The Unifying Force (57 page)

It wasn’t until the eighth level that Luke and his niece and nephew met with resistance, but it was clear from the ferocity with which the warriors attacked—from above, below, and through the various access corridors—that the onslaught was likely to continue all the way to Shimrra’s lair, and probably inside it, as well. If the warriors constituted the first line of defense, it was difficult to imagine what might await them at the summit, assuming they could even make it that far.

In most places the stairway wasn’t wide enough for the two people to stand abreast, and in those stretches Luke had to face the brunt of the attacks. He was his own vortex, deflecting amphistaff strikes, whiplike lashes, and spurts of deadly venom; dodging or redirecting flights of thud bugs; parrying the thrusts of coufees, to sidestep, duck, maneuver his body in ways that seemed to defy gravity. Stunned or burned by Luke’s green blade, thud bugs were ricocheting from the walls and high ceiling, chipping away at the yorik coral surface. Dropped in their tracks, warriors sprawled
with hands pressed to stumps of legs and opened foreheads, or with black blood welling where the lightsaber had found defenseless areas between living armor and tattooed flesh.

Jacen recalled watching his uncle on Belkadan, where the war had begun, wielding two lightsabers when he had come to Jacen’s rescue. But the rescue on Belkadan paled in comparison to the control Luke demonstrated now.

His single blade might as well have been ten, or twenty.

He took the steps at a lightning pace, burning his way through dilating membranes but in complete control of his momentum. Seen through the Force he was a maelstrom of luminous energy, a Force storm against which there was no shelter. And yet all his energy poured from a calm center; an eye. He made no missteps. None of his actions were interrupted by thought.

In fact, Luke didn’t seem to be there at all—physically or as an individual personality.

Jacen and Jaina were astounded—but they had little time to reflect. Their lightsabers were busy, as well, turning the blows Luke dodged, or defending assaults launched from below.

On the fourteenth level, where the Citadel’s exterior wings sprouted from the hull, they reached a fork in the stairway.

Luke swung to Jacen. “Which way?”

He wasn’t even breathing heavily.

Jacen extended his Vongsense. “The left passage leads to living quarters on the next level. The other, to some sort of dovin basal lift that accesses the summit.” He screwed his eyes shut. “Shimrra is there. He has guards with him—”

“Not enough.”

“—and another.”

Once more they began to race up the stairway, dropping then leaping over the bodies of wounded or dead warriors.

Tapping deeper into his Vongsense, Jacen again reached out for the dhuryam, only to be staggered by what he felt in return. The brain was even more confused than before—by something else now. It felt threatened, concerned for its survival and for what might become of its creation—Yuuzhan’tar—should the brain be killed or forced to flee the planet.

Jacen stretched out with the Force.

Mom and Dad
, he realized.

And Mara, Tahiri, and Kenth. They had fought their way into the Well, and were preparing to destroy the dhuryam with explosives.

The brain felt betrayed. It sent to Jacen that it should have killed him when it had him in its grip years earlier. It should have dragged him into the Well and let him drown. It should have ordered Sgauru to kill him.

It had been foolish to trust him.

Jacen reiterated what he had told the dhuryam two years earlier:
Yes, I taught you to trust, and I taught you what it means to trust a traitor. But I have not betrayed you this time. I live in you. We’re partners in this experiment. You need only choose whose side you’re on
.

As he had done while on Coruscant with Vergere, he shared with the dhuryam his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss … the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber’s blade …

We are one
, Jacen said with his thoughts.
We are the union of all opposites. Reject the commands Shimrra sends you. Overcome your conditioning as you have shown yourself capable of doing. Show those who threaten you that you pose no threat—that in coming to you, that in risking death to reach you, they have rescued you. Choose life over death
.

“Either you’re going to change its mind, or we’re going to change it,” Han told Qelah Kwaad. His right hand held one of the thermal detonators he had retrieved, his thumb close to the orb’s trigger. He waited for Harrar to translate the warning, then added: “There’s no two ways around this.”

The three of them, along with Leia, Mara, Nom Anor, and the droids were standing on a trembling ten-meter-diameter platform that overlooked the Well of the World Brain—a colossal bowl of yorik coral that climbed more than halfway to the vaulted roof of what had been the Great Rotunda.
Even if Han and Leia managed to discover the exterior entrance to the secret passageway Jacen and Vergere had used, they wouldn’t have been able to reach the Well—yorik coral had overgrown the Kashyyyk delegation’s platform. Jacen had said that the circular platform and the cantilevered bridge that accessed it were a hundred meters above the dhuryam’s pool, but either both had been redesigned and rebuilt at a lower tier after being destroyed during Ganner’s last stand, or the nutrient level of the pool itself had risen, because the platform was now scarcely five meters above the turbulent surface.

The battle was continuing in the Atrium, but it was mostly a mop-up operation. The warriors who had been in charge of protecting the brain were fighting to the death, and the Shamed Ones and renegade troops were accommodating them. High Prefect Darthul was dead, strangled by Nom Anor. But Harrar had spared Jakan’s life, and the high priest was in the custody of Tahiri, Kenth Hamner, and the Noghri, who had remained behind to guard the tunnel entrance.

A sulfurous mist overlay the dhuryam pool, within which moved the bloated, fleshy black monstrosity Han and Leia had come to conciliate or kill. Some of the red-orange light Leia had observed was the product of massive patches of bioluminescent lichen that crusted the walls of the humid well. But most of it came from the pool, as huge bubbles broke the misted surface, washing the Rotunda with flares of scarlet and starflower yellow. Resembling nothing so much as an everted human stomach, the tentacled creature responsible for the explosive globules was thrashing about like a hooked fish.

Recalling what Harrar had said about the Well actually being a self-contained sphere, capable of surviving even the destruction of Coruscant, Han couldn’t help feeling that the entire quaking structure was either about to explode or lift off. Considering the grip Leia had on his right bicep, she evidently felt the same.

Han glanced at the shaper, then Harrar. “What’s it going to be?”

Harrar exchanged a flurry of sharp words with Qelah
Kwaad. “She says that only Shimrra can communicate directly with the dhuryam.”

Han scowled. “Yeah, well, Shimrra’s not here, so she’s going to have to take a crack at it.” Reaching out, he grabbed the shaper by the arm and flung her to the edge of the platform. “Maybe if I just send you for a swim—”

“No!” Qelah Kwaad said in Basic. “The dhuryam cannot be touched! Take your hands from me and I promise to do what I can.”

“I figured you’d listen to reason,” Han said, grinning as he let go.

The shaper composed herself and leaned over the pool. Sweat began to bead her trestled brow, then fall into the agitated pool. Almost immediately the dhuryam breached the surface—a yellow eye as big as a starfighter glaring up at those on the platform. Then its mate appeared, blinking and fixing on everyone. A spray of powerful tentacles surrounding the creature’s mouth sliced through the humid air, faster than Han’s eyes could follow.

“Seems a bit upset,” he said, backing away from the edge and readying the detonator’s thumb trigger.

Inside the dhuryam’s tentacle-ringed mouth gnashed giant teeth shaped like swords.

“Perhaps we should all wait outside,” C-3PO started to say.

Then all at once the Well stopped shaking, and the dhuryam grew quiescent. Two of the longer tentacles stretched out to touch Qelah Kwaad, then Harrar, in what seemed a display of submission or compliance.

The shaper and the priest traded looks of incredulity. “It’s as pliant as a young yammosk,” Harrar said.

Han thumbed the grenade’s arming trigger forward.

Leia blew out her breath in relief. “Jacen talked to it.”

Qelah Kwaad ridiculed the idea. “If anyone convinced the dhuryam to yield, it was the Supreme Overlord. He knows that whatever you do here won’t matter, because we will have proved our worthiness, and the gods will rid this galaxy of all infidels.”

Harrar shook his head ruefully. “If the gods judged us by
our military might, they would never have banished us from paradise.”

The shaper sniffed in derision. “This war will take care of itself. We prove our worth by destroying Zonama Sekot.” She held Harrar’s gaze. “It is not long for this galaxy, Eminence. The Supreme Overlord discovered a way to poison it.”

“Shimrra lies,” Harrar said.

Mara shoved Nom Anor forward. “The shaper’s right,” she said in a grim voice. “Nom Anor can explain.”

At Zonama Sekot the battle had reached a fevered pitch. One thousand kilometers from the living world the Hapan line was holding, but three additional Yuuzhan Vong battle groups had arrived from Muscave to strengthen the original task force. The double hulls of many a Battle Dragon were perforated, or showed great crescents at their edges where plasma balls had seared through failing shields. Similarly overwhelmed, several Nova-class cruisers had been snapped in half or blown to pieces.

Because his fighter was without display screens of any sort, Kyp was left to imagine the intense fighting, but Lando had painted a vivid picture when he had commed Kyp from
Errant Venture
. Booster’s Star Destroyer had been forced to retreat, with both
Lady Luck
and
Wild Karrde
back on board, and six Smugglers’ Alliance ships unaccounted for. Under the joint command of Wedge Antilles and Keyan Farlander, elements of the Alliance Second Fleet had withdrawn from the engagement at Muscave and launched for Zonama Sekot, but without the blessings of Kre’fey and Sovv. With the shielding dovin basals at Coruscant overcome and thousands of commandos streaking for the surface, the two admirals had counseled for a full-scale invasion.

In contrast, Warmaster Nas Choka seemed to be concentrating the armada’s swiftest vessels at Zonama Sekot, as if the planet was somehow the key to winning the war. The fear among the Jedi pilots of the Sekotan fighters was that the Yuuzhan Vong knew something about Alpha Red that the Alliance didn’t. Perhaps winged-stars and flitnats weren’t the only life-forms that were susceptible to the bioengineered toxin, and all of Zonama Sekot was at risk.

Word that an enemy vessel contaminated with Alpha Red had been spotted flying with the original task force had placed the Jedi on the offensive. Although Jabitha had been unable to contact Sekot since, the planet showed signs of having grasped the enormity of the unforeseen threat. Columns of fiery devastation half a kilometer wide were streaming upward from summits of skyscraping mountains, boiling through layers of gauzy ice clouds to vaporize attacking coralskippers and picket vessels. Scores had already fallen to Zonama’s wrath, and scores more stood at the threshold of annihilation.

Defending close to the surface, Kyp would no sooner conclude one duel than another would present itself. Now that he and his ship had finally gotten to know each other, the fighter was responding to his every whim. But the Jedi fighters were only a dozen against hundreds, and skips were breaking through the Hapan cordon to assail the planetary weapons emplacements or make strafing runs through the deep canyons of the Middle Distance, where most of the Ferroans were holed up in the shelters. No less overwhelmed, Corran, Saba, Alema, and the others were streaking in and out of contests, their ships darting above the boras like soldier hornets protecting a nest. As had so often happened in previous battles, the Yuuzhan Vong were slowly gaining the upper hand through sheer determination and the strength of numbers. Whether the unrelenting assault echoed the will of the individual pilots or the resoluteness of the controlling yammosk, the invaders were finding soft spots and creating openings, to assure that the Alpha Red-poisoned craft would reach the surface intact.

Kyp was drawing on his ship’s extraordinary speed to intercept a pair of coralskippers when a sudden coolness enveloped his right hand—the hand that the control console had engulfed, and was in fact his interface with the ship. Almost instantly the fighter began to shed velocity and grow unresponsive. Kyp pressed the control stick trigger. Though the launchers were far from depleted, they refused to fire. Sensing that something had changed, the skip pilots began to harry him with plasma fire. With maneuverability lost, only
the organic shields were keeping the ship from being destroyed.

Kyp’s first instinct was to blame himself. His ego had crept back into the fight, and he had lost his rapport with the ship as a result. Or maybe he had been doing too much
thinking
. The frequent updates from Lando, the comm chatter with Corran and the other Jedi, the upsurge in the savagery of the fighting since word of the poisoned ship had been received …

Then Kyp realized that it wasn’t only his ship that had powered down.

Throughout the fire-fractured sky other Sekotan ships were abbreviating their duels. The comlink grew noisy with reports from Corran, Zekk, Lowbacca, and Saba, confirming that their fighters, too, were no longer responding.

Chased by the same pair of coralskippers, Kyp swooped through evasive turns that took him over a sawtoothed mountain range just south of the Middle Distance, which had been responsible for some of the heaviest outpourings of defensive fire. Now, though, even some of those summit weapons were beginning to fall silent. Above Kyp, flights of emboldened skips were plunging deeper into the gravity well.