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The bunker inclined, sending Jacen directly toward Shimrra. Without thinking—and without his lightsaber—he lunged for the neck of the towering Yuuzhan Vong. But Shimrra perceived Jacen’s intent, and threw his mighty right arm behind him. Jacen was hit squarely in the center of the chest.

Dropping to the floor, he blacked out.

When he came to an instant later, he saw that Luke had obviously intercepted Shimrra’s follow-up blow. But now, monstrous in aspect and power, Shimrra hovered over Luke like a rancor. Luke’s lightsaber thrummed through the air, but Shimrra refused to be kept at bay. Luke tried to Force-leap out of reach, but the Supreme Overlord had him caged.

The master of defense is one who is never in the place that is attacked, Jacen recalled Vergere saying. Shimrra appeared to have learned the same lesson.

Lunging, the thick, three-meter-long amphistaff wound itself around Luke’s torso, pinning his right arm and light-saber hilt to his side, the green blade aimed at the floor. Just in time, Luke managed to get his left hand gripped on the snake’s uppermost coils and avert the head as it loosed volumes of venom at him. But Luke was rapidly being squeezed to death by the amphistaff. Feeling his uncle’s suffocation in his own crushed chest, Jacen summoned his strength and crawled frantically for his lightsaber. Calling it to his right hand, he sent it hurtling through the air at Shimrra’s head.

The Supreme Overlord raised his left hand in a parry; then, with Jacen’s lightsaber spinning off toward the throne, he reached into the folds of his hide cape—and extracted a lightsaber! With a flourish, he activated it. A violet blade shot forth with the familiar snap-hiss.

Jacen recognized it immediately.

Anakin’s lightsaber.

“Weapon of the Solo we killed at Myrkr,” Shimrra said, his eyes shifting through colors as the energy shaft thrummed. “Conveyed to Yuuzhan’tar by the traitor Vergere, wielded by the Jeedai Ganner against so many of my warriors, retrieved when he died and brought to me, and now yours to confront. So that you may know what my warriors experience at Zonama Sekot, forced to fight against other living vessels.”

Jacen was too stunned to respond; too disheartened to move.

Shimrra waved the blade close to Luke’s head.

Luke removed his left hand from the amphistaff’s throat to grab Shimrra’s right wrist. The serpentine weapon immediately stiffened and plunged itself into the left side of Luke’s chest.

Luke screamed in pain.

The Supreme Overlord reared back to gloat: “One thrust and the deed is done!”

Then all at once, Anakin’s lightsaber flew from Shimrra’s grip into Luke’s left hand.

Through his Vongsense, Jacen could feel Shimrra’s astonishment and dismay.

In a motion almost too swift for Jacen’s eyes to follow, Luke slit the throat of Shimrra’s amphistaff. As its coils began to relax, he sliced his own lighsaber blade upward, cutting the amphistaff’s body into segments. As a horrified Shimrra leaned forward, as if to vise his huge hands around Luke’s neck, Luke crossed the blades and shoved them upward toward Shimrra’s neck. The blades burned clean through. Shimrra’s decapitated head dropped to the floor with a loud thud! and his body crumbled.

Luke hauled himself out from under the Supreme Overlord’s body and collapsed against the wall.

“Jaina,” he said weakly. Swinging his left hand, he sent Anakin’s lightsaber in a high arc across the room.

Jacen scrambled to his feet and had just started for the lightsaber when the floor dropped to the right and he stumbled. Jacen regained his balance and leapt for the lightsaber, but it flew past him and rolled beyond his reach.

The vision! Jacen thought.

He looked at his uncle for confirmation.

“Leave it,” Luke said.

Lips compressed in determination, Jacen raised himself from the floor and raced for the stairway that curved up into the Citadel’s towerlike summit.

FORTY-ONE

Nom Anor had his first look at the devastation that had been visited on Coruscant when Han Solo landed the Millennium Falcon in the public