CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Lieutenant Solo reporting as ordered, Colonel.” Jaina Solo stood stiffly just outside the open hatchway to Colonel Darklighter’s cabin aboard Ralroost. She had no idea why he had sent Emtrey, the unit’s M-3PO military protocol droid, to fetch her, but she was glad to get a chance to speak with him. The whole incident with her brother the week previous had left her stomach churning. When I thought he was dead . . .

“Come in, Jaina, please, be seated.” Gavin Darklighter nodded her toward the bunk against the wall. He sat at a small table bolted to the cabin’s opposite wall. On it he had a datapad, several data cards, and a small holocube displaying alternating images of his family. With just that holocube he’d managed to drain the small cabin of its sterility, despite the white walls and gray decking.

As she sat, he turned in his chair to face her. Though he was still a young man, gray had crept into his hair at the temples, and little lines traced back from the corners of his eyes. He’d assumed command of Rogue Squadron right after the peace with the Remnant, but the dozen and a half years he’d put in with it before then had been what marked him. To Jaina he was one of a handful of legends who had survived and even thrived within Rogue Squadron.

“Jaina, I should have spoken to you about this before now. What happened at Garqi was unfortunate. It was also necessary. Operational security demanded we let no one in-system at the time know that the Lost Hope was meant to go down in flames.”

Jaina nodded. “I’ve been told that only Admiral Kre’fey and the techs who had prepared the ship—as well as the task force—knew what was going to happen. I know you didn’t know, so you couldn’t warn me.”

“Yes, I have been informed of how kind you’ve been in supposing what I would have done had I known what was going to happen. The fact is, however, I would not have told you.” His looked straight at her, and she shivered. “The decision to keep that information secret came from above me, and I would have respected the security demands that would have kept me silent. And while I know you would have not let out any hint of what was happening, the judgment about whether or not to take that chance, again, was not one I would have made.”

Jaina gripped the edge of the bunk to keep herself upright. She felt betrayed by his words, in great part because she had credited him with far more kindness than he was saying he possessed. She had trusted in him, and here he was saying he was not worthy of that trust. And while his voice rang with sincerity, he was plainly suggesting he would have remained silent no matter who or what was involved.

Her anger over that latter point surprised her. Jaina would not have thought she was deserving of special treatment, but her anger clearly indicated that some part of her did. After all, she was a Jedi, as was her brother, and that should have counted for something. The affairs of Jedi were being meddled with, and that wasn’t right. Moreover, after all her family had done for the New Republic, shouldn’t it have at least taken steps to stop her from being hurt? Didn’t the New Republic owe her at least that much?

She quickly caught her outrage and broke it down. The umbrage at having Jedi affairs compromised, she realized, bordered very closely on the arrogant attitude that Kyp and his followers embraced. Jedi have abilities others do not, but this does not make us any better than anyone else; and for the purposes of my time with Rogue Squadron, I am a pilot first, not a Jedi.

That thought led her to explore the idea that the New Republic owed her anything. My parents might have a debt that needs to be paid off, but it’s not mine. The only way the New Republic will owe me anything is if I earn something from it. So far, in comparison to what my parents have done, I have done nothing.

Colonel Darklighter leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together. “I didn’t speak to you earlier by design, and while I might have saved you some pain, I thought a little now would be better than a lot later. When I came into the squadron I was your age, and I had a burden: Biggs Darklighter was my cousin, so the Darklighter reputation landed firmly on me. Like you, I was young enough to believe I could do anything. I was lucky enough that those in the squadron accepted me, helped me along, and enabled me to uphold my family’s honor.

“You have a much greater burden, and one that has shifted slightly. You’ve been born to privilege, whereas I was a moisture farmer’s brat. My parents were no one; yours saved a galaxy, and continue to serve it. In that service they made enemies, and you’re smart enough to know that once your mother left power, her enemies set about weakening her image, and that of the Jedi.”

Jaina nodded. “I’ve met people who figure me for a spoiled Jedi brat. I work hard to prove them wrong.”

“That’s very apparent, and those of us in the squadron are very happy you’re with us. There are others on this ship, however, and in the service, who don’t have the view of you that I do.” He sighed. “Part of what happened here was to show them that we play no favorites. There isn’t a single person here who didn’t feel for the death of your brother, and none of them would have liked to have been in your boots when the Lost Hope exploded. All of them know how much you must have been hurting. And when they learned that your superiors had purposely not let you know—not let any of us in Rogue Squadron know—what was happening, they realized they’ve got more in common with us than they imagined. They realized that the problem of the Yuuzhan Vong is serious enough that the New Republic isn’t playing favorites: not for Rogue Squadron, not for the Jedi, not for any Solos.”

The young pilot closed her eyes and rubbed one hand over her forehead. As he explained it, everything made sense. Jaina discovered she’d inherited from her parents the narrow belief that it was her role, her family’s role, to be saving the galaxy. The fact was that their actions were crucial, but it was the hundreds of thousands of sapient beings that made up the Rebellion that had been able to capitalize on and maintain the victories others won. Blowing up the Death Star certainly eliminated threats to the galaxy, but it hadn’t liberated a single Imperial planet. That had taken lots of others working hard.

And they needed to be shown that hard work is going to be vital here. She opened her eyes and looked up at her commander. “Colonel, I—Boy, this is humbling, and I guess I didn’t realize I needed to be humbled.”

Gavin laughed heartily, then nodded. “You didn’t need it as much as others might have thought you needed it. You’re not the first pilot in this unit to be taken down a notch or two, and remember, all of us were treated similarly. Rogue Squadron is the best unit in the New Republic, but now our comrades know we’re all on equal footing when it comes to how we are treated.”

He held up a finger. “One more thing that I hope you’ll take away from this. In my time with Rogue Squadron I’ve seen a lot of people die. I’ve lost a lot of friends, people I was close with, and some I was very close to. What Admiral Kre’fey managed to do is remind all of us, through the persons of your brother and Corran, that none of us are immune to death out here. He reminded us that we may be called upon to make sacrifices we don’t want to make, and that’s good. If we go out there thinking we’re invulnerable, we’ll get stupid. Stupid people die, and all too often, they take friends with them.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” Jaina had already seen, in the simulations she’d flown after Garqi, that she was flying sharper than before. She had more of an edge, and she knew she’d need it against the Yuuzhan Vong.

“Very good, Lieutenant.” He straightened up in his chair. “Go find your squadron mates and tell them they have two hours before we report to the belly launch bay. Admiral Kre’fey thinks he has a way to neutralize some of the Yuuzhan Vong threat facing us, but we’ll still be out there patrolling in case there’s a miscalculation. I want everyone ready to go because, at the end of this little foray, I want to recover as many fighters as we put out there.”

Sealed inside the cockpit of his X-wing, which was nestled deep in the lower launch bay on the Ralroost, Gavin never saw the Bothan Assault Cruiser revert to realspace. The second the capital ship’s sensors became operational, they flooded Gavin’s computer with systems data for Sernpidal. Launch control cleared him for launch, so he powered up his repulsorlift coils and nudged the throttle forward. The X-wing picked up speed as it moved into the launch tube, then burst through the magnetic containment bubble at the end and looped up to the rendezvous point.

He raised his right hand and flicked a canopy switch that locked his fighter’s S-foils in attack position, then checked his shields, lasers, and finally his target acquisition system. “’Roost, Rogue Leader here. Scopes are negative for an immediate threat.”

“Copy, Leader. Commence run.”

“As ordered.” Gavin flicked his comm unit over to the squadron tactical frequency. “One flight on me. Two, you’re with the snoop. Three, take low. So far, so good, but be careful.”

Gavin checked his scopes again and saw some movement out at the fringes of the system. The data came from the Ralroost’s sensors and registered the distant craft as coral-skippers. Short of making a microjump through hyperspace, they couldn’t get to the Ralroost in less than four hours, by which time the ship should have been long gone. And if they do get to the Ralroost before then, it will be long gone.

Admiral Kre’fey had agreed that the slamming of a moon into Sernpidal had not just been a terror attack. The resources it required demanded some other gain, since Sernpidal was hardly a threat and could have been useful for whatever the sorts of things were that the Yuuzhan Vong were doing with Dubrillion. Getting a mission in to see what was going on there was very important.

A standard scouting mission would generally appear at the fringes of a system and employ probe droids or just long-range sensors to learn what it could. Kre’fey assumed the Yuuzhan Vong would place defenses at the edges of the system to prevent this strategy from working. The admiral had his astronavigators run countless analyses of data from the Millennium Falcon’s outbound run. Using that information, they created models that showed how the planet would break up over time. The models helped determine how the fragmenting world would change the gravitic profile of the system as it slowly broke apart. They found a point very close to the crushed world where a ship could get in and out, yet intrasystem jumps would be difficult for the Yuuzhan Vong.

So, we’re dropped into that space and get to go. Gavin brought his fighter around and headed into the labyrinth that the debris from Sernpidal had created. While the moon’s fall had shattered the world, it had not done as complete a job with it as the Death Star had with Alderaan. Gavin had flown through the Graveyard of Alderaan, but the remains of Sernpidal were bigger than the asteroid-size shards of Alderaan.

He could see huge chunks with what were once coastlines etched on them. He suspected, were he to fly in close enough, he would see the ruins of cities. The idea of doing that, aside from being well outside mission parameters, held no appeal for him at all. My job is to get past the debris screen and see what else is going on here, if anything.

The screen of coralskippers at the edges of the system did suggest the Yuuzhan Vong wanted to protect something, but until Gavin threaded his flight through fragments of the planetary crust and around stone that had been molten and flowing until frozen by the vacuum of space, he had no inkling of what the Yuuzhan Vong would be doing. Once he did make his way through, and brought his X-wing out into the light of Sernpidal’s sun, his mouth went dry.

“Emperor’s black bones!”

Gavin heard the curse over the comm and almost snapped at the lack of comm discipline, when he realized he’d been the one to say it. “Snoop, are you operational?”

“Affirmative, Leader. Pods deployed.”

“Good, get it all.”

Gavin couldn’t be certain what he was seeing because, while he had seen similar things, it had never been in space. With his wife, back on her homeworld of Chandrila, he’d gone diving and had marveled at the life hidden under the surface of the water. Having come from a desert world, the idea that much of anything could hide beneath the waves just hadn’t occurred to him. He had come to love diving and especially watching the teeming life around various reefs in the Silver Sea.

Clinging to the sunny faces of Sernpidal’s fragments were things that looked very much like snails, only huge. Large enough to house a flight of X-wings! He could see where some of them had worked their way down along the rock, leaving a softened trail behind them, as if they were eating the rock. In their wake came countless smaller creatures of a similar design. They seemed to be following up on specific veins of minerals the large ones had exposed.

The snails clinging to the rock were not the only ones he saw. Others—a cloud of them—drifted out to a nexus point that seemed vaguely equidistant between most of the fragments. There Gavin made out a stony lattice somewhat ovoid in shape and easily the size of a small moon. Some of the snails, both big and small, moved over it, layering rock across it. Some of the snails, with decidedly different shells than those eating rock, were being incorporated into the lattice, along the spine and located in a couple of other places. Slender filaments that glistened in the sunlight linked them, calling to mind images he’d once seen of nerve plexuses.

They’re growing a ship, a huge ship. Gavin glanced at his range finder and saw he was still a good forty kilometers from the skeleton. That’s as big as the Death Star was.

“What do we do, Lead?”

Gavin heard Major Varth’s request for a mission and immediately started picking out targets. He stopped only when the absurdity of it struck him. One proton torpedo might have killed a Death Star, but this thing had no shielded reactor exhaust port. It has no reactor. It is alive . . . or will be. Even a direct hit by every proton torpedo in the squadron would only thin the work force, not even cripple it.

“Nine, we do nothing. We’re here as eyes.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth, but he could say nothing else. “Someone wiser than me will have to figure this out, Rogues. Let’s hope they can.”