The two starfighter squadrons formed on Whip Hand and leapt together into hyperspace, heading for Kashyyyk. Once there, Jaina knew, Twin Suns Squadron would bind its wounds, acquire two new replacements, and set out on its ambitious training schedule—until, of course, they were again called upon to face the Yuuzhan Vong, and the roll of death’s dice in the void.
SEVENTEEN
Nom Anor left the temple square in a thoughtful mood. The temple’s head priest, standing before the altar, had just delivered the message that High Priest Jakan had written on the subject of heresy, a message that all priests were ordered to repeat to all Yuuzhan Vong over the course of the next few days: Reverence of the Jedi was explicitly condemned.
The congregation had been attentive—much more attentive than they would have a few days earlier, before the shapers had produced the antifungal balm that had relieved their itching.
Nom Anor, his skin no longer aflame, had listened to the message with approval, at least until the message ended and the crowd began to disperse. It was then that he realized that the priests’ message had been, perhaps, a little too detailed.
What Jakan had done, the executor suddenly realized, was to explain to any potential heretics exactly how to behave. The little band of heretics that Nom Anor had infiltrated possessed a confused, inchoate doctrine, the elements of which they barely understood. But now it had all been explained to them. They had now been told that heretics believed that the Solo twins were emanations of the gods; that the power of the Jedi was a threat to the gods. Jakan had just defined heretical doctrine for the heretics themselves!
If Nom Anor should ever attend another meeting of the heretical congregation, he suspected they would have a much better idea of what they were doing.
Nom Anor rose from his thoughtful trance and discovered that he was leaving the temple alongside a young shaper, one who had—judging from the freshness of the scars—only recently acquired the shaper’s specialized hand. Nom Anor remembered the guarded damutek on the fringes of the new city, the one where he’d observed Onimi, and he approached the shaper.
“Pardon me, friend shaper,” Nom Anor said. “I wonder if I may have a moment of your time.”
“Honored thir?” the shaper said in surprise. He had knocked out several of his own teeth and replaced them with some kind of coral implants, presumably ones that aided him in his shaping duties. Nom Anor didn’t really want to know what shaper protocol required modified teeth, and he regretted the young shaper’s lisp extremely.
“My name is Hooley Krekk, from the Damutek of the Intendants,” Nom Anor said. “We’re from the Emergency Resources department, and we’ve recently received a requisition from the office of—well, I shouldn’t give the name, save to say that he’s a master shaper. Unfortunately the requisition is couched in rather technical language, and neither I nor my superior quite understand the purpose of the requisition. He says it is important work to do with the war, but we can’t quite understand what the Shaper Lord intends to do, and my superior is unwilling to release the resources until it can be made clearer.”
Nom Anor now had the shaper’s full attention. Yes, Nom Anor thought at him, this is all about making your caste richer.
“How may I athitht you, thir?” the shaper asked.
“The requisition has to do with supplies necessary in order to ‘fulfill the directives’ of—” He feigned hesitation. “—of something called a ‘cortex,’ I believe.”
“A cortecth is a body of shaper knowledge,” the helpful shaper lisped. “Each cortecth wath delivered in the Before-Time by the godth themselvth to the Thupreme Overlord or to mathter shaperth.”
“I see,” the intendant said. “And how many cortexes are there, exactly?”
“Eight.”
“The eighth would be the highest, then?”
“Yeth, Lord Intendant. The eighth cortecth is the thupreme body of knowledge of the shaper’th art. Motht of it wath delivered by the godth to the Dread One Shimrra himthelf, and he hath not yet theen fit to deliver the knowledge even to mathter shaperth.”
Nom Anor felt a chill run up his spine. We’re doomed, he thought. Who would have thought that extinction would be heralded by such an absurd, lisping voice?
He barely managed to stammer out his thanks to the shaper, and quickly tore himself away in order to contemplate in private what he had just learned. He knew how governments worked—how else could he subvert them?—and that knowledge enabled him to draw conclusions from a sprinkling of facts.
The eighth cortex, the supreme knowledge possessed only by Shimrra and the gods, did not exist. The cortex project, headquartered just beyond the city and guarded by a corps of warriors, was intended to create the knowledge, which Shimrra would then deliver to his people.
The Yuuzhan Vong were in a war of indefinite length, and they had run out of the knowledge that would enable them to win it. If the New Republic continued to learn and innovate while the eighth cortex of the Yuuzhan Vong remained empty, then the Yuuzhan Vong were finished. Doomed. About to be wiped from history.
His mind whirled. Nom Anor put a hand against a wall in order to steady himself. And if the gods, he thought in terror, have not delivered the knowledge to Shimrra, then Shimrra is a fraud, and so are the gods.
Nom Anor wanted to laugh and shriek and wail all at the same time. The greatest pillars of faith, obedience, and hierarchy, the pillars that held up the great edifice that was the Yuuzhan Vong, were nothing but a swindle. Nom Anor had always suspected this—but he had never expected to have it proved!
Others were staring at him, he realized. He managed to pull himself upright and put one foot in front of the other as he marched to his office.
The Yuuzhan Vong needed to win the war fast, he thought. Before the lack of an eighth cortex could make a difference. Nom Anor would demand more information from his agents and would sift their reports with the greatest care and diligence. He would find the enemy weaknesses and devise ways to take advantage of them. He would help the Yuuzhan Vong hammer the enemy until the enemy surrendered, or was no more.
And he would also try to work out a way to use the knowledge for his own advantage. Because he was, after all, Nom Anor.
A holo blared in the small room, and tiny three-dimensional figures swung their fists: heroes fighting evil in the days of the Sith.
“You’ve returned,” Vergere said.
“I have,” Luke said. “And I brought you something.”
He offered a package of sweets, candies made from a Mon Calamari seaweed drizzled with a sauce of jewel-fruit.
“Welcome, young Master!” Vergere cried, and took the package.
“I’m afraid you won’t find a file or a concealed vibroblade,” Luke said.
Vergere, chewing candy with an expression of bliss, did not immediately reply. When she managed to speak, she said, “My debriefers seem to have run out of questions. This means that they’re busy cataloging all my answers so they can ask the questions all again, and try to catch me in contradiction.” There was a trace of amusement in her tone. “If I contradict myself, they prove I’m a spy because I can’t keep my story straight; whereas if I don’t contradict myself, they prove I’m a spy because I’m too well briefed.”
Luke laughed to himself, imagining Ayddar Nylykerka cursing as he heard this. He had just shown Luke the transcripts of Vergere’s interviews, all annotated for the reinterrogation; he’d now learned that Vergere had anticipated his every move.
Vergere waved off the holo as Luke settled onto his chair. “There’s this comfort at least,” she said, “the holos are as witless as I remember.”
“That must be a consolation.”
She peered at him. “You’ve come to ask a question.”
“You owe me an answer from last time.”
Vergere settled comfortably onto her stool and popped another candy into her mouth. “Begin, then,” she mumbled.
“How did you prevent the Yuuzhan Vong from finding out
about your abilities? We know that yammosks can detect Force-users.”
“It is easier to demonstrate than to explain.” She faced him directly. “Please attack me through the Force.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Attack you how?”
“Mentally.” Her whiskers rippled. “If it helps, you may use a component of that anger you first brought to this room. I’ll trust that you’re a gentleman and won’t make it lethal.”
Give in to your anger. The Emperor’s seductive voice echoed in his mind. Was Vergere trying to provoke him to anger, bring him to the dark side?
If so, that attempt was doomed. He had withstood Vader and Palpatine when he was barely more than a boy; now that he was a Jedi Master in the prime of life he would hardly fall victim to such a trick.
Luke turned his chair to face her and crossed his legs. The Force welled into his mind like water rising in an artesian spring. Force awareness expanded in all directions: he was aware of Ayddar Nylykerka outside the room, the two techs who monitored the equipment, a prisoner in another cell, others who worked in an office just above them. He could sense the glow of their lives in the Force, hear the throb of their hearts, and time their whispering breaths. He knew that one of the techs was concentrating on a technical problem, and that his friend was daydreaming of her fiancé, who had four arms and bright blue fur and who sent her flowers and reams of bad poetry …
But what Luke could not detect was Vergere. She seemed to have vanished completely from his Force-awareness, even though he could plainly see her sitting on her stool across from him.
He refined his awareness and finally detected her, a kind of fitful uncertain presence, her life force a faint cool phosphorescence compared to the bright candle flames of the others.
Luke tried to refine his sense of Vergere to a greater degree, but she was remarkably evasive: she kept sliding away from his perceptions, like a slippery melon seed squeezed between the fingers. The difficulty of keeping Vergere in focus produced in Luke a sense of frustration, which he used deliberately to fuel an attack at the elusive target, a fast snakelike strike configured as a command simply to remain still. The mental bolt fired but failed to find its target.
He built a strike more deliberately, drawing more of the Force to power the attack, not a jab this time but a battering ram. REVEAL YOURSELF, he commanded, and launched the strike. Again Vergere eluded him.
His frustration rose, and he used it to power another fast strike, like a reflex backhand blow. Nothing.
Luke began to vary his attacks between massive, deliberate cannonades and swift, intuitive reflex strikes, hoping that one or the other would catch Vergere by surprise. Nothing worked.
Vergere continued to sit on her stool, her reverse-articulated knees poking up above her head like knobby horns, her eyes gazing mildly into Luke’s. I can see where she is, Luke realized. He didn’t have to search for her in the Force.
So he built a Force wall around her, an iron box to keep her mind from slipping away, and he made up the walls of the box with the command REVEAL YOURSELF. After this he shrank the box, forced it smaller around Vergere’s small body, molding it until it fit her form exactly, a prison to contain her spirit. And then he called more of the Force to him, building a vast mental cannonball that would obliterate anything in its path, again with the command REVEAL YOURSELF, and he aimed the cannonball at the tiny figure that he’d trapped inside the iron box.
REVEAL YOURSELF, he commanded again, and he launched the cannonball.
He knew it entered the box. He knew Vergere’s spirit was trapped there, boxed in, unable to move. But somehow the tiny target eluded him and the cannonball slid away on a curving trajectory, through the wall, into the next cell, and Luke was suddenly and startlingly aware of the prisoner there, who jumped from his cot and screamed, “Yes! I confess! I stole the captain’s shoes while he was drunk!”
Revealing himself.
Luke laughed and let the Force-awareness ebb to its normal level. “I’m going to get tired if I keep this up,” he said.
“That last one almost worked,” Vergere said from around a piece of candy.
“I hope you can teach this technique,” Luke said.
“There is more than one technique involved. I managed to evade that last strike with a kind of mental parry, as in fencing. You know how a thrust can be parried not by opposing it, but by redirecting it slightly so that it misses its goal?”
“Of course.”
“I did something similar. I added just enough mental energy to your strike to cause it to divert. The timing was very difficult to judge, and there was no small measure of luck involved in my success.”
“And your other techniques?”
“Do you know the definition of a master of defense?”
“Tell me.”
“A master of defense is one who is never in the place that is attacked. One can move the attack, as I just did with my parry, but one can also simply not be there.”
“Not so simply,” Luke murmured.
“I call it making myself small. I narrow my focus bit by bit until it becomes, well, microscopic. Tiny. My mind and Force-awareness I shrank to an infinitesimal size. An enemy has the same chance of finding me as his chance of finding one molecule amid billions of others.”
“Your tears,” Luke said. “That’s how you make your tears.”
“Very good, young Master,” Vergere said. “Yes. In that state I can rearrange molecules, take them apart, and build new ones bit by bit. I use my tears because they are convenient, but I can accomplish the same thing with other material.”
“I know a Jedi healer, Cilghal, who would delight in this technique.”
“I’ll try to teach her, if you and she are willing. If I’m ever permitted to leave this place.”
“You can teach without leaving this room,” Luke reminded her.
A sly smile drifted across Vergere’s face. “I can—but will I?”
Vergere gave one of her wheezing laughs, and popped a candy into her wide mouth.
“If the military releases you from here,” Luke said, “will you aid us in the fight against the Yuuzhan Vong?”
Vergere rolled the sticky candy into her cheek as she spoke. “Insofar as it coincides with my goals, I will. Though I am much more a teacher than a warrior, and I believe my greatest objective is to help Jacen to his destiny.” Her eyes narrowed. “I understand that he is your apprentice, not mine, and that you may have other intentions for him.”
“I’m glad that you appreciate that.” Luke had no clear idea whether he wanted to let Vergere near Jacen ever again.
“I think I have much to teach him.”
“I don’t want him to become dependent on you,” Luke hedged.
“Nor do I.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Vergere said, “Correct me if I’m wrong in my understanding. But Jacen gives me to understand that you’ve put restrictions on the Jedi during the course of this war, forbidding aggressive actions.”
“I’ve tried to do so,” Luke said, and then laughed. “My success has been modest.”
“But my understanding is that you, yourself, undertook offensive warfare against the forces of the late Emperor. For instance, you were part of a party that attacked the first Death Star. You led the destruction of the criminal organization of the Hutt called Jabba. You accepted military rank and participated in numerous offensive actions against the forces of the Empire and other enemies. You didn’t confine yourself to spying missions and aiding refugees.”
“All true.”
“So my question is, what has changed?”
Luke paused and considered how best to marshal his arguments. “The Yuuzhan Vong are a different enemy, for one thing,” he began. “Our special talents are ineffective against them. And—as I expressed yesterday—I didn’t know what we owed a species so far outside life as we knew it.”
Vergere nodded her understanding. “You have heard my opinion that the Yuuzhan
Vong are not outside the Force. I wonder if this has changed anything.”
Luke hesitated. “I don’t think so. The Jedi Code is clear in its statements against aggression. I know much more about the dark side than I did when I was twenty. I know how easily the dark can enter, how the dark can infiltrate the heart even when it’s most certain of its own actions, and I know that many of my students aren’t ready to face it.”
“You cut off your father’s hand.”
“Yes.”
“You want to prevent your students from making the same mistakes that you have made.”
“Of course.”
A disdainful look crossed Vergere’s face. “That is egotism speaking.”
Resentment prickled along Luke’s nerves. “You don’t know my students. You don’t know how impulsive and reckless they are. Don’t judge them all by Jacen.” He hesitated. “Kyp Durron killed millions.”
“And this was your responsibility.”
Again Luke hesitated. “The situation was complex. I was paralyzed, and Kyp was under the control of—”
“You mean to say that it was not your responsibility,” Vergere interrupted, her tone harsh.
“I could have been more aware of the situation,” Luke insisted. “There’s so much I could have done—”
“So it is your responsibility.” Interrupting again.
“The next time it will be!” Luke insisted. “The next time one of my students is swept away on a dark whirlwind and catastrophe results, it will be my fault!”
Vergere’s feathery crest rose. She smoothed it with her fingers. “Of course it would not be your fault,” she said. “You are a Jedi Master, not a nursemaid!”
“I trained them,” Luke said. “If their training fails—”
“When you cut off your father’s hand, was it the fault of your teachers?” Vergere demanded. “Did Yoda fail to instruct you what dark passion could do?”
“No, I—” Frustration throbbed in Luke’s heart. “That’s different. I—”
“I,” Vergere mocked. “I, I, I. Upon you lies the spiritual health of yourself and all those whom you taught. Is that not ego speaking?”
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