Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [16]
“We’re on the cruiser to the east,” Gavin announced. “Senior members have proton torps; everyone else, you’ll have to make do with lasers. Sorry. Break by shield trios … now.” He suited action to words, and the three members of One Flight lofted, rising above the protection of the facility’s vertical shields, staying only a few dozen meters beneath the horizontal shield overhead.
Corran waited a beat while Two Flight followed, then he led Leth and Teep up. To her credit, Leth kept tucked in professionally close, but Teep lagged, offering his shieldmates no protection from his shields, receiving no protection from theirs.
“Close it up, Seven,” Corran said.
“Sorry, Nine. Coming.”
As Corran and Leth cleared the building’s shields and dropped toward the jungle on the far side, a plasma barrage from the cruiser analog they were supposed to destroy arced toward them. If it had been slightly better aimed, it might have slid in between the top of the vertical shields and bottom of the horizontal. As it was, it angled in toward Teep, directly over Corran’s head. “Seven,” he shouted, “break to port—”
Corran chose port over starboard only because it took half the time to say, giving Teep one more fraction of a second to comprehend and react. Teep did veer to port, as much on repulsorlifts as thrusters, and the main ball of plasma flashed harmlessly past him.
Then it hit the building’s vertical shields and exploded. The concussion hammered Teep, Corran, and Leth. His cockpit swathed in flame, Corran watched his artificial horizon gauge spin. Relying on instinct more than his gauges, he leveled off and hit his thrusters. A moment later, the fire peeled away from his cockpit and he could see again.
Teep and Leth were both rolling as they fell, out of control, toward the jungle below.
Leth came out of her roll, leveling off not far above the treetops, and Corran heard her over the comm board, her voice raised in a wordless shout of both fear and exultation.
Teep didn’t come out of his roll. He punched through the treetops, and a moment later a fireball roiled up through the hole he’d made.
Corran swore. This war was gobbling up children like a starved wampa. “C’mon, Eight. Form up.”
In his transport, far below the Lusankya conflict and as far above the war waging around the biotics building, Harrar stared into the viewing lens mounted in the transport’s belly. “Is this operation yours, or Czulkang Lah’s?” he asked.
Charat Kraal knelt beside him at the edge of the lens. “It is the great master’s. But it is merely a probe, a way to test strength and evaluate the enemy’s strengths, to deny him the opportunity to rest. I have attached my mission to this operation.”
“When do your units enter the battle?”
“Soon. When the enemy is stretched thinnest.”
Twin Suns Squadron roared westward, toward the Yuuzhan Vong cruiser analog there. It and its protective squadrons were already being harassed by Blackmoon Squadron and a pair of TIE squadrons off Lusankya. “Piggy, analysis,” Jaina called.
The mechanical voice of her Gamorrean pilot boomed from the comm unit; Jaina winced and slid the volume control lower.
“They’re not concentrating on the biotics building this time,” Piggy said. “Probably to avoid a disaster like the last assault. They’ve learned their lesson from orbital bombardment. And yet they’re not systematically taking General Antilles’s defensive structure to pieces. They should be concentrating their efforts on removing Lusankya from the battlefield, so they can then move against the facility with minimal opposition. They are not.”
Jaina didn’t have to ask what that meant. The Yuuzhan Vong didn’t intend to overrun the facility this time. They had some other goal, such as staging another attempt to capture Jaina. To the Yuuzhan Vong, twins were sacred, and Jaina, as the twin of Jacen,