“Twin Suns to Record Time, you set the pace. We won’t have any trouble staying where we need to be.”
The transport surged forward, not fast by starfighter standards, but quickly enough for a freighter. Luke calculated its rate of acceleration and brought his X-wing up in front of the freighter’s bridge. Mara and Corran settled in with him. Another shield trio dropped back to the port side of Record Time, a third to the starboard side, and the last astern of the transport.
All around Twin Suns Squadron, starfighter squadrons, frigates, destroyers, transports, and shuttles began accelerating to battle speed.
Luke heard Colonel Gavin Darklighter’s voice over the operation channel: “Rogue Squadron to Borleias. We’re back. We kicked your butt twenty years ago. Now we’re here to do it again.”
Luke grinned.
Squadrons of coralskippers were already climbing to their altitude by the time Twin Suns Squadron began its descent into atmosphere. Slightly longer than X-wings and comparable spacecraft, the coralskippers were far more massive. They were dense constructions of yorik coral, tapering toward the bow, broadening and deepening toward the stern, with rough exteriors reflecting their organic origins.
They could be quite beautiful, Luke had decided. The ones rising against them and the two they’d seen after leaving the Mon Mothma shared a color scheme, a pastel red and a pearlescent silver swirled together in a mottled pattern. At the bow, tucked into a sort of niche grown into the coral surface, was the round reddish shape of the dovin basal, the creature whose gravitic powers dragged the coralskipper from point to point in space and also brought up defensive voids that drank in damage like a Tatooine bantha drank water. On the top surface, just ahead of the point where the ship’s body swelled to its greatest width, was the canopy over the cockpit; this one was tinted blue.
Their beauty was irrelevant. As soon as they came within range, they opened up with their plasma cannons, life-forms that spewed superheated materials that could eat through a starfighter’s hull. “Break and engage, cover the transport,” Luke commanded, and suited action to words; he spun out in a rapid descent relative to the planet below and opened fire, trusting his wingmates to stay with him, to fire out of phase with him and at different portions of his target to overload and baffle the dovin basal. This time the creature defending his target skip intercepted Mara’s shot, fired from slightly below the skip’s centerline, but couldn’t whip the void around fast enough to counter Luke’s and Corran’s shots, which scoured the yorik coral all around the pilot’s canopy.
Superheated blobs from his target’s wingmate flashed toward Luke’s X-wing. Luke heard a squeal of alarm from R2-D2, who was tucked into the astromech bay behind his canopy, but ignored it as an irrelevant detail. He continued his rolling descent, varying the speed of his roll and distance covered each half a standard second, and saw the plasma flash between his snubfighter and Mara’s.
Then the three of them were well below their targets and rising again behind the coralskippers’ sterns. The skips’ voids swung around, hovering at the sterns, ready to soak up infinite amounts of weapon energy.
The first engagements between coralskippers and New Republic starfighters had been terrible for the New Republic. Even seasoned pilots had been thrown off balance by the skips’ incredible durability, by the failure of proton torpedoes and laser blasts sucked into the voids to do any harm to the vehicles, by the tenacity of the damage done by plasma cannons, which kept on eating away at vehicle surfaces well after they’d hit.
Now things were different. The surviving pilots had adjusted their tactics and passed their information along to their fellows. The rules of the game were to overload the dovin basals, striking them from several directions at once to ensure that some damage got through to hit the coralskippers’ surfaces. Starfighter pilots had to avoid taking any hits at all from skip weaponry; any hit could eat through shields and prove fatal.
And there were new tactics all the time, in every battle. Mara surged ahead of Luke and Corran, flying in a pattern that was oddly predictable, and drew fire from both coralskippers. She became suddenly erratic in her flight, as random as only Force skills could make a pilot, and flashed ahead until she was just behind the skips. She sideslipped to port, and as both streams of plasma cannon fire followed her, the fire from the starboard skip crossed the body of the port-side skip; two balls of fire thudded into the skip’s belly before the starboard pilot compensated.
The port skip’s void whipped around to shield the skip’s belly. In that instant, Mara drop-fired a quad-linked burst of laserfire.
The skip detonated, hiding Mara’s X-wing from sight for a moment, and Luke fired a laser stutter-burst at the starboard skip’s underside. He hoped that the pilot’s confusion at having hurt his own wingmate, along with the dovin basal’s effort to shield this skip from the damage from Mara’s attack, would leave it momentarily vulnerable.
He was right. His lasers hit the skip’s underside and chewed through. That skip vectored away, trailing fluids that instantly froze at this near-vacuum altitude.
He checked his sensors. Two skips down. Mara was coming around to rejoin him and Corran. Diagnostics said his X-wing was undamaged.
Farther out, two of his Twin Suns snubfighters were gone. The pilot of one of them was extravehicular; Luke hoped that the flight suit would keep the pilot alive until a rescue shuttle could arrive. “Good tactics, Mara,” he said.
“You always know the sweet thing to say.”
Luke grinned and came around toward a new set of opponents.
Starfighter squadrons held the Yuuzhan Vong response to three points of conflict in orbit. The Twin Suns group took advantage of the opportunity and roared down through the atmosphere in an undefended zone, then banked toward the coralskippers’ launch point, which had been detected on gravitic sensors. It was, not coincidentally, the same map coordinate as Borleias’s New Republic military base. Luke didn’t relish seeing what had become of the base during the Yuuzhan Vong occupation.
As they dropped low over the jungle canopy, Luke could make out the target zone ahead. It didn’t have the same profile as the holocube he’d studied. The main building seemed to be lower, broader.
Small chips of yorik coral were rising above it, angling toward them. His sensors said there were six of them. “Twin Suns, up front,” Luke said. “Engage all those skips. Record Time, it’s your call whether you want to hang back with us or move on to the target without us.”
“Twin Suns One, this is Record Time. We’re here to fight. We’ll see you at the landing zone.”
“Copy.”
Lando Calrissian, in Record Time’s troop bay, stood next to the ramp access and tried not to look concerned.
He was sweating. He didn’t like sweating. It suggested hard work, something he wasn’t fond of, and just didn’t give the impression of someone who was infinitely cool, infinitely in control.
He looked over the units of men and women in the bay. Most were seated in rows of high-backed troop couches, strapped in against the turbulence that was likely to come. Their commanders walked up and down those rows, issuing last-minute instructions, advice, encouragements, jokes, insults.
He looked over his own troops. They stood in a circle, each with a hand on the metal post at the circle’s center, and stared at him. They were impassive, fearless. “Ready?” he asked.
In unison, they answered, “Ready, sir!”
He knew that once they left the bay he’d never see some of them again. Unlike the other commanders present, he was content with that knowledge. His troops would serve their purpose.
The bay shuddered as enemy fire finally began to strike Record Time. Lando saw fear, even nausea, on the faces of some of the other troops.
Not his. They continued to stare at him, waiting.
* * *
Luke, with Mara and Corran tucked in beside him, roared along in Record Time’s wake. He grimaced. He had lost his top starboard laser cannon an
d engine to plasma fire. His power, maneuverability, and fighting strength were reduced.
Ahead, Record Time was settling down into the jungle canopy, or perhaps into the open field just before the base; from here, it looked the same. Little flashes of light were pouring up from the ground and hammering into the transport’s hull, blackening it. Though he was situated directly astern of the transport, Luke thought he could see the edges of Record Time’s bow distorting as combat damage ate away at it. Then the transport turned to port and Luke saw that he was right; the bow had sustained terrific damage from plasma cannons. He’d be astonished if the transport was spaceworthy now.
After the last lurch and vibration, Lando knew the transport was down. He could barely hear over the systems alarms. He took a last deep breath and nodded at his troops, then slapped the button on the hull panel beside him.
The top portion of the entry slid instantly up out of sight. The bottom portion lowered, becoming a ramp. Warm, humid air flooded into the troop bay. Beyond the entryway was field, its stringy grasses calf-high, and beyond that was some sort of reddish Yuuzhan Vong construction, a large cylindrical building with arms radiating outward at regular intervals.
“Go, go, go!” Lando shouted, and his troops released the bar they’d been holding. Shouting an inarticulate battle cry, they surged for the ramp, readying blaster rifles.
As they reached the top of the ramp, incoming fire began to rain in. Lando heard the rear wall of the bay ring as ammunition pocked it. No, it wasn’t ammunition, he reminded himself, but creatures hurled by the Yuuzhan Vong—thud bugs, the hard-hitting insect projectiles, and razor bugs, which sliced whatever they hit and came around again to attack whatever they missed.
One of his troops took a concentration of thud bugs, several of them hitting the man in the throat. The force of the impacts was enough to shear through. That soldier’s body collapsed and his head clanked to the bay floor, rolling unerringly toward Lando.
Lando stopped it with his foot like a player trapping a ball and looked dispassionately at it. His first casualty of the day. The combat droid’s features stared up at him with no more expression than they’d shown a moment ago. The damage didn’t look too bad, he decided. This one would be easily repaired.
The unhurt nineteen droid troops charged down the ramp and into the field, turning to head toward the right flank of the big red building. Their war cry changed from a simple roar to words that Lando didn’t understand.
But he knew what they meant. He’d arranged for the war cry to be installed in his droid troops. It was in the language of the Yuuzhan Vong, and it meant, “We are machines! We are greater than the Yuuzhan Vong!”
On the bridge of the Record Time, the communications officer, a Rodian, his green scaly hide immaculately clean and the mouth at the tip of his pointed chin puckering, said, “Captain, it’s working. They’re breaking cover, showing themselves.”
The captain, a tall human woman with copper-colored hair tucked up under an officer’s cap, extracted herself from her chair and stood. This put her head squarely in the smoke accumulating against the bridge’s ceiling. She coughed, ducked, and moved to stand over the Rodian’s shoulder.
On the screen was a panoramic view collated from the holocams situated on the transport’s hull. It showed the ground all around the Record Time, jungle to port and open field to starboard.
Lando Calrissian’s droid troops were off the ramp and charging across the field, firing in a defensive screen all around them. And Yuuzhan Vong warriors were popping up all over the field, emerging from the jungle at a dead run, heading toward them, ignoring the transport—lunging like maddened animals toward the droids that insulted them by words and mere presence.
“Transmit this visual to all vehicles and vessels in our engagement zone,” the captain said. “Transmit to Mon Mothma that the tactic does work. Then tell—oh, blast.”
On the screen, something huge was approaching from the far side of the building with the radiating arms, moving around it. This was a living creature, vaguely reptilian, itself the size of a large building. Its skin was a blue-green, but patches of red and silver yorik coral grew over its head and along its spine. From the spine grew huge sail-like plates, and plasma cannons protruded by the dozens from the yorik coral.
The captain’s voice rose into a commander’s bellow. “Get the troops off this ship now. Nonessential personnel, follow the troops off. All weapons come to bear on that target. Fire at will. And vent the smoke here. We’ve got to breathe to fight.”
This had to be one of those creatures that had fought in the Dantooine engagement. The captain had an ugly presentiment that Record Time would not survive to lift off again.
TWO
Borleias Occupation, Day 1
The living troops poured out of Record Time’s bays, their war cry an inarticulate roar. Lando steered his bodyguard, another of his droid troopers, in the wake of his main body of troops while the others surged toward the main building, spread out to set up a perimeter, or stopped to set up equipment.
Ahead, his droids were experiencing heavy incoming fire; their laminanium armor was pocked with small impact craters from thud bugs, stained with the juices of razor bugs that had smashed harmlessly into them. Lando watched as a warrior of the Yuuzhan Vong hurtled between two of them, his vonduun crab armor dark but gleaming, and whipped his amphistaff back and to the right as he passed. The staff, rigid, swept toward the droid’s midsection, but the droid caught it with a free hand, its own motion a blur. The droid aimed its heavy blaster and fired, a burst of energy tearing through the Vong warrior. The warrior jerked backward, convulsed by the outpouring of blaster damage, and hit the ground steaming.
A blow to Lando’s back not hard enough to be a thud bug hurled him onto the grass, and he dimly heard his bodyguard say, “Down, sir.” Then the droid was firing. Lando half-rose and saw a Yuuzhan Vong warrior approaching at a dead run, zigzagging to avoid the droid’s blasterfire.
From his knees, Lando aimed to the right of the onrushing enemy and fired, spraying laser energy up and down into open space, then traversed left. His shots flanked the droid’s, and the Yuuzhan Vong warrior, now five steps away, dodged into them, taking a blast in the knee. He fell forward and skidded toward Lando and the droid, his amphistaff whipping around, pliant.
Lando stood. He and the droid backed away at divergent angles and continued to pour fire into the fallen warrior. The warrior rose, his armor blackened in several places, and drew back his hand to throw something, but a blast—Lando wasn’t sure whether it was his or the droid’s—caught it in the throat. It toppled backward.
Lando nodded at the droid. “I’m a businessman,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what that means.”
“You hate being here, sir.”
“You’ve got that right.” The two of them circled around the smoking body, continuing toward Lando’s force.
Now the armor-plated beast was visible around the building’s edge. The muscles beneath and surrounding its armor plates rippled and the plasma cannons all over its back tilted, taking aim—directly toward Lando, it seemed to him.
He dropped to the ground and began firing.
Luke, Mara, and Corran took a high-speed run over the base area, giving them a split-second view of the Yuuzhan Vong building, of the Record Time, of the tremendous beast hurling plasma into the transport’s side.
Luke sighed. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, which Jaina Solo had nicknamed “ranges,” and later was known by its Yuuzhan Vong name, a rakamat, and saw the tactic he’d used to destroy it had knocked him out for hours. He couldn’t afford to do that now. “Let’s do what we can to distract the thing from the ground troops,” he said. “Two Flight, Three Flight, Four Flight, whenever you get through playing with those skips back there, we can put you to work up here where the fight is.”
He led Mara and Corran in a tight loop back toward the engagement zo
ne. All three X-wings began juking just before they cleared the jungle canopy, and plasma danced up through the air all around them. He fired linked lasers at the enormous beast and saw his blast and those of his flightmates swallowed by the creature’s void defenses. Then they were over jungle again.
Lando elbow-crawled forward, chanting, “I’m too old for this, I’m a businessman, I’m too old for this, I want a drink.” The rhythm of his own words kept him from being fully aware of the sweat dripping from him, of the fear radiating from him as plasma fire flashed by mere meters over his head and into the side of the Record Time. Return fire crossed from the other direction, heavy laser cannon blasts that would evaporate him if they grazed him. His droid kept pace, walking slowly so as not to leave Lando behind.
He’d crawled into a circle of troops before he knew it—six of them, five humans and a Twi’lek, only three of them with shoulder arms. “Where are your blasters?” he asked.
The Twi’lek, a red-skinned female, huddled against the mound of her pack. “We’re engineers.”
One of the others, a long-faced male with a blaster rifle, said, “They’re engineers.” He fired at the legs of the giant creature lumbering in their direction.
“Engineers?” Lando asked. “With explosives?”
The woman nodded.
“You’re hiding behind your explosives?”
She nodded again, her dismayed expression suggesting that she understood the insanity of it.
“Dig,” Lando said. “A shallow hole. Large enough to put all those explosives in.”
“No,” said the trooper with the blaster. “We’ll just leave them behind and get clear of them.”
“No, we’re digging.” Lando glanced at the Twi’lek woman, who was frozen, her hand halfway to her field shovel, looking between him and the trooper.
The trooper gave Lando an ingratiating smile. “I’m only a noncommissioned officer, but that beats a civilian on the battlefield. We leave.”
Lando grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and dragged him close. The trooper had to be younger than twenty, despite his apparent poise. “Listen to me, bantha fodder,” Lando said. “I blew up a Death Star before you were born. In twenty seconds I can conclude a conversation with General Antilles, who blew up that Death Star with me, and I’ll be General Calrissian again, and and you’ll spend the rest of your military career cleaning refreshers on Kessel. Or you can dig. Which is it?”
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 2
