Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [27]
And each of them was filled with misery and dark side longing for ruin.
One opened its mouth and let out a piercing wail. Then another did, and a third. Suddenly the air was full of their cries.
A hand gripped Luke’s shoulder. He opened his eyes. Mara was shaking him; her face was pale. The air was still filled with cries, but they were Ben’s, and Mara held the baby away, as if to protect him from Luke. “What is it?” she asked.
“A vision.” Luke brought his breathing under control and found that one part of his vision still lingered; dark side energy and malice still surrounded him. Ben, as sensitive to the Force as only the child of two eminent Jedi could be, wailed in protest. “There’s evil on Coruscant. Tremendous dark side evil.”
Borleias Occupation, Day 5
The hologram showed a familiar sight: the daytime skyline of some portion of Coruscant. The enormous, soaring buildings and the mottled orange clouds in the sky were distinctive to that world, though there were so countless many different planetary vistas like this that no one present could precisely identify the portion of Coruscant being displayed.
Things were different, though. The more distant skyscrapers seemed to be a uniform shade of green, and the reason why was evident on the nearer buildings: they were coated in a material that looked like algae. From the algae protruded things that looked like grasses, tree branches, umbrella-topped fungi. Up close, their colors were different; only in the distance did they blur together into a single hue.
Luke found the hologram unsettling. The algae and grasses were identical to those of his vision.
In the darkened conference chamber, a man stepped up next to the holoprojection. In the light cast by the projection of Coruscant, his face was luminous, the green from the algae lending color to his pale skin, white hair, mustache, and beard, giving him a nonhuman aspect. He was lean with age, though not to the point of emaciation. His garments were black, covering all but his head and hands, leaving viewers with the impression that those body parts were floating free in the chamber.
But this wasn’t an eerie image. Many of those present had known his face for years. Wolam Tser was a political historian whose holodocumentaries had cataloged every stage of the New Republic’s development from when it was nothing but a poorly funded, chaotically disorganized Rebel Alliance.
“I’ve stopped the image here for a moment,” Wolam said, his rolling voice and upper-class accent instantly familiar to those in the chamber, “so you can see what is happening on Coruscant’s surface. Some sort of planet shaping has begun. Those growths cover much of the planet’s surface. They spread incredibly swiftly; everything you see in this image was bare duracrete the day before this was recorded. The darkest green material, some sort of pastelike scum, secretes acids that break down the chemical composition of duracrete. The fungi, I suspect, are related to the exploding fungi of Yavin Four; when struck, they detonate. The hardier-looking growths send deep taproots into the surfaces beneath them. In short, they are rapidly destroying the construction on Coruscant’s surface—and, of course, construction covers almost every square centimeter of the planet’s surface. The air, though this image doesn’t suggest it, is increasingly noxious, and the remaining population is staying in ever-lower city levels, huddling near air scrubbers that provide them with adequate atmosphere.”
Luke asked, “What about Yuuzhan Vong intrusions?”
Wolam peered in his direction, squinting in a futile effort to see deeper into the shadows. “That is the distinctive voice of Master Skywalker, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“The Yuuzhan Vong are indeed performing raids into the lower levels. Some seem to have objectives, such as the destruction of air scrubbers, while