Realspace greeted Jaina with an actinic flare and a shock wave that bucked her X-wing violently. She flinched instinctively, closing her eyes against the glare, the memory of impaired sight still imprinted on her nervous system.
Have some sense, girl, she thought, forcing them back open. You’re in enemy territory!
And about to smack into an asteroid, the same one the coralskipper Gavin Darklighter had just drilled had exploded against. She yawed hard to port to avoid an identical fate.
“Heads up, Sticks,” Gavin’s voice crackled in her ear. “Rogues, form up. We’ve got plenty of company on the way.”
“As ordered, Lead,” Jaina said, weaving her way through the irregular bits of shattered planet that stretched as far as her sensors could make out.
Starboard and above her horizon, the yellow star at the heart of the system was half eclipsed by the outstretched arms of the distant gravitic weapon. Nearer and dead ahead was the more immediate target of Rogue Squadron—the cordon where Kre’fey’s stripped-down Interdictor had sacrificed itself. Its shields had already collapsed, and its mass-shadow generators were random ions; but an expanding cloud of superheated gas marked clearly where it had been. Wedge had added one thing to the Bothan admiral’s already good idea—he’d rigged the reactor to go supercritical when the shields reached 12 percent.
There was no knowing how many Yuuzhan Vong ships it had taken with it. However many it had, there were plenty left coming through the drifting planetary shards, and they were the business of Rogue Squadron. Calculations had shown that the temporary shift in gravitic stresses in the system would give them a very small window of opportunity—not big enough to risk Kre’fey’s larger ships on, but plenty big enough to sneak the Rogues and Kyp’s Dozen through. The Dozen were headed straight for the weapon to scout out whatever forces were guarding the thing. The Rogues’ job was to clean out the Yuuzhan Vong nested around the stable hyperspace entry, which was the only way in for the Ralroost—and for the Yuuzhan Vong forces at the perimeter of the system. The Rogues had to gain control of it.
“I make something big at the target coordinates,” Gavin informed them. “Might be a ship; might be a battle station. Designate Wampa. One-flight, we’ll take that. Two and Three, keep those skips off us.”
Jaina double-clicked to acknowledge, and peeled off with Three-flight, lining up off Twelve’s port wing. She felt a brief sadness, remembering that she had once flown wing for Anni Capstan, back when she first joined the squadron. Anni had died at the Battle of Ithor. Twelve was a stranger, a Duros named Lensi. Jaina had met him in the final briefing.
“Turn two hundred thirty-one to twenty-three,” Alinn Varth, leader of Jaina’s flight, ordered. “We’ll take that bunch.”
Jaina acknowledged and did as ordered, seeing as she did so a flight of eight skips in pyramid formation, coming in fast. The space around was relatively clear of asteroids now, reflecting the low mass-density that made the area safe for jumping into and out of. Jaina felt exposed.
“Only two to one,” Lensi said. “Not bad.”
“Don’t get cocky, Twelve,” Varth snapped. “This is just the first course.”
“As ordered,” Twelve responded. Then he rolled, firing splinter shots at extreme range. Jaina stayed with him, but held her fire until they were closer in. The skips began firing all at once; Jaina jinked the stick and cut a hard corkscrew turn. The plasma globs went by without even singing. Now behind the skip that had fired at her, she got a targeting lock on it and began spraying it with underpowered shots. The skip produced a void and began absorbing them, but in doing so lost some of its mobility and taxed its power. When the shots started getting through, Jaina switched to a full-power quad burst.
To her surprise, the anomaly gobbled that, too.
Sithspawn. “Watch it, Twelve,” Jaina said. “They’re on to the bait and switch. They’re letting the splinter shots in early.”
“Acknowledged. Let me dust that off your tail, Eleven.”
A quick glance showed Jaina she had indeed picked up an admirer. She yanked her stick back, hard, but the skip followed. Her shield took a hit.
Twelve dropped in behind the skip while Jaina put her X-wing through a series of convoluted maneuvers. The skip hung right in there.
“Grounded for too long,” she muttered.
Then the tagalong flared and tumbled, trailing plasma.
“Thanks, Twelve,” she said.
“Not a problem.”
Jaina dropped and rolled down to target another coral-skipper. Like the previous one, this one started letting the splinters through early.
“We can learn, too,” she said under her breath. She kept up the spray, fired quad lasers, then fired again on full power. Three glowing holes appeared in the skip. It continued along its vector, no longer firing. Jaina wasted no more time on it, but found Twelve and dropped back to his port.
“Let’s get that stray,” Twelve said.
“Negative, Twelve,” Nine’s voice crackled. “Re-form. We can’t get them all, and we can’t afford to let them separate us for any length of time.”
“As ordered,” Twelve acknowledged.
Four more skips were coming in. If we don’t get this door open soon, Jaina thought, we’ll never get it open at all.
A sudden harsh crackle quivered Jaina’s eardrums. Then Gavin’s voice. “I’ve lost Three,” he said. “Deuce, take my back. I’m going in.”
Jaina gritted her teeth, wishing she could see what was going on at Wampa, but she had her own problems. Three skips came up on her port. She hated to do it, but after a little splinter fire she switched to proton torpedoes. A void appeared to catch the deadly missile, and as programmed the warhead detonated before it could be sucked in. The bonus was that the explosion was near enough to take out all three Yuuzhan Vong fighters.
That’s right, boys. Keep coming like that.
Then it occurred to her they were probably encouraging her to waste the torps. After all, they were never going to take out that monster down in the shipwomb with lasers.
But of course, they couldn’t take it out at all if they died here. One thing at a time.
The Falcon bounced on the expanding plume of vaporized coral her lasers had just coaxed out of the interdictor. Han’s view of the massive ship broadened, and also allowed the fifteen or so coralskippers on his tail a shot at the Falcon without danger of hitting their mother ship. Cursing, Han dived low again and quickly encountered the major problem with that, one he had never encountered while using similar tactics against Imperial Star Destroyers.
The Yuuzhan Vong ship opened a void. If Han’s reflexes had been a single twitch slower, they would have smacked right into it, and he didn’t want to find out what that would do. He hit the repulsors and bounced again, intentionally this time, hurling the Millennium Falcon into a tight arc that quickly became a circle. The skips followed—in time for half of them to run into a new explosion, this one from a concussion missile.
“That’s better,” he grunted.
“We’re doomed,” C-3PO noted.
“Lock it down. We’ve seen a lot worse than this.”
“Might I point out—”
“No.”
The quad lasers were pounding steadily, Jacen and Leia doing their part. A gratifying number of skips had already succumbed to his family’s efforts, but they weren’t the problem. The big ships were the problem, especially the Interdictor.
Only the Falcon had a shot at it. Karrde’s ships were fighting for their lives against the two Peace Brigade vessels and the Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog.
“Han Solo,” he muttered, “suckered into the most obvious pirate trap imaginable. I’ll never live it down.”
“I’ll add that to the list of other things you’ll never live down,” his wife’s voice said over the open intercom.
“Yeah, well, you’d better hope I do live this one down, sweetheart.”
“Dad?” Jacen said. “Did I ever mention this whole pirate thing was a bad idea?”
“Why no, son, you—Wow!”
His exclamation was comment on the jet of plasma the interdictor had just released. Its diameter was greater than that of the Falcon, spearing up like a solar flare. He avoided it by a turn so sharp that even with the inertial compensators at 98 percent, the g’s sent blood rushing from his head.
Behind him, he heard a loud clattering sound as C-3PO smacked into a bulkhead. Again.
“Okay,” Han muttered. “Time for a change in strategy. Threepio, quit fooling around and haul yourself up here. I need you.”
The golden droid’s head peeped around the corner. “You need me? I would be happy to be of service, Captain Solo, but I don’t see how a protocol droid could be of help. Unless you want me to transmit our surrender, which I must say seems like a bad idea, even when you consider the alternative.”
“That’s not it,” Han said, weaving through a cloud of fresh skips. “Earlier, we noticed an odd radiation signature from one of those cargo pods. Figure out what it is.”
“Sir, I really don’t see—”
“It’s that or you start working on your surrender speech.”
C-3PO moved to the sensor readout. “I’m quite sure I don’t know what I’m doing. Nevertheless, I hasten to be of service. Oh, why didn’t I stay with Master Luke?”