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“No doubt,” Corran replied.

“Captain Horn,” Tahiri said suddenly, “if it weren’t for Anakin trying to do the right thing, your kids would be Yuuzhan Vong captives right now. In fact, along with me and the rest of the candidates, they would basically be Yuuzhan Vong. He got us out of that; he’ll get us out of this.”

Corran was silent for a moment. “You know I’m grateful for what you did on Yavin Four, Anakin. Tahiri’s right. But I’m afraid you learned the wrong lesson there, and Tahiri along with you. You can’t stroll up to every reactor going supercritical and walk away again. You aren’t immortal, and you aren’t invincible. So far your quick thinking and strength in the Force have just barely managed to counterbalance your recklessness. But one day, the fraction is going to tip on the other side of the line. Maybe it already has. If you don’t come to terms with that, you’re going to get a nasty surprise.”

Anakin thought of Chewie, of Daeshara’cor, of Vua Rapuung, the Yuuzhan Vong who had saved his life. All dead now. “Everyone gets a nasty surprise someday,” he said. “I’d rather get it standing up than lying down.”

“Getting killed isn’t the only danger, Anakin. You rely heavily on the Force. It informs your every action. Just now you pulled Tahiri and me back to the surface of the asteroid with it, when you might have done so with your hand.”

“And I might have drifted off with you. It was easier, more certain.”

“And you made that decision reflexively, without thinking. In emergency situations, in battle, you make a lot of decisions like that. If you make the wrong one—”

“I’ll go to the dark side,” Anakin said. “So I keep hearing.”

“Being cavalier about it won’t help.”

“Captain Horn, I’ve thought about the dark side for most of my life. My mother named me after the man who became Darth Vader. The Emperor touched me through her womb. Every night I had nightmares that ended with me in my grandfather’s armor. With all due respect, I think I’ve probably thought a lot more about the dark side than anyone I know.”

“Probably. Inoculation doesn’t make you immune.”

“It does in medicine,” Anakin said.

“I’m guilty of a bad analogy then. I do not stand corrected on the point.”

“This is going to be a fun three days,” Tahiri said.

A standard day passed, though of course they only knew that by their chronometers. The asteroid wheeled slowly, about once every four hours. Anakin spent much of his time watching the fleet through the narrow window the fissure left them, trying to estimate how many ships there were. With electrobinoculars, he managed to reckon at least four capital ship analogs and as many as thirty smaller warcraft. That wasn’t counting coralskippers, of which about one-third were at any given time flying patrol. The rest remained docked to their larger brethren.

Anakin drew his lightsaber and closed his eyes, concentrating, trying to feel the Yuuzhan Vong ships through the blade’s lambent heart. They were there, a faint presence, with none of the clarity offered by the Force. On the other hand, the Force offered nothing at all where the Yuuzhan Vong were concerned.

“You can feel them,” Corran’s voice burred.

Anakin turned. Corran was pulling himself gingerly along the fissure wall.

“Yeah. A little.”

“I wonder if we can get our hands on a few more of—what did you call them?”

“Lambents.”

On Yavin 4, the crystal in Anakin’s lightsaber had been destroyed by a close brush with the singularity of a dovin basal. Pretending to be a slave, working the fields that grew various sorts of Yuuzhan Vong greenware, he’d been assigned to work a field of lambents. The plants produced small living crystals that the Yuuzhan Vong used for hand torches and valence inputs. The crystals were controlled via a telepathic bond formed when the crystals were harvested. Anakin had bonded with a lambent and used it to rebuild his lightsaber, with the unexpected result that he could now occasionally sense the Yuuzhan Vong and their living