THIRTY-SEVEN
A sudden darkness had fallen over the Vongformed cityscape.
Their lightsabers ignited—glowing blue, violet, green—the Jedi drew on the Force to propel them across the fissured and rain-slicked rooftops and balconies that dangled over what was once the Glitannai Esplanade. Piles of debris, precipitous ledges, and gaping chasms posed no obstacles for the six as they hurdled, vaulted, leapt in a race to reach the Citadel, and the Yuuzhan Vong most responsible for what Coruscant had become. Thanks to their jet packs, Captain Page’s Commandos were just managing to keep up.
Rain was falling hard and being driven every which way by fierce gusts of wind. Overhead it was no longer possible to differentiate flashes of lightning from the artificial brilliance of deadly engagements. It was impossible to distinguish between the lament of the wind and the howl of strafing starfighters; the billowing smoke from scudding storm clouds; the sizzle of fires being extinguished by the rain from the sound of laser bolts cleaving the saturated air. The booming cannonades of distant weapons might easily have been rolling thunder; the red-orange pillars on the horizon, erupting volcanoes or the glowing ejecta of plasma launchers.
For Luke, the nebulous nature of the surroundings mirrored his inner state. The darkness was coercing a commingling of disparate realities. Coruscant was fast becoming a void, a singularity into which the very fabric of life was being stretched and distorted. Was this Coruscant any longer, or was it really Yuuzhan’tar—as the original world had been at its end, when, angered by the Yuuzhan Vong’s turn to violence, the gods had robbed their children of the Force and cast them into a bottomless abyss?
“The quickest route is through the north concourse,” Mara told Judder Page when everyone had come to a halt on a puddled ledge. Rain dripped from the visors of their helmets and cascaded down the front of their biosuits. Mara was leading the combined teams from memory, though also relying on Jacen and Tahiri’s “Vongsense” to keep everyone from encountering patrols of Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Page had his gaze fixed on the water-beaded display of a positioning unit built into the sleeve of his biosuit. “According to this, there was bridge access to the concourse.”
Mara nodded. “The Bridge of Unity. I used to have lunch in the restaurant on the lower level.”
Even with all that Coruscant had become, she sounded wistful. Luke could imagine her, thirty years earlier, frequenting the esplanade’s expensive shops and restaurants; wandering among the crowds attending the Imperial Fair; a sometime visitor to the Imperial Palace, in her guise as the Emperor’s Hand. It was the Coruscant Luke had known only from HoloNet transmissions and the occasional dramas and documentaries that had found their way to Tosche Station on Tatooine. By the time he had finally visited the capital world in person, most of the governmental district had been in ruins, following Coruscant’s liberation by New Republic forces.
But over the decades Coruscant had become his home, as Yavin had, only to have suffered a similar fate. Luke hadn’t expected to be so heartsick; but then he hadn’t expected to find Coruscant so altered—so remade—in the two years since he and Mara had left.
Mara was waving everyone back in motion.
Fifteen minutes of flat-out running brought them to the Bridge of Unity, which had lost the ornamental wirework and inscribed plaques that had earned it landmark status. Now the bridge was little more than a ferrocrete slab spanning the esplanade canyon. Lashed by the gale, vines and slimy vegetation trailed from the edges, and a shallow but fast-moving curtain of water plunged into the frothing river far below.
From the bridge’s southern abutment, the Jedi had their first unobstructed view of their objective. Several kilometers to the east, illuminated by forking lightning and accented by the laser beams of circling starfighters, Shimrra’s Citadel towered above the infernal landscape. A veritable mountain, it stood where the Imperial Palace once had, encompassing everything from the Mon Calamari Inglenook to the Pliada di am Imperium, as the eastern terminus of the Glitannai Esplanade was known. The Citadel’s base was lost in swirls of dark smoke, but halfway to the rounded summit four walkways approached from separate directions, linking the Citadel to surrounding structures.
This close, the mountain was revealed to be as craggy and pocked as any of the Yuuzhan Vong worldships Luke had seen. But Shimrra’s was adorned with a pair of filigree wings that lent something insectlike to its appearance. The way it sat in the crater that served as its cradle, it might almost have been nesting.
Flights of X- and E-wings were taunting the crown, but voids blacker than the stormy sky were devouring everything the starfighters hurled at them. Two of the snubfighters were circling closer when plasma projectiles geysered from launchers above the wings. The X-wings might as well have been flying without shields. Caught on their starboard sides by the superheated missiles, they began to spiral down, S-foils and ion engines slagged. Luke could see pieces fly from the fighters as they struck outcroppings in the Citadel’s coarse hull. They disappeared into the smoke at the foot of the mountain, and, seconds later, roiling fire mushroomed into view.
Luke’s silence spoke volumes. As he turned and leapt out onto the bridge, a resonant bellowing issued from the far side, and two huge eyes stood out in the gloom. As if under strobing light an enormous beast waddled into view around the shoulder of a ruined building. It wasn’t the first Yuuzhan Vong creature he had seen since leaving the Falcon—the sacred precinct was literally crawling with escaped animals—but it was certainly the largest.
“A mon duul,” Jacen said, yelling to be heard. “If it’s been implanted with a villip, the belly can function like an amplifier. It’s harmless, either way.”
Page kept his blaster rifle raised regardless. “If you say so, kid.” He motioned with the barrel. “But you cross first.”
No sooner had Jacen and Luke started forward than the mon duul sat on its haunches, with its tympanum of a belly aimed out over the canyon. In a deep and menacing voice, someone began to speak in Yuuzhan Vong.
“ ‘Perish,’ ” Tahiri translated. “ ‘Perish, all of you who would stand between me and exaltation, who would seek to profane me in our finest moment.’ ”
“Shimrra?” Luke asked.
Jacen shook his head uncertainly. “Could be.”
“ ‘I battle the gods on your behalf,’ ” Tahiri continued, “ ‘and you repay me with rebellion. Perish then. Go to your deaths and your gods, while I remake the world.’ ”
“Too bad we can’t answer him,” Mara said.
“We will soon enough,” Luke assured her.
Jacen and Tahiri walked slowly toward the seated mon duul. In eerie unison they motioned with their right arms, and the four-metric-ton beast lowered its front legs to the ground and began to trundle off.
Their Vongsense, Luke thought.
Jaina hurried forward to drape her left arm around Jacen’s shoulders. “You always were good with animals.”
He responded with a wry smile, and hurried forward.
The three young Jedi crossed the span together and turned east toward the Citadel. Ahead of them, clad in vegetation, a palisade of ruined buildings extended all the way to the western access to Shimrra’s mountain. Luke, Mara, and Kenth had just caught up with the trio when Jacen and Tahiri called everyone to a halt. Lightning flashes disclosed the presence of a group of skeletally thin humans and humanoids, dressed in dripping, frayed garments and aged robeskins.
“Come forward,” Tahiri said in Yuuzhan Vong.
Two Shamed Ones approached, a male and female. “Jeedai,” the young male said, his eyes fixed on Luke’s thrumming lightsaber.
More Yuuzhan Vong began to appear, along with a dozen or so Coruscanti who looked as if they had been subsisting on grayweave since the occupation. The Shamed and the damned, Luke told himself as he deactivated his lightsaber.
Pushing through the group came two winded and wounded human commandos, who saluted Captain Page.
“Bacta Squad, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’ve just come from down below. It’s a real mess, Captain. The heretics are fighting tooth and claw, but they need reinforcements—and fast. If you can spare anyone, sir …”
Page beckoned to one of his jet-packed commandos. “Congratulations, Corporal, you’ve been promoted to squad leader. Take ten men and go with the sergeant. We’ll regroup at the Citadel, soonest.”
The commando saluted, spun on his heel, and began choosing his teammates.
The wounded sergeant looked from Page to Luke. “Master Skywalker, a couple of your people would make a world of difference, not only to us—” He motioned to the Shamed Ones. “—but to them, as well.”
Kenth and Tahiri glanced at Luke, who nodded.
“Thank you,” the sergeant said as the two Jedi moved to join him. “We’ve heard that the Prophet has reappeared, but we haven’t been able to locate him. Word has it he was last seen in the Place of Hierarchy.”
“Leading them, or helping with the slaughter?” Mara asked, stepping forward.
“Leading them.”
Luke showed Mara a skeptical look. “Maybe he’s had a change of heart since Zonama Sekot.”
She snorted in derision. “Only if someone implanted a new one in his chest.”
Luke swung to the Shamed Ones who had been the first to show themselves. “Have you or any of the others even been inside the Citadel?”
Tahiri translated.
A male in the crowd spoke, and showed himself. He was more hideously scarred than the others, and short horns sprouted from the tops of his shoulders.
“This one says that he arrived in the Citadel,” Tahiri told Luke. She listened for a moment more. “He was a warrior before the gods—before his body rejected certain enhancing biots the shapers devised for him.” The former warrior pointed to the walkways that accessed the yorik coral mountain. “Each caste uses a separate entrance. But all four avenues terminate at the Hall of Confluence, where Supreme Overlord Shimrra grants audience to the elite.”
“Ask him if Shimrra is likely to be in the hall now,” Luke said.
Tahiri phrased the question and waited for the response.
“He says that you won’t find Shimrra there. He’ll be in his private … coffer.” The Yuuzhan Vong aimed a thick, truncated finger at the lofty crown of the Citadel. “Up there is where you’ll have to go.”
“Thank you,” Luke said to the heretic, who asked something of Tahiri.
“He has a question for the Jedi,” she said after a moment. “He wants to know if we plan to help them or kill them. He wants to know if the Shamed Ones will be able to find salvation in the Force.”
Luke looked at the Yuuzhan Vong. “We’ll help you find your way back to the Force.”
Tahiri’s translation prompted agitation and a flurry of hushed conversations among the Shamed Ones. Then she and Kenth began to move off with the commandos.
Mara shifted her gaze from the Citadel to Luke.
“Ready, soldier?” When he didn’t respond immediately, she said, “What’s wrong?”
He held her gaze. “Mara, I want you to go with Tahiri and Kenth.”
She almost laughed.
“I want you to go with them,” he said again.
Her expression changed, and a twinge of fear came into her eyes. “Luke, tell me this is the Force speaking to you, and that you’re not doing it because you don’t want us fighting together—for Ben’s sake.”
“Would it matter?”
She gripped her hands on his upper arms. “You promised me on Zonama Sekot that both of us have a lot more living to do.”
He smiled and stroked her cheek with the backs of his fingertips. “You think I’d drop you into the midst of all this to make you a widow—or me a widower?”
She shook her head. “That’s not your style.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “Not because I want to. But because I trust you.”
Airborne at the extreme edge of the tempest that was lashing the northern quarter of the sacred precinct, the Falcon banked toward the former Legislative District. Owing to the toughness of its honeycomb and crumple zone engineering, the Senate itself had survived the Yuuzhan Vong barrage, but now the famed edifice was covered by the half-kilometer-high hemisphere that sheltered the World Brain.
“No mystery why we’re not taking flak from plasma emplacements,” Han said, as he and Leia powered the freighter through a reconnaissance fly-by. “Nothing short of a planet-buster is going to crack that skullcap.”
“The yorik coral has enzymatically digested and absorbed the Senate’s duracrete and transparisteel,” Harrar explained from the navigator’s chair. “The constituent materials have been used to fashion a new exoskeleton that goes deep underground and forms an impervious sphere around the dhuryam—the brain.”
C-3PO had a tight grip on the chair next to Harrar’s, and R2-D2 was securely planted behind his counterpart. Cakhmaim was in the dorsal gun turret; Meewalh in the forward compartment.
“How impervious?” Han asked over his shoulder.
“Sufficient to allow the dhuryam to survive an invasion as a self-contained, and possibly self-propelled, vessel—similar to that which constitutes the crown of the Citadel.”
“An escape pod,” Leia said.
“But massive,” Harrar elaborated. “Capable not only of preserving the dhuryam—with all its engineered genetics and learned skills—but also of preserving the lives of any who happen to be in the Well when the sphere launches.”
“Oh, my,” C-3PO remarked.
R2-D2 seconded the protocol droid’s stupefaction with a long whistle.
Han growled and rubbed his head. “So how are we supposed to get inside the thing, if you’re telling me that bombs can’t?”
Harrar leaned toward the viewport. “Complete your overflight. Let us see if we can’t locate the entrance to the secret passageway Jacen and Vergere used to escape from the Well.”
As Han banked the Falcon to the west, Leia gazed at the sprawl of vegetation-clad structures below, then pointed toward the extreme southwest projection of the dome. “Borsk Fey’lya’s office would have been right about there.”
Han sighted down her finger. “Right there, buried under who knows how many tons of yorik coral.”
Leia glanced at him. “I guess the dome has spread out since Jacen was here.”
“You could say that.”
“An unexpected turn of events,” Harrar said.
Han growled. “I’m getting tired of surprises. There has to be another way in.”
“Perhaps the front door,” C-3PO said.
“Yeah, we’ll just go up and knock,” Han said. “Isn’t that how you got yourself into Jabba’s palace?”
“Actually, Captain Solo—”
“The front entrance may prove problematic,” Harrar interrupted. “Continue your circle, and I’ll show you why.”
Lit from within by explosions and flashes of lightning, the northern horizon was a towering anvil of black clouds. Han veered east around the two-kilometer-wide dome, and a long elongated tunnel came into view, protruding from the dome. The hemispherical corridor appeared to be made of the interwoven branches of thousands of slender trees.
“The hedge maze,” Harrar said. “The ceremonial avenue that leads to the atrium of the Well.”
Han laughed. “A walk in the park. Unless you’re going to tell me a hedge is impervious to weapons.”
“The hedge is not only as solid and fire resistant as your durasteel, but the trees that comprise it are studded with needle-sharp thorns that range in size from that of your thumbnail to that of your arm. The thorns contain a neurotoxin potent enough to devastate the nervous system of any creature hapless enough to be pricked by them.”
Han tightened his lips in frustration. “I say we see how it handles a couple of concussion missiles.”
“A waste of armament,” Harrar said. “Any damage the missiles render, the dhuryam will quickly repair.”
“Yeah, well, since you’re so smart, you think of a plan to get us inside.”
“I already have. How wide is your craft, Han Solo?”
“Twenty-five meters, give or take. Why?”
Harrar took a breath. “A tight fit. But given your piloting skills I think it can be done.”
Leia swiveled her chair around to face him. “You think what can be done?”
“A flight through the hedge tunnel, directly to the entry portal.”
Leia’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be serious.”
“Princess Leia is correct,” C-3PO said as R2-D2 was mewling. “Please confirm that your statement was in jest.”
A slow grin took shape on Han’s face. “He’s serious—and he’s right.” He looked at Leia. “We can do it.”
Leia started to speak, but swallowed whatever she had in mind to say and began again. “Well, you said he’d think of something, and I guess he has.”
Han patted her left arm with affection. “Better tighten up your crash webbing. You, too, Goldenrod.”
C-3PO canted his head in apprehension. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d prefer to adjourn to the forward compartment with Artoo.”
“Suit yourself. But be quick about it.”
Han brought the headset mike close to his mouth. “Cakhmaim, get yourself to the forward cabin space with Meewalh.”
He sent the Falcon into a broad circle, from which they emerged staring directly down the throat of the hedge tunnel.
“You’re sure about this,” Leia said while Han was flipping switches on the console.
“No. But luckily we don’t have time to think about it.”
Han dropped the freighter lower and accelerated. The thorned half circle of mouth grew larger and larger in the viewport. Reflexively, Leia leaned back in her chair and clamped her hands on the armrests.
“Hang on,” Han said. “Hang on …”
And suddenly they were inside the maze.
But the Falcon wasn’t even all the way through the opening when the three of them realized that the ride was going to be worse than they had imagined. The resilient knitted branches knocked the ship harshly from one side to the other. The Falcon rattled and shuddered, in danger of being spun completely around. The longest of the thorns drew prolonged and deafening screeches from the hull. External components groaned and squealed as they were ripped away—cowlings, rectenna, fuel-driver pressure stabilizers … And ahead of them, the throat of the hedge maze was closing—narrowing as they watched.
“Fire the concussion missiles!” Han said.
Leia squeezed the trigger, sending one pair, then another streaking down the tunnel, tearing through the thorns and branches and ultimately exploding against whatever constituted the entrance to the dome.
“Angle the deflectors!”
Leia raised the forward shields as a boiling torrent of fire and debris came back at them, washing over the Falcon, stripping away more parts, and scoring and scorching the hull plates.
Then, suddenly, the ship broke through to a broad, wedge-shaped causeway formed by the limbs of great trees, whose leaf-bearing branches—now aflame—tangled toward the sky on either side. The foot of the causeway was a hundred meters high, but it tapered to an arrowhead as it rose, forming a thorn-hedged ramp whose point touched the massive, ruined hatch sphincter that had long ago enveloped the Great Door of the Senate.
Han fought to keep the ship stabilized as it skidded across the former plaza and raced into the second stretch of hedge. But the durasteel-hard branches prevailed, slowing, then snagging the spasming ship. Stalled, the Falcon came to a final rest angled to one side and ten meters from the missile-damaged entrance. While two of the landing disks were in touch with the paving stones, the entire port side of the ship was upended and held fast by the interlocked branches.
“Guess this is as far as we go,” Han said, staring straight ahead, with his hands still clenched on the control yoke.
Leia blew out her breath and swallowed hard. “Nothing like a quiet arrival.”
She, Han, and Harrar freed themselves from the chairs and staggered into the ring corridor, which was strewn with objects that had found their way there from all over the ship.
“We’ll clean up later,” Leia said.
Han uttered a laugh. “We could have Threepio do it.”
“I was hoping you would say just that, sir,” the droid said, as he, R2-D2, and the two Noghri appeared from the forward compartment, leaning against the corridor’s curving walls for support. “That would be a delightful chore.”
R2-D2 began to twitter and toodle in protest.
“We’ll have no complaints from you, Artoo. If Captain Solo wants us to remain on the ship rather than accompany him into the Well of the World Brain, the least we can do is—”
R2-D2 razzed loudly.
C-3PO straightened in a huff. “Never satisfied.”
“All right, you two, quit arguing,” Han said. “Forget the mess. Just keep the ship warmed up and stick close to the comlink.”
Han extended the landing ramp, which didn’t drop far before hitting solid ground.
“Once we are inside the Well, we will be safe from ambushes by warriors,” Harrar said. “But whatever you do between here and there, Han Solo, you must not kill the shaper. We will need his or her scent markers to get us safely into the Well. I know certain things about the brain, but not enough to incapacitate it.”
Han passed out thermal charges to the Noghri, then clipped two onto his own belt. “Just in case we have any trouble persuading it to surrender.”
Leia activated her lightsaber and narrowed her eyes. “And I promised I’d never set foot in the Senate again.”
Han nodded at her. “We’ve all had to break promises we made to ourselves.”
The five of them hurried down the angled ramp and through the slowly sealing breach the concussion missiles had blown in the thick hatch sphincter. The hideously torn membrane opened onto a vast, dimly lit cavern of yorik coral. Han scarcely had time to look around, when fifty or more warriors armed with amphistaffs poured from a narrow corridor in the curved wall opposite the hatch.
Someone shouted commands in Yuuzhan Vong that needed no translation.
A flock of whizzing bugs and hurled amphistaffs flew for the Falcon’s company.
“I thought you said there wouldn’t be warriors inside the Well!” Han yelled as he and the Noghri were ducking and triggering blaster rounds.
“This isn’t the Well,” the priest said. “This is merely the atrium!”
Batting aside thud and razor bugs, Leia led the retreat. They backed through the iris hatch, firing at their pursuers without aiming. Stumbling into the plaza, they raced for the Falcon, only to find her completely enclosed by the thorned hedge.
Despite the impetus that the Prophet’s rallying cry had given the heretics, the counteroffensive was not going well. Caught in a violent storm, the Shamed Ones and their newfound allies were being sliced to pieces by coufees, knocked unconscious by thud bugs, slashed and split by amphistaffs. Nom Anor himself was bloodied, slipping on hailstones and his own black flow as he fought with coufee in one hand, amphistaff in the other. The now-drenched throng of would-be insurgents had managed to fight their way out of the Place of Hierarchy, but Shimrra’s avengers were attempting to herd them toward the Place of Bones. If the warriors succeeded in trapping them in the sunken amphitheater, there would be no escape, no hope.
Nom Anor was trading strikes and stabs with a warrior a head taller than himself when he heard the clamor of running feet and raised voices. When the warrior turned in the direction of the commotion, Nom Anor availed himself of the moment of distraction to send the point of his amphistaff through his opponent’s right eye. All around him other warriors were beginning to add their voices to the tumult and to press the attack.
Reinforcements, Nom Anor told himself bitterly.
The heretics would be lucky now if they even made it to the Place of Bones. Unexpectedly, though, the war cries of the Citadel guard began to fade, and the crowd was pushed back toward the Place of Hierarchy. It was the heretics who were being reinforced!
Nom Anor was suddenly inflamed.
If every cell of Shamed Ones could find the courage to rise up, there was a chance, though slim, that the heretics would yet win the day. His conviction surged as the reports of stun and flash grenades began to echo and rebound from the walls of the temples and the dormitories of the intendants. Hundreds were instantly flattened to the saturated ground. Then blaster bolts rang out.
Resistance fighters and Alliance commandos! Nom Anor realized.
It was the warriors who were trapped!
Nom Anor charged into the brawl, slashing throats and hamstrings. Overwhelmed, the warriors fought brutally and valiantly, but more and more of them were falling and being trampled underfoot. Nom Anor was in the thick of things when new sounds drew his attention and he froze in surprise and dread.
Snap-hiss! Thrummm …
He risked a sideways glance to discover three Jedi, parrying and slashing with their lightsabers. Worse, one of them was Mara Jade Skywalker. The very Jedi who had fallen victim to Nom Anor’s coomb spores so long ago, now fighting all but alongside of him. Not far away from the red-golden-haired Skywalker was Tahiri Veila, the Jedi who had almost been shaped into a Yuuzhan Vong, and with whom Nom Anor had fought and escaped from on Zonama Sekot. And beside Tahiri, a tall, older male Jedi whom Nom Anor didn’t recognize.
He tried to conceal himself by wading deeper into the battle, but the conflict was too frenzied for him to make any headway. He began to angle toward the northwest entrance to the Place of Hierarchy, but there, too, he was rapidly hemmed in by clashing warriors and heretics. No matter which direction he attempted to move, he wound up being pushed inexorably closer to the two Jedi women.
Whirling, he slit the throat of a Shamed One and placed himself where the gushing blood could wash over his face. He found a sodden turban on the ground and pulled it down over his forehead, only to have it unwind and flop uselessly over his shoulders. He cursed himself for not having thought to carry an ooglith masquer with him.
A group of enraged warriors made a sudden sally, forcing the heretics away from the Place of Hierarchy and out into the broad boulevard that ran north to the Citadel. Again Nom Anor heard the distinctive thrum of a lightsaber, and shortly found himself pressed shoulder to shoulder with youthful Tahiri, who was shouting alternately in Basic and Yuuzhan Vong as her blue blade deflected overhead strikes from amphistaffs and lateral swipes from coufees.
Nom Anor’s attempts to squirm away were in vain. He turned his back at the same time the Jedi did, but surges in the crowd kept shoving them hard into each other. All at once, Nom Anor could feel small Tahiri’s body tense against his.
He pivoted in time to see Tahiri throw up her hands in some sort of Force gesture, and a dozen warriors hit the ground as if struck by a swarm of invisible thud bugs. A Force Wall! Nom Anor thought. Tahiri used her Jedi powers a second time to create an even wider circle of clear space, then whirled and grabbed Nom Anor by the arm, spinning him around to face her, her eyes already wide with discovery.
Sending his amphistaff flying with a Force command, she immobilized him by clutching the yoke of his robeskin. Then she turned and gesticulated toward her fellow Jedi.
“Mara, I have Nom Anor!”
Over the heads of combatants, through the hail, misted blood, and forest of flailing arms, Nom Anor could see Skywalker gazing directly at him in eager peril.
Summoning his strength, Nom Anor slashed upward with his coufee, missing Tahiri by a blade but succeeding in cutting the handful of robe she had gripped. Momentum propelled him backward through a splashing somersault, and while Tahiri’s attention was momentarily diverted, he shoved a wounded Shamed One at her feet. Crawling a sinuous and puddled path between the legs of warriors and heretics, he ultimately reached the northern edge of the Place of Hierarchy. There, where the crowd was thinner, he elbowed his way through a cluster of warriors and broke fast for the stairs and freedom.
Much like Millennium Falcon, Lady Luck had in the past five years undergone an atavistic transition from pleasantly appointed family craft to war vessel. But where Han’s Falcon was as armed as it was fast, Lando’s fifty-meter-long Soro-Suub yacht relied as ever on stealth, speed, and advanced sensor arrays that allowed it to observe and scrutinize vessels at far remove. With three lasers and a reinforced hull, Talon Karrde’s Corellian transport was better configured for battle, although hardly a match for a Yuuzhan Vong task force. Which was why the two ships were flying at the fringe of the battle zone and leaving most of the dirty work to Errant Venture, and to the Hapans.
Tenel Ka’s flotilla had arrived moments after the Yuuzhan Vong capital ships had begun their move against Zonama Sekot, and had immediately arrayed themselves in a blockade. The new-generation Battle Dragons were twin-saucered ships with turbolasers and ion cannons placed along the rims, made all the more lethal since the New Republic had finally shared its weapons-recharge technology with the Hapan navy. The enhanced Dragons were also equipped with pulse mass mine launchers that were nearly as effective as dovin basal singularities when it came to deflecting weapons fire and interdicting ships from jumping to hyperspace. In contrast, the shape and sleekness of the Consortium’s Nova-class cruisers brought to mind Old Republic-era hand blasters. As agile as starfighters and as deadly as warships twice their size, the cruisers were preventing Yuuzhan Vong vessels from penetrating the Dragons’ daunting barricade.
Closer to Zonama Sekot, flaming red Errant Venture, along with squadrons of X-wings and Hapan Miy’til fighters were preying on the advance coralskippers the task force had dispatched to test the planet’s defenses. Trapped between the deep-space squadrons and the atmospheric craft flown by the Jedi, the coralskippers were being decimated. And now that capital ships were involved, the planet itself had brought out its big guns, firing salvos of stunning ion fire from the summits of mountains twelve kilometers high.
Equidistant from the task force and blockade, Lando and Tendra had an overview of the entire battle, but Lady Luck’s seeming brazenness had made her the object of unwanted attention, and the Calrissians were being forced to do more running than spying. Their updates of enemy maneuvers had twice saved Booster Terrik from being taken by surprise, and they were a critical link in relaying intelligence between the Star Destroyer and the Jedi pilots, who, at last word, had finally managed to talk their living ships into returning fire.
The Yuuzhan Vong gave every indication of having been thrown into disorder by their obvious miscalculation. The pilots of the skips were fighting for their lives, and the task force itself was fast coming unglued, with cruiser and destroyer analogs maneuvering without rhyme or reason, making themselves easy targets for the precision lasers of the Hapan cruisers and the ranged weapons of the Dragons.
Only total confusion could account for the fact that some of the vessels in the task force were actually turning on one of their own.
The victim was the vessel that originally had been flying at the center of the Yuuzhan Vong’s elongated diamond formation. It had remained at the center all through the initial coralskipper assault on Zonama Sekot, but was now being raked with plasma fire by four of the surrounding cruisers. Lando and Tendra saw the vessel split wide open, and yet instead of exploding, the cleaved vessel released a smaller vessel that was concealed inside.
A corvette analog, the six-armed craft had a scaled hull and an upraised, curving stern.
Not unlike two vessels Errant Venture had destroyed at Caluula.
A slayer ship.
“They’re supposed to be hyperspace-capable,” Lando said. “So why did they need to transport this one?”
“It looks off,” Tendra said.
One eyebrow raised, Lando glanced at her. “Off course?”
She shook her head. “Off color. It looks ill.”
Lando’s blood ran cold. He commanded the scanners to provide him with a close-up and analyze the vessel’s signature. Then he commed Errant Venture.
“Booster, we’re sending you signature data on a vessel in the task force,” Lando began.
“We’re busy, Lando,” Booster snapped.
“You’re not too busy for this. Run a comparison with whatever you’ve got stored in the Venture’s, memory, and tell me if we get a hit.”
“Hold tight,” Booster said. When after a long moment he spoke again, his voice was riddled with apprehension. “The signature you sent matches the ship that evaded us at Caluula.”
“The ship carrying Alpha Red,” Lando said.
And now closing on Zonama Sekot.