Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (20 page)

She knew as soon as she entered that she had made a mistake. Before she could even really register any pattern to the incoming asteroids, she had to push hard on the stick, dropping the TIE into a straight stoop, then rolling out to the left desperately to avoid a long jag in the rock. Three-quarters of the way into that roll, Jaina pulled it to a halt and shot out diagonally, barely avoiding another asteroid and nearly clipping the back side of the first she had dodged. No time to take a deep steadying breath, for another pair came on, and Jaina put the TIE up on its side and somehow managed to slip between them, then rolled it over, top down, and pulled hard,
dropping into another stoop. Before the warning alarm could begin to sound, indicating that she was nearing the boundary of the belt, Jaina brought the TIE about, shooting off to the side, making no headway into the asteroid course, but not losing any ground—which would have disqualified her—and buying herself a precious split second.

And in that second, she composed herself and recognized that she could not keep reacting. This was a game of anticipation, of preparing the move before you had to make it. That was why the four Jedi who had run, including two relatively green pilots, her brothers, had all climbed onto the board. Jaina ignored her blinking and beeping instruments and looked ahead at the incoming swarm, feeling their pattern as much as seeing it.

She turned “her nose into the wind,” as the old water-sailing adage went, and plunged in headlong.

Han heard a low growl escape Leia’s lips as Jaina soared into the asteroid belt. He draped his arm about his wife’s shoulders.

“She heard me,” Leia remarked quietly and coldly.

Han tightened his grip, pulling Leia closer. Of course Jaina had heard her, and of course Jaina had pretended differently, had gone after the run that had consumed her thoughts these last days. Leia would get over it, Han knew, but if Jaina had acceded to her mother’s demand, had lost the challenge she had so desperately wanted, the chill between mother and daughter would have been lasting.

“She’ll be all right,” he remarked, but even he winced as Jaina’s TIE, clearly visible on the great screens in the central control room, broke into its three-quarter roll and burst out at the very last instant. “She’s the best flyer of the three.”

Beside the pair, Mara’s green eyes glowed with excitement. “Fall into it, Jaina,” she whispered. “Let the Force be your guide.”

Behind her, Luke kneaded her neck and shoulders and
smiled warmly, remembering similar advice from the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi, when old Ben had gone with him on his race down the channel of the Death Star. Don’t try to register all the input from your eyes and other senses. Don’t listen to your instruments at all—turn them off, if possible. Let the Force show you the patterns before you, the twists, the turns, the target.

Jaina was more into that flow now, they could all see, her turns coming hard, but less drastic, as if she was anticipating the next twist she would face.

Luke glanced at the timer clock hanging above them. Four minutes.

On she went, spinning and rolling, plunging suddenly, then swooping back up to a clearer region. But looking ahead of her, Luke recognized a seemingly insurmountable problem. Two thick clusters of asteroids were converging, the trailing group catching up to the other, and they seemed as if they would form a wall of stone the TIE simply couldn’t slip through.

“Unbreachable pattern!” one of Lando’s observing judges cried out, and those very words blinked off and on across his monitor, for the computer calculating Jaina’s flight saw no way around the forming barrier without clearing the borderlines of the asteroid belt.

“Tough luck,” Lando remarked. “Happens every once in a while.”

“She’ll get it,” Mara insisted.

“Come on, Jaina,” Leia whispered beside her.

Jaina recognized the convergence, like fingers interlocking to form a solid barrier, and immediately throttled down. Desperate, she glanced all about, looking for a seam.

There was none.

She looked to her instruments, all of them screaming and blinking, warning of impending collision. She punched her
fist against her thigh in frustration, losing her composure, losing any chance.

But then she heard Mara’s plea for her to fall into the Force, and then she heard her mother’s voice, nothing distinct, but a general feeling of support and love from both of them.

Jaina steeled her gaze straight ahead and throttled up, attacking the mass. She had to buy time, nothing more, and the trailing group would surpass the first, and openings would reveal themselves.

She went in hard at the closest asteroid, spun over and down as she approached, and popped her repulsor coils, bouncing off harmlessly. Into another spin, she fired the repulsors again, ricocheting off the bottom of another asteroid. And then again, bouncing her backward—but not technically flying backward, which would have disqualified her.

And so it went, with Jaina playing like a bouncing ball, never impacting, but firing her repulsor coils at precisely the right moment to launch her sidelong, or up or down, or even backward, buying time and not distance as asteroids passed others, as some collided and went spinning at slightly new angles.

Jaina felt an opening, like a breeze finding an alley between tall buildings. She bounced away from yet another rock, barrel-rolled and dived, then reversed momentum, swooping up right before yet another asteroid, but coming around it, leveling off and shooting through the gap, waggling her wings to accommodate the angled exit.

Her eyes were half-closed as she felt the patterns; her TIE fighter swooped and turned, accelerating and throttling back before she was even conscious of the movements.

Nor was she conscious of the passing seconds, or of anything at all other than the clearest course before her.

Chewie’s howl as Jaina broke through the seemingly impenetrable barrier, against the odds and against the computer calculations, very much reflected the mood of the onlookers,
even Lando’s crew. The Wookiee jumped up and down, grabbed the nearest technician and gave him a shake that set his teeth to rattling, and punched his huge hairy fist into the air.

“Was that good?” C-3PO asked in all seriousness, apparently missing the point of it all.

R2-D2 howled and screeched at him in response.

Leia reached over and squeezed Mara’s hand.

“The kid can fly,” Han remarked, his voice thick with something more than pride, with awe. He glanced up at the timer clock.

Five minutes, thirty-two seconds.

Jacen, still a bit unsteady from his collision, walked into the room then. He glanced up at the clock, then moved beside the others and took a measure of Jaina’s progress. “She’s found her inner peace,” he remarked.

“Did you?” Luke asked.

Jacen nodded. “But I didn’t have the flying skills to complement it,” he admitted. “Jaina’s got the whole package.”

And so it seemed, as the screen showed her TIE flowing effortlessly through the maze of flying boulders.

The elapsed time broke the seven-minute mark, putting Jaina high on the board.

“She’ll be no lower than third,” Lando told them. “And no one’s had a tougher course to fly.” He turned to one of his techs. “Cut into all the broadcast screens,” he instructed. “Put this out all over the planet.”

“Let the betting begin,” Han whispered into Leia’s ear, and both smiled.

“I already had it piped into the other control rooms and the docking areas,” the tech replied.

“I saw it on the way in,” Jacen agreed. “Kyp Durron’s out in the docks, watching every second.”

The name reminded Luke that they had other business to attend to out here. But not now, he told himself. He studied
Jaina’s flight pattern, then glanced back up at the timer clock. “Kyp’s going to lose,” he stated evenly.

The Force mounted within Jaina, a tangible pressure growing from second to second. It was all an incomprehensible blur, seemingly unguided movements that brought her within a hairbreadth of some asteroids, into wild turns and stoops, straight climbs and clever angles cutting the one open line between rocks.

On and on it went, though time seemed irrelevant, a concept lost in the deepest trance.

But the pressure built, surely, tangibly, and as Jaina became aware of it, that only stemmed her concentration further.

Her eyes popped open wide as she came around one spinning boulder to nick a tiny one, hardly a hit, but enough to push her out so that she clipped another, larger asteroid.

Around and around she careened, and she tensed coming out of one spin, to see a wall of stone looming before her.

Then she was spinning too fast to even register the movement, too fast to make any sense of the myriad images flashing before her. She collided with another asteroid—she felt that impact clearly—and then …

She was clear of the belt, and as her rattled senses settled, she worked the controls feverishly to stop the spin. She didn’t know how much time had elapsed, hardly remembered her run at all.

In the control room, there was … silence.

Stunned silence. The timer clock had stopped the moment Jaina’s TIE had exited the belt.

Twenty-seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds.

“The kid can fly,” Han said again.

Only six enemies remained, four men and two women, to oppose Yomin Carr. One of them was up on the tower now, wearing a full enviro-suit and trying to reattach the disconnected junction box.

It wouldn’t matter, Yomin Carr knew. The molecular plague had swept by ExGal-4, had rolled over nearly all of Belkadan, and the toxic gases and swirling yellow and green clouds were too thick now, and too tumultuous, for them to get any message off planet. When the truth of the devastation had become evident, the remaining scientists had scrambled to ready the small freighter for liftoff. How easy it had been for Yomin Carr to sabotage the already dilapidated craft, rubbing wires together so that their rotted insulation disintegrated, causing shorts, or pulling connector plates right over rusted bolts.

The scientists had quickly abandoned any hope of fleeing, and instead focused on getting out a distress signal. But they were too late; the death of Garth Breise and their trust in Yomin Carr had sealed their fate.

Now the clouds and poisoned gases had caught them, and though the buttoned-up ExGal station could be self-sustaining in the oxygen-depleted air, they were trapped,
Mon Calamari juggerhead fish in a barrel, for Yomin Carr’s harpoons.

The Yuuzhan Vong warrior casually walked out of the compound, wearing his starfish breathing adaptor, for he could not bring himself to trust the mechanical breathing apparatus of the enviro-suits. Quite comfortable in the devastation his beetle friends had wrought, he moved to the base of the tower and looked up, barely able to see the worker through the thick haze.

“How are the repairs going?” he yelled, his voice watery-sounding because of the mask.

“I got it!” came the cry from above, a woman’s voice. “One more connection …”

Yomin Carr pulled the small ax from his belt and chopped down hard on the exposed piece of cable at the base of the tower, severing it cleanly. Then he replaced the ax and waited calmly, basking in the noxious haze of his glory.

A few minutes later, Lysire Donabelle, one of only two females left alive on Belkadan, came down the tower.

“It’ll work now,” she explained as she reached the bottom and began extracting herself from the safety harness and lengths of cord. “Just a connector,” she started to explain, and then she turned about and froze, eyes wide behind her visor as she regarded Yomin Carr and his living aerator.

Yomin Carr held his hand out, motioning toward the new break in the line.

Lysire stared at it for a long moment; her visor fogged with her heavy breathing. She looked back at Yomin Carr, shaking her head in disbelief.

And then she bolted, rushing right past the alien.

He kicked her trailing foot behind her lead ankle as she passed, and in the same fluid movement, grabbed the air line at the back of her helmet and tore it free. Lysire sprawled facedown on the ground. Yomin Carr’s foot stepped down on her back, holding her firmly in place.

Lysire wriggled frantically, gasping for breath as the yellow fumes slipped under her protective gear. Somehow in her desperation, she broke free, crawling, up to her knees, then regaining her footing. Yomin Carr could have caught her, and easily, but he did not, recognizing from her stagger that he had already won.

Lysire wobbled and swayed; her line to the compound door was far from straight. She staggered the last few steps and fell forward, crashing against the portal. Her hands moved, a feeble attempt to find the door’s release, for her senses were almost completely gone by then.

Yomin Carr didn’t make a move, didn’t have to. He watched her slump against the door.

Then he stood beside her, off to the side, just looking out at the roiling clouds and thickening fumes.

A half hour slipped by. The seven scientists had buddied up for safety, two, two, and three, and while Yomin Carr’s two partners thought he was sleeping in his private chambers, Lysire’s partner knew that she had gone outside. It came as no surprise to Yomin Carr, then, when the compound door started to open.

Lysire Donabelle slipped down to the side.

“Lysire!” came her partner’s cry, the woman falling to one knee beside her.

She glanced up then, apparently noting the movement, and her eyes went wide at the specter of Yomin Carr, at the horror of watching Yomin Carr’s swiftly descending ax.

There was something symbolic about killing the last female on Belkadan, the Yuuzhan Vong warrior recognized. The seal of victory, the symbol that the humans and other intelligent species of this galaxy had lost their first encounter with the Yuuzhan Vong.

Yomin Carr tore the ax head out of the woman’s chest, let her fall right over Lysire, then moved through the door, back into the compound.

Only four enemies remained, and two of them, Yomin Carr knew, were probably asleep.