Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (21 page)

“I have an idea on that,” Jag said. “About your Force coordination.”

Jaina almost laughed. “Jag, you don’t know anything about the Force. You’re as Force-blind as your uncle.”

“Yes, and my uncle would figure this out, too. I’m looking at your Force link as though it were some sort of neural interface between you and Kyp. Assuming it allows speed-of-light communication of impulses, we have your impulse to fire essentially triggering both your firing reflex and Kyp’s. Correct?”

“Maybe.”

“So perhaps the difference in your times is roughly the difference in your physical reaction times. You’re years younger than Kyp. Perhaps you should either hesitate—for as short a time as you can manage—once you’ve made the decision to fire, or you should let Kyp choose the targets and follow
his
lead.”

Jaina looked over her shoulder, through the canopy, to where Jag’s clawcraft floated beside and behind hers, and gave Jag a dubious look. “All right, sure. Let’s give it a try.”

On their next run, the difference between Jaina’s and Kyp’s shots was one one-hundredth of a second, still in Jaina’s favor.

Kyp whistled. “Good thinking, Fel. Let’s do this a few more times …” His voice trailed off.

Jaina felt it, too. She stared off into space, in the direction of the star Pyria.

“What is it?” Jag said.

“Something …” Jaina switched her comlink to fleet frequency and brought up her navigation program. She oriented her X-wing toward the source of her disquiet to
give her a close reading on the course toward that distant point. “Twin Suns Leader to Control.”

“Control here.” It was a man’s voice, decorated with a disinterested drawl.

“Do you have anything going on in the spinward side of the system, say on an approximate course toward Arkania?”

There was a delay of a few seconds. “Negative on that.”

“Something’s up … my flight is going to head that way. Keep your ears open for us.” She switched back to her squadron frequency. “Come on, mortals.”

“As you wish, Goddess.”

Jag responded with a comlink click.

Jaina and her pilots flashed across Pyrian space as fast as their thrusters would take them; they angled in close to the star Pyria, picked up a little gravitational momentum from that close passage, and flung themselves toward the source of disturbance Jaina and Kyp could both sense. That disturbance didn’t abate. If anything, it grew more clear, more strong.

Within minutes, Iella Wessiri took over the comlink at Control. “What have you got?”

“Not sure. Just a sensation in the Force.”

“It can’t be Yuuzhan Vong, then.”

Jag said, “It can be Vong-related.”

“True.”

Jaina said, “Can you direct your sensors along our course to see what’s out there ahead of us?”

“Negative on that. There’s a little matter of a sun between us and your course. However, we’re maneuvering
Rebel Dream
into position to track you and anticipate your course. She should be coming on-station in—she’s on-station now.” Iella grew silent for a moment. “
Rebel Dream
reports one large signal, multiple smaller signals incoming. Gravitic anomalies suggest it’s Yuuzhan Vong.
General Antilles requests that you take a look, but be careful.”

“We’re on it.” General Antilles
requests
. Jaina shook her head. Wedge had been right. All this goddess deception was going to take some getting used to.

Soon enough, the distant anomalies showed up as blips on her sensors, and then she began to pick them up on her visual sensors.

Nearest was a Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog with a screen of coralskipper escorts. Behind it, some distance away, surrounded by a screen of Yuuzhan Vong capital ships …

Jaina keyed her comlink. “Control, it’s a worldship, a big one even by Vong standards.” She felt her mouth go dry. This wasn’t the worldship that was in orbit around Myrkr, the worldship where Anakin and Jacen had died, but just seeing another of the vast living craft so soon made her feel sick.

“Understood, Twin Suns Leader. Suggest you return.”

“Negative.” Jaina made a slight course correction to put her flight on an intercept course with the oncoming frigate. “We need to see why they’re starting out with such a small probe.”

Jag’s voice came over the squadron frequency. “That small probe includes a frigate. It’s big enough to cause us some trouble.”

“Yes, but that’s where I’m feeling the disturbance in the Force.” The disturbance, she decided, didn’t have the feral hunger that was characteristic of a voxyn. No, it felt like pain.

Then they could see the frigate and its escort. Three coralskippers, a quarter of the screen, peeled off from the formation to head their way.

“Three?” Kyp sounded insulted. “They expect three coralskippers to be enough for us?”

“No.” That was Jag. “They’re just supposed to slow us down. We can either ignore them and take some plasma cannon fire up the exhaust ports, or deal with them and let the frigate past.”

“We deal with them,” Jaina said. “Then catch up.”

The coralskippers came on, firing.

“Let’s play with the new tactics.” Jaina extended her Force perceptions, found Kyp’s waiting for her like an outstretched hand. The three of them settled into their earlier formation, the two X-wings ahead, the clawcraft behind and between. Almost as one, they twisted, rolled, and sideslipped, always eluding the oncoming plasma cannon fire, the oncoming grutchins.

Jaina chose their target, the coralskipper at starboard rear. Kyp chose the moment to fire. The skip’s dovin basal created its void directly before Jaina’s shot, but Kyp’s smashed into the coralskipper’s bow, annihilating the dovin basal. Then Jag’s lasers stitched their way along from the bow to the cockpit canopy, punching burning holes all the way. That coralskipper continued on a dead ballistic course as the others flashed past the Twin Suns pilots and looped around for another attack.

Jaina looked at her sensor board, at Jag’s attack delay. “Three-quarters of a second! Jag, you guessed wrong.”

“Rather, I’ve taught you to be a little more unpredictable.”

She managed an amused smile. Trust Jag’s personal shields to deflect her criticism. “Let’s do it again. Maybe with fifty-fifty odds, Jag can guess right this time.”

The Yuuzhan Vong frigate’s course took it close to the star Pyria, the reverse of Jaina’s outbound course, as it headed toward Borleias. Once Jaina, Kyp, and Jag finished with the three skips sent to delay them, they blasted along in the frigate’s wake, catching up rapidly.

The frigate cleared the star’s orbit and began a straight-line approach to Borleias. Jaina’s sensor board showed
Rebel Dream
vectoring in on an intercept course; comm transmissions indicated that starfighter squadrons were launching both from planetside and from
Lusankya
. There was no way the frigate would get close enough to Borleias to do any harm.

“Frigate’s slowing,” Kyp reported. “Vectoring. It’s changing course. It knows it’s a futile attempt.”

“Wait, wait,” Jag said. “Put your visuals on its underbelly.”

Jaina did, and saw a long slit appearing in the frigate’s underside hull. It was a moist-looking opening, as unlovely as a Hutt’s mouth that had been pressed shut and was slowly beginning to gape.

As she watched, the gap began issuing shapes, tiny irregular things that spilled forth, streaming along the frigate’s original course.

Jaina grimaced. The shapes were wiggling. More organic weapons. Probably worldshapers of some sort, if they were being released at this distance toward Borleias in general instead of at a military target in specific.

Then she realized that the disturbance she’d felt in the Force was traveling with those shapes. She felt her stomach sink. She put more power into acceleration, roaring toward the cloud of wiggling shapes, ignoring the frigate and coralskipper escort as they vectored away.

In moments, she could see what the Yuuzhan Vong had discharged.

People. Mostly humans, the occasional Sullustan or Rodian or Devaronian. They were male and female, of all ages, naked—

No, not quite naked. As she got closer, Jaina could see the transparent covering on their bodies, a transparent sac inflated over their heads. They were wearing some
variation of the ooglith cloaker, the Yuuzhan Vong environment suit; doubtless it would give them a few more minutes of life as they soared through space. They might freeze to death, they might run out of air, they might reach Borleias’s atmosphere and burn up in reentry. But they were all minutes from death, a score of them or more.

A Sullustan female saw Jaina’s X-wing approaching. The Sullustan twisted her head around and looked at Jaina, her eyes wide with fear, her expression imploring. Jaina could only stare back, helpless.

She became aware that Jag was talking.

“… ejected hostages. They appear to be in some sort of ooglith cloaker suits. They’re on ballistic approach toward Borleias. I don’t think the planet’s microgravity is perceptibly accelerating them yet. I can’t estimate the survival time their suits give them. I read twenty-two, repeat two-two of them. Standing by.”

The words, so calm, so clinical, snapped Jaina out of her reverie. She looked after the departing coralskippers and frigate.

“Don’t do it.” That was Kyp’s voice, and she felt it through the Force as much as she heard it over the comlink. “They’re trying to dictate your responses.”

“Serenity,” she whispered. She felt as though if she spoke more loudly, the volume would tear open a hole in her and let out the anger growing within her. “The way of the Jedi is serenity.” She reached out through the Force, found the Sullustan female, and tugged at her.

She could detect no change in the Sullustan’s velocity. She tugged harder. “Kyp, can you save any of them?”

“Maybe. That’s a tremendous amount of kinetic energy to absorb.” Kyp’s presence in the Force diminished as he turned away from her to the problem at hand. On
her sensors, she saw one of the hurtling shapes begin to slow down.

She pulled harder at the Sullustan and was finally certain that the female was slowing. “Jag, you can’t do anything here. Get back to Borleias, escort some shuttles up—”

“I’ve called for shuttles. And I’ll let you know when I’m useless. I recommend you follow
my
lead and discontinue trying to slow them to a stop.” Jag’s clawcraft darted ahead of the X-wings, maneuvered with delicacy into the cloud of victims, matching and then slightly surpassing their speed.

Then, with skill that was on the wrong side of impossible, Jag rotated his clawcraft and sideslipped it until it was mere meters to the side of a dark-skinned human male. Jag flicked his thrusters and the clawcraft slowed. The clawcraft slammed into the human at somewhere between twenty and thirty kilometers per hour; the man, stunned but not completely incapacitated, flailed around frantically as he was vectored away from Borleias.

The clawcraft rotated; as soon as that victim was clear of any possible ion wash, Jag touched his thrusters again, and maneuvered until he was alongside a second victim. That one, too, he rammed, as delicately as possible, an impact that appeared to hurt the Twi’lek woman’s arm, but sent her off at an angle that would not propel her into Borleias’s atmosphere.

Jaina’s flight was able to vector every one of the twenty-two ejected victims away from entering Borleias’s atmosphere. They couldn’t save all twenty-two; four died from exposure before the shuttles could reach them, and the remainder were all removed to the biotics facility’s medical ward, in varying stages of cold exposure. But none ended up as gruesome meteors flaming into incandescence in the planet’s atmosphere.

The flying it took to save the survivors was remarkable enough to draw applause from the ground crews when Jaina’s flight and the shuttles landed just after midday, but the pilots waved off the appreciation and did not lose their grim demeanor.

Word came that the Yuuzhan Vong worldship had taken up distant orbit, beyond the orbit of Pyria’s farthest planet. It remained on-station there, its capital ships and coralskippers clustered near it.

Through the special ops docking bay’s holocam feed, Wedge watched Jaina and her pilots arrive; then he switched off the view. “I was right,” he said. His voice was pitched low enough that it would not carry far in the perpetual babble of sound that was the operations center.

“You were right,” Tycho said. “The Vong have brought out big guns and someone with a certain amount of personal style to fire them.”

“Have the recovered victims, including the ones who didn’t make it, and anyone who has been in direct physical contact with them go through decontamination. Have Danni or Cilghal supervise the decontam. I want the surface of Fel’s clawcraft to be checked out and similarly decontaminated. They
might
have anticipated Jag’s tactics, so they might have booby-trapped all of the victims.”

Tycho nodded. “I’m on it.”

One more thing.” Wedge caught Tycho’s eye. “You were listening to Jaina’s comm traffic. Her desperation to save those people.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not dark-side behavior, at least as I understand it. I queried Kyp privately, and he’s pretty sure that she’s bouncing back from her brush with the dark side.”

“Meaning,” Tycho said, “is she trustworthy? Maybe even enough to be one of the Insiders?”

“Right.”

Tycho’s face revealed no emotion other than careful consideration of the question. Finally he nodded. “The brain and the gut are in agreement. I think she’s worth our trust. She’s a Solo.”

“I think so, too. She goes on the list.”

The Yuuzhan Vong pilot with the absurdly human forehead and its concealing tattoos remained bowed with his arms crossed over his chest in salute until Czulkang Lah gestured for him to straighten. Czulkang Lah said, “Your name?”

“Charat Kraal.”

“And you are a pilot of Domain Kraal and its colony on this system’s most habitable world?”

“I am, Warmaster.”

“Do not call me warmaster. My son is warmaster. And answer this: Why have you seized elements of Wyrpuuk Cha’s fleet, suborning those elements to mutiny against his designated successor?”