Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I

by Aaron Allston

  Over the Yuuzhan Vong armor, he wore an environment suit, a big, bulky, ancient one no one would miss when he had to shred it upon landing.

  He reached out to Mara, felt her in the Force, felt her living presence. She reached back, an absent gesture; he knew her mind had to be elsewhere, on their mission, on their child.

  Lando’s voice came over his helmet speakers. “We’re getting into range.” The ship, and everything in the cargo area, shuddered. “Sorry about that. Little bit of plasma goo.” His voice was replaced by 1-1A’s for a moment: “I have destroyed a sixth one.” Then Lando was back: “Knock off the running tally, would you? Um, we’ll go into a lateral maneuver in just a minute and punch you out. If you find yourselves in vacuum before then, just go on without me.”

  “I have destroyed a seventh one.”

  “I told you—”

  “I am teaching myself to taunt you.”

  Lando pulled a pilot’s helmet on. His fancy tunic and cloak concealed a far more ordinary pilot’s jumpsuit, and he checked its connections to make sure it was ready to seal him off in case of pressure loss. A piece of plasma had already burned its way through the transparisteel of the forward viewport, and air was hissing out through it.

  The Record Time shook every few seconds now. Its tail section was taking the brunt of the damage—plasma cannon fire, barely reduced by the failing shields, from both pursuing coralskippers and the trailing frigate analog—while the forward section was suffering from hit after hit launched by a single coralskipper.

  But they were almost in position. Lando keyed his helmet microphone. “Coming up on launch zone in fifteen seconds. There’s not going to be a countdown. When we’re there, I’m going to punch you out.”

  “Force be with you, Lando.”

  “Luck be with you, Luke.” Lando switched off the comlink and returned his attention to the controls.

  This was tricky. He put the ungainly, disintegrating freighter into a slow port turn, bringing its starboard side around to face the sunny side of the planet below. “Ready yourself, One-One-A.” Then he tripped the newly installed switch labeled GO.

  The ship’s inertial compensator kicked off. Though he tightly gripped the arms of his chair and was strapped into place, Lando felt himself yanked to the right, heard the post his seat was bolted to creak from the sudden pressure.

  All around the forward section of the ship, explosives attached to the outer hull would be going off. They weren’t high explosives; they had just enough detonating power to fire chaff and thick smoky residue out in all directions. From outside, it would look as though Record Time were experiencing a series of internal explosions.

  The smoke and chaff concealed the starboard cargo bay door, which should have been slung open by the maneuver and loss of artificial gravity. Lando saw that its gauge registered that it was open, that its atmospheric pressure was approaching zero, that its own temporary inertial compensator had activated.

  He looked out the starboard viewport. There, a cloud of debris was tumbling away from the freighter, directly toward Coruscant’s surface far below.

  He keyed his helmet microphone again. “Survivor Cell Thirty-Eight, this is the final transmission of Rescue Two. Sorry we couldn’t get to you. Hope you have better luck next time.” That message, he knew, would be picked up by a New Republic scout ship at the edge of the Coruscant system and relayed to Wedge Antilles; it meant that Luke and his party were safely away.

  He turned to 1-1A. “All right, let’s get—”

  A blast of plasma from the frigate analog hit the center of the span joining the two sections of Record Time. The span parted, and the ripple from the impact shook the length of the ship. This time, Lando’s chair post did break, bouncing him, still strapped into his chair, into the air. With the ship’s artificial gravity dead, he rose until he banged into the bridge ceiling, bounced off, and began drifting toward the fist-sized hole in the forward viewport.

  “Oh, I have a really good feeling about this,” he said.

  Luke felt abrupt weightlessness, then sudden acceleration as he was punched out of the cargo bay and, he hoped, toward the planet.

  He checked the sensor readouts glued to the pod surface before him. They showed course—correct. Number—correct; all of his comrades were with him still. As he watched, the inertial compensator in the unit at his feet activated, rotating him so that he approached Coruscant feet-first. Minor repulsor bursts would be keeping him in close proximity to the others.

  He shook his head, dissatisfied. He didn’t like to be in any small vehicle when he wasn’t at the controls. And this was a vehicle only by a very generous broadening of the definition of that word.

  Lando got himself unstrapped from his chair and kicked against the viewport. The move carried him away from it, but also caused cracks to appear where his heel had struck, cracks that reached the plasma hole and radiated in other directions as well.

  One-One-A pushed himself free from his seat, a trajectory that carried him past Lando and toward the door out. He caught Lando around the waist as he traveled, Lando’s mass barely causing a change in his direction, and reached the door recess. He clamped his feet down at the bottom of the recess and, with his free hand, sheared through the metal door.

  Atmosphere behind it poured through, tugging Lando, but 1-1A merely shoved his way through the ruins of the door and into the passageway beyond.

  “Good work,” Lando said.

  “Is that more taunting, or a compliment?”

  “Neither, really. In this case, it stands in for a ‘thank-you,’ which is what it really means. Now can you get us into the bay? Because that last blast seems to have pushed us toward the atmosphere, and we’re going to be carbon dust in a few seconds to a minute.”

  “You’re welcome.” One-One-A kicked again, and they were floating weightless down the passageway.

  Luke could feel the heat now; for all the Wraiths’ claims, heat soaked into the descent unit and was transmitted into the pod, cutting through his environment suit, through his armor, causing him to burst into sweat from scalp to toes.

  The sensor board before him winked out. Then, beyond it, he saw the pod interior surface go from black to red, to yellow—and then flame was licking at it there, flame that grew and spread.

  The pod rocked. Luke knew that friction had to have caused a pit in the bottom of his pod; atmosphere was getting a foothold in the pit, causing greater friction, causing the whole unit to sway. He felt a rumble in his feet as the repulsorlift there increased power output to keep the unit upright.

  Abruptly there was a bright flash and the top of the pod was gone. Luke found himself in a column of fire, streaming yellow flames that reached from the edges of the descent unit at his feet straight up into the air; he could see nothing beyond it. For a moment, a memory over twenty-five years old rose before him, the vision of the smoking remains of his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, as they lay on the sands in front of his home on Tatooine.

  He forced the memory away and tried to gain a little perspective. If this is bad for me, he thought, what is it going to be like for Tahiri? A teenager?

  Luke felt a jolt under his feet, sudden deceleration; his knees flexed as he absorbed the shock. The deceleration remained constant and the flames began to diminish, to waver.

  In moments he could see his surroundings through them. Mara was no more than ten meters away, her face not visible through her environment suit and Yuuzhan Vong armor. The others were all nearby.

  They were less than two kilometers above the world’s surface, still falling, but not at terminal velocity. And though he’d lived on Coruscant for many years, this wasn’t the surface he remembered. Great buildings lay toppled, their angles no longer conforming to those of the structures around them. Everything was coated with green, a poisonous shade of the color. At least the orange-and-brown clouds in the distance, full of rain and lightning, were the same, one reassuring piece of familiarity.

  “Interesting
ride, farmboy.” Mara’s voice was clear over the comlink; any interference brought on by the atmospheric friction of their decent was now ended.

  Luke repressed a snicker. “Not too bad.”

  “Face?” That was Tahiri’s voice, faint, full of emotion. Luke winced. He and Mara would need to offer her some reassurance.

  “Yes?”

  “I want one! I’ve got to have one of these when we get back. Oh, what a ride! Can we do it again?”

  Luke shook his head and felt Mara laughing at him.

  One-One-A had to use his blaster on the main door into the cargo bay. Once it was shredded and gone, the atmosphere from the passageway nearly blew the two of them into the bay itself, but the combat droid held fast.

  Lando poked his head in. The B-wing seemed to be secure. The cargo ramp door was still down, maybe gone, and he could see starry space beyond—space, and, as the remains of the ship rotated, a coralskipper still pouring fire into its side as the ruins descended toward the atmosphere.

  Cold began seeping into Lando’s bones. “Let’s go.”

  A minute later, just as the outer edges of the Record Time began glowing from friction, Lando’s B-wing erupted from the cargo bay, turning away from the pursuing coralskipper, away from the frigate and other skips that had chosen to hang back once their task was done. With 1-1A silent in the passenger seat, Lando plotted a course that would carry them out of Coruscant’s mass shadow, to a point where he could make a jump, any jump, to hyperspace and get clear.

  He turned to look at the combat droid. “And I did it looking good,” he said.

  “Is this taunting, too?”

  Borleias

  The biotics facility was in clear sight now. Jaina could see it, her squadmates, the surviving starfighters and blastboats of the other eleven squadrons defending the site, and fires—dozens of fires raging in the jungle outside the kill zone. She poured her lasers into distant targets: ranges, coralskippers. She saw a Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog a dozen kilometers away, in the zone defended by Rogue Squadron. The frigate blossomed in fire and blood as a proton torpedo found its mark. But there were more frigate analogs, other capital ships, all converging on the biotics facility.

  She shook her head. The Yuuzhan Vong force marching toward the facility was too great; the defenders could not hold the site.

  Until now, she’d been silently raging at Wedge Antilles. Whenever she’d manage to make inroads against the enemy assault, he or one of his controllers would order her to withdraw a half kilometer, a hundred meters. It was as if they didn’t want her to win. But now she could see that too much success on her part would serve only to cut Twin Suns off from the other units, to doom her and her pilots. It was probably best that she’d been ordered to fall back at the same rate as the other squadrons.

  The mind of Jaina the Goddess woke up. Jaina frowned. Fall back at the same rate. She consulted her sensor board. That was exactly what was happening. The New Republic Forces had withdrawn where they were too strong, and been reinforced where they were too weak, and now every live unit of those forces was within a kilometer of the kill zone.

  “Jag, I need to apologize to your uncle,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you why later.”

  “All units, fall back to kill zone,” Iella said. “All units, fall back to kill zone. You have fifteen seconds. Fourteen. Thirteen.”

  Jaina led her squad back, taking up position directly over the landing zone in front of the biotics building, directing their lasers back the way they’d come. “Twin Suns Squadron, on-station.” Using her repulsorlifts, she drifted to port and a stream of plasma whipped past her, splashing onto the blue transparisteel panels on the face of the building; she directed laserfire back at her attacker.

  Other unit commanders called in readiness as the countdown neared its end. Not all did. Jaina winced. She couldn’t hope that no friendlies were out there; she knew some were, pilots who’d been shot down but might still be alive.

  “Zero,” Iella said. “Hold positions.” And it began to rain.

  It didn’t rain water. It rained columns of destructive energy, massed fire from turbolaser batteries far overhead, brilliant needles of light that poured into the jungle all around the kill zone.

  The turbolaser blasts tore through vegetation, through everything beneath it. Blasts hitting trees detonated them in clouds of smoke. Beams hitting ponds and creeks and stagnant water sent up clouds of superheated steam. Beams flashed down through those clouds, but the manipulators of voids couldn’t see them coming, couldn’t maneuver the voids into place in time.

  Jaina sat transfixed. This was orbital bombardment, what the Empire’s Star Destroyers had been built to do, what no Star Destroyer under the command of the New Republic had ever done. Jaina had heard about it, but it was just history, just some old-timey thing that no one ever had to worry about.

  And now she was seeing it. Lusankya was finally fulfilling the purpose for which she had been built, before Jaina had even been born.

  For four minutes, death rained down from overhead, in a circle neatly surrounding the kill zone. Then it stopped, and the rumbles, the screams uttered by bodies of water suddenly superheated, the bellows of distant rakamats meeting their doom, all died away.

  Jaina jumped as her comlink crackled back into life. “Ground forces,” Wedge said, “commence mop-up.”

  Coruscant

  The repulsors on the descent units activated for the final portion of the descent. All the members of Luke’s group set down on the same roof—except for Kell Tainer, who hit the roof correctly, punched clean through its disintegrating duracrete surface, and ended up three stories down. “Not hurt,” he shouted up. “Hey, they’ve left behind some holodramas I haven’t seen.”

  Luke pulled off his scorched environment suit as the others did the same. He took a look around. In the distance, he could see a flight of four coralskippers; they were not aimed this way, but if he could see them, their pilots might be able to see him. “Let’s get under cover,” he said. “Shove all the trash into the hole Kell made. Look out below.”

  Mara, somehow stylishly savage in her vonduun crab armor with its helmet off, surveyed the landscape. Her lips twitched in a momentary grimace. “Welcome home,” she said.

  Luke shook his head. “This isn’t home. I wonder if it will ever be home again.”

  Yuuzhan Vong Worldship, Pyria Orbit

  Czulkang Lah blinked. How had that particular use of the infidels’ triangle ships eluded him?

  Nom Anor, he decided. Nom Anor had been the Yuuzhan Vong spy in this galaxy for decades. Like an idiot, during all those years, he had failed to discover that humans gave birth to twins so often that it was a matter of little interest to them, and this failure had cost them dearly—it had allowed the notion of Jacen and Jaina Solo as sacred twins to become a weapon in the hands of the infidels.

  Now, it seemed obvious that Nom Anor had failed to inform the Yuuzhan Vong military command of a littleused but critical tactic employed by the enemy’s senior capital ships. Unforgivable. Unforgivable.

  “Recall the ships and coralskippers harassing their orbital forces,” he told his aide. “This engagement is done.”

  “It cannot be done,” the officer whispered. “We have been embarrassed. We have failed.”

  “If you can’t live with it, find a way to kill yourself,” Czulkang Lah answered. “And I will find an aide who has intelligence as well as courage.” He turned away. He would have to give his son unpleasant news.

  Borleias

  As night fell, Jaina finished her power-down checklist. She exited her X-wing, gave it an affectionate pat, waved at Cappie, and turned toward the docking bay exit.

  But waiting for her, as he usually did now, was Jag. He wore the slight smile Jaina suspected that only she could see. “What’s up?” she said.

  “Calrissian got back from Coruscant alive. So, being Calrissian, he’s throwing a party for family and f
riends. And friends of friends, and anyone who looks interesting. He says he has pre-invasion brandy. Care to go?”

  Jaina felt herself start to shake her head, the refusal that had become second nature to her since she’d come to Borleias, but she caught herself in time. She linked her arm through his and smiled up at him. “Love to.”

  About the Author

  AARON ALLSTON is the New York Times bestselling author of novels in the Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi, Legacy of the Force, New Jedi Order, and X-Wing series, as well as the Doc Sidhe novels, which mix 1930s-style hero-pulp action with Celtic myth. He is also a longtime game designer and in 2006 was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design (AAGAD) Hall of Fame. He lives in Central Texas. Visit his website at AaronAllston.com.

  Books by Aaron Allston

  Galatea in 2-D

  Bard’s Tale Series (with Holly Lisle)

  Thunder of the Captains

  Wrath of the Princes

  Car Warriors Series

  Double Jeopardy

  Doc Sidhe Series

  Doc Sidhe

  Sidhe-Devil

  Star Wars: X-Wing series

  Wraith Squadron

  Iron Fist

  Solo Command

  Starfighters of Adumar

  Star Wars: New Jedi Order series

  Rebel Dream

  Rebel Stand

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series

  Betrayal

  Exile

  Fury

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi series

  Outcast

  Backlash

  Conviction

  Terminator 3 Series

  Terminator Dream

  Terminator Hunt

  STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe

  You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …