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Talon laughed bitterly. “Now is as good a time as any to make our meager but skillful contribution to the cause.”

“All right, then.” Lando straightened up his seat and was preparing to wake up the ship’s systems when Talon commed him again.

“Hold on a minute, hero. My scanners are picking up something peculiar. I’m sending you the coordinates now. You might want to have a look.”

Tendra was already realigning the scanners when Lando glanced at the display screen. A sizable number of Yuuzhan Vong ships had separated from the main body of the armada. Accreting velocity, the group was vectoring for the sunward fringe of the battle belt.

“A flanking maneuver?” Lando said. “Maybe an attempt to jump behind Alliance lines?”

“I don’t think so,” Talon answered. “When they pulled this stunt at Mon Calamari, the ships jumped for Contruum.”

Lando frowned. “Kre’fey’s long gone from Contruum. But they could be hoping to bait Wedge’s battle group into pursuing them.”

“Unless they’re heading back to Coruscant.”

Tendra dialed the scanners to maximum magnification. The computer-assisted portrait painted by the instruments showed a diamond-shaped formation of destroyer and heavy cruiser analogs, with a solitary but otherwise unremarkable vessel occupying the center.

“Major firepower,” Lando said.

“They’re going to hyperspace,” Talon updated.

“Did you get a departure vector?”

“Coming up,” Talon said.

Lando and Tendra heard Talon expel his breath in unhappy surprise.

“Zonama Sekot,” Lando surmised.

“Didn’t that Vong priest, Harrar, say that Shimrra wasn’t likely to risk an attack?”

“Guess he doesn’t know his Supreme Overlord as well as he thinks he does.”

“I’ll let Booster know.”

Lando silenced the comm and swung to his wife.

“Navicomputer is plotting a course to Zonama Sekot,” Tendra said.

Gingerly, Han placed the palms of his hands against the faintly glowing hull of the Sekotan ship. Warm to the touch, the perfectly smooth skin was a shimmering green, lit from within in a way that brought to mind the bioluminescence of some denizens of the deep ocean. Low to the ground, broad where the cockpit was, and composed of three seamlessly joined oval lobes, the ship was a smaller version of the shuttle that had carried him from the Falcon to the surface of the planet. But unlike the shuttle, it was armed with plasma cannons that might have been—and probably were—patterned after those of a coralskipper.

Speechless, Han continued his survey of the wondrous ship. Small compared to Jade Shadow, which sat on its hard-stand nearby, the Sekotan fighter was equivalent to an X-wing in size, though it more closely resembled a vintage Surronian Conqueror or one of the latest generation of Mon Calamarian starfighters. The single-pilot cockpit was an all-too-organic shade of red—made more unnerving by an instrument array that pulsed and throbbed.

The gentle internal radiance of the tripartite fuselage was most intense along the forward edges, which were knife-sharp. In contrast, the trailing edges were rounded over, with the drive tucked into the space between the two rear lobes. Han had overheard Magister Jabitha tell Kyp that the original Sekotan ships had had Haor Chall type-seven Silver-class light starship engines, with expensive hyperdrive core units and organiform circuitry. But the ships the Jentari had built for the Jedi lacked a conventional drive—unless dovin basal analogs had come to be considered standard equipment.

The similarity to coralskippers didn’t end with gravitic propulsion devices and volcano-like weapons emplacements. Though it required the pilot who had bonded with its formative seed-partners, a Sekotan craft was alive and, to a degree, capable of independent action.

Han wasn’t the only person in awe. Working overtime, the Jentari had been able to shape ships for all the Jedi who had participated in the recent ceremony. Delivered from the cybernetic assembly lines by huge manta-shaped dirigibles, the Sekotan fighters crowded the canyon-rim landing platform.