Invincible (15 page)

Jaina positioned herself dead center on the floor hatch and made sure her QuietSnipe and lightsaber were magclamped tight to her suit. Then she tucked her elbows tight against her ribs and tried not to think about what might happen to her—and the blastboat—if the drop did not go perfectly.

The status light never changed to green, at least not that Jaina saw. She just heard a loud pop against her helmet, then her stomach jumped, and the inexorable hand of a pressure imbalance shot her into space. Her helmet’s blast-tinting darkened as the brilliant glow of the blastboat’s ion engines shot past—then darkened again as two more sets of ion engines followed.

Jaina checked the heads-up display inside her visor—and felt her heart stick in her throat. A pair of blue Starhunter symbols were coming up underneath her parents’ blastboat, and Saba’s turret had been turned forward to prevent her from hitting the cannon barrels as she ejected.

Her right arm came up almost of its own accord. Luke’s admonitions were still fresh in her mind, but with a free shot like that, the Starhunters could take out her entire family. Jaina fixed her left eye on the lead fighter and blinked twice.

Its symbol turned red, and she said, “Fire one.”

Her arm shuddered as a mini missile streaked from the dropsuit’s sleeve launcher. The Starhunters opened fire on the blastboat, burning enough bolts into its shields to make its symbol turn yellow. Jaina fixed her eye on the second craft.

Before she could get a lock, the Starhunters detected her missile and stopped firing. They began to jink wildly, but the distances were too small, reaction time nil. The missile entered the target’s left engine and detonated.

The explosion did not happen all at once. The engine simply flickered out, then a yellow spark shot from its exhaust nozzle and extended itself into a red tongue of flame. The Starhunter’s canopy flew off, but before the pilot could eject, the red tongue turned orange and blossomed into the full-sized fireball of an exploding starfighter.

By then, the surviving Starhunter had passed beyond the range of her mini missiles, and Jaina’s only choice was to trust her family to take care of themselves. She hit her thrusters, then started toward the shadowy mass of Nickel One’s dark side.

Between flashes of turbolaser fire, Jaina could already see brilliant domes of light rising from the surface of Nickel One: Jedi shadow bombs, reducing Verpine loading docks to slag and pebbles. Near the middle of the asteroid, a triangular cluster of still-glowing craters marked the ruins of the Knob Nose Transfer Facility. It was located less than a kilometer from the primary command bunker—where her brother would almost certainly be. She locked in the Knob Nose coordinates and began to angle toward the glow, trying to ignore both the terrible sadness she felt at the prospect of success—and the sickening fear that she would fail.

That was when a tiny blue halo appeared in the corner of her vision, winking in and out of view as turbolaser bolts flashed past, growing a little larger each time she saw it. She checked her heads-up display and saw a single Starhunter approaching from the direction her parents had gone, moving slow and sweeping its face back and forth to maximize its sensor sensitivity.

Jaina shut down her thrusters and nonessential systems, trying to make herself as difficult to detect as possible. She could think of only one reason a pilot would approach that slowly in the middle of a battle—and it wasn’t to search for a fellow pilot’s remains. Somebody had ordered him to find the source of the mysterious mini missile that had killed his wingmate.

The blue halo continued to approach, its dark heart assuming the shape of a bent-winged ball. Jaina primed the blaster cannon in the dropsuit’s left arm and tried to ignore the guilty hollow in her stomach. She had done exactly what Luke had warned her against, and now she was in danger of being discovered even before she reached the surface of the asteroid.

But what should she have done? The day she could watch a starfighter blast her family back to atoms would be the day Luke needed to send someone to hunt
her
down.

The Starhunter was close enough now to make out its ball-shaped cockpit and solar array panels. The pilot still seemed to be searching, sweeping slowly back and forth, and Jaina began to hope he would pass without spotting her. If she could remain undetected, maybe his superiors would attribute the mysterious missile to the fog of war and focus their attention elsewhere.

Maybe.

The Starhunter turned directly toward Jaina, so close now that she could see the stripes of passing turbolaser bolts reflected in the pilot’s black goggles. She remained as motionless as was possible when floating weightless, hoping that he was looking in some other direction—but ready to open fire the instant she saw a cannon tip swivel in her direction.

The Starhunter swiveled away, and Jaina let out a sigh of relief. With a little luck, Caedus would never even hear of the other fighter’s unexplained destruction, and she would not have to spend the rest of the mission wondering if he was waiting in ambush for
her.

Then a turbolaser bolt flashed past only a dozen meters behind Jaina, lighting her silhouette, and the pilot’s head snapped around. She used the Force to rip a power cable away from the shield generator on the Starhunter’s left wing brace, then opened fire on the right brace and blasted the communications array into a spray of hot shrapnel.

The pilot reacted instantly, opening fire even as he spun his starfighter back toward Jaina. She hit her thrusters, trying to get in between his solar arrays where he would not be able to target her, but was not quite fast enough. A streak of red heat flashed past her shoulder so close that she felt its warmth even inside her dropsuit.

A failure alarm chimed inside Jaina’s helmet. In the next instant, she crashed through a solar array wing and found herself tumbling wildly out of control. The Starhunter shot out from under her and started a steep climb, no doubt looping back to attack. Then she was spun around toward the near end of the asteroid, where the
Harbinger
was belching flame and bodies through half a dozen hull breaches and still continuing to pour turbolaser fire after its fleeing attackers.

Jaina checked the damage display inside her faceplate and discovered that the feed line to her right-side maneuvering jets had been cut. She ordered the dropsuit’s computer brain to shut down the line, then quickly brought herself more or less under control…and saw the Starhunter coming out of its loop directly ahead, just a few degrees from being able to bring its weapons to bear.

Jaina dived under the Starhunter and began a sloppy corkscrew toward the surface of the asteroid. There was no question of outrunning the starfighter—or, with her right-side maneuvering jets disabled, of outflying him. But at least she could give him something else to worry about as he targeted her.

Streaks of cannon fire began to stab past her all too soon, darkening the blast-tinting in her faceplate then bursting into tiny cups of flame as they struck the asteroid five kilometers below. She locked her thrusters on maximum and snapped her lightsaber off its magclamp—then found herself flying blind as a cannon bolt hit something critical on the asteroid and triggered a secondary explosion that sent flames spraying up at least a kilometer above the surface.

Jaina pulled up, swinging her boots around beneath her. The dropsuit’s tiny inertial compensator screamed in protest and let the g forces rise high enough to dim her vision. When she could see again, cannon bolts were flashing past all around and the dark ball of the Starhunter’s cockpit was swelling in front of her.

She dropped her arm and activated her lightsaber in the same instant, then glimpsed the startled pilot pushing his yoke forward as his starfighter streaked into the glowing blade.

Because the blade was pure energy, there was no true impact. Instead, Jaina saw the tip touch the cockpit, then felt a small shock wave slam into her dropsuit. It sent her tumbling, only a few meters above the Starhunter’s tail of superheated ions.

Damage alarms began to chime inside her helmet again. She deactivated the lightsaber and slapped it back into its magclamp, then brought herself under control. By the time she had turned back toward the Starhunter, it was just a distant coil of efflux, spiraling down toward the asteroid.

After a few deep breaths to calm herself, she checked her damage report. Her air scrubbers had been disabled—knocked free of their mountings, most likely. With no way to repair them and only fifteen minutes of good air left, Jaina began her own descent, following the damaged starfighter toward the center of the asteroid.

She felt sure she had destroyed the Starhunter’s comm array before the pilot could report seeing her. Whether that would work in her favor, she had no idea. His superiors might decide that both craft had simply been lost to StealthXs, or they might realize that something else had taken the pair out. She could only hope for the best—and be alert for the worst.

As the Starhunter neared the surface of the asteroid—not far from Jaina’s primary landing zone near the Knob Nose Transfer Facility—a torrent of flames shot up to engulf it. Had she not seen a similar detonation just a few moments earlier, she might have believed that she was just seeing things wrong, that the starfighter had actually crashed
before
the explosion.

But Jaina knew better. As the Starhunter had neared the surface, the blast had erupted
beneath
it—and that could only mean one thing: cluster mines.

Now with just twelve minutes’ air left, Jaina did not have much time to reach her secondary landing zone—but she turned toward the far end of the asteroid anyway. Cluster mines and dropsuits did not mix, and that made her wonder whether it had been the Moffs or her brother who had foreseen the wisdom of trapping the area around the command center.

Jaina had just started to debate the answer when the arrow-shaped silhouette of a blastboat came streaking down from space, dodging wildly and laying cannon fire with an accuracy that betrayed its two Jedi gunners. It was being escorted by a whole wing of dark, pretty wedges—Fett’s
Bes’uliike
—and a pair of flying boxes that could only be Mandalorian
Tra’kads.

A cold knot of fear formed inside Jaina’s chest. She didn’t need the Force to know that Luke, Saba, and her parents were in the blastboat, preparing to grab Caedus’s attention by attacking the command bunker directly. Her first instinct was to warn them off—but her brother would be inside the bunker, as alert to any alarm she sent through the Force as Remnant eavesdroppers would be to a comm transmission. To caution them was to betray her presence—and her mission.

The blastboat passed overhead, waggling its wings just enough to make Jaina wonder if her father had seen her. She didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t turn away. This had to be the moment her uncle had warned her about, the moment when she resisted her emotions and trusted her parents as they were trusting her.

The blastboat continued toward the command bunker, weaving and dodging as the surface gunners concentrated their fire. The
Bes’uliike
came close on its tail, loosing missiles and pouring cannon fire into enemy weapons emplacements. The two
Tra’kads
stayed high but close, using the
Bes’uliike
like shields. Jaina was puzzled by their presence, until she recalled a comment Fett had made about them being good insertion craft for commandos. Clearly, the Mandalorians intended to honor their mutual-aid treaty with the Verpine.

When cluster mines did not start detonating, Jaina began to hope she had been wrong about what she had seen—or that her uncle had disabled them with some Force technique she had not even realized he possessed.

Then the first spray of flame and shrapnel erupted beneath a
Bes’uliik,
not so much tearing through its
beskar
hull as simply splitting it open, and the annihilation began. Jaina watched in horror as detonation after detonation shot up, sometimes engulfing the starfighters so completely that they just ceased to exist, sometimes hurling them away in spinning whorls of fire.

Her parents’ blastboat continued toward its target, picking its way as though her father knew where every mine was hidden, dodging away just before a neighboring
Bes’uliik
triggered a detonation.

As it passed deeper into the conflagration, Jaina began to wonder how much of this her uncle had foreseen—whether he had known about the minefield all along, or had just sensed that something terrible might happen to the escort squadron. It didn’t matter. Either answer explained why he had ordered the Owools to stay behind, and either answer made conning the Mandalorians into taking their place an act of ruthless manipulation. When it came to cold calculation, Fett was so far out of his league that Jaina almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The detonations began to come so fast and furious that it looked like Mustafar had cracked open. One of the
Tra’kads
got caught in a column of flame and vanished in a white flash. The other banked away and started in Jaina’s direction, dropping toward the asteroid surface and trailing smoke, flame, and bodies. Trying not to wonder how many of the friends she had made during her time on Mandalore had just died—and hoping Mirta Gev was not among them—she continued to watch until the minefield finally began to expend itself and she could see her parents’ blastboat circling around for an attack run.

Now that the inferno was dying down, they were diving straight at the command bunker, pounding it with cannon fire and missiles. Following close behind were the ten
Bes’uliike
that had survived the detonations, still flying cover for the blastboat—but, Jaina suspected, none too happy about it.

Boba Fett was no idiot. He would understand how Luke had taken advantage of him, and—while he never betrayed his word—this would be the last time he ever gave it to a Jedi.

And that was just as well. Working with your enemies was a good way to take a blaster bolt in the ear. Jaina swung back around and started toward the Knob Nose Transfer Facility. A lot of Mandalorians had lost their lives clearing her primary landing zone, and she wasn’t going to waste their sacrifice.