The Unifying Force (36 page)

“The Brigaders are all right? Healthy?” Meloque asked.

“Healthy enough to have delayed us,” Karrde said. “Momentarily, that is.”

Leia showed Han a skeptical look. “You knew about this.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t trust this whole operation from the start. I figured we’d been compromised somehow, so I wanted to make sure we had backup. Sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“That’s against orders, Solo,” Wraw said harshly.

“So bring me up on charges when we get back to Mon Calamari.”

“Don’t think I won’t try.”

Lando glanced from the Bothan to Han. “Has it been this way from the start?”

“Pretty much.”

Lando watched Han struggle to his feet. “Are you all right,

Han?”

“He was bitten by an amphistaff whose venom wasn’t working,” Kyp said.

Lando glanced at Malik Carr, the priest, and the warriors. “We’ve seen this everywhere we’ve been—at the spaceport, in the streets … What’s going on?”

Page gestured to the Yuuzhan Vong. “They caught something. And not just the warriors. The yammosk, the weapons—”

“Oh, no,” Kyp interrupted in a tone of tragic realization. “Oh, no.” Blood rushed from his face, and his expression turned grim. “I know what happened here. I probably knew from the moment we saw the crashed coralskipper, but I didn’t want to believe it.” He looked at everyone. “And may the Force help all of us if I’m right.”

Everyone was scrambling for shelter. From his perch on the rim of the abyss, Luke could see hundreds of Ferroans massed at the mouths of the tunnels below, the combined light of dozens of glow sticks creating halos around each entrance. Through Magister Jabitha, Sekot had issued the alert that the planet was preparing to make a final jump to hyperspace. Luke could feel Zonama shuddering as the core hyperdrives heated up. He could sense the tension and uncertainty in the boras, the seed-partners, the myriad creatures the vast tampasi supported.

He looked into the night sky. For no reason he could fathom, each jump seemed to have brought him closer to a familiarity that had nothing to do with star systems or planets. Even in the most remote realms of the Unknown Regions, his connection with the Force had never faltered. But with the previous jump he had begun to hear the whispers of his fellow Jedi, and their urgency told him that it was critical that he, Mara, and the others return. If the imminent jump didn’t succeed, or if it should leave Zonama far from where Luke wanted the planet to emerge, then he would do as Mara had wished, and make use of
Jade Shadow
.

He felt Jacen approach from behind him, but didn’t turn from the view.

“Something has happened,” he said finally.

“I feel it, Uncle Luke,” Jacen said. “The Jedi, our friends …”

“It’s not only them. The danger is widespread.”

Jacen came alongside him. A gust of wind tugged at the cowl of his robe. “Another Ithor? Another Barab One?”

“Not yet,” Luke said. “But a new evil has been unleashed.”

“By the Yuuzhan Vong?”

“By the dark side.”

Jacen nodded. “Your real enemy.”

Luke turned to him. “You should be thinking about your own course, Jacen, not mine.”

Jacen exhaled with purpose. “I have no one but you to look to, to know which path I should take. Our courses are entangled.”

“Then I guess I’d better listen to what you’ve decided about me.”

Jacen took a moment to collect his thoughts. “From everything you’ve told me over the years about confronting your father and the Emperor, it has always seemed to me that neither of them was your real enemy. Each tried to entice you to join him. But they were never the source of your fear. You feared falling to the dark side.”

Luke grinned faintly. “Is that all?” he said finally.

Jacen shook his head. “On Coruscant, at the ruins of the Jedi Temple, Vergere said that the Jedi had a shameful secret, and that secret was that there is no dark side. The Force is one. And since there are no separate sides, the Force can’t take sides. Our notions of light and dark only reflect how little we know about the true nature of the Force. What we’ve chosen to call the dark side is simply the raw, unrestrained Force itself, which gives rise to life as easily as it brings death and destruction.”

Luke listened closely.
Now I shall show you the true nature of the Force
, the Emperor had told him at Endor.

On Mon Calamari, Vergere had tried to lead him down the same path, by implying that Yoda and Obi-Wan were to blame for not telling him the truth about the dark side. As a result of their neglect, when Luke had cut off his father’s hand in anger, he assumed he had had a close brush with the dark side. When he stood at the side of the cloned Emperor, he had truly felt the dark side. Ever since, he had come to equate anger with darkness itself, and he had passed that along to the Jedi he had tutored. But in fact, according to Vergere, Luke had been misguided by his own ego. She had maintained that, while darkness could remain in someone by invitation, it could just as easily be jettisoned by self-awareness.
Once Luke accepted this, he would no longer have to fear being seduced by the dark side.

“You’re suggesting that I’ve held myself back by not wanting to incorporate this raw power into my awareness of the Force,” Luke said.

“Vergere received years of formal training in the Force,” Jacen said. “The things she told me must have been common knowledge among the Jedi of the Old Republic.”

“Vergere was corrupted by the years she spent living among the Yuuzhan Vong,” Luke said evenly.

“Corrupted?”

“Maybe that’s too strong a term. Let’s say
strongly influenced.”

“But she felt she hadn’t been influenced by them.”

“She can’t be blamed. Each of us stands at a kind of midpoint, from which we’re capable of seeing only so far in either direction. Our senses have been honed over countless millennia to allow us to navigate the intricacies of the physical world. But because of that, our senses blind us to the fact that we are much more than our bodies. We truly are beings of light, Jacen.

“The emphasis the Jedi have always placed on control operates the same way. Control blinds us to the more expansive nature of the Force. The Jedi of the Old Republic wanted only youngsters for this reason. Jedi needed to be raised in the light, and to come to see that light as unblemished, undivided. But you and I haven’t had the luxury of that indoctrination. Our lives are a constant test of our will to exorcise any darkness that creeps in.

“In that sense, your instincts about me are correct, and so were Vergere’s. The dark side has, in a sense, dominated my life. I’ve suspected for a long time that the fatigue I’ve sometimes experienced when drawing on the Force during combat owes to my fear of abusing the
raw power
you describe.

“It’s true that the Force is unified; it is one energy, one power. But here’s where I think you and Vergere are incorrect: the dark side is real, because evil actions are real.
Sentience
gave rise to the dark side. Does it exist in nature? No. Left to itself, nature maintains the balance. But we’ve changed that. We are a new order of consciousness that has an impact
on all life. The Force now contains light and dark because of what thinking beings have brought to it. That’s why balance has become something that must be
maintained
—because our actions have the power to tip the scales.”

“As the Sith did,” Jacen said.

“As the Sith did. The Emperor was perhaps the most self-assured person I have ever encountered, but he deliberately chose evil over good. And in the right climate, one individual, suitably driven and skilled, can tip the universe into darkness. For darkness has followers, especially where discontent, isolation, or fear hold sway. In such a climate enemies can be fashioned, imagined out of thin air, and suddenly all good is lost, all perspective vanishes, and illness takes hold.”

Luke paused, then said, “Do you believe that you spoke with Vergere after her death at Ebaq Nine, or were you conversing with the Vergere who existed only in your thoughts and memory?”

Jacen thought for a moment. “I spoke with Vergere. I’m certain of it.”

“Do you believe that I had a vision of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and my father after all three had died?”

“I’ve never had any reason to doubt you, Uncle.”

“Then, from where was Vergere speaking?”

“Maybe she learned to tap into a power that was more all-embracing than the Living Force.”

“The Unifying Force,” Luke said. “That might explain it. In fact, all the years since the deaths of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and my father, I’ve felt as if the Jedi have been on a quest to recover the Force’s power to glimpse the future, which is perhaps the nature of the Unifying Force. The search has not been unlike our search for Zonama Sekot. And there’s a power here, in the air and the trees and everything else, that convinces me we’ve found our way to something even greater than what we were seeking.”

“I feel that, too.” Jacen looked at Luke. “I told Sekot about your plan.”

Luke was surprised. “You spoke with Sekot in private?”

“In the form of Vergere, yes.”

“And?”

“Sekot thinks it can be done. Sekot also asked to speak with Danni about yammosk jammers and decoy dovin basals.”

Luke nodded in satisfaction. “That’s good. But it’s important to remember that battles are not always decided by warships or other weapons. The important battles are won in the Force.” He gestured broadly to the abyss and the starfield. “All this will pass away, but the Force endures. We tap its power, and if we so choose, it moves us according to designs we will never be able to understand.”

Abruptly, Luke turned around. Jacen followed his lead and saw Mara standing silently behind them.

“Unless you two are planning to ride out the next jump on the wing, I suggest you get to the shelters.”

“We were just on our way,” Luke said. “This could be the last peaceful stretch we’ll know for a long while.”

“Alpha Red,” Kyp said, as if having trouble believing his own words.

He walked distractedly to the yammosk basin, his boots leaving prints in the liquefied blorash jelly. There, he gestured to the gruesome scene: Malik Carr, the priest, and eight warriors, bleeding from mouths, eyes, ears; amphistaffs, villips, and yammosk, dead; yorik coral bleached of color.

“Alpha Red.”

Han and Leia traded questioning glances with each other and with Page. Lando, Talon, and Shada did the same.

“Is that some sort of curse I’m not familiar with?” Lando asked Kyp.

“You could say that.” Kyp sat down on the basin’s curved step. “Alpha Red is the name of a Yuuzhan Vong-specific poison developed by Chiss scientists and Dif Scaur’s Intelligence gang. From what I know about it—and I don’t know a lot—the starting point was bafforr tree pollen, and the bio-weapon just kept growing from there.”

“Kyp, how do you even know
anything
about this?” Leia asked.

“A dubious privilege of being a member of Cal Omas’s Advisory Council,” he said. “The first batch—the trial batch—was refined about a year ago, and tested in secret. It might have been deployed full scale at the time, if not for two things: our victory at Ebaq Nine and Vergere.”

“A Fosh Jedi of the Old Republic,” Leia explained for the benefit of Page, Meloque, and some of the others. “Vergere lived as a spy among the Yuuzhan Vong for fifty years. She helped rescue our son Jacen at Myrkr, and died at Ebaq.”

“A month or so before Ebaq,” Kyp added, “Vergere stole
the sample batch of Alpha Red and destroyed it, or somehow transformed it into something harmless.” He glanced at Leia, and she nodded for him to continue. “Alliance command ruled it an act of treason, but not much has been said about Alpha Red since then, in part because it’s been rumored that Jacen had something to do with Vergere’s escaping the military cordon set up at Kashyyyk. I thought the project had been scuttled. Obviously I’ve been kept out of the loop.”

“This stuff doesn’t only kill individual Yuuzhan Vong,” Han said, looking around the chamber.

Kyp nodded. “You’re right about that. It targets some genetic or cellular component that the Yuuzhan Vong share with
all
their biots—from the smallest right up to the largest. Even their war vessels.”

“The crashed coralskipper,” Leia said.

Han regarded Page with suspicion.

The captain raised his hands in innocence. “Han, I swear, this is the first I’ve heard of Alpha Red.”

Han looked at tall Meloque, who shook her head.

“If I knew about Alpha Red, I’m certain I would have done what the Jedi did.”

All heads turned to Wraw, whose head fur stirred. Then the Bothan Intelligence agent shrugged nonchalantly.

“Alliance command wanted field assurance that Alpha Red would work outside a laboratory setting. It’s been used effectively on captives, but we couldn’t be sure what would happen in an uncontrolled environment. When Intelligence learned that Caluula had been targeted by the Vong for occupation, it was chosen to be planet zero—step one in winning the war.”

Meloque loosed a mournful sigh. “Extermination. More of the Bothan ar’krai.”

His hands curled into claws, Han stormed across the chamber, but he made it only halfway to Wraw before Kyp wrapped his arms around him in restraint.

“That’s why Caluula’s governor promised a peaceful surrender,” Han yelled. “Your people
let
the orbital station fall, just so you could launch this half-witted plan!”

“Take it easy, Solo,” Wraw said. “If I’d been in on the
planning at that level, you think I’d be along on this little joyride? I’m here as an observer—nothing more.”

“Nothing more?” Han struggled against Kyp’s hold. The muscles in his neck stood out like cables. “This whole op has been nothing but a reconnaissance to see if Alpha Red had done the trick!”

“Not true,” Wraw fired back. “Our mission was to destroy the yammosk, and now the thing’s dead. Alliance had good reason to believe that the Vong were planning to use Caluula as a fallback point. I’ve no explanation as to why there aren’t more war vessels in orbit.”