Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [169]
Into the hole.
Syal aimed her Aleph along the second bomber’s wake.
Zueb was shouting something about insanity and destruction. She ignored him. She took the control yoke in both hands.
The second bomber disappeared into the smoke cloud. On the sensor board, it dropped into the hole in the street.
As Syal reached that point, she slammed downward on the yoke, compressing it for a fraction of a second. Her top-mounted vents fired, jolting the Aleph downward.
It didn’t hit anything. Through the viewports there was only smoke and darkness. On the sensor screen was the tail end of that chewed-up bomber blasting forward between banks of heavy-looking columns. There was debris, heavy dust and particulate matter, ahead of it. It rose toward the debris.
As her Aleph reached the point where the bomber began its rise, she jerked upward on her yoke and the bottom-mounted vents fired. She added some repulsorlift kick. The Aleph jolted upward, compressing her backbone and cutting off Zueb’s shrieks, and suddenly they were in sunlight again.
Green parklands and the shimmering dome of a military energy shield lay ahead. The first bomber was circling to port around the shield, the second bomber to starboard. Both were dropping their bomb loads—spotter droids floating to the ground, their descents slowed by the sort of short-use repulsorlift plates used by airdrop commando troops. Above circled squadrons of X-wings, Eta-5 interceptors, E-wings—the complete ground complement of the Rellidir garrison.
Zueb was shrieking something about great flying and having children and holodramas. Syal ignored him. Something was adding up in her head, cold numbers and facts.
She slammed on the reverse thrusters to slow the Aleph, jerking Zueb forward in his seat, and switched her comm board over to the general fleet frequency. “This is Gray Four to all GA forces,” she said. She felt curiously emotionless, but she knew that she had merely contained her emotion, not eliminated it. “Incoming enemy squadrons traveling east to west toward Rellidir central are missiles, and they have an unobstructed path to the interior shield. Be ready.” She switched back to squadron frequency. As the front end of the Aleph swung around and the building they’d just flown beneath was framed by their viewports, she brought the Aleph to a dead halt in the air. “Zueb, fire missiles. Bring that building down. Hit the base first.”
“What?”
“That’s an order. Bring that building down, from ground level up.”
Zueb’s hands reached for his weapons controls.
CORUSCANT
The Not-Jacen came at Luke again and again, making prodigious leaps, bounding from wall to wall, from ceiling to floor, as if immune to gravity. With each pass he hurled one, two, three lightsaber blows at Luke, striking again and again until, thrown back by the impacts, he was too far away to engage.
Luke countered every blow and pitched attacks of his own. He felt the skin of his left forearm pucker a little from the heat of a near hit, saw the Not-Jacen’s robes catch fire just under the right armpit from an especially close thrust of Luke’s…but Not-Jacen patted the flames out and merely grinned at him.
Not-Jacen seized a ceiling glow rod fixture and hung there as though his weight were nothing. “You’re just about as good as my true Master,” Not-Jacen said.
Luke gave him a quizzical look. “And who is that?”
“You know,” Not-Jacen said. “By the way, you’d look good with a beard.”
“You think so?” Luke ran his free hand over his clean-shaven chin. “Well, I’m not sure what our disagreement is, but perhaps it could be settled by talking.”
“I try not to negotiate with phantoms, with things that don’t exist. Better to just cut them in half and watch them disappear.” Not-Jacen kicked off from the wall and flew forward again.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR