He nodded his thanks to the Noghri as Sirhka put the cauterizer away. “Krag Val made me pay for my arrogance in a way none of the others had. They could have. Your uncle could have broken me down. Corran could have been nastier, but I took their being nice as a sign of weakness. I mean, I teased Corran’s son. I was being an idiot, and Corran endured it because the mission we were given was more important than his feelings.”
Ganner sighed. “So, yes, I’ll have a scar, and it will be good. The old Ganner, he had a perfect face over a perfectly arrogant attitude. Not so anymore. Every time I look in a mirror I’ll be reminded that he died on Garqi, and I’m here in his place.”
The cold edge to Ganner’s voice sent a chill through Jacen. He wanted to protest that Ganner didn’t need a ruined face to remind him of the sort of person he should be. Jacen couldn’t bring himself to speak. As we grow up, we change physically. Maybe Ganner needs this change, not to remind him of who he should be, but as a mark of who he has become. My uncle lost a hand doing that. What will happen to me?
Ganner sighed. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”
Jacen blinked. “What?”
“Sedative. I’ll take it now.”
Jacen frowned. “But you could have had it before to make all that easier.”
“I didn’t want it to be easier, Jacen; wanted it to be memorable.” He smiled, then closed his eyes. “Wake me when we’re safe again.”
Jacen touched the injector to him and pumped a full dose of sedative into Ganner. Jacen smiled as the man relaxed. Let’s just hope, Ganner, that there will be a point when we’re safe again.
Wedge Antilles stood with Admiral Kre’fey on the Ralroost’s bridge. They both stared at the forward viewport and the system’s brilliant spot that was Garqi. It seemed so far away, yet a simple jump through hyperspace could carry the ship there in an instant.
And might carry us into an ambush. Wedge slowly shook his head. “Think they’re waiting for us?”
The Bothan admiral shrugged uneasily. “There is still a great deal we don’t know about them, Wedge. We know that when we send a message from here to Garqi, it will take three and a quarter standard minutes to reach our people on the ground. We don’t know if the Yuuzhan Vong have means by which they can communicate faster. The message that came in from Corran requesting a pickup was sent over twelve hours ago. The Yuuzhan Vong could have reacted to their operation and have summoned support. Sithspawn, we don’t even know if the Yuuzhan Vong travel through hyperspace the way we do, or if they are faster than our ships are. Nor do we know how close they are to Garqi, or what their possible response time could be.”
“We live and learn.”
Kre’fey flashed fangs as he smiled. “If we live, we learn.” Without looking back, he growled a question. “Sensors, no anomalous system readings?”
“No, Admiral, all is within normal limits. Fine gravitational fluctuation readings do not indicate any increased mass hiding around moons or asteroid belts. If the Yuuzhan Vong are hiding ships out there, they must be very tiny.”
“Thank you, sensors.” The Bothan turned and nodded to a dark-furred officer at the communications console. “Lieutenant Arr’yka, send a message to Colonel Horn. Tell him we are here to pick him up. Request transmission of his intelligence reports as he comes up. Deploy a communications relay drone here to capture and send out the report in case we have trouble.”
“As ordered, Admiral.”
The snowy Bothan then looked over at Tycho Celchu at the flight operations command center. “Colonel, if you would be so kind as to put our fighters on alert.”
“Done, Admiral.”
Kre’fey came full around, his eyes narrowing. “It would seem a decision to advance would be difficult, but it’s really not. We made a bargain with Horn and his people. They go into danger, we get them out. I will uphold that bargain.”
“I think you should, though others may question your judgment if the Vong are waiting for us.” Wedge gave the Bothan a grim grin. “But then, hindsight criticism is always based on fantasy foresight. What we should have known will be touted as facts we chose to overlook.”
“If you think I’m overlooking anything, do let me know.”
“Yes, Admiral, I will.” Wedge nodded toward Garqi. “Right now the only thing I want to overlook is Garqi’s horizon and see a ship coming up to greet us.”
“I agree. Helm, execute primary egress-vector plot. Look alive, people. We have heroes to rescue.”
Jaina Solo, locked in the cockpit of her X-wing, didn’t so much feel the microjump into the interior of the Garqi system as much as she picked up sensations of uneasiness from crew members who didn’t like making jumps. As those impressions faded, she immediately got a launch authorization and jammed her throttle full forward. The fighter jetted down the launch tube and shot out beneath the belly of the Ralroost, between it and Garqi’s spinning sphere.
She brought her X-wing up on Anni Capstan’s port side and began to orbit. “Sparky, sensors at full, filter for Vong flight characteristics.”
The droid tootled an acknowledgment of the order.
Jaina resisted the urge to reach out through the Force to sense her brother. She’d been stung by the deception earlier, when the task force had been inserted into Garqi. Intellectually she understood the need for operational security, and she could remember the shock of everyone on board the Ralroost when the task force was believed dead. Gavin had been correct about the tragedy and subsequent revelation creating a sense of unity between the crew and the pilots. Not knowing made them all one, and using the Force now would violate that trust.
The latest briefing did say they had casualties, including a Jedi. She knew it wasn’t her brother; no matter the distance from her twin she felt certain she would know if he’d died. And she did acknowledge there was a huge difference between casualty and fatality, but somewhere in the back of her mind she’d imagined Jedi were somehow special and not the sort of heroes to fall in combat. Logically, and based on even the most recent history of the Jedi, she knew that wasn’t true, but the depiction of heroism in the Jedi tradition allowed her to accept the fantasy as true on an emotional level.
Right now the only possibility you should be dwelling on is vaping some Vong so the Best Chance can make it home. She checked her sensors, but they remained clean. “Nothing here, Lead.”
Anni Capstan, her wingmate, reported on the squadron tactical frequency. “Twelve here. I have one contact coming up from Garqi. Looks like our people.”
“Good, stand by.”
Jaina was about to ask Sparky to punch up Anni’s contact when the droid shrieked. Her primary sensor monitor lit up with one huge contact, then several smaller ones, all of which began leaking yet smaller contacts. She looked up through her cockpit canopy, and her mouth went bone-dry.
“Emperor’s black bones!”
The Yuuzhan Vong had arrived, and in force.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Corran Horn headed the Best Chance straight for the Ralroost and was happy to see X-wings pouring from the Bothan ship. A smile lit his face. He keyed the ship’s comm system. “There it is. We’re all but home!”
He heard a little gasp from Jacen and felt a burst of shock roll off the younger man. “Look at this! Corran, we’ve got problems.”
“Thanks for the preview, Jacen, now count it off for me.” He put enough of an edge in his voice to get Jacen to concentrate. “How much, what, and where?”
“Sorry, Corran.” Jacen exhaled curtly. “I have one big contact, seven smaller ones, and then skips all over the place—at least sixty-four, but more coming all the time. Small contacts are corvette size, the big one is a Yuuzhan Vong cruiser. They are vectoring in at our aft. Their closure rate means they’ll get us before we get to the Ralroost.”
“Thanks, I think.” Corran flicked the comm unit over to the tactical frequency for the Bothan Assault Cruiser. “This is Best Chance calling Ralroost. We can break off and go d
irtside. You get clear.”
“Negative, Best Chance, keep coming.”
Corran recognized Admiral Kre’fey’s voice. “With all due respect, sir, there’s an asteroid belt’s worth of Vong here. We are not worth risking the ’Roost for.”
“Your humility notwithstanding, Colonel Horn, I’m the one who makes the decisions here. You come to us as fast as you can.” The Bothan admiral paused for a second. “This possibility was not wholly unanticipated.”
Ensconced in his cabin aboard the Burning Pride, with the cognition hood linking him to the ship’s sensory apparatus, Deign Lian let the first shock of finding New Republic forces at Garqi roll off him. He had proposed to Shedao Shai an expedition to Garqi, ostensibly to check up on how Krag Val was doing with the slave conversion experiment. He intended, based on reports from his own agents in the Garqi garrison, to show that resistance had not been wiped out there, shaming Krag Val and bringing his master’s judgment into question.
Shedao Shai had granted the request for the trip, but demanded that Deign take a large task force with him. Deign’s inquiries as to why he should do it had been met with a withering stare. He’d acquiesced to the request because he knew it was a gross waste of resources, which would not look good for Shedao Shai.
And yet, somehow, he knew . . . Deign Lian shivered, then focused. The ship’s sensors brought to him a holographic feel for the system and ships. His training allowed him to pick out the prize, the one ship running from Garqi and his forces, the one ship to which the infidels were sending their fighters.
As fast as he could think it, the order went out. His forces oriented on the small ship racing away from Garqi. Get it, kill it, then kill all the rest of them.
On the bridge of the Ralroost, Admiral Kre’fey turned away from the viewport as the blast shields began to close. He strode over to the communications station with deliberate haste but not a whiff of anxiety. He smiled at the Bothan sitting there. “Lieutenant, please invite Hammer Group to take up the positions outlined in Delta Case.”
“As ordered, Admiral.”
As she punched up the appropriate tactical frequencies and began to relay orders, Kre’fey turned to Wedge. “Nasty little game to be played here.”
“Our reinforcements should be useful, but they’re not going to be enough.”
“We’re not trying to win the battle, Wedge, just trying to win some time.” Kre’fey pointed toward his station on the bridge. “Sensors, give me a holographic feed of the system, and start relaying all our tactical data out to Coruscant through the drone we left at the edge of the system.”
“Setting it up now, Admiral.”
“Good, very good.” He let a predatory grin slowly spread over his face. A low growl rumbled from his throat, summoning up a very fundamental piece of his Bothan psyche. It was something he set aside when dealing with humans, for they so often saw the malevolent side of it in Bothan politics. We are predators by nature, and now I need that nature.
“Remain here with me, Wedge Antilles.” Kre’fey’s words rolled out in low tones, born deep in his chest. “We might not be able to kill the Yuuzhan Vong here, but we can hurt them, and that might just be enough.”
Jaina kicked her X-wing up into a portside barrel roll, then came around for a long glide to starboard. She stayed hot on Anni’s port wing, the two of them angling in for a series of deflection shots on a skip squadron. “Ready when you are, Twelve.”
Anni double-clicked her comm, acknowledging Jaina’s comment. The pair of them adjusted their course, drifting a little more starboard, then closed on a knot of six skips jetting in at the Best Chance. In a flash of blue fire, a proton torpedo launched from Anni’s X-wing. A heartbeat later a second missile raced from the starfighter.
Jaina’s eyes narrowed. If this works . . .
The first proton torpedo approached the group of skips, and the Yuuzhan Vong fighters responded by putting up voids to catch the missile before it could hit the fighters. Using a tactic that had proved effective in the fighting on Dantooine, the New Republic had programmed the proton torpedo to detonate prematurely when it detected a gravitic anomaly, which this missile did.
The skips then found themselves on a course heading straight for a titanic cloud of energy. This shattered the formation. The Yuuzhan Vong pilots broke like birds in flight, twisting their ships about at acute angles. Some flew below, and others turned toward the attack. One pair broke away and up, and therein proved the efficacy of the new tactic.
The one flaw in the coralskipper design was that the dovin basals that manipulated gravity waves to provide propulsion also were the things that generated the voids. The New Republic analysts had noted that when voids were generated, the ability of skips to maneuver was diminished. It took Rogue Squadron’s pilots to realize that the reverse might also be true.
The second proton torpedo caught up with two of the fleeing skips and exploded. One skip vanished amid the brilliant detonation. The other caught a part of the blast on its port side, melting the yorik coral and exposing the cockpit to vacuum. The stony ship stopped flying with any direction or purpose and just tumbled toward Garqi like so much other interstellar debris.
Jaina dropped her aiming reticle on the closest Yuuzhan Vong fighter and hit the splinter-shot trigger. Her quadded lasers spat out hundreds of underpowered laser darts at her target. A small void absorbed some of them, but quickly collapsed, allowing other shots to pepper the fighter’s rocky exterior. The second she saw splinters getting through, she hit the main trigger, loosing a full quad burst on the fighter.
The sizzling crimson bolts converged on the skip, filling the nose with enough energy to make it glow white-hot. Molten stone peeled back, sloughing off like dead flesh. The skip began a slow roll, then shook and jerked, thrashing as the dovin basals died.
Anni clipped off a quick shot that damaged the other skip but didn’t kill it, and then she and Jaina were through to the other side of the Yuuzhan Vong formation. Watching the sensors intently, Jaina brought her X-wing around for another run. Above her the battle had deteriorated, with skips and X-wings spinning and looping, streaking and rolling in a chaotic tangle. The proton torpedo tactic that proved so useful in the first pass would now have as much chance of taking out an ally as an enemy.
We’re back to conventional tactics.
Beyond the fighters the capital ships had begun to slug it out. The Ralroost’s two companion ships, a pair of Victory-class Star Destroyers, appeared above and beyond the Yuuzhan Vong cruiser. They launched barrages of concussion missiles and laced the enemy formation with turbolaser fire. The corvette-size Yuuzhan Vong ships intercepted many of the missiles and shots before they could reach the cruiser, providing an outer sphere of defense. Their shots back at the New Republic forces were picked up by shields, but those shields could not hold forever.
Jaina felt a shiver run down her spine. Were this a sim it would be obvious that we’re overmatched. It would be time to cut and run. She sighed. It’s not a sim. We can’t run. We can’t win, so we just have to hope we hurt them enough that they don’t really win either.
Deep in the bowels of his ship, Deign Lian smiled. The advent of the New Republic reinforcements had surprised him, but a quick study of the situation showed that their intervention would only extend the time it took to kill them. While his coralskippers had taken more damage than he expected they would, and the new ships had deployed more mechanical fighters, his fighter force still outnumbered the enemy. Likewise, his capital ships outnumbered them and were more powerful.
He directed all his attacks at one of the smaller New Republic ships. The cannons on the Yuuzhan Vong ships vomited plasma bolts at it, hammering the shields. The enemy ship’s sphere of protection began shrinking. Another volley or two and the shields would collapse, then the shots would melt their way through the enemy vessel, ridding it of its blasphemous parody of life.
And when that is done, I take the rest of them. The Yuuzhan Vong leader smiled
slowly. Forces will praise me for winning. My position will be such that when my master falters, there will be but one choice for his replacement.
Admiral Gilad Pellaeon, seated in the chair from which Grand Admiral Thrawn had commanded the Chimaera, watched the holographic display of the battle raging at the heart of the Garqi system. He smoothed his mustache with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, then stabbed his right index finger down on the command chair’s comm button.
“Is force Spike deployed, guns?”
His combat command officer replied affirmatively. “Confirmed now, Admiral.”
“Good. Helm, five seconds to jump. Positions from Gamma file. Tell Spike Lead he is cleared to jump to point blood-niner.”
“As ordered, Admiral.”
Pellaeon released the comm button and sat back, pressing his hands together. For decades he had dreamed of finding a New Republic task force in such a compromising position. He would plan out an ambush as he had done here, then order it executed. He smiled as he imagined their surprise.
“Oh, they will still be surprised, I imagine.” He nodded slowly. “As will our targets.”
Corran whipped the Best Chance through a roll, then brought the nose up in a half loop, before inverting and rolling out to port and diving. His sensors still showed two skips on his ship’s tail. His maneuvers were keeping them from getting good shots in on him, but the Yuuzhan Vong were slowly herding him away from the Ralroost.
“Jacen, any more sedative in that injector?”
“Ganner took the last of it. Why?”
“Well, I always kinda figured I’d like to die in my sleep.” Corran laughed aloud. “Just so you know, kid, you’ve impressed me on this mission. Might not mean much when we’re free-floating atoms, but—”
“Sithspawn!”
“Didn’t think that comment warranted profanity.”
“No, Corran, multiple new contacts coming in. I have two Star Destroyers, one Imp-class and another Vic. And a bunch of something else. ID transponders list them as Imperial Remnant forces.”