“Do you want to live?” the woman asked.
He nodded.
She smiled again. She reached up with her free hand and took the captain’s cap from him, settling it down on her own head. “Then go hide. Don’t come out until I call for you.”
He turned and marched, his legs stiff, from the bridge. From the corner of his eye, he could see, through the viewport, the Yuuzhan Vong frigate launching a shuttle of some sort.
Suddenly, the thought of being less dashing than Han Solo didn’t bother him as much as it used to. He could happily be less dashing than Han Solo for the rest of his life … so long as the rest of his life was measured in years rather than minutes.
The air lock opened and the armored warrior led his unit of Yuuzhan Vong into the hateful metal corridors of the transport.
Waiting for him was a single ship’s officer, a female of a species he had seen before, a species whose name he could not recall; her skin was a pleasing blue two shades lighter than the bags under his eyes, and her hairless head separated in back into two fleshy tails. She wore a blue uniform jumpsuit and cap, both decorated in gold trim. A blaster pistol lay at her feet.
“I am Bastori Rak,” he said. “Who is captain here?”
“I am.” The female offered him a respectful nod but did not meet his eyes. Nor did she exhibit fear.
Bastori Rak hesitated for a moment. His usual tactic during such boardings was to instill pain and fear into the ship’s officers to eliminate any possibility of defiance, but no defiance was being offered. It was obvious that the female already knew she was a subject of the Yuuzhan Vong. He briefly considered striking her anyway, but decided to test the extent of her willing obedience instead.
He drove the pointed end of his amphistaff into the blaster pistol’s grip, shearing through it and into the deck plating beyond, then shook the blaster’s remains free from his weapon. “What is your destination, and what do you carry?” he asked.
“We are bound for the Hapes Cluster with a cargo made up mostly of refugees,” she said. “We carry seven crew, three hundred twenty-six refugees—three hundred forty if you count the ones who are in hidden compartments—as well as food, personal effects, trade items, and Jedi training materials. Shall I give you the codes to our computer security now?”
“Yes, and then you will follow—Jeedai training materials?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of materials?”
“I’m not sure. I saw only the contents of one barrel. They include holos of training regimens, holos of Jedi history and philosophy, infectious agents that transform normal beings into Jedi, a lot of lightsabers from their new manufacturing plant, that sort of thing.”
For a moment, Bastori Rak could only gape at her. Visions of his future passed briefly before his eyes. A find of this significance would result in his advancement, in his name accumulating long-deserved fame. Finally, he managed, “Are there Jeedai here?”
The woman considered. “I don’t think so. Though if there are, I expect they’ll be back with the training materials, destroying them.”
“Take us there at once.”
She shrugged and turned down the long corridor leading into the transport’s depths.
Two levels down, in one of the forward holds, Bastori Rak and his warriors looked with distaste at the tall stacks of nearly identical cargo containers, obviously the result of mechanical manufacture, as the female led them between aisles of the things. “There,” she said, and pointed.
Set out in an open area between two stacks were barrel-shaped metal containers, a bit over a meter tall and nearly a meter wide at their thickest point, arrayed in four rows of four. Each was labeled JEDI ACADEMY PROPERTY. DANGER. DO NOT OPEN.
Bastori Rak felt light-headed. “Can we move them without harm?”
“I don’t think so,” the woman said. She held her hand up, palm toward the ceiling, a gesture that suggested she was begging for something. “Here, let me show you.”
Bastori Rak looked at her. She now met his eyes, her expression one of mocking humor.
In his peripheral vision, Bastori Rak saw something silver moving from above. It smacked down into the woman’s palm.
The hilt of a lightsaber.
She said, “Embrace the pain, scarhead,” and ignited the weapon; a bright silver blade of energy shimmered into existence.
The weapon’s distinctive snap-hiss noise jolted Bastori Rak into action. He swung up his amphistaff in a blocking motion.
Her strike, a lateral slice, danced around his parry. It sliced the miniature villip from his shoulder and seared into his neck between the vonduun crab armor on his torso and his helmet. He felt blinding pain, pain too great for him to accept or ignore, and the amphistaff flew from his nerveless fingers as he collapsed.
But he was not dead, and could still see. He saw his second-in-command strike at the woman, saw her graceful parry, heard her laugh. He saw the tops of the Jeedai barrels bulge as their contents stood up within them and smashed through the thin metal sheets sealing them.
Their contents were droids, war droids, weapons at the ready. Their blasters opened up, chewing through his warriors.
There was blinding whiteness to his vision now. He struggled to stay focused but could not. He died watching his warriors jittering in the concentrated fire coming from the hated war droids.
Colonel Gavin Darklighter, sitting in darkness relieved only by the glows from his instruments, hit his comlink. “That’s the signal,” he said. “Launch.”
The darkness above his head parted as his X-wing’s camouflage—a cargo container bolted to the transport’s top hull, immediately before the command pod—parted and folded down to either side. All around, the other eleven snubfighters of Rogue Squadron were also being released, also hitting thrusters as they hurtled toward the Yuuzhan Vong frigate.
The Yuuzhan Vong were quick on the uptake—Gavin could allow them that. Almost as soon as Rogue Squadron cleared the transport, the frigate’s plasma cannons were opening up, directing streams of superheated material at his X-wings. “S-foils to attack position,” he said, “and fire at will.”
The wings of the twelve snubfighters opened into their characteristic X shape. Before Gavin’s were even locked into place, Nevil and two other Rogues had fired proton torpedoes.
Gavin and the rest waited for a handful of seconds, slewing their snubfighters around in an effort to keep the plasma cannon trails off them, then opened up with their lasers. Twelve sets of quad-linked lasers flashed, sending their destructive energy across twenty klicks of space in an instant, bypassing the proton torpedoes, hurtling against the frigate—
Hurtling into the voids projected before the frigate. The vessel’s dovin basals, responding to the threat of the first attacks to arrive, created their gravitic singularities in front of the laser attacks and swallowed the majority of their energy.
They were still swallowing, in fact, when the late-arriving proton torpedoes flashed between them and struck the frigate’s hull. They detonated, one, two, three brilliant explosions, and as the last of them began to fade Gavin could see the mighty frigate cracked in two, each half spitting forth flaming debris. The plasma cannons no longer aimed their energies at Rogue Squadron; two of them still fired, sending burning blobs randomly into space.
“Confirmed kill,” Gavin said, “no friendly losses. Do you read, Gambler?”
Lando Calrissian’s smooth tones were preserved across the comlink. “We read, Rogue Leader. Likewise, no friendly casualties here. A beautiful execution all around.”
“We’ll see you back at base, then. Rogue Leader out.” Gavin led the Rogues in an easy loop around until they were oriented toward Borleias. A few moments later, his squadron made the jump into hyperspace.
Lando looked over the battlefield that had been a cargo hold. Twenty Yuuzhan Vong warriors lay dead, some of them no longer recognizable as bipedal humanoids, all over the deck plating. Lando’s fifteen war droids and Alem
a Rar, the Twi’lek Jedi, moved among them, dispatching wriggling amphistaffs and the occasional thud bug and razor bug set free by the blaster damage that had killed their owners. Alema whistled to herself as she worked.
Lando consulted his datapad. He sent a signal to query a device elsewhere in the vessel. “Not good. Danni’s device isn’t indicating any weird gravitic fluctuations. Meaning that there probably isn’t a tracking creature on this vessel.”
Alema nodded and switched her lightsaber off. “Refugees have to be turning one another in. I’m not sure for what. Violence threatened against their loved ones, maybe. Maybe some sort of bribe.” She shrugged. “We’ll figure out what they’re doing.”
Lando turned his attention to his droid aide. “One-One-A, let’s get this cleaned up. Get rid of the biological remains only, don’t worry about the blaster scorches. Load representative weapons and gear into a barrel and seal it tight, then load it onto the shuttle.”
One-One-A saluted. “Acknowledged.”
“Would you like to celebrate?” That was Alema. She wore a curious smile, artificially demure.
Lando turned back to her. “What did you have in mind?”
She just continued smiling.
“Oh.” He gave her his best smile in return, modulated his voice to its smoothest register. “I find myself flattered. But I am a married man.”
She cocked her head as though the answer were incomplete.
“So I have to decline,” he concluded.
She shrugged as though it were of no concern. “I’ll prep the shuttle, then.”
When she was gone, Lando turned back to 1-1A. “Remind me again of the rewards of being virtuous?”
“I have never reminded you of this before.”
“That was a rhetorical question.”
“Nor have I ever told you of such rewards prior to not reminding you.”
“It was still rhetorical. I really need to give you an upgraded conversation module if you’re going to be talking all the time.”
In the distance, they heard Alema calling, “Captain, captain, wherever you are! You can come out now!”
Borleias Occupation, Day 30
Han came awake with Leia shaking him. Their chamber was dark, and he could feel that only a few hours had passed since they’d gone to sleep. Grogginess lay over him like a second blanket. It occurred to him that perhaps Borleias had never become a true colony world because everyone who lived there was continually sleep-deprived. “What, what?”
“The control center just reached me on the comlink,” Leia said. There was a breathless excitement to her voice, a happiness Han hadn’t heard in a long time. “Jaina’s insystem and headed this way. Get—”
Han was suddenly on his feet, the grogginess evaporated like a snubfighter shield hit by a laser cannon. He lurched toward the footlocker that held his clothes.
“—dressed.”
Luke watched them spiral down from the sky, a battered-looking X-wing and a disk-shaped Hapan freighter, landing in the same portion of the field that had briefly served the Advisory Council’s vehicles.
Jaina Solo—heir to some measure of her father Han’s lankiness, with features as deceptively delicate as her mother’s, her brown hair clinging to her scalp after hours in a helmet—descended the freighter’s boarding ramp and was immediately enfolded in the embrace of her parents. Behind her was Lowbacca, nose lifted as if trying to scent friends among the crowd; he offered a rumbling Wookiee growl of welcome as Tahiri, Zekk, and other academy friends bolted from the fringe of onlookers to embrace him.
Kyp Durron descended from the X-wing cockpit. Slender and dark-haired, with sharp features that seemed sculpted to convey anger and discontent but currently were calm, he was, for once, not dressed in stylish civilian clothes, but instead wore an anonymous pilot’s jumpsuit.
Luke moved up to join Kyp. Mara didn’t keep pace with him; Luke knew she was waiting for an opening to talk to Jaina. Luke gave the problematic Jedi a nod he hoped looked friendly. “Kyp.”
“Master Skywalker.” Oddly, there was neither irony nor anger in Kyp’s voice.
“You seem tired.”
“No, I don’t,” Kyp said. “Just different.”
They brought out a dark-hours meal for the latecomers and heard their story—a free-form recounting, to be sure, made somewhat random by the way Jaina, Kyp, and Lowbacca tended to interrupt one another with corrections and elaborations—of the days the three had spent on Hapes after the departure of Han and Leia. Wedge, acting more or less as master of ceremonies for the meal, brought in one more participant; Luke was startled to see Jag Fel enter the chamber.
Fel was a tall, wiry young man with close-cropped black hair, a scar running from his right eyebrow upward and then being echoed in a white lock of hair. He was Wedge’s nephew and, not surprisingly, a brilliant pilot, having inherited reflexes from both the Antilles and Fel families and having been raised among the militaristic, blue-skinned Chiss, among whom his parents had chosen to live. Fel’s black uniform harked back to those of old-time Imperial TIE fighter pilots, but was cut along different lines, with red piping along tunic and pants. Luke had been aware that Jag had been on Hapes with Jaina, but thought he’d departed from there for distant regions of space.
Han tried to find seats near Jaina, but, curiously, Leia chose places far enough away to give her a little distance, a little perspective on their daughter.
“So the Yuuzhan Vong are clustering around Hapes, but Tenel Ka is in charge there as Queen Mother,” Luke summarized. “Some good, some bad. Even with her fleets so badly reduced and her danger so close, Hapes could be a strong ally for us. We’ll need to offer her whatever support we can manage to keep the Vong from making any further inroads there.”
Kyp made a sour face. “I don’t think Hapes can ever be sorted out.” Then he looked thoughtful and added, “On the other hand, I’m the last one who ought to be offering that kind of opinion.”
“We’re lucky things turned out as well as they did there,” Luke said. “Ta’a Chume could still be in charge, could still be making things harder for all of us.” He turned to Jaina. “Seriously, you understand that I wasn’t questioning your decision. I wasn’t hinting that you should throw yourself on the thermal detonator that a marriage to Isolder would represent.”
Jaina offered him an unperturbed smile. “I know what you meant, Uncle Luke. I made the right choice.”
Han leaned rightward so he could whisper to Leia. “She’s changed. Just in the days since we left Hapes.”
Leia nodded, imperceptible to all but him. “She’s settled something in her mind. I think she’s come through one of the conflicts that was eating at her.” She sagged just a little. “But whatever she settled, it wasn’t about me. She didn’t quite relax when I was holding her out there.”
“She’ll find the right course through what she’s dealing with. Give her time.”
Wedge, focused on Jaina, asked, “So, what are your plans now? You’re still on Rogue Squadron’s reserve roster, but your situation is unique, so I’m not going to call you up for duty if you and Luke feel you’ll be more useful elsewhere. I can put you in touch with one of the fleet groups if that’s what you want … but we could really use your piloting skills on Borleias.”
Jaina looked around. Han saw her gaze click to a stop, ever so briefly, on him, Leia, and, curiously, Kyp and Jag. “I’d like to stay,” she said. “But I want to do something. I want to form a new starfighter squadron, if I can put together enough pilots and matériel, and practice some tactics involving the Force. Force-based coordination.”
Luke’s eyebrows rose. “Sort of like what Joruus C’baoth did for Thrawn.”
Jaina shrugged. “I’m not talking about ancient history, I’m talking about now.” She glanced around at the winces and dark looks she received from everyone present who was over the age of thirty. She offered up a calm smile. “No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant, I’m not talking about something
on the scale that C’baoth used. Just within a fighter squadron. The Yuuzhan Vong think that I’m associated somehow with Yun-Harla, their goddess of trickery. I’d like to play on that … and this means coming up with methods of trickery. Or what seems like trickery to them. That means the Force to me. The Force, and maybe the best advice from the best pilots, like Uncle Luke and General Antilles.”
Wedge considered. “I’ve heard a little about this Trickster goddess thing. I think it has real potential for psychological warfare. So I’m inclined to move on this idea. But, Jaina, if we’re going to have the Yuuzhan Vong believe you’re tied to this Yun-Harla, we’re going to have to treat you like a goddess.”
Jaina turned her smile on him. “That sounds terrible.”
“I’m not joking. I suspect it means special treatment to the point of isolation. You’d have to be seen getting benefits and considerations that you haven’t earned, which will cause bad feelings among pilots who have earned them. You’d only be able to talk freely with people who were in on the secret, and only in areas that Intelligence has certified are free of listeners. It’s going to distance you from people.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Luke leaned forward. “I also think this is something that ought to be done. Anything new we can do to keep the Yuuzhan Vong off balance is worth exploring. And since I have another mission priority now, why don’t I just hand command of Twin Suns Squadron over to her? With your approval, Wedge.”
Jaina’s head turned as though it had been snapped around by a Wookiee wrestler. “You mean that?”
“I do. And I don’t think the symbolism will be lost on the Yuuzhan Vong. Luke Skywalker gives up his personal squadron—”
“A squadron with the word twin in the name,” Jag said, his tone low.
“Good point,” Luke said. “It was actually named in memory of Tatooine, but they don’t know that.”
Wedge nodded. “Jaina could use some command experience, and I know something she doesn’t—which is that Corran Horn has rejoined Rogue Squadron. Meaning that we’d have two starfighter squadrons with Jedi in them. That might allow us some even more extravagant experiments in tactics.”
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 14
