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He was observing Jacen from across the bridge, even while guiding the vessel through the tattered sky. Willing it through the tattered sky, Jacen realized. Directing it the way a yammosk might.

“You will find no integrity in me, Jeedai,” Onimi said in Basic, as if mimicking something Vergere had told Jacen when he was in the Embrace of Pain. “Trust that everything you perceive about me is a lie.”

Jacen realized the truth. Onimi had overseen the warriors in the throne room below. Onimi, not the dhuryam, had been responsible for the quakes that had nearly toppled the Citadel—

“Shimrra was Shimrra,” Onimi said, anticipating Jacen’s next thought. “I am I.”

“The Supreme Overlord,” Jacen said.

As the realization deepened, he recognized that his Vongsense was allowing him to see Onimi in a profound way. Onimi was open to him, and in an instant Jacen understood how the Shamed One, a former shaper, had attained such power. But even Onimi didn’t understand that through his experiments he had also found a way to reverse the damage that had been done in the distant past to the Yuuzhan Vong.

He had regained the Force!

“Vergere told Nom Anor that you are the most dangerous Jeedai of all,” Onimi said. “And well you should be, since you carry Yun-Shuno within you—the betrayer of all I have sought to create. But soon, when I have killed you, you will be my passage to godhood. All you hold dear will have been destroyed. The species that gave you its blood and died to bring you worshipers. Most of all, the living world you returned from the Unknown Regions. Even now it anticipates its own death. It gasps for breath. Can you feel it? Our vessels are plunging through the shields you tried to create, coming closer and closer to the surface. The consciousness of that world is crying out that you have failed to protect it!

“How is this so? you ask yourself. How did it come to this? Because your military created a poison that was to kill my people, and instead I have sent it back to kill the very world you persuaded to join you in the fight against us. Is there not in that the hand of a new god, Jeedai Yun-Shuno? Where is your precious Force now—the lingering exhalations of Yun-Yuuzhan—that this has been allowed to happen?”

Jacen understood that Onimi was referring to Alpha Red. The toxin had to have arrived on the vessel that had escaped Caluula. He reached out for Sekot, but the voice of Zonama’s planetary consciousness was indistinct. Something had changed. Was Sekot deliberately concealing its presence from him or—

Jacen experienced a moment of insight. He could see Onimi through the Force. Was it possible that he would be able to find Sekot through his Vongsense?

Again he reached out, touching Sekot this time, and the astonishing truth struck him like lightning.

Why hadn’t he seen it earlier?

But there was no time to dwell on it.

Onimi was eager to train his awesome powers on Jacen, and to do that he had no need for an amphistaff or coufee. He was capable of manufacturing paralytic agents and lethal poisons. And in the same way the World Brain oversaw Coruscant, Onimi controlled the environment of the living vessel, and could turn any or all parts of it against Jacen.

Jacen realized that he was about to engage in a battle that would be decided not by knowledge of the Force, so much as fealty to its will. This was not a duel, but a relinquishment.

Once more he heard the voice of the vision he had had on Duro: Stand firm …

His heart told him that it was the voice of his grandfather, Anakin Skywalker.

FORTY-TWO

Lando’s urgent comlink transmission from Errant Venture found Wedge in the chaotic situation room of Mon Mothma, where a holographic image of Zonama Sekot rotated slowly in a cone of blue light, and bezels of various colors showed the deployment of Alliance and Yuuzhan Vong vessels. Technicians and droids were busy at every duty station, and the scrubbed air was filled with the din of voices and the incessant