Star Wars 396 - The Dark Nest Trilogy III - The Swarm War

by Troy Denning

  Zekk chuckled at the insult, and the sensation of his amusement made Jaina feel a little sad. There had been a time when the chuckle would have erupted from her lips, too, and neither of them would have known—or cared—who laughed first.

  Then Jaina sensed something else from Zekk—a sudden surge of alarm—and they quickly dropped back into the clouds where they would be difficult to see. Four squadrons of clawcraft had started to descend ahead of the main task force, escorting a pair of Chiss defoliators and swinging wide to avoid the megamaser barrage.

  Jaina and Zekk reached out to the defoliators in the Force and suddenly felt sick and cold. Those ships were what Leia and Saba had wanted them to intercept. There was something terrible aboard those two defoliators, something so sinister and deadly that it had overwhelmed their danger sense from nearly a hundred kilometers away.

  Navigating by instruments, they swung onto an interception vector, and shortly afterward they escaped the barrage area. UnuThul soon felt the threat, too. A dark pressure arose inside their chests, pushing them after the two defoliators, compelling them to attack now. It was all they could do to resist his Will, to remain in the clouds until they were actually in a position to succeed.

  Finally, when the two defoliators had moved so close that the main fleet would not risk firing into the fight, Jaina and Zekk raced forward. They remained in the clouds until they were directly beneath their targets, then pulled back their sticks and climbed straight up. Jaina armed a pair of proton torpedoes—the Colony could no longer acquire the baradium needed to make shadow bombs—then designated the defoliator on the right.

  “We’ll take that one, Sneaky. Let me know when we have a target-lock.”

  The droid chirped an acknowledgment, and for a moment it looked like their StealthXs might reach attack range unseen.

  Then clawcraft from the two trailing squadrons began to drop down to meet them. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, since the atmosphere even this high was thick enough to slow down a starfighter and tear it apart if it maneuvered too sharply. But the distances were also smaller—dozens of kilometers instead of hundreds—and within a few heartbeats, the dark specks of the first Chiss fighters came into view and began to rain cannon bolts down on the StealthXs.

  Sneaky reported that they had a target-lock. Jaina confirmed that it was the correct vessel, then sensed Zekk doing the same. They launched their torpedoes together and watched the white dots of the propulsion tails vanish into the green sky.

  A second later the first laser bolt slammed into Jaina’s forward shields, spilling orange flame in front of her canopy and reverberating inside the cockpit as shield hits never did in space. Zekk slipped in close and slightly ahead of her, buying time for her shields to recover by placing himself between her and their attackers. They continued to climb like that, barely five meters apart, juking and jinking as one, pouring fire back up at the clawcraft.

  Then Sneaky chirped in surprise, and Jaina checked her tactical display to find both sets of proton torpedoes detonating twenty kilometers from the defoliators—well short of where any countermeasures should have taken effect.

  “What the Hutt happened?”

  The tactical display replayed the last several seconds, and Jaina saw four clawcraft come streaking in to intercept the proton torpedoes head-on. One of the pilots was lucky enough to blast his target out of the air with cannon fire, but the other three missed and stopped the torpedoes by crashing into them.

  That’s spaced—even for Chiss! Zekk said through their shared mind.

  Maybe the defoliators don’t have countermeasures, Jaina suggested.

  Or maybe the Chiss just want to be really sure those ships deliver their payloads, Zekk said.

  Zekk took a hit in his shields, then Jaina slipped into the forward position. The enemy squadrons were coming head-on, a mad tactic as dangerous for them as it was for their targets. They were coming in waves of four, the leaders already so close that they were the size of fists. Jaina and Zekk picked the second one from the left and fired together, pounding through its shields by landing five cannon strikes simultaneously.

  Before the fireball died away, Jaina and Zekk switched targets. The first wave was so close now that they could see the laser bolts streaming from the tips of the forward-pointing “claws” that gave the starfighters their nicknames. The Jedi fired again, aiming where the Force told them the craft was going rather than where it was. The pilot accommodated them by jinking into their line of fire, and the starfighter vanished in a flash of yellow flame.

  Jaina and Zekk were just turning their attention to their next victim when the crash of a triple cannon strike shook Jaina’s cockpit. Her instrument panel lit up with depletion lights and damage warnings, but she could not hear the alarms—or Sneaky’s tweedling—over the roar of the explosion.

  Zekk slipped into the lead position, and they began to pour cannon bolts at the next clawcraft. The two survivors from the first wave had swollen in apparent diameter to the size of a Bith’s head, but they were barrel-rolling and bobbing and weaving so hard now that, at such short range, the StealthXs could not aim their laser cannons quickly enough to hit the targets.

  Sneaky scrolled a message across Jaina’s display. IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE TURN BACK IMMEDIATELY. WE HAVE LOST OUR FORWARD SHIELD CAPACITOR!

  “So?” Jaina asked. “We still have shields for now, right?”

  UNTIL WE SUFFER THE NEXT HIT, SNEAKY REPLIED. AND IF WE ARE FORCED TO EJECT, I DON’T HAVE A PARACHUTE!

  “Relax,” Jaina said. “I have the Force.”

  The Chiss finally rolled the wrong way. A trio of hits punched through his shields and took off an attack claw, sending him into an uncontrolled spin. He vanished into the roiling gray-green clouds below, and then the last clawcraft was on them, not evading, just coming straight at the StealthXs with all four cannons blazing.

  Zekk’s shields overloaded and flashed out in a second. Before Jaina could move into lead position, his StealthX took a hit in the nose and another in an upper wing, and still the clawcraft kept coming.

  Then Jaina realized the pilot had no intention of veering away. With her and Zekk flying in overlap formation, the explosion from a midair collision would be enough to take them both out.

  The thought had barely entered Jaina’s mind before Zekk was breaking left. Jaina broke in the opposite direction, trying to force a hesitation by making the enemy choose between targets.

  The Chiss was too good to hesitate. He smoothly switched targets and took aim at the side of Jaina’s StealthX, pounding through her shields and blowing head-sized holes into her fuselage. Unable to shoot back, she used the Force to tip his clawcraft downward, redirecting his fire and forcing him into a dive that carried him beneath her starfighter instead of crashing into it.

  As the starfighter streaked past, the Force fairly crackled with the pilot’s frustration—with his very human-feeling frustration. Jaina reached out to him and felt an all-too-familiar presence. “Blast,” she muttered. Jagged Fel.

  Knowing better than to let a clawcraft pilot—particularly this clawcraft pilot—get behind her, Jaina pivoted the StealthX over its wing and started after him.

  “Sneaky, open a hailing channel to our target.”

  The droid squeaked a long objection, which Jaina could barely hear over all the damage alarms—and which she could not read because her display was out.

  “Comm protocols don’t apply right now,” Jaina said, taking a guess at what her astromech was upset about. “The enemy already knows where we are. They can see us.”

  Sneaky whistled in refusal.

  “If I have to do it myself, I’m ejecting you,” Jaina said.

  The channel was open by the time she fell in behind the clawcraft.

  “Jag, what are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Trying to shoot you down,” Jag said. “But I forget—that’s supposed to be a military secret. Now I guess I have to kill you.”

  Jai
na probably should not have been surprised by the bitterness in Jag’s voice, but she was, and he nearly broke free by rolling to the left. Fortunately, Zekk was there pouring laser bolts into the clawcraft’s exhaust tail, and Jag had to slip back into Jaina’s sights when overload static began to snake across his shields. He tried to escape again by breaking hard to the right, but this time Jaina was ready and forced him back by sending a stream of cannon bolts past his flank.

  “Jag, you shouldn’t take this so personally,” Jaina said. She noticed that he was gradually turning, trying to draw them away from the defoliators. “You and I were over a long time before Zekk and I met Taat.”

  “You think I care whose antennae you rub?” Jagged retorted. “You betrayed your honor.”

  “Our honor?” Jaina was confused. “We haven’t made you any—”

  “I guaranteed Lowbacca’s parole at Qoribu,” Jagged reminded her. “And you returned my courtesy with betrayal. at Supply Depot Thrago and the Battle of Snevu. My family’s reputation has suffered.”

  As had its finances, if Jaina recalled the terms of the guarantee correctly. Aristocra Formbi had said the Fels would have to repay any damages Lowbacca caused if he violated the parole—and before returning to the Alliance, he had taken part in the destruction of not only several million liters of space fuel, but also dozens of clawcraft and a couple of capital ships.

  “Jag, I’m sorry,” Jaina said. The second wave of clawcraft reached visual range and—ignoring the possibility of hitting Jagged by accident—opened fire on the StealthXs. “In the urgency of the situation, the parole just didn’t occur to us.”

  “Don’t apologize. The fault is all mine.” Jagged continued his turn and started to climb, trying to set up Jaina and Zekk for his wingmates. “I should never have made the mistake of thinking Jedi had honor.”

  The rebuke hurt more than it should have, perhaps because Jaina and Zekk knew it was justified—and because Jaina knew that it reflected Jagged’s current disdain for her. But this was war, and they could not allow personal feelings to interfere with stopping those defoliators—not when whatever the vessels were carrying felt so malevolent and deadly.

  “Jagged, we—I—want you to know that I still love you. And I always will.” Jaina activated her attack sensors and locked Jagged’s clawcraft as the primary target. “But if you can eject, you should do it now.”

  Jaina and Zekk opened fire.

  But Jagged had already gone into the Clawcraft Spin, whirling his starfighter around its ball-shaped cockpit and spraying laser bolts in every direction as he fell away in an erratic spiral impossible to target. It was a popular tactic in space combat, but in an atmosphere it was so dangerous and difficult that most pilots would have preferred to take their chances with no shields and one engine. Yet Jagged Fel somehow managed to keep the air resistance from tearing his craft apart, and by the time he vanished into the clouds, he was already emerging from the spin and starting to pull up.

  Maybe we shouldn’t warn him next time, Zekk suggested.

  You’re just saying that because you’re jealous, Jaina joked.

  Yeah, but not over you, Zekk replied. No one can fly like that without the Force!

  A cannon bolt flashed past Jaina’s cockpit—so close that it raised a heat blister in the canopy—and she and Zekk turned and dived. With their forward shields down and the Chiss behaving more like Killik suicide fliers than clawcraft pilots, their only chance of stopping the defoliators lay in catching the two vessels in the clouds, where their StealthXs could remain hidden until they attacked. The clawcraft pursued, but both Jaina and Zekk still had their rear shields and were able to endure the short pounding they received before reaching cover.

  They had barely entered the clouds before the dark pressure began to build inside their chests again. UnuThul did not want them to wait. He wanted them to attack now. Jaina and Zekk reached out to him in the Force, trying to make him see that they could not possibly succeed, that their StealthXs were barely holding together and their only hope of success lay in concealment.

  UnuThul did not understand—or care. The dark pressure grew unrelenting, until they thought their hearts would collapse. Still, they remained in the clouds, calling on each other for the strength to resist UnuThul, Jaina using the Force to steady Zekk’s hand when his StealthX began to drift upward, Zekk reaching out to push her stick forward when she began to pull it back. Because Jaina’s displays were not working and Zekk’s sensor pod had been blasted away, they had to navigate by feeling alone, always keeping the noses of their battered starfighters pointed toward the menace they sensed in the Force.

  And even as Jaina and Zekk closed on their targets again, they sensed Leia and Saba struggling with their own troubles far above. Sometimes, her mother felt tense and worried, and other times she and Saba were clearly in combat, filling the battle-meld with fury and fear and determination. Jaina and Zekk ached to help, but they were too well disciplined to ignore the defoliators—even without the influence of UnuThul.

  A shock wave of astonishment rolled through the battle-meld, and suddenly Leia and Saba seemed confused, hopeful, and terrified all at once. The dark pressure inside Jaina and Zekk grew more powerful than ever, and they found themselves poking their canopies out of the clouds in spite of themselves.

  The defoliators were only a few kilometers above, so close now that Jaina and Zekk could clearly see their hawkish silhouettes—and the drop-shaped outlines of two enormous bombs hanging beneath each wing.

  Each of the vessels was tightly ringed by a defensive cordon of clawcraft, with another six starfighters arrayed farther out in intercept position. There would be another dozen Chiss ambushers even farther out, circling low over the clouds, ready to pounce the instant the StealthXs showed themselves.

  Far above the defoliators, a distant web of light was flashing back and forth between the descending Chiss fleet and the lower reaches of space. With both of their tactical displays nonfunctional, it was impossible for Jaina and Zekk to tell exactly what was happening…but they could guess. UnuThul had arrived with the Moon Swarm and launched his attack prematurely, probably hoping to divert the Chiss’s attention and make it easier for them to bring down the defoliators—and judging by the feelings in the battle-meld, Leia and Saba and the rest of the Falcon’s crew had gotten caught in the middle of it.

  The tactic changed nothing as far as Jaina and Zekk were concerned. Their best chance of success, as small as it was, still lay in the…

  A new presence joined the meld—the dark, oddly familiar presence of a Twi’lek Joiner. Alema Rar.

  A wave of revulsion rose inside Jaina and Zekk—and inside Leia and Saba, as well. Alema was the holochild for all that worried Master Skywalker about the Jedi’s new view of the Force. She was living proof that there was a dark side, for she had ventured into that darkness and lost her way so completely that even Luke had given up hoping of redeeming her. She had become a twisted and angry thing that cast off vows like boyfriends, that turned her back on faithful comrades and betrayed sacred trusts and viciously attacked those who had shown her nothing but kindness.

  And none of that mattered, because there she was in a StealthX, hiding in the clouds a few kilometers behind Jaina and Zekk. The Chiss had no idea she was there, and Jaina and Zekk understood now why the dark pressure inside them had grown so strong, why UnuThul was so eager for them to sacrifice themselves in a futile gesture.

  They were nothing more than a diversion. Alema—Night Herald of the Dark Nest—was the true firepower. To UnuThul, this was the surest way to stop the evil hanging beneath the defoliators’ wings.

  Leia and Saba reached out in the Force, urging Jaina and Zekk to resist UnuThul’s Will, to stick to their own plan and attack in the clouds.

  Jaina and Zekk pushed their throttles forward, then pulled their sticks back and began to climb in a wild corkscrew that made their astromechs shriek structure-stress warnings. With no forward shields left to share, it mad
e no sense to fly in close formation. Instead, they climbed in parallel spirals, angling across the bows of the defoliators to cut off their descent.

  The Chiss moved quickly to stop them, the defensive rings shifting to remain between the two StealthXs and their targets, the interceptors diving to confront them with laser cannons flashing. Jaina and Zekk returned fire effectively but without enthusiasm, destroying a clawcraft apiece and knowing that those pilots were being sacrificed to a diversion—just as they were themselves.

  “Sneaky, can you get a torpedo lock on either of the defoliators?” The bombs—four on each vessel—were identical to the prototype that Jag had destroyed in the dunes above the Iesei nest.

  The droid replied with an affirmative tweet, but added a long descending whistle that suggested he questioned the wisdom of this attack.

  “Don’t argue!” Jaina armed all of her proton torpedoes, and sensed Zekk doing the same. “Just let me know when you’re ready.”

  The droid emitted a brief whistle.

  Jaina fired her next two proton torpedoes and watched in horrified fascination as a pair of clawcraft dropped down in front of the shrinking efflux dots. A moment later, she was momentarily blinded when a pair of dazzling flashes lit the sky between her and the defoliators.

  Guessing that she must be in range by now, Jaina began to pour laser cannon fire into the defoliator Sneaky had targeted. The defensive ring tightened even more, bunching up to absorb the attacks on their own shields and leaving the stern of the vessel badly exposed to a proton torpedo.

  Still, Alema did not attack. Was she waiting for the Chiss ambushers to show themselves…or for Jaina and Zekk to be blasted out of the sky? The spite Leia and Saba were pouring into the meld made clear what they thought.

  Two proton torpedoes streaked from Zekk’s StealthX toward the second defoliator. A Chiss clawcraft dropped down and obliterated the first torpedo with a volley of cannon bolts. The pilots trying to intercept the second torpedo were blinded by the explosion, and it slipped past the defensive screen to detonate against the defoliator’s belly shields. Almost immediately, Jagged Fel and a dozen other ambushers emerged from the clouds to begin hammering Jaina and Zekk’s rear shields.