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Han embraced his children and Mara, and clamped his hands on the tops of Luke’s shoulders. “We’ve been in worse straits than this, right?”

Luke grinned. “More times than I can count.”

Han nodded soberly. “Then maybe we should make this one count as the last one.”

“I’ll abide by that if you will.”

“You just watch me.”

Han put his arm around Leia and began to lead her back to the Falcon after the Jedi, Page’s Commandos, and the YVH droids had moved out. At the ramp Leia blew out her breath and looked up at him.

“For our next trick …”

“We set a course for the World Brain.”

“And when we get there?”

Han compressed his lips. “I’m hoping Harrar’ll think of something.”

The living ship forged from the seed-partners to which Kyp had bonded soared soundlessly and effortlessly through Zonama Sekot’s tormented sky. In pairs and trios, coralskippers pierced the planet’s envelope to attack the vessels the planet itself had fashioned to frustrate them, but so far none had made it through to the surface. The few that had succeeded in getting past the Jedi pilots had been repelled by Zonama itself, with powerful updrafts or unseen gravity generators that had hurled the skips to the edge of space—repulsed in a way that reminded Kyp of magnets, when their like poles were brought into contact.

Kyp and one coralskipper pilot in particular had been testing and toying with each other for far too long, but each time Kyp had drawn a bead on the skip the Sekotan ship’s weapons had failed, or perhaps refused to fire. The same was true with the skip, whose controlling yammosk, falsely perceiving that the pilot was firing on another of its brood, would whisk the coralskipper through a turn to sabotage its shots. As acutely as Kyp could feel the gravitic tugs from the yammosk, he could also feel draws and joggles from Sekot. Zonama’s consciousness was manipulating the Jedi ships into flying with the same unsettling sense of conformity displayed by the flights of coralskippers. Yuuzhan Vong and Jedi ships alike were part of a zigzagging aerial dance that was being choreographed from afar.

Against almost any of the enemies that had massed to test the durability of the New Republic during the past twenty years, a dozen Sekotan ships, a Skipray blastboat, and a couple of X-wings wouldn’t have been adequate to protect an entire world. But the Yuuzhan Vong were not an ordinary enemy, and Zonama Sekot was hardly an ordinary world.

True to the behavior they had demonstrated from the start, the Yuuzhan Vong had their own rules of engagement, centering on challenge, honor, and persistence to the last. In the same way that their priests placed themselves at the service of a pantheon of cruel gods, the pilots of their war vessels surrendered individual action to obey the commands of the tentacled creature that coordinated them in battle. Their sense of honor was as distorted by their slavish devotion to sacrifice as local space was warped by the dovin basals that propelled and shielded their weapons. Over and above what the Alliance had accomplished, it was the Yuuzhan Vong’s unswerving subordination to the will of the gods and the importance of captives that had cost them hundreds of vessels and countless lives at Ebaq 9, Obroa-skai, and other arenas. As extraordinary as they were as a species—and as warriors—it was foolhardy courage and inflexibility that could end up costing them Zonama Sekot, as well.

That was assuming that the Jedi would eventually grow comfortable with piloting the Sekotan ships, Kyp mused. Merely settling into the pulsing red-and-green cockpits had required resolve. The canopy was similar to the mica-like transparency of a coralskipper, but, like everything in the cockpit, it was warm to the touch. Comparable to a combination yoke, accelerator, and weapons trigger, the main control had actually reached up and wrapped around his right hand, molding to it the way some of the controls of Centerpoint Station were rumored to have molded to Anakin Solo’s hand.

The console was an organiform surround of control levers that resembled