Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (12 page)

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.