Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (34 page)

Wedge scrolled down in his datapad to personnel
records, called up the details of Flight Officer Koril Bekam, and transmitted
his
authorization code.

AUTHORIZATION ACCEPTED
. Power-up of the remainder of vehicle systems commenced.

The docking bay door was now fully open, spilling sunlight across Wedge and the X-wing. Wedge saw a detachment of Yuuzhan Vong warriors, twenty or more of them, pass by the bay, headed toward the biotics building.

The data board indicated that two engines were up, three, four, then thrusters and repulsors reported ready. Lasers came online, and the bar indicating shield readiness struggled to become a solid green.

A Yuuzhan Vong warrior skidded around the corner of the special ops docking bay and halted, facing the X-wing, his posture suggesting surprise. A moment later, nine or ten more raced up behind him and turned toward Wedge.

Wedge gave them a smile—humorless, feral. He flicked his lasers over to stutterfire and sprayed the crowd of enemy warriors, saw some of them dive back the way they’d come, saw others caught in the beams.

Even set on stutterfire, where each beam was fired at the lowest useful intensity available to an X-wing weapon, the lasers were meant for vehicles, not individuals. Striking the Yuuzhan Vong, the beams superheated flesh past the point of cooking, past the point of boiling, straight to the state of gas or even plasma. Warriors hit by the beams simply exploded, torsos reduced to nothingness, limbs hurled in all directions.

Wedge grimaced, then fired up his repulsors and thrusters. In a smooth motion, his X-wing lifted, sideslipped out from under the docking bay roof, and turned the direction
opposite that from which the warriors had come. He kicked his thrusters over to full and raced at maximum acceleration away from the docking bay and crumbling biotics building. Over his shoulder, he could see the Yuuzhan Vong troop carrier, an egg-shaped thing, towering over the docking bay, squadron after squadron of warriors emerging from it at a dead run. The troop carrier opened up on his X-wing, sending glowing plasma balls after him, but Wedge twitched the vehicle to port and the flood of burning material fell into the jungle beneath him.

There wouldn’t be time for a checklist, even an abbreviated one. He had to get up into space and rejoin his forces. He switched his X-wing comm unit over to command frequency. “Blackmoon Eleven to
Mon Mothma
, Blackmoon Eleven to
Mon Mothma
, come in.”

The unit came alive with comm traffic. Wedge recognized the voice of Tycho, directing starfighter squadrons, of Jaina issuing commands to the Twin Suns, of many other officers under his command. But no one responded.

He put on a little altitude, preparatory to making the run to space. “Blackmoon Eleven to anyone. Please respond.”

Nothing.

He growled. He’d have to rely on his own sensors and instincts to choose the best course offworld, and could easily blunder into squadrons of incoming coralskippers. Well, those were the breaks. He could either complain or prepare. He pulled back on his yoke—and then flashed past a small Corellian freighter, a scarred sky-blue YT-2400. He knew the ship, which was far newer than the similar
Millennium Falcon
, but still a rickety thing held together by wire and meanness.

In the glimpse he had of it before leaving it behind, he thought that it looked mostly intact, despite smoke pouring out of one of the engine housings, and believed he’d seen people outside it, moving. He began to loop around.

“Blackmoon Eleven, this is
Ammuud Swooper
. Come in, please.”

Wedge frowned. How did they know his designation? Then it made sense. He couldn’t broadcast voice, but his transponder must still be working, must still be sending out this X-wing’s identifier code for friend-or-foe sensor recognition. “
Ammuud Swooper
, you have Blackmoon Eleven. Go.”

“Blackmoon Eleven, come in. This is
Ammuud Swooper
. Please reply.”

Wedge passed over the downed freighter again, this time at reduced velocity. He could see men and women atop the freighter, illuminated by the sparks and glow of welding torches.

At this range—he pulled his comlink out of his breast pocket and thumbed it on. “
Ammuud Swooper
, this is Blackmoon Eleven. Are you receiving me now?”

“Barely, but we have you. We were downed by plasma cannon fire but we’ve almost got a patch ready on our engines. We can lift in a couple of minutes … but the unit that shot us down is pretty close, north-northwest. Can you hold them back for us?”

“I’ll give you your two minutes. Maybe more. My comm board is shot, so if I don’t respond to further communications, don’t take it personally. Blackmoon Eleven out.”

“Thanks, Eleven.
Ammuud Swooper
out.”

Wedge reduced his speed still further, then looped
around to pass over the freighter on a north-northwest course. In seconds he saw the enemy unit
Ammuud Swooper
had spoken of, approaching through a patch of thick grasses surrounded by jungle; there were a dozen Yuuzhan Vong infantry, two dozen reptoid slave-warriors, one coralskipper, and what appeared to be an unwounded rakamat, this one tall and lean rather than mountainous, and with only half the armament of a full-sized version, but still plenty against a lightly armed freighter.

Or an X-wing, for that matter.

Even as he calculated their numbers, Wedge switched over to stutterfire and sprayed lasers across their position. Warriors and reptoids went down and grass ignited in front of the rakamat as he fired. Then he flashed over their position, plasma fire from the rakamat following, and saw on his sensor board as the coralskipper rose in pursuit. He put all discretionary vehicle power into his rear shields for a moment, heard thumps over his audio as his sensors informed him that plasma ejecta had hit the shields and been stopped.

It had taken six X-wings and a hidden cache of explosives to kill the last rakamat they’d fought against. This one might be only half as powerful as the last, but Wedge was a third as powerful as the previous force. The odds were bad.

On the other hand, Han Solo had made a generation of people think that Corellians ignored the odds, no matter how long, and Wedge was as Corellian as Solo was.

Then the idea hit him, and Wedge managed another humorless grin.

The coralskipper hot on his tail, Wedge looped around until he was approaching the rakamat and its covering troops from a cross-angle to its path. He fired again, spraying lasers indiscriminately into the grasses to the left of the rakamat, scattering the Yuuzhan Vong warriors and reptoids there. From here, he could see the rakamat’s legs as it moved stolidly toward the freighter, could time them in their steady, docile motions.

Plasma rained toward him from the rakamat, from the coralskipper behind. Wedge sideslipped and continued to fire into the grasses, setting them ablaze, kicking up gouts of dirt and steam. Now his vision was useless, but his sensors still showed the huge mass of the rakamat, distorted by the heat from the fire.

Wedge dropped to grasstop level, heard scrapes and thumps as his lower hull was grazed by foliage—perhaps even by irregularities in the terrain. Ahead, he could see the very top of the rakamat, as its plasma cannons elevated, preparing to catch his underside as he popped up over them.

He flipped an overhead switch and his S-foils closed from the X-shaped firing position to cruise position. And as he entered the zone where the grasses were blazing, he twitched his yoke down, then up.

He had the barest flash of rakamat legs to his left and right, a looming shadow over him, and then he was rising.

For a bare moment, no plasma came streaking after him. In going under the rakamat, in emerging low from the wrong side, he’d thrown the creature into confusion. He switched his S-foils back into firing position as he climbed.

In that moment, the pursuing coralskipper roared through the fire and saw the rakamat immediately before it. The pilot must have panicked. Over his shoulder, Wedge saw the bow of the coralskipper wobble as the pilot was torn between following Wedge under or bouncing over, and that moment of hesitation doomed him. The skip’s bow rose and, at several hundred kilometers per hour, the skip plowed into the flank of the rakamat.

There was no flash of light, no noise of the impact—Wedge was racing away too fast for the sound to catch him. There was only the grisly image of the coralskipper tearing through the creature, emerging in a different, narrower shape, the rakamat being flung in two pieces away from the point of impact, the remains of the coralskipper arching up in a ballistic course and then gradually down toward the ground.

Wedge looped around to mop up. There was unaccustomed tension in his arm, and he realized that he was gripping the yoke too hard.

“I’m not going to say it,” he told himself. “I’m not.”

I’m getting too old for this
.

   
Lusankya
was visible to the naked eye now, a tiny needle pointed straight for Domain Hul.

Czulkang Lah squinted up at it, irritable, his diminished eyesight insufficient to provide him with any details of what he was seeing. He gestured at an aide, who correctly interpreted the nonspecific motion and stroked the enormous circular lens in the center of the command chamber’s ceiling. It distorted, stretching details at its periphery into blurriness, magnifying the enemy ship’s image until it dominated the scene.

The ship had already sustained tremendous damage. The deckplating everywhere was torn, rough, like a road that had once been smooth and then had been traveled over by herds of rakamats with spike weapons on their feet. Flame jetted out from its hull in dozens of places. Its guns were mostly silent; Czulkang Lah saw only two batteries that were still active, and they seemed to be firing at random. They posed little threat to his coralskippers.

But there were still squadrons of enemy starfighters out there, mostly concentrated at
Lusankya
’s stern, maintaining a savage defense over that area of the ship.

Kasdakh Bhul moved to stand beside him. “Our pilots report that the
Lusankya
abomination is almost destroyed. Lack of responsiveness indicates that most of her crew must be dead and most of her weapons eliminated. She will not be able to send her lasers and bolts against us.”

Czulkang Lah carefully positioned his feet so that the blow would not cause him to lose his balance; that would be unseemly. Then he swung his arm. His vonduun crab armor correctly interpreted his haste and snapped his arm forward. His armored forearm cracked across the back of Kasdakh Bhul’s helmet, sending his second-in-command staggering forward.

Kasdakh Bhul regained his balance and spun. Czulkang Lah could see the younger officer’s features graduate from an expression of anger to one of surprise.

“You see, but you do not understand,” Czulkang Lah said. “They never intended to use their weapons upon us.”

“Oh.” The younger officer’s voice became unreasonably reasonable, a type of mockery useful in that it could be persuasively denied afterward. “So this was simply an
infidel sacrifice? An apology? They are saying,
We are sorry for being bad; here, have our greatest weapon
?”

Czulkang Lah offered him a smile nearly devoid of teeth. “You persist in being an idiot. I am proud to say I did not train you; you would have been my most repellent failure. Did you not notice? They never protected their weapons. They only protected their engines. What does that tell you?”

The younger officer scowled. “That they wanted the thing to get here quickly?”

“That their engines
are
their weapons. Are you sure you are not an ooglith masquer with nothing actually inside?”

Kasdakh Bhul ignored the undisguised insult. “Then their intention—is to ram us?”

“Wisdom. At last. So, even an ooglith masquer can learn a little when submerged in knowledge.”

“Then we must make sure the abomination is incapable of reaching us. Of maneuvering adequately to ram us.”

“Very good. Issue the orders, Ooglith Masquer.”

   Three coralskippers, all that remained of the latest wave, turned and sped away.

Doubtless they’d regroup with reinforcements in a minute and return. Luke checked his sensor and status boards. He was now two pilots down, and the remainder of his units were battered; he had some plasma scoring on his starboard top S-wing and engine. “Blackmoon Leader to squadron,” he said. “We have a moment. Anyone with stripped shields, now’s the time to commence a power restart.” He goosed his thruster to come up behind and below
Lusankya
’s port-side thruster banks; he
kept well to port of them. This position gave him a good view of the Yuuzhan Vong worldship ahead. “Anything I should know?”

“We have Blackmoon Eleven back on the status board.” That was the voice of Lieutenant Ninora Birt, Blackmoon Ten, the squad’s new communications specialist. A freelance smuggler, she’d loaned her expertise and her freighter,
Record Time
, to the cause of this operation. Her freighter had been half destroyed during the taking of Borleias, and the job had been completed above Coruscant weeks later; now, with a new military officer’s commission, she was still fighting the good fight.

Luke glanced at his status board. It did indeed indicate that Blackmoon Eleven was active. Distance and direction suggested that the X-wing was on Borleias.

“No way.” That was Blackmoon Five. “Koril’s in bacta somewhere. I saw the medics haul him off.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Luke said. “Concentrate on what’s at hand.”

“Blackmoon Leader, this is Twin Suns Leader.”

“Go, Goddess.”

“Sharr is detecting skips regrouping in a bunch of different units. All at a uniform distance away from
Lusankya.
”

“We’ll set up for a new wave, then. Thanks, Exalted One.”

   Finally Jaina could see the incoming squadrons on her sensors. There were a lot of them, eight groupings at least, and the three squadrons at
Lusankya
’s stern were losing strength. “Time for a Goddess chase, don’t you think, Sharr?”