Star by Star (55 page)

They were coming fast. Mara activated her tactical display and saw the Star Destroyer streaking toward Eclipse’s star, its forward turbolaser batteries blasting a clear path through the enormous asteroid disk that passed for a planetary system even at the edge of the Deep Core. There were eight light cruisers and twice that number of frigate and corvette analogs on his tail, and they were all traveling far too fast to intend decelerating anywhere near Eclipse.

“Corran, what’s happening?” Mirax commed. “Why aren’t you launching?”

“Han’s right, Mirax. Booster has something up his sleeve.” There was a moment’s pause, then Corran added, “I apologize, Master Skywalker.”

Mara was not sure whether the relief she felt was her own or Luke’s—or both.

“I’m sure you’d do the same for me, Corran,” Luke said. There was no hint of irritation in either his voice or his emotions. “We’ll launch after they pass. Can I count on you to keep a clear head?”

“It might be better if Han took Battle Control,” Corran admitted. “I seem to have, uh, seated myself in the wrong vessel.”

Han did not argue. Like Mara and Luke and most others old enough to have fought in the Rebellion, he had engaged in enough heroics to last five lifetimes; now, he was content to go where he was needed and let the combat come to him.

“The
Venture
has been hulled,” Watch reported.

Somehow, Mirax managed to limit her outcry to a strangled gasp. Mara would have filled the channel with curses that would have made even Rigard Matl blush.

“Venting debris now.”

Mara looked to her tactical display and saw a cloud of flotsam drifting in Eclipse’s general direction as the
Venture
flashed past. The Star Destroyer swayed wildly from side to side, as though struggling to retain control after the hit, then suddenly cleared a new path with a volley from its port turbolasers. Turning as sharply as a Star Destroyer could, it angled for a dense mass of asteroids just in-sun from Eclipse.

“He’s setting us up,” Han said. “Launch by—”

“Wait!” Mara said, still watching the debris cloud descend toward Eclipse. “Watch, scan that flotsam for life-forms. Booster wasn’t hit—he threw that stuff at us.”

Before Watch could comply, Corran said, “Mara, thank you. I can feel Jysella and Valin reaching out to me.”

“Affirmative,” Watch said. “Those are escape pods.”

“Leia, can you send Han up to Control and oversee the pod recovery in the
Falcon
?” Luke asked. “And you and Mirax can help her, Corran.”

Corran was already setting his X-wing down next to the
Falcon
. “I’d like nothing better. Thank you.”

“Everyone else, launch—carefully—by squadrons,” Luke ordered. “Watch, lower the shield. Sabers … three, two, mark.”

Mara activated her repulsorlift and followed Luke’s X-wing out of the hangar, sweeping around an escape pod and waving at a pair of wide-eyed young Jedi students watching her through
their viewport. By the time the other three squadrons had formed up behind them, the Star Destroyer and its pursuers were already out of visual range and, as they eased into the asteroid cluster, growing difficult to find even on the tactical display.

Mara thought their approach might remain undetected—until a handful of frigates poked their noses out of the asteroid cluster and began to drop their skips.

“They must want Booster pretty desperately,” Mara observed.

“Or they don’t know who we are,” Luke answered. The asteroid cluster came into visual range now, the flash of the Star Destroyer’s sixty turbolaser batteries lighting up the interior like a tiny red dwarf star. “All X-wings, lock S-foils into firing position. Don’t be stingy with those shadow bombs.”

“Farmboy, you’d better hold back a minute,” Han commed.

“Hold back?”

“Affirmative, hold—”

Han’s voice dissolved into static as the asteroid cluster began to explode mountainous rock by mountainous rock, sixty of them in staccato succession, each one spraying millions of tons of superheated stone in every direction at several thousand meters a second. On her tactical display, Mara saw a boulder split one of the frigates down the spine and glimpsed a cruiser analog tumbling out of the cluster in three separate sections, then Luke was yelling “Break, break!” and ducking them behind the shelter of a city-sized asteroid.

When Han’s voice returned, he was explaining, “… old smuggler’s trick. Shunt all engine power to the particle shields, then heat an asteroid behind them and wait for it to explode.” He paused a moment, then added, “Works really well with a Star Destroyer.”

“You could have warned us earlier, Control,” Mara observed.

“Hey—do I look like a Jedi mind reader?”

The rubble wave reached them then, tumbling past in lightninglike streaks of gray, occasionally shattering a nearby asteroid with the flash of a detonating proton torpedo. Their own mountainous shield took several hits that jolted the whole rock noticeably and pelted their particle shields with sprays of loosened pebbles, and finally the storm was past, slowly dissipating as the debris spray dispersed and gave up so much momentum to
collisions that the individual shards no longer had the energy to explode on impact.

When they poked their noses out from behind their shield, Mara was astonished to find the
Venture
on her tactical display where there had been only the asteroid cluster before. There were a few blank spots on the array where clouds of dust or frozen vapor confused the sensors, but most alarming were the squadrons of A-wing and Y-wing starfighters spilling from the Star Destroyer’s launching bays. The tactical display marked them all as New Republic craft, but … the Star Destroyer reduced the number of cruiser analogs to five with a devastating turbolaser volley, and the A-wings reduced it to four with a highspeed concussion missile-proton torpedo combination pass.

“Farmboy, the
Errant Venture
doesn’t have a fighter squadron,” Mara commed. “Let alone six.”

“Try ten, Jedi,” an unfamiliar voice said over the tactical net. “And we’re just hitching a ride on the
Venture
. We’re Reecee fleet—all that remains of it.”

A piece fell into place in Mara’s mind, and she saw the tenuous connection she had sensed earlier between the
Shadow
’s, presence at Borleias and the
Venture
’s unexpected arrival at Eclipse.

“A surprise attack?” she asked. “At the same time as Borleias?”

“On its heels,” the voice corrected. “And they meant to keep it that way. The first thing they did was, well, jam our communications. All we’ve got are our fighter comms—and only when we’re outside the Star Destroyer.”

“Jam how?” Luke asked.

“Some sort of dovin basal, we think,” the pilot answered. “The first Reecee knew of the attack was when they swarmed the base shields. We thought they were some sort of mynock at first, but when we tried to transmit, they pulled the signal in like a black hole.”

“
No one
was able to send a message?” Mara asked.

“No one. The
Venture
caught a dose when she came to get us,” he said. “We were trying to clean them off when this task force jumped us at the edge of the Deep Core.”

“So the New Republic doesn’t know that Reecee has fallen,” Luke said.

“Or that the Bilbringi Shipyards have been cut off,” Han added. “But they will soon. I’ll have a message sent now.”

The Star Destroyer’s form grew visible ahead, its nose coming up before the Sabers as it wheeled around to bring its turbolasers to bear on a cruiser trying to attack from above. Mara could just see something that looked like tiny, heart-shaped freckles dotting the white hull—no doubt the signal-devouring dovin basals that the pilot had described. Another cruiser analog was following behind the
Venture
, pouring plasma balls and magma missiles into its vulnerable exhaust ports.

“Sabers and Shockers, take that cruiser on the tail,” Han ordered. “Knights and Dozen, remove the one trying to cut him off.”

“You hear that, Reecee?” Luke asked. A flurry of comm clicks acknowledged. “Good, see if you can clear us a path. We’re coming in hard.”

The Reecee squadrons first engaged the coralskippers in the Jedi’s way, then tried to draw them off by turning to flee. The skips started to fall for the ploy—then abruptly reversed course and began to gather in front of the intended targets.

“They have a yammosk!” Danni actually sounded happy about it. “In that port cruiser. If we can—”

“Check,” a Reecee voice replied. “Thanks for the tip, Jedi.”

Two squadrons of A-wings wheeled on the cruiser instantly, discharging concussion missiles as they dropped. Taking a cue from the fighters, the
Errant Venture
concentrated a whole bank of turbolasers on the vessel, and the hull began to vomit yorik coral immediately.

“Wait!” Danni commed. “I meant capture it! We need it alive!”

The vessel went dead in space and began to drift, bodies and atmosphere streaming from its hull breaches. The coralskippers continued to cluster in the Jedi’s path, their volcano cannons now belching plasma.

“Master Skywalker, it’s still communicating with the skip,” Danni commed. “If we can board it quick enough—”

“Let’s finish this run first, Danni,” Luke replied. “Sabers and Knights, ease off. Shockers and Dozen, you’ll have to clear the way.”

Rigard simply took his squadron and shot ahead toward their target. Kyp, however, did not seem to have fully grasped his assignment.

“Let’s go, Dozen,” he commed, peeling off. “We have first shot!”

The Shockers rocketed into the enemy coralskippers a kilometer ahead of the Sabers and commenced fire, clearing a path to the cruiser as much by forcing the skips to dodge as by blasting them out of the way. Mara saw one Shocker go EV and slam into a chunk of asteroid when a volcano cannon sheered his S-foils, then watched another vanish in a ball of flame as his starfighter smashed headlong into a magma missile.

She and Tam began to weave shields with Luke, each sensing the other’s intentions through the Force, juking and jinking in perfect unison. Mara kept up a constant barrage of laserfire, using the Force more to avoid hitting her own ships than to target the enemy’s. Two skips deteriorated into rubble as she rocketed past behind Luke.

The darkness ahead suddenly grew bright as the Shockers launched their proton torpedoes, then it grew brighter still as the decoy flares deployed. The cruiser retaliated with a barrage of grutchins and magma missiles. Rigard’s squadron was already diving down and away, leaving the weapons to come streaking toward the Sabers.

“Launch!” Luke ordered.

Mara’s shadow bombs were already gone, following Luke’s toward the cruiser. Without really thinking about it, she nosed her X-wing over behind his, one eye on her target as she used the Force to guide the weapon home. Tam’s laser cannon flashed, blasting a grutchin away from her cockpit before it could attach, and then the brilliant flash of the first proton detonation caused her canopy’s blast tinting to darken. More explosions followed in quick succession, and by the time Luke swung the Sabers around, the ship was coming apart.

The inert cruiser lay ahead, surrounded by a cloud of floating bodies and equipment. The rifts in its hull hung dark and ominous, some large enough for an X-wing to enter. Mara checked her tactical display and saw that Luke
could
be thinking what she feared. The
Venture
, now turned on its side next to the Sabers, was already
hammering the last cruiser, and the Reecee squadrons were herding the surviving skips into an ever-tightening sphere, picking them off now by the twos and threes.

“Skywalker,” Mara commed. “A dead yammosk is one thing—”

“They need a live one—and when is it going to be easier?” Luke eased his X-wing toward the largest breach. “Danni’s already shown how valuable it is just to know
when
there’s a yammosk present—imagine what we’ll be able to do when we can intercept its messages.”

“How are you going to carry it back?” Mara asked. “Under your seat?”

“Han, send us the
Jolly Man.
”

“Wait a minute,” Danni said. “Something’s wrong. The yammosk has gone completely silent, and now the skips look confused.”

“That’s enough, Luke,” Mara said. Close to home or not, this felt too easy to be safe. “The Force was with us at Talfaglio. Today, it’s not.”

Luke was already swinging his X-wing around as the flash of an exploding magma magazine tore the vessel apart, bouncing yorik coral off his particle shields and licking his exhaust ports with hundred-meter flames.

Though the skyway balcony was always the grandest entrance to any society apartment, Viqi Shesh had long believed that the interior approach revealed more about the occupants’ station in life. The Solo apartment sat in a sanibuffed cul-de-sac as wide as a speeder avenue, with a floor of milky larmalstone—a costly nonfabricant available only from the Roche asteroid field—and rare red ladalums blooming in rounded wall niches between pillars of white marde. A barrel-vaulted ceiling of custom-made glow panels infused the area with cloudy light, and a smiling Serv-O-Droid greeter—no doubt with the full tattletale security package—stood patiently outside the crystasteel door.

The Solos had certainly come down in the world since Leia’s days as chief of state. Upon learning that they had quietly traded their prestigious Orowood hideaway for something in the more affordable Eastport administrative district, Viqi had at first been inclined to doubt her informer. One did not expect to find two of the Rebellion’s most acclaimed heroes and power brokers living among the bureaucrats—much less at an address nearly three hundred meters down from the top of a not-very-tall tower—but the ladalums convinced her. Unique to Alderaan, the shrubs yielded red blossoms only if their line remained pure to their planet of origin. Given the vicissitudes of disease and cross-pollination, they were, like so many things Alderaanian these days, gradually dying out.

That was what happened to those who lost power, Viqi supposed. They withered slowly away, until one day they were just gone. Like Mon Mothma, like Admiral Ackbar, like Leia Organa Solo—like Viqi herself, after being undone in the senate by Luke Skywalker and his Jedi tricks.