The Unifying Force (32 page)

“Welcome back, Twin Suns Leader,” a recognizable voice said into her helmet earphones.

“Thanks, Wedge,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been away for a week.”

“Terrific work, Jaina. Your rally point is Iceberg Three, at four-seven-nine ecliptic. You’re to stand by until the seeding’s concluded.”

“Copy, Alliance control. Standing by.”

Instructing Twin Suns to form up on her, Jaina led the squadron to its assigned coordinates, at fixed orbit over the frozen spheroid, in the company of a wing of starfighters made up of Rogue, Vanguard, Scimitar, Blackmoon, and Tesar Sabatyne’s Wild Knights.

“Hey, Sticks,” another familiar voice said.

Jaina opened a channel to Gavin Darklighter. “How long have you been sitting here, Rogue One?”

“Too long. Was Intelligence correct about the number of Vong ships?”

“I think they underestimated.”

Before Gavin could respond, Wedge broke in. “Group and squadron leaders, the beast is at the gate. I know you’re all eager to welcome it, but you’re going to have to wait your turns.”

The comm fell eerily silent, then erupted in chatter as the Yuuzhan Vong war vessels began to emerge: cones and polygons, faceted and smooth, bone white to reddish black, craggy with plasma launchers or strung with coralskippers. More rapidly and in increasing numbers they came, filling local space and eventually blotting out Mon Calamari’s distant sun. Just when it seemed that the last of them had reverted, still more appeared.

Somewhat removed from Alliance forces, and almost as if performing for an audience, the vessels began to tighten up, maneuvering into positions that ultimately created an oblate mass of yammosk carriers and destroyer and cruiser analogs. From that mass—emerging from berthing cavities in the largest ships or dropping from anchorage on yorik coral branches—streamed hundreds of picket ship analogs and coralskippers, deploying to forge the multitude of short and long tendrils that were meant to simulate the tentacles of a yammosk.

To Jaina the final arrangement more closely resembled a flaring star, or perhaps the spiral arm galaxy the Yuuzhan Vong were determined to overwhelm. But whatever the armada’s form,
beast
was the description that fit it best.

Then the immense organism was on the move, tentacles elongating from the hub as the cluster advanced on Mon Calamari, acutely aware of the reception party that awaited it, but resolute in its purpose.

“All group and squadron leaders,” a male voice announced over the battle net, “seedships have arrived.”

Alliance command might have borrowed the term from the Yuuzhan Vong, but the reference was not to the vessels that initiated the process of worldshaping; it was to the several dozen unarmed and remotely piloted freighters that gushed from behind Iceberg Three and launched straight for the armada. Plasma missiles assaulted the bulky container ships from all quarters, though armor plating kept most of them intact until they were within the embrace of the longer
tentacles. There they surrendered their payloads of thousands of probe droids.

With wide-domed heads and dangling mechanical legs, the probots were marine in appearance, and indeed they spread out like a school of deep-sea creatures riding the currents of a rising tide.

Normally the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t have wasted firepower on droids, but each probot had been programmed to mimic the propulsion signatures of Alliance starfighters, so the coralskippers and pickets had a field day, slagging the probots with fiery projectiles, or simply dismembering them by collision. The Alliance might as well have been providing the yammosks and coralskipper pilots with practice for acquisition and targeting, but in fact each probot was contributing invaluably to Alliance command’s goal of clearing fire lanes to the heart of the armada.

Many of the battles fought during the long war had been decided not by firepower or kill ratios, but by the ability of Yuuzhan Vong biots to detect mass signals and to manipulate gravity. As intelligent as the yammosks were, they were evenly matched by the crunching power of battle analysis computers, combined with the targeting skill of pilots. The dovin basals were a different animal. For a time the Alliance had managed to outwit them by employing decoys, stutter-fire lasers, and the Jedi-propelled shadow bombs, but those advantages had recently been lost.

Still, the Alliance had one powerful weapon in its arsenal:
invention
.

Gleeful as they were about decimating the probots, the Yuuzhan Vong were unaware that each droid had been tasked to calculate entry points and targeting solutions for the star-fighters. Transmitted to Alliance command’s computers, the data were collated and relayed to group and wing commanders, and on to squadron leaders and pilots.

“Your droids should be receiving navigational and targeting information,” the voice of control said into Jaina’s right ear. “Watch your display screens for assignments.”

Data began to flash on the cockpit display as Cappie deciphered the information forwarded from Mon Calamari. Jaina watched a graphic representation of the yammosk resolve
on the screen, with each tentacle of skips and gunboats assigned a number or letter. Twin Suns, Rogue, and Vanguard Squadrons were tasked with taking out tentacles fourteen through twenty. But as impatient as she was to go to guns, there was an order to battle that had to be maintained.

The first assault wave was comprised of A-wings, TIE interceptors, Chiss clawcraft, A-9 Vigilances, and a handful of Y-wings. The objective of the fastest of the starfighters—the A-wings and A-9s—was to tease the coralskippers out of formation. Both fighter types were small and fragile, but the short-range concussion missile launchers of the former and the fire-linked lasers of the latter did to the outlying coral-skippers what the skips had done to the probots.

For each dovin basal singularity that came to the rescue of a targeted ship, four failed to deploy in time, allowing the small fighters to strike and fade before the Yuuzhan Vong pilots even knew what hit them. Harried, the coralskippers and picket vessels that formed the tips of the tentacles began to disperse, and as soon as they did the dagger-shaped TIE interceptors and light bomber Y-wings were on them, weaving through the budding chaos with blinding speed and loosing proton torpedoes and bursts of high-powered laserfire.

The perimeter of the shifting armada became a blur of roiling fireballs and fragmenting vessels. Packets of green energy and nova-bright bundles of explosive power began to eat away at the suddenly flailing tentacles. Molten ejecta rocketed outward at the attackers, in such abundance the armada might almost have been hemorrhaging.

Jaina switched over to the battle net in time to hear control issue the order to withdraw. “We have clear fire lanes to their capital ships at one, six, seven, eight, twelve, and twenty-two. All starfighters in those lanes reposition to escorts and carriers.”

While the starfighters began to loop back, the Super Star Destroyer
Guardian
and the Mon Calamari cruiser
Harbinger
lumbered forward. Traversing, their ranged weapons poured huge bolts of destructive power down the unprotected lanes. Explosions blossomed at the heart of the armada, all but setting it aglow. Colossal pieces of yorik coral
streaked through local space. The beast withered visibly, but stuck to its course.

“Second group away!” Alliance control ordered.

Jaina licked the sweat from her upper lip and punched the X-wing’s throttle, leading Twin Suns swiftly into the fray. The forward view through the canopy showed so many coral-skippers, so many targets of opportunity, she felt as if she were part of an elaborate simulation rather than engaged in actual battle.

Remotely controlled by however many yammosks were contained in the core, the tentacles slithered and snapped like amphistaffs. Skips moved in and out of her targeting reticle faster than she, or even Cappie, could keep track of them. For all the shrieking and yelping, the astromech droid might have been on a thrill ride. Even so, Twin Suns managed to maintain its integrity as it advanced on the whipping rank of vessels that had been designated tentacle fourteen.

Behind the X-wings flew B-wing fighters and a squadron of TIE defenders. In combat the B-wings were somewhat cross-shaped, whereas the TIEs—with their elongated bodies and triads of solar collection panels—resembled arrowlike projectiles. Their job was to mop up any mess that Twin Suns, Rogue, and the rest left behind, and to clear the way for the ships tasked with landing punches on the capital vessels: heavily armored E-wing fighters equipped with proton torpedoes, and twin-piloted Scimitar assault bombers, carrying enough concussive strafing power to decommission half the rock spitters of an enemy destroyer analog.

Coralskippers with enough fight left in them began peppering the X- and B-wings with plasma nodules and marshaling their dovin basals to make grabs for the attackers’ particle shields.

Then, without warning, capital ships at the heart of the armada funneled furious firestorms along the depleted lanes. Jaina’s X-wing wobbled and tumbled through a swirling corridor of flames. With the starfighter’s shields all but incinerated, she rammed the control stick to one side to free herself, rolling out of volcanic heat with the ship nearly roasted, and Cappie’s dome a drooping hood of molten alloy. She performed a desperate pushover and scanned local space,
dismayed to discover that almost all of the TIE defenders were gone—atomized by the superheated tempest.

The beast hadn’t been stunned by the initial assaults; it had merely been waiting for the right time to counterpunch. And the single blow it delivered had knocked fifty or more starfighters out of the fight.

Jaina was doing a count of Twin Suns when the armada yammosks instructed the tentacle arms to rotate clockwise, and full chains of coralskippers and pickets quickly filled the gaps.

Where moments earlier Jaina was facing six wounded skips, she suddenly found herself in the sights of a ravenous thirty.

A similar thing had happened to Jacen on Duro, three years back.

At the time, he had been helping a group of Ryn refugees fit a synthplas dome over the prefabricated building that was to be their shelter. This time he was off on his own in the Middle Distance, picking his way downhill to a still pool on the floor of a narrow valley.

Jaina?

On Duro, he had passed out and fallen, knocking himself unconscious. This time a forest creeper swept his feet out from under him, and he pitched forward, sliding face-first on muddy ground and sodden deflated leaves until he managed to somersault himself onto his back and extend his hands to the sides. He was still meters from the valley floor when he arrested his descent, but his lightsaber fell prey to momentum and soared free of the cloth belt that cinched his robe. Tumbling end over end through the air, it arced into the depths of the ice-fringed pool below.

Jacen leapt to his feet and vaulted to the water’s edge. Focusing on the center of the concentric waves that were spreading across the pool, he immersed himself in the Force and stretched out his right hand.

The tubular alloy handgrip emerged vertically from the water, but not alone.

It was held in the upraised four-fingered hand of Vergere.

Sekot’s thought projection of the diminutive Fosh, at any rate, looking much younger than the piebald, short-feathered Vergere Jacen had come to know on Coruscant. Her willowy ears and pair of corkscrewing antennae appeared smaller, and her slanted eyes were radiant with wonder. The splayed
feet of her reverse-articulated legs rested just on the surface of the agitated pool.

“Lose something, Jacen?” Sekot asked through Vergere’s wide mouth.

“Not for the first time.” His exhalations formed clouds in the chill air.

“It’s not like you to stumble.”

“My sister Jaina is in danger. I forgot to look where I was going.”

“How often will you allow yourself to be distracted by the dangers she faces?”

This was Vergere as remembered by Sekot, Jacen thought, in contrast to the Vergere who had sacrificed her life at Ebaq 9 to save him and Jaina. “As often as necessary,” he said. “We’re twins, and strongly bonded.”

“What if you were faced with the choice of saving your twin or your uncle? Which do you serve?”

“I serve the Force.”

“The Force would guide you to the correct decision?”

“Why else would I serve it?”

Insubstantial Vergere extended the lightsaber to him. “Reclaim your weapon.”

He called the lightsaber to him and wedged it into the belt of his now muddy robe. The handle was wet and cold, as were his hands, which he rubbed briskly together.

Zonama Sekot had completed a second trial jump without sustaining severe damage. R2-D2 had calculated that the planet was on the galactic ecliptic, close to the Reecee system in the Inner Rim, were the frontier of that arbitrary zone to be extended into the Unknown Regions. One more jump through hyperspace and Zonama Sekot could be back in known space.

Vergere seemed to be watching him. “Do you use your lightsaber to slash or to heal?”

“That’s always been the dilemma.”

Jacen lowered himself to the ground. Broad shafts of sunlight flooded through the giant boras, dappling the leaf duff and dazzling the surface of the pool. Insects skimmed the water and bombinated around him.

“Were you searching for something here?”

“Only answers.”

“As to how best to end the pain, suffering, and death that war has brought to the galaxy. You must trust in the Force, Jacen, if you are to serve it fully.”

“Being a Jedi isn’t just about serving the Force,” he said. “It’s a commitment to valuing all life.”

Sekot brought a smile to Vergere’s whiskered face. “You learned that from your mentor, Vergere.”

“My guide,” Jacen amended.

My guide through the lands of the dead. My herald of tragedy …

“Vergere learned it from me,” Sekot said. “For that is how I felt on being brought to awareness by Leor Hal, the first Magister. You wish to reiterate that the Yuuzhan Vong are part of life, part of the Force, and therefore must be dealt with accordingly.”