The Unifying Force (9 page)

Wedge waited for the amphitheater to quiet.

“Selvaris is the last stop before the convoy jumps to Coruscant, so our ambush must wait until the prisoners have been transferred. Given the devastating losses the Peace Brigade sustained a year ago at Ylesia and Duro, it’s reasonable to assume that the convoy will be escorted and complemented by Yuuzhan Vong war vessels. Admirals Sovv and Kre’fey have already seen fit to allocate Blackmoon, Scimitar, Twin Suns, and other starfighter squadrons to the mission. The Starfighters will lend support to our gunships, as well as protect the transports needed to house those prisoners we rescue. Captain Solo and Princess Leia have volunteered
Millennium Falcon
for the latter purpose.”

Leia cut her wide-open eyes to Han. “When did that happen?”

“I, uh, might’ve said something to Wedge earlier.”

“You didn’t even know what the mission was going to entail.”

Han smiled crookedly. “I basically said that he could put us down for whatever they had in mind.”

Leia took a breath and faced front. Much to her mounting unease, Han had gotten into the habit of accepting every dangerous assignment dreamed up by Galactic Alliance command. It was as if the successes in the Koornacht Cluster, at Bakura, and at Esfandia had merely primed Han’s pump, or had been nothing more than warm-up exercises for some grand mission during which he would defeat the Yuuzhan Vong single-handedly—or at least in partnership with Leia.

But the war had taken a toll on both of them, beginning with Chewbacca’s death and culminating with the tragic events at Myrkr, where their youngest son Anakin had died, their older son Jacen had been captured, and their daughter Jaina had forged her grief into a sword of vengeance that had pushed her to the edge of the dark side and nearly cost her her life.

Leia knew in her heart that she and Han were more unified than they had ever been. But the constant missions had been exhausting, and lately there had been too many close calls. At times she wished that she could gather her scattered family and spirit everyone to some far corner of the galaxy, untouched by the war. But even on the remote chance that
such a corner existed, Han wouldn’t consider absenting himself for a moment, especially now, with HoloNet communications down, and the need for gifted pilots with fast ships.

Before that safe corner could ever be found and claimed as their own—before the galaxy could know enduring peace—Leia and Han would need to see the war through to the bitter end.

She came back to herself just as Wedge was concluding his remarks.

“We are committed to this operation for an added reason of equal importance—that is, in the hope that a rescue of such magnitude will spoil the impending sacrifice.” Wedge’s expression turned hard as he scanned the assembly. “Any thorns we can drive deeper into Shimrra’s side will further destabilize Coruscant, and provide us with the window we need to rebuild our forces and safeguard those worlds the enemy has thus far been unable to vanquish.”

It was raining insects on Yuuzhan’tar—the former Coruscant, once bright center, now dimmed, defiled by war, transformed by the Yuuzhan Vong into a riotous garden. A seeming mishmash of ferns, conifers, and other flora blunted what only two years earlier had been technological sierra. Verdant growth nudged through mist in valleys that had once been canyons between kilometer-high megastructures. Newly formed lakes and basins created by the fall of mighty towers and orbital platforms were filled to overflowing with water, initially brought by asteroids but since delivered with regularity from a purple sky.

To some, Yuuzhan’tar, “Crèche of the Gods,” was a world returned to its bygone splendor, lost and rediscovered, more alive for having been conquered, its orbit altered—tweaked sunward—three of its moons steered away and returned, and the fourth pulverized to form a braided ring, a bridge of supernatural light, along which the gods strolled in serene meditation.

And yet insects were raining down on Supreme Overlord Shimrra’s rainbow-winged worldship Citadel—his holy mount, rising from a yorik coral cradle to tower over what had been the most populous and important precinct of the galactic capital. An unrelenting tattoo of falling bodies that sounded like a thousand drummers pounding out different rhythms.

The stink beetles spattered the dome of the Hall of Confluence and the stately, organiform bridges that linked the hall to other hallowed places. The plague had been born on the other side of Yuuzhan’tar because of a mistake by the World Brain—an overbreeding—and now the creatures were dying because of yet another mistake by the dhuryam. The
air around the Citadel reeked, and the ground was slippery with smashed bodies.

The atmosphere inside the great hall was somber. A place of assembly for the Yuuzhan Vong elite, it was defined by a curving roof supported by pillars sculpted from ancient bone. Broad at the four palpating portals where the high caste entered, the hall attenuated at the opposite end, where Shimrra sat on a pulsing crimson throne, propped by clusters of hau polyps. Dovin basals provided a sense of gravity, of uphill walking, increasing the nearer one came to Shimrra’s spike-backed seat.

And yet the atmosphere inside the hall was moody and silent.

A kneeling gathering of priests, warriors, shapers, and intendants waited for the Supreme Overlord to speak. The brooding silence was fractured by the sound of insects striking the roof, or being swept from the fronting causeways into the accommodating mouths of a dozen maw luur …

“You are asking yourselves,
Where have we erred?”
Shimrra said at last.
“Does the fault lie with our cleansings, our sacrifices, our conquests? Are we being tested by the gods, or have we been abandoned? Is Shimrra still our conduit, or has he become our liability?
You are preoccupied with fears concerning balance and derangement. You wonder if all of us haven’t become Shamed Ones in the eyes of the gods—spurned, disdained, ostracized because of our pride and our inability to prevail.”

Shimrra paused to look around the hall, then asked: “Do you think that your distrust in me, your whispered doubts, benefits our noble cause? If
I
can hear you, what must the gods be thinking when they look into each and every one of you? I will tell you what the gods are saying to another:
They have lost faith in the one we set upon the polyp throne. And in doubting the Supreme Overlord, our yoke to them, they doubt
us.

“And so the gods visit plagues and defeats on their children—not to castigate
me
, but to demonstrate where
you
have failed—where you have failed
them.”

Shimrra’s black-and-gray ceremonial robes were the flayed and preserved flesh of the first Supreme Overlord. His massive
head was scarified with design; his features rearranged to suggest a godly aspect: eyes widened, mouth decurved, forehead elongated, earlobes stretched, chin narrowed to a point, like the Hall of Confluence itself. And blazing from his eye sockets, mqaaq’t implants, which changed color according to Shimrra’s mood. The fingers of his huge right hand grasped a fanged amphistaff that was the Scepter of Power.

Below the yorik coral throne sat his shamed familiar, Onimi, part pet, part speaker of truths few dared to voice.

It had reached Shimrra’s ear, through a network of eavesdropping biots and actual spies, that some of his opponents and derogators were gossiping that he had fallen out of favor with the gods—a speculation more ironic than dangerous, since Shimrra had long ago abandoned real belief in any power other than that which he wielded as Supreme Overlord.

Even so, there were undeniable reasons to fear that he had fallen out of favor. The slow progress of the conquest; a plague of itching that had commenced with his arrival on Yuuzhan’tar; the still-unabated heretical movement; the disastrous defeat at Ebaq 9; the treachery of the priestess Ngaaluh; the attempt on Shimrra’s life … Many believed that all these reversals had been engineered by the gods as a warning to Shimrra that he had become grandiose and proud.

He who had proclaimed the galaxy a chosen realm for the long-wandering, homeless Yuuzhan Vong.

As an appeasement to the concerned members of the elite, Shimrra had agreed to allow his proclamations and utterances to be analyzed by a quartet of seers—one from each caste, one for each primary god. Black midnight hags, who sat close to the throne and spoke in contradictions. Not that they dared challenge Shimrra, in any case, except with hand wringing, prayers, and other gestures meant to implore the gods to look kindly on Yuuzhan’tar.

“You disgust me,” he told them. “You think I’m spouting sacrilege. You recoil and grovel because you know that I speak the truth, and that truth rattles you to the core of your being. You’d do well to chop off more of yourselves in penance and devotion. Give all of yourselves and it won’t be
enough.” He looked down at Onimi. “You think I speak in riddles, like this one.”

Onimi’s deformities owed not to birth but to rejection by the gods. Once a shaper, he was now little more than a misshapen jester, one eye drooping below its mate, one yellow fang protruding from a twisted mouth, one portion of his skull distended, as if the shaper’s vaa-tumor had failed to seat itself properly. Long and slender, his arms and legs twitched continuously, yanked about by the gods, as they might do to a puppet.

Shimrra made a sound of angry impatience. “Come forward, Von Shul of Domain Shul and Melaan Nar of Domain Nar.”

The two consuls—midlevel intendants—advanced a few meters on their knees.

“I have pondered your grievances with each other,” Shimrra said when the throne’s dovin basal had forced the faces of the consuls to the floor, “and I now decree that you put them aside. I decree further that you redirect the energy that fuels your wrath into serving our common cause. Each of you claims that your troubles with each other began here, on Yuuzhan’tar, as have so many other petty rivalries between this domain and that one. But this is merely camouflage. I know that your dispute had its roots during our long migration through intergalactic space, and that that dispute has resurfaced here. But you are not entirely to blame.

“Absent wars to wage, what did we do but turn upon ourselves, sacrifice one another, compete for the favor of my predecessor Quoreal, or snipe behind one another’s backs? The gods were forgotten. You lost patience, you worried, you thought then that the gods had abandoned us—because our long-sought home was nowhere to be found. And that is precisely what you are doing now. Prefect Da’Gara and the Praetorite domains—what did their blasphemous actions earn them but ice graves on what little remains of Helska Four, a world so far removed from Yuuzhan’tar it might as well be in the galaxy we left behind? None less than Warmaster Czulkang Lah refused to believe me when I avowed that the promised realm was within reach, and what did that earn him but death in battle, like his son, who burned so
strongly with hatred for the
Jeedai
that he allowed himself to be drawn into an engagement he couldn’t win.”

Shimrra paid no attention to the bitter grumblings from some of the warriors, all of whom wore ceremonial vonduun crab armor. Instead his piercing gaze fell on Warmaster Nas Choka, noble in appearance despite his modest stature, with fine black hair combed straight back from his face, and a wispy beard. Choka had been escalated in the wake of Tsavong Lah’s death, but was not yet universally revered, despite his numerous victories in Hutt space.

“Learn from the mistakes of your precursors, Warmaster, and all will go well for you. Fail me as Domain Lah did and I will personally make an example of you that future warmasters will be forced to consider before they accept escalation.”

Nas Choka inclined his head in a crisp bow and struck the points of his shoulders with the opposite fists.

Now Shimrra glared at the fretting warriors. “Many of you would like to hold Prefect Nom Anor responsible for what happened at Ebaq Nine, because of the disinformation to which he fell victim. I myself accepted that for a time. But the real failure was Tsavong Lah’s, for allowing himself to be gulled by the enemy. Tsavong Lah thought he died an honorable death, but I say that he shamed us all.”

Eyes downcast, many a warrior squirmed in place.

Shimrra’s gaze found High Priest Jakan—adorned in red—and High Prefect Drathul, sheathed in green. “There are others whom I might chastise and remind of their obligation. But I will reserve that for another occasion.”

A dovin basal cushion floated Shimrra out of his throne to the ring of flower petals that encircled it, where he dismounted the cushion. Ankle-deep in the flowers, he raised his long-toothed scepter of rank. “All can be made right by the coming sacrifice. But we must take care against interference.”

“The heretics, August Lord,” a priest said.

Shimrra waved his empty hand in dismissal. “The heretics are nothing more than a pestilence—a plague of stink bugs we can eradicate at any time. I speak of interference from the
unconverted who move silently among us—those who survived the planetary bombardment and worldshaping, the slaves who escaped the maimed seedship that delivered the World Brain to Yuuzhan’tar, the resistance fighters who profane our holy ground, and the
Jeedai.”

As if on cue, Onimi scrambled to his feet and followed Shimrra along the flowered ring, reciting:

When Shimrra swung about, Onimi bowed in mock gallantry. “Great Sky Lord, if the
Jeedai
Force is nothing more than enhanced ability, why have our shapers not created worthy opponents from the warrior caste?”

Shimrra frowned and aimed a finger at his familiar. “You spoil my surprise, Onimi. But so be it.” He turned to face the white-robed, tentacle-handed shapers. “Let us not keep our company in suspense. Display your handiwork.”