He saw his son, composed of Luke and Mara and years to come. Around the edges of Lord Nyax's command he felt the Force, its other natures, the life from which it flowed.

He turned back toward Lord Nyax and struggled to find the words to express his thought. "I... stand... in... your... way."

It was the Jedi way. Jedi did not attack. But to position oneself in the path of a violent aggressor who would not yield achieved the same result.

All he could ever do as leader of the wartime Jedi was lead them into the path of the enemy. That was, Luke realized, perhaps his greatest limitation, and in struggling against it without understanding it, he may have hampered the Jedi effectiveness against the enemy.

But once recognized and accepted, it was also perhaps his greatest strength. Whether by accident or design, by his own will or by the permutations of the Force, he had always found his way into the path of the great enemies of all things living.

And here he was again. "I stand in your way," Luke repeated, and was pleased that he had regained control over his voice. "What you see, you will not achieve."

The expression on Lord Nyax's face turned from mocking amusement to seriousness... even sadness, for a brief moment, as though the thing had at last recognized some kinship and discovered that it did not bridge the gulf between the two of them.

Then it charged.

Kell finished binding Viqi's hands behind her back and looked up in time to see Lord Nyax lunge toward Luke.

Luke raised his lightsaber, caught the downward sweep of Lord Nyax's right-hand forearm weapon. He spun clockwise, narrowing his profile as the left-hand forearm blade thrust toward him, and kept his guard up in time to intercept the right-hand elbow blade. Mara leapt forward, unleashing two fast blows that the thing's left-elbow blade caught, then folded over nearly double as she leaped back from a strike from its left knee.

The Yuuzhan Vong warriors unloaded handfuls of thudbugs and razorbugs, heedless of which of the targets they might hit, but the two Jedi and Lord Nyax flicked the weapons out of the air or dodged them entirely.

Two Jedi? Three. Suddenly Tahiri was in their midst, coming up on Luke's left, blocking a follow-up blow from the elbow blade on that side.

"Bad,"Kell said.

Face nodded. "Bad bad." He pulled his blaster rifle from the wrappings on his back. "But who to shoot first?"

"We're no good here." Kell gestured toward the stairwell. "Let's see what they're doing down below. If it's important, I can blow it up."

"That's our Kell."

Kell set Viqi on her feet, then hauled her up over his shoulder.

Following Face, he descended the stairwell.

Denua Ku watched the palejeedai, and for a moment admiration almost drowned out the revulsion he felt at the notion of having abomination-machines like light-sabers touching one's own flesh.

The pale thing fought with a savagery and speed unlike those of any warrior he had ever seen. And it was untrained. With his experienced warrior's eye, he could see that its movements were instinctive, a fact revealed in the creature's failure to throw effective combinations of blows, its inability to gauge which way its enemies would leap when it attacked them.

If it had been born Yuuzhan Vong, if he'd been able to train it for a year, even half a year, he could have turned this thing into the greatest warrior who was not himself a god. As it was, he'd have to kill this thing.

Even if the Jeedai, too, wanted it dead, it was still an abomination. And it was the greater threat. It had to die first. He threw his last razorbug, then lunged forward into hand-to-hand range, probing at the pale thing's back with the tail-tip of his amphistaff.

The pale thing spun, sending its knee blade toward Denua Ku's guts.

He blocked the sweep with his amphistaff, but the impact was tremendous; it threw him back off his feet. He rolled backward and came upright, saw one of his warriors perform a similar probing assault... and this warrior took a forearm blade through the throat.

Nine Yuuzhan Vong warriors down. Sixteen to go. The numbers were becoming worse.

A tremendous mechanical roar shook the chamber. It lowered slightly in volume but became steady, filling the air.

FOURTEEN.

"It's a delaying tactic!" Mara shouted over the roar.

"I know!" Luke shouted back. "It's working! I'm being delayed!" He stopped a forearm-swing and was driven back a step, stopped the follow-up elbow swing and was driven back a step, jumped back to avoid the knee-strike and discovered it was only a feint; Lord Nyax's leg snapped back and caught a Yuuzhan Vong warrior in the crotch, collapsing the warrior despite its armor.

Every step took the Jedi and the warriors toward the center of the chamber. The floor vibrated beneath their feet.

"What?" Mara said.

"I didn't say anything!"

"Not you! Speak up, Face!"

Luke waved Mara back. She jumped up and backward in a somersault, taking her out of Lord Nyax's range, and took out her comlink, holding it up to her ear. Tahiri took her place, swinging her lightsaber defensively, eyes wide as she analyzed her attacker's motions and patterns.

"I said, it's a big machine," Face shouted. Here, at the source of the vibration, the noise was much worse.

He, Kell, and their struggling cargo were on a catwalk two levels down from the floor where the Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong fought, one level down from the side-passageways by which the Vong must have arrived. And the catwalk itself was the top level of a deep, deep chamber-a chamber that housed a single vehicle.

Had that machine been set up on any world but Cor-uscant, it would have been considered a skyscraper. It was hundreds of meters tall. At its base were treaded appendages that could roll like tank treads or lift and move independently like feet. All along its surface were hydraulic arms; some ended in what looked like plasma cutters, others in huge ball-like weapons, still others in manipulator hands.

At the top was a sensor station surrounded by trans-paristeel panels, and packed into that station were living beings. Many of the workers who had not been on the floor above at the onset of the Yuuzhan Vong attack were here, and more were shoving their way way along a catwalk extension that led to a door in that station.

Down below were more beings, tirelessly carrying hunks of debris away from the machine's base.

The whole thing roared like a fleet of antiquated Pod-racers. The vibration cut into Face's skin wherever the vonduun crab armor did not cover it.

"Tell her it's a construction droid," Kell shouted. "It looks completely functional."

Face shouted that information into his comlink.

"Did she hear you?"

"I don't know."

"Tell her it's moving."

Far below, the treads spun into action. The construction droid's machinery whined as the gigantic machine J lurched into action... and then crashed into the dura-crete wall before it.

Unable to hear, Mara bit off a curse. She tucked her comlink away and jumped back into the fight, deflected a pair of thudbugs, took a swipe at Lord Nyax's hand; its arm rotated and it caught the attack on its lightsaber blade.

Luke flipped over the pale thing, striking as he went; his blow was blocked.

Tahiri, in front, lunged forward... and stumbled, right into the path of a knee blade. Mara reached out, an effort to shove with the Force, knowing that she was too late, knowing that the knee-blade would emerge in a fraction of a second from the back of Tahiri's skull-but Tahiri whipped to the side, still in control, still in balance, even as Luke crashed feetfirst into Lord Nyax's neck, forcing its head down toward its own knee-blade.

The blade turned itself off. Lord Nyax's head passed through empty space. Luke, backflipping to his feet, offered up an expression of bafflement and frustration.

Mara sighed. It had been a feint, an effort to trick the thing into spearing itself with its own weapons. But its designers had been too thorough. There were fail-safes.

The floor rocked under their feet. Mara felt the crash from below as much as she heard it.

Lord Nyax leapt upward a half-dozen meters and then, impossibly, just hung there in space, smiling down at the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong.

Mara realized, a fraction of a second too late, that it had merely grabbed the same cord by which she and Luke had descended. Then the floor went out from under her.

The construction droid plowed into the wall before it, smashing steel and duracrete out, allowing blue-white sunlight to spilt in. It lurched and wobbled as it continued, internal balance compensators having a hard time keeping up with the irregularity of the surface it moved across.

The catwalk under Face's feet rippled. "C'mon!" He turned back toward the stairs they'd descended, but the catwalk mounting on the corner nearest the droid's exit hole snapped and dropped, snapping the next mounting toward him and the next mounting after that. The catwalk fell all along one wall, except for the mounting behind Face and Kell, turning their footing into a steep ramp.

Face managed to get his hands on the catwalk railing. As his feet went out from under him, he held on. He looked up, could see Kell holding on above him, could see the ceiling of this chamber split and collapse as one of its supporting walls gave way under the droid's destructive exit.

Bodies began spilling through the split in the ceiling. Some were bodies of workers. Others were Yuuzhan Vong warriors.

Then there were the bodies of his Jedi friends.

As he felt his footing give way, Luke sprang, with the last bit of traction the flooring gave him, toward Mara and Tahiri. He hit them like an overly aggressive ballplayer, catching one in each arm.

The patch of floor they were heading toward opened, giving him nothing to land on. With the Force, he shoved at his own back, propelling him through the rent, toward the metal wall he saw before him, the wall and the catwalk there...

He saw that their arc was going to miss the catwalk. They would hit the wall and plummet. But in that instant, the left end of the catwalk broke free of its moorings and dropped, bringing it beneath their ballistic arc. A moment later, they hit the swaying thing, bending it down still farther, but Mara and Tahiri grabbed its trailing end and held on with their considerable strength.

Gasping for breath, Luke looked around. He and both of the others had switched off their lightsabers midleap. "Good instincts," he said.

"Good teacher," Tahiri said. She looked up, past Luke. "Hey, Face, is that you?"

"Hold on, hold on, I'll get a line down to you."

Face tied off the cord he'd once used to safeguard his passage across an elevated walkway. He dropped the other end down the swaying catwalk toward the Jedi. In moments, Luke, Mara, and Tahiri swarmed up to join them. The construction droid was only just pulling out onto the avenue beyond the building.

"Did you see Viqi Shesh?" Mara asked.

Kell jerked a thumb up toward the stairwell behind them. "She was still at the bottom of the steps when the big boom hit. She took off."

Mara clambered up to the base of the stairs. "I'm going after her."

"Mara, no." Luke's voice did not carry a plea; his tone conveyed simple truth. "Lord Nyax is more important. I can feel him moving up there. Moving away. We have to go after him, bring him down."

Mara sighed, shut her eyes. After a moment, she nodded.

"I lost her, I'll go after her," Kell said.

Face pressed the locator into his hand. "No. You go after this, Mechanic Boy. It could be our ticket out of here."

"You go after her, then."

Face gestured toward the construction droid, which leaned at an alarming angle toward the next building over as it turned rightward onto the avenue. "I'm going after that. Nyax sent it off for a purpose. We need to know what that purpose is."

Mara pounded her fist on the bottom step, then stood. "Let's go,"

she said.

Up on the half-collapsed floor above, Denua Ku hung, unable to climb, unable to descend.

A three-meter length of rebar emerged from his gut. It was slick with his blood. He knew that his lung had been punctured.

The pain was extraordinary. He did not mind pain, did not fear it, but it was beginning to fade in a way that suggested imminent death rather than recovery.

In the silence left by the infidel machine's departure, he heard feet padding softly across the remaimng floor. He looked up. Viqi Shesh, most of the way around the chamber toward the hole by which the pale monster had entered, her hands tied behind her back, paused and looked at him.

"Tell them I died well," Denua Ku said.

"I'll tell them," she said. "I'll tell them you died whining, that you died begging for infidel medicines, anything to alleviate the pain."

Denua Ku snarled. He reached for his pouch, for his last remaining razorbugs.

Viqi laughed at him. Before he could bring out the weapons, she reached the corner and ducked through the hole there.

Lord Nyax led the three Jedi on a high-speed run through the ruins of Coruscant. He could travel faster than they could, because from time to time he'd simply leap from one building to the next one over, usually a leap too great for them to match. Yet they could always feel him in the distance, sense his movements, sense a feeling of expectation and even anxiety from him.

Once they caught up very close. The bodies of five lightly scarred Yuuzhan Vong warriors, young ones, lay in a brightly lit corridor, their wounds still smoking. In the distance, the Jedi could hear the footsteps of Lord Nyax fleeing.

"Where's he going?" Mara asked.

Luke thought about where they started this fight, where they'd been since then. "It's a big arc. Maybe part of a big circle."

"Why?" Tahiri asked. She breathed more easily than Luke or Mara, the energy and resilience of youth standing her in good stead.

"He's not fleeing," Luke said. "He could have left us behind some time ago. So he wants us to follow him. Into a trap?" He shook his head.

"He would have gone straight. No, he's just leading us on a chase. A diversion."

"So where does he want us not to go?" Tahiri asked.

Mara turned abruptly, headed back the way they'd come. "To wherever it sent that construction droid." She pulled out her comlink. "Mara to Face. Come in, Face."

Face ducked behind a pillar between two smashed-in panels of transparisteel. He got out of sight just in time. Outside, a wingpair of coralskippers flew by at his exact altitude-the same altitude as the top level of the combat droid. "Face here. I hear you."

"Are you still with the construction droid?"