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THIRTY

“Our redemption is at hand!” the Shamed One cried from the mound of yorik coral rubble that was her momentary pulpit. Her rapt audience of a hundred or so heretics was sitting at the base of the mound, either oblivious or indifferent to the danger they had placed themselves in by gathering in broad daylight, in the midst of the sacred precinct, no less.

“Yu’shaa urged us to watch the sky for signs, and that sign has appeared for one and all to see!” She spread her emaciated arms wide. “Gaze around you at what its coming wrought, and pray that Shimrra has taken its message to heart! The Shamed Ones have been granted a new home—and a more powerful one than Shimrra’s. When the Prophet reappears to lead us to salvation, we will be ready!”

Seated atop the shaded litter Shimrra had sent to carry him to the Citadel, Nom Anor lowered his head by reflex, then resumed his upright posture. Though within earshot of the gathering, he was far enough removed not to have to worry about being identified, should Kunra or one of the other heretical leaders be lurking about. Besides, it would be only a matter of minutes before warriors arrived to disperse the crowd.

Despite the fact that Zonama Sekot had jumped into orbit between the system’s sixth and seventh planets, aftershocks and tremors were continuing to rock Coruscant, and the living world remained visible as first to rise and brightest in the altered night sky. With one of Coruscant’s moons whipped from orbit and the rainbow bridge collapsed, Shimrra’s shapers were already positing that the celestial intruder would return to tug Coruscant gently away from its primary, reversing what dovin basals had done to raise the planet’s surface temperature.

It was as if Zonama Sekot had proclaimed: Look at what I am capable of doing, and fear my return!

Eager to launch an attack on the newly arrived enemy, Warmaster Nas Choka’s armada and other battle groups had returned to Coruscant, only to be leashed by Shimrra himself.

Coruscant, Nom Anor thought ruefully.

He had never been comfortable calling it Yuuzhan’tar—except, of course, when necessary. Shimrra’s shapers might have fashioned a leafy ooglith cloaker for the planet, but scratch the surface and you found ferrocrete, transparisteel, kelsh, and meleenium—the foundations and skeletons of once-robust edifices and the corpses of thousands of droids. Now more than ever—what with the remains of buildings protruding through the vegetation like bones through flesh in a compound fracture, and with each tremor exposing a bit more.

Coruscant wasn’t a living world like Zonama Sekot, but rather a kind of infidel worldship, shrouded in layers of technology, which—regardless of what anyone said—had a mind of its own. More, it was haunted by the members of the diverse species that had originally shaped it. And deep down, even deeper than the realms claimed by the heretics, machine systems were still operating. At night, if one listened closely, one could hear them coming on-line, moving about, humming and pinging like electronic ghosts … Even discounting what he figured Jacen Solo had done to the World Brain, Coruscant could never have truly belonged to the Yuuzhan Vong.

Many of the workers were beginning to grasp this. Nom Anor read it in the eyes of those he had passed on the littered journey from his residence. Distraught folk extricating trapped crèche members, searching in vain for keepsakes and valuables, offering blood sacrifices at the temples, hauling the dead to the maw luurs … Shimrra’s Citadel and the huge hemisphere of coral that protected the World Brain had survived, but many secondary structures and hundreds of minshals, damuteks, and grashals had been toppled. Forests had been flattened, and intense electrical storms had ignited countless fires. In remote areas of the planet, lava gushed from what had once been leveled and tamed mountains.

Sgauru and Tu-Scart had been loosed on the sacred precinct to dismantle structures on the verge of collapse. Ndgins writhed about,