Jaina wavered. Jag was one of her pilots. She couldn’t leave him behind. Couldn’t.
But Kyp was still in contact with her, still connected through the Force. She heard him across the comm unit: “No, Jaina. If you go back, you’ve just thrown away what he did for you. You can’t be captured.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice sounded weak to her. She watched as the closest of the coralskippers came within firing range of Jag. He resumed his evasive flying; the little blip representing him on the sensor board blurred as the sensors tried to keep up with his movements.
“Let’s go,” Kyp said. His voice was solemn, and she could feel that his regret was genuine.
“Yes,” she said. “Twin Suns, set course for Borleias, jump when ready. Let the planet’s mass drag you out of hyperspace.” She saw Twin Suns Eleven jump almost immediately; Tilath must have had the course already plotted.
Over the next few moments, the others jumped, all but her and Kyp, while on the sensor screen Jag’s blip became surrounded by an increasingly thick screen of red dots.
“I’m waiting for you,” Jaina said. She could barely hear her own voice. There seemed to be a haze over her eyes, a cloud of white noise in her ears.
“I’m waiting for you,” Kyp said.
“Together, then.” Jaina took a deep breath, watching the ever-tightening web of coralskippers around Jag. They were channeling him, leaving the screen lighter in one direction, and he was inexorably moving toward the other interdictor. “On three. One, two, three, jump.”
Neither X-wing jumped.
“Blast it, Kyp, go home.” Jaina yanked on her yoke, sending her X-wing in the tightest turn she could manage back toward the combat. Back toward the stream of coralskippers pursuing her. And she found, in that moment, that the haze over her eyes and white noise in her ears disappeared.
“Jaina, no.” Kyp stayed with her. “You can’t do this. You can’t save him. You can only kill yourself.”
“Shut up.” He wasn’t dead. Jag was still flying, he still had a trigger under his finger, he wouldn’t die. She would get there. She would save him.
The first of her pursuers began firing. They weren’t firing plasma cannons. Space around her was suddenly riddled with grutchins, the burrowing insects that could disable a craft. She twitched her yoke, allowing the Force to guide her evasive maneuvers, and switched discretionary power to her forward shields. So far, there were none of the distinctive ping noises of a grutchin hit.
“Jaina, this is Colonel Celchu. This transmission is scrambled and coming through your astromech. General Antilles is issuing a direct order. Do not reenter the combat zone. Return to base. Do you understand?”
Part of her did. Part of her knew that Wedge Antilles had concluded that Jag Fel was lost, and was not willing to exploit even the faint chance Jaina Solo offered to save his own nephew. That’s how bad it looked.
“Don’t tell me the odds,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper. She flashed past the first squadron of pursuers. They looped wide to turn in her wake without getting in the way of the second squadron. Now grutchins were coming at her from two directions.
“I didn’t tell you the odds.” For once, Tycho sounded confused.
“Good.”
Kyp hung doggedly at Jaina’s side, firing as constantly as his lasers would recycle. Jaina wasn’t firing. Her mind was somewhere else, not even acknowledging the coralskippers as threats, only her reflexes keeping the grutchins off her. Kyp nailed one oncoming coralskipper, his lasers hitting the dovin basal and then shearing through into the skip’s main body. He checked his sensor board. Only forty-nine skips and one interdictor to go.
Then it was forty-eight. The number on the board dropped and one little light near Jag’s blip winked out. But Jag was now awfully close to that interdictor.
Then the answer came to Kyp. “Jaina, I can save him, but I need your help.”
He felt a flicker from her. “How? ” she asked.
“Aim straight in for the other interdictor’s bow. Go ahead and punch through the cloud around Jag to give him some relief. And protect me. I’m going to be too busy to shoot.”
“Kyp, the shadow bomb thing can’t work again. They’ll be looking for it.”
“That’s not what I’m going to do. Do you trust me?”
“Do it.”
They traded places then, Jaina suddenly opening up with her weapons, Kyp handing the task of flying evasively over to his reflexes while his mind went elsewhere.
Luke Skywalker had done this once, a couple of years ago. He’d mentioned it to the other Jedi. No one else had tried it because it had exhausted Luke to the point of collapse, and Jedi were seldom in a position to survive a technique that tired them so completely.
They were past the second wave of coralskippers now and heading toward the cloud surrounding Jag. Beyond it, not far now, was the second interdictor. Kyp knew that other skips had to be converging on him and Jaina. He didn’t bother to look at his sensor board. They weren’t relevant now.
And he didn’t think he’d be as terribly drained as Luke by the technique. He was stronger in the Force than Luke Skywalker.
He’d known that almost since they’d met—that he had more pure power than the legendary Jedi Master. But this was, perhaps, the first time he’d been able to say it to himself without a little thrill of pride. He was just stronger, and that was all. It usually didn’t matter. Now it did.
They reached the edge of the coralskipper cloud around Jag. Jaina and Kyp flashed by the skips that had turned against them, dodging their incoming fire, Jaina spraying return fire. Suddenly they were in the middle, with Jag’s clawcraft turning in their wake, and the interdictor was before them.
Absently, barely aiming, Kyp squeezed the trigger of his lasers. His red beams flashed out against the interdictor, and a void moved in position to intercept the beams.
Within the Force, within the broader range of senses it gave him, he tried to feel the presence of that void. He couldn’t feel the Yuuzhan Vong or their creatures, but he could feel distortions in space, hard little nuggets of wrongness where there should be nothing.
He felt many of them, but didn’t know which belonged to the interdictor, which to the coralskippers, and this rarefied sensory data didn’t precisely translate to exact directions and distances. A void that felt far away could be from a coralskipper close at hand.
He armed a proton torpedo and fired it. He felt its physical presence as, in a matter of seconds, it closed the distance between him and the interdictor … and was swallowed by another void.
He felt it enter the void, felt which of the many singularities it was.
And he seized upon that void, directing all his Force abilities and discipline against it.
It was like using a thin metal rod to push a grounded landspeeder. Too much pressure and it would bend, becoming useless. Too little and nothing would happen. He had to find the right pressure to budge it, to set it into motion and keep it going that way …
For a moment, the only things in the universe were him, Jaina, and the void. He moved the void, turned it around, moved it back the other direction.
Then he was himself again, in the cockpit, watching the flank of the interdictor distort. The void had moved back and touched the interdictor, and now the interdictor elongated into it, extending what looked like a pliant extrusion of what he knew to be hardened yorik coral into the singularity.
The portions of the interdictor in closest proximity to the void accelerated faster into its maw so that portions farther back tore, venting gases into space. But the incredible gravity of the singularity didn’t allow the remainder of the ship to tear away and be free. It dragged greater and greater portions of the interdictor into it, compressing them, rending them, and in a moment the interdictor was gone.
Kyp felt obliterated, bone-tired, as though he’d run for days, drawing on the Force to sustain him, and had finally settled down for rest. His diagnostics board wa
s beeping at him and he spared it a glance. “I’ve taken damage,” he said. “A grutchin, I think.”
In fact, a portion of his cockpit, to starboard, was starting to blacken, with acrid smoke pouring off it. Idly, he pulled his lightsaber from his belt and oriented its head toward the blackened area.
A moment later, the metal parted and insectile eyes shoved their way into the cockpit. Kyp thumbed his lightsaber on and the energy blade plunged through the creature. Kyp turned it off again. Its noise was muted by the fact that almost all the atmosphere in the cockpit had disappeared through the hole in those few moments; Kyp’s flight suit activated, its energy shield technology holding atmosphere in around him, keeping pressure on his skin. “Grutchin problem solved,” he said.
“Sorry about that,” Jaina said. Her voice was muted.
Kyp glanced at his sensor board. He, Jaina, and Jag were outbound from the engagement zone. Maybe twenty coralskippers were in pursuit.
But there were now other friendlies on the board, a cloud tagged Rogue Squadron, a capital-ship-sized blip tagged Lunar Tide, approaching from the approximate direction of galactic spin. “Let’s go that direction,” Kyp suggested.
“We’ll do that, Kyp,” Jaina said. “Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it.”
Han sat, limp and gray, in his seat and forced himself to take deeper breaths.
Leia didn’t look any better than he felt. “We raised her that way, Han, whether we intended to or not.”
“I know.”
“So we can’t exactly criticize her.”
“Since when does logic interfere with my right to complain to her? Especially when she does something that stupid?”
“Han.”
“I’m twenty years older than I was this morning. Twenty years, Leia.”
“You’re starting to sound like Threepio.”
He scowled at her. “Am I really?”
“Just fly. The faster we get to the Maw, the faster we can return.”
FOURTEEN
Yuuzhan Vong Warldship, Coruscant Orbit
The laser beam, a meter thick, flashed from the depths of space to strike Tsavong Lah’s worldship.
It hit with the force of a turbolaser battery, pouring damage onto the worldship surface, superheating the yorik coral there, scarring deeply into it.
Less than a second later, a void materialized beneath it, intercepting it, swallowing all the damage. The void remained there as the damage continued to rain down. Then, a minute later, the laser attack ceased, and the void disappeared.
In the worldship control chamber, Tsavong Lah took the news of the attack with puzzlement in his manner. “Extent of damage?” he asked.
“Minimal,” Maal Lah said. “The damage is already regenerating. Within a day, there will be nothing but a battle scar.”
“And you have not found the vehicle or emplacement that fired it.”
“No, Warmaster. Though it appears that it was fired from beyond the orbit of this system’s outermost planet, and took considerable time to reach our worldship.”
“Demonstrating merely that they have enough spotters on the planet below, and that those spotters have enough communications gear, that they can keep track of this worldship’s position while it remains in orbit.” Tsavong Lah shrugged. “Why would they demonstrate this knowledge in a way that gains them no advantage?”
“I do not know, Warmaster.”
Tsavong Lah considered, barely distracted by the twinging sensations brought on by the parasites burrowing their way through the flesh of his arm.
A thought occurred to him, a discouraging one. “Trace the course of that laser attack.”
“We have already done so, Warmaster.”
“Trace it beyond the Coruscant system. What other planetary systems are directly along that line?”
Maal Lah gestured to one of his analysts, and within moments the analyst brought them the answer. “Pyria,” Maal Lah said.
“Open the villip to my father. And bring Viqi Shesh to me.”
Borleias Occupation, Day 39
Though the doors to the special ops docking bay were open, and the X-wings of Rogue Squadron were maneuvering through them to land, Jaina, Kyp, and Jag were directed to land in the kill zone, only a few dozen meters from the front entranceway, in an area where no other vehicles were situated. One officer stood there alone, and as they came in for a landing, Jaina recognized him: Colonel Celchu.
Her heart couldn’t sink much. It was already somewhere around her ankles. But she felt it descend the final few centimeters to her toes.
As the pilots emerged from their starfighters, Tycho looked between them. “Anyone hurt?” he asked.
They all shook their heads. Kyp, though undamaged, leaned heavily against the wing of his snubfighter, and Tycho gave him a second look. “You, go lie down,” he said.
“Happy to.” Kyp glanced at Jaina. “By your leave, Great One.”
“Get some rest, Kyp.”
Tycho turned to Jaina. “General Antilles wants to see you, now.”
“I expect so.”
“And me?” Jag asked.
“Later,” Tycho said. “Though he did want me to extend his congratulations on that shadow bomb tactic. Since kills can’t be awarded to more than two people, he thinks that first interdictor should be awarded to you.”
“I agree,” Jaina said. “I’ll sign off on that.”
“Me, too,” Kyp said.
They walked into the biotics building. Kyp managed not to stagger as he left them for his quarters.
At Wedge’s office, Tycho left Jaina and Jag to enter the inner office, then stuck his head out a moment later to say, “It’ll be about five minutes.”
“Understood,” Jaina said.
When Tycho had withdrawn again into the inner office, leaving them with Wedge’s protocol droid, Jag said, “I need to talk to you. Privately.”
Jaina couldn’t tell, from his quiet, controlled manner, what he intended to convey to her, but she had a good idea. “There’s a little conference room down the corridor.”
“That’ll do.”
She knew what he was going to say. His face would turn pale with his anger, highlighting the scar on his forehead, and he would cut her with his words. You abandoned your mission objectives for one pilot, he’d say. You almost wiped out the rest of your squadron. You almost wrecked the plan. No one’s life is worth that. Not mine. Not yours. You’re a complete failure as a leader, as an officer.
He’d say that, and she wouldn’t have any words with which to defend herself, because he’d be right.
He’d stare at her with an expression made up of analytical calculation and hard experience. He’d tell her what he thought of her. Then he’d turn and walk away. He’d find himself a unit to command, a unit that could be counted on to perform up to his professional standards.
A sharp pain sprang up in her gut, as though she’d inadvertently swallowed a vibroblade and her movements had finally switched it on. But she held herself straight. She had to be able to look him in the eye when he started in on the verbal beating she knew she deserved.
They reached the conference room, its door open, its interior cool and dark; Jag turned on the overhead lights, closed the door behind Jaina.
She faced him, hoping that what she was feeling wasn’t reflected in her expression. “I know what you’re going to say,” she told him.
“I don’t think you do.” Oddly, his face was not the stern mask she’d expected. If anything, he looked uncertain, unlike the Jag Fel she was used to.
“You’re going to tell me that I screwed up. You’re going to elaborate until you’re certain I can’t take it anymore. Then you’re going to leave.” Her throat, constricting, caused her to lose control of the last few words; they sounded high and hoarse to her.
“No. We both know that your command decisions were far afield of common sense and effective strategy. We don’t even have to discuss that. What I have to know
…” He hesitated, and if anything looked even less sure of himself than before, “What I have to know is this: Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. You have to know. Nobody else but you could know.” He leaned in closer. It wasn’t a posture of intimidation; he stared into her eyes as if he hoped to find an answer, any answer, written in tiny letters on her pupils. “Answer me.”
“I … I …” Her voice hoarsened until she was sure she could no longer use it, but finally words emerged, words that seemed to be coming from a child. “Everyone is going away.” Tears blurred her vision. “They keep going away and I can’t stop it. I didn’t want you to go away.”
Then the tears did come, and Jag was transformed into a wavery block of black uniform with a wavery block of pale skin atop it. She could no longer read his expression but knew it had to be one of puzzlement or distaste or outright contempt—
Then he took her by the shoulders and pulled her to him, drawing her head against his chest, resting his own head atop hers, an embrace that startled her so much that she should have jumped away. But she didn’t. She leaned against him, a half collapse, her legs no longer willing or able to bear all her weight, and though she did not sob, her tears ran down her face and soaked into his uniform.
“I won’t go anywhere,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why won’t you go anywhere?”
“Because I don’t want to.” He tilted his head down and hers up, and suddenly she was kissing him, holding him tight enough to cause a vacuum weld.
Her confusion didn’t disappear, but it was joined by a soaring sensation, as though she’d just taken off and left her X-wing behind. There was also an abrupt relief of pressure, unbearable pressure that she had never felt descending upon her, had never noticed until it was gone.
Gavin Darklighter departed Wedge’s office. Wedge and Tycho looked up as Jag entered and saluted.
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 22