The Unifying Force (61 page)

Han and Leia Solo, Mara Skywalker, Kenth Hamner, and Tahiri—his captors as well as his protectors for the time being—were speaking with two of the commanders of the troops that had stormed the Hall of Confluence. Judder Page, the shorter of the pair, held the rank of captain; the other, a major, was Pash Cracken, who apparently had been one of the officers rescued during the heretics’ raid at the Place of Sacrifice.

“Have you seen Luke or either of our children?” Leia was asking Page.

“They said they were going after Shimrra. Last we saw them was on what was left of the western concourse. After some huge creature knocked a hole in the Citadel wall, in they went.”

“So where is Shimrra?” Han asked.

“We think he’s somewhere up top. Some Shamed Ones Luke talked to said something about a ‘coffer.’ ”

Han swung to Nom Anor. “You know anything about this?”

“The Shamed One must have been referring to Shimrra’s
private chambers—his … bunker in the summit.” Thinking fast, he added: “I’ve been there. I can lead you to it.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Han, Leia, Mara, Tahiri, and Hamner followed Nom Anor as he hurried through the dimly lit, labyrinthine corridors of the worldship Citadel, up winding staircases and dovin-basal-governed chutes. Portions of the fortress had been extensively damaged by powerful groundquakes, which Nom Anor assumed had been engineered by the faithless dhuryam. Less easily explained was the lack of bodies along the route. But he decided that the three Jedi might have taken a different route to the summit—perhaps the winding stairway and lift chute used by Shimrra’s guards.

When they finally arrived at the filigree-trimmed membrane to the bunker, the dilating lock recognized Nom Anor’s scent and irised open.

The first thing he saw on entering the circular space was Shimrra’s head, burned clean from his body as only a light-saber could do, the menacing glow gone out of his implanted eyes.

Nom Anor stared in disbelief.

Shimrra was dead
.

He kept repeating it to himself, but his mind refused to accept the truth of it. In their long history, the Yuuzhan Vong had never been without a Supreme Overlord, and yet that was now the case, the evidence there on the floor for one and all to see.

Massed on one side of the room by the tilting of the Citadel were a dozen or more dead slayers, and slumped against the wall that contained the guards’ entrance—which also showed the marks of a lightsaber—was Luke Skywalker, wounded, and perhaps near death. A lightsaber dangled in his left hand, and the left side of his chest bore a deep puncture wound. Nearby, Shimrra’s amphistaff lay scattered in uneven segments on the floor.

The Jedi twins were nowhere to be seen.

Clearly staggered by the bloody tableau, Kenth Hamner gazed at Leia. He took his comlink from his belt and headed back for the iris portal. “Can you manage without me? Kre’fey has to be informed that Shimrra’s dead.”

Leia Organa Solo nodded her head wordlessly.

Mara Jade Skywalker was already at her husband’s side, holding his face between her hands and calling his name.

“He’s been envenomated by Shimrra’s amphistaff,” Nom Anor said. “There is no antidote. If the Force can’t heal him, he will die.”

Blood drained from Mara’s face. “We have to get him out of here!”

Just then Luke’s eyes opened, and he smiled weakly.

“Luke,” she said, her voice cracking. She put her arms around him and lifted him into a sitting position.

“I’m slowing the blood flow, Mara.” Skywalker’s gaze found Han Solo, who went down on one knee alongside him. “From the way this place was shaking, Han, I’m assuming you convinced the World Brain to see reason.”

Han traded brief glances with his wife, then mustered a smile. “A bit thorny, but we managed.”

Easing the lightsaber from her brother’s grip, Leia took his left hand between hers. “We’ve won, Luke. Once the word spreads that Shimrra is dead, the armada will deteriorate—if it hasn’t already.”

Nom Anor felt Skywalker’s blue eyes fall on him, with a look that mixed disbelief, anger, pain, and resignation.

“Luke,” Leia said, “where are Jaina and Jacen?”

Skywalker motioned with his chin toward the stairway.

Han’s eyes darted from the stairway to Nom Anor. “What’s up there?”

“The upper decks of this vessel. Command and control chambers. The bridge.”

“Vessel?” Leia repeated in perplexity.

Nom Anor gestured broadly. “This was to have been Shimrra’s escape craft and shelter—similar to the one that would have kept the dhuryam alive, had it decided to flee rather than betray its makers.”

Leia looked at her husband. “Why would Jacen—”

“Shimrra’s minion,” Skywalker answered softly.

Nom Anor’s jaw dropped. He pivoted through a circle, scanning the scattered and heaped bodies once more. Onimi had escaped! Instead of giving his life for Shimrra, the Shamed One had fled!

“Can the minion launch this ship?” Han asked.

Nom Anor considered his response. With Shimrra dead, someone would have to serve as liaison between the Alliance and the Yuuzhan Vong, and that someone might as well be Nom Anor.

“It responds only to the Supreme Overlord.” He glanced around. “Onimi—Shimrra’s familiar—must be in hiding.”

Without warning, the bunker began to vibrate.

“Someone has to tell the dhuryam that enough’s enough,” Han said.

Nom Anor’s heart began to pound. In sudden realization, he placed the palm of his left hand against the outer wall. “The dhuryam isn’t doing this! The vessel is being readied for launch!”

Wide-eyed, Han looked at the three women. “Take Luke out of here. Nom Anor and I will find Jaina and Jacen.” He glanced at Nom Anor. “Right?”

“Of course,” Nom Anor said in a distracted voice.

Leia stood up. “Not without me, you won’t.”

Han regarded her, then nodded his head.

“Then get going,” Mara said, as she and Tahiri carefully began to raise Skywalker to his feet.

The Jedi Master pointed to something across the room. “Anakin’s lightsaber,” he said weakly.

Tahiri hurried to retrieve it.

Han grabbed Nom Anor by the upper arm. “You said this ship would only respond to Shimrra.”

Nom Anor nodded. “Onimi must have found a way to deceive the controls.”

Han pointed to Shimrra’s head. “You’re sure that’s the Supreme Overlord, and not a lookalike?”

“The Supreme Overlord is dead,” Nom Anor said evenly; then thought:
Or is he?

Flagship of the First Fleet,
Ralroost
accelerated toward Coruscant, around which the fighting was continuing unabated. The Star Destroyers of Grand Admiral Pellaeon’s flotilla had overwhelmed many of the planetary dovin basals, and thousands of Alliance troops were now on the ground, but the Yuuzhan Vong home fleet wasn’t yielding a cubic
centimeter of space. The fighting had been just as intense at Muscave when
Ralroost
had left, and updates from Zonama Sekot indicated that the Yuuzhan Vong elements were storming through Alliance lines and hammering the planet into submission.

From the command chair on the bridge of the Bothan vessel, Admiral Kre’fey gazed at Coruscant’s expanding debris cloud of starfighters and coralskippers, picket ships and frigates, destroyers and cruisers. As he had maintained all along, Shimrra’s death, recently reported by Kenth Hamner, had had no discernable effect on the enemy commanders or pilots. At the climactic battle of the Galactic Civil War, Imperial forces appeared to have been thrown into disarray by the death of Emperor Palpatine. But Shimrra was scarcely a Sith Master, capable of using his powers of battle meditation to invigorate his troops. Nas Choka’s warriors were bound together not by evil but by a need for conquest and subjugation, backed by an unflinching will to fight to the death. Until the Alliance could defeat and dismantle the armada, there could be no hope for peace.

But how?
Kre’fey asked himself.
How can the Alliance rid the galaxy of an enemy that will not quit?

If he ordered Alliance forces to withdraw, the Yuuzhan Vong might simply reclaim Coruscant, or fall back to positions that hadn’t been attacked. The former galactic capital was rife with heavily forested regions where the enemy could dig in, grow and train a dhuryam to supervise the fortifications and the construction of new war vessels. The fighting could go on for years. The same would be true if Nas Choka decided to jump the armada to a star system still under Yuuzhan Vong control, resulting in the Alliance chasing them throughout the galaxy, as Kre’fey—at Mon Calamari—had expected the Yuuzhan Vong would be forced to do with the Alliance.

The war had to end here, at Coruscant, he thought. But at what cost? How many more would die if he pressed the attack—if he did as Nas Choka, by ordering his commanders to fight to the death? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

The situation was untenable.

He was still pondering the implications of either decision when
Ralroost
’s captain interrupted him to report that Nas Choka’s battle group had jumped from Muscave, and were expected to revert imminently at Coruscant.

Shimrra’s companion shuffled about the spacious bridge, activating the vessel’s organic components with waves of his crooked hands and with what seemed to be telepathic commands. The living console began to pulse and ripple like muscle tissue. A cognition hood unfolded itself, and an array of villips twitched. Blaze bugs frothed in a display niche.

Jaina understood that she was draped from two hooks that grew from the bridge’s inner bulkhead. Though the Shamed One had yet to make offerings to any of them, carved representations of the principal gods of the Yuuzhan Vong pantheon stood to both sides of her, suggesting that she had become the centerpiece of a sacrificial altar. Lichen and sconced lambents imparted a dismal green glow to the yorik coral walls, ceiling, and deck.

Jacen! Uncle Luke!
she called through the Force.

When she reached out for them, her mind was assaulted with scenes of violence. Jacen and Luke had overcome great odds, but both of them were injured. Except through their minds, she couldn’t perceive the warriors, but she grasped that most of them were dead.

Abruptly, the twisted figure turned from the console to face her, almost as if he had read her mind.

“I know you can hear me,” he said in a guttural Basic, “because I gave you only a taste of the poison encapsulated in my fang. Just enough to render you inert.”

With a glance at the console he enlivened additional living instruments and systems. It was obvious that he was preparing the vessel for launch. When the bridge began to vibrate with anticipation, the Shamed One nodded in satisfaction and turned to her once more.

“I’m grateful you elected to pursue me, Yun-Harla,” he said. “At last we have an opportunity to meet on a level battlefield. Both of us in captivity. You, hostage to my paralytic toxin; me, to the half-a-lifetime of injustices you saw fit to heap on me.”

Jaina forced herself to speak. “I’m not—”

“Who was more faithful to the gods than Onimi?” the Shamed One ranted at her. “Who was more faithful to Shimrra’s domain than the shaper who discovered the truth that the eighth cortex was empty, and that the species Yun-Yuuzhan and the rest of you created was doomed to extinction? Yes, our ancestors utilized the gifts you supplied to make war on those who would have vanquished us, but instead of rewarding our attempts to rid the galaxy of such infidels and machines, you drove us from the ancestral homeworld, bled us of further kinship with you, forced us to wander for generations in search of a new home.”

Hatred gathered in his uneven eyes and shook his curled hands.

“In your omniscience, you know that’s why I risked grafting yammosk cells to my own neural tissue: in the hope of being able to discover some way to escape the rack on which
you
had mounted us! But instead of rewarding my having the courage to emulate your bold works of creation, you
condemned
me. You granted me the powers to speak through the mouths of others, to manipulate them at will, to control remotely, as your yammosks do, and yet you punished me with physical deformities that shouted to one and all that my attempt at self-escalation had failed. You shamed me so that I could no longer consort with nor move among the elite. Not only did you deny me the rank of master shaper, you prevented me from being able to contribute to the salvation of my species.

“That was when I chose to turn against you, Yun-Harla. I was not alone in this rebellion, and yet, as if to increase my torment, you rewarded the others, while you left me to suffer in silence through the years of drifting. The long years of watching our society crumble; our crèche-born starve; our warriors turn on one another … and then you dangled before our eyes a galaxy, filled with habitable worlds. At first it seemed a blessing—proof that you had not abandoned us in our time of need. But I soon realized that you were merely setting the stage for a new form of torture.”

Again Jaina tried to respond, only to be shouted down.

“Only by means of the powers
you
conferred on me was I
able to reach out for Shimrra and make him my puppet! My most audacious act yet. But when I saw that you were either powerless to prevent it or welcoming the opportunity to do open battle with me, I knew that I was right to attempt to overthrow you in the same way.

“I compelled Shimrra to announce that a galaxy had been found for the taking. I bade him to install me as his familiar. And as my telepathic abilities increased, he disappeared—except of late, when my preoccupation with defeating you allowed what remained of Shimrra to re-emerge.

“When Zonama Sekot was found once more, and this time made to appear to have been bestowed on the Jedi, as a weapon, I believed for a moment that you were actually testing me. But I soon grasped the greater truth—the same one that had already been glimpsed by the heretics and some of our priests: that because I had grown past your control, you had decided to topple me.”

Onimi looked hard at Jaina.