Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 21_ The Unifying Force - James Luceno [89]
Nas Choka snapped his fists to his shoulders in salute. “Great Lord, I would prefer to concentrate our efforts on securing further those worlds we hold, in the regions our enemy catalogs as Core, Colonies, Inner Rim, and Expansion Region. That much accomplished, we will have created an impenetrable wall against incursion, and from inside that wall we can continue to make forays out into the Mid Rim and other sectors, until we have at last driven the forces of our enemy into a region where they might be subdued by attrition or with one final stroke.”
“Is that not what we have already done?” Shimrra asked. “As we speak they are consolidated at Mon Calamari. We have pushed them to the extremes of their own galaxy.”
“Some of the enemy, Gracious Lord, but not all. Pockets of strong resistance remain. To subdue the Hutts fully required years, and it may take as many to subjugate the Hapes Consortium, the Chiss empire, the Corporate Sector. In all those places, to name but a few, the enemy is strong. I won’t argue that many of their fleets are now united at Mon Calamari. But our campaigns in the Remnant, at Esfandia, and Bilbringi yet again, have cost us dearly. War vessels need to be grown and nurtured—weapons, craft, and coralskippers alike. Our armada is weakest in the very vessels needed to move it. More, we need to be better equipped for surface contests—unless it is our design to poison more worlds than we already have, and risk having the gods misunderstand our intentions, and pronounce us callous toward life.”
Nom Anor was impressed, and wished he had the courage to support Nas Choka openly, but he couldn’t chance adding his voice to the warmaster’s—not without jeopardizing his special relationship with Shimrra. But if the truth could be told, Nom Anor would have confessed that he wanted only to protect the world with which he had been entrusted. Having struggled for so long to attain a rank of authority, he had no desire to see the privileges that came with his station disappear because of some blunder by Shimrra.
The Supreme Overlord himself was too keen a strategist to take issue with all that Nas Choka was saying. But the warmaster was ignorant about the one unknown quantity that was compelling Shimrra to move quickly—and in seeming defiance of the belief that he was being shortsighted.
That one unknown was Zonama Sekot.
“I appreciate your concerns, Warmaster,” Shimrra said, “and indeed, if anyone is worthy of the honorific it is you, for your insight is sharp as a honed coufee.” He paused just long enough for Nas Choka to regain his confidence before adding: “But you are in error. I assure you that Yun-Yuuzhan was greatly pleased by the deaths of so many heretics at the Place of Bones. Trust to him, to Yun-Yuuzhan, to allay the concerns of the Slayer and the other gods. You will be rewarded with victory, Warmaster, and praises will be sung to you and your commanders, now and for generations to come.”
Nom Anor smiled inwardly.
Shimrra was brilliant at playing the game. All his talk of mollifying the gods was nothing more than a subterfuge—something beyond debate by the priests, since the Supreme Overlord was their only real conduit to the gods.
And it struck Nom Anor that Shimrra was right about what he had said at their most recent meeting: the Yuuzhan Vong had outgrown the gods. It wasn’t that the gods didn’t exist, so much as the Yuuzhan Vong no longer needed them.
All at once, he felt someone’s eyes on him. He looked to Shimrra, but Shimrra was still gazing down on Nas Choka.
It was Onimi who was watching Nom Anor.
In his command grotto, deep in the bowels of the holy mountain that was the worldship Citadel, Nas Choka, his chief tactician, and a warrior-seer studied a display of blaze bugs, moving about in their yorik