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Jaina picked up the hood again. “Get out.”

“Not until you tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

She rose suddenly, in a fluid blur, one hand thrown toward the older Jedi. Dark lightning crackled from her fingers and surrounded him in a shining nimbus. He flew back and struck the wall hard. His eyes narrowed, and the deadly aura disappeared. Jaina’s eyes widened in surprise.

“If I can summon it, I can dispel it,” he told her. “You’re not the only one who took that path.”

Jaina drew her lightsaber. “Outside,” she snarled.

Kyp gave her a mockingly courtly bow and motioned for her to go first. She shook her head. He shrugged and walked down the ramp, Jaina close behind him. As his feet touched the dock, she leapt into a backward flip and landed in the doorway. She shut off her lightsaber and took a step back. The living portal slammed shut behind her.

“Stang,” Kyp muttered as he watched the alien ship rise swiftly into the air.

Jaina reached up to touch the cognition hood. Information flowed from every part of the ship, as it had from the first time she donned the hood. Before, she had always listened to the ship with detachment and distaste, as she might endure the necessary but loathsome companionship of a Hutt informer. Before, she’d had other Jedi aboard helping her interact with the ship. Without Tahiri’s hard-won connection to the Yuuzhan Vong, without Lowbacca’s skill with the organic navicomputer, Jaina could not afford the luxury of detachment. For the first time she opened herself fully to the living ship.

A strangely familiar sensation swept through her as the link between ship and pilot deepened. She’d experienced something like this twice before—once when she’d built her lightsaber and learned to use it as an extension of herself and her powers, and once again when she attuned the young villips Lowbacca had found in the ship’s hydroponic vats. Now that Jaina considered it, the two experiences had more in common than she would have thought possible.

She glanced at the two villips resting on the Trickster’s console. She reached for the villip that she had painstakingly attuned and stroked it to life. After a moment, the scarred face of Warmaster Tsavong Lah appeared. He recoiled in astonishment at the face his villip revealed.

“Greetings, Warmaster,” Jaina said in mocking tones. “Remember me? Jacen Solo’s twin sister?”

“You will be sacrificed to the gods,” the warmaster gritted out, “and then I will tear out your heart with my own hands.”

“If you still have your own hands, you’re probably not as far up the ladder as you wanted us to think. Put someone else on—someone with real authority and a few more replacement parts.”

Tsavong Lah growled in fury. “With those words, you have earned yourself much pain.”

“I take it the Vong don’t get promoted for their conversational skills,” she said. “Let’s see if the priest’s commander can do better.”

She awakened the second villip, that which formed a link between this ship and the priest’s villip. When a second scarred face came into view, Jaina brushed back her bangs to reveal the mark she’d drawn there—the symbol of Yun-Harla.

Two voices lifted in outraged howls. “I will bring you in, human,” the younger warrior said, snarling. “This I swear, by all the gods, by my domain and my sacred honor.”

Jaina passed a hand over the villips. Both inverted at once.

A Yuuzhan Vong fighter streamed toward her, and all others moved aside to let it pass.

Jaina reached for the energy that she had found within, that which hurled the dark lightning. She allowed it to flood her and direct her battle.

She sank deeper into the consciousness of the alien ship, losing herself in flight as she had always done. For what seemed like hours she and her challenger darted and spun, trading bolts of plasma, dodging and blocking like swordmasters. Jaina did not think—she acted.

For a while this seemed to be an effective strategy, but her identification with the living ship was too powerful. A plasma bolt slipped back the