The Unifying Force (23 page)

Leia studied the navicomputer display. “We’ll have come around to three-zero-three. That means back toward the station.”

“I was afraid of that.”

An explosion shook the ship before it was halfway through the turn.

“There goes the only new piece of equipment they installed. But we can get by without it.”

“I’m counting on that, dearest.”

One of the curve-tailed, tandem-piloted coralskippers appeared in the wraparound viewport, coming straight at the
Falcon
. “Take the shot!” Han said into the intercom.

Singularities formed in advance of the approaching skip, but sheer firepower overwhelmed them, and the vessel came apart in roiling fire.

“Cakhmaim is
really
getting good,” Leia said.

Han shook his head negatively. “That wasn’t him.”

He leaned back in his seat to glance through the upper panes of the viewport. A classic
Firespray
-class security patrol craft shot overhead. A cross-shaped ship affixed to an oval engine suite, it was followed by four Gladiators, so named because they looked like swords thrust to the hilt through circular shields.

“It
is
Fett! And he’s clearing a lane for us!” Han snorted. “Just like him to make sure he has the upper hand on a debt.”

“Incoming transmission,” Leia said. “From the Firespray.”

Boba Fett’s voice crackled through the comm. “Just wanted to remind you, Solo, that my personal fight was always with the Jedi. You were nothing more than cargo.”

Han snorted. “For what it’s worth, Fett, you were never more than a nuisance.”

Fett laughed shortly. “To better days, Captain.”

“Count on it.”

Sowing mines far to port and starboard, the Firespray continued to break a trail for the near-weaponless
Falcon;
then Fett tipped the patrol craft’s short wings in salute and vanished.

“Ready for lightspeed,” Han said.

Leia collapsed back into the copilot’s chair, shaking her head back and forth. “I have now officially seen and heard everything.” She turned to Han with a half smile. “I’m almost ready to believe this war will actually end.”

With the Jedi Knights reduced to half their strength since the start of the war, Luke Skywalker’s seven incommunicado in the Unknown Regions, some—including the twenty or so Jedi children—still sheltered at the Maw Installation, and others participating in various Galactic Alliance military operations, Kenth Hamner could gather only a dozen Jedi for the meeting held in Tresina Lobi’s quarters on Mon Calamari.

Though understated, the circular room at the top of Coral City’s Quarren Tower was spacious and enjoyed a 360-degree view of the tranquil sea and sparkling reefs. In the continued absence of Luke and Saba—and with Kyp frequently flying missions with the Dozen—Tresina Lobi had become an important voice on Cal Omas’s Advisory Council. A Chev, she had a narrow face with angular features, and short black hair.

Tresina, Markre Medjev, and Cilghal, the Mon Calamari Jedi healer, had spent the morning preparing food, and the circular table in the sunroom was already spread with the appetizing results of their labors by the time Kenth and the others arrived.

Gradually they seated themselves at the table, except for Kenth, who was too restless to eat or stay put. Clockwise from Tresina’s armchair sat Cilghal, Jaina, Kyp, towering ginger-furred Lowbacca, the Twi’lek female Alema Rar, salt-and-pepper-haired combat instructor Kyle Katarn, Chandrilan Octa Ramis, slight and terribly scarred Waxarn Kel, and young and darkly handsome Zekk.

“Some of you might not be aware that operative Baljos Arnjak didn’t return from Wraith Squadron’s infiltration mission to Coruscant,” Kenth said as he circled the table. “Bhindi Drayson was supposed to have remained onworld, but it was Arnjak who stayed, and has been furnishing the Alliance with intelligence ever since, mostly with the help of a kind of droid-fungus he and his teammates let loose during the mission.”

Kenth came to a stop between Cilghal and Jaina, then leaned forward, planting the palms of his hands on the table. “Arnjak’s latest report states that Yu’shaa, the so-called Prophet of the heretics, was recently seen on Coruscant. By recent, I mean within the past local week, since it took that long for a string of couriers to move the information from the Core to Mon Calamari.”

“Has his identity been verified?” Kyle asked from across the table.

Kenth nodded. “Which means that he either didn’t go to Zonama Sekot with Corran and Tahiri—”

“Or that he returned without them,” Kyp said. “Is there some way we can establish whether he arrived back on Coruscant in the same vessel everyone left on?”

“No,” Kenth said.

[Or if they even reached Zonama Sekot], Lowbacca’s voice issued from his droid translator.

Kenth glanced at the Wookiee. “Exactly. Unlike most of the HoloNet transceivers, Esfandia is still functioning—if inconsistently. So, assuming nothing has befallen
Jade Shadow
, Luke and Mara should have been able to contact us.”

“We’ve waited long enough,” Octa Ramis said. “It’s time we sent a ship.”

Everyone fell silent for a long moment, then Cilghal said, “I doubt that we’ll find Zonama Sekot at the coordinates to which we’ve been transmitting messages. I suspect that the living world has moved.”

“Based on what?” Alema asked.

Cilghal spread her webbed hands. “On what the Force tells me.”

Kenth glanced around the table. “Do any of you also feel that way?”

“I do,” Jaina said. “Jacen feels farther away than he did when we received Luke and Mara’s transmission.” She shook her head somberly. “I don’t feel him as distinctly.”

Kenth inhaled with purpose. “That’s good enough for me.” He compressed his lips. “I say we have a talk with the Prophet.”

Kyp snorted. “I agree. But getting onto Coruscant won’t
be easy—even with Peace Brigade and trade ships being allowed to land there.”

Alema looked from Kyp to Kenth. “Could we appeal to Alliance command for help in inserting some of us?”

Kenth shook his head. “Not without explaining what we’re after—or why we didn’t inform command that we’d sanctioned Corran and Tahiri’s mission to Zonama Sekot. If Intelligence learns that we passed on a chance to capture a shaper, a priest, and the
Prophet
, of all people …”

“We could go to Wedge,” Markre Medjev suggested.

Kenth nodded. “We could, and I’m sure he’d do everything in his power to get us onto Coruscant. But I don’t want to put him in the position of having to lie to Sovv and Kre’fey.”

“I agree,” Cilghal said.

Tresina nodded. “Likewise.”

“This is beginning to sound like Myrkr all over again,” Kyp said.

Zekk looked at him. “If Anakin hadn’t taken on that mission, all of us might be voxyn fodder by now.”

“Zekk’s right,” Octa Ramis added. “If it sounds like Myrkr, it’s because we have no choice but to go.”

Kenth straightened and adopted a determined expression. “We’ll give Master Skywalker a week. If we don’t hear from him by then, I’ll assemble a strike team.”

Its balloonlike bone-white outriggers buffeted by gusting winds, the airship moved swiftly over the devastated surface of Zonama Sekot. Luke, Mara, Jacen, and the Yuuzhan Vong priest, Harrar, were crammed onto the rear portion of the gondola’s tiny cabin. Saba Sebatyne and a Ferroan male named Kroj’b had the controls. Companion of the manta-shaped dirigible
Elegance Enshrined
, Kroj’b had arrived in the Middle Distance only the previous day, but had agreed to accompany the Jedi on their mission to the southern realm. Next to the two pilots stood Jabitha, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak.

At three thousand meters the air was frigid, and the howling wind made conversation difficult. Even if that hadn’t been the case, no one seemed inclined to talk. Jacen was broodingly silent; Mara, preoccupied and restless. Saba, at least, had a bewildering assortment of organiform control levers to busy her.

Luke raised the cowl of his robe and shoved his hands deep into the robe’s sleeves.

The Force spoke quietly on Zonama Sekot.

The rain had finally ceased in that part of the planet, but the thick cloud cover remained. The sun—whatever star it was, named or unknown—was a broad smear of incandescence behind the gray veil. A persistent chill wind rustled the giant boras and was fast stripping them of their globular leaves. Many of the leaves had turned blue and yellow, as if bruised. Something seldom seen in the Middle Distance—except at high altitude—vapors froze during the long nights, leaving the canyon floors coated in white until the sun rose. Thin sheets of transparent ice formed over quiet pockets of
the still-swollen river. When glimpsed at all, animals could be seen seeking shelter in caves or burrows, or fashioning durable nests, as if in preparation for a long winter. Boras seeds, too, had been observed creeping off into the tampasi, perhaps to seek nourishment among the oldest of the iron-tipped boras and wait for the lightning strikes that would split and shape them.

The Ferroans rarely ventured out before midday, and then only for long enough to gather firewood or effect repairs to their cliffside dwellings. Most of them avoided the Jedi whenever possible or, when not, exchanged few words. None, however, had issued further demands that Harrar be turned over to them. Luke assumed that young Maydh had allayed fears that the Yuuzhan Vong priest was a threat.

He gazed through the cabin’s aft windscreen at the wounds Zonama had suffered. Quakes had opened deep trenches in the savannas, landslides had altered the course of rivers, fires had ravaged vast tracts of tampasi. Luke had considered taking
Jade Shadow
up to survey and catalog the damages—perhaps attaining orbit for just long enough to survey the nearby stars, as well—but he couldn’t trust that the planet wouldn’t jump into hyperspace again, as it had after its initial reversion to realspace.

Covertly he looked at Jabitha, then at Harrar. He couldn’t recall a time when he had been so close to a Yuuzhan Vong and not engaged in fighting for his life—save perhaps on the occasions he had stood close to Nom Anor. But then, any moments spent with Nom Anor constituted a duel, of sorts.

For the tenth time since the airship journey had begun, Luke tried to see Harrar in the Force, but perceived only an absence. Despite Vergere’s assurances to the contrary, Harrar—and by extension all Yuuzhan Vong—did not seem to exist in the Force. There the priest sat, not three meters away, and Luke couldn’t sense him. Harrar was nothing more or less than what he appeared to be: a tall, sinewy humanlike man, absent some of his fingers, and marked with tattoos, scars, and other modifications.

Luke knew that he could use the Force to levitate Harrar, to pirouette him about the small cabin, but he couldn’t
see
him in the same way he could see Mara, Jacen, Saba, and
Jabitha—as a luminous being; not as the crude stuff of flesh and bone, but as an egg-shaped being of light. Vergere, who had willingly spent fifty years among the Yuuzhan Vong, had maintained that the seeming invisibility of the Yuuzhan Vong owed not to any inherent failure of the Force, but to the way Luke and his fellow Jedi
perceived
the Force. The implication was they had somehow failed to grasp that the Force was grander and more far reaching than they understood it to be.

Luke could accept that. His training had been rushed; and with the deaths of Obi-Wan and Yoda he had been obliged largely to pursue his own counsel, and find his own way to mastery. He would have been the first to admit that his understanding of the Force might be limited or incomplete; that he had perhaps become more a Master of the Living Force than what the late Vergere had called the Unifying Force. But even that deficiency should not have prevented him from being able to
see
Harrar.

Either Vergere had left something out of her lectures—which Luke wouldn’t have put past her—or her own understanding of the quandary was incomplete. Luke didn’t for a moment doubt that the Fosh Jedi had somehow succeeded in tutoring herself to a kind of mastery—despite having been forced to conceal her Jedi abilities from her captors—but the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong’s invisibility ran deeper than Vergere knew, or had allowed. Perhaps she believed, as Yoda had at times, that her responsibility ended with setting Luke on the proper path. Perhaps that was the way among the Jedi of the Old Republic. For all the education and practice each had undergone, the achievement of mastery was ultimately the outcome of a personal quest for understanding.

If any of the new Jedi order grasped this on an intuitive level, it was Jacen. Long before his reeducation by Vergere—some said reindoctrination—Jacen had sought to reach a personal understanding of the Force. In that, he was much like Leia, a Knight in her own right, who had for her own reasons resisted taking up the path of the Jedi.

It was Jacen who had insisted that Harrar accompany them on the journey Jabitha had proposed a day earlier, when she had visited Luke, Mara, and the others in their cliff dwelling.

“Sekot is aging,” Jabitha had said. “I feel her, and yet I feel estranged from her. She remains in exile to puzzle out what has happened; and in withdrawing, she neglects Zonama. I don’t think she has done so deliberately. It is as if she has been abducted by dark forces, and is somehow imprisoned.”

“Nom Anor, Nen Yim, and I are responsible for what has happened to Sekot,” Harrar had said. “We should never have come here. If the gods haven’t already turned their backs on the Yuuzhan Vong, they will now, for we have despoiled a living world.”

Jabitha had listened to the priest’s confession without comment. She said, “I know where we can begin to seek Sekot. A place where the Force is strong …”

Harrar seemed to feel Luke’s eyes on him, and turned. His own eyes were moist, and tears had left streaks on his tattooed cheeks. The cause might have been the wind rushing through cracks in the cabin.

“I am overcome,” he said sadly. “Even with all its recent injuries, this is the world I have dreamed of. The world all my people have dreamed of. The one that ordained our past; the one we prayed would prefigure our future. A world of symbiosis, rather than competition and predation. The very world we have tried time and again to re-create, only to end up with facsimiles. It is no small wonder I felt nostalgic for this place the moment we landed; that I felt I’d arrived home, though I’d never been here.”