Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (37 page)

But something protruded from the vessel’s bow, like an enormous needle, reaching from where the ruin began to where the vessel’s original prow would have been.

“That is what I mean,” Kasdakh Bhul said. “It is like a stinger. Their vessels don’t have stingers, just compartments.”

Czulkang Lah felt something like dread creep through his chest. “Are we ready to withdraw?” he asked, his voice curiously calm.

“Not yet,” one of his officers answered.

* * *

Individual coralskippers, separated from squadrons or the last survivors of their squadrons, broke out of the worldship’s orbit and moved to intercept Luke and Mara. The two Jedi did not slow to engage. They juked and jinked to avoid plasma cannon fire, they responded with laserfire, and they roared past, heading relentlessly on toward the worldship while their enemies turned after them.

Then they were just above the worldship, on a diving course toward its surface. They vectored to enter orbit and whipped around the worldship’s equator, heading toward its far side, the side faced away from the star Pyria. They crossed the terminator and were suddenly plunged into darkness.

In moments, sensors showed an intact squadron ahead of them, an equal number of miscellaneous skips arriving over the horizon from behind, and enough empty space around the two Jedi to give them a few seconds of breathing space.

“This would be as good a time as any, Luke,” Mara said.

“No argument here.” Luke switched on the apparatus they’d wired into his comm unit, and the comm units of several of the prestige pilots of
Lusankya
’s guardian squadrons, just prior to the launch of this mission. “Broadcasting location,” he said. “I’m going to stay on the straight and narrow as long as I can stand to.”

There was a touch of laughter to Mara’s voice: “You know,
I’ve
said that in the past.”

“Very funny.”

Luke’s forward shield flared into incandescence as something hit it—not a plasma ball, for he would have
seen that coming, but something that had not been illuminated until it hit. Probably a grutchin. He tightened, clenching his jaw as though hardening his body could harden his X-wing against incoming fire. He was a sitting duck until his task was done.

Mara moved up before him, drifting back and forth, making herself the main target of the oncoming skips but never moving so far that her shields did not offer protection to Luke.

Luke could feel her reaching for him in the Force. It wasn’t a gesture seeking reassurance, not really; he could feel her confidence, her focus on her task.

It took him a moment to understand. She wanted to be there, with him, in case something happened, in case one or the other of them suddenly winked out of existence. It was suddenly hard for him to swallow.

Then his sensor board yowled as something huge materialized in space behind him, no more than two hundred meters in his wake.

It was
Mon Mothma
, dropping out of hyperspace. The great Interdictor immediately began drifting to Luke’s port, away from the worldship’s surface; she had to have been on a slightly different course before entering hyperspace.

A moment later, a cloud erupted from
Mon Mothma
’s underside—her complement of starfighters, squadron after squadron streaking away from the launching bays, some to guard the Destroyer, some to head off incoming coralskippers from ahead and behind.

The crude gravitic sensor that was part of the X-wing’s new instrument package lit up.
Mon Mothma
had activated her gravity-well generators. If the plan was going
according to schedule, she’d be activating her yammosk jamming, too.

“Last act, Mara.”

“Let’s catch our breath before we join the other players, farmboy.”

“Let’s do that.”

The worldship’s navigation crew did not have to be told to maneuver away from the Interdictor. But once they did set a new course, a noise akin to dismay wafted from their area.

Czulkang Lah merely looked at Kasdakh Bhul. The warrior moved to the navigators, spoke briefly with them, and returned.

In pained tones, he said, “There is confusion. Five dovin basal mines have just chased five
Millennium Falcons
into our immediate space. Their attempts to seize the infidel ships are interfering with the worldship’s dovin basals.”

“Five
Millennium Falcons.
”

“Yes.”

“And even one is enough to cause us grief.”

   A few kilometers away, another New Republic ship winked into existence—
Errant Venture
. It immediately opened up with all guns, directing damage against the worldship’s surface, against the nearest Yuuzhan Vong capital ships.

“I’ve breathed,” Luke said.

“Let’s get ’em.”

   With four coralskippers closing on his tail, Wedge hurtled away from
Ammuud Swooper
’s course. The freighter was less than a minute from being able to enter hyperspace. A minute … surely Wedge could hold the skips here that long. Even at the cost of his life.

   Czulkang Lah watched as his fleet became uncoordinated. Suddenly coralskippers swarmed like awkward trainees. Villips everted as the commanders of his capital ships stopped receiving gravitic orders. The spike at the nose of
Lusankya
was now visible through the viewing lens above; more of the ship had eroded, revealing even more spike. The gravitic interdiction of one of the triangle ships in orbit above the worldship was keeping his dovin basals from maneuvering Domain Hul out of
Lusankya
’s path.

He ignored his commanders. “Activate my son’s villip,” he told Kasdakh Bhul.

A moment later, the villip installed in the most prominent niche everted and took on the features of Tsavong Lah. “What news, my father?” the warmaster asked. “Has Borleias fallen?”

“Borleias has fallen,” said Czulkang Lah, his voice weary.

“And have you slain all the infidels? Or do some of their forces remain to flee?”

“Some forces remain.”

“But still, a great victory.”

“No, son. Limited facts can point at victory when in fact there is only defeat to taste.”

The villip frowned. “Defeat? You have achieved the conditions of victory. You have once more brought glory to Domain Lah.”

“In a minute I will be dead. Too many clever minds, however heretical they may be, have undone me.”

“But—”

“Be quiet, my son, and know that my last words were reserved for you. Fare well, and may the gods smile upon you, as they once did upon me.” Czulkang Lah reached up to stroke the villip. It inverted, carrying Tsavong Lah’s expression of bafflement with it.

Kasdakh Bhul stepped before him. “We are on the verge of victory, old one. Pull one last strategy out of your mind. Give us that last success.”

Czulkang Lah stared into the face of a warrior too stupid even to know regret. The old warmaster held his silence. He’d promised that his words to Tsavong Lah would be his last. He would not diminish their value by breaking that promise.

One of his officers, his voice quaking in fear or anger—or both—asked, “Shall I give the order to abandon Domain Hul?”

Czulkang Lah nodded.

   Suddenly space was swarming with New Republic reinforcements. Gavin let off his thruster and watched, bemused, as four TIE Interceptors off
Mon Mothma
strafed the coralskipper duo he and Nevil had been dueling, shredding them by virtue of fresh pilots and fresh lasers.

“Rogue Squadron, regroup on me,” Gavin said. “Let’s
let the latecomers escort
Lusankya
in. Blackmoons, how are you doing?”

“Rogue Leader, this is Blackmoon Ten. We’re, ah, not doing too well. Four actives remain, not counting Blackmoon One and Two, who are detached.”

“Recommend you sit back and watch for a minute, then.”

“Can’t do it, Rogue Leader. One of our own appears to be in a furball back at Borleias. We’re going back after him.”

“We’ll come with you.”

   Wedge finished his loop and headed back toward his four pursuers. They were firing long before he was aligned, but two of them, the survivors of Wedge’s proton torpedo attack, were not firing accurately; their undersides were charred, and Wedge suspected that those two coralskippers were damaged. Injured, and in pain.

Not that two healthy ones couldn’t kill him. Wedge sideslipped, rotated to change his profile, juked and jinked to keep incoming plasma and grutchin fire off him.

As he approached the coralskipper formation, he drifted to port and squeezed off some stutterfire laser at the healthy skip on that side. He fired for only a fraction of a second, letting the short series of beams drift forward from the target’s cockpit, watching as the skip’s voids moved with the streams of coherent light and swallowed them; then he switched the weapon over to quad-linked fire, flicked his targeting reticle back toward the cockpit, and fired, all in one quick motion.

The voids continued forward for a brief, deadly fraction of a second. Wedge’s lasers slammed in behind them,
punching through the pilot’s canopy, punching through the pilot.

Wedge’s X-wing shook as plasma, not completely deflected by his shields, seared through his starboard lower S-foil. His diagnostics lit up with their report. Structural damage, but no interruption of engine power. The S-foil might collapse if flown into atmosphere, especially in firing position, but should hold up to all but the most rigorous of maneuvers in space.

The last healthy coralskipper and its two injured wingmates were on his tail, pouring plasma after him; he heard impact after impact as the superheated projectiles hit his rear shields, watched the alarming drop of his shield power.

His sensor board beeped, alerting him to an object in his path, on collision course, less than a second away. He began to twitch the X-wing yoke, to sideslip him around the obstacle, but instead switched weapons controls back to proton torpedo and fired on it. Only then did he shove the yoke down.

He saw the brilliant flash of the torpedo detonating above him, felt his X-wing rock as the shock wave from the explosion hammered him, but he switched back to lasers and hauled back on the yoke even as he was being battered. He was through the detonation zone in an instant—and there, meters above him, was the last healthy skip, its pilot still recovering from the unexpected detonation. Wedge fired and saw his lasers tear into the skip’s underbelly.

There was another explosion, this one far less severe, as the skip vented gases through the crater Wedge’s lasers
punched in the yorik coral. The skip suddenly ceased maneuvering.

A shrill alarm had been wailing in Wedge’s ear since the explosion. Finally he could spare an instant’s attention to his diagnostics board.

He cursed. His shields were down. Whether they had failed from the proton torpedo explosion or been stripped as a last act of the coralskipper’s voids, he did not know, but he suspected the latter; it would explain why his last shot against the skip’s underbelly was not blocked.

Without shields, he was nearly as good as dead. He spared a glance for the two injured skips. They would be closing on him now, predators coming after injured prey.

Instead, they were moving away at high speed.

Wedge laughed. Seeing the last intact skip of the squadron destroyed had caused their nerve to fail; they probably hadn’t even detected that he had lost his shields. He wondered what they thought he was—another supposed godly manifestation, like Jaina?

Then he stopped laughing. His sensors showed the coralskipper squadron from planetside had left the atmosphere and was racing up in the wake of
Ammuud Swooper
. They might intercept her before she reached a point from which she could launch into hyperspace.

Unless he maneuvered himself in the way. Unless he persuaded a second squadron to duel with him.

But if he did that, his X-wing shieldless and damaged, he would die. He would die alone, and he would die anonymous, flying another pilot’s X-wing with no record left behind of his having been here. Iella and his children would never know what had become of him.

He swung around on an intercept course and hit his thrusters.

Turning his back on the
Ammuud Swooper
, leaving her to be destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong when she was so close to escape, would not allow him to live. It would just give him time to tidy up his affairs before guilt—the crushing weight of responsibility abandoned—caused him to find some other way to die.

Coming in at an oblique angle to the new coralskippers’ course, Wedge fired at maximum possible distance. On his sensor board, he saw no indication that his laserfire had done any damage.

But after a moment the squadron of skips vectored, angling toward him.

He could have cheered. They, too, wanted a challenging kill rather than some defenseless freighter. Had their decision not guaranteed his death, he
would
have cheered.

Wedge kept up his fire, jerking his X-wing back and forth in a bone-jarring evasive pattern, seeing plasma fire streak above, to port, to starboard. His sustained lasers fired straight down the voids of the foremost skip, only occasionally drifting far and fast enough to one side to hit yorik coral.

He felt a tremendous impact and the starfield was suddenly rotating outside his canopy. The X-wing no longer responded to his control of the yoke. Systems failure alarms shrilled in his ears, and he knew he was dead.

   Eldo Davip locked down the auxiliary bridge controls, then slapped the button for the new door at the chamber’s rear. It slid open instantly, undamaged, revealing the Y-wing beyond.

A Y-wing. He shook his head as he ran to the cockpit and clambered within. The starfighter was as old as he was, if not older; he suspected it was one of the assembly of “spare parts” vehicles that had been used to fabricate the pipefighters. As he closed the canopy, the door into the auxiliary bridge snapped shut and another bulkhead slid open, meters ahead of him, allowing him a view of space flanked by the emissions of
Lusankya
’s powerful thrusters.

He started up the starfighter’s engines but couldn’t yet launch. A jury-rigged screen and set of controls went live, and once again Davip could see through
Lusankya
’s remaining forward holocams, could see instrument readouts.