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Turning his back on the Ammuud Swooper, leaving her to be destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong when she was so close to escape, would not allow him to live. It would just give him time to tidy up his affairs before guilt—the crushing weight of responsibility abandoned—caused him to find some other way to die.

Coming in at an oblique angle to the new coralskippers’ course, Wedge fired at maximum possible distance. On his sensor board, he saw no indication that his laserfire had done any damage.

But after a moment the squadron of skips vectored, angling toward him.

He could have cheered. They, too, wanted a challenging kill rather than some defenseless freighter. Had their decision not guaranteed his death, he would have cheered.

Wedge kept up his fire, jerking his X-wing back and forth in a bone-jarring evasive pattern, seeing plasma fire streak above, to port, to starboard. His sustained lasers fired straight down the voids of the foremost skip, only occasionally drifting far and fast enough to one side to hit yorik coral.

He felt a tremendous impact and the starfield was suddenly rotating outside his canopy. The X-wing no longer responded to his control of the yoke. Systems failure alarms shrilled in his ears, and he knew he was dead.

Eldo Davip locked down the auxiliary bridge controls, then slapped the button for the new door at the chamber’s rear. It slid open instantly, undamaged, revealing the Y-wing beyond.

A Y-wing. He shook his head as he ran to the cockpit and clambered within. The starfighter was as old as he was, if not older; he suspected it was one of the assembly of “spare parts” vehicles that had been used to fabricate the pipefighters. As he closed the canopy, the door into the auxiliary bridge snapped shut and another bulkhead slid open, meters ahead of him, allowing him a view of space flanked by the emissions of Lusankya’s powerful thrusters.

He started up the starfighter’s engines but couldn’t yet launch. A jury-rigged screen and set of controls went live, and once again Davip could see through Lusankya’s remaining forward holocams, could see instrument readouts.

The dying Super Star Destroyer was drifting to starboard. This probably wasn’t navigational failure. Instead, some dovin basal on the surface of the worldship had to be exerting its gravitational power against Lusankya, trying to turn the vessel aside.

It might work, too. No dovin basal was going to be able to entirely deflect the millions of tons of Lusankya, to counteract the tremendous kinetic energy built up during the ship’s constant acceleration toward the worldship. But a dovin basal might be able to turn her protruding spearhead aside, to reduce the penetration of impact.

Davip wouldn’t have that. He resumed direct control of Lusankya and increased thrust output from her starboard engines, redlining them, bringing the spearpoint back in line.

He’d just stay here and make sure everything went according to plan.

* * *

Czulkang Lah watched as the sharp prow of Lusankya grew in the sky, approaching with a meticulous precision that he could, with a growing sense of detachment, appreciate.

Up close, the crudeness of the protruding spike became evident. He could see scarlike welds suggesting that the thing had been assembled in sections within the triangle ship. Still, its simplicity, and the fact that it had succeeded in serving its intended purpose, was admirable.

It entered the worldship’s atmosphere and, a moment later, struck the viewing lens immediately above.

And Czulkang Lah was gone.

The prow of Lusankya hit the worldship.

Eight kilometers up, before the shock of that impact had even been transmitted along Lusankya’s body, Eldo Davip fired his thrusters and shot out of the vessel’s stern.

He passed between two of the vessel’s thrusters and saw his diagnostics light up as they anticipated possible life-support failure, but then the yellows faded to a safe green.

But still he was feeling vibration. Had he sustained damage that the diagnostics didn’t detect?

It took him a moment to realize that