Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (35 page)

“Ooh, your words thrill me, Great One.”

“Don’t be so thrilled that you screw up.”

“Ooh, your supportiveness thrills me—”

“Get back to business, Sharr.”

“Right.” Sharr was silent for a long moment, during which the units of coralskippers got closer, moving in from all directions. Then: “Nearest dovin basal minefield is ahead and to port. The Goddess should aim for that. Piggy, when do the incoming units get close enough to recognize us by sight?”

“Forty seconds, but if the Goddess goes off straight toward that minefield, she’ll pass close enough for them to see her.”

“Ooh, right. Adjusting course … Twin Suns Leader, prepare yourself for the chase. Three, two, one … chase.”

A missile roared away from Twin Suns Ten, streaking off to port at nearly a ninety-degree angle to their current course, aiming toward the largest gap between any of the inbound squadrons. Jaina activated her gravitic signature and transponder switches. Abruptly her designation on the sensor board went to Twin Suns Nine, while the outbound missile, just as instantaneously, became Twin Suns One.

There was a momentary wobble in the movements of skip squadrons to port. Then four of the squads in that direction changed course, converging on the missile.

“Well done, Sharr,” Jaina said. When she’d switched to the Twin Suns Nine identity, her comm system should have activated a program to alter her vocal characteristics, making her sound like an older woman, one with a deeper voice.

“Thanks, Nine. And nice to have Leader gone. She’s so bossy.”

Kyp cut into the conversation: “Heads up. We still have incoming contacts to starboard. Prepare to repel boarders. Break by shield trios on my command … three, two, one, break.”

   While Beelyath held position within the Twin Suns Ten-Eleven-Twelve shield trio, Sharr kept his attention on his special sensor and comm boards. The distant missile code-named Goddess, and now, courtesy of Cilghal’s biotechnical magic, characterized by the precise gravitic signature of Jaina’s X-wing, had onboard computers and logic programs that allowed it to execute its mission on its own, but Sharr could still feed it priority updates.

He switched to a wire-frame view of local space as the Goddess missile and the coralskippers pursuing it entered the dovin basal minefield. The green wire frame superimposed on the scene showed the spatial distortions caused by the mines and their gravitic influence on their surroundings.

Sharr kept the missile’s speed down to that of an X-wing’s standard cruise rate, allowing the pursuing skips to gain on it. So far, they were still far enough in its wake that the pilots could not see it with their naked eyes, could not realize that it wasn’t the true Jaina Solo.

The Yuuzhan Vong pursuers were good. They were gaining faster than he expected on the missile. With his sensors, superior to the missile’s, Sharr drew a course revision on his screen, sending the missile on a path that would take it past mine after mine, while giving more and more pursuers the chance to approach it. He executed
and sent the course revision, then lost sight of his sensor board as Beelyath sent the B-wing into a veering turn that crushed Sharr into his restraints and caused his vision to blur, all despite the starfighter’s inertial compensators.

“Comfortable?” Beelyath croaked.

“Huh?” Sharr grunted. “Sorry, I was sleeping.”

Though he could not see the distant X-wing, Charat Kraal’s cognition hood created a glow in the distance, a glow he knew actually existed only in his mind, showing the enemy vehicle’s position.

And his opponent was good, as he knew Jaina Solo to be, but this day she was flying with more skillful reckless abandon than he had ever before seen, leading the coralskippers deep into the dovin basal minefield, doubtless hoping to elude them by passing through such a difficult and dangerous area at high speed.

For a moment, doubt flickered in Charat Kraal’s mind. Why would she have left the relative safety of numbers, of her personal squadron, to lead the Yuuzhan Vong here by herself? There seemed to be only one possible answer: so she could attempt to kill them all without any of her fellow pilots to share the glory.

Was she that overconfident? Was she that mad?

Could her confidence be warranted?

The pilot to Charat Kraal’s port side opened fire with his plasma cannon, sending a stream of red glows off toward the distant target.

Charat Kraal cursed to himself. Of all the traits of the
infidels’ starfighters, the one he truly envied was the ability they gave their pilots to talk to one another, voice to voice. The yammosk war coordinator kept this flight of pursuers coordinated and pointed in the right direction, but could not prevent a pilot with a rogue streak from firing on an enemy they were supposed to capture alive.

Charat Kraal dropped back a few lengths and slid in behind the errant pilot. From this close distance, he could see that the yorik coral of the coralskipper ahead was marked with the symbols of Domain Hul. Making no effort to disguise his action, he carefully aimed at that coralskipper’s stern and fired a single plasma cannon shot straight at it. As he expected, a void from the other coralskipper appeared in the path of the plasma projectile and swallowed it.

That pilot ignored the warning. He continued firing at the distant Jaina Solo and now sideslipped to starboard, distancing himself from Charat Kraal, indicating in no uncertain terms his intent to continue following his own warrior spirit, even if it meant disobeying direct orders.

Charat Kraal growled to himself and followed. He fired again, this time a continuous stream of plasma, intending to kill rather than to warn. The Hul pilot banked away more sharply, his voids intercepting the incoming plasma, and then rolled into a maneuver designed to swing him around behind Charat Kraal.

Finally, Charat Kraal grinned. In a moment, he would have another kill, this one a disobedient pilot from another domain, and would have reinforced his reputation for order and ruthlessness in his own unit.

The other coralskippers of the unit continued on their original course, closing on Jaina Solo.

   Czulkang Lah made a noise of displeasure. The pattern of blaze bugs in the darkened sensor niche told the whole story of Charat Kraal’s pursuit. He did not blame Charat Kraal for this momentary diversion, but was not happy at the lack of discipline shown by the other pilot. It would be best when that warrior was dead, best if he died painfully and ignobly enough to discourage other warriors from similar acts of self-glorifying disobedience.

“What is wrong?” Harrar asked. “This is the Jaina Solo pursuit?”

“It is.” Czulkang Lah pointed into the mass of blaze bugs, though he doubted that the priest, unused to the complexity of battlefield images, would be able to interpret what he saw. “The pursuers are not acting in concert. It appears that one wishes to kill Jaina Solo. If we are lucky, this notion will not spread to the others.”

“We cannot have that. We must capture her. Must extract from her the truth about her trickery, the truth that she has nothing to do with our gods.” Harrar turned to another of the command chamber’s officers. “Have my ship alerted and readied. I will enter the minefield and join the pursuit.”

At Czulkang Lah’s reinforcing nod, the officer did as instructed.

Then something changed in the blaze bug image, and for a moment Czulkang Lah thought that perhaps he, too, was misinterpreting what he was seeing. Two of the coralskippers closest to Jaina Solo, though too far away for her infidel lasers to have hit them, had disappeared,
simply winked out. Even with his enfeebled eyes, Czulkang Lah could see the blaze bugs that had represented them, now darkened, flying to the darkened back of the display niche, ready to reenter as a new contact when needed.

What had happened?

   Sharr Latt was getting the hang of it now, the method of calculating the gravitic pull of a dovin basal mine on one of the Goddess missile’s passes, then coming near it again and using its own gravitic attraction to whip the missile around and slingshot it in a new direction.

The missile, mostly solid-state, not disadvantaged by the physical limitations of a living pilot, could survive much tighter turns and more strenuous g-forces than the pursuing coralskippers. On the last pass the missile made past one specific mine, the two closest pursuers had followed the missile’s path exactly, had been caught by the mine’s gravity, had been torn to pieces by their own daring.

Plasma projectiles flashed past the bubble viewport of the B-wing’s crew compartment. Fascinated with his deadly toy, Sharr ignored them, relying on Beelyath to keep him alive.

   The squadrons protecting
Lusankya
broke toward different incoming squadrons. Jaina, still masquerading as Twin Suns Nine, kept her silence as Kyp Durron scattered her shield trios in the path of incoming coralskippers.

As the distant skips came within maximum laser-effective range, she reached for Kyp in the Force, found him there, found him waiting for a better shot. She reached
for Jag as well, detected him, could even faintly feel the intensity of his focus, his state of alert relaxation. But she could not interact with him as she could with Kyp, could not afford to be distracted, so she withdrew from that contact.

Then Kyp was firing and her hand was automatically squeezing her lasers’ trigger, firing a quad-linked blast at one incoming skip. Both her shot and Kyp’s were intercepted by voids, but Jag’s, a fraction of a second later, plowed into the enemy starfighter’s nose, destroying the dovin basal there, depriving the craft of its capabilities of flight and defense. Kyp and Jaina each poured another salvo of laser energy into the craft; it burst, exploding as the lasers superheated internal moisture to the state of gas, and vented atmosphere into space.

“One Flight, Twin Suns Five.” That was Piggy. “Suggest you come to zero-one-zero ecliptic, hold that course for ten seconds, take targets of opportunity.”

“Twin Suns Two, copy.” Kyp led Jag and Jaina around in the indicated direction. Ahead, Jaina could see where Four Flight—Beelyath and Tilath—had gotten on the tails of two skips and were chasing them directly across One Flight’s path. Jaina gauged Beelyath’s and Tilath’s firing patterns, timed them, felt Kyp doing the same … and, as the enemy skips crossed before them, as Beelyath and Tilath sent stutterfire laser against the sterns of the skips one last time, Kyp, Jaina, and Jag fired from the skips’ port quarter, their quad-linked lasers hitting yorik coral instead of voids. Both skips detonated, sending a cloud of gases and yorik coral chunks hurtling along their course.

But now the wingmate of the first skip they’d hit was behind them, closing, firing. Jaina didn’t listen to the good-shooting congratulations coming across the comm board; she followed Kyp as he made a tight loop up and to starboard, trying to elude their pursuit.

Jag looped tighter, forcing the pursuer to divide his attention between his clawcraft and the two X-wings, and managed to come around behind the coralskipper even as it managed to maintain its position behind the X-wings. He poured laserfire into its stern and top hull, but all of it was dragged into the skip’s defensive voids.

Jaina felt a sort of mental shrug from Kyp. “Break,” she said, aloud and through the Force but not over the comm frequencies, and she broke to port as Kyp broke to starboard.

She gritted her teeth against the g-forces her tight turn exerted on her, but got oriented around toward that skip—just in time to see an X-wing flash over and past it at a right angle to its course, in time to see plasma projectiles tracking that X-wing strike the coralskipper instead. They chewed through its hull and the skip suddenly turned away, no longer anxious to fight.

Piggy’s distinctive, mechanical laugh sounded over the comm board.

Jaina grinned. “Nice fleeing, Piggy.”

   Wedge’s X-wing reached low Borleias orbit as the
Ammuud Swooper
lumbered along behind. He tried to remind himself that the Corellian freighter “lumbered” only in comparison with a starfighter, of course; the freighter was nearly as fast and nimble as the
Millennium Falcon
.

He dropped back to give his personal comlink a better chance to reach the ship. “Blackmoon Eleven to
Swooper
, do you have an exit path?”

“We do, Eleven. Can you receive it?”

“I’ve been patching my comlink and datapad into what’s left of the computer on this battered baby. Just transmit me the directional and I’ll escort you out.”

“Will do, Eleven. Many thanks.”

Wedge waited until the numbers appeared on his datapad screen, then reoriented to
Ammuud Swooper
’s outbound course. He could only estimate, based on what he remembered of Borleias’s current position in orbit around the star Pyria, but he believed that the course would take
Ammuud Swooper
in the general direction of the Deep Core worlds. Doubtless the freighter would only take a short hyperspace jump, a few light-years, and then correct to take them toward the rendezvous point.

The starfighter’s sensor board beeped with a new contact. Wedge took in the new information and bit back a curse. A squadron of coralskippers was headed their way, and would intercept Wedge and the freighter long before they were clear of Borleias’s mass shadow.

   Charat Kraal poured plasma cannon fire into his opponent, saw some of it flitting around the edges of his target’s void and chewing into its hull.

As he’d suspected, the only kind of pilot foolish enough to disobey orders like that, to seek personal glory at the expense of duty, was a green pilot, one fresh from teaching. He might have gloriously fast reflexes, but he didn’t have the experience or will to defeat someone like Charat Kraal.

His target waggled side to side, signaling that he was quitting an exercise, the only way he had to communicate that he was surrending. He brought his voids around from his stern to his bow, symbolically baring his stomach, further sign that he was giving up this fight.

Charat Kraal fired again, pouring damage into his target’s stern, and, as he gained altitude relative to the other coralskipper, into its canopy. He saw the canopy crack and then explode outward from the atmospheric pressure within, saw one of his plasma projectiles hit and burn entirely through the torso of the pilot. That coralskipper continued in straight-line flight, a flight that might never end.