CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Night had fallen thick and hard before the first warning was sounded. The troopers Admiral Kre’fey had sent down to help out with the situation had set up remote sensor pods that picked up the infrared energy the Yuuzhan Vong gave off. Once the first alarm came through, two TIE-wings from Tough Squadron went up for a quick recon of the area where the sensors had reported movement.

Gavin had watched the TIE-wings take off and head south. They became distant pinpoints of light to the naked eye, but situated in his cockpit, he was able to follow them on his primary monitor. He listened to their comm chatter and heard one pilot’s voice strain as he saw a long column of Yuuzhan Vong coming in.

Out there, five to six kilometers distant, reddish ground fire reached up toward the fighters. They were able to avoid it fairly easily and still managed to report back what they saw. “Multiple contacts, command. Ground troops on foot, as well as two large vehicles and twelve smaller ones. Gravitic anomalies and plasma cannons on the big ones, plasma cannons on the smaller ones. Air contacts coming on now. We’re scooting.”

Gavin hit a button on his comm unit. “This is Rogue Leader to all Rogues. Light them up. The enemy is out there, and we’re going to pulverize them.” He keyed in his ignition sequence and waited for his power and weapons systems to go green. “Catch, monitor base tactical frequency and flash the button when there is an emergency.”

The droid warbled a positive reply.

Gavin shunted power to his repulsorlift coils, then nudged the throttle forward. Once he was up and moving, he clicked the switch that locked the S-foils in combat position and ruddered the fighter around to 180 degrees. “One flight on me.”

Multiple clicks came over the comm channel to acknowledge his command. Catch started painting multiple enemy contacts in the air ahead of them. Looks like they have two squadrons of skips up. I have to like the odds and just have to hope we can make the best of them.

He quadded up his lasers and dropped the aiming reticle on one of the skips harassing a returning Tough. Gavin hit the secondary trigger, spewing out a hail of red energy darts. “Tough, break port.”

The ugly cut to Gavin’s starboard, and the skip swerved to keep on the TIE-wing’s tail. Gavin ruddered around to starboard and kept the skip in his sights. At the same time Nevil sprayed the skip with scatter shots, Gavin hit the primary trigger and sent one full-power burst of laser fire into the skip. The black hole being used to pick off the Quarren’s shots did warp the flight path of the bolts Gavin had triggered, but managed only to draw them in toward the dovin basal creating the black hole.

The bolts hit and burned through the coralskipper’s stony flesh. Something evaporated in a burst of steam, then the skip’s aft began to drop. Seconds later the last of the laser bolts burst from the other side of the craft. For a half second the skip hung in the air, its nose pointing skyward, then Nevil’s second flicker-shot barrage stippled the skip with glowing red points. One must have hit a dovin basal, killing it, because the skip then plummeted from the sky and crashed unseen into the ground below.

Ahead of Gavin the sky lit up like the Coruscant cityscape during a celebration of Liberation Day. Plasma bolts arced into the sky. Laser bolts, both red and green, as well as blue ion bolts, slanted down toward the ground. Flashes of color illuminated the two huge shadowy shapes moving through the night, but Gavin could not make out much in the way of detail. He almost asked Catch to switch him over to ground-attack mode on his sensors so he could get an idea of what the Yuuzhan Vong were bringing to assault the base, but incoming fighters demanded his attention.

And they’ll get it. He spitted one on his aiming reticle and tightened up on the trigger. My undivided attention.

The nervous anxiety of the pilots woke Luke first, but the roar of the snubfighters taking off guaranteed to keep him awake. He pulled a tunic on, then looped his lightsaber belt over his shoulder before emerging from his tent. He watched the fighters head south and, just for a moment, wished he could be up there in one with them. Once again, with Artoo behind me, rolling through a dogfight.

He shivered, knowing that such remembrances were not quite the thing a Jedi Master should dwell on. An affinity for combat was a necessary evil, but one that could be tolerated only when a Jedi held himself back and used it only to defend people. Seeing the line between offensive action and defensive was, at the best of times, difficult, but as he watched sleepy people emerge from tents, rubbing their eyes and beginning to murmur, he knew where it lay in this case.

Mara appeared at his side. “Where do you want me?”

The urgency in her voice belied the weariness on her face.

“You want the honest truth?”

Mara hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I trust your judgment, Luke.”

“Good. I want you to find Leia. She’s going to be running around herding the noncombatants. Right now I need you to be there and back her, so we don’t get any grief from them. I know you want to be—”

Mara reached out and touched a finger to his lips. “I said I trusted your judgment. I trust you will have me where you need me, and if I am needed elsewhere, you will let me know.”

Luke reached out and pulled Mara into a firm hug. “I love you very much, Mara. For this and for everything else.”

“I know, Luke.” Mara pulled her head back a bit, then rested her forehead on his, noses touching. “Each of us doing our parts will defeat the Yuuzhan Vong. Count on it.”

“I do.” Luke kissed her and held her as if it would be the last time, then reluctantly let her slip from his arms. “May the Force be with you.”

“And you, my love.” She winked at him and backed away toward the center of the camp. “When you need me, I’ll be there.”

He nodded, then jogged out toward the southern perimeter. He quickly found Colonel Bril’nilim, a Twi’lek in charge of the New Republic troopers, scanning the distance with a pair of macrobinoculars. Luke sensed frustration coming off the commando leader, so did nothing to disturb him.

The Twi’lek turned and offered him the vision device. “Perhaps you can see something more than I can.”

Luke waved the macrobinoculars away. “The Yuuzhan Vong are out there, but that’s obvious. The troops are likely slave forces they want to bear the brunt of the casualties. Where do you want me?”

Bril’nilim pointed over toward the southeast. “You, I’d like there, your nephews off to the southwest. Let me know anything you feel that is odd, and I can send scouts out.”

“As ordered, Colonel.” Luke turned and found his nephews hanging back a bit. “Did you hear?”

Jacen nodded. “Yes. Anakin and I go over there, you’re over here. We report whatever is odd.”

“Right. No going yourselves to investigate, understand?”

Colonel Bril’nilim’s lekku twitched as he came around. “You better understand. No heroics. My troops will shoot things they don’t understand, and a Jedi sneaking around will be one of them. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the two young Jedi Knights said in unison.

Luke and the colonel exchanged smiles. “Good, get to it. I like having three Jedi on my line. I just hope none of us will have to see too much action.”

“Tough Seven here. I could use some cover on my attack run.”

Jaina clicked on her comm unit. “Rogue Eleven on you, T-sev.”

“Thanks, Sticks.”

The Jedi pilot rolled her X-wing up on the port stabilizer and came around on a heading that put her to starboard of the X-ceptor heading in at the ground formation. The TIE interceptor wings on the X-ceptor spat laser darts past its long X-wing nose, scything down rows of Yuuzhan Vong troopers. Though Jaina could not see much in the green light from the lasers, she could make out that none of the Yuuzhan Vong troopers broke or ran. They also seem small to me, stockier than I thought the Yuuzhan Vong were from what Jacen described.

A coralskipper came around and vectored in on the X-ceptor. Jaina shoved her stick forward and sprayed red laser splinters at the skip. It immediately sprouted a void that sucked in most of the laserfire. Jaina kept her ship coming on hard and loosed a solid quad burst in the midst of a spray, which caused the Yuuzhan Vong pilot to shy off. As he broke to her port, she rolled to port and leveled out in T-sev’s aft. I don’t like being shielding, but I need to give him this shot.

Fire blossomed from the X-ceptor’s nose as a proton torpedo squirted out. Jaina bounced her ship up after the launch and gained a bit of altitude. Below her the torpedo streaked straight at the first moving mountain shadow, then it exploded into a brilliant silvery ball that lit up the night.

The X-wing’s canopy flash suppressor engaged immediately, cutting out most of the glare but still allowing her to see what was going on at the point of the attack. The torpedo had detonated shy of the target by about one hundred meters, and a void had gobbled up a lot of the energy, but what little it didn’t consume wrought havoc on the ground. The energy evaporated soldiers, eliminating whole companies in the blink of an eye. Others it scattered like toys beneath a vengeful child’s feet. The shock wave toppled several of the smaller vehicles, which looked to Jaina like bony armored domes mounted on brush-bristle cilia. Several rolled onto their backs, with their little legs waving in the air, while others that had their cilia flash-fried ground to a halt.

Most impressive, however, had been the larger vehicle at which T-sev had aimed. Like the smaller creatures, it had a bony-plate armor. Along its spine, and at points on the flanks, hornlike growths jutted out. Plasma bolts shot from these horns, and while she couldn’t tell if the horns could swivel, enough of them pointed in any one direction to be able to scour the skies of fighters.

She shuddered, as the whole thing looked to her like one giant, armored slug sprouting thorns.

Jaina rolled hard to starboard, then sideslipped back to port before triggering a burst at the thing, which she arbitrarily decided to call a range—short for mountain range. A void snapped her shots up, and the range launched plasma in her direction. She juked her way clear of most shots and heard the static of her shields absorbing damage from the others. Her sensors reported other gravitic anomalies, which she assumed were dovin basals trying to take her shields down, but her compensator sphere had been expanded to fend off that sort of assault.

She pulled up and throttled forward into the battle above the convoy. As she inverted her fighter to climb, she saw other ground detonations of proton torpedoes. It looked to her as if they had also gone off prematurely, which killed a lot of troopers and toppled the little creatures. She was glad to know her strategy would have some effect, but she feared it would not be enough.

“Sparky, what’s the distance between the most forward and most distant ground explosions?”

The droid scrolled the answer up on her secondary monitor.

Jaina shivered. The distance made the Yuuzhan Vong column at least five kilometers long. It doesn’t matter how well we shoot. If we can’t knock out the ranges, there is no way we will stop the Yuuzhan Vong from reaching the camp. And, when they do . . .

Leia started as she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned quickly and dropped a hand to the blaster she wore on her hip, but Mara bodied her back against the hull of the freighter in whose shadow they stood. Leia stared at her for a moment, then raised her free hand to her own throat. “You scared me.”

“Sorry. Luke sent me to find you, stay with you.”

“Are you sure? Shouldn’t you be—”

“Resting?” Mara shook her head. “Never did like being helpless, so here I am. What are you doing out here?”

Leia jerked a thumb toward the camp’s northeast perimeter. “People have been coming in to the center of the camp, but a couple of families from out here have not. I wanted to check on them . . . I was heading out, and then, I don’t know, I got a feeling . . .”

Mara’s head came up, and she peered off past the edge of the freighter. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing like that.”

Mara nodded, then unclipped her lightsaber from her belt. “You got nothing at all, right?”

“What?”

Mara pointed at one of the tents. Movement was plainly visible in it, but as Leia reached out with the Force, she could sense no life in it. “That’s impossible.”

“Not quite.” Mara darted forward, and her blue lightsaber extended itself in a sizzling line. She slashed at the guylines holding the tent up. It collapsed over three figures for a second, then they clawed their way free of the red fabric.

The trio of Yuuzhan Vong warriors stood there for a moment, looking tall but, because of what they wore, hardly like the lean figures others had described. A pale pseudoflesh covered them save for the claws that projected through it and where it hung like a hood back off their heads. They had also pulled on clothes. At their feet, revealed by the shredded folds of the tent, Leia saw three naked bodies, covered in blood.

In an instant she knew what had happened. Some of the Yuuzhan Vong had slipped into the camp, had killed refugees, and were using ooglith masquers to make themselves appear to be human. If others have mixed with the real refugees, innocent people might be slaughtered. The desire to run off and raise an alarm warred with her seeing the three warriors turn to face Mara and her lightsaber. I have to protect the people, but I can’t leave Mara. What am I going to do?