Star by Star (77 page)

“And leave the bird behind? Never!” Han commed. “You guys take care of things up there.”

“Will do,” Luke said. “And may the Force be with you.”

“Yeah, kid—you, too,” Han said. “Solo out.”

Luke’s thoughts turned to his son. Mara had already plotted an atmosphere-skimming vector that would intercept the
Byrt
and a thousand other vessels streaming up from the Eastport/Imperial City area. But they would have to hurry. The tactical display showed a Yuuzhan Vong frigate group moving to intercept the fleeing starships.

“Gambler—”

“Go,” Lando commed. “A couple of Jedi won’t make a difference here.”

Luke peeled off after Mara, who was already diving away. Noticing that Tam was following, he commed, “Quiet, stay with
the wing. Hisser, you’re in charge. Make it look good until things fall apart, then comet for the rendezvous.”

“You do not want help, Master Farmboy?”

“I want it.” Luke pushed the stick forward and followed Mara under the flaming belly of a kilometer-long KDY New Republic battle cruiser. “But every minute you hold that task force here saves ten thousand New Republic lives.”

“Copy,” Saba said. “Count on us to save a million.”

The comm speaker gave a sharp crackle, then Luke came up on the other side of the cruiser to find a rolling fireball where the tactical display showed Mara’s X-wing.

Jinking around the explosion, he commed, “Mara?”

No answer, but she reached out through the Force, urging him not to worry.
Get Ben
.

R2-D2 tweedled a warning. Luke swung left and narrowly avoided a barrage from the enemy vessel—also a cruiser—that had set the KDY aflame. He designated it a high-priority watch for R2-D2 and automatically fell into a random jink-and-juke evasive pattern. He found Mara silhouetted against the lights of Coruscant’s night side, her number three engine trailing yellow flame, her astromech droid domeless, her S-foils stuck half open—no good for firing or speed.

Had she been anyone else, or their task any but retrieving Ben, Luke would have ordered her to a safe base. With Mara, that was out of the question until their son was safe. He pulled his X-wing alongside hers and pointed at her shield generator.

Mara shook her head. No shields.

Finally frightened, Luke reached out with the Force, consciously reinforcing their bond. Mara reached back and slid into place beneath his X-wing—before he could gesture her over.

They skimmed through the upper atmosphere, giving wide berth to a small battle raging around a skyhook residential platform tethered in low orbit, then began to take incidental fire dodging through an airskiff insertion zone. As they drew nearer the
Byrt
, R2-D2 kept changing the tactical display’s scale to show more detail. It soon grew apparent that the Yuuzhan Vong frigate group was moving to intercept the same starferry they were.

They left the atmosphere again and found themselves surrounded by a dozen small battles as Yuuzhan Vong assault
groups struggled through the interlocking fire zones of Coruscant’s orbital defense platforms. The invaders were succeeding, but slowly and only by weight of superior numbers. In view of the naked eye alone, there were a dozen enemy cruisers venting their entrails into space and hundreds of smaller craft drifting about in aimless, decaying orbits.

Luke started to detour around the combat cluster—and drew an admonishing whistle from R2-D2. A pair of time estimates appeared on the main display, showing that the frigate would beat them to the
Byrt
as it was. Luke adjusted the threat alarms to their most sensitive and set the X-wing on a straight vector.

Something bumped his starfighter’s belly. Luke’s first thought was of Mara, that maybe she’d been hit again; then he felt her apprehension and knew she was there. His X-wing jumped again. He looked over and saw her flying down to one side. She pulled back on her stick and banged her S-foils into his undercarriage, hard.

When she bounced away, they were closed. A new time estimate appeared on Luke’s display. They would intercept the
Byrt
within a few seconds of the Yuuzhan Vong.

“Artoo, is Mara seeing this?”

The droid chirped impatiently, then an explanation appeared on the primary display. R2-D2 was using his transceiver to feed data directly onto her vid displays.

“You could have told me,” Luke said. “Ask how many shadow bombs she has available.”

Mara held up three fingers.

Luke nodded, then flashed three fingers twice and closed his S-foils. “Give us a two-second count.”

The count appeared, and two seconds later they were flying through the combat area at two-thirds an X-wing’s top speed—the best Mara could manage on three engines without drifting into overload ranges. Luke lost his own shields when an enemy corvette used half a dozen dovin basals to rip them in swift succession, drawing down the grab-safety and overloading the generator as it tried to bring up new protection too quickly. But then they were above the defense platforms and out of those battles, streaking after the
Byrt
.

Luke opened a channel to the liner. “Starferry
Byrt
, please alter vector toward incoming X-wings. We’ll eliminate your pursuit.”

There was a short pause, then a deep voice came over the channel. “You gone vac-brain? There are only two of you!” A second New Republic vessel, a sleek KDY staryacht flying with its transponder off, appeared on the tactical display behind the
Byrt
. “We’ll take our chances. No particular reason they’d be after us.”

“There is,” Luke said. On the display, the frigate group—a frigate analog and two corvettes—was gaining on the starferry. “This is Luke Skywalker. You have my son aboard.”

“What?” the captain cried. “This is no time for jokes.”

“No joke,” Luke said. “Alter your vector now.”

Though he doubted it would carry over comm waves, Luke put the weight of the Force behind his words.

The
Byrt
’s vector started to bend.

Mara’s relief washed up from below. Luke checked the tactical display and found the KDY staryacht continuing along its original vector—one less factor to worry about. The
Byrt
came into visible range, a finger-length needle of ion efflux illuminating the yorik coral noses of the three pursuing vessels.

Luke touched the symbol of the rearmost corvette. “Artoo, designate that one for Mara … and tell her to be careful.”

R2-D2 bleeped an acknowledgment. The Jedi split, streaking toward their targets in wild corkscrews. The frigate group dropped skips and began to spray plasma. Lacking shields, Luke and Mara poured on speed and gave their stick hands over to the Force. The enemy vessels swelled into stony monoliths, scabrous and black and half hidden behind whirling curtains of flame. Mara broke toward her corvette, barrel-rolled past half a dozen skips, and launched her shadow bombs.

Luke swung after her. The skips took the bait and rushed to intercept him. He broke back toward the frigate and dodged past a magma missile, slashed a grutchin apart on his closed S-foils, and made an oblique run down the vessel’s flank.

A shielding crew snared his first shadow bomb twenty meters from target. The other two blossomed against the hull. One breached at midships, the other behind the bow. The frigate fell silent and began to vent flotsam. Luke dodged over the top and began a tight turn toward the last corvette.

Her first target already reduced to rubble, Mara was also swinging toward the corvette. Luke could feel her resolve as clearly as his own, but with her shadow bombs gone and her S-foils stuck closed, that was all she had.

“Artoo, tell her to dock with the Byrt.”

The droid whistled negatively. They were too far apart to project data directly onto her screens.

“Great.”

Luke finished his turn, found skips swarming over the corvette to cut him off. The
Byrt
’s two laser cannons began to spray red bolts at the vessel’s nose. The corvette held its fire and extruded capture tentacles.

Luke deployed his S-foils and began to trade fire with the skips. With Corran’s new targeting system, he quickly destroyed the first pair and forced the rest to spread out. A notice alarm beeped on the tactical display. The unidentified staryacht had changed vector, was coming in behind Mara.

“What now?” Luke grumbled. “Get this onto Mara’s display.”

R2-D2 whistled doubtfully.

“
Try.
” Luke juked past a plasma ball and poured cannon bolts into the skip that had launched it. “And open a channel to that yacht.”

A half-dozen skips swung toward Mara. He started after them, then heard her voice in his mind.

No
!

The image of the corvette flashed in Luke’s mind, and he knew that Mara wanted him to concentrate on saving Ben.

Behind you
, Luke returned. He sent a flurry of bolts streaming at the skips, then rolled back toward the corvette. “How about that channel, Artoo?”

An explanation appeared on the primary display.

“They won’t?”

The reason for the staryacht’s silence grew clear when it fired on Mara from behind. Luke twisted around and saw bolts streaming into her starfighter, then the bright flash of a hit. A piece of wing spun off flaming.

Go
! Mara urged. The panic in her thought was for Ben, not herself.

A single word more,
eject
, came to Luke’s mind. Mara wheeled toward the planet, using the Force to hold her X-wing level so it would not go into a tumble when she hit the atmosphere. Luke reached out to envelop her with his love, then looked to his tactical display and found her craft already marked for tracking. There was now a transponder identification below the staryacht: the
Wicked Pleasure
, registered to Senator Viqi Shesh. Luke took a breath and let it out, let his fury go with it.
Then
he marked the vessel as a target of opportunity.

A plasma ball skipped across his nose cone, and the tactical display went dead beneath his fingers. R2-D2 shrieked with static, then fell into an electronic babble as melted comm components and burning sensor packages spilled into space.

Luke soared in among the skips, dodging and rolling and pivoting, targeting by the Force alone and still scoring hits. He blasted one skip into pebbles and suddenly found a clear hole to the corvette. He closed his S-foils and accelerated. The skips whirled after him, pouring fire from behind. The X-wing bucked. Alarm screeches filled the cockpit. The engines lost power, and he decelerated.

Luke launched his shadow bombs anyway. The first veered into a skip’s shielding singularity and detonated barely a hundred meters away. The other two vanished against the corvette’s black silhouette. He kept pushing until their proximity fuses detected the pull of a dovin basal and blasted a pair of deep hollows in the vessel’s hull.

Close, but no breach.

R2-D2 wailed for Luke’s attention. He glanced back and found two engines, possibly all four, burning. He slapped the emergency shutdown, wheeled toward Coruscant, and reached out with the Force, pulling himself toward Mara and her plummeting X-wing.

I couldn’t get to him
, he told her.
I just couldn’t make it
.

Jaina woke to the sound of laughter, with a bright light shining in her eye and a stink in her nose like a Gamorrean refresher station. The laugh was just the sort of mad cackle one would expect in a Kala’uun ryll den, but she knew better than to think her throbbing head and aching shoulder were the by-products of a
spice dream. This nightmare was real. Nom Anor’s frigate had shot down her stolen shuttle, Jacen and the rest were stranded on an enemy worldship, Anakin was dead.

The longblaster roared, and another mad cackle sounded somewhere forward of Jaina.

“Did you see that one?” Alema Rar chortled. “I cut him in two.”

“Good,” Jaina rasped. The effort filled her head with pain, but she welcomed it, drew strength from it. “Kill some more.”

“Be quiet, Jaina,” Zekk said, his voice condemning. The light shifted to her other eye. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And you do?” Jaina slapped the glow stick aside, and the foul-smelling stinksalts, as well. “You don’t even
have
a brother.”

“But I do know the dark side,” he said. “It isn’t the answer.”

“Who said I was turning to the dark side?” Jaina asked.

“You used the Force to kill.”

Zekk did not say more.

Jaina looked away from Zekk’s dark eyes. “He had it coming.” Her numbness had been replaced with raw fury, and she was glad. “You saw what he did to Anakin.”

“Anakin is beyond insults,” Zekk said evenly. “And what about Vergere? You attacked her, too.”

“I was angry.”

Gritting her teeth against the pain, Jaina sat up and looked around. The inside of the shuttle was a listing mass of clutter, with a long crack running the length of the hull and a fluid-smeared tangle of cognition hoods and burst villips strewn across the flight deck. Jaina flashed on a garbled memory of struggling with those controls to keep the nose up, of skimming a crater rim and coming down like the rock the shuttle was, of skipping across the basin floor and rolling sideways and decelerating sharply as the nose caught … then there was nothing, only a vague feeling of pitching forward and the sound of screaming voices and a sudden darkness.

Across from Jaina, Tahiri lay on a litter next to Anakin, one obviously broken arm resting across the husk in which his body
was encased. Barely half lucid, she was still talking to him, describing how they had tracked him down in the Yuuzhan Vong mortuary.

In the back of the vessel, Lowbacca let out a low groan as he moved something heavy into place. He rumbled softly to himself in the half-slurred voice of a Wookiee with a concussion, then let what sounded like a rock plop into a pool of viscous liquid. A sodden bang followed, and an instant after that, the distant crackle of an erupting plasma ball.

“A little short,” Alema called from the forward door. “Raise it one degree, and you’ll burn them crisp.”