With Zonama"s mountaintop defenses either incapacitated or determined to be ineffective against the small craft, Mon Mothma was speeding for the planet. Separate conversations among the tactical officers surrounding the holoprojector table made it impossible for Wedge to hear Lando clearly, so he moved to a corner of the vast room and slipped a headset over his ears.
"The battle at Muscave was nothing more than a diversion," Lando was saying. "Nas Choka was hoping to keep us too occupied to notice the poisoned vessel he"s trying to get to the surface of Zonama Sekot." He snorted. "One small ship, slipping past all the defenses. Does that sound familiar?"
"Vaguely," Wedge lied. "Do you have information on why the Jedi fighters have gone to ground?"
"Negative."
"Could the Vong have already delivered the Alpha Red?"
"That"s as good a guess as any," Lando said. "Unless Sekot" decided to surrender."
"If that"s the case, then it"s grown weaker over the past fifty years. "
"Or the Vong have gotten stronger," Lando paused, then said: "Booster"s going to take Errant Venture as close to Zonama Sekot as possible. We"ll evacuate as many of the Jedi and the Ferroans as we can."
Wedge grimaced.
"Lando, you can"t do that if the planet"s already been poisoned. I realize Alpha Red probably doesn"t pose a threat to humans or Bothans, but, after Caluula, we can"t be sure that it can"t be spread by other species."
Lando was silent for a long moment.
"Understood, Wedge," he said in a resigned voice. "We"ll check with Kyp and Corran before we lift anyone up the well. What do you hear from Coruscant?"
"Tooth and nail. Shimrra is apparently dead-Luke saw to that. But Shimrra"s death hasn"t slowed Nas Choka. Even if we can eventually defeat his forces, there"s not much chance of forcing a surrender."
"What"s the answer?"
"I"m worried that Kre"fey and Sovv are looking hard at Alpha Red."
Lando exhaled audibly. "Seems to be everybody"s solution just now."
Wedge signed off and removed the headset. He spent a long moment regarding the rotating holoimage of Zonama Sekot. He refused to accept that the poisoned ship had gotten through. Starfighters could prevent it from reaching the surface. He thought back almost five years to the decision he had made to come out of retirement. He hadn"t a notion then that he would end up piloting a starfighter at Sernpidal, be charged with holding Borleias, or attacking Corulag. But that was the way of war. You did whatever you could, hoping that even the smallest contributions affected the end result.
He moved to the nearest duty station and asked to be patched through to the senior mission officer.
"I want you to ready a starfighter," he said when the female officer answered.
"For any particular squadron?" she asked. "They"re all so shot up the pilot can have his pick."
"Who"s been tasked with protecting Zonama Sekot?"
"That would be Red Squadron, General."
Perfect, Wedge thought.
"Alert Red Leader to expect a reinforcement."
"What"s the pilot"s call sign, sir?"
Wedge considered it, then said, "Vader."
"Impossible," Nas Choka told his tactician. "The Supreme Overlord is a ward of the G.o.ds. Should we fail in our task, he will be the last of us to die-and our success is a.s.sured." He gestured toward Coruscant, readily visible through the blister transparency. "Zonama Sekot will die, and the battle here will turn as soon as I recall the rest of our forces from Muscave. We will chase the Alliance back to the Outer Rim, where they will spend the next ten years licking their wounds and dreaming of the day they will be strong enough to mount a second counteroffensive."
The tactician inclined his head in respect.
"But the announcement was made by Eminence Harrar himself."
"Harrar!" the warmaster said in surprise. "I thought he was in the Outer Rim."
"No, Fearsome One. Crossed over to the side of the enemy-at Zonama Sekot, when it was in the Unknown Regions. Prefect Nom Anor, as well, now revealed to be leader of the heretics."
Nas Choka extended his hand to the bulkhead to steady himself.
Harrar, a traitor? Nom Anor, an insurgent... Though painful to endure, those were reversals he could accept. But surely he would know if the Yuuzhan Vong had suddenly lost their conduit to the G.o.ds. He glanced around the command chamber at his commander and subaltern, his villip mistress and priest.
Not one of them was distracted or apprehensive; all of them were attending to their duties.
"A lie by renegades," he said to the tactician at last. "A cowardly attempt to throw us into confusion."
Again, the tactician inclined his head.
"Warmaster, my feelings echo yours. I should know-inside-if our Supreme Overlord is dead. And yet the villip reports from other commanders on the surface confirm that warriors and Jeedai have overrun the Citadel, including Shimrra"s coffer."
"Jeedai," Nas Choka repeated.
"May I speak my thoughts?"
"Quietly," the warmaster cautioned.
"Why should Zonama Sekot"s planetary weapons cease unless the living world is fearless? Could Shimrra somehow have been duped into playing into the hands of the G.o.ds, when their true aim is to punish him for arrogance-and us, for our faithfulness to him?"
Nas Choka"s slanted forehead furrowed.
"I-".
"Warmaster," Yammka"s Mount"s Supreme Commander interrupted, with a brisk salute.
"Lord Shimrra"s personal vessel has launched from the Citadel, and even now emerges from the atmosphere to join us in battle."
"Show me!" Nas Choka said, whirling to the transparency.
The commander pointed to a section of the blister, which showed an enhanced view of the Supreme Overlord"s projectile-shaped coffer, its powerful dovin basal tugging it swiftly from the gravitational grip of the planet. Alongside the vessel, though not yet engaging it in battle, flew two Alliance starfighters and a battered, saucer-shaped freighter.
Nas Choka showed the tactician a brief nod of acquittal.
"You see, a trick by renegades. Not only does the Supreme Overlord live, he seeks to reinvigorate us personally." He looked at the commander. "We will demonstrate our grat.i.tude to Shimrra by immolating the flagship in his honor. Order all vessels to converge on Ralroost."
On the bridge of the vessel whose every component answered to him, Onimi sent a blur of objects racing for Jacen, beginning with the carved idols that flanked Jaina: cloaked Yun-Harla, many-armed Yun-Yammka, thousand-eyed Yun-Shuno, and the rest.
But Jacen stood firm. Not wanting to risk hurting Jaina inadvertently by deflecting the objects, he pulled everything into a whirling cloud, as if in orbit around him. Beyond the cloud, he was dimly aware that a transparency had formed above the console, and that constellations of stars were winking into existence, smeared in places by the explosive exchanges among the hundreds of warships battling at the edge of Coruscant"s envelope. Jacen"s steadfast defense infuriated Onimi.
Reaching deeper into himself, the Supreme Overlord used his telekinetic powers to create cracks in the bulkheads and ceiling, hoping to add chunks of uprooted yorik coral to his conjured storm.
But as fast as the fissures formed, Jacen repaired them, and those chunks that were torn away he ordered the vessel to cement in place.
Mismatched eyes opened wide in disbelief, Onimi charged, his feet moving so rapidly that he might have been gliding across the deck. Though crippled by the deformations that had resulted from poorly healed enhancement surgeries and the consequences of experimental escalations, the former shaper was still taller than Jacen and pound for pound more powerful.
But the struggle had nothing to do with size and less to do with brute strength. Onimi"s true potency lay in his abilities to amplify the electric current that flowed through his body, or-like Vergere-to call on his refined metabolism to fashion molecules and compounds, and deliver them through his curving yellow fingernails, his single fang, his blood, sweat, saliva, and breath. But where Vergere had learned to produce emollients and healing tears, Onimi was capable of producing a brew of fast-acting and deadly toxins.
Compared to the former shaper"s mastery of Yuuzhan Vong bioscience, Vergere had been a mere adept. He flew at Jacen with hands upraised and mouth ajar. Jacen lifted his hands in defense and he and Onimi met with blinding discharges of electrical energy that entangled both of them in a flashing web.
Their hands interlocked, they whirled from one side of the bridge to the other in a kind of mad pirouette, caroming off the coa.r.s.e bulkheads and smooth instrumentation. Jaina sent her twin what reinforcement she could summon, but he told her to conserve her strength.
The trans.m.u.tated secretions from Onimi"s palms and fingertips sent hallucinogens through Jacen"s skin and capillaries, and coursing through his bloodstream. Onimi"s paralyzing fang struck repeatedly for Jacen"s temples and neck. Poison wafted on his forced sighs and rode within the droplets of his frothing saliva. But the Jacen that the Supreme Overlord had in his taloned grip was not there. Where once Jacen had been unable to find Onimi through the Force, now it was Onimi who couldn"t find Jacen.
What he found instead was formless, supple, and fathomless-an infinite emptiness, but as serene as a wind toppling trees to encourage new growth. A being of light, Jacen was drawing into himself all of Onimi"s lethal compounds, neutralizing them and casting them out as sweat, tears, and exhalations. He understood at last why he had failed to catch Anakin"s lightsaber when Luke had tossed it to him: he was never meant to catch it, because he had become the lightsaber. He had attained the ability to cut through any resistance in himself; to sever the bonds of preconception; to open a gaping hole into a reality more expansive than any he had ever dared imagine; to heal.
As his grandfather had done, he had broken through the apparent opposites that concealed the absolute nature of the Force, and found his way into an unseen unity that existed beyond the seeming separateness of the world. For a moment all the cosmic tumblers had clicked into place, and light and dark sides became something he could balance within himself, without having to remain on one side or the other.
The consciousness that was Jacen Solo was strewn across the vast spectrum of life energy. He had pa.s.sed beyond choice and consequence, good and evil, light and dark, life and death. All that had been required of Jacen was complete surrender-a technique once mastered by the Jedi Order but at some point misplaced; transposed to an emphasis on individual achievement, which had opened a way to arrogance. In that the path was available to any who chose to seek and follow it, Jacen understood that the discovery was really a rediscovery.
Indeed, the Yun-Yuuzhan Vong had adhered to it when they had lived in symbiosis with Yuuzhan"tar. In that dim protohistorical time, they had been group-minded, living in a world where the boundaries between self and other were permeable. By cutting that bond they had isolated themselves from the Force. They had deluded themselves into thinking that they were worshiping life, when in fact they were worshiping the only route to symbiosis left open to them, which was death.
Jacen realized that, in a sense, he had paraphrased Onimi. He had pa.s.sed beyond the tradition of the Jedi Order into a more embracing reality. But instead of attempting to steal the authority of the G.o.ds, or to become a G.o.d, he had finally allowed himself to merge with the Force in its entirety and become a conduit for its raw power, which flowed through him like the thundering headwaters of a great river. The conjoining of the Force and his Vongsense enabled him to render himself small enough to follow Onimi wherever he went or attempted to hide; to counter Onimi"s every action, and merge with his living vessel on a molecular level.
Jacen ended their spinning, bringing them to a halt in the center of the bridge, where he continued to parry Onimi"s strikes. The Supreme Overlord"s lolling eye fixed him with a gimlet stare. Gradually Onimi began to understand, as well. He grasped that Jacen wasn"t defending himself so much as using Onimi"s own strengths against him.
Jacen was fighting without fighting; drawing Onimi deeper into the struggle by demanding more of Onimi"s indigenous toxins, to the point that he couldn"t keep up. Jacen was the vacuum, the dovin basal singularity into which Onimi was being sucked. Jacen had become the dismantling void that was drawing Onimi into a slender thread, attenuating him to the point of infinite smallness. Onimi"s self-deformed face began to change. His arteries pulsed and his veins bulged from beneath his pale skin.
Onimi fought with everything that remained in him, but Jacen could not be overwhelmed. As a pure conduit of the Force, he was incapable of taking missteps or making wrong moves. He stood not at the edge of the tilting ecliptic of his vision, but at the center, as a fulcrum. The weight that would disturb the balance was Onimi, but to Jacen, that weight was no longer of sufficient ma.s.s to make a difference. The Force encased Jacen like a whirlwind, moving deep into the darkness the Yuuzhan Vong had brought to the galaxy, and gathering it and sending it up the spout into the funnel cloud, where it was transformed and dispersed.
Onimi was becoming more insubstantial by the moment.
Jacen continued to stand firm, righting the world. He had become so powerful as to be dangerous to his own galaxy, for he could see clearly the temptations of the dark side and the desire to force one"s will on others-to so completely dominate that all life would kowtow to him. He purged his mind of all pride and evil intent and entered a moment of unadulterated bliss, where he seemed to have unlocked the very secrets of existence. He knew that he would never again be able to reach this exalted state, and at once that he would spend the rest of his life trying.
Neither Jaina nor Jacen had answered Leia"s calls as Nom Anor had led the search for them, but the reason for their silence became clear the moment she entered the bridge of the accelerating alien vessel. She was last to arrive in the cavernous chamber.
Nom Anor and Han, blaster in hand, had raced in ahead of her, only to be transfixed by the spectacle unfolding before their eyes-a sight Leia knew she would carry to her grave, and all the more spellbinding for the backdrop of familiar stars, hyphens of coherent light, roiling plasma missiles. She felt as if she were wedged between a dream and a vision; lifted into a realm that was usually denied to mortal beings. In the center of the bridge Jacen stood like a pillar of blinding light, feet planted, arms at his sides, chin lifted.
The dazzling light seemed to spin outward from his midsection and surround him like an aura. His face was almost frighteningly serene, and perhaps a touch sad. The pupils of his eyes were like rising suns. He seemed to age five years-features maturing, complexion softening, body elongating-as Leia watched breathlessly. What youth might have remained in her son vanished.
Across the bridge, Shimrra"s Shamed familiar, Onimi, was pinned to the coa.r.s.e bulkhead like a captive shadowmoth, uneven eyes rolled up into his deformed head and slavering mouth opened wide in wonderment, agony, despair-it was impossible to know.
Jaina dangled limply between her brother and Onimi, as if a mournful sculpture, fragile but growing stronger by the moment. And as she strengthened, Onimi began to wane. For an instant it appeared that the surgeries, mutilations, and disfigurements were reversing themselves.
The Shamed One"s facial features became symmetrical. His twisted body straightened, a.s.suming its original size, shape, and aspect-more human than not, though taller and leaner, with long limbs and large hands.
But life deserted him just as quickly. He slid to the deck as if his bones had dissolved. Poured from his mouth, eyes, and ears, corrosive fluids began to consume him, leaving nothing more than a puddle of foul hydrocarbons, which the yorik coral deck absorbed as it might a stain.
Immediately the vessel spasmed, as if it had been struck by turbolaser fire, or had in fact sustained a kind of stroke. Color and warmth drained from the living console, and the instruments took on an arthritic look.
Cognition hoods and villips grew desiccated. Blaze bugs fell out of formation and died on the floor of their niche. Coral fractured, and the already scant green light faded. With its dovin basal dying, the vessel almost succ.u.mbed to a last grab by Coruscant; then it lurched forward once more, aimed resolutely for the heart of the battle. When Leia finally came back to herself, Jacen had lifted Jaina from the horns on which she had been suspended, and was cradling her in his arms.
"You wouldn"t let me help you," she said.
Jacen comforted her with a smile.
"I needed you to help yourself."
Nom Anor watched in awe as Onimi disappeared into the deck of the bridge, his body dissolved by whatever corrosive poisons he had fabricated to use against Jacen Solo.
Death had come to the Shamed One who had brought shaper Nen Yim to Coruscant; the Shamed One whom Nom Anor had once followed to a secret shaper grashal; the Shamed One who had sat at the feet of Shimrra, and whose rhymes had been a constant irritant to the elite. The Shamed One who had tricked everyone into believing that Shimrra was the Supreme Overlord. The Supreme Overlord who was now dead. Nom Anor stared at the discoloration that had been Onimi.
Even if he lived to tell it, would anyone believe his tale? Would the Jedi be willing to corroborate it?
A prolonged paroxysm from the vessel snapped him back into awareness of his perilous dilemma. His real eye darted from the Jedi twins to their parents. There was still time to render them unconscious where they stood, then pilot Onimi"s vessel to rendezvous with whatever was left of Nas Choka"s mighty armada-But perhaps not. Jacen Solo was as dangerous a foe as could be imagined. What"s more, Onimi"s vessel, though roused from stasis, might not respond to Nom Anor.
If he was to escape with his life, he needed a more foolproof plan.
The solution presented itself when the vessel lurched again, and the controls began to surrender their suppleness.
"Onimi was wedded to this ship," he said in a rush. "With his death, it has begun to die, and we will perish with it."
When Jacen nodded in confirmation, Jaina said, "Mara is searching for us."
Han rushed to the console and peered through the blister transparency.
"Then the Falcon"s gotta be out there somewhere." He turned to Nom Anor. "I"ve seen Yuuzhan Vong evacuate their ships, wearing those gnullith masks-"
"There"s a better way." Nom Anor cut him off. "This vessel is equipped with a yorik-trema. What you call a "crate"-a landing craft."
Han showed him a long-suffering look.
"What, you were waiting for me to ask?"
Quickly, Nom Anor led the Solo family out of the bridge and through a bewildering maze of corridors, whose throbbing walls were already showing signs of imminent collapse. The palm of his right hand opened lock after dilating lock, allowing them to weave their way clear across the vessel to the portside bulkhead, and ultimately into a small grotto, equipped with a semicircular array of locks. Nom Anor opened what appeared to be the most exterior of the locks, and gestured everyone inside.
"Get settled, while I arm the launch organ!" Han clasped his left arm around his daughter"s waist and started for the lock.
But Jacen stopped him.
"This doesn"t lead to the yorik-trema." He turned slightly and pointed to the innermost lock. "That"s the correct one."
Jaina glanced around the grotto.
"Jacen"s right." She nodded to the lock Nom Anor had opened. "It leads to a waste disposal area."
Jacen regarded Nom Anor.