Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [193]
“Not enough.”
“—and another.”
Once more they began to race up the stairway, dropping then leaping over the bodies of wounded or dead warriors.
Tapping deeper into his Vongsense, Jacen again reached out for the dhuryam, only to be staggered by what he felt in return. The brain was even more confused than before—by something else now. It felt threatened, concerned for its survival and for what might become of its creation—Yuuzhan’tar—should the brain be killed or forced to flee the planet.
Jacen stretched out with the Force.
Mom and Dad, he realized.
And Mara, Tahiri, and Kenth. They had fought their way into the Well, and were preparing to destroy the dhuryam with explosives.
The brain felt betrayed. It sent to Jacen that it should have killed him when it had him in its grip years earlier. It should have dragged him into the Well and let him drown. It should have ordered Sgauru to kill him.
It had been foolish to trust him.
Jacen reiterated what he had told the dhuryam two years earlier: Yes, I taught you to trust, and I taught you what it means to trust a traitor. But I have not betrayed you this time. I live in you. We’re partners in this experiment. You need only choose whose side you’re on.
As he had done while on Coruscant with Vergere, he shared with the dhuryam his experience with the spectrum of life: the featureless whiteout of agony, the red tide of rage, the black hole of despair, the gamma-sleet of loss … the lush verdure of growing things, the grays of stone and duracrete, the glisten of gemstones and transparisteel, the blue-white sizzle of the noonday sun and its exact echo in a lightsaber’s blade …
We are one, Jacen said with his thoughts. We are the union of all opposites. Reject the commands Shimrra sends you. Overcome your conditioning as you have shown yourself capable of doing. Show those who threaten you that you pose no threat—that in coming to you, that in risking death to reach you, they have rescued you. Choose life over death.
“Either you’re going to change its mind, or we’re going to change it,” Han told Qelah Kwaad. His right hand held one of the thermal detonators he had retrieved, his thumb close to the orb’s trigger. He waited for Harrar to translate the warning, then added: “There’s no two ways around this.”
The three of them, along with Leia, Mara, Nom Anor, and the droids were standing on a trembling ten-meter-diameter platform that overlooked the Well of the World Brain—a colossal bowl of yorik coral that climbed more than halfway to the vaulted roof of what had been the Great Rotunda. Even if Han and Leia managed to discover the exterior entrance to the secret passageway Jacen and Vergere had used, they wouldn’t have been able to reach the Well—yorik coral had overgrown the Kashyyyk delegation’s platform. Jacen had said that the circular platform and the cantilevered bridge that accessed it were a hundred meters above the dhuryam’s pool, but either both had been redesigned and rebuilt at a lower tier after being destroyed during Ganner’s last stand, or the nutrient level of the pool itself had risen, because the platform was now scarcely five meters above the turbulent surface.
The battle was continuing in the Atrium, but it was mostly a mop-up operation. The warriors who had been in charge of protecting the brain were fighting to the death, and the Shamed Ones and renegade troops were accommodating them. High Prefect Darthul was dead, strangled by Nom Anor. But Harrar had spared Jakan’s life, and the high priest was in the custody of Tahiri, Kenth Hamner, and the Noghri, who had remained behind to guard the tunnel entrance.
A sulfurous mist overlay the dhuryam pool, within which moved the bloated, fleshy black monstrosity Han and Leia had come to conciliate or kill. Some of the red-orange light Leia had observed was the product of massive patches of bioluminescent lichen that crusted the walls of the humid well. But most of it came from the