Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (47 page)

On the bridge of the
Jade Sabre
, Mara glowed with pride and with awe.

Both pilots on the bridge of the
Millennium Falcon
were struck all but dumb, until Han finally managed to whisper, “The kid can fly.”

An explosion shook the
Falcon
, and then the ship dipped suddenly as a tractor beam from the surface nearly caught it, poignant reminders that it was past time to leave.

Coralskippers came at the two ships from every conceivable angle, missiles firing, and the surface batteries opened up, and the dovin basal gravity wells grabbed at them. But this was old news to the four pilots, particularly to Han Solo, and the ships went out past the reach of the Yuuzhan Vong and to hyperspace,
Falcon
first and
Jade Sabre
right behind.

They had escaped, barely, and so, apparently, had Jacen. Still, none of them were ready to call this day anything close to a victory.

As soon as the
Merry Miner
left the region, and then Jaina confirmed that the
Jade Sabre
and the
Millennium Falcon
had gotten out, as well, Jacen breathed considerably easier. He pulled off his breather, trying not to spit all over his close-quartered companion, then pressed the pressure point, releasing the invasive cloaker. Despite all the seriousness of the situation around him, all the grief and all the loss, he couldn’t help but be self-conscious as that skinlike covering peeled away from him, rolling down past his belly, sliding under his loose-fitting skirt, then lower, down his bare legs and feet.

Leaving him feeling quite naked, and leaving him, as Danni likewise released her mask and cloaker, conscious of the fact that she was in a similar state, wearing no more than a tiny loose-fitting shift.

Above that level of tension, Jacen noted that his companion’s shoulders bobbed with quiet sobs.

“We’re out now,” he said to her softly, and then he looked at her, really looked at her, and nearly lost his breath at the beauty he saw there. In truth, Danni was a mess, with bruises on her face and her curly blond hair matted and ragged. But Jacen didn’t see any of that as he looked hard and for the first time into her green eyes, into the pain he saw there, both the vulnerability and the inner strength, as he stared into her
mind and her spirit, remembering that she, and not Miko Reglia, had been the one to put out the telepathic call, though she was not a Jedi Knight.

She could be, Jacen realized then and there, and a great one, at that.

He was conscious, too, of the press of their scantily clothed bodies together within the confines of the small stylus ship.

“You’re safe now,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, and he worked his hand up from his side, taking care as to where it brushed, then brought his fingers gently against Danni’s cheek.

“Miko,” the woman said quietly.

Jacen nodded that he understood—about Miko and about the ordeal this woman had apparently suffered on that cold planet. He dared to bring his hand around to the back of her head, his fingers sliding into her thick shock of hair, and he pulled her close.

Danni didn’t resist. She buried her face in Jacen’s strong shoulder and allowed the tears to flow.

As soon as the three ships came out of hyperspace, and still far from Dubrillion, Luke opened channels to the other two. Jaina piped it down to Jacen and Danni in the stylus ship, and Han moved to open it up to the rest of his ship—until he noted that Anakin and Lando were already entering the bridge.

And so it began, the analysis of what had just happened, the expressions of shock that this still-unknown enemy had so thoroughly routed such a formidable New Republic fleet.

Still unknown?

A hush engulfed the other eight when an unfamiliar voice piped in, Danni Quee beginning a long and thorough explanation of this enemy they now faced, the Praetorite Vong, from the time they had breached the galactic rim, to their journey to Belkadan, to her experiences under their control.

Only Luke interrupted her compelling story, just enough to explain to Danni the ultimate fate of Belkadan.

The woman swallowed hard, and seemed to swallow it away, going on with a determination that they could all hear in her voice, and that Jacen could see clearly in her eyes.

He joined in when she got to the end of her tale, the escape, the rescue by Jacen, the death of Miko Reglia. When the pair finished, there was near silence for a while, except that the people on the
Falcon
and the
Merry Miner
could hear Luke and Mara speaking quietly about something.

“Care to let us in on the secret?” Leia asked.

“We were talking about the creature Danni spoke of,” Luke replied. “The yammosk.” Then, his voice lowered and thick with meaning, he added, “The war coordinator.”

“Yeah, that’s what she called it,” Han said dismissively, missing any understanding of the gravity of Luke’s tone.

“That’s why they fought so well,” Anakin blurted.

“You think that yammosk creature was somehow binding our enemies together?” Leia asked.

“I know that they fought too synchronously,” Luke replied. “Too
coordinated
, and without any communication that we could hear, or even sense.”

“The Yuuzhan Vong were always talking about being joined together by the war coordinator,” Danni put in.

“You felt the power when we went down into the atmosphere,” Luke added, and Mara, beside him, agreed.

“Absolutely,” Leia replied.

“I didn’t,” Han said. “I just know that my instruments were a bit whacky.”

“I felt it,” Jaina put in. “I felt it a long way out from the planet. But down near the surface, it was incredible, overwhelming.”

“So that creature is what turned our enemies into such a tremendous force,” Leia followed the reasoning. “That creature brought them together into a singular fighting unit.”

“Like me, Jacen, and Jaina in the belt,” Anakin put in.

“Then we have to destroy that creature,” Luke reasoned.

“You won’t get near it without an army of soldiers,” Danni said without hesitation. “Even if you can get back down under the ice crust, you’d be battling hundreds of Yuuzhan Vong warriors.”

In fact, Luke was entertaining that very thought. If he could take the iceborer stylus ship back down and somehow work his way to the great yammosk …

“And the yammosk itself would stop you,” Danni added. “It’s huge, and that energy you felt about the planet pales in comparison to what it can do up close.”

“Uncle Luke is Jedi,” Anakin came back, somewhat indignantly.

“So was Miko Reglia,” Danni replied. “And the yammosk overwhelmed him, repeatedly.”

“Jedi Master,” Anakin retorted defiantly, but then Luke cut in, diffusing the tension and changing the subject.

“Can we rally enough firepower in here to take out the whole planet?” he asked, and the hesitation in his voice was an accurate reflection of the trepidation in his thoughts. How many ships would they need? And how many would be destroyed before they ever came close to accomplishing the task?

“That’d take half the fleet,” Han reminded.

“Or more,” Leia added grimly. “We hardly hurt them today, and what will we be left with for defense at the Core if we bring the fleet out here and lose?”

“The Praetorite Vong will walk across the galaxy, one system at a time,” Danni added, and as she was the expert among them on their enemies, those words rang ominously indeed.

“How else can we beat it?” Luke asked in all seriousness. “What can we do, here and now, to defeat the yammosk?”

“I’ve got some heat charges that would do some damage to that ice crust,” Lando offered.

“If we could even get them to the right places on the surface past those gravity wells,” Han said.

“I don’t think they’d do much good anyway,” Danni put in. “The yammosk is down deep, where the water is warmer from the volcanoes.”

“Too bad we couldn’t just shut the volcanoes off and freeze the thing,” Jacen added.

Then came a short pause, and Luke started to break it by asking how much damage
Rejuvenator
had been able to inflict with her laser batteries, taking that line of questioning to the point with Danni and Jacen to learn if they, since they were under that ice crust, had even felt the pounding. He was cut short, though, by a surprisingly animated Anakin.

“We can,” he said, and when his father returned with a “huh?” he added, “We can shut the volcanoes off. Or at least we can freeze the water around them.”

“How’re we going to do that?” Han asked. “It’s already about as cold around that planet as it can be.”

“Almost,” Anakin said slyly. “But not quite.”

“Absolute zero?” Luke asked. “How are we going to do that?”

“Evaporation,” Anakin replied.

“Huh?” Han said again.

“Nothing steals energy faster,” Jacen agreed, remembering the science lessons Anakin was recalling, lessons that he and Jaina, too, had been taught at the Jedi academy.

“If we can speed up the evaporation around the planet, we’ll cool it down,” Anakin said.

“And how do we do that?” Han asked skeptically.

“You infuse the process with energy,” Jaina explained. “Like the energy of sunlight drying up puddles.”

Han snorted. “If we can get that amount of energy out here, we can just use it to destroy the planet,” he reasoned.

“Unless we turn the yammosk’s energy back in on the planet,” Danni said suddenly, and except for Han’s increasingly
predictable “huh?” there came a few moments of dead silence, as the others all considered the logic of the notion.

“Lando?” Luke called.

“Why’re you asking me?” the man came back.

“When you were on Nkllon, you did some serious energy reflection,” Luke replied, a sly note edging his voice, showing that he thought he might be on to something.

“You mean the sunlight?” Lando asked. “We did more hiding from it than turning it back. Running behind the panels of the shieldships, and—” He paused, and those on the
Falcon
’s bridge with him saw his face brighten.

“Shieldships,” he said evenly.

“I thought they were all destroyed,” Danni said. She had heard the tales and had not seen the great ships in close orbit to Destrillion.

“Well, I had to build a few more,” Lando replied, and his tone gave Luke the image of the man’s always wry grin. “Couldn’t lose the technology, after all.”

“Get them out here as quickly as you can,” Luke ordered. “There’s mountains of mist around the planet already, from the pounding
Rejuvenator
gave to the place. And if we turn right back after being so routed, we might catch our enemies by surprise, perhaps even with many of their fighters away from home, heading out to find the remnants of our fleet.

“You’d better bring back Kyp and all the starfighters and gunships we can manage, too,” he added. “Just to help protect the shieldships while they move in close and do their work.”

“Already making the call,” Lando assured him.

They set up a rendezvous at a nearby planet, one where Jaina, Jacen, and Danni could get out of the
Merry Miner
and go aboard the other ships, with Jacen taking Lando’s place in the
Falcon’s
bottom gun pod, Danni going to the
Jade Sabre
with Jaina and Mara, and Luke going back in the
Jade Sabre’
s hold, prepping his X-wing for the coming fight.

It took a while for the lumbering shieldships to get there from their docks at Destrillion. The fleet that had come out to run guard for the ships was nowhere near as large as Luke and the others had hoped. Although Kyp Durron had returned with a large squadron of starfighters, none of the Ranger gunships had joined his force, their commanders opting to wait for more New Republic firepower to arrive.

Those commanders were in error, Luke knew, for as he considered the level of the rout at the Helska system, the coordination of the enemy force, and the sheer power of the energy field protecting the planet itself, he understood that the New Republic would never rally enough of an armada to win out there. And likely, those Ranger gunships and the others who opted to remain at Destrillion would see more fighting from the Yuuzhan Vong gone on the offensive than those with Luke trying to surprise the planetary base.

Still, he considered retreating back to Dubrillion with his makeshift fleet, digging in their heels there, and trying to hold out long enough for battle cruisers and Star Destroyers to arrive—though if they came in scattershot, he realized, they would run the risk of being picked off one by one by the Yuuzhan Vong force. Perhaps they should try their cooling plan with the entire fleet, or as much of the fleet as the councilors would send, assembled. But there was the rub, for Luke understood, above all else, that paralyzing, bureaucratic, self-serving council and could hardly count on them acting prudently and correctly.

Even with the disappointments, then, Luke knew that they had to press on, and quickly. The aliens had not been caught by surprise with the first assault, and without any element of surprise this time, the plan had little chance of working.

They came in hot, on the very edge of disaster, plotting coordinates and speeds that brought them out of hyperspace practically as a singular unit, and right near the fourth planet
of the Helska system. So close, in fact, that a pair of ships, the one cruiser that had joined the fleet and a starfighter, slammed right into that planet, so close together that another pair of starfighters clipped wings and went spinning and exploding away, one of them taking out a third in the process.

Luke, who had ordered the dangerous jump, could only wince at the losses, and at the notion that they were acceptable losses, for this ragtag fleet could not have done it any other way.

For now, suddenly, and before any Yuuzhan Vong had risen against them, they were already moving into place, the six great, umbrella-shaped shieldships falling into orbit around the ice planet and decreasing that orbit with each rotation.