The Unifying Force (5 page)

The Bith’s hunch was verified as the swoop raced through
the vanguard wave of the swarm. Within seconds the down-sloping front cowling was spattered with smashed beetle corpses. Thorsh plucked several from his fur-covered forehead and threw them aside. Just ahead, thousands of lav peq were plummeting into the jungle, tearing through the leafy canopy like hailstones. Thorsh ground his teeth and lowered his head. As strong as the strands were, they were no match for a swoop in the right hands.

Fifty meters away the first web was already taking shape. Thorsh squinted in misgiving. More tightly woven than any he had seen on other worlds, the web actually obscured the trees. It took only a moment to realize that Selvaris’s species of netting beetle was special. While half the swarm was flying horizontally at various levels, the other half was flying in vertical rows. The result was a warp-and-weft weave—a veritable curtain that, for all Thorsh knew, could snare the swoop as easily as a spiderweb might a nightfly.

Extending his legs behind him, he flattened himself over the surging engine. With a distressed cry, the Bith followed suit, pressing himself to Thorsh’s back.

Thorsh cranked the accelerator for all it was worth, aiming for what he thought might be an area of relatively few trees. The swoop ripped through the webs at better than two hundred kilometers per hour, each successive curtain parting with loud cleaving sounds that sometimes resembled screams. Rear-guard beetles struck the cowling with the force of malleable bullets, and the Bith yelped in pain time and again. The swoop wobbled and the repulsorlift began to howl in protest. Thorsh fought to hold on to the handgrips as they were yanked from side to side by the viscous strands. He risked an ascent, only to learn the hard way that the situation was even more perilous in the upper reaches of the trees, where the branches fanned out and the leaves were home to clouds of insatiable needle fliers.

Refusing to give a centimeter, he demanded every last bit of power from the struggling machine. Then, all at once, the swoop tore through the final web. Sticky strands cooked on the superheated engine, sending out an acrid smell. Thorsh coughed strands from his throat and pawed others away from his stinging eyes.

He brought the swoop to a halt just long enough to clear the exhaust ports and fan housing. His swearing passenger might have been wearing a long white wig. Thorsh had his right hand back on the accelerator when a pained shriek erupted from the jungle, punctuating the cacophony of birdcalls. He heard a familiar roar, and not a moment later the second swoop bobbed into view, bearing only the pilot.

“The nets got him!” the Bith pilot shouted over the irregular throb of a choked engine. He twisted the accelerator to keep the swoop idling. “I’m going back for him!”

Thorsh spit web from his mouth and scowled. “Don’t be a fool.”

“He’s alive—”

“Better that you are,” Thorsh interrupted. He jerked his bearded chin to the west. “The estuary. Get going!”

Thorsh spurred the swoop through a quick circle and darted off into the trees, the Bith hanging on to what was left of the Jenet’s flight jacket. Punching through the dense jungle that grew along the shore of the island, they found themselves back in the blinding light of Selvaris’s double suns. Coaxing more speed from the rapidly failing engine, pilot and passenger leaned the swoop through a sweeping turn that carried them out over brackish water, inky with organics leached from the trees. They soared at top speed a few meters above the calm surface, racing past narrow, meandering channels of pellucid fresh water, bubbled up from the planet’s underground and teeming with brilliantly colored fish.

From the far shore came the urgent woofing and snarling of bissop hounds, galloping through swamps and across berms of scalpel grass. The harsh barks were accompanied by the war cries of Yuuzhan Vong chase teams, running behind the pack. Thorsh banked just in time to avoid a horde of thud and razor bugs that whirled out of the trees, passing within centimeters of the swoop and tearing into the opposite shoreline.

Drawn by the commotion, schools of sharp-toothed predators, showing multifinned backs and serrated tails, leapt from the water to gorge on the airborne weapon bugs. Wide-winged raptors with huge wingspans left the fungus-filled cavities of
dying trees to glide down and grab whatever bugs the aquatic behemoths missed.

Thorsh pulled at the handgrips and sent the swoop into a steep climb. The saline water grew more agitated beneath them as the mouth of the estuary came into view, a line of white where curling waves broke against the marshy shore. Hundreds of white-cliffed islets, straight as towers and draped with vegetation, rose from out of the aquamarine ocean. On the horizon a volcano mounded from the water, great clouds of smoke billowing from its crater and bleeding a thick river of lava that turned part of the sea to steam.

Thorsh scanned the otherwise clear sky for signs of the coralskipper. A kilometer away to the east, the other swoop was paralleling him. Gaining altitude, the two machines sped out over the breaking waves, making for the narrow channel that separated the islets closest to shore.

“Heads up!” the Bith said into Thorsh’s right ear. His long-fingered hand shot out, indicating an object in the western sky.

Thorsh tracked it and nodded, muttering a curse.

The Yuuzhan Vong called it a tsik vai. Reminiscent of a seabird, it was an atmospheric search craft, its neck sac inflated and bright red as a signal to other craft in the area. Powered by a gravity-sensitive dovin basal, the monstrosity had a transparent blister cockpit, flexible wings, and gill analogs that made it whine in flight.

Thorsh threw his weight against the handgrips and leaned hard against the steering auxiliaries, slewing the swoop toward the closest island, intent on keeping as close to the white cliffs as he dared.

The tsik vai was not unnerved. It dived for its small prey, whining and releasing several thin, cablelike grasping tendrils.

Thorsh dropped back to the turbulent surface, swerved, and cut across the channel for the neighboring islet, running full out, a meter above the waves. The search craft was following him down, prepared to make another grab, when something nailed it from behind.

Thorsh and the Bith watched in bafflement as the tsik vai veered off course, one wing blown off, and spiraled out of
control. It struck the sea with a loud splash, skipped twice on the waves, then crashed nose-first and began to sink. Out of the eastern sky, dazzled by sunlight, something large and dull-black was approaching at supersonic speed.

Another Yuuzhan Vong vessel, Thorsh decided, whose pilot had just shot down one of his own craft to get to the swoop.

Twitching the braking thrusters, he spun the swoop around in midair, hoping to race away from the mystery vessel before it could draw a bead on him. Even so, he waited for the fireballs to start falling. When they didn’t, he glanced over his shoulder in time to see a twin-mandibled old freighter come streaking out of the cloudless sky. Thorsh felt crackling heat wash over him as the ship made a low, earsplitting, teeth-rattling pass, its dorsal laser cannon loosing green hyphens of energy at a trio of pursuing coralskippers.

The freighter signaled the swoops with a rocking motion, then banked into a long sweeping turn to the south.

“Looks like our ride’s here!” Thorsh said.

“And in worse trouble than we are!”

A flurry of well-placed bursts from the freighter’s top gunner caught the lead coralskipper head-on and sent it boiling into the sea.

The other two enemy craft continued to pummel the freighter with plasma missiles. Perhaps frustrated by the ship’s seemingly impenetrable shields, one of the skip pilots took aim on the Bith-piloted swoop. Caught in midair by a single lava-hot projectile, the machine disappeared without a trace.

Thorsh clenched his jaws and steered the swoop for deeper water. The swoop was grazing the white crests of five-meter waves when something enormous rose from beneath the heaving surface.

“Cakhmaim’s getting to be a pretty good shot,” Han said over the sound of the reciprocating quad laser cannon. “Remind me to up his pay—or at least promote him.”

Leia glanced at him from the copilot’s chair. “From bodyguard to what—butler?”

Han pictured the Noghri in formal attire, setting meals in
front of Han and Leia in the
Falcon
’s forward cabin. His upper lip curled in delight, and he laughed shortly. “Maybe we should see how he does with the rest of these skips.”

The YT-1300 was just coming out of her long turn, with Selvaris’s double suns off to starboard and an active volcano dominating the forward view. Below, green-capped, sheer-sided islands reached up into the planet’s deep blue sky, and the aquamarine sea seemed to go on forever. Two coral-skippers were still glued to the
Falcon
’s tail, chopping at it and holding position through all the insane turns and evasions, but so far the deflector shields were holding.

His large hands gripped on the control yoke, Han glanced at the console’s locator display, where only one bezel was pulsing.

“Where’d the other swoop go?”

“We lost it,” Leia said.

Han leaned toward the viewport to survey the undulating sea. “How could we lose—”

“No, I mean it’s gone. One of the coralskippers took it out.”

Han’s eyes blazed. “Why, that—which one of ’em?”

Before Leia could answer, two plasma missiles streaked past the cockpit, bright as meteors and barely missing the starboard mandible.

“Does it matter?”

Han shook his head. “Where’s the other swoop?”

Leia studied the locator display, then called up a map from the terrain sensor, which showed everything from the mouth of the estuary clear to the volcano. Her left forefinger tapped the screen. “Far side of that island.”

“Any skips after it?”

A loud explosion buffeted the
Falcon
from behind.

“We seem to be the popular target,” Leia said. “Just the way you like it.”

Han narrowed his eyes. “You bet I do.”

Determined to lure their pair of pursuers away from the swoop, he threw the freighter into a sudden ascent. When they had climbed halfway to the stars, he dropped the ship into a stomach-churning corkscrew. Pulling out sharply, he twisted the ship through a looping rollover, emerging from
the combo headed in the opposite direction, with the two coralskippers in front of him.

He grinned at Leia. “Now who’s in charge?”

She blew out her breath. “Was there ever any doubt?”

Han focused his attention on the two enemy craft. Over the long years, Yuuzhan Vong pilots faced with impossible odds had surrendered some of the suicidal resolve they had displayed during the early days of the war. Maybe word had come down from Supreme Overlord Shimrra or someone that discretion really was the better part of valor. Whatever the case, the pilots of the two skips Han was stalking apparently saw some advantage to fleeing rather than reengaging the ship their plasma missiles had failed to bring down. But Han wasn’t content to send them home with their tails tucked between their legs—especially not after they had killed an unarmed swoop pilot he had come halfway across the galaxy to rescue.

“Cakhmaim, listen up,” he said into his headset mike. “I’ll fire the belly gun from here. We’ll put ’em in the Money Lane and be done with them.”

Money Lane
was Han’s term for the area where the quad lasers’ firing fields overlapped. In emergency situations, both cannons could be fired from the cockpit, but the present situation didn’t call for that. What’s more, Han wanted to give Cakhmaim the chance to hone his firing technique. All Han and Leia had to do was help line up the shots.

From the way the coralskippers reacted to the
Falcon
’s sudden turnabout, Han could almost believe that the enemy pilots had been eavesdropping on his communication with the Noghri. The first skip—the more battered of the pair, showing charred blotches and deep pockmarks—poured on all speed, separating from his wingmate at a sharp angle. Smaller and faster, and seemingly helmed by a better pilot, the second skip shed velocity in an attempt to trick the
Falcon
into coming across his vector.

That was the skip that had taken out the swoop, Han decided, sentencing the pilot to be the first to feel the
Falcon
’s wrath.

Leia guessed as much, and immediately plotted an intercept course.

Exposed, the skip pilot went evasive, moving into the gun-sights and out again, but with mounting panic as the
Falcon
settled calmly into kill position. The dorsal laser cannon was programmed to fire three-beam bursts that, all these years later, still had the ability to outwit the dovin basals of the older, perhaps more dim-witted coralskippers. While the enemy craft was quick to deploy a gravitic anomaly that engulfed the first and second beams, the third got through, blowing a huge chunk of yorik coral from the vessel’s fantail. Han tweaked the yoke to place the skip in the Money Lane, and his left hand tightened on the trigger of the belly gun’s remote firing mechanism. Sustained bursts from the twin cannons whittled the skip to half its size; then it blew, throwing pieces of coral wreckage in every direction.

“That’s for the swoop pilot,” Han said soberly. He turned his attention to the second skip, which, desperate to avoid a similar fate, was jinking and juking all over the sky.

Zipping through the showering remains of the first kill, the
Falcon
quickened up and pounced on the wildly maneuvering skip from above. The targeting reticle went red, and a target-lock tone filled the cockpit. Again the quad lasers rallied, catching the vessel with burst after burst until it disappeared in a nimbus of coral dust and white-hot gas.

Han and Leia hooted. “Nice shooting, Cakhmaim!” he said into the headset. “Score two more for the good guys.”

Leia watched him for a moment. “Happy now?”

Instead of replying, Han pushed the yoke away from him, dropping the
Falcon
to within meters of the surging waves. “Where’s the swoop?” he asked finally.