Refugee: Force Heretic II (40 page)

The treaty with the P’w’eck was a smokescreen for the real tactic: once Bakura belonged to the Ssi-ruuk, once it was consecrated, they could advance on it in force!

“This can’t be good,” Han said as columns of russet-scaled Ssi-ruuvi warriors began marching out of the nearest troopship.

Jag’s frustration immediately increased when, at the peak of the consecration ceremony, the feed from the ground dissolved in a burst of static. All transmissions from the planet ceased, sending white noise blistering through his ears. He quickly checked his comm and ascertained that the problem wasn’t onboard. It lay outside his clawcraft.

“Selonia
, I seem to have a communications outage. Anything coming through from your end?”

“Negative, Twin One,” came the reply, distorted but comprehensible. “We’ve lost our uplink, too. Hold on while we look into it.”

Jag waited anxiously with only the persistent static to listen to. Then, amid the crackly hissing, he heard another noise. It was like a wailing, constantly fading in and out. It was unsettling—both haunting and hypnotic at the same time …

“I have launches!”

The voice of one of his pilots jolted him out of his reverie. A quick glance at his board confirmed the report: the nearest of the two P’w’eck carriers,
Errinung’ka
, was disgorging dozens of smaller vessels into the space around it. His computer instantly recognized and marked the familiar droid fighters, but that proved to be only half the complement of the new ships. The rest were of a type never before seen outside the borders of the Ssi-ruuk Imperium. They were V’sett-class fighters, and if his memory served him well they possessed twice the firepower of ordinary droid fighters, as well as a superior maneuverability.

Most importantly, though, they carried flesh-and-blood pilots.

It took him only a moment to figure out what was going on. The P’w’eck’s offer of peace had been completely bogus; the consecration of the planet had been nothing more than a means to clear the way for an invasion force! It didn’t take a genius to know that things were about to get very nasty, very quickly.

“Twin Suns, full alert.
Selonia
, are you registering this?”

“We have it on our scopes now. Trying to raise General Panib … Communications are out down there, too.” The transmission dissolved into static again. The voice returned briefly with “… be jammed somehow. Be on …”

The signal vanished beneath a howl of rising interference. Jag turned down the gain. What next? They had enemy ships pouring onto the scan and, as yet, no response from the local forces. Between himself and the enemy were the mixed flights comprising the Bakuran/P’w’eck “honor guard,” now numbering in excess of two hundred. It seemed from the way they were still flying in formation that they hadn’t received orders to engage or break away. This surprised Jag. Even if the messages were being jammed, surely
one
of the Bakuran honor guard pilots would have realized by now what was going on. And yet, there they all were, flying in perfect formation, completely unaffected by what was happening around them.

Clicking his wingmates, he brought his clawcraft around to match vectors with the nearest trio of honor guard fighters. Two droid ships flanked a Bakuran Y-wing in perfect synchrony, shadowing its every move as it swept around the planet.

He scanned the formation for energy emissions and soon discovered that “shadowing” was as far from the truth as it could get. The two droid ships had powerful
tractor beams locked on the Y-wing and were forcing it to go where they wanted it.

He plotted its course. In two orbits, it would intersect with the carrier
Firrinree
. A cold chill ran through him. The droid ships were kidnapping the pilot!

A quick scan confirmed that the same was true of all the other honor guard flights. Powerless to resist the P’w’eck tractor beams, the Bakuran pilots were helpless in the trap sprung on them—and half of the Bakuran’s Defense Fleet was about to be taken down with them.

There was no way he could warn Twin Suns,
Selonia
, or General Panib. However, he wasn’t about to sit back and let those pilots be reeled in to be enteched. He could only hope that others would understand his actions and follow his lead.

Arming his forward batteries, he thrust hard to cut off the droid fighters. A burst from his blaster cannon skittered off shields that were tougher than he’d expected. It weakened them slightly, but there was certainly no penetration. As soon as he’d swept past, one of them broke away to give chase. The first of his wingmates, Twin Six, met it with a hail of laserfire that forced it to change course. It ducked away, although not before sending a spray of energy at Twin Three as it did.

The second droid ship and its unwilling charge were making a break for it, abandoning all pretense of cooperation and changing course. Instead of arcing gradually around the planet, the pair headed directly for
Firrinree
. A quick glance at his scopes confirmed that the others were doing the same. The masquerade was over; there was no longer any mistaking the honor guard for what it was.

Jag lined up behind the fleeing droid fighter and sent a volley of lasers through its weakened shields, quickly reducing it into space dust. The liberated Y-wing instantly
changed course, wiggling on its long axis in what Jag took as a gesture of thanks.

Twin Two dispatched the other droid fighter and swooped back to join formation. The Y-wing followed, emitting a series of clicks. Jag didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Leading a diamond-shaped formation of mixed vessels, he targeted the next “honor guard” trio and closed in.

By then, his tactical scopes were full of new targets. The alien carriers had emptied their launching bays, and hundreds of fully fueled fighters were jockeying to protect the inbound captives. A rash of launches from
Sentinel
and
Defender
indicated that the Bakuran Defense Fleet had finally caught on. The sky around Bakura was soon boiling as the two forces clashed over the “honor guard” ships, one half fighting to save them, the other half doing everything in their power to repel the rescue attempt.

Jag flew as he hadn’t flown in a long time. It felt good to be fighting an enemy who used a technology he was familiar with—even if that enemy easily outnumbered him and his squadron. In a strange way, it felt like he was back at the academy sitting through a simulation, riding out old melees with an instructor on his case. He was pleased that time away fighting the Yuuzhan Vong hadn’t eroded the reflexes he’d honed as a child.

The manned V’sett fighters were tough kills, though. Flattened and slightly curved versions of the droid fighters the Ssi-ruuk usually sent into battle, these were equipped with shield generators and sensor arrays at every corner. Their engines flashed an eye-piercing violet when powering at max; their weapons burned a brilliant white. Each pilot hid behind an opaque hull and shields that turned mirror-bright every time a shot came too near.

It was an earlier version of those shields, Jag had learned in the academy, that the Emperor Palpatine had
coveted. Hence his attempt to form a treaty with the Ssi-ruuk, just before the Rebels had beaten him at Endor. Jag dreaded to think what might have happened had the Emperor’s dream come true. If he’d had these shields back then, the Rebellion would have undoubtedly been quashed and the outcome of the Battle of Endor would have been considerably different. Moreover, the Chiss, safe in the Unknown Regions, might not have been safe for much longer.

But the Chiss had fought the Ssi-ruuvi fighters before and, even after years of technical improvements, they were capable of doing so again now. V’sett fighters, Jag soon discovered, were vulnerable to multiple attacks. Converging in pairs from different angles was difficult to coordinate without the benefit of effective communications, but all the pilots read the situation similarly and they managed to struggle through. With a few multiple attacks under their belts, it got steadily easier, and in no time at all they were taking out V’sett fighters in sufficient quantities to make the Ssi-ruuk think twice. Soon the dense and volatile orbits surrounding Bakura were a mass of energy, dangerous for pilots on both sides to navigate through.

Seeing one of his squadron’s X-wings trying to shake off the V’sett fighter riding its tail, Jag set off in pursuit. He got a lock on the fighter as it dog-tailed after the X-wing, and he fired when he thought he had a reasonable aim, but the fighter suddenly banked left after the X-wing and the shot went wide. Jag cursed under his breath as he brought the clawcraft back onto the fighter’s tail. Before he could line up another shot, two more fighters came at him from his port side, weapons blazing angrily at him. He sucked air through clenched teeth sharply and nosedived away from the incoming fire. Seconds later, when he had chance to look again for the X-wing, he saw it fall apart in a blaze of fire beneath the V’sett’s blasters.

The two fighters he had just eluded were quickly back on his tail. With the rest of the squadron engaged in the battle elsewhere, he knew that help wouldn’t be coming anytime soon. He was going to have to make his own luck …

Han was backing up, looking for the nearest exit. From below came the sound of screams as the crowd ran in a panic from the advancing aliens. Security guards opened fire on the Ssi-ruuvi warriors, who responded with blistering barrages from their paddle beamers. In leaps and bounds, propelled by powerful thigh and tail muscles, the Ssi-ruuk soon overwhelmed the Bakuran troops. The P’w’eck guards, who had originally protected the Keeramak from attack, turned out to be genuine P’w’eck, unlike the disguised priests; they protected their leader behind a tight huddle, beamers at the ready.

“A tactical retreat might be called for,” Jaina suggested to her parents. “Now that Bakura has been consecrated, my guess is that these guys won’t be afraid to fight anymore.”

“If we get to the
Falcon,”
Leia said, her Noghri bodyguards closing in around her, watching the Ssi-ruuvi warriors balefully, “we’ll have a better chance of dealing with this.”

“Does
Selonia
know?” Han asked.

Leia shook her head. “Jammed.”

Jaina thought of Jag and hoped he was all right. There was no telling what was happening in orbit. If it was anything like what was happening down here on the ground, then it was going to get messy fast. She wished she were behind the controls of her X-wing, flying at his side, her only concern the enemy in her crosshairs. Things were a whole lot simpler in a dogfight.

But wishing wasn’t going to get her or her family away from here. She needed to act—and quickly!

She turned to find Goure standing at Tahiri’s side.

“We need a way out of here,” she said.

He looked up at her, his face illuminated sharply by a flash of lightning. “The main exits are going to be blocked,” he shouted over the thunder rolling from the sky.

Jaina looked around again. The rain was thickening, making it harder to see what was happening in the bowl of the stadium. Paddle beams sizzled through the air, weaving a dense and deadly fabric of energy below. The leading edge was coming rapidly closer.

She nodded after a moment. “I think it’s safe to assume that that’s what the other three ships were for: to keep us from getting out.”

“The way we came, then.” The Ryn pointed at the craterous hole in the stands. “It has to be safer than staying out in the open.”

Jaina agreed, and together they began to gather up the confused rescue workers and spectators still milling about the area. She explained her intentions as best she could, asking them to trust her as she sent them down into the hole. There was little resistance from the people; in the absence of any other plan, most were more than happy to follow her instructions. Once everyone was in, Han and Leia were to go next, then wait for Goure to lower Tahiri into the hole on her gurney. Jaina and the Noghri guards would take up the rear to protect everyone’s backs.

“What about the Prime Minister?” one of the women asked as she went past Jaina.

“What about him?” she shouted back over the rain. “He’s dead!”

“We can’t leave his body here for the Fluties!”

“But—” The protest died in her throat. “Okay, okay, I’ll see what I can do!”

Leaving her parents to supervise the evacuation, she
looked around for the stretcher on which she’d last seen the body. She found it tucked away behind an outcrop, covered in a body bag. If she could slave it to Tahiri’s repulsor gurney, maybe they’d be able to take both of them out in tandem. The moment it got in her way, she told herself, then she would cut it loose. The living had to take priority over—

Her thoughts stopped in midtrack as she went to move the stretcher. The body bag caught on a twisted seat and pulled away, revealing it to be empty.

Her puzzlement was short-lived. Someone else must have had the same concerns and already taken the body to safety; one of the guards or Senators, perhaps, who had made a break for it without the others. She didn’t care. The problem was no longer hers; that was all that mattered.

She returned to the crater, where the last of the survivors was disappearing into the hole. Glad that they would soon be making a move, she looked over her shoulder at the battle taking place in the arena below. The rain was heavier than ever, but she could still make out figures moving in groups across the stadium bowl. The blasterfire was becoming increasingly sporadic as Bakuran resistance failed before the Ssi-ruuvi advance. It wouldn’t be long now before the stadium belonged to the Ssi-ruuk. Soon after, she assumed with a shudder, the captives would be rounded up and taken to the carriers in orbit for entechment …

She turned when a hand touched her shoulder.

“Come on, Jaina,” her father said. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

Although it galled her to leave the battle, the odds were so overwhelming that she knew she didn’t really have a choice.

Before she climbed back down into the hole, she cast her eyes up at the cloud-packed sky.