Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II

by Aaron Allston

  Piggy’s distinctive, mechanical laugh sounded over the comm board.

  Jaina grinned. “Nice fleeing, Piggy.”

  Wedge’s X-wing reached low Borleias orbit as the Ammuud Swooper lumbered along behind. He tried to remind himself that the Corellian freighter “lumbered” only in comparison with a starfighter, of course; the freighter was nearly as fast and nimble as the Millennium Falcon.

  He dropped back to give his personal comlink a better chance to reach the ship. “Blackmoon Eleven to Swooper, do you have an exit path?”

  “We do, Eleven. Can you receive it?”

  “I’ve been patching my comlink and datapad into what’s left of the computer on this battered baby. Just transmit me the directional and I’ll escort you out.”

  “Will do, Eleven. Many thanks.”

  Wedge waited until the numbers appeared on his datapad screen, then reoriented to Ammuud Swooper’s outbound course. He could only estimate, based on what he remembered of Borleias’s current position in orbit around the star Pyria, but he believed that the course would take Ammuud Swooper in the general direction of the Deep Core worlds. Doubtless the freighter would only take a short hyperspace jump, a few light-years, and then correct to take them toward the rendezvous point.

  The starfighter’s sensor board beeped with a new contact. Wedge took in the new information and bit back a curse. A squadron of coralskippers was headed their way, and would intercept Wedge and the freighter long before they were clear of Borleias’s mass shadow.

  Charat Kraal poured plasma cannon fire into his opponent, saw some of it flitting around the edges of his target’s void and chewing into its hull.

  As he’d suspected, the only kind of pilot foolish enough to disobey orders like that, to seek personal glory at the expense of duty, was a green pilot, one fresh from teaching. He might have gloriously fast reflexes, but he didn’t have the experience or will to defeat someone like Charat Kraal.

  His target waggled side to side, signaling that he was quitting an exercise, the only way he had to communicate that he was surrending. He brought his voids around from his stern to his bow, symbolically baring his stomach, further sign that he was giving up this fight.

  Charat Kraal fired again, pouring damage into his target’s stern, and, as he gained altitude relative to the other coralskipper, into its canopy. He saw the canopy crack and then explode outward from the atmospheric pressure within, saw one of his plasma projectiles hit and burn entirely through the torso of the pilot. That coralskipper continued in straight-line flight, a flight that might never end.

  “Disobedience is death,” Charat Kraal said aloud, as though the spirit of his enemy might hear him. “Unless you win. And you cannot win by surrendering.” He looped back around toward the portion of the minefield where his pilots and Jaina Solo were.

  And he frowned. The cognition hood showed him the locations of all those fighters, but there were four fewer coralskipper glows than there should have been, even counting the pilot he’d just killed.

  Jaina Solo was whittling down the numbers of her pursuers. Charat Kraal shook his head and accelerated toward the action.

  Luke’s X-wing blasted through a cloud of flame and vapor spilling out of a dying blastboat analog. He tensed against the impacts that would come if there was solid matter in the cloud, but emerged on the far side without hitting anything. He fired the instant he was free of the cloud, his quad-linked lasers barely missing Mara’s oncoming E-wing and ripping into the nose of the coralskipper chasing her. His shot missed the dovin basal housing at the bow but tore into the yorik coral beneath it before a void moved into place to intercept the rest of the damage.

  The coralskipper, its pilot doubtless spooked by Luke’s magical arrival from within a cloud of flames, banked away from Mara, breaking off pursuit. Luke looped around to roar up in his wife’s wake. “Oh, there you are.”

  Her voice, across the comm board, sounded amused. “Afraid I was running out on you?”

  “You know what a jealous, possessive man I am.”

  “Starfighter Command to Blackmoon Squadron, Yellow Aces.” The voice was Tycho’s. “We’re seeing increased defense at the worldship. Break off stern defense and move up to escort. We also need our spotter in place.”

  “Blackmoon Leader copies.” Luke checked his sensor and comm boards. The Blackmoons were in pretty bad shape, down to about half strength, though most of his losses were from damage to and withdrawal of starfighters rather than their destruction. He also read that the mysterious Blackmoon Eleven was off Borleias and engaged with what looked like an entire squad of coralskippers.

  He couldn’t let that be his problem right now. “I’m your spotter,” he said. “Two, assume control of the squadron.”

  Mara said, “Negative on that. I’m your wing.”

  He sighed, but knew better than to waste time by arguing. “Correction, Blackmoon Ten, take command.”

  “Ten copies.”

  “Leader’s away.” Luke kicked in his thrusters and roared straight toward the Yuuzhan Vong worldship, away from his reinforcements, away from everyone but Mara.

  Charat Kraal sped along in Jaina Solo’s wake, leaving his other pilots behind through sheer piloting skill. Kilometer by kilometer he gained on her and knew, at last, that he was a better pilot than this infidel.

  All he had to do was get in range, disable her abomination-craft, and wait for a capture ship to assist him.

  The tiny gleam he could only see in his cognition hood, the one that indicated Jaina Solo’s position, grew to a size indicating that he should be able to make out some details of the X-wing. But he could not; he could only see thruster emission from one engine. Yet it could not be moving so fast with three-quarters of its power gone.

  His coralskipper’s gravitic sensors created the illusion that space itself was rippling in the distance ahead of Jaina Solo, the visual image of a dovin basal mine. She seemed to be aimed almost directly at it.

  Charat Kraal smiled. Her intention was clear—take a close pass by the mine, using its gravitational attraction to sling her around and accelerate her beyond Charat Kraal’s ability to overtake.

  But it would not work that way. The mine would detect her specific graviational signature, recognize her as a most-wanted target, and reach out to strip her shields, perhaps annihilating her engines in the process.

  He had her. He had won.

  Her vehicle whipped around the dovin basal mine and came straight back at him. The turn was so abrupt that no living thing could have survived it, so unexpected that Charat Kraal sat stunned for a long, deadly moment.

  His surprise communicated itself to the coralskipper, which waited for instructions—dodge? Defend with voids? Open fire?

  And when Charat Kraal finally saw his target, made it out for what it was—a missile, unarmed, faster than any starfighter or coralskipper when it chose to be—he was only two-tenths of a second from impact.

  Harrar’s pilot turned to the priest. “Jaina Solo is destroyed. It appears that Charat Kraal rammed her.”

  Harrar shook his head. “You must be mistaken.”

  “I think not. I witnessed the two images merge. There was energy released. Both images are gone.” The pilot pulled his cognition hood back on … and then stiffened.

  “Well?”

  “You … were correct. Jaina Solo is not where I thought she was. Not in the minefield at all. She is in the vicinity of the worldship.”

  “And Charat Kraal?”

  “Still dead.”

  Eldo Davip sat alone at the control console of Lusankya, sweat dripping from his face despite the efforts of the chamber’s cooling system to keep him comfortable.

  He wasn’t on the Super Star Destroyer’s bridge. That chamber, once brilliantly clean and huge enough for snub-fighters to land in, was destroyed; he’d seen the holocam image of a dying coralskipper corkscrewing its way into the front viewports, crashing through, annihilating everything there.

&nbs
p; But no one had been there, no officers, no droids. It had been left lit as bait, though no ship’s controls operated there.

  All ship’s controls were routed here, to an auxiliary bridge deep in the vessel’s stern, a place where the command crew could operate if the stern were gone or the vessel somehow captured. Even this small chamber seemed empty and strange now; Davip was the only person left. Everywhere else, computer gear was patched into the ship’s controls.

  Every few moments, another shudder racked Lusankya and the lights momentarily dimmed. Red showed on the screens of every diagnostics terminal, indicating that the systems they monitored were destroyed or nonfunctional. The only exceptions were the systems Davip’s own terminal controlled: main thrusters, gravitic sensors, localized life support, localized power.

  He spared a glance for the door at the back of the chamber. Newly installed, it was a crude plate of armor that would lift out of the way—once—and give him access to the starfighter that lay beyond. The starfighter was already pointed along the shaft that led to Lusankya’s stern. It was a way out for him … assuming that the damage the Star Destroyer was taking didn’t collapse the shaft, didn’t ruin the starfighter. If it did, he was dead.

  Well, dead or alive, he was going to finish this fight with a bang. He returned his attention to the sensors, to the large signal that indicated the Yuuzhan Vong worldship ahead.

  * * *

  Wedge accelerated away from the Ammuud Swooper and toward the oncoming squadron of coralskippers. His sensors showed two eager skip pilots moving out in front of the others, the better to engage him first. He expected Ammuud Swooper to turn tail, dive back into the atmosphere, and try to find a safer exit vector, but the freighter came stolidly on in his wake. The reason why was soon evident: coralskippers from the vicinity of the biotics building site were now climbing after them.

  There was nowhere to run.

  In moments, the lead skips came into visual range. They separated and began launching plasma his way—all but daring him to fly between them, to try to persuade them to fire on one another by accident.

  Wedge smiled mirthlessly. A novice pilot might try that very thing, but would find his shields stripped by a deft use of the coralskippers’ voids. Without shields, his X-wing would be easy pickings for the skips. Instead, he veered to starboard, passing on the outward side of the skip in that direction, firing stuttering lasers at that craft until his weapons could no longer depress to hit it. He saw his shields flare as a bit of plasma hit them and was deflected, but his diagnostics didn’t indicate a direct hit.

  Then he was past the two lead coralskippers. They turned to follow. The oncoming ten also vectored as if to head him off, but they weren’t making the kind of speed the lead coralskippers were.

  Ammuud Swooper maintained her original course, and none of the coralskippers remained directly in her path. Wedge frowned at the sensor board. Why?

  He increased the angle of his starboard turn. The two coralskippers continued to accelerate in his wake. The other ten turned so that their course paralleled his, pacing him instead of intercepting him.

  That was it. At least one of the lead skips had to be the squadron commander. He wanted a duel. His pilots wanted to watch. They figured the commander could finish Wedge off, then they could catch up to Ammuud Swooper before the freighter could get free of Borleias’s mass shadow.

  Well, it wasn’t going to work that way.

  Wedge veered toward the pacing coralskippers, maneuvering so unexpectedly that the skips on his tail took an extra moment to turn after him. The maneuver was harsh enough to cause Wedge’s sight to gray out just a little—he could see his vision contract, as though he were flying into a tunnel, but he shook his head as he straightened out his course and his vision returned to normal. He began firing into the midst of the ten skips, and, as he’d hoped, there was no immediate return fire: the squadron leader had doubtless instructed his pilots not to interfere, that Wedge was his alone to kill.

  Wedge sprayed his stutterfire over the flank of one skip, then, as he gauged the speed with which its void intercepted the laser, switched to quad link for a harder punch. His shot, beautifully placed, dropped between the defensive voids and hulled the skip. It detonated into the small, grisly cloud characteristic of a dying coralskipper. Wedge roared past the cloud, missing it by mere meters, hearing the ping of small chunks of yorik coral striking his shields.

  As soon as he was past, he looped around, opposite the direction the skips were heading. He was rewarded by the sight of the skips slowing, turning back toward him as he circled. The lead skips punched through the same hole in the formation he’d just been through and turned after him, gaining ground.

  In a moment—tunnel vision returning as he performed a turn too hard for his body to quite withstand—he was lined up on the formation again. The nine remaining witness skips had done an impressive about-face and were now reaching the cloud of gases and coral chunks that had once been one of their own number.

  Wedge armed and fired a proton torpedo, then switched back to stutterfire lasers and began spattering red beams among those targets. Their voids came up and effortlessly caught the energy.

  Then his torpedo hit. It didn’t reach any of the functional targets, but hit the largest remaining chunk of the destroyed coralskipper, deep in the midst of the formation of skips as they passed around it.

  It detonated in a bright flash, its energy hurled outward in all directions simultaneously, slamming into every coralskipper within its explosive diameter. The skips’ voids could intercept only a fraction of the released energy.

  Wedge looped up and around the expanding gas cloud, pouring on speed to gain a little ground on his pursuers while he waited for the sensor board to clear.

  When it did, the numbers were like a lifeday present. Six of the ten coralskippers in that formation were gone or smashed into smaller pieces. Two more were on ballistic courses toward Borleias’s atmosphere. The last two were turning to join up with the squadron leader and his wingmate, but even they seemed to be moving sluggishly.

  Impossible odds had just been turned into one-third impossible. And in the distance, Ammuud Swooper continued plodding her way toward her hyperspace launch point.

  Czulkang Lah evaluated the data and variables. He did not like the conclusions he was reaching. There was altogether too much attention being paid to the Domain Hul worldship, too many missing infidel resources, too much unexplained behavior from the gigantic triangle ship now mere minutes from reaching him.

  “Prepare to disengage,” he commanded. “Select a Rim-ward withdrawal course and execute it on my order.”

  He could feel the eyes of his officers on him. Some would be concealing anger at what they interpreted as an act of cowardice. Some, knowing how bad his eyes were, wouldn’t bother to conceal it.

  He understood their anger. He felt it himself. But he knew, too, that he did not serve the Yuuzhan Vong cause by needlessly sacrificing a resource as great as a healthy worldship, not when he could withdraw now and assault again later with victory more likely. So he ignored them, ignored their stares.

  One of his officers said, “Subsurface dovin basal clusters are being maneuvered into the correct position.”

  Then Kasdakh Bhul stood beside him once more. He stared up through the command chamber’s viewing lens. “There is something wrong with the oncoming triangle ship.”

  “I should hope so, considering the damage that has been inflicted upon her.”

  “I mean, she is not what I expected. I have been forced to learn something of the infidel vessels, and this one is not dying the way she should. Her skeleton is wrong.”

  Czulkang Lah squinted up through the viewing lens, but all he could make out of the approaching vessel were her outline and the flashes of light, exchanges between starfighters and coralskippers, all around her.

  He moved to the blaze bug niche, reached into it until he pointed straight at the glowing creatures representing the tri
angle ship, then irritably waved toward himself. Blaze bugs from the back of the niche swarmed to the center, joined with the image of the triangle ship, and caused it to grow in apparent size and detail. Czulkang Lah kept waving until the triangle ship dominated the niche, surrounded by blaze bugs engaged in dogfights.

  The triangle ship had suffered tremendous damage. The topside extension where her commanders were said to remain was almost gone. No sputters of light leapt from her flanks or belly—all her weapons were dead. And her nose was destroyed, the front one-quarter of the vessel worn away by the constant attacks by coralskippers and Yuuzhan Vong capital ships.

  But something protruded from the vessel’s bow, like an enormous needle, reaching from where the ruin began to where the vessel’s original prow would have been.

  “That is what I mean,” Kasdakh Bhul said. “It is like a stinger. Their vessels don’t have stingers, just compartments.”

  Czulkang Lah felt something like dread creep through his chest. “Are we ready to withdraw?” he asked, his voice curiously calm.

  “Not yet,” one of his officers answered.

  * * *

  Individual coralskippers, separated from squadrons or the last survivors of their squadrons, broke out of the worldship’s orbit and moved to intercept Luke and Mara. The two Jedi did not slow to engage. They juked and jinked to avoid plasma cannon fire, they responded with laserfire, and they roared past, heading relentlessly on toward the worldship while their enemies turned after them.

  Then they were just above the worldship, on a diving course toward its surface. They vectored to enter orbit and whipped around the worldship’s equator, heading toward its far side, the side faced away from the star Pyria. They crossed the terminator and were suddenly plunged into darkness.

  In moments, sensors showed an intact squadron ahead of them, an equal number of miscellaneous skips arriving over the horizon from behind, and enough empty space around the two Jedi to give them a few seconds of breathing space.