Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (25 page)

“Who cares about the record?” Leia asked. “The flying alone to get you onto that asteroid was nothing short of remarkable, according to Luke.”

“Best flying those two have ever done,” Luke agreed.

The others added their platitudes, with words like
brilliant
and
amazing
thrown about.

Han was going to explain that Chewie deserved the credit, that the blow to his head had knocked him senseless for those few critical seconds, but the Wookiee interjected a long wail, a confirmation of their teamwork effort. They were a unit, comrades, the closest and most trusted of friends, and by definition of that bond, the credit for either one’s exploits would be deservedly shared by the other.

Han took it all in with a wink to his Wookiee counterpart. “No problem,” he assured them, his face twisting into a wry smile.

He did frown a bit when his gaze drifted to Lando, though, reflecting his honest feelings: fear and even a sickness deep in the pit of his stomach.

No problem indeed.

They came out of hyperspace and into the Helska system in a rolling, living formation, the Dozen-and-Two Avengers alternating their respective places in the wedge with coordinated barrel rolls and tight loops, brilliant precision flying that kept them on the edge of disaster—and also made their
signal on any watching scanners much harder to decipher. Kyp Durron kept the lead at all times, though, with Miko Reglia on his right wing.

The system wasn’t large, with only seven planets, and none of them too widely spaced. R5-L4 kept the data streaming across Kyp’s viewscreen, detailing all the knowledge about the planets and the system, as the squadron cruised past the seventh planet, and then the sixth.

The fifth was a gas giant, an uninhabitable ball of roiling fury, so Kyp rolled past it with hardly a thought, focusing on the fourth planet, an intriguing ball of ice.

“I’m getting some readings from the fourth,” Miko called in a moment later.

Following Kyp’s lead, the squadron slowed. What had they stumbled upon? he wondered. A smuggler’s den? Another scientific outpost—and if so, then why wasn’t it on the charts, as required by New Republic law? It made no sense to him, and yet, he knew that the
Spacecaster-
class shuttle hadn’t exited the system—if it had, the buoy would surely have detected it.

“Shields up and torpedoes ready,” Kyp called on the open frequency to all the others. “Offset the wedge, two to my right.”

The speedy A-wing on Kyp’s left did a snap roll that put it right in line behind the trailing ship on the right-hand line of the wedge.

“Off-planet movement,” came Miko’s call, and Kyp’s astromech confirmed it even as his wingman cried out. Indeed, he soon confirmed visually, there was movement, dozens and dozens of …

Of what? Asteroids?

Kyp’s instruments revealed little at first, bringing in a jumble of signals that seemed to indicate some sort of life energy. “Hold back and cover my tail,” he instructed the others, and he swooped away. His next impression was that these were indeed asteroids, albeit spectacular ones, showing many
different colors. But as he drew even nearer, a chill ran up Kyp’s spine.

R5-L4 issued a stream of protests, flashed signals on Kyp’s screen that showed that there were some life-forms ahead, and then another, even more urgent signal brought Kyp’s attention to his instruments. A tremendous energy bubble surrounded the frozen fourth planet.

Kyp looked back to the multicolored asteroids, noted the specific geometric shapes. Not one of the things looked exactly like another, but they all shared some features, the tapered nose, the aerodynamic sides.

These were craft, starfighters!

Kyp throttled up to full and yanked back, turning his nose up in a sharp loop. As he hit the top, he rolled about to upright and leveled off, shooting back the way he had come.

And on came the pursuit—“a swarm” was the only way Kyp could describe it.

“They’re enemies!” he cried, and even as the words left his mouth, R5-L4 screeched and his X-wing lurched, slammed by something.

Kyp went through a series of evasive maneuvers, spinning down and out to the right, snap-rolling back to the left, and with full throttle the whole time. He took some comfort as he neared the rest of his squadron, screaming ahead in tight formation, laser cannons firing, torpedos flashing away.

“Meet me left, Miko,” he cried, and he hook-turned to his right and continued the turn until he was facing back the other way, with Miko obediently on his wing.

Miko was firing, and so, too, was Kyp as he came out of the turn, blindly, desperately. He scored a solid hit on the nearest enemy, and that rocklike starfighter spun away, but the second zoomed past him, and in that close encounter, he saw that these were piloted ships. There was a canopy, resembling mica more than transparisteel, and behind it he saw the pilot, a barbaric-looking humanoid, its face a lump of pulsating flesh.

He shook off the disturbing sight and led Miko back to the right, back toward the rest of the squadron.

And they were into it thick, with enemy fighters swooping all about them, firing projectiles out of forward and side cannons that looked more like strange, miniature volcanoes. To their credit, the Dozen-and-Two were handing out most of the hits, many taking chunks off enemy vessels. But those vessels usually went into a spin and then came back out of it, leveling and heading fast to rejoin the battle.

“They can take a beating,” Miko remarked.

“But they can’t hand one out,” Kyp noted, seeing several projectiles slam against a B-wing’s shields, only to be repelled. “All right, Dozen-and-Two,” he called. “Our shields’ll beat them. Let’s get organized and knock them off one at a time.” He turned back to his droid. “Elfour, try to call them, all channels. Let’s see if they’ll surrender.”

Even as he finished, a cry came back, from the B-wing. “My shields are down!”

Before Kyp could even respond, a host of enemy fighters soared into position and let fly swarms of volcano missiles, and that B-wing was halved again and again in rapid sequence, until a thousand little pieces littered the dark sky.

And then another cry of lost shields, and a Headhunter swiftly suffered the same fate.

Still, the remaining Avengers held their formations and hammered at the enemy fighters. Several were blasted into little pieces with concentrated laser fire, drilling chunk after chunk in the same spot until the whole of the ship cracked apart. But for every one lost, another dozen replaced it, and more and more were swarming up from the planet.

“No shield!” Miko cried.

Kyp looked at his wingman, perplexed. How was that possible? Miko hadn’t even been hit, for he and Kyp weren’t in the thick of it yet.

“Gravity well! I felt a tug, like a dozen g’s pulling me out of my seat,” Miko tried to quickly explain. “And then a hole in
the shield, and then, nothing. My droid’s babbling about magnetic fields, but I don’t know!”

“Get out! Get out!” Kyp cried, to Miko and to all the others, and he pointed his own nose toward the main battle, thinking to cover the retreat. He came in spinning and firing, hitting one with a laser blast and then neatly tucking a torpedo into the cavity the laser had caused, blowing the enemy fighter to bits. He swerved between two more, taking a couple of inconsequential hits, then reversed throttle, with R5-L4 howling all the while, and flipped his X-wing about, a vicious maneuver that nearly stole his consciousness despite the fact that his inertial compensator was running at 97 percent. Kyp kept his cool and came out firing and had both the enemy fighters he had just passed spinning away, with pieces of them flying.

An A-wing flew past him, the pilot frantic, taking hits, with some of them thudding against the side and latching on, like molten goo.

“Oh, no,” Kyp moaned, seeing those missiles melting right through the hull, one going right into the ion-drive connectors.

The A-wing blew apart.

Kyp spun about to meet the pursuing swarm, got a few shots off and took a few hits, but got past them.

He went in close enough to the bow of one enemy ship to spot another facet of it, or perhaps an added piece, for this looked more like a breathing, pulsing creature, a disembodied heart, and the readings coming from it were very different from anything Kyp had ever seen.

He felt a sudden tug and knew that his shields had dropped, and knew that this ship, or creature, or whatever it was, had just ripped them away with some type of magnetic or super-gravity field. He focused his wrath on that notion, on this thing that had brought death so quickly to several of his friends.

Torpedoes away!

But they didn’t get near the thing, seemed to stop in mid-flight, as if they were pressing their noses against an impenetrable barrier, and then just crushed in on themselves and blew apart.

“What?” Kyp cried, not daring to slow and inspect things further, for he was naked now, without shields, and with a host of enemy ships in pursuit.

“I’m hit!” Miko cried.

Kyp turned and turned, dived and spun, trying to find his friend, firing his laser cannons all the while, though he couldn’t even slow enough to locate a target.

“My drives are down!” came Miko’s voice. “No power! No power!”

Then silence.

Kyp saw another of his squadron, an older X-wing, disintegrate under a barrage of missiles, and he pointed his nose out of the system and took off at full throttle. He felt the pursuit at his back and worked hard to fix the coordinates so that he could make the jump to lightspeed. No time for heroics now; survival was the key, survival to return and report!

An A-wing appeared on his wing, the speedy craft pacing him.

“They’re right behind!” the pilot cried. “Keep it straight and fast!” Kyp called back, for these strange craft had not shown any ability to outrun them. “But we’re the only ones left!” the pilot cried. “Steady and straight!”

And indeed, the enemy fighters couldn’t catch them, but that surely did not end the pursuit, for another craft, a roughly oval-shaped rocky vessel, burst open a forward chamber, and a host of half-meter-long black winged creatures that somewhat resembled armored turfhoppers poured forth.

Kyp saw them and saw that they closed easily.

“Hyperdrive!” he cried to his new wingman.

“No coordinates!”

“Now!” Kyp ordered, and he engaged, and so did the
A-wing, but the A-wing had a trio of the vicious insectoids already on it, secreting a substance that melted through the hull, allowing the creatures to burrow in.

Kyp lost sight of the A-wing as the starlight elongated in that momentary freeze of reality that was initial hyperspace, but he understood, somewhere in his subconscious, that the other had not survived the jump, that the engagement of the powerful hyperdrive had blown the damaged A-wing to pieces.

Kyp came out of lightspeed almost immediately, fearing he would collide with a planet or zip through a sun. Before he could begin to try and calculate where he was, though, he saw that he, too, had not escaped unscathed, that he, too, carried a couple of unwanted passengers.

And one was coming through the canopy right at him, wicked pincers chopping excitedly.

“Sernpidal?” Han echoed incredulously. “You want me to go to Sernpidal?”

“A favor,” Lando innocently replied. “Hey, I let you run the belt for free—” He stopped as Han frowned, reminding him that bringing up the belt incident might not be a wise thing to do when begging a favor.

“It’ll take you two days,” Lando said. “If I have to divert a freighter, I’ll be spending more than the payload will bring in.”

“Then don’t sell them the ore,” Han reasoned.

“Got to,” Lando explained. “As long as I keep the outer colonies supplied, the New Republic looks the other way on some of my—how shall I put this?—under-the-table operations.”

“Cost of doing business,” Han said with finality, holding up his arms. He looked past Lando then, to Leia, who was standing in the hallway, arms crossed over her chest and frowning, a pose that poignantly reminded him that Lando could prove to be a very valuable ally at this time. Lando had
the network out here, the contacts they’d need if they wanted to truly understand how the Advisory Council might be connected to the smugglers. Like it or not, Lando Calrissian was a lever that both Luke and Leia desired in the turbulent political arena.

“Hey, even though your run didn’t go well—and I’ll give you another try for free—Jaina got the record and so did you and Chewie,” Lando pleaded.

Han smirked, more at his wife than at Lando. “Sernpidal?” he repeated, as if the very notion was preposterous, but in a conciliatory tone.

Lando’s smile nearly took in his ears, and he started walking again toward the control room. “You’ll be back before anyone realizes you’re gone,” he said.

One of the technicians came out of the control room then, carrying a datapad. He spotted Lando and ran to the man, his look somewhat nervous.

“Trouble?” Lando asked, taking the printout.

“From Kyp Durron,” the technician explained.

Lando looked at the heading and chuckled. “The Dozen-and-Two Avengers,” he recited with a snort and a shake of his head, for even Lando, known to be boastful and flashy, recognized that Kyp was going a little over the line of pretense here.

“What’s the problem?” Leia asked, as she and Han moved beside their friend.

“Outpost on Belkadan, in the Dalonbian sector,” Lando explained. “Something going on over there.” He looked to the technician. “Did you try to raise them?”

“Nothing coming from that planet but static,” the man confirmed.

“Belkadan?” Leia asked.

“Small planet with a scientific outpost,” Lando replied. “Just a dozen or so scientists on planet.”

“And what does this mean?” she asked, taking the printout.

“Probably means their transmitter is out,” Lando replied. “Or
maybe there’s a solar flare wrecking communications. Probably nothing important.” He looked to Han with a wry smile. “Since you’re going out anyway …,” he began.

“Belkadan?” Han echoed, more incredulously than he had echoed
Sernpidal
.