by Timothy Zahn
"You will soon learn it," the Miskara promised him coldly. "In the meantime, you will serve as translator."
Car'das grimaced. That was all he needed: the people on Outbound Flight assuming he was a renegade or, worse, a traitor. Whatever necessary . . . "Of course, Your Eminence," he said. "I stand humbly ready to serve the Miskara and the Vagaari people in any way you wish."
"Of course," the Miskara said, as if even a breath of hesitation on Car'das's part would be unthinkable. "Tell me first: how deeply within the vessels will the fighting machines be stored? Will they be at the surfaces, or deeper inside."
"Deep inside," Car'das told him, not knowing whether it was true but not about to take the time to try to actually think about it.
"Good," the Miskara said with satisfaction. "Then we may destroy as we will without risking our prize."
An unpleasant sensation tingled across Car'das's skin. With a hundred Vagaari warships blotting out the starscape around him, the Miskara's words were as close to a death sentence as anything he'd ever heard.
And he was the one who'd pointed the Vagaari in that direction.
"Now: speak this," the Miskara continued. " 'You of the vessel known as Outbound Flight: we are the Vagaari. You will surrender or be destroyed.' "
22
. . . Or be destroyed."
Lorana looked across the weapons blister at Ma'Ning, at the tight set to his mouth. The first voice from the unknown ships had definitely not been human. This one just as definitely was.
And the human had been speaking Basic, as well. This wasn't good. "A captive from the Republic?" she suggested.
"Or a traitor," Ma'Ning said grimly. "Either way, it's going to make this that much trickier."
"Not at all," C'baoth's voice came from the comm speaker. "There's nothing even a traitor could have told them that will have prepared them for the kind of coordinated defense a Jedi meld can offer."
"With a hundred or more warships at their disposal I can't see them worrying overly much about how tight our defense is," Ma'Ning countered.
"Patience, Master Ma'Ning," C'baoth said, his voice glacially calm. "Trust in the Force."
"They're moving forward," Captain Pakmillu's voice cut in. "All weapons stations stand ready."
Lorana took a deep breath as she stretched out to the Force for strength and calm. This was it: the first genuine test of the Jedi control system C'baoth had spent so much of his time teaching the rest of them.
"What in the name—?" Abruptly, Ma'Ning hunched closer to his sensor displays. "Master C'baoth?"
"I see them," C'baoth said. "So this is the sort of enemy we face."
"What is it?" Lorana asked, swiveling her chair to her own displays.
"Look at the warships," Ma'Ning said. "See all those plastic bubbles on the hulls?"
Lorana felt her chest tighten. "There are people in there!"
"Living shields," C'baoth confirmed, his voice thick with contempt. "The most evil and cowardly defense concept ever created."
"What do we do?" Lorana asked, a sudden trembling in her voice. "We can't just slaughter them."
"Courage, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth said. "We'll simply shoot between the hostages."
"Impossible," Ma'Ning insisted. "Not even with Jedi gunners. Turbolasers simply aren't accurate enough."
"Do you assume me to be a fool, Master Ma'Ning?" C'baoth demanded scathingly. "Of course we won't fire until we're close enough for the necessary accuracy."
"And meanwhile we just sit here and take their fire?" Ma'Ning countered.
"Hardly," C'baoth said, an edge of malicious anticipation creeping into his voice. "The Vagaari have a surprise in store for them. All Jedi: prepare to meld. Stretch out to the Force . . . and then, to the Vagaari."
"They make no answer," the Miskara said accusingly, as if Outbound Flight's silence was Car'das's fault.
"Perhaps they're still consulting among themselves, Your Eminence," Car'das suggested, shifting his eyes back and firth across the sky. The Vagaari ships had started to close the gap between themselves and Outbound Flight, moving together into groups of tight-formation clusters that would provide them the protection of overlapping forward shields.
They were preparing to attack.
And still nothing from Outbound Flight. Or from Thrawn, for that matter. His ships had to be around here somewhere. But where?
"You will give them a new message," the Miskara ordered. " 'The time for discussion is ended. You will surrender now or—' "
And in the middle of the sentence, his voice abruptly dissolved into a confused burbling.
Car'das frowned, pressing the comlink to his ear. The whole bridge seemed to have collapsed into the same helpless babbling, as if the entire crew had had a mass mental attack.
Which was, he suspected, exactly what had happened.
He looked out again at Outbound Flight, an unpleasant shiver running through him. He'd heard the stories about all the ways Jedi could use their mind control tricks to confuse attackers, everything from creating false noises in their ears to making them unable to properly focus on controls or weapons systems. But while the stories also claimed that a group of them together could use that power on this massive a scale, he'd never heard of something like that actually happening.
Until now.
And with that, he knew, it was all over. The final card had come up double-down-nine, and the rest was as fixed and inevitable as a planetary orbit.
With the comlink still pressed to his ear, he settled down to wait for the end.
"So your tales were correct," Mitth'raw'nuruodo murmured. "Your Jedi have reached across the distance to the Vagaari and numbed or destroyed their minds."
"So it would seem," Doriana agreed, feeling a little numb himself. Even if it was just the Vagaari commanders and gunners who'd been affected, and even given the fact that the aliens would have had no forewarning of what was coming, it was still a terrifying feat.
And it was being performed by a relative handful of Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights.
Predictably, it was Kav who broke the awed silence first. "And our part is to sit by and do nothing?" he prompted.
"Our part is to do that for which we have come," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said. Reaching to his board, he keyed a switch. "It is time for the Vagaari to die."
"The Vagaari?" Kav echoed. "No! You were given my starfighters for use against Outbound Flight."
"I was not given the starfighters at all," Mitth'raw'nuruodo corrected him coolly. Ahead, the droid starfighters were rising in waves now from their asteroid staging area, heading at full speed toward the clusters of Vagaari warships. "I will choose how to use them."
Kav snarled something in his own language. "You will not get away with this," he bit out.
"Walk cautiously, Vicelord," Mitth'raw'nuruodo warned, his glowing eyes flashing at the Neimoidian. "Don't forget that the starfighters aren't the only Neimoidian technology I've taken from you."
Doriana felt a sudden tingling on the back of his neck. He spun around, expecting to find the two droidekas Mitth'raw'nuruodo had taken from the Darleveme standing behind them in full combat stance.
But there was nothing there. "No, Commander, the combat droids are not here," Mitth'raw'nuruodo assured him. "They're where they can be of far more useful service."
"And where is that?" Doriana asked.
"Where else?" Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, smiling tightly. "On the bridge of the Vagaari flagship."
The sudden multiple stutter of blasterfire in his ear sent Car'das twitching to the side, and he banged his elbow against the edge of the bubble as he hastily moved the comlink farther away. His head was still ringing as the rhythmic fire of the droidekas was joined by the more deliberate shots from the four battle droids' rifles. Apparently, Thrawn had had a secondary control pattern laid in beneath the program Car'das had set up earlier for the Miskara. The sounds of shooting shifted subtly as the six droids began to move across the bri
dge, mowing down the helpless gunners and commanders.
And as they systematically chopped off the head of the Vagaari leadership hierarchy, the droid starfighters arrived.
The first and second waves flashed overhead without slowing, skimming the hull barely five meters from Car'das's face as they drove toward the clusters of Vagaari ships in the distance. The third wave arrived in full combat mode, their laser cannons raking the flagship with a brilliant sheet of fire. Car'das flinched back, but almost before he had time to be frightened they, too, were past, leaving torn pieces of shattered hull material and white jets of escaping air in their wake. Blinking against the multiple purple afterimages, he peered through the dissipating gases at the other bubbles around him, half afraid of what he would see.
But the starfighters had pulled it off. In every single one of the bubbles within his view, the Geroon hostages were still alive—terrified, certainly, some of them clawing mindlessly at the plastic as if trying to tunnel their way out. But they were alive. With Outbound Flight's Jedi preventing the Vagaari gunners from defending their ships, and with the sharp-edged precision the droids' electronic targeting systems and close-approach attack had permitted, the starfighters had sliced their way neatly through the warship's hull between the Vagaari's living shields.
And not just aboard the flagship. All around him, Car'das could see clouds of debris and escaping air enveloping the other nearby Vagaari warships, the haze scintillating with the fiery glow of the starfighters' drives as they finished each set of targets and moved on to the next. Already in this first attack, he estimated Thrawn's assault had taken out over a quarter of the alien warships.
And still with no response from the remainder. The question now, he knew, was whether the Jedi control of the aliens would last long enough for the starfighters to finish the job. Switching on his macrobinoculars, listening with half an ear to the one-sided carnage still going on beneath him on the bridge, he focused on Outbound Flight.
It was like nothing Lorana had ever felt before. Like nothing she had ever dreamed she would ever feel, or need to prepare herself for. Even as she submerged herself in the Jedi meld, allowing C'baoth to guide her and the others as they spread confusion across the Vagaari commanders and gunners, the alien minds she was wrapped around suddenly began exploding into death.
Not just a few deaths, either, small ripples of sensation that might have throbbed painfully but controllably against her consciousness. These deaths came in a thunderstorm torrent, wave after wave of fear and agony and rage that hammered against her already overstretched and vulnerable mind. She could feel herself staggering, her hands clutching blindly for something to hold on to as her body reacted to her disorientation. There was a sharp pain in her shoulder and head; distantly, she realized she had fallen out of her chair onto the deck. She could feel herself twitching uncontrollably; could sense the others' reactions flowing through the meld, feeding into her weakness even as her own pain fed into theirs. A thousand alien voices shrieked through her brain as their life forces were snuffed out, with a thousand more waiting behind them .. .
Beside Doriana, Mitth'raw'nuruodo took a deep breath. "Ch'tra," he ordered.
And moving as a single unit, the Chiss fleet surged forward. "Time to join the party?" Doriana asked, still watching in grim amazement as the waves of droid starfighters methodically cut their way across the Vagaari ships.
"No," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said. "Time to start one of our own.”
And it was only then that Doriana saw that the Springhawk and the rest of the Chiss ships were heading for Outbound Flight. He closed his hands into fists, waiting tensely for the Dreadnaughts' gunners to spot this new threat and open fire.
But nothing happened. The Springhawk flew completely through the turbolasers' effective combat range, passed unchallenged through the point-defense zone, and with only minor turbulence passed through the shields near the bow of the nearest Dreadnaught. The other Chiss ships broke from the Springhawk’s flanks, spreading out toward the other Dreadnaughts as the Springhawk curved from its intercept vector to fly low across its chosen Dreadnaught's hull.
And opened fire.
They hit the weapons blisters first, the brilliant blue fire of the Chiss lasers tearing through armor and capacitors and charging equipment and digging deeply into the blisters themselves. The shield generators were next, the Springhawk zigzagging along the Dreadnaught's hull as it targeted and destroyed each in turn. All done with the utmost efficiency, a small detached part of Doriana's mind noted, without a single wasted movement. Clearly, Mitth'raw'nuruodo had made good use of the technical readouts he'd provided.
And then, to his surprise, the Springhawk made a sharp turn away from the hull and headed again for deep space. Beyond the expanding cloud of destruction, he could see the other Chiss ships doing the same. "What's wrong?" he asked, his eyes flicking across the sky for some new danger that might have caused Mitth'raw'nuruodo to break off his attack.
"Nothing is wrong," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, sounding puzzled. "Why?"
"But you have ceased the attack," Kav said, clearly as bewildered as Doriana. "Yet they lie helpless before you."
"Which is precisely why I've stopped," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said. "Jedi Master C'baoth; leaders of Outbound Flight. Your vessel has been disarmed, its ability to defend itself destroyed. I offer you this one final chance to surrender and return to the Republic."
"What?" Kav yelped, his eyes widening. "But you were to destroy them."
"If and when you should command again, Vicelord Kav, such decisions will be yours," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said coolly. "But not now. Outbound Flight, I await your decision."
Through the echoing haze of dying minds still screaming at her, through the smoke and debris and distant moans of the injured, Lorana realized she was dying.
Probably from suffocation, she decided as she noticed that her lungs were straining but that little or no air was reaching them. She tried to move, but her legs seemed pinned somehow to the deck. She tried to stretch out to the Force, but with the death agonies of the Vagaari now joined by the much closer deaths of her own shipmates she couldn't seem to bring her thoughts into focus.
Something cold and metallic closed around her wrist.
She opened her eyes to find a maintenance droid tugging at her arm. "What are you doing?" she croaked. It was a matter of mild surprise to discover that she had enough air even to speak. Experimentally, she tried to take a deep breath.
And felt a welcome coolness as air flowed into her lungs.
She blinked away some of the fog hazing her eyes and peered through the swirling debris. There was a long jagged slash through the ceiling above her, undoubtedly the source of the weapons blister's sudden decompression. Stretched across the gash were a dozen sheets of twisted metal that appeared to have been blown or pulled away from the walls. Half a dozen small metalwork droids were climbing across them, filling the room with clouds of sparks as they hastily welded the sheets into place over the gash.
Lying on the deck halfway across the room, his arms stretching toward the ceiling as he used the Force to hold the still unwelded sheets in place, was Ma'Ning.
Lorana couldn't see very much of his body with the wreckage of the control room scattered across her line of sight. But she could see enough to turn her stomach. He must have caught the full brunt of one of the laser blasts, taking both the agony of the shot itself as well as the impact of the shards of shattered metal it had created. "Master Ma'Ning," she gasped, trying to get up. But her legs still refused to work.
"No, don't," Ma'Ning said. His voice was strained but still carried the full authority of a Jedi Master. "It's too late for me."
"For—" Lorana broke off, a sudden edge of horror cutting through her. With the attack and her own near suffocation, she'd completely lost her connection to the Jedi meld that had so successfully blocked the Vagaari attack.
Now, as she tried to stretch out to it again,
she found that it had all but vanished.
"No," she whispered to herself But there was no mistake. When their attackers had targeted the weapons blisters, they had knowingly or unknowingly targeted the Jedi as well.
And with only one or two dazed and stunned exceptions, they were dead.
All of them.
"I should have . . . tried stop . . . him sooner," Ma'Ning murmured, his voice weakening as he rapidly lost strength. "But he was ... Jedi Master . . . Jedi Master . . ."
With an effort, Lorana pushed back the paralyzing horror. "Don't talk," she said, trying again to move. "Let me help you."
"No," Ma'Ning said. "Too late . . . for me. But not . . . for others." One of his outstretched hands twitched toward her, and a bent section of girder pinning her legs to the deck lifted a few millimeters and clattered away. "You can . . . help them."
"But I can't just leave you," Lorana protested. Again she tried to get up, and this time she succeeded.
"I am far . . . beyond your help," Ma'Ning said, a deep sadness in his voice. "Go. Help those . . . who can still . . . be helped."
"But—"
"No!" Ma'Ning bit out, his face convulsing with a sudden spasm. "You're . . . Jedi. Taken . . . oath . . . serve others. Go .. . go.
Lorana swallowed. "Yes, Master. I—" She trailed off, searching for the right words. But there weren't any.
Perhaps Ma'Ning couldn't find any, either. "Good-bye .. . Jedi Jinzler," he simply said, a ghostly smile touching his lips. "Good-bye, Master Ma'Ning."
Ma'Ning's smile vanished, and he lifted his eyes again to the repair droids and their work. Turning away, Lorana picked her way through the wreckage toward the door.
She knew she would never see him again.
The door, when she reached it, was jammed shut. Stretching out as best she could to the Force, she managed to work it open far enough to slip through. The corridor outside was nearly as bad as the blister itself, with buckled walls and chunks of ceiling littering the deck. But here at least the attackers hadn't managed to cut completely through the hull and open it to space.