by Troy Denning
“Fiver, open a private channel to Jaina.”
Before the droid could obey, Jaina said, “We’re whole and hot. Green to go, Jedi, and good shooting.”
Her X-wing leapt ahead, racing into a light-laced panorama now so large it spilled across the entire front panel of Anakin’s canopy. Putting aside any thought of suggesting she stay behind, he toggled his weapons live and selected laser cannons. The target swelled into view, first a blocky silhouette hiding the stars, then a megalithic darkness spewing plasma and magma into the maelstrom beyond.
Jaina nosed down to meet the only coralskipper in position to intercept the Jedi and soon had it juking and jinking to avoid her laserfire. The enemy pilot poured the power of his dovin basal into shielding his craft instead of maneuvering it. Not smart. Jaina dodged past the few plasma balls he lobbed in her direction and raked the skip with low-power stutter blasts. When the first hit scored, she immediately quadded her weapons and unloaded.
“Now that’s shooting!” Zekk said.
“Neg that commclutter, Bounty Hunter,” Jaina ordered.
Zekk keyed his microphone.
With nothing between him and the frigate, Anakin switched to proton torpedoes and laid his targeting reticle on the ship’s bow. Tesar had guessed right about the missile crews; the plasma nodules and rock spitters on their side of the vessel remained quiet.
“Fiver, what’s happening with those skips chasing the Speed Queen?”
Fiver shifted the tactical display’s scale. The missing coralskippers were swarming the Queen.
“Not good,” Anakin groaned. “Really not good. Uncle Luke will like that about as much as rancor fighting.”
Fiver displayed a readout noting how long it would take the skips to return. They were out of the fight, but they might try to cut off the Jedi retreat.
“Keep an eye on them.”
Fiver whistled an acknowledgment, then Anakin’s targeting reticle lit as he entered torpedo range. The frigate filled the front of the canopy now, an asteroidlike rock that was all Anakin could see.
“Little Brother green,” he reported.
“Bounty Hunter green,” Zekk said. “Back and forth?”
“You first.”
A dozen white circles—three proton torpedoes and their decoy flares—streaked past and spread along the frigate’s flank. The Yuuzhan Vong shielding crews activated their gravity-focusing dovin basals, projecting a string of miniature black holes that swallowed everything coming at them. Zekk switched to laser cannons and sprayed the frigate with stutter blasts. Over the last two years, space combat between the New Republic and the Yuuzhan Vong had evolved into a game of bait and switch, each side trying to bluff the other into squandering its limited reserve of power on unneeded defenses and ineffectual attacks. The XJ3 updates had been designed to win that game.
Anakin fired his first torpedo salvo, then switched weapons and sprayed laserfire. The shield crews were slower to grab his attacks, and the proximity fuses detonated within meters of the ship. Melt circles pocked the hull. Out of one small crack shot a geyser of atmosphere. Anakin hit the fissure with a pair of laser bursts, and a plume of bodies and equipment tumbled out. Zekk added a quadded burst and triggered a flurry of internal explosions, and then they were too close and had to pull up.
Anakin felt a pair of Yuuzhan Vong eyes on him—the lambent wasn’t always a distraction—and jinked right. A magma missile spiraled past from somewhere beyond the frigate, and he felt his alarm mirrored back to him through the Force. He checked the heads-up display and saw Zekk sliding in behind him as another rock missile corkscrewed past.
“Thanks for the warning!” Zekk commed.
A pair of skips shot up from behind the frigate and hurled past, volcano cannons spitting plasma balls in the blastboat’s direction.
Anakin started to loop around. “Get ’em!”
“Neg that, boys.” Jaina’s X-wing came swinging up behind the skips, her nose already leveling off to fire. “Take the pair going under.”
She flashed past, a single proton torpedo streaking after the rear skip. No need to check the tactical display; with Jaina on their tail, the two Yuuzhan Vong were already dead. Anakin and Zekk nosed down over the frigate, weaving through a storm of magma missiles and circling under the vessel’s belly before the surprised gunnery crews could target them. Three hundred meters ahead, two skips were angling up under the Big Eye, trading fire with the blastboat’s big laser cannons.
Anakin felt Zekk find him through the Force. He quadded his cannons and positioned his targeting reticle. Lead flier ready. They depressed their triggers together. Their weapons flashed together. The skips disintegrated … together.
“Very nice shooting,” Tenel Ka said. “Now please get clear.”
Anakin pushed his throttle forward. There should have been another coralskipper, but it was nowhere on his display.
“Where’s that last skip?” he said.
“Got it,” Jaina replied. “On the way under.”
Fiver let out a whistle.
“Yeah, four of ’em,” Anakin said. “And she’s not even excited.”
The blastboat lit the darkness with flashing color. Anakin used his rearview vidscreen to watch the enemy shielding crews catch the entire first salvo. They missed four missiles from the next salvo, though, and one entered the breach Anakin and Zekk had opened earlier. The blast blew a hole through the far hull. The third salvo broke the vessel in two, and the ship tumbled away in separate pieces, its truncated halves bleeding bodies and vapor.
Anakin looped his X-wing back toward the battle and found another frigate angling to cut off the Dozen. The Big Eye launched all torpedoes and, no match for the larger ship’s firepower, fled. Jaina led Anakin and Zekk after the volleys, but Kyp’s voice came over their comm channel.
“You’ve done enough, Sticks. We’ve got it from here.”
“Sure.” Jaina’s reply was sarcastic, perhaps because the blastboat’s torpedoes were arcing into a gravitic singularity. “They’ll just let you past.”
“Well, not let.”
A brilliant flash lit the frigate’s bow, incinerating the bridge and leaving the vessel dead in space. The Dozen’s eight survivors launched a torpedo volley at the crippled ship, then streaked out of the killing zone with a comfortable lead on the pursuing coralskippers.
“Kyp?” Anakin gasped. “How did you—”
“The Force.”
The answer was curt, and even without the Force, Anakin would have sensed Kyp’s anger at losing so many pilots. The two groups joined formations in cold silence and remained silent. Kyp had yielded to his anger before, and all Jedi knew the danger of that.
But Anakin was beginning to wonder. On Yavin 4, a bitter Yuuzhan Vong outcast had betrayed his people to help Anakin rescue Tahiri—and from him, Anakin had learned that there was a dark side even without the Force, that strength of will counted for as much as purity of heart. Now, more than ever, it seemed to him that the Force was one tool among many, to be used for a greater good. And if Kyp Durron had discovered some way to use the Force to destroy enemy ships, it seemed to Anakin that Eclipse should investigate it—that a strong Jedi with a focused will and pure heart might be able to use it without turning to the dark side.
Kyp allowed the silence to hang on the comm channels until they were clear of the enemy, then asked, “Anakin, did those explosions remind you of anything?”
“Their spectrographic signature was that of a proton torpedo,” Tenel Ka said helpfully. “But there was no propellant trail.”
“And what does that tell you?” Kyp asked smugly. “Think about it. ‘Size matters not,’ and all that.”
“Telekinesis?” Anakin gasped. “You’re using the Force to throw torpedoes?”
“I’m not as fast as a propellant charge—yet—but the Yuuzhan Vong have a hard time seeing proton torpedoes without a big, bright propellant glow to give them away.”
Anakin was almost disappointed.
He had been hoping for a secret weapon, something the Force-blind Yuuzhan Vong could never counter. Instead, it was just one more move in the game, one more trick the enemy would soon learn to defeat.
If Kyp expected someone to congratulate him on his cleverness, he was disappointed. Tenel Ka remarked that it would save the New Republic a few propellant cylinders if nothing else, then an urgent warble drew Anakin’s attention to his tactical display. Fiver shifted scales, showing the Speed Queen’s derelict hulk dead in space. The six coralskippers that had destroyed it were rushing to cut off his group’s escape path.
“We are not done yet, I fear,” Tenel Ka said.
The six skip pilots were hopelessly outnumbered and would no doubt die, but they would also buy the rest of the task force time to catch the X-wings from behind. Anakin hissed a curse—then cursed again as three X-wings appeared ahead of the skips, rushing to meet them.
“Please continue on course, Little Brother,” a Barabel rasped. “This will not take long. There are only six.”
The three X-wings merged into one blip and continued toward the enemy, forcing the Yuuzhan Vong to choose between being torn apart piecemeal and abandoning their screen. Not surprisingly, they closed ranks, spraying a flurry of stripes and corkscrew lines at the Barabels.
Outside the canopy, Anakin could barely see the battle ahead, mere pinpoints of light flashing in the distant darkness. He looked back to the tactical display and saw the corkscrew lines winking out as they approached the X-wings.
“They can’t do that!” Zekk gasped.
“If you think they are shooting missiles out of space, then they can,” Tenel Ka said. “Optical magnification shows a seventy-two percent correlation between their laser flashes and the disappearance of the missiles.”
Anakin was not as impressed by their shooting as by their flying. To merge into one blip, they had to be on top of each other, no more than a meter apart, at a velocity that might well be 10 percent of light. Aside from demoralizing the enemy, he could think of no battle use for such a display of precision, but he was impressed.
At last, one magma missile got through to the X-wings. Anakin’s eyes remained glued to the tactical display, awaiting the horrible flash that would mean the end of one or—as close as they were—all three Barabels.
It never came. The missile reappeared on the other side of the blip in a different trajectory. Someone had used the Force to redirect its flight.
“I need some Jedi in my squadron,” Kyp said. “I need some Barabel Jedi.”
Anakin looked up again. The battle was brighter now, more like a flickering phosflea, but there was no question of reaching it in time to help the Barabels.
The Yuuzhan Vong gave up on the magma missiles and concentrated on plasma balls. To Anakin’s amazement, the Barabels wasted no effort trying to dodge. They took the attacks head-on, one after the other, and continued straight on long after their shields should have fallen.
“How can they do that?” Zekk asked. “Are they reinforcing each other’s shields?”
“Not enough overlap.” Jaina’s voice was full of admiration—the first sign of emotion she had displayed during the battle.
“They must be leapfrogging, taking turns out front while the others reenergize.”
“Fact,” Tenel Ka confirmed. “There are fluctuating ion pulses consistent with variations in drive output.”
“Now I’m really impressed,” Anakin said.
A Yuuzhan Vong blip vanished. The X-wings swung toward another skip. It disappeared, too. Anakin was not surprised by this tactic, but he was awed by its precision. The hatchmates were concentrating their fire, simply overwhelming their targets with the sheer volume of laser blasts. A third skip blinked out. The survivors closed on the X-wings’ flanks, trying to swing around behind them.
The Barabels’ blip quivered and slowed. Anakin knew the Yuuzhan Vong were using dovin basals to pull at the X-wings’ shields. He wanted to open a channel and yell at them to toggle their grab-safety, which would release the shields and bring them back up a millisecond later. He did not dare interfere with their concentration.
The Barabels surprised him again, this time shutting down their sublight drives completely. With the skips pulling on their shields, the distance closed in a heartbeat. Then there were three X-wings again, each nose to nose with a coralskipper. The tactical display burst into an indecipherable tangle of propellant trails, then dissolved into static as the rapid-fire proton bursts overloaded the blastboat’s sensors. Anakin glanced through his canopy and saw a novalike burst of light.
When he looked back to his display, there was nothing but static.
“Fiver?”
The droid tweedled and set to work filtering the overload.
“Tails?” Jaina called. “Are you there?”
They did not reply, but Tenel Ka said, “Our sensors are coming back on-line. There appear to be three X-wings.”
“Tails, are you there?” Jaina repeated. “One? Two? Three?”
She was answered by a long outburst of sissing, what passed for laughter among the Barabel.
“We are here, Stickz,” one of the hatchmates rasped. “One, Two, Three.”
TEN
Nearly a hundred senatorial balconies sat empty in support of the Ithorian boycott. The Wookiees were hurling pieces of their conferencing console at the speaker’s dais, where a hologram of the Thyferran senator offered a nine-point plan to open peace negotiations with the Yuuzhan Vong. The entire consular staff of Talfaglio wandered the walkways shouting—actually shouting—their demand that the Jedi surrender to save the hostages. Balmorra was channel-blasting an offer of free orbital turbolaser platforms to any world that sent a fleet to its defense, and security droids were whirring back and forth through the air, searching in vain for a Dathomiri assassin rumored to be hiding in the chamber.
It was not how Borsk Fey’lya would have liked to meet Tsavong Lah’s envoy. He would have preferred to receive him in the State Reception Hall and, over a decanter of fine Endorian port, quietly work out an acceptable script for their public confrontation. But the emissary had balked at the invitation, suggesting instead that the chief of state greet him as he debarked his ship—a deferential gesture that would have further split the senate and undermined Borsk’s already sagging support. So, unable to reach a compromise, here they were, meeting for the first time in the Grand Convocation Chamber of the New Republic Senate, the whole galaxy watching, and neither one with a clue as to what the other would do or say. It was, as the phrase went, a Great Moment in History, when empires rose or fell on the words of politicians and posterity’s favor was won or lost in a second. Chief of State Fey’lya felt like he was going to throw up.
The Yuuzhan Vong, looking faintly Jedi-like in a hooded cape over scarlet vonduun crab armor, made Borsk wait while he descended three hundred meters of stairs at the pace of a Dagobah swamp sloth. The envoy brought no bodyguards, giving the impression that he needed no protection but his living armor and the long amphistaff in his hands. He paid no attention to the hisses and jeers many senators cast his way, and even less to the fools who stepped forward to suggest private meetings. The only time he looked away was when the Togorians hurled a volley of caf mugs at him, and even then it was only to cast a shadowed glare upon the security droids who intercepted the fusillade.
Borsk suddenly wished he had instructed the sergeant at arms to disarm the Yuuzhan Vong. He had thought facing an armed warrior would make him look brave on the HoloNet, but now he was not so sure. Though the security droids would blast the envoy senseless at the first sign of an attack, Borsk knew himself well enough to realize even holocams would not ease his anxiety.
When the Yuuzhan Vong finally reached the chamber floor, he stopped on one side of the speaker’s rostrum and waited. As their negotiators had agreed, Borsk left the chief of state’s console and came down to stand across from him. He was followed by two members of the Advisory Council, Viqi Shesh of Kuat and Fyo
r Rodan of Commenor. No one exchanged pleasantries or greetings.
“I am Borsk Fey’lya. I have invited you here to discuss the Talfaglion hostages.”
“What is there to discuss?” The envoy reached up and pulled his hood back, revealing the usual wreck of a Yuuzhan Vong face. “My words to Leia Solo were clear enough.”
The uproar in the chamber faded to an electric drone as consular aides scoured data banks for facemap fits and voiceprint matches. Borsk needed no such help. Though he had not stood toe to toe with many invaders—none, actually—he had watched the hologram of Leia’s Bilbringi meeting a hundred times. Nom Anor’s gnarled visage was almost as familiar to him as his own—even with a new false eye fitted in what had been an empty socket on the holo.
“Leia Solo is no longer a representative of this government,” Borsk said. Though his fur was standing on end, his tone was dismissive. “If you have something to say to the New Republic, you must say it to me.”
The envoy glared out of his one good eye, clearly surprised by Borsk’s impudence. “You do not know of our terms?”
An indignant murmur built in the chamber as the consular aides began to inform their masters of the envoy’s identity, and Borsk knew he had to work quickly. Nom Anor’s role in both the Rhommamool-Osarian conflict and the fall of Duro were well documented, and selecting him as an envoy was an open insult.
“I know you have threatened to kill millions of New Republic citizens,” Borsk said. “I summoned you here to provide an explanation.”
The murmur in the chamber rose to a near-din, and the Wookiees whooped in approval. Borsk did nothing to quell the noise, which the Talfaglions correctly interpreted as encouragement and attempted to rebut by urging their allies to shout down the Wookiees. This drew a deafening counterroar from the Jedi-supporters, and it occurred to Borsk that he might have found the way to shore up his support. He locked gazes with Nom Anor and allowed the uproar to continue, until Viqi Shesh finally returned to the Advisory Council’s dais and used the gallery address to plead for quiet. Borsk was not as troubled by the betrayal of his patronage as by how quickly her efforts were rewarded.