Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (35 page)
Read Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Online
Authors: Aaron Allston
He turned to look at the combat droid. “And I did it looking good,” he said.
“Is this taunting, too?”
The biotics facility was in clear sight now. Jaina could see it, her squadmates, the surviving starfighters and blastboats of the other eleven squadrons defending the site, and fires—dozens of fires raging in the jungle outside the
kill zone. She poured her lasers into distant targets: ranges, coralskippers. She saw a Yuuzhan Vong frigate analog a dozen kilometers away, in the zone defended by Rogue Squadron. The frigate blossomed in fire and blood as a proton torpedo found its mark. But there were more frigate analogs, other capital ships, all converging on the biotics facility.
She shook her head. The Yuuzhan Vong force marching toward the facility was too great; the defenders could not hold the site.
Until now, she’d been silently raging at Wedge Antilles. Whenever she’d manage to make inroads against the enemy assault, he or one of his controllers would order her to withdraw a half kilometer, a hundred meters. It was as if they didn’t want her to win. But now she could see that too much success on her part would serve only to cut Twin Suns off from the other units, to doom her and her pilots. It was probably best that she’d been ordered to fall back at the same rate as the other squadrons.
The mind of Jaina the Goddess woke up. Jaina frowned.
Fall back at the same rate
. She consulted her sensor board. That was exactly what was happening. The New Republic Forces had withdrawn where they were too strong, and been reinforced where they were too weak, and now every live unit of those forces was within a kilometer of the kill zone.
“Jag, I need to apologize to your uncle,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you why later.”
“All units, fall back to kill zone,” Iella said. “All units, fall back to kill zone. You have fifteen seconds. Fourteen. Thirteen.”
Jaina led her squad back, taking up position directly over the landing zone in front of the biotics building, directing
their lasers back the way they’d come. “Twin Suns Squadron, on-station.” Using her repulsorlifts, she drifted to port and a stream of plasma whipped past her, splashing onto the blue transparisteel panels on the face of the building; she directed laserfire back at her attacker.
Other unit commanders called in readiness as the countdown neared its end. Not all did. Jaina winced. She couldn’t hope that no friendlies were out there; she knew some were, pilots who’d been shot down but might still be alive.
“Zero,” Iella said. “Hold positions.” And it began to rain.
It didn’t rain water. It rained columns of destructive energy, massed fire from turbolaser batteries far overhead, brilliant needles of light that poured into the jungle all around the kill zone.
The turbolaser blasts tore through vegetation, through everything beneath it. Blasts hitting trees detonated them in clouds of smoke. Beams hitting ponds and creeks and stagnant water sent up clouds of superheated steam. Beams flashed down through those clouds, but the manipulators of voids couldn’t see them coming, couldn’t maneuver the voids into place in time.
Jaina sat transfixed. This was orbital bombardment, what the Empire’s Star Destroyers had been built to do, what no Star Destroyer under the command of the New Republic had
ever
done. Jaina had heard about it, but it was just history, just some old-timey thing that no one ever had to worry about.
And now she was seeing it.
Lusankya
was finally fulfilling the purpose for which she had been built, before Jaina had even been born.
For four minutes, death rained down from overhead, in a circle neatly surrounding the kill zone. Then it stopped, and the rumbles, the screams uttered by bodies of water
suddenly superheated, the bellows of distant
rakamats
meeting their doom, all died away.
Jaina jumped as her comlink crackled back into life. “Ground forces,” Wedge said, “commence mop-up.”
The repulsors on the descent units activated for the final portion of the descent. All the members of Luke’s group set down on the same roof—except for Kell Tainer, who hit the roof correctly, punched clean through its disintegrating duracrete surface, and ended up three stories down. “Not hurt,” he shouted up. “Hey, they’ve left behind some holodramas I haven’t seen.”
Luke pulled off his scorched environment suit as the others did the same. He took a look around. In the distance, he could see a flight of four coralskippers; they were not aimed this way, but if he could see them, their pilots might be able to see him. “Let’s get under cover,” he said. “Shove all the trash into the hole Kell made. Look out below.”
Mara, somehow stylishly savage in her vonduun crab armor with its helmet off, surveyed the landscape. Her lips twitched in a momentary grimace. “Welcome home,” she said.
Luke shook his head. “This isn’t home. I wonder if it will ever be home again.”
Czulkang Lah blinked. How had that particular use of the infidels’ triangle ships eluded him?
Nom Anor, he decided. Nom Anor had been the Yuuzhan
Vong spy in this galaxy for decades. Like an idiot, during all those years, he had failed to discover that humans gave birth to twins so often that it was a matter of little interest to them, and this failure had cost them dearly—it had allowed the notion of Jacen and Jaina Solo as sacred twins to become a weapon in the hands of the infidels.
Now, it seemed obvious that Nom Anor had failed to inform the Yuuzhan Vong military command of a littleused but critical tactic employed by the enemy’s senior capital ships. Unforgivable. Unforgivable.
“Recall the ships and coralskippers harassing their orbital forces,” he told his aide. “This engagement is done.”
“It cannot be done,” the officer whispered. “We have been embarrassed. We have
failed.
”
“If you can’t live with it, find a way to kill yourself,” Czulkang Lah answered. “And I will find an aide who has intelligence as well as courage.” He turned away. He would have to give his son unpleasant news.
As night fell, Jaina finished her power-down checklist. She exited her X-wing, gave it an affectionate pat, waved at Cappie, and turned toward the docking bay exit.
But waiting for her, as he usually did now, was Jag. He wore the slight smile Jaina suspected that only she could see. “What’s up?” she said.
“Calrissian got back from Coruscant alive. So, being Calrissian, he’s throwing a party for family and friends. And friends of friends, and anyone who looks interesting. He says he has pre-invasion brandy. Care to go?”
Jaina felt herself start to shake her head, the refusal
that had become second nature to her since she’d come to Borleias, but she caught herself in time. She linked her arm through his and smiled up at him. “Love to.”
A
ARON
A
LLSTON
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of novels in the
Star Wars:
Fate of the Jedi, Legacy of the Force, New Jedi Order, and X-Wing series, as well as the Doc Sidhe novels, which mix 1930s-style hero-pulp action with Celtic myth. He is also a longtime game designer and in 2006 was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design (AAGAD) Hall of Fame. He lives in Central Texas. Visit his website at
AaronAllston.com
.
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Pyria System
Jaina Solo banked her X-wing starfighter into as tight a turn as she could endure. The g-forces of her maneuver crushed her into her seat, but she called upon the Force to protect her, to keep her centimeters away from the edge of blackout.
She came out of the maneuver pointed back the way she’d come, directly toward the Star Destroyer
Rebel Dream
and the partial squadron of Yuuzhan Vong coralskippers beyond the ship, and spared a glance to her sensor board. The other members of her shield trio, Kyp Durron and Jag Fel, were right alongside—no problem for Jag and his Chiss clawcraft, far nimbler than the X-wings, but the turn had to have been as taxing for Kyp as it was for Jaina. On the other hand, Kyp was a Jedi Master, not just a Jedi Knight, not yet twenty years of age.
Jaina and her shieldmates passed beneath
Rebel Dream
, her tremendous length flashing overhead in an instant. “All right, here’s the plan,” she said. “We go in looking like we’re going to punch into the center of their formation, but instead we turn to starboard and skirt along its
edge. As each target comes up, we concentrate fire on it, just like those drills we did. Ready?”
Kyp’s voice was smooth, controlled: “Always ready, Goddess.”
Jag merely clicked his comlink once for affirmative.
“Fire and break.”
As the foremost of the oncoming coralskippers came within firing range, it began unloading a stream of tiny red glows in their direction. Each glow was a couple of kilograms of superheated molten rock, plasma. In the coldness of space, these projectiles would rapidly cool, but during the seconds they remained heated they were deadly weapons capable of burning through starfighter armor as though it were sheet ice.
Jaina set her lasers to dual fire and waited. A brief instant later, she felt Kyp reach out to her through the Force, taking momentary control of her hand on the pilot’s yoke. She felt herself aim and fire on the distant coralskipper. Kyp’s lasers flashed at the same instant, Jag’s a fraction of a second later.
In the distance, Jaina’s shot disappeared as a tiny black singularity, a miniature black hole called a void, appeared at the bow of the coralskipper. Kyp’s vanished into an identical void a meter or so back. But Jag’s shot, one too many for the skip’s voids to intercept, punched into the vehicle’s canopy. There was a brief flash from within and the coralskipper’s flight became ballistic instead of controlled.
Jaina, back in full control of her motions, banked and turned to starboard, her wingmates keeping in tight, controlled formation; ahead of her was a second coralskipper, then a third. She reached out for Kyp, let him
fire, regained control, reoriented, reached for Kyp, let him fire—
In seconds two more coralskippers were flaming wrecks in space. She knew, without consulting the sensor board, that the skips from the other side of that formation had to be angling in toward her from her port side; she stood her X-wing on its tail, relative to its previous course, and rose away from the conflict zone, forcing those coralskippers to give chase—
away
from
Mon Mothma
and that ship’s mission.
In the distance,
Mon Mothma
entered the zone of dovin basal mines. Her own complement of fighters—E-wings, X-wings, and TIE interceptors—boiled out of her fighter bays and streaked off into the darkness, toward the ship they had come to escort, to protect.
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, walked point, meters ahead of the rest of his party.
He knew he’d never be recognized as Luke Skywalker, despite his fame. He wore vonduun crab armor, the preferred defensive dress of Yuuzhan Vong warriors. His was artificial, made of lightweight materials carefully textured and colored to resemble the living arthropod plates of the Yuuzhan Vong, but he actually preferred that; some of his companions, wearing the real thing, had to deal with the occasional twitches and contractions made by living armor. Beneath the armor, he wore a body stocking in pale gray with blue highlights that was a close match
for some Yuuzhan Vong skin tones. Except for his height, handspans shorter than that of the average Yuuzhan Vong warrior, he was a visual match for the enemy.
Not that he’d be easy to see in his current surroundings. He was in a pedestrian traffic corridor, the sort that continued from building to building via enclosed, elevated walkways, at about the hundred-story level. This had once been a well-to-do residential building, with only a few well-appointed suites per floor. Every door into the corridor had been smashed in, but the state of the chambers beyond—stripped of valuables, but with common machinery left intact—suggested that it had been looters rather than Yuuzhan Vong at work here.
And the smell of decay was everywhere. They’d stumbled across numerous remains of Coruscant residents—some the obvious victims of violence, some whose deaths had no clear cause, most in advanced stages of decomposition.
How much food had there been in these people’s kitchens at the time of Coruscant’s fall and the utter demolition of its infrastructure? How much water would they have been able to find? On a world with no wilderness, no farmlands, no means of obtaining food other than now impossible import and machinery that was vulnerable to destruction by the enemy, it was very possible that a simple majority of the population of Coruscant was already dead, with the proportion growing every day.
In some places the stench of rot was greater, in some places lesser, but it was everywhere. Luke and most of his companions now had patches of cloth saturated with a mild perfume stuffed into their nostrils. Face had supplied them. Luke didn’t want to know what experiences
Face had gone through to give him the foreknowledge to bring a large supply of that perfume.
As Luke neared the edge of this building and the start of one of the connecting walkways, he shut off his glow rod, which itself was engineered to resemble a Yuuzhan Vong illumination creature. Dim sunlight spilled in from the opening to the walkway, indicating that the walkway was the sort with transparisteel panels providing what had once been a breathtaking view of this part of the world-city.
He felt, as well as heard, Mara catch up to him. “You did the last one, farmboy,” she said.
He gave her a look. She, too, was dressed in Yuuzhan Vong combat armor and an appropriately colored body stocking. But for the shape of her chin and mouth beneath the edge of her helmet, she was unrecognizable as his wife. “You did the one before that.”
“My turn.” That was Garik “Face” Loran, onetime actor, longtime team leader in New Republic Intelligence. About half his usual team, designated the Wraiths, were along on this mission. He was totally unrecognizable; in addition to the vonduun crab armor, he wore an ooglith masquer, a type of living mask employed by the Yuuzhan Vong, that had been engineered by Wraith member Baljos Arnjak to resemble the branded, mutilated face of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He stopped beside Mara. “Kiss for luck?” He puckered the alien face’s slitted, mangled lips.
She shook her head. “I don’t know whether to mark that down as ‘exceptionally daring’ or ‘unusually stupid.’ ”
Face chuckled. He shucked his pack free and extracted a coil of cord from it, then continued forward, tying one
end of the coil around his waist. He handed the other end and the coil itself to Luke. “Kiss for luck?”
“Get out of here.”
They reached the large aperture providing access to the walkway. Like the corridor itself, it was wide enough for four large humans easily to walk abreast, but it was lined on either side and above with transparisteel panels reinforced by metal supports. Through the transparisteel, Luke could see surrounding buildings, most of them coated by green algaelike scum or patches of alien grasses. Many of the buildings seemed to be in an advanced condition of decay, with crumbled roofs and rounded edges.
Face moved ahead on the walkway, each step tentative. Luke couldn’t see the far end of the walkway; it was bowed in the middle, higher there than at either end, the better to support great weights, and was at least fifty meters in length, crossing over what had once been a broad boulevard.
When Face was ten meters away, Luke’s helmet comlink popped, then came alive with Face’s whispered words: “No excess creaking. This one seems pretty solid.”
The other members of Luke’s group moved up to the near end of the walkway. All were in Yuuzhan Vong armor, either real like Face’s or fake like Luke’s.
The largest “warrior,” with distinctive black-and-silver tracery on his mask and torso armor, was Kell Tainer, a Wraith, fond of machinery and high explosives, a skilled hand-to-hand combatant.
Then there were the two “Domain Kraal” sets of armor, colored in swirled silver and coral-pink hues, taken from warriors who’d occupied the world of Borleias before the splintering New Republic had regained it. The one with
the more pointed helmet was worn by Baljos Arnjak, the Wraiths’ expert on Yuuzhan Vong society and organic technology; the other, whose broader helmet had larger eyeholes, was worn by Bhindi Drayson, a woman with a broad range of intelligence skills, including military tactics, computers, and robotics. Bhindi’s face was marred by hard-wearing makeup that, short of close inspection, made it look like her lips were cut to tatters and the remainder of her face was tattooed. Baljos wore another of the ooglith masquers, his with a pair of tusks jutting from the lowest portion of the chin.
Next was Elassar Targon, a Devaronian, the Wraiths’ medic. He wore a gray-and-green set of artificial armor; the thought of wearing living armor had apparently filled him with supernatural dread. Even now, as he kept his attention fixed on Face’s progress, his right hand was engaged in making a series of gestures. Were they to keep the Yuuzhan Vong at bay, or to keep Face safe? Luke didn’t know, and Elassar did this sort of thing so habitually that he probably didn’t realize he was doing it.
Beside him was Danni Quee, the New Republic scientist who had been responsible for so many technological developments in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong. She wore the all-black armor, a living set that had originally been slated for Elassar; it was a touch too large for Danni and she was awkward moving in it. With a moment of rest available to her, she dug a small electromagnetic radiation sensor out of her bag and began sampling the local environment. Danni and Elassar also wore makeup, though it was more effective on his typically diabolical, red-skinned Devaronian face than on her even features.
Tahiri Veila stayed meters to the rear of the party, guarding the approach from that direction. She was the third Jedi in the group. Still a teenager, she was officially a Jedi apprentice; in all but official recognition, however, she was a Jedi Knight because of the skills and experience she’d accumulated since the Yuuzhan Vong invasion began. Things changed so fast in these war years that testing hadn’t kept up with the advancement of her generation of Jedi. Hers was a rust-colored set of armor, and the no-skid soles of her body-stockinged feet were doubtless better, to her mind, than wearing shoes or boots, but not as good as going barefoot, her habitual preference. She wore the last of the three ooglith masquers, hers showing four sharp nail-like spikes protruding from each cheek and deep, red crisscross scar patterns on her jaws and neck.
Luke looked at her. He hardly needed the Force to sense the pain that seemed to be her constant companion these days. Her best friend, Luke’s nephew Anakin Solo, had died not long ago—died during a successful but costly mission to destroy the source of the voxyn creatures that had proven so adept at hunting and killing Jedi. Since then, Tahiri had, except for occasional moments, worn silence and distance like a set of Jedi robes.
Luke had authorized that mission of the young Jedi, and many of them had died. It was hard at times to look Han and Leia, Anakin’s parents, in the eye. And now he was leading yet another mission in which a young Jedi would be in peril. He wondered sometimes if he would ever be allowed to quit sending the young off to suffer pain and death.
Probably not
, he thought.
I’m not that lucky
.
“I’m at the midpoint,” Face whispered. “Still no creaking. I’ll jump up and down at the far end to make sure the attachment there is still secure, and—wait a second. I see some movement …”
Then there was a new voice, a shout in the Yuuzhan Vong language from well beyond Face. The tizowyrm—a Yuuzhan Vong organic translator—installed in Luke’s ear gave him the words in Basic: “Stop where you are! Tell me your name, domain, and mission!”
Luke tossed the coil to Baljos. “Leave the packs here.” He moved forward, Mara and Kell with him, and heard the running feet of Tahiri coming up from behind. The four of them were the only ones with much of a chance in direct battle with fully trained Yuuzhan Vong warriors.
Both normally and through his helmet comlink, Luke heard Face’s reply, shouted in the Yuuzhan Vong language, with to what Luke sounded like proper aggression and inflection: “I am Faka Rann. My mission is the destruction of abominations and the training of my warriors. Do not hinder me.”
As Luke, Mara, Kell, and Tahiri came closer to Face, they could see down the incline on the other side, where a party of Yuuzhan Vong warriors approached. Luke saw seven of them, most already holding amphistaffs in their hands. The serpentlike amphistaffs were currently stiff, in staff/spear configuration. Face was fiddling with the fake amphistaff wrapped around his waist, but Luke could see that he was actually freeing the cord.
Luke came up beside Face and stood there, arms crossed, a stance of defiance and arrogance. Mara came to a stop beside him, Tahiri and Kell on the other side of Face. Kell
unwrapped the false amphistaff from around his own waist and triggered it, snapping it into rigidity, an artful imitation of the use of the genuine weapons, though his would never stand up to the rigors of combat.
The oncoming unit of warriors halted ten meters away and their leader looked at Luke and the others. “This is our designated zone,” he said. “Who has commanded you to hunt here?”
