SEVEN

Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker stood in the trapezoidal entrance to the cliff dwelling that had been their home and shelter on Zonama Sekot for what had felt like three standard weeks. The span of time was only a guess based on human circadian rhythms, because the days had been anything but regular since the living world’s abrupt jump to hyperspace, lasting anywhere from fifteen to forty hours, as Zonama’s governing intelligence struggled to reassert control.

Torrential rain continued to lash the Middle Distance, driven by gales powerful enough to snap and topple the giant boras and strip the reddish trees of their globular leaves. The sky was an inverted silver bowl, with massive storm clouds stacked high in all directions, deep purple to black, and incandescent with continuous flashes of lightning. Peals of thunder resonated from the bare rock walls of the chasms that housed the cliff dwellings. As if from deep below the surface came a hollow moan, like breath across the narrow mouth of a container. Many believed that the sound was caused by wind rushing across Zonama Sekot’s three-hundred-meter-high hyperdrive vanes.

Caught in an updraft, three sheets of lamina building material spiraled up from the floor of the chasm and disappeared over the rim.

“This place is coming apart,” Mara said.

Luke nodded but said nothing. He had his right arm around Mara’s shoulders, and the side of her face was pressed to the soft weave of his dark cloak. The persistent gusts whipped Mara’s red-gold hair about her face and across her mouth.

To Luke’s left stood R2-D2, emitting a steady stream of mournful chirrs and chatterings, his status indicator flashing from red to blue and his third tread extended to keep himself from being blown over. Luke put his left hand on the astromech droid’s hemispherical head.

“Don’t worry, Artoo. We’ll come through this all right.”

R2 swiveled his primary photoreceptor to Luke and warbled in renewed hope.

Mara snorted a laugh. “What a guy. Always a kind word for pets, small children, and droids.”

The cliff dwelling—walls of tightly fitted stones enclosing two small spaces—was located in the canyon’s middle tier of natural ledges. Cavities in the bare rock face opposite were likewise partitioned into hundreds of separate dwellings, but many of the vine-and-lamina suspension bridges that had joined the community’s two halves were gone, as were the pulleyed platforms the Ferroans used for vertical transportation. Two kilometers below raged a ribbon of muddy water, dammed in places by knots of fallen boras and other detritus.

Word had it that similar conditions prevailed throughout the Middle Distance, which was the name given to the equatorial region where the Ferroans had settled more than seventy-five years earlier, when Zonama Sekot had resided on the other side of the galactic plane, in the Outer Rim of known space.

“Corran is coming,” Luke announced in a matter-of-fact tone.

Mara slipped out of his embrace and leaned out the entrance to gaze around, one hand clasping her long hair. “Where?” she said, just loudly enough to be heard. “I don’t see—”

She interrupted herself when she saw his head poke above the rungs of a wooden ladder that rose from a lower tier. Soaked to the bone, Corran held his jacket closed at the neck. Water dripped from his furrowed face and the graying beard and mustache that framed his mouth. His limp hair was pulled into a short tail at the back. He smiled when he noticed Mara, and hurried for the cliff dwelling, using his free hand to sluice some of the water from his forehead.

“Jacen and Saba’s airship has been spotted downvalley!” he shouted into the wind. “They should arrive any minute.”

Luke stepped out into the rain and wind to glance at the landing platform that jutted out over the canyon. “They might need some help. We’d better be on hand to meet them.” He looked back at R2, who was whining in apprehension.

“Stay here, Artoo. We’ll be right back.”

The three Jedi hurried for the ladder. Whereas Luke and Mara had been on Zonama Sekot for almost three months, Corran had arrived only three weeks earlier, in the company of Tahiri Veila and three Yuuzhan Vong agents. Two of the Yuuzhan Vong were now dead, and the third was believed to have escaped from the living world short of the act of sabotage that had hurled it through hyperspace.

First to reach the edge of the wind-tossed walkway that accessed the landing platform, Mara came to a sudden halt. “Is this thing safe?”

Luke regarded it for a moment. “It’ll hold!”

Corran frowned. “Could you be a bit more specific?”

Luke squeezed past him, out onto the swinging walkway, where he jumped in place, twice. “See?”

Mara threw Corran a look. “You can take the kid from Tatooine …” Leaving the remark unfinished, she dashed after Luke.

Corran was only steps behind when they reached the platform itself, square and cantilevered by thick timbers anchored in the cliff face. From downvalley, and drifting to and fro in the wind, appeared a cluster of what might have been balloons, holding aloft an oblong wooden gondola with an aft cabin.

“There she blows,” Corran said.

“You’re not kidding,” Mara said. She looked at Luke. “They’ll never be able to land!”

“They will. They have the Force at their backs.”

Luke set himself in the near-horizontal rain and focused his attention on the approaching airship. Through the Force, he could feel Mara and Corran join him, and he could also feel the tremendous power Jacen and Saba were exercising to prevent the airship from being blown where the howling wind wanted to take it. Confidence surged through him. The Jedi were working not against the natural forces, but in harmony with them, availing themselves of just those gusts that would maneuver the airship to the destination they had chosen.

Had there been better forewarning of the trap the three Yuuzhan Vong agents had sprung, Sekot also might have been able to maneuver Zonama through hyperspace to a safe landing. But the jump to lightspeed had been inadvertent—though fortunately in place of the planned destruction of the planet.

When Zonama Sekot first emerged from transit, conditions were even worse than those that followed. Luke could remember staring into an unfamiliar night sky; then, at daybreak, an enormous sun ballooning on the horizon like an explosion, too brilliant to regard, and radiating such heat that huge expanses of tampasi had burst into flame. Seismic events had opened yawning, zigzagging fissures on the high plateaus, and gigantic slabs of rock had been thrust from the parted ground. Forest fires filled the already scorching air with smoke, cinder, and ash.

As protection from the dangerous rays of the star in whose clutches Zonama had been thrown, Sekot had engineered cloud cover from what moisture it could suck from the planetary mantle. But the damage had already been done. Breathable air was in short supply, and the plasma cores of the hyperdrive engines were dazed. Then, just when Luke had feared the worst for everyone huddled in the shelters and deep in the canyons, where the air was slightly cooler if no less oxygen-deprived, Zonama had jumped again.

Whether because of further misfortune or at Sekot’s direction, no one could say. But rain had been falling ever since.

Under the guidance of the five Jedi, the airship completed its descent and made a satisfactory landing on the platform. Luke, Mara, and Corran had the ship tethered to its docking cleats even before Jacen and Saba emerged from the small cabin.

“Welcome back,” Luke said, clapping his nephew on the shoulders, then hugging him.

Jacen’s brown hair was combed back and fell almost to his shoulders now, but he had recently shaved his beard. His cloak was stiff with dried mud. Saba, in contrast, wore minimal garments, and her black reptilian skin glistened.

“You’re shivering,” Mara said to Jacen while she was hugging him.

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not.” She nodded toward the cliff dwelling. “Let’s get you inside. We have a fire going.”

R2-D2 was chirping in excitement when the waterlogged Jedi filed through the trapezoidal entrance. A nourishing fire blazed in the center of the room, smoke escaping through a natural chimney. Elsewhere were glow sticks, sleeping rolls, gear, and provisions, moved there from Jade Shadow.

“Are either of you hungry?” Mara asked Jacen and Saba when everyone had warmed themselves.

“Starved,” Jacen said.

The Barabel Jedi nodded. “This one az well.”

Mara glanced around. “Anyone else?”

Corran shrugged. “I’m not about to turn down a home-cooked meal.”

Luke took off his wet cloak and hung it by the fire, then sat down opposite Jacen and Saba. “Tell us everything.”

With a nod of her round head, Saba deferred to Jacen.

“Conditions in the south are worse than here,” the young man began. “The forests are scorched beyond recognition, the trails are impassable, and the rivers are too swollen to navigate. A lot of the boras are completely leafless, and the wildlife has been shocked into hibernation. Most of the Ferroans reached the shelters in time, but hundreds died. When they can, Owell, Darak, Rowel, and others have been scouring the area for survivors, but they haven’t found any. There’s no word on the Jentari, because no one has been able to reach them.”

Cybernetic organisms bred by the planet’s early Magisters—overseers and liaisons with Sekot—the Jentari were the carvers and assemblers of Zonama’s once-celebrated living starships.

“Some Ferroans are saying that the southern hemisphere is every bit as traumatized as it was when the Far Outsiders attacked,” Jacen continued.

Saba nodded. “This one haz rarely seen such devastation on an inhabited world.”

Far Outsiders was the Ferroan term for the Yuuzhan Vong, who had found and engaged Zonama Sekot some fifty years earlier, when first scouting the galaxy they planned to invade.

“The Far Distance is melting,” Jacen said. “The area where Obi-Wan and Anakin landed has broken away from the ice shelf and is adrift in the Northern Sea.” He paused to consider his words. “I guess I should say Southern Sea, since Zonama Sekot is now upside down.”

Mara interrupted the conversation to pass out bowls of stew, sweetened with rogir-boln fruit, which Jacen and Saba devoured ravenously.

“Were you able to learn anything about Widowmaker?” Luke asked after Jacen had set his bowl down.

Jacen shook his head sadly. “It’s gone. It didn’t make the jump to hyperspace with Zonama Sekot.”

The sudden silence was broken only by the crackling of the fire. Jade Shadow’s, escort since leaving the Remnant, the Imperial frigate had been commanded by Captain Arien Yage, whom the Jedi had come to regard as a close friend rather than a mere comrade in arms.

“There’s more bad news,” Jacen said finally. “Some of the Ferroans are holding us accountable for what happened.”

Mara compressed her lips in anger. “Luke warned Sekot that the Yuuzhan Vong might return.”

Luke shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure the Ferroans are thinking that if it took only three Yuuzhan Vong to reopen wounds fifty years old, nothing less than annihilation can come of Sekot’s pledge to enlist in the war against them.”

“That iz precisely what the Ferroanz are thinking,” Saba said, showing her sharp teeth.

Jacen sighed. “Darak told me that, in the past, visitors could remain on Zonama Sekot for only sixty days, and that our time is up.”

Luke studied his hands and shook his head back and forth. “All those weeks of persuading Sekot and the Ferroans of the rightness of their participation—undone in an instant …” He looked up at Jacen and Saba. “Has anyone seen Jabitha?”

“Not since the day Zonama caught fire,” Saba replied.

Sekot’s humanoid interface with its sentient residents, Jabitha was Zonama’s current Magister, the third in the planet’s history. During her brief appearance following the planet’s emergence from hyperspace, Jabitha had said only that Sekot had desperate need of her elsewhere, and that she would return when she could. Present at the appearance, Luke and the other Jedi had quickly discerned that the Jabitha who spoke to them was merely a thought projection of Sekot. That fact had been borne out later, when Jabitha’s entranced body had been discovered in her dwelling place.

“We’ll just have to go back to the beginning,” Mara said in a determined way.

Luke looked at her. “We won’t know until we speak to Sekot.”

In front of the hearth an apparition appeared, gradually manifesting as a tall, wide-eyed, dark-haired, and faintly blue-skinned woman, wearing a black robe decorated with green medallions that sparkled in the light of the fire.

“Jabitha,” Luke said, coming to his feet.

“Of a sort,” Mara said quietly as she joined him.

“Sekot wishes to reassure you that Zonama will persevere,” the thought-projected Jabitha said without preamble. “Since perseverance will necessitate significant alterations to Zonama’s present orbit and spin, it would be best if everyone remained in the shelters for the time being.”

Luke drew in his breath, only to sense that his relief was premature.

“I am also charged with advising you that Sekot needs time to reassess the possible consequences of returning Zonama to known space. As caretaker of the Living Force—as defined by the Potentium—the continued existence of Zonama Sekot is of utmost importance.”

Luke and Mara traded looks of disappointment. Founded in the pre-Palpatine Republic by would-be Jedi, the order known as the Potentium professed belief in a Force that was not divisible into light and dark. Birthed from Zonama by the founders, and under their tutelage as it evolved from egolessness to full self-awareness, Sekot had come to accept the tenets of the Potentium as fact.

Luke hung his head momentarily. Back to the beginning, just as Mara had said—and perhaps worse. Sekot was turning away from involvement in the war. Sekot preferred the sanctuary provided by a gas giant like Mobus over open space and exposure to whatever harm might find the planet.

“Sekot has some idea where we are,” Jabitha was saying. “It’s possible that Zonama Sekot passed close to this star system during the Crossings from known space.”

Luke motioned across the room to R2-D2, who was standing silently against the wall. “Tell Sekot that Artoo can help compute the location—as soon as we can see the stars.”

The astromech droid tootled in reinforcement.

“I will tell Sekot,” Jabitha said, dematerializing.

Mara sat down next to Luke. “That was Jabitha’s voice, but I think we just heard directly from Sekot.”

“It’s possible.”

The five Jedi had yet to emerge from reflection when someone hurried out of the storm into the dwelling’s anteroom.

“Danni,” Luke said, even as he was turning toward her.

Danni Quee’s blond hair hung loosely around her face, but her green eyes shone with excitement.

“Tekli and Tahiri …” she said in a rush.

Mara shot to her feet. “What’s happened?”

Danni motioned behind her, as if to something just outside the entrance. “They’re with him now, the Yuuzhan Vong Priest—Harrar.” She blinked and stared at Mara and the others. “He’s alive.”