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but the thoughts changed in pitch. It was as if they’d reached the eye of a storm. Energy still swirled around them, but at the center there was a kind of peacefulbalance. Saba felt her thoughts regain a sense of normality, joining up again in a single coherent stream. They had emerged from hyperspace once more, only this time the screens were alive with data: there was a sun blazing on one, a gas giant looming on another. A faint green-blue speck hung in the center of a third screen—and it was to this that her senses clung. Green meant chlorophyll; blue meant water. If a world was ever to live, it had to have both.
    Zonama Sekot
!
    But as the view zoomed in closer, she saw yellow and bright red clouds blossoming as energy weapons flashed and flared around the atmosphere. Thin-hulled spaceships burst open under the influence of stupendous forces, casting countless lives into the harsh vacuum of space.
    And that wasn’t all. What Saba saw behind the space battle was completely beyond her experience. Bright feathery ribbons trailed from the planet’s poles like liberated coronas. Fleeting sprites danced in the upper atmosphere, sending towering flashes of energy spiking far above. Massive sheets of lightning swept around the equator, gathering speed until they joined in a smooth ring; then, with a piercing crack, they lashed out and up like a whip of pure energy. Magnetic field fluxes measured by
Jade Shadow
accompanied what appeared to be tractor beam effects on scales Saba had never imagined possible.
    Zonama Sekot’s attackers were obviously Yuuzhan Vong vessels: two mid-size cruiser analogs and countless numbers of coralskippers. But they weren’t the only ships in the air. Among them darted and wove tiny points of light like no ships Saba had ever seen before. Every one was different; every one was beautiful; every one was deadly.
    Zonama Sekot was fighting back!
    Anger blazed—ugly in its ferocity, devastating in itsefficacy—and with it came a return of the storm. Saba barely had time to wonder what would happen when the mind they’d been seeking finally noticed
them
, when a wall of psychic energy struck them, tossing them into oblivion.
    “Spare me, Master! Spare me!”
    Supreme Overlord Shimrra gazed down with cold contempt at the squirming thing at his feet. The Shamed One had been tortured and beaten, but still she hadn’t broken. If the godlike ruler of the Yuuzhan Vong found this puzzling, he didn’t let it show.
    “Spare you?” he said, slowly pacing around the prostrate figure. “Why? So you can continue to pollute my chambers with your false protestations of innocence?”
    “Not false, Lord! You must believe me.”
    “You dare to tell me what
I
must do?” Shimrra snarled.
    The object of his ire quivered piteously. “Forgive my ignorance! If I knew the answers to the questions you ask, I would surely tell you!”
    “But you
do
know. You are a pawn of the vile sect that dares follow the
Jeedai.
”
    “Master, I swear by—”
    “Spare me oaths to your infidel gods. I will hear no more of your foul lies.” Shimrra gestured imperiously, and the Shamed One was dragged away. The charnel pits where the heretics were taken for dishonorable execution had been working day and night in recent times. A swarm of ravenous yargh’un—toothy rodents as long as a Shamed One’s leg—devoured the victims in swift order. Crippled, their limbs broken prior to being tossed to their doom, those found guilty of heresy were shown no mercy, nor afforded any honor in the manner of their death.
    “Destroy the yargh’un,” Shimrra ordered of the guards who had stepped forward to do his will.
    The guards stopped in their tracks, confused by the Supreme One’s command. “Master?”
    “The beasts have been defiled by heretical blood,” he said. “Take them from the pit and have them burned.”
    “What shall we do with this one, Master?” The guards indicated the Shamed One quailing between them.
    “Deal