Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (20 page)

“No. I decided on this design days ago, when I calculated that you’d be issuing that directive.”

Days
ago? Jaina felt a flash of surprise and irritation. How dare he attempt to predict her this way?

How dare he do it successfully?

But she tamped down on the feeling. Jedi Knights needed to be serene. Squadron leaders shouldn’t let their pilots get to them. She needed not to be caught off guard, even when caught off guard. She just smiled. “Well, it’s a good design. I approve.”

“Thank you.” There was the slightest touch of mockery to his reply, and Jaina felt her mood sour slightly. It wasn’t true, as some of the New Republic pilots thought, that Jag Fel always acted as though he were superior. What was true was that he always seemed to see through deceptions, always seemed to know the truth behind
what was being said to him. No one liked to have their falsehoods ignored, their images pierced.

On the other hand, this meant Jag would have a harder time behaving as though he were serving a goddess made flesh. Jaina smiled to herself. She’d be able to find some way to make him uncomfortable, to penetrate his unflappable manner.

“
Record Time
coming on-station.” The announcement blaring through her comlink jolted Jaina out of her reverie.

“Deploy targets,” Jaina said. “All right, Kyp, let’s show Jag how Force-users do it.”

From one of
Record Time
’s bays streamed a series of cargo containers. They were the most-damaged of the containers that had been used to bring garrison supplies into the Pyria system, too badly crushed or corroded to stand up to further use. Now each had two red target zones painted on each long side; sensors were attached to the targets. They tumbled through space at
Record Time
’s arrival velocity.

Jaina led her flight in a loop that would bring them up at a ninety-degree course to the containers’ path.

“I’m open, Goddess.”

Jaina suppressed a grimace. She should have known that Kyp would be ready for the Force link they were trying. She should have felt it.

But she had been keeping herself a little closed off. It was better that way. She didn’t want to be so closely tied to Kyp that he would feel it through the Force, be tortured by it, when and if she followed her brothers into death.

When, not if.

So, though she let him help her back from the dark side path she had recently followed, though she even acknowledged him as a second Jedi Master—though no
one would ever replace Mara as her true Master—it was best to keep him at a certain distance.

But she couldn’t do so all the time, so, feeling a touch of unease, she extended her Force perceptions toward Kyp, found him, merged with him in a sense.

It was neither as close nor as effective a bond as the one between Luke and Mara. But then, she didn’t want it to be. That sort of closeness led to no good.

She frowned at that thought, wondering where it had come from, wondering if Kyp had picked it up. But there had been no flicker of emotion from him. Doubtless he hadn’t. “All right, Jag. Kyp and I are going to pick and hit a target. The sensors will tell us how close together our strikes are, how well we’re coordinating through the Force. For fun, I want you to see how long it takes you to punch a hole in the target directly between our two strikes.”

“Consider it done.”

They angled in toward one target, Jaina and Kyp moving together with a precision possible only through the Force. Jag stayed with them, tucked between and slightly behind them, his maneuvers as fast and precise as it was possible for them to be without Force coordination.

Jaina picked her target—a container both tumbling and spinning on its long axis, two containers starboard of the one they were heading toward—and fired. Her quad-linked lasers and Kyp’s burned off at what looked like exactly the same instant, hitting the red target zones of the container simultaneously, reducing the container’s two ends to molten slag. A fraction of a second later, Jag’s blast hit the center of the spinning mess, cleaving it in two.

“Not bad.” Jaina consulted her comm board. “Four one-hundredths of a second between our shots, Kyp; yours hit second. We need to get those numbers down.
Jag, you were twenty-six one-hundredths of a second behind Kyp. Pretty good, considering you didn’t know which container was going to be our target.”

“Actually, I did. I knew it wasn’t going to be the one our course was aimed at. Given a fifty-fifty directional choice, you go starboard more than half the time. I figured you wouldn’t choose the first target of opportunity in that direction, so I centered on the second. Of course, if I’d been wrong, it would have taken me a much bigger fraction of a second to hit the target you’d chosen.”

Jaina heaved a sigh. Jag was determined to annoy her with his efforts to predict her. But she schooled her emotions once more into something like serenity and merely clicked her comlink in acknowledgment. “Let’s go around again,” she said.

The second run was much like the first. Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots remained separated by a few hundredths of a second. Jag’s follow-up shot was, if anything, faster than it had been on the first target.

“You guessed I’d go left of our course, one target out,” Jaina said.

“Yes.”

“Let’s do it again.”

As Luke finished packing his bag for the day’s activities, Mara entered their quarters. Ben was awake in her arms, grasping at her hair, pulling it into his mouth, but all of Mara’s attention was on Luke. “I’m going to Coruscant with you.”

That stopped Luke cold. “What changed your mind?”

“Time. Time to calm down, time to figure things out. Understanding that there’s nobody more suited than you are to stopping the enemy that menaces Ben, and there’s nobody better than
me
at watching your
back.” She shrugged, then looked down into the face of their son.

“Ultimately, it was figuring out that if I wait until Ben’s enemies are right in front of me before I kill them, I’ve already failed him.”

Mara’s expression was so melancholy that Luke felt his throat constrict. “Listen, I’m about to go out into the jungle with Tahiri to plant a few gravitic sensors. Care to come along?”

Mara nodded. “Do you think Leia would baby-sit for us?”

“I suspect she’d be very happy to.”

Luke, Mara, and Tahiri moved through the jungle a few hundred meters from the start of the kill zone. They’d entered the jungle, had gone through a series of steps to shake off any likely Yuuzhan Vong observers, and now reached the first of their target zones.

Luke set down his backpack. From within it he drew a short-hafted heavy hammer. “Behold,” he told Tahiri, “the favorite weapon of Jedi before the invention of the lightsaber.”

She frowned at him, green eyes confused beneath her bangs. “You’re kidding.”

“Of course I’m kidding. C’mon. The Jedi sledgehammer?” Grinning, he turned to his wife. “Mara?”

From her own backpack she drew a stake, two-thirds of a meter long, made of metal, very broad at the top. She obligingly set it point-first into the ground. “Go ahead. I’ve always thought that menial labor involving hitting heavy metal things with other heavy metal things was man’s work.”

With quick, hard blows, Luke pounded the thing until its head was flush with the ground. Then he spread dirt and leaves over it.

“And that’s going to transmit gravitic fluctuations?” Tahiri sounded dubious.

“Uh-huh.” Luke replaced the hammer in his backpack, then picked the backpack up. It weighed less, several kilograms less, than it had when he set it down. He pretended not to notice, or to recognize that the ground beneath the pack was stirred up, when it had been smooth when he’d set the pack down. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Tahiri announced. Mara just nodded.

As they moved from the site, Luke whispered, “Well?”

“I think we were being watched,” Tahiri whispered back. “I mean, it felt right. From the Yuuzhan Vong perspective. But I’m not sure.”

“I’m sure,” Luke said. “Couldn’t you feel the insect life go quiet just east, ahead of us?”

“I …” Tahiri looked embarrassed. “I could have been able to if I’d thought about it. But I didn’t.”

“Don’t feel bad. You were thinking Vong—”

“
Yuuzhan
Vong.”

“—Yuuzhan Vong instead of Jedi. I suspect it’s not easy to think both ways at once. Is it?”

Tahiri shook her head. “They’re ahead of us, then. That won’t be the same group that was watching us, I expect. That group hasn’t had time to get into position ahead of us.”

“Good work,” Mara said. “When do we expect it?”

“They’ll wait until we can’t hear what the first group is doing back at the site we just left,” Tahiri said. “But they’ll be impatient. It’ll be pretty soon after that. Such as … now.” Tahiri thumbed her lightsaber on; its
snap-hiss
heralded the lengthening of its glowing blade just in time for that blade to intercept a thud bug. The thud bug flared into incandescence and disappeared with a crackling sound.

Luke brought his lightsaber up but turned away from
Tahiri. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, Mara doing the same, turning the other way. The three of them stood back to back as the Yuuzhan Vong warriors came spilling out of the jungle.

There were five of them, and the first, coming in at Luke, was moving too fast, committed to the charge, depending on the first thud bug to distract the Jedi. Luke spun his lightsaber to intercept his cracking amphistaff, then rolled over backward, propelling the Yuuzhan Vong warrior past him in an uncontrolled tumble.
Yours
, he thought.

Barely looking, Mara brought her own lightsaber blade around, plunging it into the hurtling warrior’s face as he tumbled past.

The next one in came at Tahiri, amphistaff rigid in a two-handed grip. She parried his first strike, his second, and kicked him in the knee, but the impact of her bare foot on his vonduun crab armor slowed him not at all.

Two, timing it as a single attack, leapt out from a screen of dangling fronds at Mara. She reversed her lightsaber so that the butt of the hilt was next to her thumb, the blade oriented down, and directed it back and forth against their low amphistaff attacks, using the lightsaber as a defensive umbrella. As one went high to bring his weapon up and over her defense, she kicked out, a beauty of a full-extension kick that caught him under the jaw and tumbled him backward into the fronds.

The last one came in at Luke. He was slower, more patient than his comrades. Luke struck, a feint, then began a reverse strike as he saw his opponent raise the amphistaff to parry … then something about the warrior’s pose and motion set off an alarm in Luke’s mind. Luke dropped to one knee and the poison spat by his foe’s amphistaff went harmlessly over his head.

It wasn’t entirely harmless. Luke saw it arc toward
Tahiri’s side. She withdrew a step, drawing her enemy forward, and the poison splattered against that warrior’s mask, dribbling through the eyehole. The warrior gurgled, clamping down on a shout of pain or dread.

Luke rose to a crouching position and then continued the motion, leaping up and over his opponent, inverting as he went, swinging his lightsaber with blurring speed at his foe’s head. His enemy caught the blow on his amphistaff and was shoving the staff’s pointed tail at Luke even as the Jedi Master landed. Luke caught the thrust on his lightsaber blade, deflected it mere centimeters, and kept the energy blade scraping up the amphistaff’s length. His opponent jumped away before the lightsaber could sever his fingers.

Tahiri’s enemy was down now, poison flowing from one eye socket and smoke rising from the other, and she moved into position just in time to intercept Mara’s second foe as he returned from the verge of fronds. Caught off guard by her flurry of attacks, the Yuuzhan Vong warrior allowed himself to be forced into retreat; both of them disappeared into the fronds.

Luke’s foe flicked the serpent head of his amphistaff forward. Luke sidestepped and the poisoned thing snapped to full extension a hairsbreadth from his side. Then Mara’s hand closed around it, over the head, and yanked. Luke’s foe stumbled forward, off balance for one deadly moment, and Luke swung his lightsaber into the vulnerable gap beneath the warrior’s helmet. Flesh boiled and severed. The warrior fell.

Luke spun. Mara was flinging the captured amphistaff into the face of her foe; the warrior contemptuously brushed it aside and raised his weapon.

Luke flung his own lightsaber spinning toward the warrior, then added a deft touch with the Force to make its flight eccentric, unpredictable. The warrior batted it
aside as well, but the distraction was too long; Mara drove in with her lightsaber, punching through the warrior’s right arm socket, shearing his arm completely off. As he fell, she followed through with a thrust to the face.

Luke beckoned and his lightsaber, depowered, flew back into his hand. He snapped it on again. “Tahiri?”

“Here.” She emerged from the screen of fronds, unhurt. “Look what mine was carrying.” In her hand was a metal stake.

Luke frowned. “Is that the one we just planted?”

“No, a different one.” Mara smiled. “Success.”

“Let’s go,” Luke said. “Before any more decide to visit.”

They headed on to their next planting spot. There, they’d hammer another stake in—a stake that did contain sensor equipment, but which was designed to be found and removed by the Yuuzhan Vong.

For the real sensors were in Luke’s bag. Each was a little droid, the size of the ubiquitous little utility droids found all over capital ships. These contained the same gravitic sensors as the spikes, but also burrowing motivators that allowed them to exit the slit at the bottom of Luke’s backpack and dig their way into soft soil. The Yuuzhan Vong might see every spike planted, might remove every one … but odds were good they wouldn’t detect a single burrowing droid.

Luke had fought against many sneaky people, but was usually happy to have sneaky people on his side.

As they executed kills on target after target, Jaina became more proficient at choosing targets Jag couldn’t anticipate; the time between Kyp’s shot and Jag’s grew until it averaged nearly half a standard second. Jaina felt she’d achieved a slight measure of victory. At least Jag couldn’t
remain confident in his ability to anticipate her thinking. But the gap between Jaina’s firing time and Kyp’s remained about the same.