CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“It’s huge, Admiral. It masses as much as a Super Star Destroyer.”

Pellaeon turned slowly away from the viewport on the Chimaera’s bridge, knowing he would win the battle as much by the demeanor he showed his crew as he would by firepower or tactics. “We’ll have to see, Commander, if we can trim mass from it, shall we?”

The Chimaera sat in the center of the defender’s formation, deep in the well of a cone. Arrayed around and ahead of it were four other Imperial-class Star Destroyers—two each from the New Republic and the Remnant. Then nine Victory-class Star Destroyers, three Bothan Assault Cruisers, and a Mon Calamari star cruiser ranged out further along the cone. Beyond them came a scattering of smaller ships, from frigates on down to a couple of freighters with more guts in the crew than weapons on the hull.

“Firing solutions for the grand, please; fire at will.” The Imperial admiral turned and watched the turbolaser batteries on either of the ship’s flanks fill space with hot red bolts of energy. Some of the weapons emitted a nearly constant stream of small bolts that sprayed back and forth at the target. The voids the Yuuzhan Vong used to shield their ships sucked them up greedily, though when a few began to get through, the other guns unleashed a concentrated torrent of fire.

Those heavier bolts flashed in at their targets. Pellaeon expected them to hit and melt gaping holes in the grand’s rocky hull, but voids swallowed those bolts, as well. The admiral’s eyes narrowed as he studied the large ship’s ability to absorb the punishment his guns were doling out.

“No good, sir.” The weapons-control officer let frustration bleed into his words. “These snubfighter tactics may work against skips, but not against the big ships. They have enough shielding to hold us off.”

“That’s possible, quite possible.” Pellaeon frowned, and ran his right hand over his chin. “Or have they learned how we fight?”

Jaina scattered laserfire over a skip, then drilled a quad burst into its aft. Coral slagged off into a frozen comet tail. The dark little Yuuzhan Vong ship started to roll and began on a course that would burn it into a golden streak high in Ithor’s atmosphere.

“Sticks, break starboard.”

Without thinking, Jaina reacted to Anni Capstan’s warning. She jerked her stick to the right and feathered the adjustment jets to pitch the X-wing into a barrel roll to starboard. A plasma blast from a skip sizzled past her ship, then hot after it came molten chunks of coralskipper. Anni’s fighter blazed through, sparks still trailing from her shields, and Jaina dropped onto her aft, then slipped slightly to port.

They exchanged fire with a pair of skips, then blew through the Yuuzhan Vong screen to get in among the crates. In comparison to the fast-moving skips, the crates were bloated floaters, just inviting a quick run and a pair of proton torpedoes. Each of the troop carriers sprouted hornlike projections that spat plasma bolts at incoming fighters, but they were clearly meant more for antipersonnel use than antifighter tactics. Dodging the streams was easy, and a burst of splinter shots actually scored some hits on the hull.

“Sparky, watch our tail, we’re making a run.” Jaina slipped her X-wing back into the lead, then leveled out and started in on one crate. As it fired plasma toward her, she abruptly kicked her X-wing up on its port S-foil and dived down at another. She snapped off two bursts of splinters fore and aft, then drilled a quad burst into the boxy craft’s spine. Coral went from coal black to white-hot in an instant, then evaporated.

Got it! Jaina keyed her comlink. “Finish it, Twelve.”

“As ordered, Sticks.”

Suddenly Sparky started shrieking. Jaina’s secondary monitor showed a pair of skips lurking dead center in her aft scope, slipping in behind Anni. “Twelve, break off the run.”

“Sithspawn!” Anni’s voice rose with panic. “I’m hit!”

Jaina jerked her stick to starboard and pulled back to climb, but it was too late. Anni’s X-wing trailed flames from two engines. The fighter had tucked itself into a tight spiral and slammed full force into the crate Jaina had shot up. Jaina caught a pulse of pain from her wing mate and then nothing.

Anni!

Jaina!

Down on Ithor, hidden with the Jedi squad waiting for the Yuuzhan Vong, Jacen doubled over as pain exploded in his stomach. He struggled for breath, feeling as if a vibroblade had been shoved into his guts. The physical pain in his middle slowly began to ease, but not so the heartache flooding through him.

In an instant Corran was beside him, his hand on Jacen’s back. “What is it?”

Jacen coughed a couple of times, then caught his breath. “My sister, she’s . . . something happened . . . up there.”

“How bad?”

Jacen blinked and reached out with the Force, then raised his face to the night sky. He could still feel her out there amid the flashes of laserfire and the golden debris streaking across the sky. “She’s okay, but someone close to her got vaped. I get that much very clearly.”

Corran nodded, then he and Ganner slapped Jacen on the back. “You have to figure she’ll be safe.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because, Jacen,” Ganner offered, “there’s nothing you can do for her down here. We’ll just make sure that what comes down isn’t going back up again to bother her.”

The youngest Jedi nodded. “You think they’re going to take the bait?”

“Do glitbiters suck spice?” Corran gave Jacen a confident smile. “The Vong have managed to surprise all of us a number of times. It’s their turn to be surprised, and a nasty surprise it will be.”

With his head ensconced in a cognition hood, Deign Lian surveyed the battle. He had chosen to color the carrier bearing Shedao Shai red and watched as the enemy fighters broke through coralskipper cover to start shooting up the carriers. Their weapons spat hot light at Shedao Shai’s ship, but none hit. The outer shell of carriers was gradually carved away, but the majority of them hit atmosphere and began their descent onto the night side of the planet.

Lian then turned his attention to the fleet battle. In an eye blink he designated one of the small infidel ships as a target. The Legacy of Torment’s gunners focused on it, launching a salvo from a half-dozen plasma cannons. The first shot to hit the ship splashed around its shield like mud on an egg. The subsequent shots, all golden and boiling, ate through it like acid. The last one blew unabated through the ball that had once been a metal construct in which warriors had huddled.

More infidels to feed the gods.

With a flicker of thought, Deign Lian shifted the representation of the battle. Instead of seeing it as it might appear in visual light, the Torment’s analytic neuroengines layered colors over the images, letting him assess the damage done to the fleet. Coralskippers became gold and red sparks flitting through the void, growing darker until they winked out of existence. The larger ships started gold, but took on reddened spots or stripes. It pleased him that so few of his ships were reddened.

That pleasure faded quickly as he realized that Shedao Shai was the reason for their successes. His superior had analyzed the infidel’s small-fighter tactics and anticipated the capital ships using a version of them. His countertactic, of deploying a dovin basal screen of sufficient strength to pick off the weakened shots, succeeded in conserving energy for the intense fields needed to arrest the full-power shots.

It does not matter. He might win today, but his victory will just blind him to what needs to be done in the future. Deign Lian smiled. And if he loses, to him goes all blame, and to me will fall the glory of having made the best of his feeble plan.

Colonel Gavin Darklighter rolled to starboard, then spiraled down after the escaping crates. “Got my wing, Deuce?”

Kral Nevil double-clicked his comm, replying in the positive. Gavin checked his scopes and found six more Rogues coming on hot. Only eight of us left? A shudder shook him. At once he was happy that so many of the Rogues were still operational, but the losses still sent icy tendrils through his guts. Anni, gone, and others whom I never got a chance to know.

He snarled angrily, then felt his mind go very cold and clear, as his fury became arctic and infused his body and mind. He suddenly felt as if he was more than a pilot in a machine, that somehow he and his fighter had become one. As closely linked as a Vong pilot and his machine. He let his right hand ride lightly on the stick despite the bump of entering the atmosphere and cruised on in after one of the crates.

Gavin sailed in at its aft and scattered splinter shots at it. The crate projected a void that swallowed the red darts, then its aft guns started spitting plasma sparks at him. The New Republic pilot took his fighter down enough that the crate’s own voids shielded him from the fire, then he laced the carrier’s belly with splinter shots. The void shifted down to pick off those shots, and the plasma fire resumed.

Gavin smiled and tugged back on his stick. His nose came up just enough to pulse a quad burst at the crate’s aft. The lasers hit it hard, with one carving a black furrow up along the side. The other three burned holes in the back. Gavin followed them with more splinter shots, not figuring they’d do more damage to the carrier, but every one that got through the hole would wreak havoc on the cargo.

That crate broke left and dived hard for the jungle below. Gavin ignored it and brought his X-wing around on the same heading as the rest of the crates. In the distance gleamed a white building complex nestled amid the jungle, and twenty kilometers north of it, the lone remaining herd ship, the Tafanda Bay, rode in the sky like a peaceful metal cloud. Four of the crates broke off for the herd ship, while the rest bore in at the ground target.

Gavin flicked his weapons control over to proton torpedoes and targeted the space between two of the crates heading for the Tafanda Bay. He glanced at his monitor and read the range to target. “Catch, program the torps for detonation at two klicks or proximity void detection.”

The droid beeped once, solidly, then Gavin hit the trigger. The paired missiles burned blue through the sky, and his sensors reported voids appearing behind the crates. The Yuuzhan Vong had clearly learned the proton torpedoes would go off when they detected a void, so these crates projected their voids far behind them. In space, the amount of energy from the blast would be insignificant at that range.

But we’re not in space, are we, boys? The exploding proton torpedoes did two things. The first was to pulse out a shock wave that traveled faster than the speed of sound and pushed a lot of atmosphere in front of it. That dense chunk of air slammed into the two crates, boosting them forward and starting them to tumble. It raced past, dissipating as it went, but even the two leaders were bounced around a bit.

The second thing the explosions did, by superheating air and blasting it out in all directions, was to create a void that a lot of air rushed in to fill. The resulting turbulence whirled the spinning crates around. Gavin had no idea how the Yuuzhan Vong pilots and the living components of their ships were able to track up, down, direction, speed, or altitude, but he knew that at the heart of a whirlwind he’d have had a hard time thinking about any of that.

Apparently, so did the Yuuzhan Vong. Their ships fell from the sky, careening through the jungle. No explosions resulted from their impacts, though trees toppled, scarring the dark canopy.

Gavin watched them fall, then focused on the rest of the crates. They were already quite far and quite low, and too close to the herd ship to risk another proton torpedo shot. He smiled to himself. Did what we could to slow them down. Now they’re not our problem.