced that he was happy with the vector. Jaina unclipped her safety harness and she stood cautiously, fighting the constant bucking of the floor beneath her.

“All right, let’s get those speeders warmed up.”

The six of them headed back to where the vehicles rested in makeshift harnesses. Jag donned his armored enviro-suit’s helmet and enabled his maser communications systems. He could communicate with anyone via the suit’s speakers and mikes, if they were close enough; for long-distance communication, while comm silence was being maintained, a microwave laser network could keep everyone in line of sight in touch.

“Testing, testing.”

“Loud and clear, Colonel Fel.” Sergeant Gxin was already in the saddle, flicking switches. His enviro-suit was as black and shiny as his hair. “All systems green.”

“Green for go,” Jocell echoed, two speeders along.

Jag took the speeder between them and punched its repulsor engine into life. The air was rapidly filling with the high-pitched whining of machines eager for freedom. One by one, they all confirmed their status.

“Charges armed,” Jaina said. “We are go in three, two, one.”

Jag felt the explosion through his suit. It was immediately overwhelmed by the shock of the hull breaking apart. In no time at all the alien hulk had cracked open completely, as per the plan. They were sucked out, one by one, into a swirling hurricane. Jag fought the turbulence, feeling his speeder kick in as he approached the hard ground below. He didn’t have time to note the locations of the others, but the maser system kept tabs on all of them, displaying their locations as red dots on his helmet’s display.

A thundering boom signaled Collaborator’s ungentle crash landing on Esfandia, a safe distance away.

“Everyone okay?” Jaina’s voice came clear and clipped over the maser intercom. The dots converged on hers as everyone confirmed that they’d exited the ship safely.

“We’re a little off target,” she said, taking the center position of a triangular aerial formation. Jag, from the rear starboard point, could see her checking map data and triangulating on navigation signals broadcast by Imperial ships high above. “Our heading is thirty degrees south, five kilometers. Sergeant Gxin, you lead the way.”

The Imperial gunned his speeder bike in that direction, quickly accelerating to maximum velocity. The rest followed close behind. Jag checked his weapons as he flew, single-handedly steering his speeder over the undulating, rubble-strewn plains. As well as the fixed cannon on his speeder bike, he had a heavy blaster pistol holstered at his side, a belt of thermal detonators, and his charric slung across his back. Webbing held four 4HX4 land mines securely on either side of his saddle. Only when he felt sure that their rough landing hadn’t damaged his mini arsenal did he take the time to actually look around.

As viewed through the light enhancers built into his helmet, the sky appeared burnt orange and muted. Heavy wind pulled at him, but it wasn’t the usual sort of air he would find on a planet of this size; Esfandia’s atmosphere, primarily methane and hydrogen, was normally associated with gas giants. Although Jag couldn’t actually feel the cold, he was acutely aware of its presence just millimeters from his skin. If his enviro-suit were to fail, his blood would freeze in seconds. All in all, it wasn’t the most hospitable environment he’d ever visited.

Gxin led them dodging and weaving through a forest of slender columns that resembled the trunks of petrified trees. What they were actually made of, though, Jag couldn’t tell—nor did he have the time or the inclination to stop and find out. As far as he was concerned, the sooner he was off the planet the better.

A thin spire rose out of the gloom ahead. Twenty meters tall, its tapering, geometric lines distinguished it from the “tree trunks” in the area. This, Jag knew, was the transponder rendezvous point. They approached it cautiously, Gxin decelerating as they came around the transponder’s wire-framed, expanding skirt. Jag kept his eyes peeled, conscious of the many hiding places in and around the main structure. Jaina had said something about a traitor among the expedition; if that person had managed to overpower Han and the others, he could well be waiting for them now, intending to pick them off one by one as they arrived.

A snarl of speeder engines from Jag’s right brought him around in a tight turn. The triangular formation dissolved to present as dispersed a target as possible. Jag kept one finger on the trigger while ducking to target whoever was approaching out of the murk.

A buzz of static sounded in his earpieces as his comm located and locked on to a signal.

“—else could it be using these frequencies? You worry too much, Droma.”

“That’s what has kept me alive this long.”

“And there I was thinking it was because of your good looks and charms.”

“Dad?” Jaina’s voice cut across the chatter. “Your signal is coming in loud and clear.”

“As it should be. We’re right on top of you.” Five more speeder bikes appeared out of the gloom. The size of the riders varied greatly. “Welcome to Esfandia,” her father said, pulling his speeder bike up to a halt next to Jaina’s. “Glad you could make it, sweetheart.”

“Likewise,” Jaina replied. The relief at finding her father all right was obvious in her voice.

“What do you think of Esfandia so far?” he asked.

“Not the kind of place I’d spend a holiday.”

“I wouldn’t say that too loudly,” Droma put in. “You might offend the locals.”

As the wake of the speeder bikes settled, shadowy circular shapes drifted in from the gloom. Jag was startled until he realized that this was what Droma had meant by “the locals.” The indigenous life-forms of Esfandia seemed to float like kites in the thick atmosphere; every now and again one would collapse in upon itself, as though clenching like a fist, and then suddenly shoot forward. He assumed they were sucking in the thick air and then blasting it out a rear vent in order to propel themselves along. It wasn’t the most graceful means of propulsion he’d seen, but it seemed effective nonetheless.

“Don’t they know it’s dangerous being around us?” Jaina asked.

“We’ve tried telling them that,” Droma said. “But they followed us anyway. They can put on quite a turn of speed when they want to.”

“The Cold Ones may be curious,” Han added, “but they’re not stupid. Mark my words, they’ll get out of the way when things really heat up.”

“How close are we to being ready?” Jaina asked.

Han introduced the communications tech they’d brought along to reprogram the massive transponder. He explained that it would take the man about half an hour to bypass the automated systems and give the transmitter its new instructions.

Jaina nodded. “Get started immediately, then. We’ll prepare the perimeter.”

She dismounted her speeder bike to dole out the mines with the help of Adelmaa’j, her father and Droma, and a Klatooinian security guard from the relay base. Jag unloaded his mines, then swept the area with Jocell to make sure it was clear. This proved more difficult than he’d first thought. What with the dim light, the dense atmosphere, and the irregular terrain, there were a thousand ways they could miss someone sneaking up on them. The only good thing was that sound carried a long way here, allowing them a good lead time before an airborne strike arrived. But even that could work against them: the sound of their engines would be audible for a much wider range, increasing the chances that one of the Yuuzhan Vong ground teams would find them before they were ready.

Only once did the sensors on his suit detect anything remotely threatening. A hissing rumble, like a blast of white noise from a long way away, rose out of the background static. It didn’t sound like a tsik vai, the Yuuzhan Vong equivalent of an airspeeder, but Jag called an alert just to be on the safe side. As his repulsor engines wound down, the approaching sound seemed almost deafening against the background moan of the wind. It doubled in volume before peaking, then slowly trailed away.

“Yorik-trema,” Tahiri said. “One of the landing craft. This is a hostile environment, so its hold will be full of tsik seru rather than the usual ground troops.”

“And they are?” Jag asked.

“Tsik vais equipped with plasma blasters, designed to move fast and make nuisances of themselves.”

“Any other weapons?”

“Netting beetles, razorbugs, needle thorns—anything the pilots can carry.”

“Great. Thanks for the tip.”

Jaina’s voice was taut as she made a stab at reassurance. “It’s gone past us, and that’s all that matters. We should be safe now.”

Ten minutes later, the comm tech announced that the transponder was ready. Tahiri gave him the message, the last piece of the puzzle. It was shorter than Jag had expected, and utterly incomprehensible. The subtleties of the Yuuzhan Vong language, which sounded to his ears like nothing more than a series of guttural grunts and painful throat clearings, eluded him completely. He had to take on faith that it said what Jaina intended.

“One more mine to place,” Han said, the sound of digging coming over the comm. There was a grunt, followed by, “Well done, Droma. You’ve just earned your passage on the Falcon.”

“Passage nothing. Give me a good lawyer and I’ll sue you for damages.”

“Back on the speeders, people. This thing’s set to go off in three standard minutes, once I give the word. You know what you have to do.”

Jag circled the transponder for one final check, and made sure everyone’s navigation systems were updated with the location of the mines. He didn’t want anyone stumbling into one by mistake.

“We need to hurry. Vorrik won’t wait forever,” Tahiri said. “The longer my message takes, the more frustrated he will become.”

“Then let’s get under way. Start the timer ticking … now.”

The eleven speeder bikes accelerated away from the transponder, scattering the Cold Ones in their wake. Jag had no qualms about that. Scaring the natives was the best thing to do given the circumstances. In a very short time, the area around the transponder was going to become very unsafe for everyone.

Sergeant Gxin led the retreat to safer ground. He’d scouted the area during the preparations and found two ideal locations for speeders to hide in waiting. One was an overhang hollowed out by winds. Jaina left Jag, her father and Droma, Jocell, and the comm tech there while she took the rest to the second location, a kilometer away.

When the sound of their engines faded, there was less than thirty seconds to go. Jag used the time to load his charric, fastening it to the saddle by his right thigh so that it was easily accessible should he need it.

Barely had he finished doing this when the giant transponder awoke with a blast of static to relay Tahiri’s message to all the Yuuzhan Vong hanging in wait above Esfandia.

Pellaeon glanced up from the charts before him as an alarm sounded on the bridge of Right to Rule.

“Report.”

“Audio signal from the ground, sir.”

“Let’s hear it.”

The voice of the young female Jedi filled the bridge, spitting and snarling in the Yuuzhan Vong language. The electromagnetic radiation carrying the message radiated from a point on Esfandia’s surface and out into space. No one with ears could miss it for millions of kilometers—which was the idea, of course. Pellaeon had no idea what the message contained. He had to trust Jaina Solo’s assertion that Tahiri was saying what she was supposed to. If she did, then the effect would be instantaneous.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Every sensor at Right to Rule’s disposal was focused on the source of the signal. It was hard to see anything through the thick smog Esfandia called an atmosphere. Through a confusion of random heat impressions and radar images, he tried to detect any sort of coherent reading. Was that a speeder bike wake? Did a Yuuzhan Vong lander cast that sort of shadow?

When it came, there was no mistaking it.

Bright orange heat blossomed on the infrared scan. It flowered to white intensity, then faded to a red background.

“We have a detonation,” his aide called.

“I’m picking up flashes,” a telemetry officer said. “High-energy weapons fire.”

“Where?”

“Multiple sources, all around the target.”

Pellaeon’s aide looked up at him. “It’s started, sir.”

“This isn’t right,” the Magister said.

“Quiet!” Senshi pushed the lightning rod harder into Jabitha’s temple, provoking a wince of discomfort. “I want to hear what the Jedi have to say.”

Jacen took a deep breath. He could sense everything focused on him: the Ferroans surrounding them, the boras whipping angrily overhead, Saba watching tense and puzzled beside him, Senshi, the Magister—perhaps even Sekot itself. What he did next would be critical.

His options were limited. He and Saba could easily use the Force to take out the Ferroan kidnappers, but that would leave Danni and Jabitha at Senshi’s mercy. He could knock Senshi’s weapon aside, removing Jabitha from the immediate threat, but could he be quick enough to stop the other Ferroans from firing their weapons? Using his lightsaber was a possibility, but the question was, what would he do with it? How would that help Danni? No, there had to be a solution that didn’t involve aggression …

The sharp-tipped end of a boras tentacle thudded heavily into the dirt beside him, then snapped back up into the air ready for another strike. That was all the incentive he needed. As Saba staggered back, flailing at a tentacle that had lashed down at her, Jacen straightened his posture and closed his eyes. Ignoring the rain on his face, shutting out the booming of thunder from the sky and the strange cries of the boras, he extended himself into the warmth of the Force, and went searching …

Up …

Past the Ferroans.

Higher …

Between the cracking tentacles and into the branches, where drenched birds and other animals huddled for shelter.

Higher still …

To the tops of the trees, where static electricity sizzled from the storm and wind whipped leaves in furious waves.

What he was looking for wasn’t there, though. He was thinking too much in human terms. He chided himself for taking anything for granted on a world like this and sent himself hurtling down the side of the nearest boras—along thickening branches as the trunk opened up to embrace the soil, and then into it, into darkness where strange small minds lurked, living among the knotted roots and dining on the remains of the surface world.

And it was there that he found what he was looking for: a knot of intense anger that was the heart of the malignant stand of boras. It wanted to kill those who had invaded its most sacred place; it wanted to crush them into fertilizer, grind their bones into the dirt, and seed their graves with scavengers to erase every last memory of their presence.

As tentacles rained down on the seeding ground, Jacen’s mind slid into the convoluted spaces of the outraged plant.

Violated! the primitive mind shrieked. Protect!

We’re not harming you, Jacen assured. We’ll be gone soon.

Even as he said it, though, he could sense that advanced concepts like future benefits would be beyond the creature’s simple understanding.

Bones make us strong!

You are strong enough, Jacen told it, trying to ease the anger of the plant-mind with suggestive thoughts.

Stronger!

Jacen plunged deeper into the boras’s mind and found a furious tangle. Pressure mounted around the tangle, forging a buildup of primitive frustration and rage. He tugged gently at it.

Isolation leads to stagnation, he whispered.

He teased the inflamed threads in new directions.

Stagnation leads to corruption.

The tangle slipped apart under his mental touch, prompting a surge of pent-up energies in all directions.

Corruption leads to death.

The mind of the boras exploded in a shower of bright sparks. Somewhere, seemingly far away, Saba Sebatyne roared.

Jacen’s eyes snapped open. Saba was standing over him and Danni, shielding them with her lightsaber. Above and around them was a tightly knit cage of angry boras tentacles, poised ready to attack.

Then, with a smooth, hissing sound, the tentacles retracted, sliding smoothly back up into the canopy, their pointed tips curling in on themselves so that they were no longer a threat. The mind of the boras had retreated into itself, to lick its wounds and examine its sudden relief.

But Saba wasn’t about to lower her lightsaber; the hunter in her simply wouldn’t allow it. The look in her slitted eyes suggested she wasn’t about to be lulled into a false sense of security.

“It’s okay, Saba,” he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. He felt her ropy, reptilian muscles relax under her thick skin. “It’s over.”

“And yet,” said a voice from behind him, “in a very real sense, it’s only just beginning.”

Jacen turned, unable to credit his ears. The sight before him caused his heart to race and his mind to reel.

“But you’re … dead!”

Vergere didn’t reply. She just stood in front of Jacen, smiling faintly as though waiting for him to understand.

Jaina tensed as the yorik-trema rose around her. The electronic hollering of Tahiri’s message was loud in her ears, blasting out of the transponder at close range. Her address to the commander was brief, its message simple and brutal.

“The cowering infidels await your vengeance, Great Commander. I give them to you as tribute. Crush them beneath your heel as you would a diseased dweebit!”

The yorik-trema was so close that Jaina was amazed she couldn’t see it through her enviro-suit visor. The sound of it made her teeth vibrate.

Then there was a bright flash and a sound like a peal of thunder. A powerful shock wave rolled over her and the others where they’d taken shelter in a small cave tunneling through a rocky spar. The yorik-trema, or one of its tsik seru fliers, must have run into a mine protecting the periphery of the transponder. The detonation acted as a signal to her speeder bikes. With a snarl of engines, they burst out of their hiding place and split up into groups of two, weapons armed and ready.

Jaina paired herself with Eniknar, the skinny Noghri her mother suspected was a traitor. He flew confidently and economically into battle, crouched low over his saddle to her right. The Klatooinian security guard and Enton Adelmaa’j peeled off to approach the Yuuzhan Vong from the far side. Gxin and Tahiri sped off together. Jaina expected them to separate before long, but didn’t mind. Together or apart, they would be capable of a great deal of damage.

Infrared blossomed ahead of her. She hunkered down and armed her blaster cannon when something large and dark loomed out of the smog. She raked it with fire before swooping up and over it and coming around for a closer look.

The yorik-trema had caught the mine on its underbelly, crippling it. Bodies spilled from a wide crack in its fuselage. Reptoid ground troops swarmed from a rear hatch, too confused to return her fire. She sent a dozen rounds into the breach and was gratified when something exploded with a solid crump from within.

“Fliers approaching,” crackled Eniknar’s voice over the maser comm.

Jaina took a second to check her tactical display. There were no blips on the display, so clearly the fliers weren’t friendly. She took another pass around the downed yorik-trema and joined the security chief in meeting the fliers head-on. A formation of seven tsik seru peeled apart in disarray as blasterfire cut hot lines between them. Jaina braked back in a tight turn, then came around again to play havoc with their rear vents. Any hope of maintaining order to the fight dissolved at that point. With visibility low, her sensors restricted to nonemitting radiation, and dozens of targets appearing and disappearing all around her, the skirmish dissolved into a furious free-for-all. Her blaster pounded beneath her, knocking chunks from alien coral and tearing reptoid troops limb from limb. Eniknar was nowhere in sight, but she didn’t have time to dwell upon that.

“Watch your rear, Jaina.” Jag’s voice came out of the fierce clamor of battle, startlingly clear over the comm. She looked over her shoulder and saw two tsik seru jockeying for attack position. She crouched low over her saddle to present a smaller target and led the two alien fliers on a harried chase. She dodged plasma fire and a rain of netting beetles while swinging wildly around the treelike ground features. Her face was locked in a grim smile as she rounded a steep rock shelf and gunned her speeder in a tight port turn, too fast for the fliers behind her to see or imitate. By the time they came wide around the same corner, she was pushing her speeder to its maximum acceleration in order to get as far away from the area as quickly as possible.

The explosion as the two fliers hit the mine picked her up and threw her forward on a blast of hot air. The world exploded with stars as her speeder clipped a rock formation and sent her flying.

Tahiri felt the growling power of the machine beneath her as it swept through the air toward the Yuuzhan Vong warriors. The Yuuzhan Vong part of her instinctively mistrusted something that wasn’t alive, and the Jedi in her could sympathize somewhat, too. The living Force that flowed through every biological thing was more potent and persuasive than any machine.

Sergeant Gxin shadowed her to where the yorik-trema had spilled its contents onto the deep cold soil of Esfandia, then peeled away to seek other, less obvious targets. Jaina had beaten them there and was already peppering the downed craft’s dying hull with fire. Tahiri didn’t see the need to duplicate her efforts, so instead followed Gxin’s example and went in search of more worthy prey. There was at least one other yorik-trema out there, and an unknown number of tsik seru, all converging on the signal she’d sent to Commander Vorrik …

Barely had she finished thinking this when three tsik seru swooped at her out of the gloom, disrupting her thoughts. Her new, joined self fought smoothly, instinctively. There was not the slightest awkwardness or hesitation in her actions. The Yuuzhan Vong part of her meshed with the Jedi Knight to create something truly deadly, something neither side had seen before—and she used that advantage to the fullest.

Plasma fire couldn’t be deflected by a lightsaber, but the nozzles that spewed it forth—deep pits just above and forward of the tsik seru intake vents—could be closed by the Force. She applied a Force-push at exactly the right moment, tweaking the alien sphincter muscles just as they clenched to fire, causing the plasma cannon to jam. The resulting explosion—a messy burst that tore a huge hole in the tsik seru’s triangular flank—sent it spinning out of control into a cliff face. The Yuuzhan Vong pilot was thrown free and landed with a bone-snapping crunch.

Satisfied with the result, Tahiri repeated the tactic on the remaining two fliers while dodging their attempts to cut her down. As the third tumbled like a broken-winged bird into the ground, a speeder bike buzzed across her path, wobbling precariously. Through the enviro-suit helmet, she recognized Droma.

“Having trouble?” she asked.

“Took a hit to a steering vane,” the Ryn replied.

“Will you be okay?”

“As long as no one gets in my way.”

A sharp twinge through the Force distracted her. She cast her mind out, seeking the source of the troubling sensation. Within a moment she had isolated it.

“Jaina’s down,” she said.

“Whereabouts?” Droma asked, tugging at the resisting controls of his speeder to bring it around.

She didn’t wait to answer him. She just headed off in the direction she felt Jaina to be.

“The coralskipper,” Tekli said, “it’s changing!”

“I don’t understand,” Mara said. “Changing how?”

“It’s changing shape, and its gravitic emissions are adopting a different profile.” The voice of the Chadra-Fan was unable to hide her exasperation with what she was seeing. “It’s much faster—and turning!”

“It’s coming back at us,” came the calmer voice of Captain Yage over the comlink. “Whatever it is, we’re ready for it.”

“You’re so not ready,” came a voice off to Luke’s right, “it’s almost funny.”

Luke turned at the new voice and found himself staring at a young boy standing in the entrance to the habitat’s upper floor. He was about twelve years of age with blue eyes. His face was round under sandy, short hair, and his expression was one of amusement.

“What is the meaning of this?” Rowel asked, scowling. “Who are you?”

The Ferroan glanced accusingly at Luke, as if the boy’s presence were somehow his doing. Which only went to show, Luke thought, just how little the Ferroans really knew about the planet they lived on.

He closed the distance between himself and the boy with a handful of cautious steps. The blue orbs of the boy stared back at him, full of confidence and power. They stripped every other concern from him, made him feel like he was falling. The mind behind those eyes shimmered in the Force, bright and potent as Jabitha’s had been when she had met them on the landing field.

There was only one person it could be behind those eyes—and it wasn’t really a person at all.

“Is that—?” Mara started, but was clearly unsure how to finish the sentence.

Luke crouched down before the boy, staring in wonderment at the ghostly image of Anakin Skywalker. “My father?” he finished for her. He shook his head. “No, it’s not. It’s Sekot.”

The boy smiled broadly now, his eyes shining in a manner that suggested pride. “You are wise, Luke Skywalker,” he said. “Your father would have been proud of the man you have become.”

“Sekot?” This came from Rowel behind Luke. He emitted a choking noise, embarrassed by his initial response to the boy’s presence. “Forgive me, please.”

Neither Luke nor the image of the boy broke their stare to address the Ferroan. His awkwardness seemed irrelevant. Everything seemed irrelevant.

“Why have you taken this form?” Luke asked.

The boy shrugged, the amusement behind his eyes suddenly undercut with sadness. “Everyone with power faces a choice. It’s a difficult choice, and the choice is different for everyone. Only time reveals which choice is correct.”

The boy’s face assumed an expression of deep sympathy as he cupped Luke’s cheek gently in one small hand.

“This is how your father appeared to me many years ago,” Sekot said. “He and I faced the same choice. We are both still waiting to find out whether we chose correctly.”

Luke sensed Mara behind him radiating her love and sympathy out to him. He was transfixed by the boy’s blue eyes. The same color as mine, he thought. No, not just the same color; they were the same …

“That’s what Darth Vader looked like?” Hegerty’s was voice thick with amazement.

“He was a boy once,” Mara said softly.

“Master Skywalker,” came Captain Yage’s voice over the comlink, interrupting the surreal reunion. “The unidentified vessel is still approaching Zonama Sekot, and is refusing to respond to our hails. We’re on full alert and ready to intercept. You just have to give the order.”

Luke stood, pulling himself away from the vision of his father to address the captain of the Widowmaker. “Stand down, Arien,” he said. He was acutely conscious of everything around him: the humid air; the scent of waterlogged undergrowth; the breathless ring of Ferroans waiting to see what happened next. “That ship isn’t about to attack us.”

The image of his father moved to the center of the room. Luke faced him, feeling the pressure of the planet’s attention upon him. He shook his head, wondering why he hadn’t realized sooner what was going on.

“So, tell me,” he said. “Have we performed to your satisfaction?”

Sekot looked at him with the wisdom of ages from the eyes of innocence. “If I were to say that you hadn’t, what would you do then?”

Luke shrugged. “That would depend on the choices I had available to me.”

“You don’t have any.” The innocent face broke into a smile. “That’s what’s so wizard about it.”

“Then your question is meaningless,” Luke said.

“Perhaps,” Sekot said. “But the exercise wasn’t. Since your arrival I have learned more about why you are here than you probably ever intended to tell me. Maybe even more than you know yourself.”

“Then you know we came in search of an answer.”

“I do. But I have no easy answer to offer you.”

“Any answer at this point would be appreciated,” Mara said.

The image of the boy looked in silence at all of those standing around expectantly, then finally nodded. “Very well,” he said, gesturing for them all to be seated.

Luke did so gratefully. Ever since laying eyes upon the boy he had felt the tug of emotions that he hadn’t accessed in a long time—emotions that were leaving him weak at the knees, even though he knew it wasn’t his father before him.

When everyone was seated, Sekot began to speak.

*  *  *

Jag ducked as a tsik seru skimmed narrowly over his head, the tug of its dovin basal lifting him slightly from his seat. He dropped the power on his speeder as a large stone formation loomed out of the haze ahead, swinging around to give chase to the Yuuzhan Vong that had just buzzed him, only to find the tsik seru already coming back for another pass. Its pilot’s face was all snarl and scars, partly obscured by a fleshy gnullith. Not obscured enough as far as Jag was concerned, though. He strafed laserfire in the small craft’s path, making the Yuuzhan Vong pilot bank sharply as he fired a cloud of netting beetles in retaliation. The tsik seru had almost matched speed and vector with Jag’s flier when something caught the pilot’s attention and he swept away, disappearing into the murky atmosphere.

Left in the turbulent wake, Jag wondered what had torn the Yuuzhan Vong from his prey. Something important must have come up.

Jag came around and set off after the flier. What his speeder lacked in full-body coverage, it certainly made up for in velocity. He caught up with the tsik seru just as it crested a sharp rise and dipped down the far side. He saw its plasma launchers flex in readiness, then suddenly explode in a ball of green flame. With a pained shriek, the living craft curved away and crashed into one of the stony “stalagmites” that littered the planet’s surface. With a loud whump, it exploded into a million red-hot fragments.

Only then did Jag realize what lay below.

Huddled against a boulder were three small, humanoid figures. They stood with their backs to the boulder, two of them firing repeating blasters or using lightsabers to keep two more tsik seru and a swarm of reptoids at bay. The third slumped against the stone and appeared to be having difficulty remaining upright.

Jag stitched a line of fire across the contracting line of alien foot soldiers. At least a dozen went down screaming.

“Jag, back here!”

The comm message was from Tahiri. She was warding off four reptoids, two of them armed with coufees. The other two were throwing thud bugs whenever they saw an opening. Jag swept in low across the fight and dropped a thermal mine in the middle of the reptoids, shooting at the two with coufees on his way out.

When the thermal mine went off, bits of reptoids were sent flying every which way. Something thumped against the side of his helmet, and he ducked in case more pieces were following. Guiding his bucking speeder around in a circle, he came back to check on Tahiri and the others.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Jaina took a fall,” Tahiri explained, getting up from where she’d dropped. She lent Jaina a hand as she climbed to her feet.

Jag brought his speeder to a halt and jumped off to see if he could help. When Jaina spoke, her voice was thick and groggy. She was blinking her eyes too rapidly, as though trying to focus.

“My feet are cold.”

“Her suit is failing,” Tahiri said. “We have to get her out of here.”

Jag tried to get her attention. “Jaina? Can you hear me?”

“Jag?” Her gaze caught him and held on. She nodded in a delayed response to his question. “I’ll be all right. Just give me a second.”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,” Droma said, pointing over Jag’s shoulder, “but …”

Jag turned and saw the reptoids getting up and regrouping.

He went back to his speeder and collected his charric blaster.

“We don’t have much time,” he said. “Where’s Jaina’s speeder?”

“Over there,” Tahiri said.

Jag looked and saw the tangled wreck.

“Okay, then, she can take mine and head back to the relay base,” he said. “It’s the only shelter we’ve got down here. I’ll hitch a lift with Droma.”

“No, I’ll take her,” Droma said. “She shouldn’t fly alone. And besides which, I know the way.”

Reluctant though he was to lose another fighter, Jag nodded in agreement. It made sense to have someone with her, to help her if she blacked out or got lost.

“Get going,” he said. “We’ll cover your backs.”

Droma helped Jaina to Jag’s speeder. She protested vaguely, but was unable to put up much of a fight. When she was safely on the saddle, the nimble Ryn climbed up in front of her and activated the engine.

“Keep an eye on Eniknar,” he said.

“We will,” Tahiri said.

With a brisk wave, Droma sped off into the gloom.

“So where are our speeders?” Jag said, firing his blaster at a knot of reptoids who looked about ready to charge.

Tahiri pointed at a crater behind the line of reptoids. “A tsik seru took them out before I could take it out. We tried calling for help, but our line of sight is shot down here. We were lucky you came along.”

He felt strangely like laughing, but doubted the approaching line of snarling reptoids would see the joke. “You’re back where you started!”

“Not at all.” Tahiri’s grin was fleeting and joyful. “Now Jaina’s safe, I don’t have to watch my back.” She tensed. “Try and keep up, Colonel. We’re getting out of here.”

With a powerful, Force-augmented spring, she somersaulted up onto the boulder they’d been sheltering in front of and began blasting the reptoids from above.

*  *  *

Leia paced nervously across the Falcon’s passenger bay, wishing there were something she could do. She’d felt the shock of Jaina’s sudden plunge into unconsciousness, and had endured an anxious ten minutes until she felt her daughter recover. The relief had been enormous, but did little to assuage the underlying frustration. Somewhere out there a desperate fight was going on, and she was too far away to be of any use.

A bleeping from the cockpit came as a thankful distraction to her thoughts. She ran to find out what the instruments were reporting, and found new telemetry scrolling down the screens, courtesy of Pellaeon. The surface scans showed furious activity around the transponder site. At least five mines had blown, turning the normally frigid cloud patterns into relatively hot hurricanes. She only hoped the Cold Ones were keeping well away, as instructed.

In orbit, things were beginning to change. Responding to the lack of rapid progress on the ground, Vorrik was moving ships into strike range for a bombing run. Pellaeon had responded to the threat by boosting his presence along that orbit. Leia had witnessed enough muscle flexing in the past to know that the situation was at flashpoint. Unless the ground troops delivered—or appeared to deliver, anyway—a decisive victory to the Yuuzhan Vong, things in orbit would soon get very ugly once again.

At least the relay base was safe, though. That was a small comfort in the middle of such chaos and confusion. And she supposed she shouldn’t complain too much. She’d been hiding only a matter of hours, whereas Ashpidar and her crew had been evading the Yuuzhan Vong for days.

Thinking of the base commander, she clicked open the comm to Ashpidar’s office.

“Commander Ashpidar?” she said. “If you’re interested, I have new telemetry from Pellaeon.”

There was no response.

“Sekot!”

Jabitha’s startled cry brought Jacen out of his stunned daze. He was gaping at the image of Vergere where she stood opposite Senshi, her diminutive figure commanding everyone’s attention. She was dressed in a brown robe, and her large, almost hypnotic eyes were fixed on him. The fringe of feathers and whiskers around her face were, despite the rain, completely dry.

“You’re not Vergere, are you?” After so long, there was no way his teacher could have returned from the dead—and he could tell from the image’s presence in the Force that this was something much more than just a projection or an echo of someone who had once lived.

“I come to you in this guise as someone we have both known,” the image said. “Someone who was close to you, someone you found trustworthy.”

“Sekot does this,” Jabitha explained. “It appears as my father sometimes, or as your grandfather. Sometimes it appears as me, and that is the most disconcerting of all.”

Jacen remembered something the real Vergere had told him. She had been present at the birth of the living planet’s consciousness, when Sekot had assumed the personality of its dead Magister and communicated with her and the Yuuzhan Vong. He had known about this all along and not realized …

“Why now?” Saba asked, her voice a growl of puzzlement. “Why not before?”

“It did before,” Jacen said, “when we arrived. That wasn’t the Magister Uncle Luke and Aunt Mara spoke to. It was Sekot in Jabitha’s form.”

“That still does not tell uz why.”

Jacen looked around: at Saba staring uncertainly back at him, at Danni still unconscious on the stretcher, at Senshi with his weapon pressed against Jabitha’s head … The image of Vergere watched him closely, waiting for him to answer the question for himself.

“You’re testing us, aren’t you?” he said.

Sekot shook its fringed head, smiling. “I’m testing you, Jacen Solo.”

“And did I pass?”

Instead of answering his question, Sekot faced Senshi. The elderly Ferroan immediately removed the lightning rod from Jabitha’s temple and climbed to his feet. The Magister sat up, rubbing at her neck where the kidnapper had been holding her. Sekot then glanced over the Danni on the other stretcher, and the young scientist stirred with a soft moan. Jacen went over to her, kneeling beside her in the mud.

“Danni?” He could barely contain his relief.

Danni opened her eyes slowly, blinking into the light rain falling across her face. She propped herself up onto her elbows, looking up at Jacen with confusion etched across her brow.

“Where am I?” Her eyes widened as she looked around. “The last thing I remember is the roof coming down—”

“It’s all right, Danni,” Jacen reassured her. “You’re safe now.”

Her gaze fell upon the Ferroans standing around her, some with their weapons held loosely at their sides.

“This would be the Solo definition of ‘safe,’ I’m taking it?”

“You will not be harmed,” Vergere said, stepping up alongside Jacen.

Danni’s eyes widened in surprise even more at the sight of Vergere. “But—I thought—”

“It’s not Vergere,” Jacen said.

“It iz Sekot.” Saba finally extinguished her lightsaber. Jacen couldn’t tell if she’d decided that Sekot meant no harm, or that there was nothing she could do about it even if Sekot did.

Danni turned back to Jacen, shaking her head as though the questions it carried were too heavy. “I don’t understand.”

“I think I’m beginning to,” he said. “This whole thing was a setup designed to see how I react under threat. Do I fight or flee? Do I defend my loved ones, or do I use them as shields?”

“Or do you attempt to take the middle ground,” Sekot said, “and allow both sides to win?”

“I’m sorry,” Jabitha said. “I knew Sekot was going to test you, but I didn’t know how. I convinced it that it should, rather than trust you implicitly. I had no idea that your lives were going to be put in any danger.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Jacen said, standing again to face Vergere’s image. “It was Sekot who kept Danni unconscious, and who used Senshi to execute the kidnapping. Just as it used the boras here to threaten us.”

“Actually, the boras were acting of their own will. They could not be controlled—only provoked or soothed. You had to solve that problem on your own. But the rest is true, yes. Does that fact make you angry?”

Vergere was the perfect form for Sekot to take, Jacen thought. This was exactly the sort of mind-expanding trick she might have played on him during his brief apprenticeship to her.

“No,” he said. “I just want to know why.”

“I had to know what manner of warrior I was dealing with before responding to your request.”

“I’m uncomfortable with the term warrior,” he said. “A Jedi stands for peace, not war.”

“You do not believe in fighting for peace, for freedom?” Sekot spoke in a way that made Jacen feel he was being mocked.

“I believe that there should be a way of achieving peace other than fighting,” he said.

“Have you found it, Jacen Solo?”

He looked down to the ground, reluctant to admit his failure to his former teacher—even though he knew in himself that it wasn’t really her. “No,” he admitted quietly. “No, I haven’t.”

“But that doesn’t stop you looking.”

He lifted his gaze again to meet Sekot’s. “As the real Vergere once told me, I have chosen my destiny. Now I just have to deal with the consequences.”

“As must we all,” Sekot said. “As have those who came before us. We inhabit the galaxy that arose as a result of their decisions, just as our descendants will inherit the galaxy that will arise from our own. It is the responsibility of every generation to choose well.”

“And what is your decision, Sekot? What sort of galaxy will you leave for future generations?”

Sekot smiled. “Let me tell you a little about myself, Jacen Solo.”

“No word from the ground as yet, sir.”

“What about those bombers?”

“Orbital insertion for surface run confirmed.” Pellaeon acknowledged the report with a nod. “Hit them hard.”

His aide turned away to issue the orders. Relentless immediately fired its main engines and descended to a lower orbit. TIE fighters poured from its launching bays by the hundreds. Every turbolaser and heavy laser cannon targeted the bombers preparing to demolish the transponder on the surface of Esfandia.

Pellaeon didn’t doubt that Vorrik would respond immediately, thereby ensuring an escalation in the battle, but that was unavoidable. As pointless as it was to defend a decoy, he had to make it look as though the effort was worth defending, at least, and therefore confirm it as a legitimate target. With any luck, Vorrik would spend entirely too much effort trying to get more firepower on the ground while Pellaeon picked at the commander’s forces from above.

Fire flashed on all screens as Imperial fighters engaged the Yuuzhan Vong. As though that were the spark that lit the fire, conflagrations broke out within minutes in a dozen other locations. The massive warship Kur-hashan came about in a ripple of gravitic disturbances, every dovin basal on its hull and in its engine housings wielding arcane energies in order to prepare it for battle.

“All ships,” Pellaeon ordered, “engage at will!”

The first truly conscious thought Jaina had was that she couldn’t feel her left foot—and the sensation was slowly creeping up her legs. The second thought was that she was moving—and fast!

Opening her eyes, she realized with a start that she was actually flying.

“What—?” she called out, clutching the padded seat beneath her.

“Hang on, Jaina,” said the figure sitting in front of her on the cramped speeder bike saddle. “Don’t rock the boat.”

“Droma?”

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

Jaina looked around to see if there were any tsik seru nearby. There weren’t. “Like an idiot. I was downed before the fight even started!”

“Don’t beat yourself up about it. This kind of thing can happen to the best of us, I’m afraid.” The Ryn’s fluting voice was full of sympathy and understanding. “I’m taking you back to the Falcon. Your suit is leaking.”

“I know. I can feel it.”

He leaned the speeder over as he skirted a copse of towering rock formations, and she leaned with him, trying to patch together the scattered memories of how she’d come to be here. She vaguely recalled Jag being with her at some point, and Tahiri, but it was mostly a blur.

“Everything’s going according to plan,” he said, straightening the vessel. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

Jaina peered over his shoulder, just in time to see something dark and spiky loom out of atmospheric haze, coming right for them.

“Duck!” she called.

She grabbed the shoulders of the spindly alien and pushed him flat across the speeder. She scrunched down next to him, praying there wasn’t anything else directly in their path. A loud, rasping hum rose up around them, momentarily deafening her, and something fleetingly snatched at her back.

Then the encrusted belly of the yorik-trema they’d grazed was past, and Droma attempted to bring the speeder back under control. It wobbled uneasily for a few seconds, then steadied.

“Do you think they saw us?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder as the alien lander faded back into the haze.

“I’m not sure,” the Ryn said.

“Either way, we can’t afford to take the chance that they might follow us back to the base,” Jaina said. “Hang a right here.”

Droma did as he was told. “You’re thinking we should loop around and distract them, aren’t you?” he said. “Or warn the others, right?”

“You have a problem with that?”

Droma’s helmet moved back and forth as he shook his head. “No, but I do have a problem with you getting frostbite.”

“I’m not so keen on losing any toes, either—but that’s a chance we’re going to have to take.”

“It’s too risky,” Droma said. “Besides, I doubt those Vong would be interested in us. We’re the ones fleeing the fight scene, after all.”

Jaina glanced back over her shoulder. “You might want to tell them that, then.”

Droma snapped his head back for a split-second look; then with a curse that would have made her father blush, he returned his attention forward. Jaina felt the engine surge beneath them as he pushed the speeder it to its max in an effort to outrun the pair of tsik seru that had locked on to their tail.

Jaina felt the pockets of her suit. Thankfully the cold hadn’t affected her fingers yet, but it was still hard to feel through so many layers of insulation. She had her lightsaber, a repeating blaster, and two thermal detonators. She quickly withdrew one of the latter and activated it.

“Take a turn when I tell you,” she said, arming one of the detonators.

“Which way?” Droma called.

“Any way!” she said, lobbing the device into their wake. “Now!”

The detonator exploded with a flash of heat and light, almost blinding her through her visor’s light-enhancing systems. She couldn’t tell exactly which heading Droma had chosen until her eyesight returned, then saw that he’d slipped them into a narrow crevasse that dipped below the surface of the plain they’d been traveling across.

“Did you get them?” Droma asked, his voice thin with the strain of following the crevasse’s bends.

“One of them, I think,” she said as a shadow fell across them. One had survived, and it was now above them, attempting to match their speed.

A clutch of netting beetles ejected from a hatch at them, and Droma braked heavily. They decelerated quickly enough to miss the bugs themselves, but there was no chance of avoiding the sticky threads the creatures left in their wake. Two attached themselves to Droma’s back, and one fell across her visor. On the ends of each fiber, grublike finger-length insects began to reel themselves in.

Jaina tried to tug the threads from Droma’s back while he navigated the narrow crevasse, but the threads were strong and refused to break. Reaching into her side pocket, she produced her lightsaber and activated the blade. If she didn’t get the threads off in time, those bugs would soon wrap themselves around the two of them and bind them up for easy capture.

The threads snapped under the bright fire of her lightsaber, and two bugs dropped away from Droma’s back. She followed the thread stuck to her visor and found the bug that was its source barely a meter away from her head, whipping along behind her. She snatched her hand away and sliced the thread in two.

Three down, she thought, but there was no time for self-congratulations just yet. She didn’t know how many more there were. Her visibility at close quarters was poor through the visor, and her gloves weren’t sensitive enough to find them by touch. It would take just one to foul up the speeder’s steering vanes, or close Droma’s fingers together at the wrong moment.

“We have to set down,” she said. “It’s the only way to make sure we’re clean.”

“But the flier—” Droma pointed up at the tsik seru shadowing them high above.

His argument stopped in midsentence, however, when he saw another of the netting beetles dangling from her hand, steadily wriggling its way closer to his suit.

He quickly put them down in a sliding skid across a surface thick with carbon dioxide snow. Jaina tried hard not to think of what standing on such a material was going to do to her toes. There were more important things to worry about for the moment.

She jumped off the speeder, with Droma close behind, frantically brushing himself down in a vain attempt to lose the beetles. When Jaina raised her lightsaber and approached him, he took a step back.

“Hey, wait a second! If that thing nicks my suit I’ll—”

He shut up when she started to dart and weave her lightsaber, removing the bugs with easy, deft strokes. Then she turned the weapon on herself.

“On your thigh,” Droma was saying. “And one on your shoulder!”

Something sizzled as she swung her lightsaber blindly behind her head.

“Okay, you’re clear,” he announced with relief. “Now let’s—”

Before he could finish what he was saying, more threads fell around them. The shadow of the tsik seru, which had swung briefly out of sight, had returned, and a rain of bugs descended out of the flier’s belly. Jaina didn’t think; she just did what she had to do. Her blade seemed to sing in the murky air as she swung it with controlled, precise swipes that prevented a single one of the beetles from reaching her or Droma.

“Nicely done,” Droma breathed in disbelief. “But I fear it’s only a temporary reprieve.”

The tsik seru was backing up and tipping forward.

“It’s going to fire at us,” Jaina said, already tensing to run.

“Do that thing!” Droma shouted, waving his hands. “That thing Tahiri did!”

“What thing?”

“She closed the throats of the plasma launchers!”

“What?”

“I saw her do it when you were passed out. It works, believe me!”

Time seemed to slow as she worked her way though what he was telling her. Plasma launchers … Tahiri … closing the throat …

Her body was one step ahead of her. At the very instant she realized—or so it seemed—her hand was already heading upward to point at the tsik seru’s wings. The hand clenched into a fist just as it was about to fire, belching out its high-pressure plasma, full of potency and bile.

It hit the obstruction of her will and blew one side of the flier to smithereens. The second side detonated an instant later, showering them with glowing debris. Gas hissed from the ultracold snow beneath their feet. They ducked instinctively, throwing their arms up for protection. Peering through them, Jaina saw the remains of the tsik seru falling into the crevasse, tumbling in a spitting fireball right toward them. She grabbed Droma and dragged him out of the way just in time. Steam exploded around them as its fiery corpse finally came to rest.

Droma picked himself up, staring in amazement at the ruined flier. “Now that,” he said, “was too close!”

“Just be grateful it didn’t come down on the speeder,” she said, tugging the dead weight of the vehicle away from the flames. The growing numbness in her left foot was making walking awkward.

“Believe me, I’m grateful,” Droma said, lending her a hand. “More grateful than—”

A roar over their suits’ external receivers cut him off. Something stumbled out of the flames and steam—something humanoid, blackened, and snarling. Jaina adopted a defensive stance as she grabbed her lightsaber, but her frozen foot betrayed her balance and she slipped over onto her side. Droma tried to put himself between her and the creature, but was smacked away by a smoldering limb. The creature loomed over him, its blackened face splitting where a mouth might have once been.

“Jeedai!”

The breath issued from the Yuuzhan Vong pilot in a furious rush. The only thing keeping him alive in Esfandia’s frigid air, Jaina realized, was the fire itself. That wasn’t going to last long—but long enough for one chance to strike.

The pilot raised a viciously sharp splinter of yorik coral and prepared to drive it down into her, where she lay sprawled at his feet. She reached for her lightsaber again, but it wasn’t there. She must have dropped it when she’d fallen.

Before the blow could fall, something moved behind her, well away from where Droma lay slumped against the ravine wall. It caught the Yuuzhan Vong’s attention, too, and his eyes momentarily flicked up to look. It was all the time Jaina needed. She struck upward with both feet, forcing the pilot back. His yorik shard went flying, and Jaina was up on her feet in an instant, reaching out with her mind for her lightsaber. It whipped out of the snow and back into her hand. With a vicious snap-hiss, it came to life.

The pilot regained his balance and stood, preparing to rush her. Fire still licked at his back and legs, making him a truly monstrous figure. Jaina tensed, ready to cut him down.

But she didn’t need to. The alien’s stare froze as ice formed across his eyes. Pain and cold couldn’t be kept at bay forever, not even by the prodigious Yuuzhan Vong will. With a despairing gurgle, the pilot folded forward into the snow, dead before he hit the ground.

Jaina stepped back, lowering her blade, her breath loud in her helmet. She should have reacted faster than that. Yes, she was still recovering from her crash and the cold had crept as far as her knees, now, but that was no excuse. If it hadn’t been for—

She stopped in midthought, remembering what had saved her life. Something had distracted the pilot just as he’d been about to stab her—and that something couldn’t have been Droma, for he was only now struggling to his feet in the snow by the flier.

She turned around to look.

Hanging in the thick air before her, the edges of its circular, kitelike body rippling as though in an unseen current, was one of the natives. It was so close she could have touched it, but she resisted the impulse. It looked quite fearsome, with its many-tentacled maw and strange organs pulsing through translucent skin. Hundreds of tiny bumplike “eyes” around the maw seemed to be watching her as closely as she studied it, wondering what it would do next.

In the end, it just wafted gently up into the cloudy atmosphere. When it was several meters away, its elongated tail flexed, and the creature shot over her head with surprising acceleration.

A groan from Droma took her mind away from the strange encounter. He was leaning against the speeder, holding his head.

“I think we should get out of here,” he said.

She nodded. “My turn to drive.”

Through his suit’s visor, she could see a half smile forming below his beaked nose. “Here’s hoping we can get the rest of the way without any more problems.”

“We’ve had our fair share for the day, I think,” she said, hoisting herself up into the saddle and helping him on behind her.

“Solos always seem to have more than their ‘fair share’ of trouble,” Droma commented dryly. “Maybe it’s genetic.”

“Hey, the universe is the one with the problem,” she returned lightly. “It’s just the Solos’ job to fix it.”

The Ryn laughed as Jaina kicked the speeder into life and began winding her way out of the crevasse.

Tahiri ducked. A coufee swished over her head. With a grunt she came back up with her lightsaber in a two-handed blow and drove it into the reptoid’s chest. The blue blade stuck out the alien’s back for an instant before she withdrew it and stepped away. The alien staggered back with an expression of agonized surprise on its face, then toppled over into the snow.

“Jag, over here!” She hurried up the steep slope with the Chiss pilot following close behind, peppering anyone crazy enough to follow them with projectile and energy fire. At the top of the slope, she paused to collect her bearings, mindful that her silhouette would make an easy target for anyone on either side of the ridge, hurried down the far side.

In the distance, delineated as a red dot on her helmet’s display, was an Imperial speeder cruising the far side of the transponder. She tried hailing it by waving her arms.

“Hey, over here!”

“Tahiri, is that you?” Han’s voice came loud and clear over the comm. Now that they were in line of sight, conversing was simple.

“And Jag, too. We’ve lost our speeders.”

“I’m on my way.” Han changed course, disappearing behind the base of the transponder.

“Come on!” Tahiri grabbed Jag’s arm and hurried him down the ridge.

A dark shadow slid across the dimly visible horizon as Han returned with another speeder. The second pilot, Enton Adelmaa’j, sprayed the reptoids coming down the ridge after them, then skidded to a halt in front of Jag.

“Good to see you. We were starting to get a little worried.”

“It’s not over yet,” Tahiri said, pointing. “Here comes the second yorik-trema.”

The Yuuzhan Vong lander was proceeding more cautiously than its predecessor, firing plasma bolts into the ground ahead of it. As she watched, one caught a mine. The explosion sent boiling air upward in a dark mushroom cloud. The yorik-trema rolled on through it, unscathed.

Han grunted. “Well, I guess we move to Plan B,” he said, waving Tahiri onto the back of his speeder.

Jag jumped on to Adelmaa’j’s craft, and together the two speeder bikes raced from the howling reptoids. They split up briefly to locate the other speeders from the party, then regrouped on a relatively clear side of the battle zone. Only one speeder remained unaccounted for, and that belonged to the relay base security chief—a fact that only made Han’s scowl cut deeper into his face.

“We can’t hide the fact that the base isn’t here for much longer,” he said. “Especially if Eniknar has gone over. The sooner we get out of here and finish it, the better.”

There were no arguments. The communications tech produced a remote timer and keyed a short code into it. He waited a second, then shook the timer and tried again.

“There’s something wrong,” he said. “I’m trying to arm the charges but the transmission seems to be blocked. The dish must be damaged.”

“Or sabotaged, more likely,” Han said. He sighed. “Okay, I guess somebody will have to go in and arm the charges manually.”

“I’ll go,” Tahiri said without hesitation.

“And I’ll go with her,” Jag said.

Tahiri turned to face him. “I can manage on my own.”

“I know that,” he answered evenly. “But I still need to go.”

She nodded, understanding the unstated sentiment. She was still new and untested; someone needed to watch over her until they were certain that she wasn’t going to betray them. Which was fine with her. If having him tag along was going to help allay suspicions, then so be it.

They rearranged speeders again while the comm tech explained what needed to be done. The detonator control box was hidden at the base of the transponder. Assuming the box itself was intact, all they’d have to do was input the code into its keypad. The explosion would take out the transponder and anything else within a hundredmeter radius. They would have only a minute to get clear of the blast.

“Got it,” Jag said, taking the controls. “We’ll meet you back at the base—either on this speeder or the crest of a shock wave.”

Han offered a half smile and a lazy salute. “Fly well.”

“I always do.” The Chiss pilot gunned the engine and sped off toward the transponder.

“When I became aware,” Sekot told Luke, “the only person I had to talk to was the first Magister. Jabitha’s father, the second Magister, was the one who realized what I was, and who helped me come to terms with my potential. It was he who helped me survive the attack of the Far Outsiders that laid waste to my southern hemisphere; it was he who encouraged me to retool my shipbuilding facilities to the manufacture of weapons and other means by which I could defend myself and the people in my care. When we were next under threat, I wasn’t entirely ready, but I was able to survive. After a long and arduous journey, I took my charges and myself to safety, revealing myself to them along the way. It was there, after the death of the Magister, the confusion of my birth, and the frantic desperation of my escape, that I finally found time to think.”

The being projecting the image of Anakin Skywalker had all the resources of a planet behind it, yet still it radiated uncertainty. It was easy to believe that it was the child Luke’s father had once been, enormously powerful, tempted by the dark side but still too young to know what was right or wrong.

“The first thing I asked myself was: where did I come from?” Sekot placed a hand on the lamina surface of the table. “Jabitha’s father believed that I arose directly out of the Potentium—that I was a physical incarnation of the life energy he believed filled the universe. To him, that was the only explanation that made any sense, but even then I knew it lacked something. It was a very human response in the face of two incomprehensible phenomena, and it ignored the question of why such living planets had not come into being elsewhere. If intelligence on this scale could spontaneously emerge from a biosphere, why then, in a galaxy of hundreds of millions of star systems, was I the only one? What made me different?”

The intense blue eyes of Sekot’s image stared into Luke’s without blinking. “I have spent decades examining my being in an attempt to unravel the truth of my self. Anakin Skywalker once described me as an ‘immensity,’ yet at the same time a ‘unity.’ All conscious beings could be described as such by the creatures that inhabit them. You all have a multitude of bacteria inhabiting your digestive tracts; from their point of view, you are undeniably immense. And yet at the same time you are also one. The truth of your existence lies on the cellular level, in your genes; I came to suspect that my truth lay on a similarly minute level—comparatively speaking, of course. The people who inhabit my surface are as important to my well-being as the boras, the atmosphere, or the sun. Without them, I would be barren; fallow.”

“They’re part of your mind?” Hegerty asked, listening with fascination to the words of the living planet.

“Would you say that the microbes in your stomach are part of your mind?” The image shook its head. “My intelligence is as far above the Ferroans as yours is above those microbes. They fulfill other needs—needs you would have difficulty comprehending. All you need to understand, for the purposes of this conversation, is that I need them as much as they need me. Without them, it is possible that I might never have existed. Or worse: I might have grown stunted and feeble like the rogue boras that Jacen recently encountered.”

The mention of his nephew immediately grabbed Luke’s attention. “You know where they are?”

Sekot nodded. “I’m speaking to them now.”

Jag kept the transponder between himself and Tahiri and the second yorik-trema. He came in low, relying on the large amount of dust kicked up by mines and energy discharges to give them cover. Only once did they encounter resistance, and the single tsik seru was soon dispatched.

Soon they were ducking through a fence of horizontal girders and into the transponder infrastructure. The exterior framework acted as both shield and support for the large and elaborate antenna structure itself. The detonator control was hidden under the skirt of the antenna, in a cavity too low to accommodate the speeder.

Jag deactivated the repulsor engine and hopped off. Tahiri watched his back while he pulled the machine under cover. Then the two of them scurried beneath the skirt and into the complex beneath.

The base of the antenna was a maze of supports and thick cable conduits leading underground. It was so dark that even his suit’s light-enhancing algorithms had trouble coping. They made their way by the shine of Tahiri’s lightsaber to the place the comm tech had described. Sure enough, the detonator control was exactly where he’d said it would be.

Jag hunkered down next to it, opening the top of the device with the first of three codes he’d been given. A glowing control surface unfolded, providing him with a small 2-D video screen and a keyboard. It was awkward with his gloves on, but Jag soon managed to tap out the commands required until he had the autodetonation window open before him. The second code gained him access to the timer menu. He typed in a one-minute delay.

“Confirm the final code,” he said to Tahiri. “And remember, we only have one chance at this. We get one digit wrong and it’ll reset the codes and shut down for good.”

Tahiri nodded and began to recite the code to Jag. “Zero-eight-eight-two-three-four-one-zero-three-zero.”

“That’s what I’ve got.”

He tapped in the digits one at a time while she watched to make sure he didn’t mistype anything. Just as he was keying in the second-to-last digit, though, something black shot past his faceplate. He jumped back, reaching for his charric blaster as the glowing controls burst into a shower of sparks. Tahiri was one step ahead of him. Two more thud bugs came darting in; she burned them out of the air with her lightsaber just as a Yuuzhan Vong warrior bore down upon them, waving an amphistaff. Tahiri shouted something guttural in return and met him halfway.

Jag stayed down, not wanting to risk hitting Tahiri with an ill-timed shot in the cramped space, but ready to step in if needed. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on; her lightsaber left sheets of glare in its wake. It looked for a moment as though she was being driven back by heavy blows from the amphistaff, but then, just when he felt sure she was beaten, she ducked beneath the weapon and delivered a lazy-looking slash that opened the warrior up from groin to chin. With a steaming gurgle, the alien fell backward and was still.

Tahiri didn’t even appear out of breath when she returned her attention to Jag.

“How bad is the damage?” she asked.

He looked down at the detonator unit. The control surface was blackened and melted; its glow was completely gone. When he touched it, there was no response.

“That can’t be a good sign.”

“We have to get it working.”

He leaned in to examine the unit more closely. “I think it’s just the controls that are damaged. The unit itself seems to be functioning. There might be another way to activate it.”

Something shuffled out of the darkness toward them. In a heartbeat, Tahiri had turned from Jag, her lightsaber at the ready for another attack. Just as quickly, though, her posture relaxed. It wasn’t another warrior, but a Galactic Alliance–issue enviro-suit limned with frost. Steaming blood caked one side. Through the partially fogged visor, Jag made out square, reptilian features, clenched with pain.

“Eniknar?” Tahiri took some of the base security chief’s weight onto her as the Noghri almost collapsed to the ground next to them. His lips were moving, but Jag couldn’t hear anything.

“His comm is gone,” Tahiri said. “You should be able to hear him if you touch helmets.”

Jag leaned in to the wounded alien.

“Manual release.” Eniknar’s soft voice was even more muted than usual, but there was no mistaking the pain he was in. “There’s a … manual release.”

His hands fumbled for the detonator control unit. Around the back was a panel he managed to twist free, exposing several buttons in numerous colors.

“Manual release,” he wheezed, falling back against Tahiri in a manner that suggested all of his strength had been spent. “Coded.”

“Will it set off the bombs?”

Nod.

“Is there a delay?” Shake.

“So whoever sets it off will die.”

Another nod.

Jag pulled back, as did Tahiri. They stared at each other over the injured security chief, but before either could speak, Eniknar clutched at the front of Jag’s enviro-suit, pulling him closer.

“Me,” the Noghri wheezed. “I’ll do it. I know the code.”

“No,” Jag said, breaking free of the Noghri’s grip. “You tell us the code, and Tahiri can use the Force to depress the button from a safe distance.”

“I don’t think we have time for that,” Tahiri returned soberly. “And besides, even if we could, we can’t fit three on a speeder. One of us would still be left behind.”

Jag turned over a number of possibilities in his head, each dismissed as quickly as they came to him.

“How do we even know we can trust Eniknar?” he argued, pulling away from the injured security chief so his objection wouldn’t be overheard. “Droma warned us to be careful of him, right? Leia thinks he’s a traitor. What if this is a ruse? If we leave him to—”

“It’s not a ruse,” Tahiri said.

“How can you be so sure?”

Her gaze dropped to Eniknar, seeming to stare into him rather than at him. After a long moment, she looked back at Jag.

“I just am.”

“Well, that still doesn’t mean he has to be the one who sacrifices—”

“Jag,” she interrupted sternly. “We don’t have time for this. From the look of him, I doubt that he’s going to survive very long anyway.”

Jag sighed. She was right; they were running out of time. He leaned back down to Eniknar.

“Are you sure?” he said, offering one last resistance to the plan. “We could try—”

The security chief was already shaking his head before he’d finished. “This way … at least … I die … with honor.”

Jag knew it made no sense to argue. The Noghri’s strength was ebbing; if he left his decision too long, the situation might be taken out of their hands.

He placed the control unit against Eniknar’s chest, and Tahiri taped it in place.

“Twenty seconds,” she said through their visors. “Wait twenty seconds, then input the code, okay? That’ll give us time to get clear.”

Eniknar’s eyes were shut as he nodded. “I can wait … that long.”

They left him there, propped up against a reinforced girder. As Jag gunned the speeder bike off into the darkness, scattering a pack of reptoid ground troops in their wake, he heard Tahiri’s voice in his helmet speakers.

“Rrush’hok ichnar vinim’hok,” she muttered softly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Yuuzhan Vong blessing,” she said. “It means, ‘die well, brave warrior.’ ”

Jag acknowledged the sentiment with a nod of his head, although her ease with the Yuuzhan Vong culture continued to unsettle him. “I guess the others owe him an apology.”

“I’ll make sure he gets one, when things quiet down.”

“A little late, don’t you think?”

“Not for those of us who will remember him.” Eniknar’s sacrifice didn’t sit well with Jag for so many reasons he had difficulty identifying them all. Chiss culture had a strong aversion to suicide, regarding it wasteful and unjustifiable. Although Eniknar’s gesture would save many more lives, it still rankled.

But there was something else that bothered him more. If Eniknar wasn’t the traitor as everyone had believed him to be, then who was?

Behind them, the sky lit with a bright, white light, as though an impossible dawn had come to this cold and sunless world.

“Your uncle asks after you,” the image with Vergere’s face said to Jacen. Saba observed the exchange with senses desensitized to surprise. That Sekot could be in two places at once didn’t seem as unreasonable as it would have just a day ago. “I have told him that you are all well, and that no harm will come to you now that the testing is complete.”

“Did you test the Ferroanz, too?” Saba asked. She was still smarting at the way she and Jacen had been deceived. The supposed mastermind of the kidnappers, Senshi, smiled serenely at her from where he rested with the Magister against one side of the seeding ground.

Sekot’s beaked visage turned to face her. “When I awoke, they were already here. In fact, I suspect it was their arrival that precipitated my awakening—or at least hastened it along. Whatever process I was undergoing to reach full awareness, it needed only their presence to be complete.”

“That doesn’t explain where you came from,” Danni said. The human scientist seemed none the worse for her time spent unconscious at the whim of Sekot. She sat cross-legged on the stretcher, listening intently to Sekot’s story. “If you weren’t a chance combination of elements requiring just an intelligent, peaceful civilization to jumpstart your evolution to consciousness, then what were you? How did you come to be?”

“I have asked myself that many times,” Sekot said, “and never been able to satisfactorily answer it. Jabitha’s father’s understanding of the Force was flawed. I know that now. He thought that everything was one in the Potentium, a teaching that has survived among the Ferroans to this day. But the Jedi showed me that evil does exist, and I know that the Far Outsiders stand outside the Force. Where does that leave me now? Did I spring from the Force or somewhere else?”

“We have speculated on this,” Danni said. “There are a number of possibilities.”

“And I would be interested to discuss them with you another time.” Vergere’s fringe shivered as she turned to face the human scientist. “It remains, though, that a sample size of one is not enough for either of us to reach a conclusion. The simple fact is that I do not know where I came from. I have not come across any others of my kind anywhere else in the galaxy, and that makes me wonder. Perhaps I did wake once, or many times before, but without the Ferroans I retreated into unconsciousness and forgot those dark periods of my development. I only came into the light when there was someone here to welcome my birth, someone to know me. For without that, could I ever be considered alive?”

Saba was struck by the image of world-minds like orphaned hatchlings, scattered across the stars. What would it be like to grow up alone, never knowing who had spawned you, or who your siblings might be? She couldn’t imagine it. Neither could she decide if it would be worse or better than knowing your family and then losing them.

Vergere’s alien eyes regarded Jacen coolly, waiting for him to comment.

He did so eventually with a nod. “You’re right. It’s how we treat others that matters, not where we came from.”

“Exactly, young Jedi. I stand by everything I’ve done since I became alive. I trust and obey my own imperatives.”

“Thoze being?” Saba asked.

“The same as any intelligent entity: to live in peace, to grow in knowledge and wisdom, to love and be loved in return.” Vergere’s smiled was broad and peaceful, belying the words that followed. “And if any tries to rob me of my right to follow those imperatives, I have the same choices as anyone: I can run or I can fight. I have experienced both.”

Leia tried Ashpidar for the fourth time, now more worried than before.

“Commander? Are you there?”

“Perhaps Commander Ashpidar is attending business elsewhere,” C-3PO suggested.

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “It’s been far too long. A good commander wouldn’t leave her post like this at a time of crisis.” She stood after a moment’s consideration. “I’m going to see what’s wrong.”

“Oh, dear.” The golden droid’s arms flapped like those of a flightless bird. “Do you think that’s a good idea, Princess? Perhaps a call to base security—”

“I’d rather check it out myself.” She retrieved her lightsaber and a blaster from the passenger area. “It’s the only way to be sure.”

“As you wish, Princess,” the droid said.

Meewalh and Cakhmain, her two Noghri bodyguards, preceded her down the umbilical connecting the Falcon to the base.

“Stay here,” she said to C-3PO. “Call me on my comlink if you hear anything. If I’m not back in half an hour, or I haven’t called you, shut the air lock and wait for Han to come back. Don’t let anyone else in, whatever you do.”

Leia left him dithering and flustered, reassuring her profusely that he’d do as instructed. She slotted between Meewalh and Cakhmain and walked along the umbilical into the relay base.

The corridors were quiet as she headed to Ashpidar’s quarters. The base was on alert, so most of the crew were at their stations, ready in case of an emergency. She passed two of the Ugnaughts and a Sullustan supervisor performing maintenance work on a power router, but apart from that, the base seemed utterly deserted.

Leia took the curving corridor leading to Ashpidar’s office at a slower pace, wary of surprises. She didn’t know what was making her so edgy, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

The door to Ashpidar’s office was, not surprisingly, locked. “Go back and get that engineer,” she ordered Meewalh. “Perhaps she can get us in.”

While she waited for Meewalh to return with the Sullustan, she tried in vain to listen for anything through the bulkhead. The room on the other side was either empty, or—

She stopped herself short. There was no point heading for such pessimistic conclusions until she had cause to do so. There were a thousand reasons that might explain Ashpidar’s silence. Just because she couldn’t think of one that held up to close examination at this time didn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t one …

“What’s the problem here?” the Sullustan asked, striding confidently up to Leia.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your work—” Leia read the engineer’s name tag. “—Gantree, but I need to get into this room.”

Gantree’s response was instantly suspicious. “Why?”

“Commander Ashpidar isn’t answering my calls.”

“She could be resting.”

“At a time like this?” Leia shook her head.

“Then perhaps she’s busy elsewhere on the base.”

“Have you seen her in the last couple of hours?”

The engineer sighed, her large eyes blinking. “You must understand that privacy on a base such as this is respected by everyone. I can’t just—”

“I do understand that,” Leia said. “But this is important. I have a terrible feeling that something has happened to the commander. So please, open this door. If my suspicions prove to be unfounded, then I’ll take full responsibility.”

The Sullustan slowly nodded. “Very well,” she muttered, approaching the door and examining its keypad. “But if she asks what—” Gantree stopped, frowning down at the lock. “That’s strange.”

“What is it?” Leia asked.

“The door,” the engineer said. “It’s been locked from the outside.”

Leia’s stomach began to turn over uneasily as the engineer tapped in a long string of codes until the lock finally beeped and the door slid open.

Meewalh went first. Leia followed close behind, her lightsaber drawn but not lit. The first thing she noticed was a smell of ozone in the air. The second was a pair of large feet protruding from behind the desk.

She hurried over to where Ashpidar lay facedown, a web of fine wires wrapped around her horns. The engineer pushed past to examine the body of her commander.

“They tortured her!” the Sullustan exclaimed, tugging at the wires to remove them. “Gotals can’t stand intense magnetic fields anywhere near them.”

“Will she be all right?” Leia asked, crouching down beside the Sullustan. Gotal physiology wasn’t one of her strong points.

“They just knocked her out.” Gantree’s big eyes looked up imploringly at Leia. “Why would anyone do this?”

“Lady Vader,” Cakhmain whispered. “I think you should see this.”

She looked up. The Noghri female was examining the safe in the wall of Ashpidar’s office. It should have been tightly sealed, but the door was ajar. When Cakhmain swung it fully open, the inside was empty.

Cold rushed through her as she realized what had happened.

“Someone stole the villip.”

The Sullustan engineer looked confused. “A villip?”

“Eniknar and Ashpidar found one hidden in a maintenance recess a couple of days ago,” she explained. “They were trying to find out whom it belonged to when the Yuuzhan Vong attacked. Someone must have used it to lure them here.”

“A traitor? Here?”

A discomfiting thought struck her. “We thought it was Eniknar because he smelled wrong.”

The Sullustan frowned. “What does smell have to do with it?”

“To a Noghri, everything. Usually.” She glanced at her bodyguards, but they didn’t have the capacity to look sheepish. “The real traitor has been here all along,” she went on. “And now he or she has the villip.”

Alarm showed on the engineer’s expressive face. “They could call the Yuuzhan Vong down upon us!”

Leia nodded gravely. “We have to find a way to stop that from happening.”

“Wouldn’t they have done it already?

“Unlikely,” she said. “They’d need to be able to get away from here first. They wouldn’t want to go down with the ship.”

“Then they must be heading out on foot, because there are no speeder bikes left.”

“And it takes time to put on an enviro-suit.” A sense of urgency gripped her; they might have arrived too late to prevent Ashpidar from being tortured for the codes for the safe, but they might yet stop the traitor finishing the job. “Come on.”

Gantree hurried from the room close behind Leia. “A roll call would tell us who was missing,” she began, flustered by Leia’s sudden haste.

“That would only alert them that we’re onto them. No, we have to get to them before they escape. Which air lock would they use?”

“There’s only one designed for suited EVA.”

“Take me there.”

The Sullustan’s short legs propelled her rapidly along the base’s corridor, urged on by Leia’s certainty that this was the only way to stop the traitor. There wasn’t time to move the base to safety—or the Falcon, for that matter. If they failed, it would all end here.

The extravehicular air lock was locked when they arrived. Through a thick transparisteel observation window, they saw a diminutive figure working the final seals on an enviro-suit. Leia couldn’t make out who it was from the back, but the Sullustan beside her seemed to know automatically. Her hand punched at an intercom.

“Tegg! What are you doing?”

The Ugnaught on the other side of the glass didn’t respond, except to hasten his efforts. There was a small, vacuum-sealed box beside him, just large enough to contain a villip.

“Why are you doing this?” the engineer went on. “Don’t you know they’ll kill us all?”

Still the Ugnaught didn’t speak, but the look of hatred in the tiny traitor’s eyes said it all: Peace Brigade. They were everywhere, their once vague and amorphous resentment and anger finally given shape by the Yuuzhan Vong.

“Can we open the door?” Leia asked.

The Sullustan tapped at a keypad, then threw her hands up in frustration. “He’s frozen the controls!”

“Then we have to stop him getting out.” Leia’s palms itched at the closeness of disaster. “Does this lock meet standard safety requirements?”

The Sullustan looked offended at the suggestion that it might not. “Of course! Why?”

“That means the outer lock can’t open if there’s a breach in the inner lock.” She snapped on her lightsaber. “Stand back.”

Her bodyguards and the Sullustan moved to the far side of the air lock bay. Leia raised her lightsaber and channeled all her energy along it. She would need every iota of strength she had to drill through a half-meter-thick transparisteel sheet.

Yellow-hot sparks flew in all directions as she brought the tip of her lightsaber in contact with the window. A trickle of molten transparisteel ran down the surface, and she felt the blade sink slowly into it, one centimeter at a time. The Ugnaught looked up and hastened his efforts to escape, but she didn’t let herself think about him. His actions were beyond her control right now; she had to focus solely upon the job at hand. She narrowed her awareness down to the blade itself, sending her will in waves down to the very tip as it worked its way through the transparisteel. There she concentrated on breaking chemical bonds, setting chunks of complex materials free, burning deeper and deeper. Her being dissolved in that fire until she seemed no longer to exist. Everything hinged on one incredibly simple task, and she became that task. There was nothing else of her left.

An alarm sounding in her ears dragged her reluctantly back to her physical surroundings, thinking she’d made it through the window and thereby activated the breach failsafes. But there was still resistance at the end of her lightsaber. She looked up from the glow of her blade and saw red warning lights flashing, but they weren’t from any alarm she had triggered. The exterior air lock was open and the air lock was empty.

She couldn’t believe her eyes. It wasn’t possible! Yet there it was, undeniable. The Ugnaught had escaped, leaving the door jammed open behind him so they couldn’t follow. The same failsafes that might have stopped the traitor now stopped her. She couldn’t open the inner door while the outer was ajar. All of her efforts had been for nothing.… She deactivated her lightsaber.

“Can you move the base without Ashpidar’s authorization?” she said, turning to the engineer.

“Yes, but—”

“Just do it. Get it out of here now! It doesn’t matter where. I’ll get the Falcon moving, too, perhaps as a decoy. Any chance at all is better than none!”

Gantree blinked wide, frightened eyes at her. Leia sensed the Sullustan’s fear, but she didn’t have time to reassure her. If they were going to save the relay base then—

Something clattering in the air lock distracted her. She turned in unison with the Sullustan to see that the Ugnaught had returned. Through the thick, Esfandian air that had filled the chamber it was hard to tell exactly what was going on, but it looked as though he’d tripped headlong over the threshold and now lay sprawled faceup on the floor. As Leia watched, he struggled to his feet, edging away from the open air lock with his back to the window. Seconds later, Leia saw the cause of his fear.

A human-shaped figure in an enviro-suit stepped into the air lock, a glowing violet lightsaber raised, ready to strike.

Relief tightened Leia’s throat. “Jaina!”

“I came as soon as I could,” came her daughter’s voice over the intercom.

“You felt me?”

“Felt that something was wrong. I homed in on you just in time to catch this little one trying to set up his pet villip.”

At that moment, the Ugnaught feinted and made a break for the door. Jaina gestured with her free hand and he flew against a wall, arms and legs spread wide.

Another figure appeared in the door. Leia sensed the two talking to each other, although she couldn’t tap into their internal comm system without wearing a suit of her own.

“Droma says there’s something going on above,” Jaina said as the two of them worked at the obstruction holding the external door open. “Looks like the fighting’s started again. We’ll let ourselves in while you go check to see if Pellaeon’s sent some telemetry.”

Leia nodded, her relief at the timely rescue turning once again to worry. Whatever had broken the stalemate, it couldn’t bode well for the Imperial forces. They were still outnumbered.

Besides, this wasn’t the way the plan was supposed to go. If Jaina and the others had successfully destroyed the transponder tower, making it look as if the relay base had been destroyed, there should be no reason for Commander Vorrik to stick around any longer. He could leave, mission accomplished and honor intact, leaving the Galactic Alliance to sift through the wreckage. So why was he still here?

The crisis with the villip safely averted, her thoughts turned out to the rest of the planet, and beyond. The battle may have been won, but the course of the war was still very much to be decided.

Something anxious and troubling chewed at her stomach. What had gone wrong?

A chill went down Jacen’s spine.

“You’ve decided to fight,” he said, trying to fathom the words coming from his former teacher with the same veneration as if Vergere herself were speaking. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

“That is not what I said.” Sekot turned on him and fixed him with a piercing stare. “I said that I had a choice, and that I have tried both of the options already. I fought off the Far Outsiders. Then, I fled the fire of the inner galaxy, seeking the outer darkness so that I might be alone—so that I might be safe. And for many years I was just that. Then you came to disturb my peace.”

“The Yuuzhan Vong came first,” he reminded the living planet.

“You both invade my Sanctuary.”

“But with different intentions.”

The image of Vergere’s feathered eyebrows went up in surprise. “You presume a lot, young Jedi,” Sekot said. “Without knowing what the Far Outsiders said to me, what they demanded of me, or what they tried to take from me, you seem confident to speak of their intentions.”

Jacen bowed his head apologetically. “You’re right, of course.” He raised his eyes to meet those of Vergere. “Nevertheless, you must have seen something different about us. You allowed us to land, after all; the Yuuzhan Vong you simply destroyed.”

“The Jedi have never openly meant me harm, and I have learned much from you in the past. There is much I have left to learn, and you can help with that, under the right circumstances. Many people here remember your kind, and would have been keen to have you here, but for your war.”

“We’re here in search of peace, not war,” Jacen said, injecting every word with as much sincerity as he could muster.

“How can I give you peace?”

Jacen shook his head. This was the question that had haunted him ever since his teacher’s death “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But there has to be something, otherwise Vergere would never have sent us in the first place.”

“I could give you weapons to help you fight your war,” Sekot said. “The Far Outsiders are invisible to the life flows that the first Magister called the Potentium and that you Jedi call the Force, but that does not make them utter abominations. Ever since their first attack, I have been examining fragments of destroyed vessels, seeking to understand the principles by which they operate.”

“Back-engineering their technology,” Danni said.

“Precisely. Much that I found was confusing and disturbing, but I took what I could and made it my own. My living ships and weapons bear similarities to those of the Far Outsiders, and few of their weaknesses.”

Jacen felt his breath catch in his throat. Was this why Vergere had sent them to Sekot? Part of him was excited by the thought of beating the Yuuzhan Vong at their own game, but it didn’t ring true with what he remembered of his teacher. He doubted she had intended for them to find superweapons to help destroy the Yuuzhan Vong. A deeper understanding of their enemy, yes, and perhaps a new weakness, but not another means of wreaking slaughter.

“What’s wrong, Jacen?” Sekot asked him. “You don’t look pleased.”

“I guess I’m not,” he said. “I don’t think that’s why we’re here.”

“You’re not here to get our help in the war?” Jabitha asked.

“We are, yes. But not like that.”

“Then how? What else do we have to offer you?”

“I don’t know.”

The image of his teacher crooked one eye higher than the other in a distinctly avian gesture. “I am a force unlike anything you have come across before,” Sekot said. “Are you trying to tell me that were I to offer myself as a weapon in your fight against the Far Outsiders, you would turn me down?”

Jacen felt Saba and Danni staring at him, and for a moment two words warred with his thoughts.

Yes—because he was tired of death and destruction and the endless cycle of violence. A military victory for the Galactic Alliance would require the utter genocide of the Yuuzhan Vong species. How could he possibly live with himself if he was in any way responsible for something like that?

And no—because he could see no other way to defend those he loved. If there was no other option but military might, he couldn’t stand by and watch his friends and family be slaughtered. His conscience would be clear to turn down the offer of such a weapon, he knew, but what was a moral victory if in the end it meant the deaths of trillions?

The weight of the future might rest heavily upon what he would say next, yet Jacen felt incredibly small at that moment. With a word he could change the course of the war, and therefore the destiny of his people.

“Well?” Sekot prompted. “What is your answer?”

“No.”

The word seemed to echo in Luke’s mind as he imagined generations of children who might not live if the Galactic Alliance failed in the fight against the Yuuzhan Vong—children such as his own son, Ben. He saw every species of the galaxy enslaved to the biological slave machine of Supreme Overlord Shimrra—every cell screaming rebellion, but every limb yoked in an endless cycle of pain and despair. With such images in his mind, could he really afford to turn down the means to the galaxy’s salvation that Sekot might bring?

“You would accept such an offer?” said the image of Anakin Skywalker, face tipped forward as though seeking reassurance that he’d heard correctly.

Luke nodded slowly, deliberately. “I would.”

But even as he spoke the words, he couldn’t help but wonder if, in accepting the offer, he might be straying too close to the dark side, or encouraging Sekot to do so …

“Then consider the offer made,” Sekot said, smiling broadly.

Behind Luke, the Ferroans gasped as one. This they hadn’t expected—and neither had Luke.

“What about all this talk about wanting peace and to be left alone?” Mara asked. She made no attempt to hide her suspicions.

“I still desire those things,” Sekot said. “I just know that I cannot have them here, or while the Far Outsiders trouble this galaxy. So my offer is for my benefit as much as it is your own.”

“But, Sekot,” Rowel spluttered, “what of Sanctuary?”

“Sanctuary has already been irreparably shattered,” Sekot answered. “You see, the escape of the coralskipper from the moon M-Three was not entirely fiction. One vessel did manage to escape my net during the attack, and we must presume that that ship is returning to its masters to report on my whereabouts.”

The words provoked a look of both horror and surprise on the faces of Darak and Rowel. Horror for Sekot’s decision to help the Jedi, and surprise, perhaps, because even their godlike planet had not been able to prevent one of the enemy’s ships from escaping.

Sekot must have seen this in their expressions, too.

“I guess I am not as all-powerful as you think me,” it said to the Ferroans. To Mara and Luke it added: “Nor you. Is that a sobering thought?”

Pellaeon observed the demise of the transponder with something approaching satisfaction. The explosion showed as a white-hot dimple bulging up through the dense atmosphere, accompanied by a sharp electromagnetic crack. It was unmistakable, even through the flash and scatter of the battle above.

Now, Vorrik, he thought. Let’s see what you’re really made of. Will you turn tail and flee, or have I stung your pride enough to make you stay around, for one final humiliation?

Kur-hashan seemed to hover, indecisive, as the news sunk in. Pellaeon wondered what was going through the commander’s mind. What secret agenda had been confounded? Pellaeon didn’t doubt there was one. Expending so much energy to knock out a single communications nexus just didn’t make sense. They could have destroyed it days ago simply by pounding the surface of the planet back to molten slag. That they hadn’t could only mean one thing: they wanted the base intact.

Pellaeon smiled as Kur-hashan began to come about, preparing for all-out attack.

“Send the signal,” he instructed his aide. “I think it’s been long enough.”

Secrets within secrets …

Imperial and Yuuzhan Vong forces clashed anew, a thousand bright flashes lighting up the dark world below. TIE fighter hunted coralskipper; capital ships turned their prodigious energies against each other; shields burned a million different colors, dissipating deadly forces in all directions. From the planet below, the skies of Esfandia would be burning bright, as they never had before.

Pellaeon stood firm on the bridge as Kur-hashan bore down on him. The hideous, mottled hull grinned like a dreadful death mask. He imagined Vorrik’s rage and anticipation building behind it. An infidel might defy the great commander, but victory in the end was assured. As far as Vorrik would have been concerned, it was only a matter of time before his superior forces swept those in his path to the edges of the universe, like dust.

A ripple of worry spread across the bridge. For the briefest of moments, Pellaeon wondered if Vorrik might be right, if he hadn’t miscalculated the timing or gotten the message wrong. A thousand and one things could have gone awry, which was why he hadn’t shared the truth with anyone but his aide.

Then, just as the grinning skull of Kur-hashan seemed to bulge out of the screen at him, a telemetry officer spoke up.

“Hyperspace signatures, sir—dozens of them!”

Pellaeon let out the breath he’d been holding as ships of all shapes and sizes appeared around Esfandia, a ragtag fleet armed with patchwork cannons and out-of-date missiles. What they lacked in top-of-the-line hardware, though, they more than made up for with surprise and guts. They threw themselves against the warship and its attendant craft, pounding dovin basals and cutting great swaths out of yorik coral. For a minute, it looked as though the alien behemoth might recover its poise, and its control of the situation with it, but with atmosphere and bodies venting in more than a dozen places, and dovin basals failing in great ripples along one flank, the tide quickly turned. A gunboat with unfamiliar markings stitched a line of fiery death down the giant living vessel’s spine. Two very unsteady-looking corvettes, working in tandem, took out a yammosk-bearing support ship. A heavily shielded drone freighter spun out of control into Kur-hashan’s midsection and blew up as though it had been loaded from stem to stern with high explosives.

“Incoming transmission!” his comm officer announced. “It’s from the enemy.”

Pellaeon smiled.

Vorrik’s hideous visage appeared before him. The commander’s bridge was shaking behind him, and the image was fuzzy, as though the room was filling with smoke.

Pellaeon made a gesture to his aide, out of Vorrik’s sight.

“I take it you wish to surrender, Vorrik?”

The warrior snarled. “You cannot defeat us, infidel.”

“Five minutes ago I would have said the same thing,” Pellaeon said. “But now …”

“You may kill us, but you will not defeat us! You will never defeat us!”

With a roar from the commander, the communication ended. Pellaeon knew what was about to happen. “Full shields immediately!” he commanded. “He’s going to blow his drives!”

The order spread among the Imperial and other ships harassing the giant destroyer. Just as Kur-hashan’s surviving engines surged forward and something deep in its belly began to erupt, every ship within range shunted all power away from attack to defense. The commander’s final gesture was wasted. For all the fury of the dying warship, all the energy expended in one wild rush and all the Yuuzhan Vong lives lost, it did little more than nudge Right to Rule slightly off course.

And when the titanic fireball had dwindled to embers, the odds were better than even.

“Transmission from Pride of Selonia.”

“Put it through,” Pellaeon ordered. “My station only.”

He turned as a holo image of Captain Mayn appeared behind him.

“Congratulations, Grand Admiral,” she said. “I presume you knew all along what was going to happen.”

“That Vorrik would self-destruct rather than surrender? No, but it was a good bet he’d prefer to go out kicking. I may not have as much experience with the Yuuzhan Vong as you, but I know their type; I know the way they think. They never bend; all they can do is break, with an eye to the spectacular.”

Mayn smiled. “Actually, I was referring to the other ships. Where did they come from? Who are they?”

“Friends of yours, I believe. They told me about Esfandia after Generis. They suggested I come here to avoid another catastrophe. They also said reinforcements wouldn’t be far behind, if I needed them. I could summon them by transmitting a code phrase on a particular frequency. When Vorrik attacked rather than giving up the game, I figured the time had come.”

“That was quite a gamble, sir.”

“You have a problem with the way it turned out, Captain?”

Mayn smiled briefly. “Not at all, Admiral. I might have done the same thing myself, given the circumstances. I’m just trying to work out who these ‘friends’ of ours are, though.”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Pellaeon said. “All I know is that they’re calling themselves the Ryn network.”

Understanding and puzzlement collided on Mayn’s face. “Really? Well, I suppose they could’ve called in some favors, here and there, but I never suspected they’d have this sort of influence.”

“So you do know something about them?”

Mayn nodded. “A little. But you might want to talk to Princess Leia and Captain Solo to find out the full story.”

With that, Mayn saluted, and the transmission eneded. Pellaeon turned back to his duties, nodding thoughtfully to himself.

“Believe me,” he muttered, “I intend to.”

“Yes.”

Stunned silence fell about the rain-soaked pit in the wake of Jacen’s answer to Sekot. He could feel Saba and Danni looking at him, uncomprehending. How could he have said that? their eyes asked. How could he have damned countless millions to unspeakable misery?

He turned away from them both, not wanting their silent accusations. Deep in his heart he knew he’d made the right decision, and two voices in his mind reassured him of that. The first belonged to Wynssa Fel, who had said to him on Csilla: The weapon at your side seems out of place on a man who professes to hate violence. The second voice belonged to his uncle: How do we fight a brutal, evil enemy without becoming brutal and evil ourselves?

Somewhere between those two statements lurked the justification for his decision. It was the most difficult decision he’d ever had to make, and one he could not explain in a few words to either Danni or Saba. It pained him to think of what the ramifications of his decision might be for the rest of the galaxy, but he wasn’t about to back down from the stand he was making. Saying yes to Zonama Sekot had been a show of strength, not an act of weakness.

“After traveling as far as you have to beseech my help,” Sekot said, “you reject my offer. Are you sure?”

“I stand by my decision,” he answered soberly.

“Jacen …” Danni’s objection petered out with a bewildered shake of her head.

“Military might is not what we need,” he tried to explain. “I cannot countenance destruction as a solution to the threat of destruction. In the long run, such a victory would only bring about our own downfall.” He faced Sekot once again. “I’m sorry, but I cannot accept your offer.”

The image of his former teacher smiled. “Nevertheless, I have decided to join your cause.”

Jacen frowned at Sekot’s unnaturally dry image. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you have achieved what you set out to do,” Sekot said. “I shall return with you to your war. Whether or not I can make a difference, of course, remains to be seen.”

Vergere’s image moved over to where Jacen stood, his mind still numb with shock. To his surprise, the arm Vergere’s image placed around his waist exerted a faint pressure, like heavy fog.

“We are done with running,” Sekot told him, softly, so only he could hear. “We must find a way to end this war. Perhaps together we can work out which way we must go. Not just for ourselves, but for the sake of all life within the galaxy.”

Jacen turned to stare into the eyes of his former teacher. In them he found great intellect and infinite compassion, as well as an ageless, unfathomable wisdom the likes of which he could never hope to achieve. But try as he might, he could find no reassurance in them, and that troubled him more than he was prepared to admit.

“It gives me great displeasure, Supreme One, to report on yet another nest of perfidy, this time in Numesh sector and overseen by the Prefect Zareb.”

Nom Anor watched with keen interest as the court of the Supreme Overlord heard of the latest supposed threat to the status quo. The villip hidden in Ngaaluh’s robes caught the scene with perfect clarity as she presented her report. He listened with relish, feeling the need for some uncomplicated revenge in order to wash the taste of Shoon-mi’s betrayal from his throat.

Shimrra was seated atop his yorik throne, one elbow resting on the throne’s arm as he gazed down reflectively upon those gathered before him. The baleful red eyes swept the attentive crowd. There was no sound apart from the shuffling of feet and the soft, creaking contractions of shifting armor, and Ngaaluh’s voice, tolling the doom of the former executor Zareb. The planted heretics had been interrogated; their testimony was plain.

“It is with regret that I must deliver this news, Supreme One, but the conclusion is inescapable: you have been yet again betrayed by someone in whom you put your trust.”

Shimrra shook his head at the inevitable conclusion. “How is this possible?”

“My Lord, I fear—”

“Not you, Ngaaluh. You have said all you need to say.” Shimrra rose to his feet and descended from his throne with calculated precision, red eyes glancing at a different member of his audience with each step. His voice, when he spoke, was like the voice of Yun-Yuuzhan himself.

“The heresy is not a poison gas that sneaks in through the cracks. It is not spirits whispering in someone’s ear. It is not a contagion, floating on the wind. No, the heresy is spread by Shamed Ones who are flesh and blood like us. They possess no supernatural powers. Their love of the infidel Jeedai gives them no unseen advantage.”

Shimrra’s posture was one of restrained fury when he reached the base of the steps.

“So, Warmaster, can you explain how these flesh-and-blood heretics are able to corrupt my most trusted servants without being detected?”

The mighty Nas Choka ground sharpened teeth together. “Our investigations continue through all avenues, Great One,” he said. “Of prime concern to us is the nature of the traitors Ngaaluh has reported. They are all, you will note, of the intendant caste.”

“Indeed.” The Supreme Overlord turned to High Prefect Drathul, whose eyes shot hatefully at the warmaster. “Tell me, Drathul, how these Shamed Ones have been able to amass the resources necessary for their existence, let alone to undermine my authority.”

The High Prefect shifted uneasily. “I can assure you that the chains of supply are being examined as we speak. We strongly suspect that some of the knowledge required to divert these resources was obtained from a renegade shaper.”

Shimrra’s look of disdain required no words. “Master Shaper,” he said, turning next to Yal Phaath. “How do you respond to this claim?”

“Such knowledge did not come from our ranks, I assure you, Supreme One.” The master shaper locked his grotesquely modified hands nervously in front of him. “Our faith lies firmly in you and the gods.”

The Supreme Overlord’s expression conveyed perfectly what he thought of that assertion.

“Ah, yes: faith.” Shimrra turned lastly to the high priest. Nom Anor wished he could freeze the villip choir on the look on Jakan’s face. Watching the warmaster, high prefect, and master shaper squirm had been fine enough, but this was even better.

“This heresy undermines the spiritual center of our mighty people, Jakan,” Shimrra said, looming less than an arm’s length away from the high priest. “The gods have every right to be displeased at the lack of faith we show in them. Your plans to rid us of this treacherous Prophet show a distinct lack of imagination.”

“You may be assured, Supreme One, that retribution is at hand,” Jakan pronounced, a slight trembling of his hands the only sign of the terror he was surely feeling. “Such vile blasphemies will not go unpunished.”

“Indeed they will not. Our enemies are flesh and blood, after all. They are nothing to the gods but aberrations.” Shimrra released the high priest from his stare, and Jakan visibly sagged.

“The question remains, however,” said Shimrra, stalking back to confront High Prefect Drathul, “how to explain the spread of the heresy among the higher ranks on Yuuzhan’tar.”

Drathul straightened, but remained silent in the face of the Supreme Overlord’s piercing stare.

“Perhaps, High Prefect, I am betrayed more profoundly than I ever dared think. Perhaps there is a traitor in my palace, a recruiter for the vile sect that swears allegiance to the Jeedai.”

Shimrra’s voice was low and threatening, and the implications were obvious. Every scar on Nom Anor’s head tingled to hear it. He had never hoped it would come to this. Not against the high prefect himself!

“This poisoned kshirrup dares to purvey the Prophet’s rot among those closest to me, attempting to turn them against my will. The traitor steals secrets, misappropriates resources, tells me lies, holds a weapon to my throat that I cannot even see. What do you say of that possibility, Drathul?”

The high prefect’s name emerged as a low, threatening growl. The audience craned forward to see what would happen next.

“I think it is a possibility, My Lord,” the high prefect said in as firm as voice as anyone could muster under the circumstances, “but I assure you—”

“Not another word, Drathul!” Shimrra leaned over the high prefect. “I am observant. I hear the whispers; I sense the hidden eyes upon me. I know when I am being betrayed!”

The roar echoed through the chamber. Drathul visibly flinched at the bile in the words. Guards appeared from behind the hau polyp dais, and Nom Anor felt a keen sense of victory sweep through him. Drathul in the yargh’un pit? So soon?

But instead of closing in on the high prefect, it was Ngaaluh whom the warriors surrounded. Staring dumbly at the villip choir, Nom Anor saw the blunt, scarred faces closing in, and it took him a long moment to realize what was happening. It took Ngaaluh just as long, for the guards were almost upon her before she proclaimed her innocence.

“My Lord? What is this?”

“This is treachery,” Shimrra said, turning to face her. His burning red eyes seemed to stare right into Nom Anor’s frozen heart. “You should know that well enough.”

“Supreme One, I swear—”

“Seize her!”

Shimrra strode across from Drathul, growing mightier and more furious in the villip choir with every step. The guards grabbed Ngaaluh and held her tightly. To her credit, she didn’t struggle, but Nom Anor felt her fear in the way the villip trembled.

“Your evidence against Prefect Ash’ett was convincing,” Shimrra snarled. “Against Drosh Khalii and Prefect Zareb it was watertight. Almost too good, in fact. Wondering, I took the opportunity to question the witnesses you brought here, prior to their disposal in the yargh’un pits. When interrogated properly, they told a very different story.”

“No—”

“They were planted to deliberately incriminate Ash’ett, Khalii, and Zareb, weren’t they, Ngaaluh? You are the trusted one who turns against me, not these innocent intendants!”

Behind Shimrra, High Prefect Drathul’s face glowed with a mixture of relief and anger.

“My Lord,” he said, “this is inconceivable. Ngaaluh’s treachery explains much, but for the Prophet to have reached here, into your very court—”

“I did not say anything about the Prophet, High Prefect,” Shimrra said, turning. “This traitor uses the trappings of the heresy to accuse her victims, but that does not mean that she adheres to them herself.” Shimrra prowled across Ngaaluh’s field of view. “No. I sense conspiracies within conspiracies, here. It will take some time—and no considerable effort—to disentangle the truth from the web of lies concealing it.”

“I will tell you nothing!” Ngaaluh gasped. The view through the villip shook as her body spasmed. Nom Anor watched and listened in horror as his spy emitted a pained cry, then slumped into the arms of the guards.

There was a commotion. The view shook, and for a moment Nom Anor couldn’t tell what was happening. When the villip was still, faces loomed in close, and he realized that Ngaaluh was prostrate on the ground, with people bending over her.

“Poison,” one of the guards said. “I fear that she has escaped us, Supreme One.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Shimrra’s voice was surprisingly calm. “We could not have trusted the confession of a priestess of deception, even under the most intense interrogation. Her discovery and death is enough to warn the person or persons she served that we are not fools. We cannot be deceived for long.”

“The damage she did can be reversed,” High Prefect Drathul said. “The lies she told can be rescinded. My intendants’ names can be cleared.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Shimrra’s reply surprised Nom Anor. “Ash’ett, Khalii, and Zareb will not be wasted. Already reports of heresy are on the increase. Fear of punishment is driving this new purge, and I would not see that undone. One good thing will come of this fiasco. That is a certainty.”

The villip continued to transmit as one of the guards kicked Ngaaluh’s lifeless body.

“What shall we do with this?” he asked.

“The usual.” Shimrra’s voice was dismissive. “Whether the Prophet sent her or not, she will serve as a warning to anyone else who would attempt to spy on me and to sow division in my court. Her hidden master will see that I am no fool. He will know that it is only a matter of time before I find him, too, and before he shares her fate.”

“That time is long overdue,” High Prefect Drathul said.

“It will come, faithful servant,” the Supreme Overlord said. “It will come …”

Shimrra’s voice faded into the background as Ngaaluh’s body was hauled unceremoniously from the throne room. Nom Anor couldn’t tear his eyes from the wildly swinging view. Muffled grunts and the sounds of heavy footfalls accompanied the morbid procession through the palace. There were no exclamations, no questions. A dead body these days was not an unusual sight.

“Master,” Kunra said from the shadows, his voice tremulous.

“Be quiet,” Nom Anor growled. He wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. Ngaaluh was gone, and with her he had lost his best means of enacting his will on Yuuzhan’tar. Without her, he could no longer observe Shimrra and his court; nor could he tell what plans the Supreme Overlord was concocting against him. The chance to revenge himself on his enemies had slipped through his fingers, just when he had felt that he had been on the verge of success.

The rocking of the villip ceased for a moment, and Nom Anor’s eyes, which had been staring blindly at the villip choir, registered the scene again. Ngaaluh was swinging back and forth. The guards were counting. When they reached “Three!” the world whirled and the body fell.

Ngaaluh and the villip came to rest atop the charnel pit, tilted slightly to one side. Nom Anor had a perfect view of rotting bodies piled up in their hundreds. Somewhere in there were the pseudo-heretics he had sent to their deaths, along with Prefect Ash’ett, Drosh Khalii, and all the faithful who had been betrayed by Shimrra’s new regime of terror. The boastful Commander Ekh’m Val was in there, too, faceless and nameless, his dreams of glory shattered.

How long, Nom Anor wondered, until the Prophet himself joined them?

“Nom Anor—”

“I said, be quiet, Kunra.” He heard a worried crack to his voice, but couldn’t hide it. “There is nothing to say.”

Together, in silence, they watched the bodies rot. When darkness fell, the view in the villip choir faded to black, but still Nom Anor watched. Hypnotized, he could only stare and think.

How long?

He barely heard Kunra leave to attend to the work of the heresy.

How long? …