Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (33 page)

Then all the oncoming craft vanished.

Charat Kraal blinked, then focused his attention on his second dovin basal. The question he asked it was wordless, but understood:
Where is the vehicle
?

But the dovin basal didn’t know.

The four vehicles that the infidels called pipefighters were still ahead in the distance, however. Shaken and confused, Charat Kraal oriented toward them and kept up the pursuit, as did the others of his mighty coralskipper force.

Soon, they pulled within firing range of the flying blasphemies. Charat Kraal’s contempt grew as the foremost
coralskippers of his formation began firing. The pipefighters did not bother to maneuver. Perhaps their pilots were too inexperienced, too frightened.

Charat Kraal willed that thought away. It made no sense. Even the most inexperienced pilot could try to maneuver out of the line of fire, and these didn’t. One by one, the four vehicles detonated under the plasma cannons of their pursuers, the crystal-bearing vehicle last.

The thought came hard to Charat Kraal:
Were they even occupied by the living? Or could they have been abominations controlled by other abominations
?

   Kasdakh Bhul looked inconvenienced at having to bring incomprehensible news to Czulkang Lah. “The coralskippers pursuing the lambent fighters report that all the infidels’ protective fighters have disappeared.”

“Disappeared. Fled?”

“No, it seemed to be an orderly jump into darkspace. And there is more.”

“Tell me.”

“The mataloks sent to destroy the red triangle ship are gone, as is the red triangle ship.”

“All destroyed? It put up an impressive battle for something so ill equipped.”

“Unknown. The matalok commanders did not report their target putting up a fierce struggle.”

Czulkang Lah scowled, but turned his anger away from Kasdakh Bhul. The warrior did not have much intelligence to offer, but it did require courage to deliver unhappy news to a senior officer.

And this was unhappy news. Mysteries were piling up.
He didn’t like mysteries. They meant that he had not correctly interpreted every variable.

And that was one way to lose an engagement.

   Once free of Borleias’s gravity well,
Lusankya
fired off her hyperdrive, a microjump that left her escort screen of starfighters behind. The jump took her halfway across the solar system before a dovin basal mine dragged her back into realspace.

This wasn’t an unexpected turn of events. Her crew knew it would happen, though not precisely where. In terms of stellar distances, she was not far now from the Domain Hul worldship commanded by Czulkang Lah, but it was not likely that she would be able to make another jump to get closer; the space between this point and that was doubtless thick with dovin basal mines.

Her crew immediately transmitted a signal on the fleet frequency. It said, in effect,
I’m here
.

Though she’d been built to carry a crew of more than a quarter million, not including ground troops, things had changed. There were no weapon batteries to operate. Life-support systems were shut down over most of the ship. Communications were restricted to a few comm channels. Shields and a few other critical systems were largely governed now by droids taken apart and then reassembled straight into system relay points. No one monitored fuel expenditure, thruster heat conditions, stores, supplies.

She now carried a crew of one.

A minute later, the squadrons that had just abandoned the pipefighters appeared in her wake, yanked out of
hyperspace by the same dovin basal mine. They turned, moving up and around
Lusankya
, a protective screen.

And coralskipper squadrons began moving against them.

   The
Millennium Falcon
was not among the vehicles protecting
Lusankya
. Instead, the transport dropped out of hyperspace at the edge of one of the thickest of the dovin basal minefields, the one on the primary arrival vector from Coruscant space.

“I don’t read any coralskippers,” Leia said.

“Good! Anyone for sabacc?”

Leia gave him a look.

“You know I’m kidding. Ready the grav decoys.”

Leia flipped the series of switches on the weapons board before her. It had been a single concussion missile power-up sequence switch, but it had, in the last few days, been temporarily replaced. “Five live,” she said.

“Fire one.”

She returned the first switch to its down position. The
Falcon
rattled slightly as a missile launched from the concussion missile tube.

Leia watched it on the sensor board. It roared into the middle of the minefield, then slowly turned toward the distant engagement zone. It moved far more slowly than a missile should.

On the board, the wire-frame images indicating points in space where gravity was distorted remained constant … except in one area. The wire frame wrinkled there, and the distortion moved, at first slowly and then with increasing speed, in the missile’s wake.

She smiled. “It’s taking the bait.”

The bait was an instrument package that used the Jaina
Solo-developed technique of gravitic signature simulation. The missile she’d fired carried with it the exact gravitic signature of the
Millennium Falcon
, as did the other four missiles the
Falcon
held ready.

“Fire two.”

“You really like sounding military, don’t you?”

Han grinned. “Only when I’m
giving
orders.”

“Second missile is away.”

Wedge watched on the monitors as
Lusankya
’s starfighters screamed back down into the atmosphere, then began escorting the last personnel transports up. With the transports was a small, private yacht, a converted blastboat that carried Wolam Tser, Tam Elgrin, and a boy named Tarc. Wedge wished them success in staying away from the Yuuzhan Vong—now, and forever.

Iella stood by the door, waiting. Other than Wedge, she was the last person in the biotics building’s operations center. “You can’t do much more here, Wedge. Time to go.”

“Not quite yet. As long as there’s a chance their Peace Brigade friends are trying to crack our comm traffic, them knowing that I’m still here could still cause them to wonder why.” He gave her a conciliatory look. “I’ll be along. I have a shuttle standing by.”

“Come on.”

“You go. Now. Don’t force me to make an order of it.”

Married long enough to know where duty absolutely defined Wedge’s actions, Iella gave an exasperated shake of her head. She came over for one last kiss. “Don’t get hurt.”

“You, either.”

“I
want
you to be able to retire again.”

“You, too.”

“I love you.”

He kissed her a second time. “I love you, too. And I plan to prove it over and over again.” He smiled against the sick feeling that suddenly roiled within him, the fear that there would be no over and over again, that this was the last time she would see him. “Now go.”

She went.

He returned to the sensor board and forced the conversation, the sensation out of his mind. Whether it was a valid premonition or just ordinary fear, he had a job to do.

He watched as the biotics complex’s starfighter defenses continued to crumble, as Yuuzhan Vong air and ground forces continued their approach.

   Charat Kraal led his squadron around toward Domain Hul. His villip had just told him that
Lusankya
was coming … and that Jaina Solo’s squadron was among those escorting her.

He was confused. He didn’t like being confused. No Yuuzhan Vong warrior ever endured being confused.

The only appropriate response was to kill something.

   The elite squadrons guarding
Lusankya
fought with tremendous skill. Czulkang Lah made sure that the patterns flown by the blaze bugs, showing the development of that conflict, would be seared into the memory of the worldship’s brain. He knew he would enjoy watching it again and again.

Coralskipper squadrons entering that combat zone emerged depleted, tattered … when they emerged at all.

Reports of his sensor advisers indicated that the coralskipper assaults were taking their toll. New Republic pilots were falling. And
Lusankya
was being taken to pieces. Despite the fact that an unusual amount of power was being directed into her shields, the ship’s weapons batteries were silent, and great chunks of metal were said to be tearing free of the superstructure under the constant pounding from coralskippers and capital ships that ventured close enough to strike.

   Wedge charged out of the operations center. The biotics building shook with the pounding it received from distant plasma cannons, impacts so loud that he couldn’t hear his own boots on the duracrete floor. Chunks of the ceiling rained down; he threw his arms over his head for protection, catching a blow on his right wrist from descending debris.

He made it up the staircase to the ground level without seeing any other personnel. That gave him a grim satisfaction. No one had managed to outstubborn him, to defy his orders in order to make sure that Wedge had company on his escape. It was a little comforting, but the thought that he might be the last member of the New Republic standing on Borleias was oddly unsettling.

Through the transparisteel in the doors at the end of the main hall he could see distant flashes, narrow red streaks heading one way at the speed of light, more wobbly orange-red streaks headed the other, clear evidence that Wedge’s last forces were still fighting their delaying action. Then he slammed through the doors,
emerging onto the kill zone, and could see that the engagement was continuing at every degree of the compass.

The kill zone itself was full of craters and destroyed vehicles. Everything that had been fit to fly was up in space now; the vehicles too wrecked to lift off had been destroyed by Wedge’s engineers, standard operating procedure, though the Yuuzhan Vong were not in the habit of studying captured technology. Some of them had been additionally hit by distant plasma cannon fire aimed at the biotics building. There were no functional vehicles to be seen.

No
functional vehicles. Where was his shuttle?

Then he recognized it, a heap of burning metal whose shape suggested it had once been a
Lambda-class
shuttle.

Wedge grimaced. A pilot had died waiting for him. It was another tally mark for the list—the list he’d once hoped he’d retired; the one he carried in his heart.

He shoved the thought to one side. He’d join that list in a minute if he didn’t act. Punctuating his thought, a plasma cannon projectile hit the biotics building far over his head, plowing through ferrocrete and transparisteel, sending sharp, lethal chunks down toward him.

Wedge sprinted away from the building’s face. There was no purpose in going into the main docking bay, except perhaps to hide; it was open, and he could see from here that nothing more useful than a small cargo lifter was left within it.

The special operations docking bay was almost intact, though, and still closed. Wedge hoped they hadn’t booby-trapped it. He reached the main door, tapped his authorization code into the keypad, and then flinched as he heard the biotics building take a hit from something big.
The force of the explosion, though weakened by distance, pushed him into the door. He spun to look and watched as the building folded over like a fighter punched once too often in the midsection; the top portion at the center tumbled down onto the kill zone where he’d been standing just seconds before.

The docking bay door ground open. He backed in and spun, eyes trying to pierce the darkness of the interior even as the overhead lights began to flicker on.

The special operations crew had left behind a landspeeder that looked as though it had been slow-roasted for the eating pleasure of some alien giant. Nearby was a half-finished pipefighter, one they’d been assembling in case any of the others failed during their bogus tests. And then Wedge’s heart soared—off to the right, near the still-opening door, where the lights were last to come to full brightness, was an X-wing. There was no astromech waiting beside it or tucked in place behind the cockpit, but otherwise it looked intact, its cockpit raised as if in greeting.

The vehicle’s surface was scratched and burned everywhere, but there were a dozen shiny patches in place on the hull, not yet painted to match the snubfighter’s color scheme, and the canopy was gleaming, unmarred, obviously brand-new.

Wedge raced to it and climbed up into the cockpit, adrenaline letting him move like a man half his age. He’d commenced the emergency power-start procedure before gravity had quite settled him into the pilot’s couch, and brought up the vehicle’s assignment and diagnostics before lowering the canopy and buckling in.

The text board on his control panel swam into letters before it was even at full brightness:

“Too bad you’re not along for the ride, Plug.” Without an astromech, Wedge would be able to perform only the most basic insystem navigation; he wouldn’t be able to plot any interstellar routes. But if he could get up to his forces in this vehicle, accept a broadcast nav course or land aboard one of the capital ships, he’d be fine.

He triggered a command on his datapad, sending an authorization code to the X-wing.

CODE NOT RECOGNIZED. AUTHORIZATION FAILED
.

The diagnostics board was now up. Power, shield, weapon, and thruster systems seemed to be fine, but the board showed unrepaired damage to the snubfighter’s computer and communications systems. Wedge swore. The time pressures that had forced the mechanics to abandon this vehicle before it was quite repaired might have doomed him. That point was accentuated by a new sound—the
whumf
of some large craft making an awkward landing near the special ops docking bay. No, it was
adjacent
to the docking bay—Wedge saw the back wall of the building, hardy sheet metal, bow in from the displaced air.