@darthfallax: Sorry for the lateness of this reply, Fallax. On top of other responsibilities, I had to review large sections of the book in order to piece together Onimi’s influence because the ending twist involves his powers; so the majority of the novel intentionally neglects his effect on the Citadel. I’ve also never studied out the lengths of Onimi’s feat here, and the answer is buried under the enormity of the climax. Without further delay, here is my full analysis on Onimi’s manipulation of the Citadel in The Unifying Force.
If you recall during the events leading up to and during the final Battle of Coruscant in the Vong War, Coruscant/Yuuzhan’tar suffered one cataclysm after another for a variety of extraneous reasons I’ll recite briefly; I bring this up because we need to identify specifically which tremors were supposed to be caused by Onimi personally and which were by some other force.
As you know from the events of Traitor, after the initial Vongforming of Coruscant into a facsimile of their ancient homeworld, the organic yorik coral on Yuuzhan’tar overgrew and assimilated the remains of the Imperial Palace to fashion Shimrra’s Citadel and the upper bunker that doubled as an escape vessel. Turning over to the conclusion of the war in The Unifying Force, once Zonama Sekot appeared in the orbit of Coruscant/Yuuzhan’tar, it upset the gravitational field of the planet and its satellites, causing huge upheavals in volcanic activity and earthquakes (the scene where Drathul threatens Nom Anor).
Then, during the last battle of the conflict, Jag Fe's squadron of Alliance starfighters that penetrated the planet’s orbital defenses fired on the Citadel but to little effect. Lastly, and immediately after the event of which this discussion pertains, the Citadel was shaken again by the takeoff of the Supreme Overlord’s escape vessel at the summit of the Citadel.
"It responds only to the Supreme Overlord." He glanced around. "Onimi—Shimrra's familiar—must be in hiding."
Without warning, the bunker began to vibrate.
"Someone has to tell the dhuryam that enough's enough," Han said.
Nom Anor's heart began to pound. In sudden realization, he placed the palm of his left hand against the outer wall. "The dhuryam isn't doing this! The vessel is being readied for launch! "
Without warning, the ground started to shake. For a moment Mara thought that the Falcon's repulsorlifts were the cause; then she realized that the Citadel was the source. Frightened faces raised to the worldship fortress, the heretics began to retreat to the far side of the square, where the great beasts were on their feet and bellowing in fear. As the shaking grew more violent, cracks formed in the facade of the Citadel and huge hunks of yorik coral began to avalanche down its sheer sides. Paving stones under the Falcon heaved, then sank, dropping the starboard landing gear disk a meter into the fractured ground.
A rending sound thundered through the air. Then the bullet-shaped crown of the holy mountain slowly separated from the base and lifted into the sky.
--The Unifying Force
These are obviously not the handiwork of Onimi’s powers. I’m listing them because the devastation that swept the world at the time came by successive degrees from one catastrophe or another. The subject of this discussion, Onimi’s influence on the Citadel, must be observed as irrespective of these other circumstances, and I’ll now move onto that.
When Jacen reestablished his connection with the World Brain and persuaded it to trust him once again, it was assumed by practically everyone—Jacen, Luke, Nom Anor, Han—that the shaking at the Citadel was caused the dhuryam’s revolt against Shimrra. The text of the book itself narrates this at least four separate times from different perspectives; the following are just a few:
He risked a few cautious steps toward the beasts, then stopped when temblors began to rock the fragile span at regular intervals.
"Now what?" Jaina yelled to Luke. "Is Zonama Sekot making another fly-by?"
The temblors grew louder and more forceful. Jacen managed to keep his balance on the swaying concourse, but the steady jolts proved too much for the unbroken expanse. Fissured, the yorik coral span gave way, plummeting in fragments into the whitewater torrent.
Portions of the fortress had been extensively damaged by powerful groundquakes, which Nom Anor assumed had been engineered by the faithless dhuryam.
"I'm slowing the blood flow, Mara." Skywalker's gaze found Han Solo, who went down on one knee alongside him. "From the way this place was shaking, Han, I'm assuming you convinced the World Brain to see reason."
Han traded brief glances with his wife, then mustered a smile.
"A bit thorny, but we managed."
--The Unifying Force
So the whole Citadel was shaken by earthquakes and the commands of the dhuryam to the yorik coral biots constituting the architecture. This became more concentrated during the battle in the throne room at the summit, where the whole pinnacle bunker tilted from side-to-side unpredictably “as if mounted on gimbals,” according to the text. This phenomenon was also believed by Jacen and Luke to be the intent of the World Brain.
Jacen jumped straight up, but not quickly enough, and the amphistaff struck him on the ankle. Landing off balance, he staggered into the wall. Two warriors hurried after him, but made it only halfway when the entire bunker tipped to the right.
The unexpected movement sent everyone, slayers and Jedi alike, scurrying, sailing, and tumbling into the opposite wall. As if mounted on gimbals, the bunker tipped again, this time in the direction of the ruined osmotic membrane, bunching everyone against that wall. Guessing that Shimrra was responsible, Luke spared a glance at the throne.
The Supreme Overlord's clawed hands were indeed in motion, but the expression on Shimrra's face was one of benign bafflement.
The dhuryam, Jacen sent through the Force.
Luke understood.
The World Brain, joining the Shamed Ones in revolt, was causing the entire Citadel to shake, perhaps by rocking the cradle to which it was wed, or by some means beyond Luke's imagining. Self-contained, the bunker was attempting to keep itself level.
--The Unifying Force
The illustration of gimbals like a gyroscope explains how the bunker can shift on its side without collapsing the Citadel wholesale, especially since the upper bunker—including the Supreme Overlord’s ship—forms only the peak of the palace, which earlier chapters described entering like a completely separate structure, “in some sense leaving the Citadel itself.” This distinguishes the integrity of the bunker from the integrity of the Citadel, answering my earlier question about how the bunker can tilt without destroying the palace; while the Citadel at large shook at apparently tectonic movements, the bunker pivoted unexpectedly at odd angles seemingly on an axis, leaving the warriors frequently grounded. In total, I counted more than six times that the bunker canted during the battle between the Jedi and the slayers.
But while the escape ship according to design is removable from the Citadel, these effects aren’t entirely detached from one another. Twice, the novel says that the shaking of the Citadel caused the bunker to turn angularly.
If not for the swaying of the Citadel and the effects of its unpredictable oscillations of Shimrra's coffer—his escape vessel—Jacen figured he would already be dead. That was the World Brain, having finally decided which side it was on.
Abruptly, the Citadel rocked and the room tilted to the right. Luke dropped to one knee, holding his lightsaber arm up to protect his head, then dived, somersaulting on landing and spinning to his feet to face the warriors' charge.
--The Unifying Force
So basically, we have this happening: as the Citadel is shaken, the bunker oscillates from side-to-side. What does this have to do with Onimi? Well, all three of the Jedi suspected the Shamed One’s hand in the fight in the throne chamber somehow, though none guessed precisely the role he played except for Jacen at the end. Luke caught glimpse of him when the first shift happens, and then Jaina and Jacen also take a hard look at him later on, marking particularly how he stood unaffected by the precarious floor level.
But cut off from the dhuryam, it couldn't anticipate the Citadel's behavior. Shimrra's hand movements were just that—the idle flutters of a god-king who was forced to accept that he had lost his most powerful ally and weapon. Without the dhuryam's cooperation, Coruscant could never be Yuuzhan'tar. Even if victorious in the war, the Yuuzhan Vong would have failed to re-create their ancestral homeworld.
And yet there was a look in Shimrra's blazing eyes that promised Luke he had not seen the last of the Supreme Overlord's tricks. Shimrra was concealing something—a secret of such power that it enabled him to remain seated on his throne, even with his world teetering around him.
Luke noticed then, for the first time, that Shimrra wasn't alone on the dais. Behind the throne crouched another Yuuzhan Vong, whose asymmetrically swollen head and downcast features identified him as a Shamed One. Aware that he had been glimpsed, the Shamed One withdrew into the shadow cast by the throne, as if in an attempt to make himself small and unnoticeable.
But Luke had no time to think further about Shimrra's companion.
The bunker was suddenly in motion again.
In the center of the bunker, giant Shimrra had left his throne and was tottering toward the moat, his powerful amphistaff unfurled and serving as a kind of walking stick. Also in motion was Shimrra's companion, who was making steady if tortuous progress toward the curving stairway that climbed into the summit.
Jaina had first noticed him moments earlier when the bunker had shifted, somehow maintaining his balance despite his asymmetry.
--The Unifying Force
Jacen’s curiosity about Onimi was finally put to rest when he confronted him. Just as he caught onto during the battle, the slayers fought in a directed pattern once Onimi left the dais and climbed into the ship. He had in fact begun guiding the movements of the slayers, much like a yammosk guides coralskippers during warfare. More pertinently, Jacen also discovered that Onimi and not the World Brain was the one responsible for the shaking of the Citadel. This is our key text:
The trouble was, that decision mattered only to the reshaping of Coruscant and not to the Supreme Overlord, who was clearly able to control objects in his immediate environment without need of the dhuryam.
The slayers, for one thing.
Where initially they had been moving with individual vigilance and of their own accord, they were now moving as coralskippers did under the control of a battle coordinator. The change had come simultaneously with Shimrra's rising from the throne, and the escape of his Shamed One companion, whom Jaina had pursued into the summit of the Citadel.
"In your omniscience, you know that's why I risked grafting yammosk cells to my own neural tissue: in the hope of being able to discover some way to escape the rack on which you had mounted us! But instead of rewarding my having the courage to emulate your bold works of creation, you condemned me. You granted me the powers to speak through the mouths of others, to manipulate them at will, to control remotely, as your yammosks do, and yet you punished me with physical deformities that shouted to one and all that my attempt at self-escalation had failed.
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—
--The Unifying Force
So Onimi generated the quaking of the entire citadel and the pinwheeling of the bunker during the fight. This is wholly attributed to his own powers.
Now, we have the question: how did Onimi do this? Does this show powers usable in other circumstances absent Vong biotechnology, for battle forum purposes for instance? To answer that, let’s consider how his powers worked. Onimi by shaper engineering manipulated his own cellular makeup, infusing yammosk cells to his brain tissue and so doing granted himself telepathic powers. Yammosks, as you know, coordinated warfare for the Vong, using their telepathic influence on coralskippers and other crafts to win battles. Dhuryams, which are basically just modified super-yammosks, applied this same principle on a planetary scope to forge the Vong homeworld, cultivating its foliage and animals and creating architecture and ecosystems necessary for both the Vong and their sundry biots to thrive.
What Jacen found went deeper though; he saw that Onimi had actually reversed his Force severance by his self-bioengineering and that his telepathic powers were a manifestation of his Force powers. This was why Onimi could see Jacen and Jaina through the Force and summon electrical charges reminiscent of Force Lightning.
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!
--The Unifying Force
Coming to the point, Onimi’s ability to command the Supreme Overlord’s escape vessel was because he essentially was the Supreme Overlord in everything but name. It was his own craft joined to him, not Shimrra. Like other organic spacecraft, the ship would respond to the telepathic tugging of a yammosk or, in this case, Onimi. It can activate and move on command. So was that how Onimi shook the palace, by telepathically impelling the biots? There’s definitely a case for that, and I’ll actually present arguments for both sides of this.
To begin with, while it’s true that the escape vessel was bound to Onimi personally, it wasn’t already active when the Jedi entered the bunker. Onimi fled up the steps into the bridge in order to prep it for launch. This required him to both telekinetically and telepathically manipulate the vessel’s organic control nodes.
Shimrra's companion shuffled about the spacious bridge, activating the vessel's organic components with waves of his crooked hands and with what seemed to be telepathic commands. The living console began to pulse and ripple like muscle tissue.
Jacen kept climbing. On reaching the last few high-risered stairs, he leapt through the well and landed in a defensive crouch on the deck of the vessel's immense bridge. Shimrra's familiar stood opposite him, his disfigured body listed to one side, his twisted hands waving commands at the throbbing control console.
Onimi wanted nothing more than to kill them. 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.
--The Unifying Force
Clearly, Onimi’s activation of the ship and its ready response to him owes to his ownership of the vessel, and when he died, the vessel underwent a near-immediate catastrophic system shut-down, destroying it with him.
"Onimi was wedded to this ship," he said in a rush. "With his death, it has begun to die, and we will perish with it."
--The Unifying Force
But to answer one of your earlier questions, the Citadel wasn’t destroyed, not entirely anyway; what remained of it after the damage from Alliance ships, groundquakes, and the liftoff of the escape vessel still stood afterward. It was the ship only that perished when struck with the death of Onimi.
So did the escape ship share some unique, telepathic bond with Onimi? It appears so given the comparison between Onimi’s control of it and the dhuryam’s control of the planet. It’s curious too that the excerpts concerning the coffer tilting portray the organic bunker being “self-contained,” finding itself “cut off from the dhuryam” and so couldn’t “anticipate the Citadel’s behavior.” This was while everyone labored under the impression that the World Brain caused the quaking of the Citadel, when actually it was Onimi; this might suggest that the biot structure of the Citadel reacted to telepathic instructions, while the bunker received none and had to right itself when shaken. If that’s the case, this shows a more telepathic origin to Onimi’s feat.
About the ship in question, in addition to being the one Vong the vessel was programmed to obey, we find in the narration that the ship and all constituents of it answered Onimi’s commands. However, this is described as telekinetic during Onimi’s fight with Jacen and seems to stretch beyond what an ordinary yammosk could do. Indeed, his abilities are compared to the World Brain itself, but the text calls his environmental manipulation “telekinetic powers.”
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.
On the bridge of the vessel whose every component answered to him, Onimi sent a blur of objects racing for Jacen, beginning with the carved idols that flanked Jaina: cloaked Yun-Harla, many-armed Yun-Yammka, thousand-eyed Yun-Shuno, and the rest. But Jacen stood firm. Not wanting to risk hurting Jaina inadvertently by deflecting the objects, he pulled everything into a whirling cloud, as if in orbit around him. Beyond the cloud, he was dimly aware that a transparency had formed above the console, and that constellations of stars were winking into existence, smeared in places by the explosive exchanges among the hundreds of warships battling at the edge of Coruscant's envelope.
Jacen's steadfast defense infuriated Onimi. Reaching deeper into himself, the Supreme Overlord used his telekinetic powers to create cracks in the bulkheads and ceiling, hoping to add chunks of uprooted yorik coral to his conjured storm.
But as fast as the fissures formed, Jacen repaired them, and those chunks that were torn away he ordered the vessel to cement in place.
--The Unifying Force
As seen above, Jacen successfully bent the environment of the ship back against Onimi, exerting telekinetic control to close the fissures, and so united his Force sensitivity and Vongsense into a state of Oneness that allowed him to touch the universe at large and the severed Vong life simultaneously, with no break in his awareness between them. Evidently, the Force motioned the living ship, and if it was the Force that Onimi used to control it, it’s possible he could use the Force also to the same effect on anything else.
Furthermore, nothing of this kind of special control or connection is described of Onimi’s quaking of the Citadel and the bunker atop it, aside from a possible correlation to the World Brain’s telephatic faculties, and even if it did, it’s not explicitly stated that Onimi’s bond with the escape ship exclusively permitted him to telekinetically crack the ship’s bulkheads. That’s only inference and not an absolute one, in my opinion. The comparison to the World Brain and Onimi’s control over every article in the escape vessel might be nothing more than an analogy to express the breadth of his control, not the method of it. What dhuryams do by biologically engineered telepathic powers, Onimi does by biologically renewed Force powers.
I think the argument of yammosk-like telepathy being the source of Onimi’s feats would be more plausible if the novel didn’t reveal him to be Force sensitive and describe his hurling objects as “telekinetic.” Those bits of information point to the conclusion that this power is Force-derived telekinesis applied on the Citadel. His powers pour from the Force, and the whole premise and philosophical thrust of The Unifying Force is the oneness of all the universe. Ergo, I believe what Onimi did to the Citadel, he can do to anything else, because all is connected by the same power, the same consciousness.
To summarize:
- Onimi quaked and shook the entire Citadel, a multi-level spacecraper-palace, possibly by telekinetic pressure
- The shaking of the Citadel resulted in the drastic angular shifting of the bunker
- Onimi continued doing this while telepathically conducting the slayers in their attack against Luke and Jacen and only seemed to stop once he started up the escape ship
If all of this is correct, this amounts to one of the best telekinetic feats in Legends Star Wars. Its quality will vary a bit by interpretation though. Although I lean just a bit towards the interpretation that Onimi rumbled the Citadel telekinetically based on the novel’s description of his Force sensitivity and manifesting “telekinetic” powers, I wouldn’t be too dogmatic about this conclusion; I honestly had to give it quite a bit of consideration before posting this. There’s certainly an argument to be made for a telepathic root to all this where Onimi merely compelled the biots to rattle uncontrollably, and I even raised a few points to that interpretation. It’s even possible that there’s a combination of both telepathy and telekinesis at work here. At the moment, I just think a telekinetic influence makes the most sense.
Hopefully, this sheds some light for you. Let me know your thoughts.
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