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A figure was emerging from the smoke and fire, through a hole leading into the next chamber. Tall and lean, he was dressed all in black and had his arms spread as if running toward a lover.

Seven—as she hit the ground and rolled, Jaina saw seven blaster bolts converge on the intruder, one each from the surviving security operatives, two each from Jag and her father. Steam erupted from each hit as the blaster bolts vaporized skin and flesh beneath it. The intruder jerked, shuddered. He did not topple over backward; his forward momentum balanced the energy imparted by the blaster bolts, and he stopped in his tracks. His face was slack. Jaina knew that his life span could be counted in heartbeats, just long enough for shock to transmit through his nervous system and inform his brain that it was time to shut things down.

Then two more holes smashed in through the wall to either side of the intruder. He was abruptly flanked by dark, skeleton-like carapaces with glowing red optic eyes and weapons systems emerging from arms and torsos.

They were Yuuzhan Vong Hunter droids, the deadliest droids fabricated since the time of the Old Republic and the destroyer droids of that era.

The human intruder glanced leftward at one of the YVH droids. The beginnings of a look of confusion crossed his face. Then his knees buckled, and he began to fall backward.

The YVH droids swung their weapon barrels toward Jaina’s parents and advanced.

The tactical combat computer in Jaina’s mind clicked through options. Get Allana to safety? Stay here and cover the girl? Attack? It took a fraction of a second for her to reach that third option, decide it was best, press Allana to the floor, and ignite her lightsaber. She leapt forward, swinging it with the speed and ferocity of one of the best-trained Jedi Knights in recent history.

In her peripheral vision, she could see the upended tabletop disintegrating under the hail of blaster bolts from the droids’ right-arm weapons systems. Her father and Jag, shoulder to shoulder and barely visible over the lip of the ruined table, were putting round after blaster round into the droids’ heads. Her mother was standing, lightsaber lit, catching and deflecting some portion of the droids’ blasterfire, perhaps one bolt in three.

The YVH droid on the left, nearer Jaina by two meters, reacted to her attack. A flash heralding an electrical discharge grew on its left arm. But her Force-aided burst of speed brought her beside the droid before it could fire at her and she swung.

Jedi instinct was to take off the head of a well-armored foe who had to be put down instantly. She ignored that instinct. YVH droid heads were securely mounted atop their bodies by a series of laminanium alloy struts mimicking in their outline the contours of an athlete’s neck. A single lightsaber blow had to shear through several of them in turn to sever a YVH droid’s head. Instead, she struck low, beneath the rib cage. A single thick-armored span, similar to a human’s spinal column, held torso to pelvis. Thicker than any two neck struts, it was, unlike the neck, at a ninety-degree angle to the ground and would not cause a lightsaber blow to glance. Jaina hit it with all her considerable speed and strength.

There was a bright flash from the point of impact, a zatt noise that rose even over the roar of the blasters, and abruptly that droid was falling in two pieces.

It was not out of the action, just inconvenienced. All its primary weapons systems were still functional. As it fell, Jaina twirled her lightsaber and thrust with it. The point of the glowing blade entered the spinal shaft where it had been severed. The blade slammed up the length of the shaft, straightening the droid’s recurved spine, and plunged up through the neck into the droid’s skull, entering from an unarmored direction. Jaina’s attack reamed out its crucial cognitive processing circuitry before the droid finished crashing to the ground.

Which left Jaina