Rebel Stand: Enemy Lines II (38 page)

The dying Super Star Destroyer was drifting to starboard. This probably wasn’t navigational failure. Instead, some dovin basal on the surface of the worldship had to be exerting its gravitational power against
Lusankya
, trying to turn the vessel aside.

It might work, too. No dovin basal was going to be able to entirely deflect the millions of tons of
Lusankya
, to counteract the tremendous kinetic energy built up during the ship’s constant acceleration toward the worldship. But a dovin basal might be able to turn her protruding spearhead aside, to reduce the penetration of impact.

Davip wouldn’t have that. He resumed direct control of
Lusankya
and increased thrust output from her starboard engines, redlining them, bringing the spearpoint back in line.

He’d just stay here and make sure everything went according to plan.

* * *

Czulkang Lah watched as the sharp prow of
Lusankya
grew in the sky, approaching with a meticulous precision that he could, with a growing sense of detachment, appreciate.

Up close, the crudeness of the protruding spike became evident. He could see scarlike welds suggesting that the thing had been assembled in sections within the triangle ship. Still, its simplicity, and the fact that it had succeeded in serving its intended purpose, was admirable.

It entered the worldship’s atmosphere and, a moment later, struck the viewing lens immediately above.

And Czulkang Lah was gone.

   The prow of
Lusankya
hit the worldship.

Eight kilometers up, before the shock of that impact had even been transmitted along
Lusankya
’s body, Eldo Davip fired his thrusters and shot out of the vessel’s stern.

He passed between two of the vessel’s thrusters and saw his diagnostics light up as they anticipated possible life-support failure, but then the yellows faded to a safe green.

But still he was feeling vibration. Had he sustained damage that the diagnostics didn’t detect?

It took him a moment to realize that the vibration wasn’t from his Y-wing. It was from him.

As he set a course to take him to a formation of allied starfighters, he tried to stop shaking.

But he couldn’t.

   Coming around the far side of the worldship, Luke and Mara saw
Lusankya
dive into the worldship’s surface.
It seemed to Luke that a ripple spread out from the point of impact, either a shock wave or an animal contraction of pain.

The Super Star Destroyer, her kinetic energy scarcely slowed by the impact, continued to plow into the worldship. Hundred-meter-long remnants of the ship’s superstructure sheared off from the solid core, but that core plunged inexorably deeper into the worldship.

In moments, as the orbit of the two Jedi brought them closer to the impact zone,
Lusankya
’s core was swallowed by the worldship, her superstructure scraped off and left behind, mountain-high, on the worldship’s surface.

Then the surface of the worldship shuddered. Luke knew what that meant. Eight or more kilometers below the surface, the spearpoint of the core had exploded. Then the next hundred-meter section behind it would detonate, then the one behind that, a chain of destruction reaching all the way back to what had once been
Lusankya
’s stern.

As they passed over the Super Star Destroyer’s wreckage, the mountain of scrap leapt skyward, propelled by a volcanolike eruption from beneath the surface as the last of
Lusankya
’s core sections detonated. The flash from the explosion was brilliant and the force of the explosion jetted into the sky, looking for one brief moment like a red-orange lightsaber blade kilometers in length.

The surface of the worldship heaved. Great jagged cracks flowing with a red-black substance Luke did not care to contemplate spread out from
Lusankya
’s impact point as the worldship began to die.

* * *

His ship protected by the remains of Charat Kraal’s special operations group, Harrar watched the crash and detonation. He could feel blood drain from his face, could feel the strength of his legs begin to fail. He sat heavily in the captain’s seat, wordless.

“The infidels appear to be grouping again,” his pilot said. “Shall we join these coralskippers in a counterattack?”

“What’s the point?” Harrar whispered. “Take us back to Coruscant. Take us back where we can look on victory instead of disaster.”

   On his next spin, Wedge saw the squadron of skips turn back toward him. He aimed and fired after them, a final, defiant gesture, but his weapon failed to discharge.

On his next spin, he could see the incoming skips but, beyond them, witnessed the brilliant flash of light that heralded
Lusankya’
s demise. “I’m not exactly going to miss you,” he said.

The incoming coralskippers opened fire. At this range, only one of the plasma projectiles hit; Wedge felt it crash into and through the X-wing’s stern, and suddenly he was spinning even faster, watching the stars rotate by at bewildering speed.

Then things became more complicated. Unable to quite resolve the picture outside his canopy into a comprehensible one, growing dizzier by the minute, Wedge thought he saw red lasers flashing among the orange-red plasma balls. He was certain he saw one coralskipper detonate, then two.

There were E-wings and X-wings near him, the latter painted in the standard New Republic colors, and his
comlink crackled to life—a woman’s voice, fading in and out: “Blackmoon Ten … Eleven. Are … with us?”

He activated his jury-rigged comm board. “Blackmoon Ten, this is Blackmoon Eleven. That’s a copy. Still here, but about to throw up.”

“Hold on … shuttle. It’ll be here … minutes.”

Then there was a new voice, stronger because the broadcasting X-wing hovered only fifty meters away. Wedge recognized the voice as Gavin Darklighter’s. “Blackmoon Eleven, what did you think you were doing going after an entire squadron?”

“My job.”

“That’s ‘My job,
sir.
’ ”

Wedge grinned. “My job,
sir.
”

“Son, if you develop piloting skills in proportion to your nerve, someday they’ll call you the greatest pilot of all time.”

   Gavin, baffled, stared down at his comm board. “Blackmoon Eleven? Are you still there?”

But Blackmoon Eleven didn’t respond—at least, not with words. The only thing emerging from Gavin’s comm board was laughter. Laughter that was somehow familiar.

   The New Republic forces staged mop-up and withdrawal operations. Starfighter squadrons collected themselves, escorted rescue shuttles, defended their capital ships from the uncoordinated attacks of the Yuuzhan Vong.

But it would not be long before a new yammosk was brought into the system, not long before more Yuuzhan Vong reinforcements made the system untenable. One
after another, the divisions of Borleias’s defenders launched into hyperspace to travel to their first rendezvous point.

The world they left behind was, for now, Yuuzhan Vong property. The stand here had served its intended purpose. The Advisory Council and its supporters had enjoyed months in which to plot their next moves—defenses, surrenders, tricks. But the Advisory Council might never know what else had been done during those months: what plans had been made, what foundations had been laid for a resistance that would not depend on them.

Tsavong Lah sat alone on his seat in his command chamber. He could not speak.

The gods
must
love him. They had restored his arm to him. They had allowed him to root out treachery that had threatened to topple him. They had given him Borleias, whose defenders had, at last, fled.

The gods must
hate
him. They had taken his father from him. Not only his father, but the fabled warmaster, Czulkang Lah, whose methods of teaching, whose strategic innovations, though introduced decades before the war on this galaxy was launched, had made these conquests possible. The Yuuzhan Vong would be struck like a coufee in the guts by news of Czulkang Lah’s death and the utter destruction of Domain Hul.

Which was it? Had he earned the hatred or the affection of the gods?

He sat back, hollow with the loss he had just experienced, uncertain within a universe that had just grown darker and stranger.

Books by Aaron Allston

Galatea in 2-D
Bard’s Tale Series (with Holly Lisle)
Thunder of the Captains
Wrath of the Princes

Car Warriors Series
Double Jeopardy

Doc Sidhe Series
Doc Sidhe
Sidhe-Devil

Star Wars: X-Wing
series
Wraith Squadron
Iron Fist
Solo Command
Starfighters of Adumar

Star Wars: New Jedi Order
series
Rebel Dream
Rebel Stand

Star Wars: Legacy of the Force
series
Betrayal
Exile
Fury

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi
series
Outcast
Backlash
Conviction

Terminator 3 Series
Terminator Dream
Terminator Hunt

You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …

In
The Empire Strikes Back
, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?

Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?

Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?

Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?

All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the
Star Wars
expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of
Star Wars
!

Turn the page or jump to the
timeline
of
Star Wars
novels to learn more.

Outside the universe, there is nothing.

This nothing is called hyperspace.

A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship.

The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.

The bubble is its own universe.

Outside the universe, there is nothing.

   Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain.

In the far infrared, he finds cinders of thirst that bake his throat. Higher, up in the visible wavelengths, gleam the crimson wire-stretched ligaments that sizzle within his shoulders; grinding glass-shard screams howl from his hip joints like the death shrieks of golden Ithorian starflowers. There is green here, too—bubbling tongues of acid hungrily lick his nerves—as well as lightning-blue shocks that spasm his overloaded body into convulsion.

And higher still, now far beyond the ultraviolet betrayal that brought him here—the betrayal that delivered him into the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong, the betrayal that gathered him into the Embrace of Pain, the betrayal by Vergere, whom he had trusted—he finds silent shattering gamma-ray bursts sleeting into his brain.

Those gamma-ray bursts are the color of his brother’s death.

Anakin
, he moans, somewhere deep within himself.
Anakin, how can you be dead
?