Inferno (29 page)

“It’s nothing special,” Luke said. “A standard assault mission—we’re going to soften up the Fifth Fleet so the Wookiees have a fighting chance to stop Jacen’s pyromania.”

“And?”

Luke sighed. “And I’m going to use the assault as a diversion to make a run at the
Anakin Solo.
Lowie managed to drop a shadow bomb near the bridge, and we might drive it off with another hit. Maybe even take it out.”

Jaina dropped off the ladder. “I’m coming.”

“Great,” Luke said. “Tahiri seems to have disappeared. You can take her place in the Night Blades.”

“With
you.
”

“Jaina, I don’t need—”

“The hell you don’t.” Jaina turned back toward her own StealthX. “And don’t even
think
about trying to lose me. I’ll blow out your droid socket faster than you can say
sideslip.
”

R2-D2 screeched in protest, but if Luke voiced his consent, Jaina didn’t hear it. She was already racing across the hangar toward her own StealthX. The efficient ground crew had refueled the craft and topped off the laser cannon actuating gas. But Jaina had not been carrying heavy weapons when she arrived, and the Wookiees were just now preparing to stock the torpedo compartment.

“Forget it, boys.” Jaina jumped onto the cockpit access ladder. “I don’t think we’re going to have time to load the shadow bombs, and it looks like I’m flying tail cover anyway.”

Jaina had barely reattached her suit systems to the cockpit before the order came to launch. She closed her canopy and, once the ground chief had given her the okay, engaged her repulsor drives and spun around. The StealthXs were just launching, a long line of black ghosts gliding out the hangar door, arcing up into the wroshyrs and vanishing into the smoke.

Most of the wing had departed before Jaina felt Luke touch her mind. She opened herself to the Force, expecting to join him in a combat-meld. She felt only his outer presence, reluctant and unwelcoming, and even that quickly drew in on itself until she could barely tell it was there. There would be no emotional joining on this mission; he was not ready to share his pain with anyone. Jaina slid into line behind her uncle, wishing there was some way to comfort him through the Force, but knowing there wasn’t. A few minutes later, they were climbing out of the smoke into the blue Kashyyyk sky.

It was almost too early to call the battle a battle. The Wookiee fleet was still on the far side of the planet, just getting itself organized, and the Alliance’s Fifth Fleet was hanging back beyond the gravity well to protect the
Anakin Solo.
The only actual hostilities taking place were the blue lines lancing out from the
Anakin Solo
’s long-range batteries, blazing through the Kashyyyk atmosphere to burn what no one had ever thought it necessary to defend.

Jaina found herself alternately hating her brother and mourning his loss, trying to understand what the Yuuzhan Vong could have done to him—or what could have happened to him during his five-year sojourn—to turn him so horribly evil. Could he really believe the efflux he spouted about protecting the Alliance against “terrorist elements”—like their own parents? After all of the torture and loss he had suffered, did he feel so threatened by the ever-changing nature of the galaxy that the only way he could feel secure was by controlling it?

Ultimately, Jaina knew, what had changed her brother didn’t matter. He’d become another Emperor, and he simply had to be stopped. It broke her heart, but the only thing that counted now was putting an end to his madness. If Jacen survived, maybe he could be redeemed, as Kyp had been after he destroyed the Carida system. But if not…well, there was no need to consider that possibility. It simply wasn’t important now.

Jaina felt Luke chiding her through the Force, demanding that she pay attention. Embarrassed by her uncharacteristic lack of focus, she glanced out the canopy and found no reason for the rebuke. The Fifth Fleet was dead ahead, floating between them and the
Anakin Solo
’s flashing turbolasers, a field of white speckles interlaced with the tiny blue filaments of starfighter ion tails.

Then Jaina
felt
it—a pressure building in the Force, a sensation of imminent arrival. Several thousand kilometers to one side of the fleet, crooked snakes of iridescence began to dance between the stars. Immediately a message scrolled across the primary display, reporting the arrival of a large fleet.

“No kidding,” Jaina said. “
Whose
fleet?”

U
NKNOWN
. C
LASSIFYING VESSELS NOW
.

Jaina’s question was answered an instant later when a volley of green dashes erupted from the new arrivals and blossomed against the shields of the Fifth Fleet.

B
OTHAN
, Sneaker answered. Corvette and light cruiser designator symbols began to populate the edge of the tactical display. S
ENSOR ANALYSIS CONFIRMS MANUFACTURE
.

“Bothan?”
Jaina was incredulous; the Bothans were the last species she would have expected to come rushing to the Wookiees’ aid. “Are you sure?”

N
O
. C
ORRELATION IS ONLY
98.76
PERCENT
, Sneaker informed her. D
AMAGE FROM RECENT ENGAGEMENT PREVENTS CERTITUDE
.

Jaina scowled inside her helmet. The damage profile suggested the Bothans had broken away from the Battle of Kuat to come defend Kashyyyk. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said to herself. “What are they doing here?”

A
TTACKING US
.

“Not
us,
” Jaina told the droid. “You need to realign your friend-or-foe identification files. We’ve sort of changed sides.”

S
O THEY ARE
F
RIENDLIES
?

“Maybe,” Jaina said. “We’ll have to ask Luke later.”

N
EUTRALS
? the droid persisted.

“Close enough.”

The Fifth Fleet began to return fire, focusing Alliance attention on the Bothans and making it even more unlikely that the fleet would notice the StealthXs coming. Feelings of guilt and sorrow permeated the Force as the Jedi began to realize how easy their run was going to be—how many of their friends and acquaintances they would soon be killing in cold blood.

Jaina felt her own throat tightening and found herself struggling to blink away tears. For a time, she had flown with the Fifth against the Yuuzhan Vong, and many of the beings she had met then were still serving with it. They were good people—brave, loyal, kind—and it didn’t seem right that so many would die today at Jedi hands. But what could the Masters do? Let Jacen burn Kashyyyk to a cinder?

By the time the StealthXs had drawn near enough to worry about being spotted visually, the Fifth Fleet was fully engaged against the Bothans. Both sides were pouring starfighters into the void and hurling turbolaser fire back and forth between them. With her naked eye, Jaina could see tiny balls of orange limning the hulls of many Alliance vessels ahead. On her tactical display, Bothan corvettes were blinking yellow, red, then vanishing almost faster than Sneaker could update the data.

All too soon, the Fifth Fleet started to spread across Jaina’s canopy. Its vessels began to assume identifiable shapes—the wedges of Star Destroyers, the fist-headed cylinders of heavy frigates, the sleek curves of Mon Calamari cruisers. The StealthX wing split into six squadrons and angled toward different areas of the fleet. Jaina and Luke fell in with the Night Blades and followed Saba Sebatyne toward the
Vulnerator,
an old
Victory
-class Star Destroyer that had been in service as long as Jaina’s parents.

The
Vulnerator
and its two escort frigates swelled rapidly in the forward canopy, their shields glimmering gold with turbolaser energy. When the vessels did not loose so much as a blaster bolt at the approaching Jedi, Jaina began to think it might have been better to have the StealthXs simply sneak through the Fifth Fleet’s protective shell and swarm the
Anakin Solo.

Then a chill raced down her spine, and the Night Blades began to scatter. Space exploded into clouds of fiery brilliance in every direction, and Jaina’s StealthX bucked so hard she could not read her displays. Crash webbing bit into her shoulders and damage alarms began to beep, alerting her to a multitude of problems she had no time to register. She sensed Luke diving to one side and jammed the stick over, following, then breathed a sigh of relief when the starfighter actually responded.

“How bad is it, Sneaker?”

The droid sent a report to the primary display. The way the cockpit was bouncing, it was just jumping lights.

“Can’t read it,” she said. “Are we holding together?”

Sneaker toodled an affirmative answer that sounded vaguely like “for now.” Another volley of crimson blossoms opened around them, many laced together by flashing lines of cannon bolts. The
Vulnerator
had anticipated their attack, waiting until the StealthXs had drawn close enough to spot. Then—and this was the smart part, the part that required discipline only the Alliance space navy could instill—the gunners had held their fire until all stations had acquired the target.

Luke was weaving through the storm almost effortlessly, slipping away from turbolaser strikes half a second before they blossomed, ducking cannon bolts as though he had a telepathic connection to the gunner’s mind. And maybe he did, for all Jaina knew. She had thought she had a fair understanding of his Force abilities, but if his flying was any example, he hadn’t revealed half of what he could do. Maybe not even a quarter.

She concentrated on staying behind him, trying to follow the silhouette of his StealthX as it darted through the fiery curtain surrounding them. Often she could see only the faint glow of his ion engines before their efflux turned dark, and sometimes her only sense of his location came through the Force. It did not take long for her cockpit to stop bucking despite the barrage, and she was finally able to read the damage report Sneaker had put on the display earlier.

T
HREE
.

“Three what?” Jaina asked. It certainly wasn’t engines—she would never have been able to keep up with Luke with three engines out.

T
HREE CASUALTIES
, Sneaker reported. Y
OU WANTED TO KNOW HOW BAD THE FIRST STRIKE WAS
.

Jaina gasped into her oxygen mask. Clearly, the
Vulnerator
had developed a very effective technique for dealing with stealth fighters. If a Star Destroyer could take out three Night Blades in an opening salvo, the usefulness of stealth-equipped attack fighters was going to be very limited indeed.

“What about our other squadrons?” Jaina asked. “Were they hit as hard as the Night Blades?”

I
NSUFFICIENT DATA TO REPLY
, Sneaker reported. N
IGHT
B
LADE CASUALTY COUNT IS BASED ON OBSERVED CRAFT DETONATIONS
. S
INCE
S
TEALTH
X
S HAVE NO SENSOR SIGNATURE
—

“Right,” Jaina interrupted. “You have no way of telling.”

She glanced at the tactical display and found the rest of the Fifth’s Star Destroyers encased in envelopes of short-range turbolaser fire. If the other StealthX squadrons had suffered as many casualties as the Night Blades, the Jedi had just lost a quarter of their fighter wing.

Jaina reached out in the Force, hoping to join the nearest combat-meld and discover that the situation wasn’t so bad—and recoiled from the disapproval Luke sent boiling her way. She quickly drew back in on herself and—thinking he was actually having to hold back so she could keep up—concentrated on staying on his tail.

When Luke did not increase the sharpness of his maneuvers and came perilously close to flying them into a fireball, she finally realized that his reason for shunning the combat-meld earlier had nothing to do with concealing his pain.

Luke was hiding from Jacen.

Jacen
was the reason the Fifth was so prepared, why they seemed to be expecting the StealthX attack—even with the distraction provided by the arrival of the Bothan fleet. Jacen had been looking for the Jedi combat-meld.

Jaina was still contemplating this when the
Vulnerator
retargeted its batteries and space turned dark again. She checked the tactical display and found the entire Fifth Fleet shifting fire back toward the approaching Bothans. A handful of Star Destroyer symbols were blinking yellow for damaged. But all in all the StealthX attack had been a terrible failure—just how the Masters might plan it if they wanted to minimize Alliance casualties while Luke slipped through to take out Jacen.

That would certainly explain Luke’s behavior before launch. If he were planning to try something as reckless as taking out a Star Destroyer alone, it might be reasonable to think someone
else
would have to avenge his wife’s death. And he wouldn’t want his niece tailing along…and if she insisted, rather than risk getting her killed, too, he might try to lose her at the last instant.

“Not going to happen, Uncle.”

Jaina tightened up, coming in so close that she could see R2-D2’s dome blinking. Luke seemed to sense what she was doing—or what she was worried about—and gave a little wing-waggle. Then he drew in his Force presence so tightly that she could no longer find it. She thought at first he was mocking her, but quickly realized he was showing her what to do. She pulled her own presence so close that Jacen would have to be sitting in the cockpit to sense her.

Luke gave another wing-waggle. They left the Fifth Fleet behind, descending toward the flashing beams of turbolaser light that were all they could see of the
Anakin Solo.
It disgusted Jaina more than ever to have Jacen’s flagship named for their younger brother. It was just a name—but it was a name that had stood for something good, and she knew she would feel a pang of regret when they began their attack run. Something else to make Jacen pay for…if he survived.