Jag knew that scanners aboard the Alliance capital ships were already a.n.a.lyzing the relative strengths of the singularities and monitoring the trajectories of the meteors that had slipped through the gravitic shield. Once the areas of greatest stress were identified, their locations would be relayed to the transports and starfighters. Not quite two years earlier, the troop transport Record Time had delivered its cargo of Wraiths and Jedi to the surface of Coruscant in single-person containers. But that was before the dovin basals had been seeded into orbit. More important, there was no reason for stealth now. As someone at Contruum had said to Jag, "If we can"t drop a moon on them, we can at least make it rain rocks."
"Twin Suns," Right to Rule control said, "you have open windows at coordinates four-two-three and four-two-five. Rothana transport is reorienting to follow you through."
Jag pa.s.sed the word to his pilots, even though the navicomputers on each starfighter had certainly received the course corrections.
Configured into pairs and trios, Twin Suns formed up along both sides of the antique wedge-shaped ship and began to herd it toward the infiltration zone. Adapting their vectors to match those of the escort starfighters, coralskippers attacked from all sides, threading through the fragment cloud and augmenting it with plasma missiles and gouts of molten stone. Flying just at the perimeter of the transport"s shields, Jag"s clawcraft was jarred by every projectile that found its target. The comm channel was a babble of voices, as pilots issued warnings of strafing runs or declared the status of their ships. Explosive light washed into the spherical c.o.c.kpit of Twin Suns One from astern, and Jag glanced at his displays to see Twin Eight and Eleven vanish from the grid.
With scant room to maneuver, he tried to make the most of every squeeze of the trigger, but the skips had the advantage of being able to take evasive action, whereas the starfighters were intent on protecting their ward. Carefully trained laser bolts from Right to Rule created a sudden corridor of destructive energy around the transport and fighters.
A dozen more skips became extra fodder for the meteor-gobbling dovin basals.
Still in darkness, a Yuuzhan Vong cruiser stabbed by convergent blasts from three separate Alliance ships cracked open and blew apart.
A second vessel, spewing blades of flame from its midsection, rolled lazily out of orbit and began to fall into the atmosphere. The dovin basals were trying desperately to prioritize, but more and more rock fragments were getting past them. As overtaxed as they were, the gigantic biots still posed a threat to any ship that ventured too close.
For that reason the transports had been retrofitted with Bakuran-designed HIMS generators, which should have allowed them to sustain momentum even in an interdiction field. At Contruum, few had expressed confidence in the retrofitting, and Jag was one of the first pilots to see why.
His group of vanguard starfighters was just pa.s.sing between a pair of the Yuuzhan Vong orbital monstrosities when two overlapping singularities yawned, catching the pointed bow of the transport and dragging it hard to starboard. The ship"s aged cylindrical thrusters tried to compensate for the unexpected tug of gravity, but they weren"t up to the challenge. The jury-rigged HIMS failed, and the deflector shields followed. The transport twisted over on its side and began to founder.
Armor flayed from the hull and surface modules disappeared into the swirling black mouth of the singularity. Breaches opened, venting precious atmosphere and unsecured objects. Then, deep within the vessel, an explosion flashed, and it split wide open. Ground-effect vehicles, combat droids, and acceleration couches spun outward-some of the latter with commandos still strapped into them.
In the blink of an eye Twin Suns lost another three fighters. To port, trimmed in golden sunlight, one of the newer transports was banking as quickly as its bulk allowed. Rogue Squadron had re-formed around the ship and was just beginning to shepherd it into the atmosphere. Jag looked to his right and overhead for the second transport, but couldn"t find it. What he found instead were the Wraiths, winning their duels with coralskippers even as they blazed toward Twin Suns.
Right to Rule control boomed in Jag"s ears.
"Twin Suns Leader, come about to zero-zero-three. You are redesignated escort for number one transport. As soon as your group is clear, we"re going to try to burn a tunnel to the surface."
Jag hauled on the control yoke, gravitational forces all but burying him in the seat as he slewed to port. The dozen remaining members of his group followed in formation, sticking close enough to one another to provide adjuvant shielding. Ahead of them, transport one had dropped inside the tier of dovin basals and was rushing for the surface, blunt nose aglow from friction. Twenty years earlier Coruscant had been liberated from Imperial forces by loosing a group of criminals to sow confusion, and by sabotaging the planet"s shield generators. Now liberation would depend largely on the actions of a thousand commandos and a handful of resistance fighters, and the off chance of their being able to mobilize the Yuuzhan Vong heretics into an insurgent force.
As promised, coordinated laserfire came from the capital ships.
Sizzling through the atmosphere, the sustained fusillade annihilated everything in its path and burned a ragged bald patch in Coruscant"s verdant surface. It was toward the denuded area that the starfighters and transport raced, firing on the run at the few coralskippers that had survived the laser shower. The control yoke shuddered in Jag"s grip as he powered the clawcraft into denser air. The ship rattled, as if on the verge of coming apart, but it held together.
Surface features of Coruscant began to come into focus: forest-covered spires and mounds, wide creva.s.ses br.i.m.m.i.n.g with mist yet to be burned off by the sun. Gradually he decreased the angle of his descent until he was flying into the sun, and parallel to the undulating terrain.
Frightened by the roar of the approaching craft, flocks of black birds with three-meter wingspans took flight from the branching crowns of emergent trees. A contour map resolved on the c.o.c.kpit navigational display, showing the buildings and features of the so-called sacred precinct, from the craggy mountain that was Shimrra"s worldship Citadel to the domelike structure that housed and protected the World Brain-what had once been the most affluent and fashionable area of the planet.
A counter at the bottom of the screen showed the distance remaining to the scorched landing zone, which was surrounded by dense forest and yorik coral outcroppings. Without warning, enemy artillery fire erupted from the tree line around the clearing, fountaining molten ejecta and flaming projectiles high into the air. Flying nap of the forest, Jag spotted the distinctive sail-like spine plates of the armored beast the Yuuzhan Vong called a rakamat, and the Alliance knew as a range. The blue-green reptilian creatures were the size of small buildings, and on Borleias had proved almost impossible to stop.
"That plasma is coming from a range, east of the landing zone," Jag said over the tactical net. "Shawnkyr, Eprill, see if you can hold it at bay long enough for Page"s Commandos to insert."
"On our way, Colonel," Shawnkyr responded.
At Borleias, she had urged Jag to return to their native Chiss s.p.a.ce. Now she was as much an Alliance pilot as he was. Dodging projectiles, Jag banked over the forest. He was doubling back to the transport when he finally caught sight of its sister ship, ten kilometers to the south and covered stem to stern in grutchins. The Yellow Aces were pursuing the out-of-control vessel and using their lasers to dislodge the grutchins, as if picking vermin off a pet.
But the acid-producing, globular-eyed insectoids had ingested large areas of the hull and, judging by the way the transport was wobbling, had already infiltrated the cabin s.p.a.ces. Jag watched helplessly as the vessel bellied into the forest, cutting a wide, burning swath through the trees. Sliding for a kilometer or more, it tipped nose-first over the rim of a deep creva.s.se and began a slow descent toward the bottom. Closer to the lasered clearing, Rogue and Twin Suns snubfighters were making paired strafing runs over the rakamat and Yuuzhan Vong infantry units, creating an inferno with lasers and proton torpedoes.
Slowed by its repulsorlift engines, number one transport was a few kilometers short of the laser-denuded tableland when a large hatch opened in its ventral surface. First to exit the hatch were YVH droids, folded into foam-filled crash canisters. Then, sheathed in enviro-suits and harnessed into jet packs, came Page"s company, soaring from the rectangular opening and spiraling down to the surface.
The pilots of Wraith Squadron followed, setting their X-wings down and scrambling from the c.o.c.kpits. Jag swung wide to make another pa.s.s over the forest. With projectiles streaking out of the trees, Gavin Darklighter"s Rogues buzzed like angry hornets, torching everything that moved. Jag was racing to join them when a fireball caught the clawcraft from behind, blowing away pieces of the starboard solar panels and sending him into an uncontrollable spin. The crowns of the trees rushed up at him, then patches of soggy ground. The clawcraft whined as it slammed into the canopy, and darkness engulfed him. The view forward from the plush c.o.c.kpit of Lady Luck revealed a panorama of stroboscopic globular explosions stretched across, as well as two or three degrees above and below, the ecliptic plane.
"That was the Alliance"s salvo," Lando told Tendra.
Her mouth was slightly ajar, she was shaking her head in amazement.
"I"ve never seen anything that was at once so beautiful and so dreadful."
Tall, even for a Sacorrian, Tendra was a regal beauty, with sparkling brown eyes and full lips. The SoroSuub luxury yacht, a somewhat flattened and oblate vessel, was well inside the Alliance lines, but close enough for long-range scanners to capture the continuous exchanges of fire, if not detail the individual warships themselves. Lando knew that Wedge was out there somewhere, along with countless other friends and comrades he had known from as far back as the Battle of Endor.
He couldn"t remember a time when he had felt so small or alone. In a gesture that combined affection and anguish, he tightened his grip on Tendra"s hand. No sooner had the spherical explosions faded than a pyrotechnic display of what might have been fire-tailed comets rocketed from unseen sources, splaying against deflector screens too distant to discern, and in some cases creating explosions of their own.
"Nas Choka"s response," Lando said dryly.
He flipped a switch on the communications console and swiveled his chair slightly toward the c.o.c.kpit"s audio pickups.
"You watching this?"
"Can"t take my eyes away," Talon Karrde answered from Wild Karrde, five hundred kilometers Rimward and, like Lady Luck, running mostly silent. Scores of other starfighters, converted yachts, and blockade runners allied with the loosely knit Smugglers" Alliance were deployed between Wild Karrde and Errant Venture, which was closest to Zonama Sekot, and thus almost a quarter of the way to the outer-system world of Stentat.
"How long are we just going to sit here and watch?" Lando asked Talon.
Talon laughed bitterly.
"Now is as good a time as any to make our meager but skillful contribution to the cause."
"All right, then."
Lando straightened up in his seat and was preparing to wake up the ship"s systems when Talon commed him again.
"Hold on a minute, hero. My scanners are picking up something peculiar. I"m sending you the coordinates now. You might want to have a look."
Tendra was already realigning the scanners when Lando glanced at the display screen. A sizable number of Yuuzhan Vong ships had separated from the main body of the armada. Accreting velocity, the group was vectoring for the sunward fringe of the battle belt.
"A flanking maneuver?" Lando said. "Maybe an attempt to jump behind Alliance lines?"
"I don"t think so," Talon answered. "When they pulled this stunt at Mon Calamari, the ships jumped for Contruum."
Lando frowned.
"Kre"fey"s long gone from Contruum. But they could be hoping to bait Wedge"s battle group into pursuing them."
"Unless they"re heading back to Coruscant."
Tendra dialed the scanners to maximum magnification. The computer-a.s.sisted portrait painted by the instruments showed a diamond-shaped formation of destroyer and heavy cruiser a.n.a.logs, with a solitary but otherwise unremarkable vessel occupying the center.
"Major firepower," Lando said.
"They"re going to hypers.p.a.ce," Talon updated. "Did you get a departure vector?"
"Coming up," Talon said.
Lando and Tendra heard Talon expel his breath in unhappy surprise.
"Zonama Sekot," Lando surmised. "Didn"t that Vong priest, Harrar, say that Shimrra wasn"t likely to risk an attack?"
"Guess he doesn"t know his Supreme Overlord as well as he thinks he does."
"I"ll let Booster know." Lando silenced the comm and swung to his wife.
"Navicomputer is plotting a course to Zonama Sekot," Tendra said.
Gingerly, Han placed the palms of his hands against the faintly glowing hull of the Sekotan ship. Warm to the touch, the perfectly smooth skin was a shimmering green, lit from within in a way that brought to mind the bioluminescence of some denizens of the deep ocean. Low to the ground, broad where the c.o.c.kpit was, and composed of three seamlessly joined oval lobes, the ship was a smaller version of the shuttle that had carried him from the Falcon to the surface of the planet.
But unlike the shuttle, it was armed with plasma cannons that might have been-and probably were-patterned after those of a coralskipper.
Speechless, Han continued his survey of the wondrous ship. Small compared to Jade Shadow, which sat on its hardstand nearby, the Sekotan fighter was equivalent to an X-wing in size, though it more closely resembled a vintage Surronian Conqueror or one of the latest generation of Mon Calamarian starfighters.
The single-pilot c.o.c.kpit was an all-too-organic shade of red-made more unnerving by an instrument array that pulsed and throbbed. The gentle internal radiance of the tripart.i.te fuselage was most intense along the forward edges, which were knife-sharp. In contrast, the trailing edges were rounded over, with the drive tucked into the s.p.a.ce between the two rear lobes. Han had overheard Magister Jabitha tell Kyp that the original Sekotan ships had had Haor Chall type-seven Silver-cla.s.s light starship engines, with expensive hyperdrive core units and organiform circuitry. But the ships the Jentari had built for the Jedi lacked a conventional drive-unless dovin basal a.n.a.logs had come to be considered standard equipment.
The similarity to coralskippers didn"t end with gravitic propulsion devices and volcano-like weapons emplacements. Though it required the pilot who had bonded with its formative seed-partners, a Sekotan craft was alive and, to a degree, capable of independent action. Han wasn"t the only person in awe.
Working overtime, the Jentari had been able to shape ships for all the Jedi who had partic.i.p.ated in the recent ceremony. Delivered from the cybernetic a.s.sembly lines by huge manta-shaped dirigibles, the Sekotan fighters crowded the canyon-rim landing platform. None of them had been flown, but Han could feel the eagerness of the pilots-Kyp, Corran, Lowbacca, dark-complected Markre Medjev, facially scarred Waxarn Kel, the stocky Chandrilan woman Octa Ramis, slight Tam Azur-Jamin, gallant Kyle Katarn, the ever-brooding Zekk, the Barabel Saba Sebatyne, and the Twi"lek female Alema Rar-all of whom were circling their individual crafts, much as Han was circling Kyp"s.
"Well, she"s not the Falcon," Han said, "but I"m sure she"ll do until the next living ship comes along."
Kyp took his gaze from the ship long enough to glance at Han and laugh.
"Wish I could tell you to take it for a spin."
Han nodded.
"Yeah, I wish you could, too."
Distracted, Han wasn"t aware of Leia"s approach until she slipped her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder. He turned slightly, expecting to see her smiling as broadly as he was. Instead, she was anything but joyful.
"What"s wrong?"
"Luke just heard from Booster. A Yuuzhan Vong battle group is headed here."
Han stared at her.
"I thought-"
It was all he got out before Luke, Mara, Jaina, Danni, Kenth, and some of the other Jedi arrived at the landing platform. The last to show up were Magister Jabitha, Jacen, and Harrar. The pilots hurried from their Sekotan ships to join the circle that quickly took shape around Luke.
"We were hoping for more time, but that"s not going to happen,"
Luke began. "The Yuuzhan Vong are on the way, which means you"re going to have to get your ships airborne and give yourselves a crash course in piloting them." He swung to face Tesar Sebatyne.
"The shuttle will take you and the rest of the Wild Knights to your blastboat and fighters."
Saba nodded to her son.
"Good hunting, Tesar."
"Now do I get to fly my X-wing?" Jaina asked. Mara shot her a cautionary look.
"We"ve been through this."
"But-"
"May I say something?" Harrar said.
Everyone turned to him in surprise.
"a.s.suming some of you are going to Coruscant, your war party will benefit by having both Jaina Solo and Jacen Solo as comrades. Our warriors are very superst.i.tious, and the sight of the celebrated Jedi twins-united-could demoralize them. The capture of one such as Jaina Solo would count for more than her death." The priest paused to glance around.
"Our forces failed at Borleias because Supreme Commander Czulkang Lah was fixated on capturing the Jedi who had come to be a.s.sociated with Yun-Harla. It was my personal failing that I supported Czulkang Lah"s actions."
Tahiri looked at Jaina.
"At Borleias I told you not to accompany Luke and Mara to Coruscant, because I was afraid that your presence would endanger them.
Now I agree with Harrar that you should go."
Jaina folded her arms across her chest.
"Nice to see that everyone is so comfortable with deciding my destiny. "
Jabitha stepped forward before anyone could respond.
"Sekot has requested that Cilghal, Tekli, and Danni Quee remain on Zonama."
Danni looked at Luke in stark confusion.
"I thought I"d be going with you and Mara to Coruscant."
Luke shook his head.
"Sekot obviously feels that you"re needed here."
"If I can accept not flying, then you can accept staying here,"
Jaina said.
Han and Leia traded uneasy looks. Luke took his lightsaber from his belt, ignited the blade, and held it over his head. Wordlessly, the other Jedi began to follow suit. Taking note of Leia"s hesitation, Han nodded in encouragement.
"Go," he said quietly, "you"re as much a Jedi as any of them."