The Joiner King (66 page)

Jacen’s heart leapt as he realized he was in danger, and he jerked his stick to the right as shots flared past his canopy. He’d spent too long lining up his last target and an enemy had jumped him. He corkscrewed through the sprawl of swirling fighter craft and managed to lose his pursuer, and when he stopped his dodging there was an enemy right in front of him, flying right into his sights while lining up on a clawcraft. Jacen blew him apart with a quad laser burst.

He was through the furball now, and pulled back the stick to climb and repeat his maneuver. The others had slowed down to maneuver, and were easy targets for anyone diving in from above. He doubted that he could manage three hits on every pass, but there was no reason not to try.

Jacen made a lazy loop while he scanned the fight through his cockpit, then he half rolled upright and fed power to the engines. A sudden cry came over the comm. “I’ve just lost rear shields!
Anyone!
This is Twin Two—I’ve just lost an engine!
Help!
”

Twin Two was Vale, Jaina’s rookie wingmate—probably lost, and without cover. He felt Jaina’s rising tension through the Force-meld as she searched for Twin Two, and he scanned the mass of weaving fighters as he approached, seeing one madly dancing X-wing with a tail of flame, a pair of skips weaving after her.

“Break left, Twin Two,” he called. “I’ve got you.”

“Breaking left!” Panic and relief warred in Vale’s reply.

Jacen hit the atmosphere brakes and the X-wing slowed as if
it had hit a lake of mercury, and then he crabbed his jouncing fighter around into a shot on the lead coralskipper. His laser bolts blew the canopy away and sent the craft in an end-over-end spin for the planet below. The second enemy dodged his lasers, and Jacen yanked his fighter into an even tighter turn, the atmosphere jolting the craft, dropping its speed. The enemy swallowed his concussion missile into the singularity of its dovin basal and caught the laser bolts as well, but Jacen saw Vale dart away into safety while her pursuer was preoccupied. And then enemy rounds were hammering on Jacen’s shields, and he released the atmosphere brakes and tried to roll away, punching the throttle.

He’d slowed down too much, losing speed and maneuverability and choice. An enemy had found him and was hovering off his tail, hurling round after round after him while he tried desperately to regain speed and the ability to maneuver …

Jacen’s astromech droid chittered as the aft shields died. And then there was a crash that Jacen felt through his spine, and the stick kicked against his gloved hand. The X-wing slewed abruptly to the left. It slowed so much that the pursuing coral-skipper overshot, passing within meters of Jacen’s canopy, and his head swiveled on his neck as he looked frantically in all directions, trying to spot any additional threats …

And there it was. On the end of Jacen’s left foils, its claws dug into the paired laser cannons, was a grutchin, one of the winged, insectoid, metal-eating creatures that the Yuuzhan Vong sometimes released with their missiles. A grutchin whose malevolent black-eyed gaze stared back at Jacen, before it turned to its work and took a leisurely chomp out of the upper left foil.

Jacen dived to gain speed, working the controls frantically to keep the X-wing balanced as the weight and drag of the grutchin threatened to destabilize it. As speed built he was rewarded by the grutchin digging its claws more firmly into the foil, hunching against the battering it was receiving from the atmosphere. Jacen felt his lips draw back in a harsh smile. He’d hoped the wind would strip the grutchin away, but this was the next best thing: the creature couldn’t eat his ship as long as it was spending all its strength just to hang on.

Then Jacen pulled back on the stick and fed power to the engines. The only way to get rid of the grutchin was to open the canopy and shoot the thing off his wing, but he couldn’t open the canopy and stand up as long as he was in Ylesia’s atmosphere—the wind would tear him right out of the craft and send him tumbling toward the planet below with half the bones in his body broken.

An interesting dilemma
, he thought. The grutchin couldn’t eat his craft as long as Jacen was flying at speed through the atmosphere, but he couldn’t get rid of the grutchin until he got out of the atmosphere altogether. This would call for fine judgment.

“This is Twin Thirteen,” he said into the comm. “I’ve got a grutchin on my wing. I’ll be back after I deal with it.”

“Copy,” came Jaina’s voice. He could hear the strain of combat in the terse expression, and feel her stress in the Force.

Jacen kept his eyes on the grutchin and his throttles all the way forward. He kept the nose tipped as far as he could without losing speed, and slowly the buffeting of the atmosphere eased as the air thinned. When the grutchin was able to lift its head and take another bite of the upper port laser cannon, Jacen stood the X-wing on its tail and fled straight up into space. The grutchin shifted its grip and took another bite, and the laser cannon tore free and spun away into the darkening sky. Jacen reached for his blaster and loosened it in its holster. The whisper of wind on the canopy was almost gone. The second laser tumbled into the sky, and the grutchin turned, its claws clamped firmly on metal, and walked methodically along the two united foils, heading for the engine.

Jacen extended the foils into the X-position, hoping to shake it free or slow it down, but without success. Instead he felt, rather than heard, a crash as the grutchin’s head drove like a metal punch into his engine cowling.

Better do
something
, he thought. He threw the cockpit latch; as the cockpit depressurized, force fields snapped into place around him, preserving his air. The sound of flight vanished, though he could still feel the vibration of his craft sounding up his spine. Red lights were flashing on his engine displays. He nudged the controls to the cockpit servos, lifting it slightly
open. When he felt no turbulence he opened the cockpit all the way.

He summoned the Force to guide the fighter’s controls as he stood in the cockpit and pulled his blaster from its holster. As he leaned out of the cockpit he saw the upper left foil fly away spinning, eaten away at the root. There was a flash of fire in the engine and it died.

Surely, he thought, the flameout was enough to cook the grutchin. He leaned farther out, bracing one arm on the cockpit coaming, and thrust out the blaster.

The grutchin’s beady eyes stared back at him with malevolent purpose. And then the creature’s wings extended, and Jacen’s heart gave a lurch as he realized the grutchin was going to leap straight for his face.

He fired while mentally rehearsing the move necessary to snatch his lightsaber with his free hand in case the blaster didn’t do the job. He fired again, and again. The grutchin reared, its clawed forelegs pawing the airless space between them, and Jacen fired twice more.

The grutchin’s head tumbled away into the emptiness. The rest of the grutchin then followed.

Blasters work
, Jacen reminded himself as he eased back into the cockpit and sealed the canopy.

His astromech droid had already prepared a damage report. Rear shields down, both port lasers gone along with the port upper S-foil; the other port foil damaged, and one engine destroyed.

Jacen thumped a frustrated fist on the cockpit coaming. The X-wing’s aerodynamics had been wrecked—if he went into the atmosphere to aid Jaina now, his craft would go into a spin that would end only when he hit the ground.

He had come here to aid Jaina, to make certain that she would never be without his support. Now he was leaving her in a desperate fight with the enemy.

But once he had time to listen on Twin Suns’ comm channel, it appeared that Jaina no longer needed his aid. She was ordering her squadron to regroup.

“Twin Leader, this is Twin Thirteen,” he said. “The grutchin’s dealt with.”

Jaina was all business. “Twin Thirteen, what’s your status?”

“I’m going to need to get a new fighter before I can rejoin. What’s
your
condition?”

“The fight’s over. Kyp and Saba came to help us. We’re regrouping to hit the spaceport and cover the landing.”

“And the Brigaders’ fleet?”

“Surrendered. That’s how Kyp and Saba were free to join us.” There was a pause. “Twin Thirteen, Twin Two has lost an engine. I need you to escort her to rejoin the fleet.”

“Understood,” Jacen said, “though considering the state of my fighter, Vale may end up escorting me”

He heard snickers over the comm. Through the meld Jacen felt his sister bearing the humor with patience.

“Just get her there, Twin Thirteen,” she said finally.

“Understood,” Jacen said, and rolled his fighter so that he could spot Vale approaching from the planet below.

“Inertial compensators,” Thrackan said as he contemplated the wreck of his landspeeder. “What a
good
idea.”

It had taken Thrackan and Dagga Marl longer to escape Peace City than he’d expected, largely because so many others were fleeting on foot and had gotten in the way. Barely had they emerged from Peace City’s ramshackle limits than a colossal spiraling chunk of yorik coral had come tumbling down out of the sky like a grayish green lump of cosmic vomit and impacted on the road just ahead of them.

The explosion had thrown the landspeeder off the road and spinning into a patch of trees, where, between tree trunks and flying chunks of yorik coral, it had been comprehensively destroyed. But the deluxe landspeeder—built originally for a young Hutt, to judge by the fittings—had been equipped with inertial compensators, and these had failed only after the vehicle had come to a complete halt. Thrackan and Dagga emerged from the wreck unscathed.

Thrackan turned to look at the shattered Yuuzhan Vong frigate lying in fragments beneath a thick cloud of smoke and dust.

“I don’t think Maal Lah’s forces are doing very well,” Thrackan said. There was a horrific smell of burning organics, and he remembered that the frigate had actually been alive, that something akin to blood had pulsed through its hull.

He turned to Dagga. “You wouldn’t have private means of getting us off the planet, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Or knowledge of a landspeeder anywhere nearby?”

Dagga shook her head. Thrackan shrugged.

“That’s all right. One will come along in a minute, stop to work out how to get-around the wreckage—and then we’ll steal it.”

Dagga flashed him her shark’s grin. “Boss, I like the way you think.”

They crouched for some time in the trees by the road, but no landspeeder came. The explosion, with its cloud of smoke, had discouraged anyone from fleeing in this direction.

Thrackan shrugged. “I guess we walk.”

“Where are we walking
to
?”

“Away from the city that’s about to be pounded into gravel.” Thrackan began picking his way through the debris field. There was relatively little left to burn—most of the frigate had been
rock
—and the smoke was dissipating.

He and Dagga fled back into the cover of the trees as a flight of fighter craft howled out of the sky and shrieked along the road toward Peace City. The fighters were distinctive, with ball cockpits and weird jagged pylons on either side. Thrackan was annoyed.

“TIE fighters? We’re being attacked by the
Empire
now?” He glared. “I call this excessive!” He shook his finger at the sky. “I call this overkill on the part of Fate!”

He waited a few minutes, then rose from his crouch among the bushes and scanned the sky carefully. “I guess they’re gone. But let’s stay in the trees and—”

Dagga cocked an ear to the sky. “Listen, boss.”

Thrackan listened, then ducked into the bushes again. “This is outrageous,” he muttered. “Haven’t these people anything better to do?”

Another squadron of fighters—X-wings this time—blasted along the road, their wakes sending the last of the debris smoke swirling out to the sides in huge corkscrew whirls. Then out of the smoke came a phalanx of whining white landing craft that settled onto the huge scar created by the falling frigate. The last wisps of smoke were flattened by the repulsorlift fields as the landers neared the ground, and then the great forward hatches swung open and whole companies of armored soldiers floated out on military landspeeders that bristled with armament.

“Right,” Thrackan said as he and Dagga tried to dig themselves into the turf. “We wait till they’ve gone on to the city, and then we steal one of the transports and head for home.”

Dagga gave him a look. “Home had better be pretty close. Those transports won’t have hyperspace capability.”

Thrackan ground his teeth. This was
not
working out.

The soldiers briskly secured a perimeter, and more craft whined to a landing. It looked as if the soldiers had landed in at least regimental strength.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Dagga said.

The soldiers’ perimeter had expanded as new craft landed, and troopers were now quite close. An officer with a scanner had spotted the two life-forms in the trees, and at his command a pair of landspeeders swung toward the wooded area where Thrackan and Dagga were hiding.

“Right,” Thrackan said. “We give ourselves up. First chance you get, you break me out and we steal a ship and head for freedom.”

“I’m with you there,” Dagga said, “right up to the point where I take
you
with me. I don’t think you’re going to have access to a weekly kilo of spice after this.”

“I’ve got more than spice,” Thrackan said. “Get me to Corellia, and you’ll find I’m stinking rich and willing to share—”

His words were interrupted by an officer’s amplified order.

“
The two of you in the woods. Come out slowly, and with your hands up.
”

Thrackan saw Dagga’s cold eyes harden as she calculated her chances, and his nerves leapt at the thought of being caught in a crossfire. He decided he’d better make up her mind for her.
“Darling!” he shouted. “We’re saved!” And then, as he scrambled to his feet, he whispered, “Leave your weapons here.”

He pasted a silly grin to his face and came out of the trees, his hands held high. “You’re from the New Republic, right? Bless you for coming!” The officer approached and scanned him for weapons. “We saw those TIE fighters and we thought maybe the Emperor was back. Again. That’s why we were hiding.”