Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (37 page)

He executed a third snap turn and broke out of it back to the left, locking fast on two enemy ships along the same line and firing away, blowing the first into bits and then pounding through to take a huge chunk off the second, sending it spinning away.

Luke sensed the danger from the side and behind, and went through the only open avenue, back to the right yet again, punching the X-wing to full throttle.

The remaining ion drive screeched in protest and could not deliver the full desired thrust.

Luke was running, but the enemies were catching him, closing in from all sides.

“It is Kyp,” Han noted as the familiar, and obviously wounded, XJ X-wing came into clearer view. “Oh, no,” he added, for the instruments were screaming at them, and a glance to the side told him why.

A swarm of insects, zooming in for the X-wing and for the
Falcon
.

“They baited us,” Han insisted. “They used Kyp to lure us in.”

“You think they’re intelligent?” Anakin asked skeptically.

“I think it worked,” was all that Han replied. “Get ready for some hot flying, kid!”

Anakin set to work with his instruments.

“Get to the top guns,” Han instructed, referring to the pod
of quad laser cannons atop the
Millennium Falcon
. The old ship had two such pods, one above and one below, along with a single gun on the front that could be controlled from the cockpit.

As he started to rise, Anakin heard his father quietly add, “Be alive, Kyp.”

Anakin rushed out into the hall, around the corner. He had to push several people out of the way to get to the gunnery seat—he thought of asking if anyone else knew how to operate cannons, so he could send them to the second pod down below. But he quickly reversed his thinking. If his father wanted someone else on the other guns, his father would make the request.

He scrambled up the ladder and squeezed in, settling and strapping into the swiveling chair, feeling the trigger and stick in each hand. Anakin loved this place, considering the fast swiveling chair and the thumping guns as a test of his reaction and skill, and even more than that, given the speed of targets, a test of his intuition, his bond with the Force. Now he had a chance to use the guns in a real setting, and despite the very real danger, he could not deny his excitement.

That feeling didn’t last long, though, not with the events of Sernpidal so pressing on his thoughts.

“Don’t let these things get anywhere near us,” Han warned gravely, his tone bringing Anakin back to the situation at hand, making him rub his sweaty palms across the ridged sticks. He looked at the situation unfolding in front of him, and at the wounded X-wing, hoping, as had Han, that Kyp was somehow still alive.

“And don’t blow Kyp out of the universe!” Han added suddenly, and Anakin winced, as if that had been a direct reference to his other recent failure. He heard his father mumbling then, and perked up his ears.

“Dammit, Chewie,” Han was saying quietly. “How am I gonna get that thing in tow without you?”

Anakin pulled back, feeling as if he had intruded in a place
where he did not belong, and tried to regain his focus on the situation at hand, though Han’s plea to his dead friend stung the boy profoundly. He took a deep breath, his wounded expression solidifying into a determined scowl. He swung the rotating cockpit around, sighted a group of incoming insect-like creatures, and locked on. Then he waited, waited, holding his shot, keeping his calm.

“Trying to hit them as they pass?” his father cried out to him.

Anakin ignored the sarcasm and kept his cool, waiting, waiting. They were almost on the
Falcon
now—Anakin could see their bulbous eyes and the absolute ferocity reflected in them.

He let them fire, all four laser cannons, the long barrels retracting as each burst blazed out. Insect parts and flashes of light filled his screen, a wave of devastation, and the young Jedi quickly rocked the cannons about, triggers held down and barrels blasting, sweeping the insect parts away.

But more were coming, many more, and fast! Anakin swiveled and let fly a volley, then spun back and powered off another, and then another, and when one insect zipped out of harm’s way, he followed it down and to the side, catching up and just ahead, and
—whump!
—blew it to little pieces.

It wasn’t enough.

“They’re on the hull!” Han cried.

Anakin dropped back down the ladder into the main deck and rushed out, pushing through the crowd, then diving into the lower storage area and readying the tow cable. He heard his father call out for him, repeatedly, heard something about the shields hardly slowing them down, but he kept his calm, and as the
Falcon
came over the drifting X-wing, he fired the grapnel out, hooking it about one of the wings.

Then he ran, hearing his father’s cry that the
Falcon
was about to be breached. Anakin didn’t go right to the bridge, though, but to the main power transfer alcove. He had
been working in here after his disastrous descent to Coruscant, working with … Chewbacca, and he knew the layout pretty well.

He flipped the main, shutting down all but the
Falcon’
s essential life-support systems. He heard the cries of fear from the many passengers, but put them away, locked them out of his thoughts. The insects were on the hull, his father had said, and so he pulled free the main cable and juiced the power back on, then climbed with the sparking thing in hand, up, up, to the top hatch. Gently, so gently, Anakin fed it through the tool release, more and more until it looped back down. And then he held his breath.

The main cable touched the outer hull and sent a burst of electricity across it, firing up the
Falcon
like a holiday candle.

“What’re you doing?” came Han’s cry from below. “We got no power!”

“Just washing off the hull,” Anakin replied, and he slid back down into the alcove. “Go and see if it’s clear.”

Han looked at him sternly, but then did go back to the bridge, and sure enough, all of his readings indicated that the insectoids had been zapped from the hull. Many floated by, not charred or blasted, but stunned at the least.

The lights flickered; all the power came back on-line.

“Nice move, kid,” Han whispered under his breath.

A moment later, the laser cannons roared to life above the bridge, plucking the floating monsters out of the sky.

Han smiled in spite of himself, checked the tow line to make sure they had Kyp’s X-wing firmly in their grasp, then headed back for the convoy, for a freighter where they could bring the X-wing aboard and see if the Jedi was alive or dead.

Luke flew purely on instinct, on anticipation and reaction combined, a dazzling, dipping, dodging display that had the horde of enemy fighters wildly trying to keep up—and even brought a pair of them crashing together at one point—and had R2-D2 howling the whole time. For Luke was too fast for
the astromech, his course changes too abrupt for the navigation instrumentation to calculate and correct.

Luke came out of one sweeping arc with a pair of enemies on his tail. He gently twisted and turned, and avoided the firing projectiles—just barely, with one grazing the underside of his upped right wing. “Please give me this,” he asked his ship, and he throttled up as fast as she would go.

The enemy fighters paced him, closing.

Luke reversed the throttle, the wounded ion drive roaring in protest. He sensed a collision and dived down to the side at the last possible second, and both enemy fighters flashed past.

The X-wing’s four laser cannons let loose, scattering the two rocklike fighters all across the sector.

But there was no time to stop and cheer, for more were on him fast, from every conceivable angle. Luke growled and went through every twist and turn, cannons blasting away, reacting with lightning precision.

It wouldn’t be enough, he knew, not this time, not against this many opponents.

An explosion to the left caught his eye, and then another, and then the
Jade Sabre
appeared, blasting through the enemy line.

“Flying catch!” came Mara’s cry.

Luke swerved that way, and the
Jade Sabre
swished past him, and he could see her tail compartment opened wide. He took the X-wing straight in, as fast as he dared, screeching in and firing his repulsors as he entered the hold, then the instant his momentum broke, shutting down everything so that the X-wing literally dropped to the floor with a resounding thud.

“I’m in! I’m in!” he cried, and he looked back to see the fishtail sliding closed.

He felt the rocking as the
Jade Sabre
took a few hits, but she was built to take them, Luke realized. He scrambled out of his starfighter and ran along the corridors, getting tossed with every evasive turn. By the time he got to the bridge, Mara had things in hand, rocketing around the system’s fifth
planet just enough to get a boost from the gravitational pull, and then tearing off into deep space, the enemy fighters quickly losing ground.

“Something bad’s happening here,” Mara remarked.

“Something connected to Belkadan and that warrior,” Luke agreed. “I feel sure of it.”

“And there were a thousand ships coming up to get you,” Mara explained.

Luke considered the situation carefully for a long moment. “Back to Lando’s,” he said at last. But Mara was already feeding in that course, acting on the same thought: If there were this many of the strange fighter craft around this planet, how many others might be out wandering the sector? How many might have been at Belkadan, and how many were now at Sernpidal?

Or Dubrillion?

Kyp Durron walked into the cockpit of the
Millennium Falcon
a couple of hours later, having come across on a walking dock, a tube extending from the freighter that had collected his X-wing to hard-dock with the
Falcon
’s upper hatch.

“Elfour’s gone,” he said quietly, obviously wounded deeply by the loss.

Anakin could sympathize with his grief, understanding that his own grief at losing either R2-D2 or C-3PO would be considerable indeed, perhaps rivaling the pain he felt for Chewie’s loss. Han, though, shrugged, and even snorted a bit, as if the loss of a droid was hardly comparable to that which he was now feeling.

“What were those things?” Han asked a moment later.

Kyp shrugged. “We followed a ship from Belkadan to the fourth planet of the Helska system,” he explained. “And there we got—” He paused and swallowed hard several times, and both Han and Anakin looked back at him curiously.

“All thirteen of the others?” Han asked, catching on, and now his visage did soften to an expression of sincere sympathy.

Kyp nodded grimly.

“By those bug things?” Han asked.

“They came after,” Kyp explained, and he went on to detail the rocky starfighters, telling how his buddies had their shields torn away one by one. “The bug things chased me and one of my pilots out when we jumped to lightspeed.”

“They can go to hyperspace?” Anakin asked incredulously.

Kyp shrugged, for the answer seemed self-evident.

Han started to reply, but he paused, staring intently at his console screen.

“What?” both Anakin and Kyp said together, Anakin leaning over and Kyp moving closer to see. Scores of signals were appearing, and then more and more and more. Large signals, stronger than any the insectoid creatures might show.

“Tell me about these starfighter things again,” Han insisted.

They put the call out immediately to the convoy, to break ranks and head for Lando’s place with all possible speed. Many ships reported that they could make the jump to lightspeed, but many others, too much fallen into disrepair, simply couldn’t. They’d have to be towed with tractor beams, which would slow the convoy considerably. Han instructed several smaller, faster ships to fly on ahead, to get to Lando and tell him to get his defenses up and ready, and then the
Falcon
swerved in and out of the remaining fleet ships, organizing the tow, coaxing the beleaguered refugees on. The pilots of all the towing ships agreed on an acceptable speed, and they laid in their course and jumped to hyperspace.

Anakin checked the instruments the whole time, plotting the course and speed of the enemy starfighters—if that’s what they were—and calculating the time until they were overrun.

They all breathed a little easier a short while later, when the young Jedi announced that they would indeed make Lando’s planet ahead of the enemies.

But not by much.

“We’ve got more cannons than people to operate them,” Lando said with that wry grin of his. “From salvage operations, mostly. Taken from the burned-out hulks of Imperial Star Destroyers.”

Han wasn’t surprised. Lando was among the most capable men he had ever known, and Lando was most capable of all at taking care of Lando and Lando’s interests.

“We got your cargo unloaded,” he snapped.

Lando stared at him, confused.

“On Sernpidal, I mean,” Han went on. “We got your cargo off right before the moon fell. You think your business connection will be satisfied with that?”

“Hey, buddy, it wasn’t my fault,” Lando said, patting his hands in the air.

“It was your fault that we were there!” Han growled at him.

“And twenty thousand people are glad that you were!” Lando retorted, pointedly reminding his friend that, though the loss of Chewbacca was a bitter price to pay, the efforts of Han, Anakin, and the Wookiee had saved thousands and thousands of people.

Han chewed his lip, his fists clenching and opening at his sides, unsure of whether he should let this inevitable battle
with Lando explode now, or put his pain and anger aside until the danger had passed.

“We can’t look back at any one decision that brought us to this place,” Lando said quietly, shaking his head. “If I hadn’t asked you to go to Sernpidal, you wouldn’t have, and Chewie would still be here. But a lot of other people would be dead right now, probably including Kyp, and we’d have no idea of what was coming against us. In that case, all of us, Chewie included, would be in serious trouble.”