"Group and squadron leaders, the beast is at the gate. I know you're all eager to welcome it, but you're going to have to wait your turns."

The comm fell eerily silent, then erupted in chatter as the Yuuzhan Vong war vessels began to emerge: cones and polygons, faceted and smooth, bone white to reddish black, craggy with plasma launchers or strung with coralskippers. More rapidly and in increasing numbers they came, filling local s.p.a.ce and eventually blotting out Mon Calamari's distant sun. Just when it seemed that the last of them had reverted, still more appeared.

Somewhat removed from Alliance forces, and almost as if performing for an audience, the vessels began to tighten up, maneuvering into positions that ultimately created an oblate ma.s.s of yammosk carriers and destroyer and cruiser a.n.a.logs. From that ma.s.s-emerging from berthing cavities in the largest ships or dropping from anchorage on yorik coral branches-streamed hundreds of picket ship a.n.a.logs and coralskippers, deploying to forge the mult.i.tude of short and long tendrils that were meant to simulate the tentacles of a yammosk. To Jaina the final arrangement more closely resembled a flaring star, or perhaps the spiral arm galaxy the Yuuzhan Vong were determined to overwhelm. But whatever the armada's form, beast was the description that fit it best.

Then the immense organism was on the move, tentacles elongating from the hub as the cl.u.s.ter advanced on Mon Calamari, acutely aware of the reception party that awaited it, but resolute in its purpose.

"All group and squadron leaders," a male voice announced over the battle net, "seedships have arrived."

Alliance command might have borrowed the term from the Yuuzhan Vong, but the reference was not to the vessels that initiated the process of worldshaping; it was to the several dozen unarmed and remotely piloted freighters that gushed from behind Iceberg Three and launched straight for the armada. Plasma missiles a.s.saulted the bulky container ships from all quarters, though armor plating kept most of them intact until they were within the embrace of the longer tentacles.

There they surrendered their payloads of thousands of probe droids. With wide-domed heads and dangling mechanical legs, the probots were marine in appearance, and indeed they spread out like a school of deep-sea creatures riding the currents of a rising tide. Normally the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn't have wasted firepower on droids, but each probot had been programmed to mimic the propulsion signatures of Alliance starfighters, so the coralskippers and pickets had a field day, slagging the probots with fiery projectiles, or simply dismembering them by collision.

The Alliance might as well have been providing the yammosks and coralskipper pilots with practice for acquisition and targeting, but in fact each probot was contributing invaluably to Alliance command's goal of clearing fire lanes to the heart of the armada. Many of the battles fought during the long war had been decided not by firepower or kill ratios, but by the ability of Yuuzhan Vong biots to detect ma.s.s signals and to manipulate gravity.

As intelligent as the yammosks were, they were evenly matched by the crunching power of battle a.n.a.lysis computers, combined with the targeting skill of pilots. The dovin basals were a different animal. For a time the Alliance had managed to outwit them by employing decoys, stutterfire lasers, and the Jedi-propelled shadow bombs, but those advantages had recently been lost. Still, the Alliance had one powerful weapon in its a.r.s.enal: invention. Gleeful as they were about decimating the probots, the Yuuzhan Vong were unaware that each droid had been tasked to calculate entry points and targeting solutions for the starfighters.

Transmitted to Alliance command's computers, the data were collated and relayed to group and wing commanders, and on to squadron leaders and pilots.

"Your droids should be receiving navigational and targeting information," the voice of control said into Jaina's right ear. "Watch your display screens for a.s.signments."

Data began to flash on the c.o.c.kpit display as Cappie deciphered the information forwarded from Mon Calamari. Jaina watched a graphic representation of the yammosk resolve on the screen, with each tentacle of skips and gunboats a.s.signed a number or letter. Twin Suns, Rogue, and Vanguard Squadrons were tasked with taking out tentacles fourteen through twenty. But as impatient as she was to go to guns, there was an order to battle that had to be maintained.

The first a.s.sault wave was comprised of A-wings, TIE interceptors, Chiss clawcraft, A-9 Vigilances, and a handful of Y-wings. The objective of the fastest of the starfighters-the A-wings and A-9s-was to tease the coralskippers out of formation. Both fighter types were small and fragile, but the short-range concussion missile launchers of the former and the fire-linked lasers of the latter did to the outlying coralskippers what the skips had done to the probots.

For each dovin basal singularity that came to the rescue of a targeted ship, four failed to deploy in time, allowing the small fighters to strike and fade before the Yuuzhan Vong pilots even knew what hit them. Harried, the coralskippers and picket vessels that formed the tips of the tentacles began to disperse, and as soon as they did the dagger-shaped TIE interceptors and light bomber Y-wings were on them, weaving through the budding chaos with blinding speed and loosing proton torpedoes and bursts of high-powered laserfire.

The perimeter of the shifting armada became a blur of roiling fireb.a.l.l.s and fragmenting vessels. Packets of green energy and nova-bright bundles of explosive power began to eat away at the suddenly flailing tentacles. Molten ejecta rocketed outward at the attackers, in such abundance the armada might almost have been hemorrhaging.

Jaina switched over to the battle net in time to hear control issue the order to withdraw.

"We have clear fire lanes to their capital ships at one, six, seven, eight, twelve, and twenty-two. All starfighters in those lanes reposition to escorts and carriers!"

While the starfighters began to loop back, the Super Star Destroyer Guardian and the Mon Calamari cruiser Harbinger lumbered forward.

Traversing, their ranged weapons poured huge bolts of destructive power down the unprotected lanes. Explosions blossomed at the heart of the armada, all but setting it aglow. Colossal pieces of yorik coral streaked through local s.p.a.ce. The beast withered visibly, but stuck to its course.

"Second group away!" Alliance control ordered.

Jaina licked the sweat from her upper lip and punched the X-wing's throttle, leading Twin Suns swiftly into the fray. The forward view through the canopy showed so many coralskippers, so many targets of opportunity, she felt as if she were part of an elaborate simulation rather than engaged in actual battle. Remotely controlled by however many yammosks were contained in the core, the tentacles slithered and snapped like amphistaffs. Skips moved in and out of her targeting reticle faster than she, or even Cappie, could keep track of them.

For all the shrieking and yelping, the astromech droid might have been on a thrill ride. Even so, Twin Suns managed to maintain its integrity as it advanced on the whipping rank of vessels that had been designated tentacle fourteen. Behind the X-wings flew B-wing fighters and a squadron of TIE defenders. In combat the B-wings were somewhat cross-shaped, whereas the TIEs-with their elongated bodies and triads of solar collection panels-resembled arrowlike projectiles. Their job was to mop up any mess that Twin Suns, Rogue, and the rest left behind, and to clear the way for the ships tasked with landing punches on the capital vessels: heavily armored E-wing fighters equipped with proton torpedoes, and twin-piloted Scimitar a.s.sault bombers, carrying enough concussive strafing power to decommission half the rock spitters of an enemy destroyer a.n.a.log.

Coralskippers with enough fight left in them began peppering the X - and B-wings with plasma nodules and marshaling their dovin basals to make grabs for the attackers' particle shields. Then, without warning, capital ships at the heart of the armada funneled furious firestorms along the depleted lanes. Jaina's X-wing wobbled and tumbled through a swirling corridor of flames.

With the starfighter's shields all but incinerated, she rammed the control stick to one side to free herself, rolling out of volcanic heat with the ship nearly roasted, and Cappie's dome a drooping hood of molten alloy. She performed a desperate pushover and scanned local s.p.a.ce, dismayed to discover that almost all of the TIE defenders were gone-atomized by the superheated tempest.

The beast hadn't been stunned by the initial a.s.saults; it had been merely waiting for the right time to counterpunch. And the single blow it delivered had knocked fifty or more starfighters out of the fight. Jaina was doing a count of Twin Suns when the armada yammosks instructed the tentacle arms to rotate clockwise, and full chains of coralskippers and pickets quickly filled the gaps. Where moments earlier Jaina was facing six wounded skips, she suddenly found herself in the sights of a ravenous thirty.

TWENTY-THREE.

A similar thing had happened to Jacen on Duro, three years back. At the time, he had been helping a group of Ryn refugees fit a synthplas dome over the prefabricated building that was to be their shelter. This time he was off on his own in the Middle Distance, picking his way downhill to a still pool on the floor of a narrow valley.

Jaina?

On Duro, he had pa.s.sed out and fallen, knocking himself unconscious. This time a forest creeper swept his feet out from under him, and he pitched forward, sliding face-first on muddy ground and sodden deflated leaves until he managed to somersault himself onto his back and extend his hands to the sides. He was still meters from the valley floor when he arrested his descent, but his lightsaber fell prey to momentum and soared free of the cloth belt that cinched his robe.

Tumbling end over end through the air, it arced into the depths of the ice-fringed pool below. Jacen leapt to his feet and vaulted to the water's edge. Focusing on the center of the concentric waves that were spreading across the pool, he immersed himself in the Force and stretched out his right hand. The tubular alloy handgrip emerged vertically from the water, but not alone. It was held in the upraised four-fingered hand of Vergere. Sekot's thought projection of the diminutive Fosh, at any rate, looking much younger than the piebald, short-feathered Vergere Jacen had come to know on Coruscant.

Her willowy ears and pair of corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g antennae appeared smaller, and her slanted eyes were radiant with wonder. The splayed feet of her reverse-articulated legs rested just on the surface of the agitated pool.

"Lose something, Jacen?" Sekot asked through Vergere's wide mouth.

"Not for the first time."

His exhalations formed clouds in the chill air.

"It's not like you to stumble."

"My sister Jaina is in danger. I forgot to look where I was going."

"How often will you allow yourself to be distracted by the dangers she faces?"

This was Vergere as remembered by Sekot, Jacen thought, in contrast to the Vergere who had sacrificed her life at Ebaq 9 to save him and Jaina.

"As often as necessary," he said. "We're twins, and strongly bonded."

"What if you were faced with the choice of saving your twin or your uncle? Which do you serve?"

"I serve the Force."

"The Force would guide you to the correct decision?"

"Why else would I serve it?"

Insubstantial Vergere extended the lightsaber to him.

"Reclaim your weapon."

He called the lightsaber to him and wedged it into the belt of his now muddy robe. The handle was wet and cold, as were his hands, which he rubbed briskly together. Zonama Sekot had completed a second trial jump without sustaining severe damage. R2-D2 had calculated that the planet was on the galactic ecliptic, close to the Reecee system in the Inner Rim, were the frontier of that arbitrary zone to be extended into the Unknown Regions. One more jump through hypers.p.a.ce and Zonama could be back in known s.p.a.ce. Vergere seemed to be watching him.

"Do you use your lightsaber to slash or to heal?"

"That's always been the dilemma." Jacen lowered himself to the ground.

Broad shafts of sunlight flooded through the giant boras, dappling the leaf duff and dazzling the surface of the pool. Insects skimmed the water and bombinated around him.

"Were you searching for something here?"

"Only answers."

"As to how best to end the pain, suffering, and death that war has brought to the galaxy. You must trust in the Force, Jacen, if you are to serve it fully."

"Being a Jedi isn't just about serving the Force," he said. "It's a commitment to valuing all life."

Sekot brought a smile to Vergere's whiskered face.

"You learned that from your mentor, Vergere."

"My guide," Jacen amended. My guide through the lands of the dead.

My herald of tragedy...

"Vergere learned it from me," Sekot said. "For that is how I felt on being brought to awareness by Leor Hal, the first Magister. You wish to reiterate that the Yuuzhan Vong are part of life, part of the Force, and therefore must be dealt with accordingly."

"More to be pitied if stripped of the Force, as you contend," Jacen said.

Vergere's narrow shoulders sagged.

"I, too, am searching for answers, Jacen. But I do not sympathize with the enemy as you appear to."

Jacen compressed his lips.

"Because of what Vergere guided me through, I've developed a kind of..

. sense for them-a Vongsense. I feel it more strongly here, not only when I speak with Harrar, but wherever I go." He touched the hollow s.p.a.ce in his chest that had once housed the slave seed Vergere had implanted, and he recalled how it felt to have been racked on the Embrace of Pain; stripped of the Force. You are forever lost to the worlds you knew, Vergere had told him at the beginning of his process of being remade.

Your friends mourn, your father rages, your mother weeps. Your life has been terminated: a line of division has been drawn between you and everything you have ever known. You have seen the terminator that sweeps across the face of a planet, the twilit division between day and night.

You have crossed that line, Jacen Solo. The bright fields of day are forever past.

"By growing to understand you better, I grow to understand our enemy better," Sekot said. "Do you see a contradiction there, Jedi?"

"That depends on whom Sekot serves."

"I too, serve the Force-but as defined by the Potentium, which does not recognize evil, except as a label. Magister Leor and the Ferroans were my guides to consciousness. But it was the Far Outsiders-the Yuuzhan Vong-who taught me that while evil does not exist, evil actions do exist, and it is to those that we must direct ourselves. I had the power to halt the Yuuzhan Vong when they approached me fifty years ago, and I have the power to halt them now. My instincts, such as they are, tell me that I have always had power over them."

Jacen thought about the Force punch Sekot had delivered to those aboard Jade Shadow when the ship had first appeared in the Kla.s.se Ephemora system-Sanctuary.

"And you'll exercise that power to defeat them?" he asked carefully.

"If necessary-but without contempt. If I defeat them aggressively, if I hate them for who they have become, then I will have separated myself from the Force, and permitted my ego to triumph over my desire to merge and expand my consciousness. I will have corrupted the light with my darkness, stained it forever. Self-awareness tricks us into believing that there is us, and that there is the other. But in serving the Force we recognize that we are all the same thing; that when we act in accordance with the Force we act in accordance with the wish of all life to enlarge itself, to rise out of physicality and become something greater.

"In that sense, all living beings are seed-partners, Jacen, pa.s.sionate to unite with all life, and to help give birth to grand enterprises-whether a starship, a work of art, or a deed that will echo through history as a n.o.ble action. I am no different than you in wanting to play a part in the evolution of the spirit. My consciousness yearns for this."

"Easier said than done," Jacen said.

"Yes, it is a matter of balance. But we are balancing the universe constantly with every action we take, some tipping it one way, some another. To triumph over the Yuuzhan Vong we must simply go where we wish to go. That is also what I must do to return us to known s.p.a.ce. But the task entails far more than simply focusing on a set of hypers.p.a.ce coordinates. Unless the destination is a place I wish to go, nothing will work out. Even if I execute the jump flawlessly, my actions will come to nothing.

"For your interest, Jacen, that is something that Vergere taught me."

Jacen was listening too intently to respond. Vergere had set him on the path to remaking himself. But unless he could complete the process, he would be ensnared by the very self-conscious uncertainties Sekot professed to have grown past, and prevented from merging fully with the Force.

"We must approach the turning points in our lives with purity of heart," Sekot was saying. "We must look beyond ourselves, and when we see danger approaching or a difficult choice ahead, we must calm ourselves well in advance, so that we can navigate with a clear mind. Once we have mastered the technique, we can learn to trust that we're doing the right thing, without thinking about it."

"Do you know where you want to go?" Jacen asked when he realized that Sekot was waiting for him to say something.

"By a.n.a.lyzing Yuuzhan Vong biotech-by what I intuited from Nen Yim-I have learned much about augmenting Zonama's hypers.p.a.ce cores with energy derived from the planet itself. And the success of the trial jumps has encouraged me that I can safely return Zonama to known s.p.a.ce. I begin to understand how the Yuuzhan Vong created what they call dovin basals, villips, yammosks, and other biots. Or perhaps I begin to remember.

"But I am worried about the potentially calamitous or destabilizing effects Zonama's sudden appearance could have on any planet in close proximity to our emergence."

From records stored in the Chiss library, Jacen and Saba had learned of the widespread seismic devastation Zonama Sekot had caused on Munlali Mafir, standard decades earlier, not only to the planet but to the indigenous Jostrans and Krizlaws, as well.

"My uncle thought you might be worried about that," Jacen said.

"He was going to tell you himself that you shouldn't be."

Vergere glided toward him across the water and ice.

"Tell me what Master Skywalker has in mind."

TWENTY-FOUR.

Caluula's reddish sun was cresting the ridgeline, limning the crowns of the tallest trees and warming the air. Leia began to rub her hands together, but stopped when she realized that the chill she felt had nothing to do with the temperature. North of the trail, in an area of trees that were snapped in half, the team had come upon a crashed coralskipper.

The craft's translucent, mica-like canopy was cracked, and inside the cavity that served as a c.o.c.kpit sat the dead pilot. The cognition hood that was the pilot's living interface with the coralskipper was shriveled and stuck to his face like a sheet of flimsiplast. Han was squatting at the craft's blunt nose, poking at a deep red heart-shaped ma.s.s, studded with pale blue projections, that had dropped from the fractured fuselage.

"Dovin basal's dead," he said.

"Same with the rock spitters," Kyp replied.

The Jedi Master was circling the craft while Wraw and Sa.s.so inspected the c.o.c.kpit. Page, Ferfer, and Meloque were scouting the forest to the north, in the direction of Caluula City. The timbus were grazing contentedly nearby. Han stood up, put the edge of his hand to his brow, and gazed at the splintered trees.

"Came in from that direction." He pointed to a depression some distance away. "Hit the ground there, plowed its way through those bushes, and came to a stop here."

Kyp completed his circle of the craft, nodding his head.