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“Or,” Mara added in ominous tones, “to curry favor with it in the hopes of being spared.”

Luke hissed. “I don’t like the sound of that, Mara.” On Belkadan he had seen beings that had been enslaved by the Yuuzhan Vong, but he had wondered if some of them had accepted their role or welcomed it. Fear can motivate people to do all manner of irrational things. Having to fight people of the New Republic to fend off the Yuuzhan Vong was something Luke didn’t want to consider.

“Still, Corran’s point is good. Kyp’s calling this gathering a council of war is a clear sign that some want to strike hard at the Yuuzhan Vong.” Luke rubbed a hand over his forehead. “The missions for us, as Jedi, are simple. We go to the frontier worlds and help evacuate the helpless. We go and coordinate defensive postures. Dantooine seems like a poor example of how that sort of thing can turn out, but we did allow some people to escape who would not otherwise have made it.”

Mara looked up sharply. “What about scouting missions? That’s what you did on Belkadan and it was useful. We learned a lot from your being there. Corran and Ganner brought back useful information from Bimmiel, too, including those samples of biotech the Yuuzhan Vong use and that mummified Yuuzhan Vong body. The more intelligence we can gather on the Yuuzhan Vong, the better off we’ll be in dealing with them.”

“I agree, but with fewer than a hundred Jedi, and with hundreds of worlds as potential targets, how do we allocate our people?”

Corran nodded. “Well, there is no winning the political battle here, I think we all know that. If no Jedi is on a world the Vong hit, we’ll be blamed. If too few Jedi are there to stop them—and we know that’s a given—we lose again. I’m not suggesting that we do nothing, but we have to know that we’re never going to satisfy those that we can’t help.

“On the other hand, Mara’s point also carries with it a truism: the only place we know for certain that we can find the Vong is on worlds they’ve taken. I can review data on the conquered worlds and see if there is any way we could get a mission in. It won’t be easy.”

“None of this will be easy, Corran.” The Jedi Master reached out and took Mara’s left hand in his right. “We’ll just have to make sure that the Jedi do everything we can to fulfill our mission. I’m less afraid of criticism from outside than I am that failure on our part may shatter the Jedi from within. If that happens, the Yuuzhan Vong will face no opposition at all.”

CHAPTER THREE

Something about returning to the suite of rooms where he’d spent much of his time on Coruscant felt very odd to Jacen Solo. He would have said he’d grown up there, but he knew that wasn’t close to the truth. He’d traveled all over the New Republic with his parents, then spent a lot of time at the Jedi academy.

The place didn’t look that much different than he remembered it. His room was down the hallway; his parents’ suite was upstairs. C-3PO still puttered about, dashing from one seeming crisis to another, stopping only to say how good it was to see Jacen again. The golden protocol droid’s antics, while annoying, made up one of the elements Jacen still found familiar about the place, and for some reason even that made him uneasy.

The unsettling nature of the suite bothered him. Anakin, his younger brother, stood over by the transparisteel viewport, studying the lines of speeders tracing their paths through the sky. Jacen got almost no sense of Anakin through the Force, as if his brother were a continent away. What little he did get was somber and tinged a bit with apprehension.

Jaina, his twin, on the other hand, brimmed over with bright emotion. Seeing her, dark hair gathered into a thick braid, dark eyes bright, brought a smile to his own face. Her joy at having joined Rogue Squadron infected him, broadening that smile. As twins, they had always been close and shared much; still, the way Jaina had blossomed in this new role had taken him by surprise.

But a pleasant surprise.

Jacen enfolded her in a hug after he stepped