Saba Sebatyne, a Jedi Knight of the Barabel people, tapped her way through the power-up checklist of the Wild Knights’ lead blastboat. Her fingers moved deftly and surely for such a large and bulky creature; Barabels were reptilian, covered in scales, with large eyes protected by heavy, protruding brow ridges, but otherwise somewhat inexpressive faces.
Danni Quee covertly watched Saba. Danni’s position on the ship, sensor operator and sometimes ship’s weapons, didn’t call for as much preparation as Saba’s. Saba’s efficiency and speed with her task were undiminished, but Danni knew she had been through much pain recently—the loss of her Jedi Master, Eelysa, to a Yuuzhan Vong–bred monster called a voxyn on Corellia, and then the loss of two of her kin, hatchmates to her own son, during Anakin Solo’s successful but costly mission to destroy the queen—the source of the voxyn. But Barabels were very different from humans in their expressions of pain and grief, inviting no sympathy, so Danni could offer her no condolences.
Saba came to the end of her checklist. “Pilot station ready,” she said.
“Sensor station ready,” Danni responded automatically, and the other Wild Knights aboard called out their readiness. Danni was not technically a Wild Knight, nor technically a Jedi Knight like the others, but she had flown with them on many occasions now and found that her duty station, when she wasn’t occupied with critical scientific projects, was aboard the Wild Knights’ blastboat.
Saba called in the squadron’s state of readiness and immediately received the unit’s orders. With a hiss, she turned her attention away from the screen before her as if rejecting its presence.
“What is it?” Danni asked. “If you can tell us, I mean.”
“We are to defend, and lose, and quit the field,” Saba said. “To act as a shield. Conservative tacticz. This one is a hunter. This one does not know how to defend or flee.”
“This one is a scientist,” Danni said. “This one didn’t used to know how to kill.”
Saba regarded Danni levelly, then returned her attention to the screen. “Danni can return to using human grammar now,” she said.
Twin Suns Squadron, Rogue Squadron, and the Wild Knights blasted off from Borleias’s surface. The fuel it took to reach orbit, though not a substantial portion of the starfighters’ capacity, could well be missed in the later stages of today’s battle, but Luke agreed with Wedge that allowing the Yuuzhan Vong to detect the launch of three preeminent New Republic squadrons from the planet’s surface would reinforce the enemy’s impression that this was a significant site.
As they reached high orbit, their astromechs and onboard computers received detailed orders. Luke reviewed them and nodded. Twin Suns was to stay in geosynchronous orbit above the biotics facility and vape anything that came at it. Rogue Squadron would set up above Borleias’s moon and make a speed run against any promising target of opportunity. The Wild Knights would move to reinforce the lunar station at Pyria VI. “Twin Suns on station,” he announced. “Rogues, Knights, good hunting.”
“Good hunting.” That was Saba Sebatyne’s voice, made even raspier by the limitations of the comlink. Her starfighters and blastboats peeled off for their run to Pyria VI. Gavin Darklighter responded with a mere click of his own comlink before Rogue Squadron looped away for the short run to Borleias’s moon.
Luke glanced behind him, to port and starboard. To port, Corran Horn waited with a calm he had never enjoyed as an X-wing pilot, a calm he had attained only after becoming a Jedi Knight. But to starboard, where Mara should have been, was Zindra Daine. She was a Corellian pilot, green as grass, barely out of her teens, not a Jedi. Luke winced at the thought of himself and Corran having to cover for a novice. Mara’s absence would be keenly felt today and in subsequent engagements. Though he sympathized with her desire to stay with Ben, to protect him against all possible dangers, he hoped Mara would realize that her desire was irrational, her goal an impossible one—and that her absence from the battlefield might just result in the loss of good people.
Wedge stood before the hologram at the center of the command room. This was an unlovely lozenge-shaped chamber with a curved ceiling two dozen meters below the biotics building. It had once been intended as a blast shelter, but now it was crammed with mobile consoles and their operators.
The chamber’s duracrete walls, not well designed for acoustics, rang with noise, the voices of military officers doing their duties, the beeps and chirps of computers demanding their operators’ attention, live sound feeds from unit leaders up there in the battle zone. Wedge ignored them and concentrated on the continuously updated tactical holo.
It showed Pyria at one edge, Borleias a little out from it, Pyria VI farther out, and the fringes of the solar system at the far edge. Red blips representing the Yuuzhan Vong invasion force clustered at that edge and streamed toward the other sites.
“The Rogues are on-station,” Tycho said. As chronically unable as Wedge was to run his operations from a seated position, he stood before the console devoted to starfighter coordination. “The starfighters on the target moon are standing by. Vong intrusion there anticipated in two minutes.”
“Have those fighters launch,” Wedge said. “Make it erratic. They can form up in time, but they should look as though they were caught off guard.”
“Done.” Tycho turned back to his screen.
Wedge’s attention flicked across the hologram. Some ships lay dormant, well away from the action, monitoring the situation with their sensors, ready to step in should reinforcements be needed. Frigates, cruisers, and other capital ships were situated above Borleias. Starfighter units maneuvered to head off the Yuuzhan Vong approach.
The main Yuuzhan Vong force stayed coherent, a reserve fleet situated not far from where it had entered Pyrian space. The units moving against the New Republic forces were, Wedge knew, mere probes, sent out to test the strength of the defensive forces. This battle wasn’t about winning or losing; it was about gathering information on enemy capabilities.
“Pyria Six reports contact,” Tycho said.
* * *
Captain Yakown Reth was not a happy man.
It wasn’t enough that, of all the up-and-coming officers in Wedge Antilles’s command, he’d been assigned the unpromising duty of guarding a shuttle load of scientists, engineers, and construction specialists building a subsurface habitat on an airless moon. Yes, he’d been assigned two full squadrons of starfighters to defend the base. But his E-wings were not equipped with proton torpedoes—the brass said that these weapons were in short supply—and Reth wasn’t even authorized to know what the scientific personnel were up to.
And now, as Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers hurtled toward him, came to wipe out this idiotic little facility, Colonel Celchu was micromanaging him, dictating that wing pairs launch only as they came ready after going through a second checklist. His forces were straggling into space like an undisciplined mob. If General Antilles was monitoring the action here, he’d assume that Reth was an idiot.
Finally, as the incoming blips on the sensor screens reached the outer limits of his starfighters’ range of fire, the last two E-wings of Green Squadron struggled into formation and announced their readiness.
“Remember, no individual heroics,” Reth said. “We have to overwhelm their defenses and overlap our own. Break by wing quads on my command, three, two, one … now.” He suited action to words and spun down a few hundred meters toward the jagged and unappealing surface of the moon he was protecting. Green Two through Green Four followed him, in loose, imprecise formation. This was not surprising for a group that had been cobbled together from units shattered back at Coruscant. But it was aggravating. It made him look sloppy.
Coralskippers too distant to see opened fire; trails of glowing redness lanced out toward Green Squadron. Reth nudged closer to Green Two, his wingmate, and saw Green Three and Four crowding in, allowing their shields to overlap. Reth grimaced. Working with unfamiliar pilots in such proximity was as distasteful to him as the thought of trading unwashed clothing with them.
“Accelerate to full,” he said. “We’ll punch through and come back. Set lasers to stutterfire. I’ll designate a target and we’ll all hit it. Ready … mark.” He put his targeting reticle on an incoming coralskipper, not the first in the line coming toward him but the third, and fired a burst.
Red laser beams erupted from his E-wing’s nose and wingtips, an irregular drizzle rather than a hard-hitting burst of concentrated energy. Bursts from his wingmates followed his in, drenching his target. Reth hated the new stutterfire configuration. He knew that it did damage around the coralskippers’ blasted void defenses, but it prevented the lasers from hitting with any sort of satisfying power.
An incoming stream of lava balls angled across his formation. Three or four hit the overlapping shields of the E-wings, and the audible sensor interpreters of his vehicle noted the impacts with sharp bangs. His diagnostics didn’t light up, and his sensors showed his target followed by a cometlike tail consisting of bits of yorik coral chewed away by their laserfire.
Though that coralskipper was still sound, Reth switched targets, pouring his damage and that of his wingmates on another skip. This coralskipper, angling straight into the path of his lasers, was distantly visible, and Reth saw his unit’s lasers chewing at it, at its edges, across its canopy; though its void flashed in front of much of the laserfire, swallowing it, enough curved around the singularity’s edges and penetrated the skip’s surface. That skip suddenly became as luminous as the distant Pyrian sun and then was gone.
Reth managed a tight smile. So far, so good.
“Sensors show a formation looping around the moon toward us.” The voice, quiet and controlled, was Corran’s, and it came across Luke’s private comlink, not the one built into his X-wing. Corran’s X-wing was several hundred kilometers behind the Twin Suns Squadron’s formation in lunar orbit, trailing it and acting as rear guard.
Luke nodded. The main sensor relay from the ground stations showed a column of coralskippers and frigate analogs on a straight approach toward Borleias, but the Yuuzhan Vong had obviously detected Twin Suns and sent a detachment around the moon to trap them between two forces. “Get back up here,” he told Corran. “Prepare a shadow bomb to drop.” The other pilots of Twin Suns weren’t Jedi and so weren’t capable of utilizing the shadow bomb weapons—proton torpedoes with their propulsion units removed, shoved across space merely by the powers of the Jedi mind—so he didn’t have to transmit these orders to them. He activated his snubfighter’s comlink on squadron frequency. “Prepare to follow me in.” He switched back to the scrambled frequency he shared with Corran and Zindra. “Thirty seconds before our pursuit gets into firing range, we accelerate straight toward the enemy column … but Corran and I leave the shadow bombs behind.”
Corran and Zindra responded with comlink clicks.
Sensors showed Yuuzhan Vong vessels far ahead, crossing the plane of lunar orbit on their approach toward Borleias. Luke could distantly see the running lights, or whatever the organic equivalents were, on the Yuuzhan Vong frigate analogs. Corran was much closer, approaching fast from the rear, and now Luke could detect the first blips indicating the detachment coming up behind Corran. “Drop shadow bombs,” he said, and kicked his accelerator into life as he dropped his own shadow bomb.
Twin Suns Squadron roared out from lunar orbit on a straight approach toward the main Yuuzhan Vong column. Their course had to be absolutely straight if the trick was to work.
His Force perceptions irrelevant, Luke kept his eye on the sensors. They showed the distant blip of Yuuzhan Vong pursuers growing less distant; they showed the tiny, coded comlink transmission from the shadow bombs left behind; they showed the alien column ahead, also getting closer and closer.
“They’re firing,” Zindra said, the high-pitched excitement of a novice in her voice, and Luke saw flashes of distant lava cannon misses in his peripheral vision.
Luke began juking and jinking, his attention divided between controlling his X-wing and and the shadow bomb he had launched.
The trailing force of coralskippers numbered about thirty; at this range, it was hard to get exact numbers. They were approaching the point where the Jedi had dropped the shadow bombs and were in a narrow approach formation, a speed formation. Luke nudged the shadow bombs into a line, each a few kilometers from the next, and watched their blips separate and line up in anticipation of the approaching skips.
He didn’t feel the coralskippers pass the rearmost shadow bomb; his Force perceptions couldn’t detect them. But the sensors showed the line of skips reach and begin to superimpose itself on the line of shadow bombs. He waited until the foremost skip reached the leading bomb, then reached out and squeezed with a small measure of his Force powers.
On the sensors, the clean line of coralskippers behind became a fuzzy mass, then began to fade. Where perhaps thirty skips had been in pursuit, half that number now looped away from the detonation point, in search of whatever mystery ship must have attacked them.
Luke snapped back to the here and now. Zindra’s X-wing was directly above him, its mass blocking his direct view of the fight, but he could tell that they were in the midst of the main coralskipper column, had maneuvered into the midst of the enemy while most of his attention was locked up with the shadow bombs. Corran was still tucked in to port, his shields overlapping Luke’s and providing additional support, patiently waiting for Luke to snap back to full attention so they could deal with the enemies ahead.
Zindra’s voice crackled over the comlink: “Great shooting! Um, are we going to do anything about that frigate ahead?”
Luke suppressed the urge to grind his teeth. “Yes, we are. I’ll take lead.” He goosed his thrusters; he and Corran maneuvered ahead of Zindra. “Follow me in.”
Luke peeled off on a strafing run against the frigate analog. Corran and Zindra followed.
Saba fired and a pulse from the Wild Knights’ ion cannons washed across a tight formation of coralskippers, causing them to spin out of control; the skips veered out of the main engagement area above the moon of Pyria VI.
The blastboat shuddered. Saba checked her diagnostics screen, saw nothing, and glanced at Danni, who was on the main sensors.
Danni shook her head. “No damage. But … well … it’s a good excuse.”
Saba hissed in vexation, but said, “Do it.”
Danni activated a control on her console board. Saba, unhappy, added a little wobble to the blastboat’s motion as it looped around toward another patch of coralskippers.
“Wild Knights One, this is Green Leader. You’re venting atmosphere, repeat, venting atmosphere. Can you hear me? Over.”
Saba stared unhappily at her controls. Of course they were venting atmosphere. They’d rigged the rear of the blastboat with a couple of new valves to do just that—to eject a compressed oxygen and nitrogen mix to suggest they’d been hulled.
Danni activated her comlink. “Green Leader, this is Wild One. We’ve taken major grutchin hits. Venting … they’re chewing through toward the engines …” Her voice sounded pained, and she added a racking cough to her performance. “Smoke in the cabin …”
“Wild One, get out of here. Get to ground, now. We’ll hold here.”
“Thanks, Green Leader. Wild Knights are—” Danni clicked the comlink off and then added, unnecessarily, “away.” She looked up at Saba, guilt in her expression.
Saba hissed again and banked around back toward Borleias.
Behind them, over the next few minutes, the other members of the Wild Knights would follow suit. As each took a minor bit of damage, he or she’d behave as though the craft had sustained a major hit and turn toward home. Eventually the other units defending the moon over Pyria VI would find their situation untenable and have to abandon their post.
That was the plan. But it felt like losing. It felt like abandoning comrades to the enemy.
And that was something Saba Sebatyne did not do. Had she been a human, the pressure she exerted on the controls would have turned her knuckles white.
Captain Reth grinned after the departing Wild Knights leader. Certainly, the blastboat’s departure weakened their position. But the almighty Jedi leader of that famous squadron was fleeing the battle zone, her tail between her legs, and he, commander of the lowly cobbled-together Green Squadron, was still in the fight.
He returned his attention to the enemy before him. It wouldn’t do to receive his medals posthumously.
“Analysis,” Wyrpuuk Cha said.
Kadlah Cha joined him again. “We have caught their outpost off guard,” she said, and gestured at the engagement zone most distant from Borleias. “They supported it with insufficient numbers. No matter what they choose to throw at us, we can bring units to it faster and in better condition from the reserve fleet.”
“Good. Go on.”
She gestured at the main battle zone, above Borleias. “Here, matters are not so promising. Their defense of the hardpoint site on the ground is ferocious, and we are losing forces, coralskippers especially, at a far greater rate than they are losing analogous forces.”
“Have they demonstrated any new tactics, new weapons?”
She shook her head.
“Good. They’re fighting with spirit, but don’t seem to have any surprises for us. We can break their spirit.” He considered. “We’ll continue until this outpost has fallen to us, and break off the assault on Borleias for now. We’ll use the outpost as a staging area. Break any prisoners found at the outpost, and arrange for all information, all memory, found there to be sent to the warmaster.”
“It shall be done.”
* * *
“Arrival in three … two … one … mark.”
Right on the navigator’s spoken cue, the swirl of lines in Lusankya’s forward viewport straightened out and contracted into stationary stars, one of them barely near enough to be recognized as a sphere instead of a mere pinpoint of light.
Commander Eldo Davip, nearly two meters of space navy gristle packed into a bulging officer’s uniform, shook his head, not satisfied with the results. His bridge crew, most of its members new to Lusankya, had not so far demonstrated reliable competence, and now they’d managed to drop his new command into the Pyria star system much farther from the planet Borleias than he had indicated.
Then he frowned. Ahead, some stars were disappearing, others reappearing, as objects moved into and out of the way. Did the Pyria system have an asteroid belt? He turned to his navigator to ask that question, but suddenly the bridge was filled with alarm bells and the startled exclamations of officers.
“It’s a trap!” That was the sensor operator, a male from Coruscant, his excitement not quite concealing the clipped, upper-class pronunciation that betrayed his origin. “We’re surrounded by Vong vessels!”
Davip whirled to face the sensor screen set up near his commander’s post at the rear of the bridge’s second-level walkway. It showed Lusankya’s position with the blip representing Millennium Falcon neatly tucked in beneath, but the two spacecraft were surrounded by the blips of dozens of vehicles, mostly capital ships, all either enemy red or winking from unknown yellow to red.
The horror of the situation swelled in Davip’s throat, choking him for a brief moment. Then the commands he needed to utter, had to utter, forced their way past the obstruction. “All shields up! All batteries fire at will! Fire as you bear! Launch all squadrons!”
As soon as the drop out of hyperspace was complete, Han Solo frowned at his instruments. “We dropped a couple of seconds early,” he said.
Leia, looking absurdly tiny in the Millennium Falcon’s oversized copilot’s seat, pointed up through the cockpit viewport. The underside of Lusankya hung there like an irregular ceiling. “It wasn’t a mistake. Their nav computers must have sent us faulty data.”
“No, I’m showing heavy gravitic abnormalities here. We were pulled out of hyperspace by the presence of—” Han’s eyes snapped wide open and he yanked at the Falcon’s controls, sending the onetime freighter into a rolling dive its original manufacturers had never intended it to experience. Shouts of surprise—and a couple of thrill-rider glee—erupted from the passenger compartment.
A glowing trail of fire, ejecta from a Yuuzhan Vong plasma cannon, ripped through space where the Falcon had just been. Han pitched his voice to be heard throughout the ship: “Take the guns! We’re in the middle of a Vong fleet!”
Wyrpuuk Cha nodded, satisfied with the results he was seeing.
The blaze bugs flurried, rapidly changing position in the portion of the depression representing the reserve fleet. Wyrpuuk Cha frowned as he took in the changes. Something triangular, in the same approximate shape as one of the enemy’s hated Imperial Star Destroyers but much larger, was now situated in the midst of his fleet. Wyrpuuk Cha wondered if the blaze bugs’ representation was actually to scale.
He glanced out the viewport of his bridge. There, to port, seemingly close enough to touch, hung a vast expanse of darkness decorated by running lights in deep blue, a vastly oversized Star Destroyer.
Jolted by sudden panic, Wyrpuuk Cha opened his mouth to issue commands.
The Super Star Destroyer erupted as if channeling an internal explosion through innumerable tiny ports on its hull.
Wyrpuuk Cha didn’t know the numbers, didn’t know how many hundreds of laser batteries the vessel carried, had no idea how many hundreds of ion cannons. All he knew was that as his voice had to rise to be heard above the shrieks of the alarms emanating from the bridge’s walls as their inarticulate cries indicated where and how badly his matalok, a rough analog of the toolmakers’ hated Mon Calimari cruisers, was sustaining damage; that the bridge floor was shuddering under his feet; that nothing could be seen outside the port-side viewports because of the intensity of incoming fire from the enemy monstrosity; that there was no way, short of a personal blessing from the gods, that the voids projected by his ship’s dovin basals could protect his matalok from the incalculable damage being directed against it.
He turned to shout a command to his chief pilot, an order to turn directly away from the enemy vessel and present all voids to the rear. Before he could speak, there was a bright flash of light in his peripheral vision and all noise ceased. Wyrpuuk Cha turned toward the bow again.
There was nothing there, only stars and flashes of fire from the ships of his fleet. The seats where his yammosk interpreter and villip officer had been were gone, as were the floor, walls, and ceiling of the bridge, all missing from a point a mere pace in front of Wyrpuuk Cha’s feet.
And it wasn’t true that all noise was gone. There was a roaring in his ears, a pain—just none of the sounds of battle that had filled them mere moments ago.
He was cold, suddenly so cold that he involuntarily curled into a ball, and abruptly he found himself floating forward, past the last few handspans of bridge, out into starry emptiness.
“Wild Knights are out of the engagement zone,” Tycho said. He reached into the hologram representing the battle zones of Pyrian space and gestured at one bright cluster of colorful, swirling blips. “The Yuuzhan Vong are concentrating their effort on Pyria Six’s moon. They’re cautious, not trying anything particularly bold, just a standard attritional assault.”
“Very well,” Wedge said. He stood beside his chair, knowing that his voice was carrying very little expression, that his features must look blank at the moment—that was the way it always was when he was calculating things on a strategic scale. Focusing like this seemed to make him distant, inhuman.
But he couldn’t focus. Something was wrong, some noise out of place, and Wedge turned from Tycho to pinpoint the incongruity.
There it was, one of the communications officers. During the last minute, her voice had risen, taken on a tone not of alarm but of confusion, as she’d dealt with the faraway unit leader who was her assignment. But now Iella stood leaning over her shoulder while the comm officer waited. Both women wore perplexed expressions. Wedge didn’t like things that could perplex Iella.
Iella looked up and caught his eye. She raised her voice to be heard over the chamber’s clamor. “Super Star Destroyer Lusankya reports that she’s insystem with the Millennium Falcon. They’re in the middle of the reserve Yuuzhan Vong forces. Lusankya has inflicted heavy damage on the enemy and is taking damage. She needs an escort to get through the enemy.”
The volume of voices in the chamber dropped by a measurable proportion. Wedge heard Tycho’s shout of “What?”
Then Wedge got his own voice under control. “Confirm ship identification,” he managed, and moved to stand by Tycho. “Bring up that portion of the battle zone.”
Tycho manipulated controls on his console and the area of space it displayed contracted and panned to one side. The effect was that of one portion of the battle zone suddenly swelling to dominate the hologram. Wedge could see that the tight formation of the enemy reserve fleet had blurred, diffused, and that in the midst of all the red blips were one large green and one small green marker.
“Identities confirmed,” Iella called. “Millennium Falcon, Han Solo swearing up a storm. Lusankya, Commander Davip commanding.”
“Commander Davip?” Wedge shook his head and bit back on his next question: Why was Davip, a ship captain whose career had long been characterized by strong-willed indecisiveness, a commander instead of a galley cook now? And why wasn’t a ship of Lusankya’s military importance under the command of a full admiral? “Who’s closest to this engagement? Never mind that. Who’s unengaged and far enough out from the sun to make a microjump into that engagement zone?”
“Mon Mothma,” Tycho said, not bothering to refer to the hologram or his console. “Rebel Dream. In one to two minutes, we can have another six ships ready to jump.”
“Danni Quee reports detection of two yammosk kills,” Iella said. “One minute apart. The Yuuzhan Vong are not battle-coordinated now.”
“Very well.” Wedge lowered his voice. “Of course, they don’t need to be coordinated to destroy Lusankya and the Falcon.”
Tycho nodded.
The tactic he needed clicked into Wedge’s mind. In the span of a second, he evaluated it, tested it for major weaknesses, dismissed the weaknesses as irrelevant because of the Yuuzhan Vong’s current state of confusion, and decided that he could probably use the tactic again—once—at a later time.
He reached into the hologram and indicated an area of space next to the Yuuzhan Vong reserve fleet, just on the far side of that engagement zone from the direction of Borleias. “Have Mon Mothma make a microjump to appear here. When she arrives, she’s to broadcast a homing beacon on open fleet group frequencies and defend herself. One minute after she arrives, she’s to activate her gravity-well generators and keep them up for one minute. Issue that to Mon Mothma directly.”
Tycho turned to his console.
Wedge turned to the room. “Attention,” he said, and the clamor dropped a couple of notches. “All ships and hyperdrive-equipped starfighters that can get clear of enemies within the next two minutes are to do so. Inform Rogue Squadron and Twin Suns Squadron that they’re to abandon their current action and get clear. They’ll jump in the direction of a homing beacon they’re about to detect. Gravity-well generators will pull them out of hyperspace in the Falcon’s and Lusankya’s engagement zone. Their orders are to form up on Lusankya and escort her to Borleias. Let’s do it, people.”
Tycho straightened from his console. “Mon Mothma has jumped.”
“Good.” Wedge sighed and lowered his voice. “Tycho, we’re about to achieve a tremendous victory we don’t want.”
Tycho gave him a thin smile. “We’ll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn’t fail when he tried to.”
“Thanks.”