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Leia stood up. “Not without me, you won’t.”

Han regarded her, then nodded his head.

“Then get going,” Mara said, as she and Tahiri carefully began to raise Skywalker to his feet.

The Jedi Master pointed to something across the room. “Anakin’s lightsaber,” he said weakly.

Tahiri hurried to retrieve it.

Han grabbed Nom Anor by the upper arm. “You said this ship would only respond to Shimrra.”

Nom Anor nodded. “Onimi must have found a way to deceive the controls.”

Han pointed to Shimrra’s head. “You’re sure that’s the Supreme Overlord, and not a lookalike?”

“The Supreme Overlord is dead,” Nom Anor said evenly; then thought: Or is he?

Flagship of the First Fleet, Ralroost accelerated toward Coruscant, around which the fighting was continuing unabated. The Star Destroyers of Grand Admiral Pellaeon’s flotilla had overwhelmed many of the planetary dovin basals, and thousands of Alliance troops were now on the ground, but the Yuuzhan Vong home fleet wasn’t yielding a cubic centimeter of space. The fighting had been just as intense at Muscave when Ralroost had left, and updates from Zonama Sekot indicated that the Yuuzhan Vong elements were storming through Alliance lines and hammering the planet into submission.

From the command chair on the bridge of the Bothan vessel, Admiral Kre’fey gazed at Coruscant’s expanding debris cloud of starfighters and coralskippers, picket ships and frigates, destroyers and cruisers. As he had maintained all along, Shimrra’s death, recently reported by Kenth Hamner, had had no discernable effect on the enemy commanders or pilots. At the climactic battle of the Galactic Civil War, Imperial forces appeared to have been thrown into disarray by the death of Emperor Palpatine. But Shimrra was scarcely a Sith Master, capable of using his powers of battle meditation to invigorate his troops. Nas Choka’s warriors were bound together not by evil but by a need for conquest and subjugation, backed by an unflinching will to fight to the death. Until the Alliance could defeat and dismantle the armada, there could be no hope for peace.

But how? Kre’fey asked himself. How can the Alliance rid the galaxy of an enemy that will not quit?

If he ordered Alliance forces to withdraw, the Yuuzhan Vong might simply reclaim Coruscant, or fall back to positions that hadn’t been attacked. The former galactic capital was rife with heavily forested regions where the enemy could dig in, grow and train a dhuryam to supervise the fortifications and the construction of new war vessels. The fighting could go on for years. The same would be true if Nas Choka decided to jump the armada to a star system still under Yuuzhan Vong control, resulting in the Alliance chasing them throughout the galaxy, as Kre’fey—at Mon Calamari—had expected the Yuuzhan Vong would be forced to do with the Alliance.

The war had to end here, at Coruscant, he thought. But at what cost? How many more would die if he pressed the attack—if he did as Nas Choka, by ordering his commanders to fight to the death? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

The situation was untenable.

He was still pondering the implications of either decision when Ralroost’s captain interrupted him to report that Nas Choka’s battle group had jumped from Muscave, and were expected to revert imminently at Coruscant.

Shimrra’s companion shuffled about the spacious bridge, activating the vessel’s organic components with waves of his crooked hands and with what seemed to be telepathic commands. The living console began to pulse and ripple like muscle tissue. A cognition hood unfolded itself, and an array of villips twitched. Blaze bugs frothed in a display niche.

Jaina understood that she was draped from two hooks that grew from the bridge’s inner bulkhead. Though the Shamed One had yet to make offerings to any of them, carved representations of the principal gods of the Yuuzhan Vong pantheon stood to both sides of her, suggesting that she had become the centerpiece of a sacrificial altar. Lichen and sconced lambents imparted a dismal