The trooper looked at him for one long moment, during which streaks of plasma began to look like solid lines in the air above them. “I guess we dig, sir.”
“Right.” Lando released him. He looked at the Twi’lek engineer and gestured at the trooper. “Give him your shovel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lando stretched out, took up his blaster rifle, and took the trooper’s place at the perimeter. He fired a few times at distant Yuuzhan Vong warriors and once at the creature. Then he turned to his bodyguard and smiled. “You know, that’s the kind of worker negotiations I really love.”
The droid nodded. “Yes, sir.”
The latest flyby of Luke and his wingmates, during which some of their shots were again absorbed by the rakamat’s voids and others hit the side of the Yuuzhan Vong building, showed one party of soldiers in a circle directly ahead of the oncoming rakamat. The soldiers seemed to be digging a hole. “What do you think?” he heard Mara ask. “Idiots?”
“Picnickers,” Luke offered.
“There’s a thought.”
Luke led Mara and Corran back toward the Yuuzhan Vong base. A moment later, three more Twin Suns settled into formation with them.
“Good to see you,” Luke said. “Split off and approach the base from the far side so that you reach the edge of the canopy half a second after we do. They’re only expecting three of us. Ready, break.”
The ground here was soft; they had the hole dug and three engineers’ worth of explosives loaded into it in less than a standard minute. The eight of them crawled away from the hole and toward the Record Time.
The Twi’lek woman wasn’t crawling. She was flat on her back toward the rear of the column, fiddling with a remote detonator, while Lando’s droid dragged her by the feet. The droid kept up sustained fire aimed behind them, toward the rakamat and the main engagement area of the infantry fight.
Lando, elbow-crawling at the head of the column, heard the roar of the returning X-wings. He knew their attacks on the beast were futile, but was grateful for their strafing runs, which had kept him and this unit from falling under constant fire.
Three X-wings flashed by from the right, unloading laserfire on the beast’s left side. The voids flicked around into the path of the attacks, and Lando thought he saw the snubfighters’ red laser beams actually bend as they entered the voids.
Then three X-wings flashed by from the left, pouring laserfire into the beast’s right side. The six snubfighters crossed like a demonstration of trick flying and disappeared beyond the jungle canopy.
Lando saw yorik coral superheat and explode, propelled out as the flesh beneath the coral was instantly transformed into steam.
Blackish blood poured down the beast’s right flank. The creature roared, a noise like the offspring of a ground-quake and distant thunder, and poured plasma fire after the six snubfighters. But still it came on, toward them, toward the Record Time.
“Got it,” the Twi’lek engineer said.
“Get ready,” Lando said. “We’ll try to time it to the X-wings’ next pass if they’re back in time.”
The woman began elbow-crawling, freeing Lando’s droid.
Lando suddenly found two stumps in the way before him. He looked up. They weren’t stumps. They were the legs of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, encased in vonduun crab armor. The warrior’s amphistaff was straight as a spear, its tapered tail pointed right at Lando’s back; the warrior held it up, ready to plunge.
The point came down and a dark shape shielded Lando from it, from the dazzling display of plasma and laser energy overhead. Lando heard a human scream, and abruptly the Yuuzhan Vong warrior was flat on the grass, his feet kicking centimeters from Lando’s nose. One of the soldiers was atop him, but was already going limp, the amphistaff driven clear through his back.
From his position, Lando had a view under the skirt plates of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior’s armor. As the warrior tossed aside the soldier’s body, Lando angled his blaster rifle in and fired, hitting the warrior where neither leg armor nor skirt armor protected. This time it was the Yuuzhan Vong who cried out in pain. The warrior jerked and writhed, agony twisting his body apparently beyond the level that even a Yuuzhan Vong could endure.
Lando’s bodyguard droid landed between Lando and the warrior. It kicked out against the amphistaff. Its blow hurled the weapon away, though the amphistaff, pliant again, bit the droid; the attack, faster than Lando’s eye could follow, did not penetrate the droid’s armor and would not have damaged the droid if it had. The amphistaff flew meters away.
The droid stood over the warrior, aimed carefully, and began firing.
Lando twisted around. The giant creature behind them, still pouring blood, had picked up speed. Knowing it was injured, perhaps dying, it was charging the Record Time.
The Twi’lek engineer had the detonator in her hand, her thumb over the button.
“Wait,” Lando said.
She turned an anguished expression toward him, but didn’t argue.
The roar of the returning X-wings began to rattle everyone and everything in the field. Lando watched the skies with a small part of his attention and kept the rest on the oncoming creature. Its front feet were over, then past the buried cache of explosives, and its main body was moving into place above the disturbed ground that marked its location.
Lando swallowed. If he was successful, the beast would die. Innocent, and Lando found it painful to watch it lumber toward him, toward its death.
He put the blame on the Yuuzhan Vong. It was better than accepting every bit of responsibility for killing a tremendous creature that, but for its controllers, might never have endangered him.
The X-wing roar rose in volume, and the plasma cannons on the beast diverted their streams of fire from the Record Time into the air. Lando saw the vehicles flash in from two sides, north and south this time instead of east and west. He saw red lasers flash down into the blackness of the beast’s voids, saw return plasma fire clip an X-wing’s underside and begin burrowing in.
Then the snubfighters were gone, the plasma cannons sending fiery destruction after them. “Now!” Lando shouted.
He didn’t even see the woman press the button; he was aware only of the fire, reddish yellow and as evil looking as anything produced by the Yuuzhan Vong, roiling out from under the beast. It engulfed the creature and slammed Lando with heat and noise; he buried his face in the grass to escape it.
A moment later, he could look again. The creature was down on its side, its belly ripped and blackened by the force of the explosion. Blood streamed from it, but amazingly, it still lived, at least for the moment, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe.
It was not firing on X-wings or the troop transport now. Lando could hear and see the transport’s lasers picking up again, not concentrating their fire on the creature, now picking off individual Yuuzhan Vong warriors within sight.
Lando’s droid was firing, too. Lando looked over to see the droid placing shot after shot into the body of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior who’d come so close to killing him. The warrior was dead, the neck and top torso portions of his armor burned away by repeated blasts.
“One-One-A, you can stop now,” Lando said. “What’s wrong? Is your threat-recognition software on the blink?”
The droid looked at him. “Yes, sir. I suspect so, sir. I still register this one as a threat.”
“Override control twenty-seven aye aye six, flag this target as no threat.”
“Understood, sir.” The droid stopped firing.
“We’ll get you in for repairs,” Lando said. “But don’t feel bad. You did well.”
“Yes, sir.”
The situation was largely under control by the time Wedge descended to the planet’s surface in his shuttle. He made a pass over the site of the Borleias New Republic base.
Once upon a time, it had been an Imperial base, housing TIE fighters and stormtroopers, charged with the duty of defending a nearby biological research facility mana
ged by the Imperial general Evir Derricote. Then Rogue Squadron, at the time commanded by Wedge himself, had come as the spearhead of a mission that had wrested control of the world from Derricote. The Imperial base had become a Rebel Alliance base, and then, once the Rebels had taken Coruscant and become the legitimate government in this part of the galaxy, a New Republic base.
Now it was rubble. Wedge doubted that any part of the original base was more than two meters in size. Where the main facilities buildings had once been now rested another sort of building, pastel red and pearl, several stories in height, a circular core from which eight more or less evenly spaced extensions radiated, like arms on a sea creature. Wedge didn’t have to ask to know that the building was something organic, a living creature bred by the Yuuzhan Vong to serve as a dwelling. Had it been dropped on the former base like a bomb, crushing it flat, or had it grown out of the middle? Wedge didn’t know.
Lying beside it was a gargantuan creature, another of the Yuuzhan Vong’s fighting resources, the reptile the Record Time had reported. It lay on its side in an immense pool of black blood. Wedge’s troops reported that it was dead and awarded the kill to Lando Calrissian and the group of engineers.
The main building was surrounded by numerous smaller buildings, these shaped like the curved shells found on the backs of oceangoing arthropods and some land-based snails. Each was the size of a small house, aesthetically pleasing in muted color and curving design—so long as one didn’t remember that they housed beings who killed other sapient beings without mercy and injured themselves for pleasure.
The rest of the old base was in ruins, docking bays and outbuildings turned into blackened, crumbling shells. It looked to Wedge as though they’d been used for target practice by the coralskippers’ plasma cannons.
The area was swarming with New Republic troops. Dead men and women in New Republic uniforms lay at various points on the ground; there were many dead Yuuzhan Vong among them. Wedge saw his troops leading prisoners into open patches of ground surrounded by other troops. Many of the prisoners were human, their foreheads, even at this distance, clearly bearing the coral-like twin horn growths that signaled they were slaves of the Yuuzhan Vong. Other prisoners were Yuuzhan Vong, but their skins were smooth, unadorned by the extensive tattooing or scarring he’d seen on Vong pilots; Wedge assumed that they were members of the Shamed Ones, the pariah caste of Yuuzhan Vong society, whose bodies rejected modifications and who could thus never climb the ranks of the Yuuzhan Vong social hierarchy.
The base was a loss, and, even though it was captured, the new Yuuzhan Vong base on top of it was not the sort of place Wedge wanted to use as a ground-based operations center. It might contain numberless traps and dangers for New Republic occupants, and it certainly wouldn’t reassure the New Republic refugees he expected to begin streaming in from Coruscant.
He keyed his comlink. “Rogue One, this is Antilles. Give me an escort. We’re going to visit the biotics facility.”
“Will do.” A few moments later, two X-wings, one belonging to Gavin Darklighter and the other to his wingmate Kral Nevil, maneuvered to flank him. Wedge heeled about toward the biotics facility and hit his thrusters. Not long after, he hovered over the site of that base.
General Derricote’s biotics facility was a long single building, several stories tall, its eastern facing a sheer drop, its western facing graduated downward in an aesthetically pleasing slope; the top story was a narrow strip, wide enough for a corridor along one set of rooms, the next story down wider, the next story down wider still, so that the whole thing seemed to be a gigantic wedge whose sharp edge pointed at the sky. Officially, it had been a site where Derricote preserved and studied samples of rare plant species from the world of Alderaan. Secretly, it had been used to engineer a deadly disease, the Krytos virus, which afflicted and killed members of nonhuman species. It was spread by the Imperial forces when the Alliance captured Coruscant.
From this height, Wedge could see that the building was still intact. The jungle had grown right up to it, trees surrounding it, vines draping over the turquoise-colored banks of viewports. But those viewports were unbroken; it didn’t surprise Wedge that Derricote had used transparisteel instead of some lesser material.
Wedge transmitted a holocam view of the site, adding coordinates to the data stream accompanying the transmission. “Mon Mothma, this will be our ground facility. I want an occupation force and engineers here from our battle reserves as soon as possible. I want the jungle burned away for a kilometer around on the north, east, and south faces, two kilometers to the west—with escaped Yuuzhan Vong in the jungle, I want a substantial kill zone. Once that’s done, have the ground forces enter and clear it of Yuuzhan Vong and other predators, then bring in personnel to clean it up, get its generators working, and so on. The field immediately west will be our landing zone.
“Issue the order that all the Yuuzhan Vong dead are to be stripped of gear for study, but their bodies are to be left where they fell.” This was not an act of insult on Wedge’s part. The Yuuzhan Vong had several times in the past demonstrated a need to retrieve the bodies of their dead. By leaving the bodies, Wedge hoped to reduce the number of assaults that his troops would suffer, since there would be no assaults while attempting to retrieve bodies.
“Keep a detachment on duty to contain the Yuuzhan Vong base while another detachment, plus Danni Quee’s people and Lando’s droids, searches it for prisoners and hiding Vong. When they’re done evacuating the site, have the engineers blow it up.”
He sighed to himself. After a brief respite from it, he was back to niggling administrative details. He’d rather be retired or fighting again.
Borleias Occupation, Day 2
A day later, the biotics building was secure and operational.
The occupation forces hadn’t found any Yuuzhan Vong hiding within the structure, but it was obvious the enemy had been here on a few occasions, breaking up machinery, smashing furniture—warrior-vandals. The bad news was that the building’s generator had been smashed. Currently a small freighter was situated next to the building, heavy cables running from its engine compartment into the building’s basement and to field shield units set up to protect the complex.
The building was now surrounded by six square kilometers of destroyed jungle growth. His forces had used fire, lasers, defoliants, whatever they could get their hands on. The biotics facility, a secret home of ugliness, was surrounded by obvious ugliness. To step out of the building was to step into a hot, humid environment that stank of burned vegetation and offered no view but char, ships that had landed for repairs, and distant jungle.
Luke, returning from a perimeter sweep around the Yuuzhan Vong settlement—a sweep in which they’d encountered no Yuuzhan Vong, but suspected, from the behavior of Borleias’s animal life, that Vong were out there—learned that Wedge had requested his presence at a general meeting of his senior officers and personal allies. He joined the crowd in the biotics building’s ground-floor mess hall. Mara was already there, baby Ben in her arms; at her feet was a baby carrier she’d jury-rigged from a backpack. On one ankle was a cast, immobilizing it against the bone break she’d sustained when she crash-landed during Coruscant’s fall.
Luke headed for a seat beside her, but Wedge waved him up to the head of the table, to the other seat beside him. Luke gave Mara a smile of apology and moved to sit by Wedge.
“Our stay here is going to be short,” Wedge said to the entire assembly. “But it’s going to be longer than we’d like. There’s going to be more fighting. I’d like to have some tricks up our sleeves to offer the Yuuzhan Vong when they come, so I want you to be thinking about it. Transmit your ideas to your commanding officers. The commanding officers will transmit them to me—and I don’t want there to be too much editing of them. Now’s not the time to think conservatively.”
A naval officer Luke did not know, a woman in a lieutenant’s uniform, spoke up. “General, if I can ask—”
“Go
ahead,” Wedge said.
“Why do we want to stay here at all? The garrison has to have alerted their commanders that they were being overrun. The Yuuzhan Vong will be coming.”
Wedge nodded. “Well, there are several reasons. The first is this: because Borleias—rather, the Pyria solar system—is an important hyperspace crossroads, the convenient intersection of a lot of routes, it’s on a lot of people’s nav computers. It’s inevitable that many refugees fleeing Coruscant—or arriving there and suddenly discovering that the Yuuzhan Vong have taken it—will be coming here as the first stage of their escapes. Someone needs to help them. A lot of them may be in damaged craft. We can’t have them clogging up our repair facilities in space, not when they’re needed to repair combat craft, so they’ll have to put down on the planet’s surface.
“Second, we need to catch our collective breaths. We left Coruscant with just the ships on our backs. We need to take stock, take inventory … and calculate the enormity of the disaster that we’ve just experienced.” Wedge’s face, for a moment, expressed a pang of pain, and Luke felt it, too. Wedge hadn’t been able to get in touch with his wife, Iella, or daughters, Syal and Myri, before duty had forced him to leave Coruscant. Not knowing what had happened to them, the shame of not being able to carry out both his duties to the New Republic and his duties to his family, had to be eating at him. Wedge swallowed hard, then his features were schooled once again into impassivity, and he continued.
“Third, yes, the Yuuzhan Vong will be coming here. They can’t permit an enemy garrison so close to the planet they’ve just taken. And if we can hold their attention for a while, that’s even more time for others fleeing Coruscant to get away, and for our other fleet groups, the ones bel Iblis and Kre’fey command, to gather themselves, too.
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 3
