Tarc shook his head. “They’re better at everything than I am. Even Syal and Myri.”
Leia exchanged a look with Han. Han cleared his throat. “Sure, kid, strap into the seat behind mine. And cinch everything down tight.”
The two coralskipper squadrons came laser-straight toward the Twin Suns pilots. As Twin Suns broke again into four shield trios, the coralskippers broke into four units of six, one each to a shield trio.
“Standard procedures,” Jaina said, and angled toward one of the six coralskippers heading her way. She reached out for Kyp within the Force, found him and grabbed him as easily as catching a comrade’s hand, then waited for him to select a target.
He did. They fired together, Jag firing an almost undetectable fraction of a second later. Kyp’s lasers found the target coralskipper’s void; Jaina’s blasted through the bow, Jag’s through the pilot canopy. Then they hurtled past, the remaining five coralskippers turning in pursuit.
As she banked around for another pass, Jaina spared a glance for her sensor board. It showed all the coralskippers still engaged with the starfighters; the six skips on the second shield trio, the one with Piggy in it, had already been reduced to five, and the other two groups were intact. No one was maneuvering against the pipefighter, which was still pouring laser energy in three directions—no, one direction, as the two greater pipes shut down, leaving just the smaller pipe to fire energy at the center of the pipefighters’ long-distance formation.
A stream of plasma cannon projectiles poured past her X-wing, at a distance of fifty meters or so, close by starfighter battle standards but not close enough to worry her. These coralskipper pilots weren’t the best the Yuuzhan Vong had to offer; she could tell by the difficulty they had in maintaining pursuit of her squadron’s starfighters, by the fact that incoming fire was not drifting close enough to be terrifying. Even the comm chatter suggested the comparative lack of danger the squadrons were facing; the voices of Rogue Squadron and Blackmoon Squadron conveyed tension, but not as much as in more challenging exchanges.
Jaina led her shield trio around in a wide loop that kept them ahead of their pursuers but brought them to within firing range of the skips assaulting Twin Suns Seven through Nine. She gave Kyp a little confirming flicker through the Force; he chose another target and fired. This skip pilot managed to veer away and get his void up behind his narrower profile, intercepting the lasers of both Jaina and Kyp, but Jag’s, at a slightly different angle and fired at a slight delay, sprayed around the void and tore out the skip’s underbelly. The coralskipper veered away, barely under control, and began a long loop away from the combat zone.
“This is a trap.” It was Piggy’s voice, and Jaina saw that the message was being routed directly to her through her astromech; none of the other pilots would be hearing it. “I recommend we return to base.”
Jaina frowned. The five skips pursuing her shield trio were now in a wedge formation, the boldest of them well out ahead of the others. “Explain that, Piggy.”
She reached out to Kyp, feeling for a moment his hand on his X-wing’s yoke. She handled both her controls and his, simultaneously, identically, and both X-wings decelerated and gained altitude relative to their pursuers. Jag, left out of their Force link, leapt ahead.
Jaina gave Kyp the cue. He targeted the lead skip and fired just as she did. Jag, in his more maneuverable clawcraft, inverted in a maneuver tight enough to send an X-wing out of control and fired at the lead skip’s bow. The skip’s dovin basal brought its void up to capture Jag’s lasers, but Jaina’s and Kyp’s fire shredded it, sending glowing yorik coral chunks in all directions.
Jaina and Kyp kept up their fire, concentrating on the port side of the coralskipper formation. Jag drifted to his starboard, flashing by those same two targets as he fired, his shots intercepted by voids but keeping those spots of darkness from swallowing the X-wings’ fire. In moments, those two skips, though not destroyed, were charred by laserfire and venting atmosphere. Jag looped around and came up behind Jaina and Kyp as they dropped into position behind the coralskipper formation.
Meanwhile, Piggy was talking. Talking and talking. “Listen to the comm chatter. We’ve been attacked by forces sophisticated enough to time simultaneous assaults on the other three squads, but they didn’t jump us until the other three were fully engaged. This is a ploy designed to make sure we’re pinned in place and happily hunting easy kills, while they set something up.”
“Copy.” Jaina trained bursts of laserfire on the skip ahead. Her Force connection with Kyp slipped as she focused on Piggy’s words.
He was right. All evidence pointed to the new Yuuzhan Vong commander being canny and experienced. He’d never set up a sophisticated assault with second-rate pilots except as a distraction, a bluff, or a trap.
But they couldn’t just flee whenever they faced a trap. The Yuuzhan Vong would come to recognize their skittishness, and then begin to exploit it.
“Piggy, we’re going to weather this one out,” she said. “I want you to broadcast that warning, the short form, in the clear on fleet frequencies. Try to sound panicked, would you?”
“Copy.” A moment later, his voice sounded across the fleet frequency, at a higher volume and pitch: “Great One, this is Twin Suns Five. I feel a trap closing around us. We have to flee.”
Jaina snorted to herself at his melodramatic words, then responded appropriately. “Be calm, Piggy. Have faith. You feel their trap. They’re about to feel mine.”
Now, she told herself, all we have to do is figure out what they’re trying to do, keep them from doing it, and do something worse to them. Easy.
Sure.
The beam from the lesser end of the pipefighter ceased. Its part in the operation was over for now. She switched to squad frequency. “Starlancer One, get out of there. Head back to base.”
“Copy. Starlancer One on our way.”
THIRTEEN
Borleias Occupation, Day 39
The streams of laser energy from Starlancers One, Two, and Three converged on Starlancer Prime, the pipefighter with the three extrusions arrayed in equal angles. Each stream entered one of the pipe openings.
Starlancer Prime’s last extrusion, the one aimed at the Coruscant system, fired, channeling its constant, meter-thick beam of laser light toward the former home of the New Republic government several light-years away.
Jag had made a clean solo kill against one of the starboard skips. That left two damaged, one unhurt, of the six that had come against them. Jaina’s sensor board showed that one of her pilots, Twin Suns Ten, was drifting powerless, but Eleven had reported that Ten was still alive.
Then there was something else on her long-range sensors, two large red blips arriving from the opposite directions at high speed, just now slowing as they reached the vicinity of the target zone. They were the right size for Yuuzhan Vong corvette analogs, and as Jaina watched, the blips fired off many more, smaller blips—signs of a coralskipper launch. “The second wave is here,” she told her squad. “Rogues, Blackmoons, Wild Knights, watch out for reinforcements at your end.”
She received three sets of acknowledgments but barely registered them as her wing trio scored quick kills on the undamaged coralskipper and one of the damaged ones. The last Yuuzhan Vong pilot from the original six turned away, toward one of the oncoming flood of coralskipper reinforcements.
Jaina let him go. Other survivors of the two first Yuuzhan Vong squadrons were also scattering back toward their reinforcements. None of them appeared to be pursuing the rapidly retreating Starlancer vehicle or the drifting Twin Suns Ten. Jaina called for her squad to muster in the few seconds available to them. “Rogues, have they sprung the same trap at your end?”
“Negative, Twins Leader.”
“Wild Knights just have the original squads, though resistance is stiffening.”
“Same with Blackmoon, Twins.”
“These are interdictors, Leader.” That was Piggy’s voice. “They’re not here fo
r the Starlancers. They’re here for you.”
“Plot us a course out of here, Piggy. Away from the Starlancers’ escape vector.”
A bare second later, a projected course sprang up on Jaina’s nav computer. It didn’t lead through the area showing the most open space. Jaina wondered why Piggy had deliberately ignored that most logical option—and then realized that he’d probably done so because it was the most logical option, and one the Yuuzhan Vong had doubtless planned on her choosing. He had to have seen other things she’d missed for him to decide on this course.
Whatever his reasoning, she oriented along his escape vector and fired her thrusters at full acceleration. The rest of Twin Suns came up smoothly behind her. Ahead, Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers began to congregate on her escape route; behind, more skips turned in her wake, accelerating to catch up. Her sensor board suggested that the eleven Twin Suns pilots now faced five times as many skips.
A microjump away, a fraction of a light-year outside the Pyria system, Han and Leia listened to the holocomm traffic from their daughter’s battle zone. “I’m going back,” Han said.
Leia looked as ashen as Han felt. Slowly, she shook her head. “We can’t help her.”
“The hell we can’t. I can get her escape vector, and we can drill a hole in from the other side before the Vong know we’re coming—”
“Fine. What do you want me to tell our passengers, the children?”
Han gave an inarticulate growl. He sat with muscles locked, listening to find out what would become of his daughter.
“We screwed up,” Wedge said. As usual during missions of any importance, he stood in the control chamber beside the hologram displaying the mission zone.
Tycho nodded, looking glum. He didn’t elaborate on Wedge’s words.
He didn’t need to. The two of them had had the mission and the Yuuzhan Vong response plotted out in great detail. The Yuuzhan Vong would, at some point, make an attempt to grab the Starlancer vehicles. The pilots of the pipefighters would be theoretically able to detach their cockpits, which had their own rudimentary thrusters, and escape, destroying the pipe assemblies with primitive mechanical self-destruct systems that were unlikely to be affected by enemy countermeasures, leaving behind just enough clues to give the Yuuzhan Vong a hint of what was going on.
But that whole approach assumed that the Starlancers would be the Yuuzhan Vong target. Instead, it appeared that Jaina Solo was the target.
And since only Jaina’s squadron had been attacked in this fashion, it meant that Yuuzhan Vong spotters on the ground or in Borleias orbit had identified her and correctly determined her course, suggesting that they were even more on the ball than Wedge and Tycho had guessed.
“How long before we can get anyone to her?” Wedge asked.
Tycho shrugged. “Two minutes to get the frigate Lunar Tide to the site. And that’ll just get Lunar Tide destroyed. Five minutes for the task force now leaving Borleias’s mass shadow.”
Wedge weighed the numbers, not forgetting that among them were numbers of the living crew of the vessels involved. How many lives was Jaina Solo worth? More important, how much harm would it do to them, to their plans, to demonstrate the New Republic habit, considered a weakness by the Yuuzhan Vong, to risk and probably doom a greater number of people to save a smaller number?
“Tell Lunar Tide to get into position to jump … but not jump until we give the order. They’ll wait for the task force unless we say otherwise.”
Tycho nodded and turned to his comm board.
With the discipline of decades, Wedge was able to conceal the way his decision tied his insides up in knots, and he prayed that he wouldn’t have to tell Han and Leia that he’d doomed their daughter.
* * *
“I can get the squad out of here,” Jag said.
“Care to share the information?” Jaina asked.
“It’ll take too long, Goddess. Care to trust me?”
Jaina weighed the question for part of a second and found that she did—if he said he knew how to get them out alive, then he did. “We’re your wing,” she said.
“You and Kyp, launch shadow bombs. Have them follow me at a distance of a few meters—as close as you can manage. You’ll know when to drop them. Hang back, let me lead you by a few kilometers.” Without waiting for further authorization or acknowledgment, Jag hit his thrusters and pulled out ahead of the Twin Suns formation.
Jaina felt slight confusion from Kyp, a sort of question mark. She offered up a mental shrug. She armed and launched one shadow bomb, then reached out to grab it with the Force and hurtle it along in Jag’s wake. She dimly detected Kyp’s similar efforts; his shadow bomb was well ahead of hers.
The foremost oncoming coralskippers were almost on Jag now, but he executed a starboard turn, as close to a right-angle turn as a TIE pilot could manage, and headed directly toward one of the Yuuzhan Vong interdictors, the one between their position and the safety of Borleias.
The oncoming coralskippers vectored to follow Jag. Jaina opened fire, spraying them with stuttering red laser bolts, and heeled over in Jag’s wake; she saw laserfire from her fellow pilots flashing into the cloud of skips, saw one of the Yuuzhan Vong craft detonate.
This was hard going. She had to fly, fire, and keep track of her shadow bomb in the Force—and the latter task was one of the more difficult, because Jag was jinking and juking as only a TIE or A-wing fighter pilot could, dodging incoming plasma cannon fire from the interdictor so nimbly and acrobatically that the chief danger to him was that he’d twitch into the path of a plasma projectile rather than having one seek and find him. Keeping the shadow bomb tucked in right behind him was proving an almost impossible task. Her bomb strayed to either side of Jag’s clawcraft with every sideslip he performed.
Then she felt Kyp reach to her through the Force. She could suddenly see his technique; she saw Jag’s living presence in the Force, and there were the two unliving things that were his shadow bombs, and Kyp had connected them as if encasing all three in a bubble so that whenever Jag moved, he himself drew the bomb along with him. Kyp was supplying the energy, but Jag, unknowing, was directing it. Jaina tried to do the same, tried to draw a connection between her bomb and Jag … and though, in that instant, she knew she hadn’t developed the degree of control Kyp had, she could tell that her shadow bomb was now shadowing Jag more effectively.
The coralskippers they’d been heading toward mere moments ago had now turned in their wake. Jaina put most of her discretionary X-wing energy into her rear shields and concentrated on flitting like a piranha-beetle, keeping the pursuing Yuuzhan Vong pilots from getting a good shot in at her. Her other pilots were doing the same.
Jag had increased his lead to several kilometers, and up ahead loomed the bulk of the Yuuzhan Vong interdictor. Its squadrons of coralskippers, which had dispersed to head off the Twin Suns’ escape were congregating again, but they’d been caught off guard by the run against the interdictor. Of course they had. From a logical point of view, it was the dumbest thing the New Republic pilots could have done.
Jag aimed straight in at the capital ship’s bow, the node where its dovin basals were concentrated—the dovin basals that dragged the ship through space, that projected the voids that drank incoming damage, that projected gravitic fluctuations into hyperspace to drag ships in transit back into realspace—and to keep nearby craft from making the jump into hyperspace. And finally Jaina knew and understood Jag’s plan.
His evasive maneuvers became tighter, faster, more random as he neared the interdictor and its full array of plasma cannons opened up on him. Jaina, through her tentative Force connection with Jag, could feel little spikes of alarm and adrenaline go through him, something she would never have guessed, given his calm demeanor in every situation.
“Coming up on drop point,” Jag said, his tone as indifferent as if he’d just ordered a meal he didn’t look forward to eating. “Three, two …” His clawcraft began spraying laserfire in a spiral patter
n, the interdictor’s voids greedily sucking it all in. Jaina could see the voids concentrating there before Jag’s clawcraft, anticipating the spread of his attack.
Anticipating. He was so good at anticipating, predicting, that he could use the anticipation of his enemies as a weapon against them. Jaina shook her head.
“… one, drop.”
Jag’s clawcraft vectored again, another angle only a TIE craft could manage, but he continued to direct his laserfire against the flank of the interdictor. Its voids tracked, staying ahead of his lasers.
Jaina yanked her shadow bomb away from Jag, kept it almost on his original course, pulling it to port. Kyp maneuvered his up and to starboard. A void sprang up before Kyp’s.
But Jaina’s hit, detonating in a brilliant flash mere meters from the dovin basal node. She felt another jolt of alarm from Jag, but he did not disappear from her perceptions.
She looped around the dying interdictor, spraying fire at a pair of coralskippers approaching from ahead to port, and her laser attacks were joined by those of her squadmates. The two skips were reduced to superheated yorik coral rubble in a matter of moments … and suddenly there was nothing between her squad and Borleias but open space. Coralskippers were angling in from the sides, but none could manage an intercept course capable of catching her X-wings. She breathed a sigh of relief.
Then her breath left her. Her unit consisted of only ten blips. Twin Suns Three wasn’t back with them. She found Jag on the sensor board, back in the vicinity of the dying interdictor, at an angle that was carrying him back into the midst of the coralskippers.
“Twins Three, this is Leader. What are you doing?”
“Sorry, Leader.” Jag’s voice sounded pained. “I was grazed by a singularity effect. My shields are stripped and the yank put me off course. I’ll have to catch up to you later.”
That was just pilot bravado. Jag had nearly two squadrons of coralskippers converging on him from all directions. No available exit vector would let him use the clawfighter’s superior speed to just speed past opposition; he’d have to fight his way out, and without shields, he didn’t have a chance. His skills might let him last a few seconds, perhaps a minute. Then he would be dead.
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 21