THIRTY-FIVE

Scepter of Power grasped in his right hand and trailed by a cortege of eight slayers, Shimrra marched into the Hall of Convergence, his legs propelling him in such long strides that Onimi was compelled to run to keep up. Alerted to his approach, everyone present in the vaulted chamber—Nom Anor included—had already assumed attitudes of obeisance. The warriors were down on one knee, and the four seers had their heads inclined in reverent if apprehensive bows. The hall smelled strongly of sacrificial blood, yorik coral dust, and incense, and suddenly of floral scents as the Supreme Overlord’s bare feet crushed the flower petals that had been scattered for him.

Shimrra went directly to his ray-backed throne, but sat for only a moment before rising and beginning to pace back and forth, a confused Onimi following in the wake of the Supreme Overlord’s pliant flayed-skin robe.

“Why was I summoned from my meditation with the gods?” Shimrra demanded of no one in particular. “Is my role in our final campaign less than yours, Supreme Commander Laait?” He gazed balefully at the seers. “Or yours?”

Laait remained in genuflection. “Supreme One, the warmaster bade that I seek audience with you as soon as you would permit.”

“Is Warmaster Nas Choka’s inactivity such that he can find time to communicate with the likes of you?”

“Dread Lord, the warmaster had been anything but idle,” Laait said with a hint of exasperation. “Engaged at Muscave, his forces overwhelm those of our enemy. Thus was he able to dispatch to Zonama Sekot a task force that escorts and safeguards the ailing vessel that is our secret weapon.”

Shimrra made a fatigued sound. “I need to hear this from your mouth, Supreme Commander? Did I not just say that your urgent entreaty found me deep in rapport with the gods?”

Laait snapped his fists to his shoulders in salute. “I beg forgiveness, Great One. Then assuredly you already know that Zonama Sekot appeared to be undefended, save for a handful of enemy fighters.”

“Assuredly.”

“And that the task force commander dispatched coral-skippers to engage those fighters.”

“What of it?” Shimrra said heatedly. “Would you hold me prisoner here with your pointless statements?”

Again Laait snapped his fists. “Of course the gods told you, Lord, that the coralskippers have met with resistance from living vessels.”

Shimrra came to an abrupt halt and stared at the Supreme Commander.

“Dread Lord,” Onimi said, as if to prompt a response.

“Living vessels, you say,” Shimrra said finally.

Laait nodded in acknowledgment. “Vessels that not only match our coralskippers for size and speed, but also are propelled by gravitic affinity, and answer our plasma weapons with theirs.”

Shimrra pointed to the hall’s villip-choir. “I would see an image of these living vessels!”

Supreme Commander Laait stood and beckoned to the villip mistress. Shortly a ghostly image appeared, showing a vessel forged of smooth rocks, dimpled with plasma launchers and dovin basal emplacements.

Canting his huge head, Shimrra regarded the glimmering image in silence.

“The domain commander reported to Warmaster Nas Choka that the living vessels have sown confusion among our ranks of coralskippers. Worse, the yammosk itself is perplexed. It is having trouble differentiating our vessels from the enemy vessels.”

Shimrra swung to Laait. “Why hasn’t the warmaster ordered the domain commander to bring his capital vessels to bear on Zonama Sekot?”

“The warmaster wishes to do just that, God-Chosen. He merely awaits your sanction for such an action.”

Shimrra said nothing.

“Great One?” Laait said carefully, after a long moment had passed.

“What do the seers say of all this?” Onimi interjected into the ensuing silence, as if deflecting attention from Shimrra.

“The auguries have left us troubled, Great Lord,” their haggish spokeswoman said. “The prospect of combating living vessels runs counter to the most sacred of our beliefs. Even as a test of our worthiness, the gods themselves would never have engineered such a sacrilege. We implore you, Lord, to explain how infidels have been allowed access to our biotechnology, and been granted sanction to create vessels that mimic ours.”

“There is more, Lord,” a second seer said. “Several enemy ships have outwitted our dovin basal voids and found their way to the surface of Yuuzhan’tar. Even now our primary landing field is threatened.”

Shimrra seemed to shake himself out of his daze. “Need I remind any of you that I have looked deeply into the eighth cortex, and conversed with Yun-Harla herself on these matters?”

The chief seer nodded. “We bear that in mind, Great One, and ask only for elucidation. Could the ancient prophecies and revelations be wrong? Could they have been misinterpreted? Is it possible that the gods have not engineered the living vessels as an additional test, but in fact have aligned themselves with the Jeedai?”

Shimrra’s eyes flared like novas. “Heresy! Heresy—here in my very house!” He aimed the scepter at the seers. “You buffoons have outlived your usefulness.” He whirled to the slayers. “Rid me of them!”

A pair of slayers uncoiled their amphistaffs and advanced on the female quartet with deadly purpose. The seers offered no resistance, raising faces and extending their thin necks for the stiffened weapons. The slayers wasted no motions in decapitating them. One of the severed heads was still rolling across the floor when a herald entered the hall.

“Great Lord, High Priest Jakan, Master Shaper Qelah Kwaad, and High Prefect Drathul request audience.”

Shimrra went to his throne and sat. “By all means bid them enter, herald.”

The elite trio entered in a rush, but lost some of their momentum on seeing the four headless corpses.

Shimrra smiled faintly. “They had the audacity to doubt my interpretation of the revelation.” His expression darkened. “Be attentive to their present circumstance when you state your concerns.”

“We have no concerns, Dread Lord,” Drathul said, clearly improvising. “On learning of the warmaster’s report of living ships, we came to offer you praise for your foresight. The Yuuzhan Vong are escalated by the gods’ willingness to present us with even greater challenges.”

“You hastened here to tell me that?” Shimrra asked.

“One question, Lord,” Jakan said. “Have the gods furnished these ships to the Alliance, or do the ships originate from the living world itself?”

Shimrra gestured in an offhand way to Nom Anor. “Answer him, Prefect. Since you are our leading expert on Zonama Sekot.”

The object of Jakan and Qelah Kwaad’s astonishment, Nom Anor, slouched. Taken off his guard, he had to swallow to find his voice.

“Supreme One, I—I know only what I hear from spies among the heretics. But I—I suspect that there are no living ships.” He grew emboldened as he continued. “Instead, I propose that our coralskipper pilots have fallen victim to Jeedai mind tricks.”

Drathul gestured angrily to the villip-image of the living ship. “You dismiss that as a Jeedai mind trick?”

Shimrra grinned maniacally. “Answer your superior, Prefect Nom Anor.”

Nom Anor straightened his shoulders. “Why not? We know that they are capable of projecting false images and putting words in the mouths of those they would manipulate. We also know that they have successfully confused our yammosks in the past.”

Shimrra spoke before Drathul could argue the point. “Prefect Nom Anor is to be admired for his inventiveness. But, in fact, the vessel our villips show us is no mind trick. In answer to High Priest Jakan’s question, the gods have tutored the living planet in the creation of these monstrosities. But the Jeedai are not responsible.” He paused, then said, “It is the heretics who have brought this latest test upon us. The gods have no desire to award us this galaxy while heretics and Shamed Ones walk freely among us. They won’t permit us to deliver the poison vessel until we have brought Yuuzhan’tar into balance.”

Onimi shuffled to the center of the hall. “Great One,” he began. “Our skies breached, our land despoiled; these heretic ravings we can later foil—”

“Enough of your insolent rhyming, Shamed One!” Shimrra cut him off. “Only by my good graces have you been spared the life led by others of your kind. Do you, too, doubt me? Do you, too, harbor fears of defeat, and rally suddenly to the heretic cause?”

Onimi fell on his face before the throne. “I remain your most abject servant, Lord.”

Shimrra ignored him. “The heretics must be eradicated!” He turned to the commander of the slayers. “Half the Citadel garrison of warriors is to be placed at the right hand of Prefect Nom Anor. He will lead them against the heretics and the Shamed Ones. Not one of them is to be left alive!”

“Your will be done, Great Lord,” the commander said. In unison, the slayers turned and snapped their fists in salute to Nom Anor.

Drathul looked from Nom Anor to Shimrra in mounting bewilderment. “But what of Yuuzhan’tar, Lord? Our dovin basals are overwhelmed. The enemy has made a sieve of our sky—”

“I will deal with those who would profane our soil.” Shimrra’s gaze fell in turn on Jakan, Qelah Kwaad, and Drathul. “Go to the Well of the World Brain. I will communicate with it, and prepare it for your arrival.”

“What, then?” Jakan asked.

“By and by, priest.”

With a motion of his fingertips, Shimrra dismissed everyone, including Onimi. As the elite were filing from the hall, Drathul dragged Nom Anor aside.

“We know that Commander Ekh’m Val brought a Sekotan ship to Yuuzhan’tar,” he hissed. “You had the opportunity to say as much for everyone to hear, and to put an end to Shimrra’s charade. Whose service do you do by concealing the truth now, with our future hanging in the balance?”

“I serve myself,” Nom Anor said evenly.

Drathul shoved him back. “As ever. I would kill you now but for your new legion of bodyguards. But you will die before this day is through, Nom Anor. If not by my hand, then by another’s.”

Nom Anor glanced at Jakan, then at Qelah Kwaad, and finally at Onimi, who appeared to be watching him closely. “Stand in line, High Prefect,” he said at last. “I’ve no lack of enemies.”

A human soldier rapped the knuckles of his gloved hand against the circular viewport of Jag’s inverted clawcraft. “Hang on a minute, flyboy,” he yelled.

All at once the access hatch above—or under—Jag’s head opened, and several pairs of hands were reaching inside the cockpit to release him from the crash webbing that secured him to the seat.

“Down you go,” the same one who had rapped on the viewport said.

Jag allowed himself to descend into the upraised hands of his rescuers, and to continue to be supported by them while he was planted on his feet, with the world spinning around him and the blood that had gathered in his head draining back to where it belonged. Someone removed Jag’s helmet and put the mouth of a canteen to his lips.

When the long moment of dizziness had passed, he saw that the clawcraft—missing three of its sweeping talon-shaped solar array panels—had crashed upside down in a copse of tangled, fruit-bearing trees that rose from the middle of an oozy villip paddy. The soldiers around him wore jet backpacks, holotransceiving helmets, and combat biosuits. Seen through the snarl of branches overhead, Coruscant’s bruised sky was torn to ribbons with contrails, meteors, and countless dirtbound coralskippers and starfighters. Explosions strobed and flashed in tiers behind scudding clouds of gray smoke.

A haze of smoke lay over the rank-smelling paddy, as well, and from all directions came the reports of concussion missiles and torpedoes, the sizzle and hiss of laser beams, the roar of Yuuzhan Vong beasts, the bloodthirsty cries of warriors—all of it reverberating from the sheer faces of yorik coral outcroppings and the digested facades of once-grand spacescrapers that studded the terrain.

“Is he hurt?” someone asked, loud enough to be heard over the tumult.

Jag recognized the lined face of Captain Judder Page under the camouflage cosmetic. Jag patted himself down. “I’m unharmed.”

Page swung to his communications aide. “Inform starfighter control on Right to Rule that Colonel Fel is ground-side and back on his feet.”

“Incoming!” came a distant voice.

Page and others dragged Jag to the ground an instant before a swarm of thud and razor bugs ripped through the gnarled trees, stripping leaves and oval-shaped fruits from the branches, and knocking down entire limbs. Two deafening explosions followed in succession and the storm of projectile biots abated.

A flight of black-striped bright yellow X-wings streaked over the treetops, firing quad bursts at some unseen target. Page, Jag, and the others crouched, then slowly got to their feet. Combat droids armored with laminanium had formed a perimeter at the edge of the trees. Close to what remained of Jag’s clawcraft, two medical droids were field-dressing wounds sustained by a couple of humans and Bothans.

Page stuck out his hand. “I’m Captain—”

“I know who you are,” Jag said. “Thank you for coming to my aid.”

Page shrugged off the gratitude and motioned to the men on either side of him. “Garik Loran,” he said, naming the shaven-skulled one; then, “Kell Tainer,” naming the one with the receding hairline.

“Wraith Squadron,” Jag said, shaking hands with each of them. “I met both of you on Borleias.” He glanced at Page. “Just before my clawcraft was hit, I saw number two transport crash.”

Page nodded grimly. “Grutchins took it down and chewed their way through the hull. We’ve sent a squad to search the canyon for survivors.”

“Captain Page,” a young Bothan interrupted. “We’ve made contact with the indigenous force.”

Jag, Page, and the pair of Wraith Squadron Intelligence operatives turned to see four Yuuzhan Vong males being ushered through the perimeter. The humanoids were scarcely scarred compared to most of the Yuuzhan Vong warriors Jag had seen, but all had pronounced deformities, some of the face, others of the limbs.

Shamed Ones, he thought.

The tallest and most deformed of the four executed a facsimile of an Alliance salute. “Take us to your leaders,” he said in Basic, as if by rote.

Garik Loran and Kell Tainer exchanged skeptical glances. “Who taught you to say that?” Loran asked.

“I did,” someone answered in a clipped Coruscanti accent, as the same Shamed One was pressing his forefinger to his ear, presumably to adjust the fit of a translating tizowyrm.

A tall, lean, dark-haired human appeared from the trees, beaming at the two Wraiths.

“Son of a blaster,” Tainer said, smiling.

Jag was familiar with the name Baljos Arnjak. Also a Wraith, Arnjak had remained behind on Coruscant following the combined Wraith/Jedi infiltration mission almost two years earlier. With him walked a thin but dashing-looking middle-aged man, with reddish hair, bright even teeth, and deeply tanned skin.

Smiling broadly, Page immediately shook hands with the man, then pulled him into a mutually back-slapping embrace. “I always figured you’d survive,” Page said when the two had stepped away from each other.

The handsome man motioned to the four Yuuzhan Vong. “Thanks to them, I did. Their heretic group rescued me and a bunch of others from what would have been some serious bloodletting at one of the temples.”

Page turned to Jag. “Fel, meet Major Pash Cracken.”

Jag nodded in greeting. Coruscant was suddenly starting to feel like the Veterans’ Home.

“How long will it take us to reach Westport from here?” Page was saying.

“It would have taken about an hour, but we’re too late.” Cracken beckoned for everyone to follow him to the perimeter. Once there, he gestured to the northern horizon, which was a solid bank of billowing smoke.

“The entire sacred precinct is up in flames,” Cracken said.

Page pressed a blaster into Jag’s gloved right hand. “Welcome to the commandos, Colonel.”

“The fires are Shimrra’s doing,” Harrar said. “The Supreme Overlord has asked the World Brain to set Yuuzhan’tar ablaze—to prevent anyone from occupying it.” The priest sounded despondent. “Shimrra wouldn’t have done this unless he fears defeat. Either that or the proximity of Zonama Sekot has deranged him.”

“Whether he’s desperate or mad, we have him on the run,” Han said, elated.

Harrar gazed at those around him. Judging by the nods of agreement, the always entertaining and sometimes perplexing Han Solo was expressing the sentiment of everyone gathered at the landing platform—his wife, Leia; Master Luke Skywalker and his wife, Mara; the twins Jacen and Jaina; Yuuzhan Vong-marked Tahiri; the military-minded Jedi Kenth Hamner; Zonama Sekot’s Magister Jabitha; the two numerically named machine intelligences—droids—who sometimes seemed as alive as their makers and owners; and the pair of Noghri, who appeared at once to be bodyguards, familiars, and friends.

The rest of the Jedi had taken to the skies in the Sekotan ships, or had been lofted by shuttle to their orbiting warcraft. Han Solo had ridden up the gravity well with the Wild Knights, but only to retrieve his battered freighter, Millennium Falcon, which, with Sekot’s permission, was now parked on its landing disks and warming alongside Mara Skywalker’s Jade Shadow. Word of the conflagrations spreading across Yuuzhan’tar had come from Booster Terrik, the penultimate link in a communications chain that began with the commando team that had penetrated Yuuzhan’tar’s defenses, and had apparently included the giant warships Right to Rule and Mon Mothma.

“How could even Shimrra convince the dhuryam to do something harmful to Yuuzhan’tar?” Jacen asked.

“All things Yuuzhan Vong answer to Shimrra,” Harrar said. “The dhuryam is responsible for integrating the activities of all our planetshaping biots. It is not a servant, but a partner—fully intelligent, fully aware, capable of making decisions based on information it receives from telepathically linked creatures, and from the Supreme Overlord himself. But Shimrra may have convinced the dhuryam that intense fires were needed to open latent seedpods, so that trees could grow to replace those lost during the recent landquakes. He may have suggested to the dhuryam that it fashion clearings in the forests, so that saplings might glean additional light, as well as nourishment from trees felled and reduced to ash by the fires.”

“All the more reason for us to get to Shimrra now,” Han said, pacing at the foot of the Millennium Falcon’s landing ramp. “If Page got his transports past the dovin basals, I know I can get the Falcon through.”

Harrar shook his head.

“What now?” Han asked, planting his hands on his hips in a posture of impatience.

“Capturing or killing Shimrra may not be enough to save the planet. Actions taken by the World Brain are incontrovertible. Once tasked, it cannot be swayed to alter its plan—even by Shimrra.” Harrar glanced at the Skywalkers. “If you are to save your capital world, the brain, too, will have to be destroyed.”

“You can’t do that, Harrar,” Jacen snapped.

Harrar looked at the young Jedi. “Then go to it, and persuade it otherwise.”

“That’s our job,” Han said suddenly, reaching for Leia’s right hand. With the other Jedi, Magister Jabitha, and the pair of droids gazing at him in sudden alarm, he added: “D’you think we were just going to give the rest of you a ride there?” He jerked his thumb at the Millennium Falcon. “This ship ain’t no air taxi.” He snorted ruefully, then grew solemn. “Besides, we started this together in the Outer Rim, and we’re going to end it together.”

“Or his name isn’t Han Solo,” Leia said, in a way that mixed amusement and resignation.

Han grinned in a lopsided fashion. “Took the words right out of my mouth.”