She helped him seal his suit and gave him a quick kiss. “I hate it that you’re going to lose, even on purpose.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a bad loser.” He gave her a grin. “Ultimately, I intend to be a very, very bad loser.”
SIX
Borleias Occupation, Day 9
Saba Sebatyne, a Jedi Knight of the Barabel people, tapped her way through the power-up checklist of the Wild Knights’ lead blastboat. Her fingers moved deftly and surely for such a large and bulky creature; Barabels were reptilian, covered in scales, with large eyes protected by heavy, protruding brow ridges, but otherwise somewhat inexpressive faces.
Danni Quee covertly watched Saba. Danni’s position on the ship, sensor operator and sometimes ship’s weapons, didn’t call for as much preparation as Saba’s. Saba’s efficiency and speed with her task were undiminished, but Danni knew she had been through much pain recently—the loss of her Jedi Master, Eelysa, to a Yuuzhan Vong–bred monster called a voxyn on Corellia, and then the loss of two of her kin, hatchmates to her own son, during Anakin Solo’s successful but costly mission to destroy the queen—the source of the voxyn. But Barabels were very different from humans in their expressions of pain and grief, inviting no sympathy, so Danni could offer her no condolences.
Saba came to the end of her checklist. “Pilot station ready,” she said.
“Sensor station ready,” Danni responded automatically, and the other Wild Knights aboard called out their readiness. Danni was not technically a Wild Knight, nor technically a Jedi Knight like the others, but she had flown with them on many occasions now and found that her duty station, when she wasn’t occupied with critical scientific projects, was aboard the Wild Knights’ blastboat.
Saba called in the squadron’s state of readiness and immediately received the unit’s orders. With a hiss, she turned her attention away from the screen before her as if rejecting its presence.
“What is it?” Danni asked. “If you can tell us, I mean.”
“We are to defend, and lose, and quit the field,” Saba said. “To act as a shield. Conservative tacticz. This one is a hunter. This one does not know how to defend or flee.”
“This one is a scientist,” Danni said. “This one didn’t used to know how to kill.”
Saba regarded Danni levelly, then returned her attention to the screen. “Danni can return to using human grammar now,” she said.
Twin Suns Squadron, Rogue Squadron, and the Wild Knights blasted off from Borleias’s surface. The fuel it took to reach orbit, though not a substantial portion of the starfighters’ capacity, could well be missed in the later stages of today’s battle, but Luke agreed with Wedge that allowing the Yuuzhan Vong to detect the launch of three preeminent New Republic squadrons from the planet’s surface would reinforce the enemy’s impression that this was a significant site.
As they reached high orbit, their astromechs and onboard computers received detailed orders. Luke reviewed them and nodded. Twin Suns was to stay in geosynchronous orbit above the biotics facility and vape anything that came at it. Rogue Squadron would set up above Borleias’s moon and make a speed run against any promising target of opportunity. The Wild Knights would move to reinforce the lunar station at Pyria VI. “Twin Suns on station,” he announced. “Rogues, Knights, good hunting.”
“Good hunting.” That was Saba Sebatyne’s voice, made even raspier by the limitations of the comlink. Her starfighters and blastboats peeled off for their run to Pyria VI. Gavin Darklighter responded with a mere click of his own comlink before Rogue Squadron looped away for the short run to Borleias’s moon.
Luke glanced behind him, to port and starboard. To port, Corran Horn waited with a calm he had never enjoyed as an X-wing pilot, a calm he had attained only after becoming a Jedi Knight. But to starboard, where Mara should have been, was Zindra Daine. She was a Corellian pilot, green as grass, barely out of her teens, not a Jedi. Luke winced at the thought of himself and Corran having to cover for a novice. Mara’s absence would be keenly felt today and in subsequent engagements. Though he sympathized with her desire to stay with Ben, to protect him against all possible dangers, he hoped Mara would realize that her desire was irrational, her goal an impossible one—and that her absence from the battlefield might just result in the loss of good people.
Wedge stood before the hologram at the center of the command room. This was an unlovely lozenge-shaped chamber with a curved ceiling two dozen meters below the biotics building. It had once been intended as a blast shelter, but now it was crammed with mobile consoles and their operators.
The chamber’s duracrete walls, not well designed for acoustics, rang with noise, the voices of military officers doing their duties, the beeps and chirps of computers demanding their operators’ attention, live sound feeds from unit leaders up there in the battle zone. Wedge ignored them and concentrated on the continuously updated tactical holo.
It showed Pyria at one edge, Borleias a little out from it, Pyria VI farther out, and the fringes of the solar system at the far edge. Red blips representing the Yuuzhan Vong invasion force clustered at that edge and streamed toward the other sites.
“The Rogues are on-station,” Tycho said. As chronically unable as Wedge was to run his operations from a seated position, he stood before the console devoted to starfighter coordination. “The starfighters on the target moon are standing by. Vong intrusion there anticipated in two minutes.”
“Have those fighters launch,” Wedge said. “Make it erratic. They can form up in time, but they should look as though they were caught off guard.”
“Done.” Tycho turned back to his screen.
Wedge’s attention flicked across the hologram. Some ships lay dormant, well away from the action, monitoring the situation with their sensors, ready to step in should reinforcements be needed. Frigates, cruisers, and other capital ships were situated above Borleias. Starfighter units maneuvered to head off the Yuuzhan Vong approach.
The main Yuuzhan Vong force stayed coherent, a reserve fleet situated not far from where it had entered Pyrian space. The units moving against the New Republic forces were, Wedge knew, mere probes, sent out to test the strength of the defensive forces. This battle wasn’t about winning or losing; it was about gathering information on enemy capabilities.
“Pyria Six reports contact,” Tycho said.
* * *
Captain Yakown Reth was not a happy man.
It wasn’t enough that, of all the up-and-coming officers in Wedge Antilles’s command, he’d been assigned the unpromising duty of guarding a shuttle load of scientists, engineers, and construction specialists building a subsurface habitat on an airless moon. Yes, he’d been assigned two full squadrons of starfighters to defend the base. But his E-wings were not equipped with proton torpedoes—the brass said that these weapons were in short supply—and Reth wasn’t even authorized to know what the scientific personnel were up to.
And now, as Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers hurtled toward him, came to wipe out this idiotic little facility, Colonel Celchu was micromanaging him, dictating that wing pairs launch only as they came ready after going through a second checklist. His forces were straggling into space like an undisciplined mob. If General Antilles was monitoring the action here, he’d assume that Reth was an idiot.
Finally, as the incoming blips on the sensor screens reached the outer limits of his starfighters’ range of fire, the last two E-wings of Green Squadron struggled into formation and announced their readiness.
“Remember, no individual heroics,” Reth said. “We have to overwhelm their defenses and overlap our own. Break by wing quads on my command, three, two, one … now.” He suited action to words and spun down a few hundred meters toward the jagged and unappealing surface of the moon he was protecting. Green Two through Green Four followed him, in loose, imprecise formation. This was not surprising for a group that had been cobbled together from units shattered back at Coruscant. But it was aggravating.
It made him look sloppy.
Coralskippers too distant to see opened fire; trails of glowing redness lanced out toward Green Squadron. Reth nudged closer to Green Two, his wingmate, and saw Green Three and Four crowding in, allowing their shields to overlap. Reth grimaced. Working with unfamiliar pilots in such proximity was as distasteful to him as the thought of trading unwashed clothing with them.
“Accelerate to full,” he said. “We’ll punch through and come back. Set lasers to stutterfire. I’ll designate a target and we’ll all hit it. Ready … mark.” He put his targeting reticle on an incoming coralskipper, not the first in the line coming toward him but the third, and fired a burst.
Red laser beams erupted from his E-wing’s nose and wingtips, an irregular drizzle rather than a hard-hitting burst of concentrated energy. Bursts from his wingmates followed his in, drenching his target. Reth hated the new stutterfire configuration. He knew that it did damage around the coralskippers’ blasted void defenses, but it prevented the lasers from hitting with any sort of satisfying power.
An incoming stream of lava balls angled across his formation. Three or four hit the overlapping shields of the E-wings, and the audible sensor interpreters of his vehicle noted the impacts with sharp bangs. His diagnostics didn’t light up, and his sensors showed his target followed by a cometlike tail consisting of bits of yorik coral chewed away by their laserfire.
Though that coralskipper was still sound, Reth switched targets, pouring his damage and that of his wingmates on another skip. This coralskipper, angling straight into the path of his lasers, was distantly visible, and Reth saw his unit’s lasers chewing at it, at its edges, across its canopy; though its void flashed in front of much of the laserfire, swallowing it, enough curved around the singularity’s edges and penetrated the skip’s surface. That skip suddenly became as luminous as the distant Pyrian sun and then was gone.
Reth managed a tight smile. So far, so good.
“Sensors show a formation looping around the moon toward us.” The voice, quiet and controlled, was Corran’s, and it came across Luke’s private comlink, not the one built into his X-wing. Corran’s X-wing was several hundred kilometers behind the Twin Suns Squadron’s formation in lunar orbit, trailing it and acting as rear guard.
Luke nodded. The main sensor relay from the ground stations showed a column of coralskippers and frigate analogs on a straight approach toward Borleias, but the Yuuzhan Vong had obviously detected Twin Suns and sent a detachment around the moon to trap them between two forces. “Get back up here,” he told Corran. “Prepare a shadow bomb to drop.” The other pilots of Twin Suns weren’t Jedi and so weren’t capable of utilizing the shadow bomb weapons—proton torpedoes with their propulsion units removed, shoved across space merely by the powers of the Jedi mind—so he didn’t have to transmit these orders to them. He activated his snubfighter’s comlink on squadron frequency. “Prepare to follow me in.” He switched back to the scrambled frequency he shared with Corran and Zindra. “Thirty seconds before our pursuit gets into firing range, we accelerate straight toward the enemy column … but Corran and I leave the shadow bombs behind.”
Corran and Zindra responded with comlink clicks.
Sensors showed Yuuzhan Vong vessels far ahead, crossing the plane of lunar orbit on their approach toward Borleias. Luke could distantly see the running lights, or whatever the organic equivalents were, on the Yuuzhan Vong frigate analogs. Corran was much closer, approaching fast from the rear, and now Luke could detect the first blips indicating the detachment coming up behind Corran. “Drop shadow bombs,” he said, and kicked his accelerator into life as he dropped his own shadow bomb.
Twin Suns Squadron roared out from lunar orbit on a straight approach toward the main Yuuzhan Vong column. Their course had to be absolutely straight if the trick was to work.
His Force perceptions irrelevant, Luke kept his eye on the sensors. They showed the distant blip of Yuuzhan Vong pursuers growing less distant; they showed the tiny, coded comlink transmission from the shadow bombs left behind; they showed the alien column ahead, also getting closer and closer.
“They’re firing,” Zindra said, the high-pitched excitement of a novice in her voice, and Luke saw flashes of distant lava cannon misses in his peripheral vision.
Luke began juking and jinking, his attention divided between controlling his X-wing and and the shadow bomb he had launched.
The trailing force of coralskippers numbered about thirty; at this range, it was hard to get exact numbers. They were approaching the point where the Jedi had dropped the shadow bombs and were in a narrow approach formation, a speed formation. Luke nudged the shadow bombs into a line, each a few kilometers from the next, and watched their blips separate and line up in anticipation of the approaching skips.
He didn’t feel the coralskippers pass the rearmost shadow bomb; his Force perceptions couldn’t detect them. But the sensors showed the line of skips reach and begin to superimpose itself on the line of shadow bombs. He waited until the foremost skip reached the leading bomb, then reached out and squeezed with a small measure of his Force powers.
On the sensors, the clean line of coralskippers behind became a fuzzy mass, then began to fade. Where perhaps thirty skips had been in pursuit, half that number now looped away from the detonation point, in search of whatever mystery ship must have attacked them.
Luke snapped back to the here and now. Zindra’s X-wing was directly above him, its mass blocking his direct view of the fight, but he could tell that they were in the midst of the main coralskipper column, had maneuvered into the midst of the enemy while most of his attention was locked up with the shadow bombs. Corran was still tucked in to port, his shields overlapping Luke’s and providing additional support, patiently waiting for Luke to snap back to full attention so they could deal with the enemies ahead.
Zindra’s voice crackled over the comlink: “Great shooting! Um, are we going to do anything about that frigate ahead?”
Luke suppressed the urge to grind his teeth. “Yes, we are. I’ll take lead.” He goosed his thrusters; he and Corran maneuvered ahead of Zindra. “Follow me in.”
Luke peeled off on a strafing run against the frigate analog. Corran and Zindra followed.
Saba fired and a pulse from the Wild Knights’ ion cannons washed across a tight formation of coralskippers, causing them to spin out of control; the skips veered out of the main engagement area above the moon of Pyria VI.
The blastboat shuddered. Saba checked her diagnostics screen, saw nothing, and glanced at Danni, who was on the main sensors.
Danni shook her head. “No damage. But … well … it’s a good excuse.”
Saba hissed in vexation, but said, “Do it.”
Danni activated a control on her console board. Saba, unhappy, added a little wobble to the blastboat’s motion as it looped around toward another patch of coralskippers.
“Wild Knights One, this is Green Leader. You’re venting atmosphere, repeat, venting atmosphere. Can you hear me? Over.”
Saba stared unhappily at her controls. Of course they were venting atmosphere. They’d rigged the rear of the blastboat with a couple of new valves to do just that—to eject a compressed oxygen and nitrogen mix to suggest they’d been hulled.
Danni activated her comlink. “Green Leader, this is Wild One. We’ve taken major grutchin hits. Venting … they’re chewing through toward the engines …” Her voice sounded pained, and she added a racking cough to her performance. “Smoke in the cabin …”
“Wild One, get out of here. Get to ground, now. We’ll hold here.”
“Thanks, Green Leader. Wild Knights are—” Danni clicked the comlink off and then added, unnecessarily, “away.” She looked up at Saba, guilt in her expression.
Saba hissed again and banked around back toward Borleias.
Behind them, over the next few minutes, the other members of the Wild Knights would follow suit. As each took a minor bit of damage, he or she’d behave as though the cra
ft had sustained a major hit and turn toward home. Eventually the other units defending the moon over Pyria VI would find their situation untenable and have to abandon their post.
That was the plan. But it felt like losing. It felt like abandoning comrades to the enemy.
And that was something Saba Sebatyne did not do. Had she been a human, the pressure she exerted on the controls would have turned her knuckles white.
* * *
Captain Reth grinned after the departing Wild Knights leader. Certainly, the blastboat’s departure weakened their position. But the almighty Jedi leader of that famous squadron was fleeing the battle zone, her tail between her legs, and he, commander of the lowly cobbled-together Green Squadron, was still in the fight.
He returned his attention to the enemy before him. It wouldn’t do to receive his medals posthumously.
“Analysis,” Wyrpuuk Cha said.
Kadlah Cha joined him again. “We have caught their outpost off guard,” she said, and gestured at the engagement zone most distant from Borleias. “They supported it with insufficient numbers. No matter what they choose to throw at us, we can bring units to it faster and in better condition from the reserve fleet.”
“Good. Go on.”
She gestured at the main battle zone, above Borleias. “Here, matters are not so promising. Their defense of the hardpoint site on the ground is ferocious, and we are losing forces, coralskippers especially, at a far greater rate than they are losing analogous forces.”
“Have they demonstrated any new tactics, new weapons?”
She shook her head.
“Good. They’re fighting with spirit, but don’t seem to have any surprises for us. We can break their spirit.” He considered. “We’ll continue until this outpost has fallen to us, and break off the assault on Borleias for now. We’ll use the outpost as a staging area. Break any prisoners found at the outpost, and arrange for all information, all memory, found there to be sent to the warmaster.”
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 9