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Onimi shuffled to the center of the hall. “Great One,” he began. “Our skies breached, our land despoiled; these heretic ravings we can later foil—”

“Enough of your insolent rhyming, Shamed One!” Shimrra cut him off. “Only by my good graces have you been spared the life led by others of your kind. Do you, too, doubt me? Do you, too, harbor fears of defeat, and rally suddenly to the heretic cause?”

Onimi fell on his face before the throne. “I remain your most abject servant, Lord.”

Shimrra ignored him. “The heretics must be eradicated!” He turned to the commander of the slayers. “Half the Citadel garrison of warriors is to be placed at the right hand of Prefect Nom Anor. He will lead them against the heretics and the Shamed Ones. Not one of them is to be left alive!”

“Your will be done, Great Lord,” the commander said. In unison, the slayers turned and snapped their fists in salute to Nom Anor.

Drathul looked from Nom Anor to Shimrra in mounting bewilderment. “But what of Yuuzhan’tar, Lord? Our dovin basals are overwhelmed. The enemy has made a sieve of our sky—”

“I will deal with those who would profane our soil.” Shimrra’s gaze fell in turn on Jakan, Qelah Kwaad, and Drathul. “Go to the Well of the World Brain. I will communicate with it, and prepare it for your arrival.”

“What, then?” Jakan asked.

“By and by, priest.”

With a motion of his fingertips, Shimrra dismissed everyone, including Onimi. As the elite were filing from the hall, Drathul dragged Nom Anor aside.

“We know that Commander Ekh’m Val brought a Sekotan ship to Yuuzhan’tar,” he hissed. “You had the opportunity to say as much for everyone to hear, and to put an end to Shimrra’s charade. Whose service do you do by concealing the truth now, with our future hanging in the balance?”

“I serve myself,” Nom Anor said evenly.

Drathul shoved him back. “As ever. I would kill you now but for your new legion of bodyguards. But you will die before this day is through, Nom Anor. If not by my hand, then by another’s.”

Nom Anor glanced at Jakan, then at Qelah Kwaad, and finally at Onimi, who appeared to be watching him closely. “Stand in line, High Prefect,” he said at last. “I’ve no lack of enemies.”

A human soldier rapped the knuckles of his gloved hand against the circular viewport of Jag’s inverted clawcraft. “Hang on a minute, flyboy,” he yelled.

All at once the access hatch above—or under—Jag’s head opened, and several pairs of hands were reaching inside the cockpit to release him from the crash webbing that secured him to the seat.

“Down you go,” the same one who had rapped on the viewport said.

Jag allowed himself to descend into the upraised hands of his rescuers, and to continue to be supported by them while he was planted on his feet, with the world spinning around him and the blood that had gathered in his head draining back to where it belonged. Someone removed Jag’s helmet and put the mouth of a canteen to his lips.

When the long moment of dizziness had passed, he saw that the clawcraft—missing three of its sweeping talon-shaped solar array panels—had crashed upside down in a copse of tangled, fruit-bearing trees that rose from the middle of an oozy villip paddy. The soldiers around him wore jet backpacks, holotransceiving helmets, and combat biosuits. Seen through the snarl of branches overhead, Coruscant’s bruised sky was torn to ribbons with contrails, meteors, and countless dirtbound coralskippers and starfighters. Explosions strobed and flashed in tiers behind scudding clouds of gray smoke.

A haze of smoke lay over the rank-smelling paddy, as well, and from all directions came the reports of concussion missiles and torpedoes, the sizzle and hiss of laser beams, the roar of Yuuzhan Vong beasts, the bloodthirsty cries of warriors—all of it reverberating from the sheer faces of yorik coral outcroppings and the digested facades of once-grand spacescrapers that studded the terrain.

“Is he hurt?” someone asked, loud enough to be heard over the tumult.

Jag recognized