Balance Point (2 page)

The skip she was chasing swooped toward the Bothan Assault Cruiser
Champion. Champ
was flying cover for another refugee convoy. Kalarba’s industrialized moon, Hosk, already wobbled in its orbit. The situation was hauntingly similar to Sernpidal’s last hours, almost ten months ago. There would be even greater losses, here—to the Kalarbans. But to Jaina, like her dad, Sernpidal had been a tragedy that might never be matched.

Vaping these skips wouldn’t bring back Chewbacca,
but it helped deaden Jaina’s bitter memories. Keeping one finger on her stutter trigger, she showered the coralskipper with crimson laser splinters. Multiple bursts of low-power energy tired and distracted the skip’s energy-sucking dovin basals. As the colonel once put it, “Tickle its teeth, then ram a fist down its throat.”

Her sensor showed the vortex draw back slightly, a little closer to the enemy ship that projected it. On her primary screen, a Chiss clawcraft swooped in from behind. “Covering you, Rogue Eleven.”

Now!
Jaina tightened her index finger on the main firing control, loosing a solid burst from all four of her lasers. The skip’s tiny, projected gravity well bent her laser blast, but she’d shot high to compensate. The anomaly sent two of her shots wild. It focused the other two exactly where she wanted them, painting the crystal-paneled cockpit with flaming sheets of light.

We’ve got the tactics to beat them in an even fight, now. But it’s never even. They keep killing us and keep coming. Their ships even heal themselves!
The Yuuzhan Vong had converted whole worlds into coralskipper nurseries and blasted one of the New Republic’s biggest military shipyards, at Fondor. Surviving major yards—Kuat, Mon Calamari, Bilbringi—had gone to full alert, with carrier groups deployed to defend them.

Crystal shards and hot gravel blasted off the coralskipper, propelling it into a slow spiral out of the fire zone. The Yuuzhan Vong pilot didn’t eject. They all died with their ships—by choice, it seemed.

And
still
they kept coming, while New Republic pilots were pulled home to defend their own systems.

“You’re clear, Ten,” Jaina exclaimed.

“Thanks, Sticks.”

“Anytime.” Jaina pulled to starboard and spotted a catastrophe in the making. “Rogues, more skips coming
in at 349 mark 18. They’re headed for
Champ
’s drive nacelles.”

“Copy that.” Major Alinn Varth, commander of Jaina’s flight, put an edge on her voice. “Time to make coral dust. Eleven, Twelve. On me.”

Jaina double-clicked her comm to acknowledge the order, then pushed her throttle forward. She inverted her X-wing, following Rogue Nine over
Champion
’s ventral surface, so close and so low she could almost count rectennae and rivets.

Brevet Admiral Glie’oleg Kru, a Twi’lek, commanded
Champion
. Since Fondor, Jaina heard about a newly made captain or admiral at almost every engagement. Other worlds recently lost—Gyndine, Bimmiel, and Tynna. Here at Kalarba, Jaina’s intelligence briefer had speculated that the aliens were trying to cut the Corellian Run, a vital hyperspace route to the Rim. Druckenwell and Rodia had just gone to full alert.

Another convoy of Kalarban ships, including dozens fleeing the ruin of Hosk Station, had just jumped. Despite all efforts to find and destroy a huge dovin basal the Yuuzhan Vong had obviously dropped on Kalarba, Hosk was losing altitude with each orbit. Its Hyrotii Zebra fighters were long gone, all ten of its turbolasers disabled. Enemy vessels that showed on her screen as many-legged creatures pursued the metal-sheathed moon, gobbling up shuttles that lagged behind the convoy. Hosk’s polar cluster of towers was already skewed more than thirty degrees from its normal orientation. Soon Kalarba would be another dead world, useless even to the Yuuzhan Vong.

Jaina rounded
Champion
’s starboard fighter docking bays into a blazing free-for-all. Three coralskippers jumped her, flinging brilliant plasma bolts. Her pulse pounded as she went evasive, juking in all directions
without thinking, keeping her right middle finger tight on the secondary trigger.

“Sparky,” she ordered her astromech droid, “I need one hundred percent shields at thirteen meters.”

Letters flashed on her heads-up display as the R5 unit, her companion ever since joining Rogue Squadron, complied just in time. Static buzzed in her headset. A dovin basal grabbed for her shields.

Another new skip vectored low and to port. Jaina feathered her etheric rudder and shoved the stick over, chasing while stars spun.
Just that much closer, Vong. Just that much closer …

Her torp brackets went red with a lock-on. Triumphant, she squeezed off a proton torpedo. As it rode blue flame toward the alien fighter, she held course, squeezing off more scarlet splinters, distracting the dovin basal—

“Eleven,” a voice cried in her ear. “Break starboard!”

Hutt slime!
Jaina goosed her throttle and broke, pitching against her flight harness. The X-wing shuddered. “I’m hit,” she cried. Adrenaline made her clench the controls. She eyed her primary board. “Still got shields, though.” She feathered stick and rudder, bringing the X-wing about. “And maneuvering.”

But now she was mad. Coralskippers, designated scarlet on her heads-up display, swarmed
Champion
and its defenders. But one, swooping back toward
Champion
, had to be the skip that just put scorch marks on her S-foils.

She rammed her throttle forward.

Now she saw the big enemy ship astern of
Champion
. Just smaller than a Star Destroyer, its configuration reminded her of some weird marine creature. Its thickest arm pointed forward, probably command and control. Two thinner arms stuck out dorsally, two ventrally.
From the ventral arms, blinding plasma was already pouring out at
Champion
.

Two flights of New Republic E-wings swooped in to hit the new arrival. Staying hot on her skip’s tail, Jaina squeezed her stutter trigger.

“Rogues.” The colonel’s cry caught her off guard. “Somebody just sucked
Champ
’s shields. Get clear!”

What had they done, brought in another big one just out of Jaina’s line of sight? She wrenched her stick and punched for full speed.

She was passing
Champion
’s port nacelle when light broke through from deep inside. Slowly, with an eerie, fatal beauty, a seam opened on
Champ
’s glossy side.

“Sticks,” a voice shouted in her ear. “Eleven, get clear!”

“Full power, Sparky!” Jaina called. “Go—”

The blast flung her against her instrument panel. Rudder pedals seemed to crush up through her legs. Her cockpit’s sides buckled, then vanished. A siren shrieked in her ears, blaring in rhythm with a synthesized voice.

“Ejection. Ejection.”

She flailed down into the Force, grasping desperately. Almost …

A white explosion of pain washed awareness away.

Jacen Solo stood with his father outside the mud-block refugee hut they were sharing on Duro. Jacen’s brown coveralls had accumulated a layer of grit and dust, and his wavy, dark brown hair fell over his ears, not quite long enough to pull back into a tail. Under a translucent gray dome, tension wrapped around him like a Zharan glass-snake—invisible, but so palpable through the Force that he could almost feel its coils constrict.

Something was about to happen. He could feel it coming when he listened through the Force. Something vital, but …

What?

A Ryn female—velvet-furred with a spiked mane, her tail and forearm bristles graying with age—stood talking to Jacen’s dad, Han Solo.

“Those are our caravan ships,” she bellowed, waving her hands. “Ours.” She snorted, and the breath
whonked
through four holes in her chitinous beak.

Han swung around, narrowly missing Jacen with his left arm. “And right at this moment, we can’t afford to take them offworld to run systems checks. You’ve been in a restricted area, Mezza.”

Splashes of red-orange fur highlighted Mezza’s soft
taupe coat. Her blue tail tip trembled, a gesture Jacen had learned to interpret as impatience.

“Of course we’ve been in the ship lot,” she snapped. “There’s never been a security fence Ryn couldn’t get inside, and those are our caravan ships. Ours.” She tapped her threadbare vest, which covered an ample chest. “And don’t tell me to
trust
you, Captain. We do. It’s SELCORE we don’t trust. SELCORE, and the people up there.” She waved her arm skyward.

Han’s mouth twitched, and seventeen-year-old Jacen could almost feel him trying not to laugh. Jacen’s dad could sympathize with refugees making unofficial reconnaissances, especially on board their own ships. But Han was in charge now. Instead of showing his amusement, he was supposed to enforce SELCORE regulations—publicly, at least, for the sake of a few juvenile offenders. He and Mezza would undoubtedly settle the real issues later, in private.

So Han plunged back into the argument.

Jacen watched the show, trying to pick up one more piece of the puzzle he felt in every cell of his being. Trained as a Jedi and unusually perceptive, he could tell that the Force was about to move. To shift.

This time, he didn’t dare miss the clues.

His right cheekbone twinged. He touched it self-consciously, then swept his hair back from his face. It needed cutting, but no one here cared what he looked like. His legs were still growing, his shoulders broadening. He felt like an awkward hybrid of trained Jedi and barely grown boy.

He leaned against his hut’s outer wall and stared out over his new home. The dome had been engineered by SELCORE, the New Republic Senate Select Committee for Refugees, to hold a thousand settlers. Naturally, twelve hundred had been squeezed in. Besides these outcast
Ryn, there were several hundred desperate humans, delicate Vors, Vuvrians with their enormous round heads—and one young Hutt.

And the relentless Yuuzhan Vong kept sweeping across the galaxy, destroying whole worlds, enslaving or sacrificing planetary populations. Lush Ithor, lawless Ord Mantell, and Obroa-skai with its fabulous libraries—all had fallen to the merciless invaders. Hutt space and the Mid Rim worlds along the Corellian Run were under attack. If the Yuuzhan Vong could be stopped, the New Republic hadn’t figured out how.

Han Solo stood with his left hand on his hip, arguing with Mezza, who led the larger of two Ryn clan remnants, but keeping one eye on the transgressors, a group of youths about Jacen’s age, with fading juvenile stripes on their cheeks. The Ryn clans occupied one of Settlement Thirty-two’s three wedge-shaped arrays of blue-roofed huts. The synthplas dome arched overhead, as gray as the polluted mists that swirled outside.

Jacen had been blessed—or cursed—with a sensitivity that he once hid behind labored jokes, and he did find it easy to see both sides of almost any argument. Part of his job here was to help his dad negotiate. Han tended to cut to solutions, instead of listening to both parties’ points of view. Han had chased the Ryn over half the New Republic, trying to gather his new friend Droma’s invasion-scattered clanmates. As world after world closed its doors to refugees, the Ryn had been beggared, duped, and betrayed. They’d taken terrible losses. They needed a sponsor.

So a reluctant Han Solo registered with the burgeoning Select Committee for Refugees. “Just long enough to settle them someplace.” That was how he explained it to Jacen, anyway.

Jacen had fled here from Coruscant. Two months ago,
the New Republic had called him and his brother Anakin to Centerpoint Station, the massive hyperspace repulsor and gravity lens in the Corellian system. There’d been hope that Anakin, who had activated Centerpoint once before, could enable it again. Military advisers had hoped to lure the Yuuzhan Vong into attacking Corellia, and they meant to use Centerpoint as an interdiction field, to trap the enemy inside Corellian space—and then wipe them out. Even Uncle Luke hoped the station might be used only in its shielding capacity, not as a weapon.

The New Republic might never recover from the catastrophe that followed.

Jacen could see stress in his dad’s lined face and his labored stride, and in the gray growing into his hair. Even after all these years of hobnobbing with bureaucrats and tolerating his wife’s protocol droid, patience clearly wasn’t his strong suit.

Standing on the dust-beaten lane outside the Solos’ hut, Mezza’s opposing clan leader twisted his own tail between strong hands. The fur on Romany’s forearms, and the tip of his tail, stood out like bleached bristles.

“So
your
clan,” Han said, pointing at Romany, “thinks
your
clan”—pointing now at Mezza—“is likely to hijack our transport ships and strand everybody else here on Duro? Is that it?”

Someone at the back of Romany’s group shouted, “I wouldn’t put it past them, Solo.”

Another Ryn stepped forward. “We were better off in the Corporate Sector, dancing for credits and telling fortunes. At least there we had our own ships. We could hide our children from poisoned air. And even more poisonous … words.”

Han stuck his hands into his dusty coverall pockets and caught Jacen’s glance. Jacen could almost look him in the eye nowadays.

“Any suggestions?” Han muttered.

“They’re just venting their frustrations now,” Jacen observed.

He glanced up. The gray synthplas dome over their heads had been imported in accordion folds and unfurled over three arched metal struts. The refugees were reinforcing it with webs of native rock fiber, roughly half the colony working double shifts to strengthen the dome and their prefab huts. The other half labored outside, at a pit-mine “reservoir” and water purification site assigned by SELCORE.

Abruptly Han flung up an arm and shouted, “Hey!”

Jacen spun around in time to see one young male Ryn somersault out of Romany’s group and crouch for fisticuffs. Two from Mezza’s group body-blocked him with surprising grace. Within seconds, Han was wading into an out-and-out melee that looked too graceful to actually endanger anyone. Ryn were natural gymnasts. They swung their opponents by their bristled tails, hooting through their beaks like a flock of astromech droids. They almost seemed to be dancing, playing, releasing their tensions. Jacen opened his mouth to say,
Don’t stop them. They need to cut loose
.